The Saffron Malformation (5 page)

             
Richter Crow looked away from his new employee’s face, took a long sip of whiskey, and hoped the pill would work.

             
The car rolled along in silence for a while before Richter asked, without looking at Sticklan, “You haven’t told anyone that name before have you?”

             
Sticklan shook his head, “Just came to me.”

             
Richter Crow nodded, “And the rhyme?”

             
He looked at Richter with eyes that chilled him, made him consider, briefly, turning the car around and heading back, but that was the fun wasn’t it?  Control over the uncontrollable.  “And the rhyme,” Sticklan confirmed.

             
A moment of silence passed and then Len asked what Crow couldn’t bring himself to.  “You make up the Butcher Baker chants too?”

             
That smile came back to the plain man’s face and he answered, “Used to sing it to them.  Never could settle on any one version though.”

             
The big man behind the wheel glanced up at the rear view again and watched Richter Crow look out the window at the passing landscape.  He was a child that asked Santa for a loaded gun and was beginning to realize it isn’t a toy.

A Wall and the Once Men

Quey was half a kilometer from the highway when he heard gunfire and screams.  He turned and looked back the way he’d come, squinting to see the road and the shape of his truck and the abandoned vehicles the Once Men had been driving.  Something was happening back there but what it was he couldn’t quite make, so he tapped the button on his sheet that made it pliable and folded it lengthwise into thirds.  Then he lifted the device to his face and activated the camera.  He touched the wheel in the lower corner, turned it clockwise to zoom in on the road, and panned the device across the distance until he saw the ruckus.

The question mark bot rolled behind the car that had stopped beside his truck while the other bot took position in the middle of the highway.  Its gun arms were raised and its head scanned the far waste.  He heard the dull, hollow pops of the Once Men’s revolvers and saw the ricochets spark off the turtlebots paint job.  Then he heard the roar of the bot’s machine guns.

             
Six Once Men came from behind the truck and fired wildly at the bot in the middle of the road.  There was another roar of automatic fire that tore through them, severing limbs and spraying the highway with innards.

             
Quey watched the bot scan the landscape again but it appeared to find nothing and returned to whatever it was doing.  Quey lowered his sheet from his face and looked toward the road another moment before unfolding it and hurrying on.  The bots had handled the Once Men for now, but the bitch about Once Men was that there were always more.

             
The heat swarmed around him in a hot breeze that offered no relief from the sun above.  His boots fell onto the hard dead earth with dull thuds as the meters clicked slowly by.  He could smell the heat in the dry air, it seemed, as his saliva grew thicker with each breath.  He turned and spit as his stride seemed to shrivel and his pace seemed to dull with every step.

             
Ahead, he could see the compound in the distance, a little over two kilometers away.  It was a massive three-story structure; a perfect square perched upon a slight hill which was the only significant rise in these wastes.  A narrow stream snaked across the landscape and curved around the south side of the hill.

             
Quey wiped at the river of sweat running from his brow with the back of his hand.  Grimacing, he flicked his wrist sending droplets raining down onto the barren earth in a speckled arch.  Watching the compound, he opened his water bottle and took a long sip.  He was sweating more water than he had.

             
Whirr.

             
He heard the sound but it was different than it had been at the highway.  It had a higher pitch and remained constant.  Quey turned and saw the fire turtle bot and the question mark bot rolling toward him.

             
Drinking deep from his water bottle he watched the bots close fast on him and then roll past and turn toward the compound.  They paid him less interest here than they had at the highway.  As he slowly screwed his water bottle cap back into place he thought maybe that was a good thing.  So far anything the bots took notice of didn’t last very long.  Sometimes it’s good to be ignored.  He continued forward toward the hill and the compound.

             
There was no fence around the building.  There was no barbed wire and no turrets on the rooftop.  Near as he could tell the only defense it had was the reinforced shutters over the first and second floor windows.  One other thing he noted was that the rooftop seemed to shimmer.  He couldn’t see it clearly from the ground, but something up there was reflecting light with a vengeance.

             
Quey took a long slow breath, tried to slow his heart and lend it a bit of courage, then took tentative steps forward with his hands opened and his arms out at his side.

             
“No need to worry crazy person,” he said quietly to himself.  “Not here for nothin’ but a tow.”

             
He was halfway up the hill when he heard the soft hum of hydraulics.  Pausing mid step, he scanned the building again and this time he saw them, tiny cameras along the lip of the roof.

             
A long minute passed while he waited to see if bullets were going to pummel holes through his body.  When they didn’t he let himself breathe again and decided to proceed with a bit of confidence.  He stood straight, let his arms drop to his sides and strolled toward the front door where he stopped, looked up at the cameras, and waved.

             
“Name’s Quey,” he shouted.  Nothing changed.  “Is this… I mean,” he thought for a moment then asked, “Is Ryla home?”

             
The ground to his left and right exploded into a cloud of dust with a loud metallic clank as two massive gun turrets burst from underground.  Quey felt his bladder tighten and struggled not to piss himself as he threw his hands up toward the cameras and shouted, “Woah.”

             
The guns erupted with a chain of deafening booms he could feel in his ribs that sent shells the size of his fingers flying into the air.  Quey jumped, spun, and slammed his back against the compound’s metal doors just in time to watch the guns cut a Once Man in half.  One moment the Once Man was running toward the building with a knife the size of his arm in his hand and the next his legs gave out and his torso tumbled away from them and rolled a quarter of the way up the hill, spilling a line of guts across the ground.  Two others stopped in their tracks and Quey watched their mouths open.  They seemed to be screaming but he couldn’t hear them, all he heard was a sharp ring in both ears.

             
His heart pounded and the smell of discharged shells, like the firework finale of a celebration, caught in the back of his throat.  Finding it difficult to swallow, Quey felt his knees shaking under him and collapsed to the ground.  Sitting there, in the heat of the wastes, watching the last thin trails of smoke slither from the guns and vanish in the air, Quey decided there had to be a limit to the number of times a man could take thinking he was going to die in a single day.

             
Quey saw more Once Men, gathered a few dozen yards from the base of the hill.  Their pale skin caked in the dry dust of the wastes and covered loosely by ragged clothes they’d torn from victims, they stood together grumbling their simple words.  Whatever they were deciding drew their glances toward the compound with increasing frequency.

             
Quey sighed, stood, and looked up at the cameras.  “Any chance I could maybe come inside?” he asked with a bit of desperation.  Quey stood staring at the camera for a long moment before he finally sat back down and rested against the door.

             
In the distance Quey saw more Once Men approaching, some from the highway, others from the south, and he knew what all that screaming after the turrets fired had been about.  It was a call, and if his ears hadn’t been ringing he would have heard it echoed across the wastes by others.  It was like a dog’s howl, and it was leading the rest of the pack here to this compound, where he was about to be trapped.

             
Unsure of anything else he could do, Quey walked over to the corner of the building and took a leak.  As he dampened the soil, he couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of pissing on the side of the building being seen as a hostile act, causing the robots to suddenly open fire on him.  It was morbid, sure, but still something in the idea that everything that should have killed him hadn’t and that he’d come all this way to be done in by a piss tickled him.

             
Looking up he noticed the clusters of Once Men strolling in from a number of directions and his smile faded. It occurred to him then that being shot might not look so bad before too long.

             
Quey zipped up and peered at the new group of Once Men wandering in from the highway.  He wondered how far their pack strayed and where their camp was located.  He guessed it was within howling distance.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself when he saw one of them was rolling a plastic drum of his shine across the wastes.  When the group met up with the others, gathered a hundred or so meters up river, they cracked open the top of the drum and drank his shine using their dirt-caked hands as cups.

Quey didn’t know much but he thought it was safe to guess that drunken Once Men were a bad problem to have.  He watched intently as they gathered around the fifty-gallon drum and drank feverishly, snarling and shoving each other between gulps.  It didn’t take them long to get a buzz and an hour later dusk hadn’t even finished settling over the sand and the Once Men were stumbling.

By the time the sun set Quey counted thirty-eight Once Men gathered, but he guessed he’d missed at least a few.  He checked his gun and heard the hydraulic whirr from overhead.  He looked up at the camera trained on him and then over at the turret that had sprung from the ground.  It was still.  He put his gun away.

Resting against the building Quey watched the Once Men drink themselves into a stupor.

As the sun began to set Quey noticed a new group of them far in the distance.  He didn’t see them so much as he spotted the trailer they were pulling.  It was the sort a small truck or even a car might be able to haul, and it was packed full and covered with a pale green tarp.  As the group approached Quey sat up and peered at them with new interest.  They weren’t Once Men at all, they were once women and he’d never seen one before.  Their skin was pale and dry and covered with a thin layer of dirt.  Their hair was tangled and probably thinner than it should be but nowhere near as patchy as the men’s.  The rags of their clothes hung loose around them and were torn to the point that most of them were essentially topless.

              The drunken Once Men cheered the arrival of the women and one of them ran over to the group.  He grabbed one of the girls, a little thing that couldn’t have been much older than fifteen, and threw her to the ground.  He fell on top of her and the others cheered again.  The women stood still and when the rest of the men rushed them and selected a mate they submitted quickly, as if they’d learned it gets worse if they resist.  The men outnumbered the women by about three to one and so the hierarchy of the males became clear.  The first one to charge had been the alpha, and the ones who got in on the first round were dominant.  The youngest, the six or seven who were teenagers, would have to wait for round three.

             
Quey picked up his sheet and turned it on.  He accessed a game of Hungry Monkey and tried to tune out the savage orgy by collecting all the bananas, which is harder than it sounds on both ends.

Gunfire woke him with a jolt.

              Quey took a moment to look around and remember where he was.  It settled on him slowly, crumbling his hope that the Once Men and the bots had simply been a bad dream he was waking from.

             
He’d fallen asleep playing Hungry Monkey and now his sheet was dead.

             
More gunfire.  It came from the other side of the building.

             
Quey looked to where the Once Men had gathered.  They’d built a set of tents near the shore, and a large number had gathered under them and were face down in the dirt, blacked out from the drunkenness his shine caused and the ravenous sex.  The others must be running about, looking for a way to get to the compound.

             
Whirr.

             
A robot was around the corner and it was coming closer.  Quey watched that edge of the building unsure of what might happen when it came around.

Night was thick and cool in the wastes, above him hundreds of stars burned brilliant and distant, and two of Saffron’s moons were visible
—he always thought the third to be a glorified pebble.  He didn’t have to wait long for the fire turtle bot to come rolling around the corner.  It paused and surveyed him for a split then moved down the hill and toward the river.

             
The bot stopped a handful of meters from a bit of weeds and dry grass and fired.  A Once Man had been hiding in the brush, trying to use the bit of cover to inch his way to the building.  What he planned to do once he got there was a mystery.  As bullets tore through him, another Once Man leapt to his feet and got off a pair of shots that bounced feebly off the fire turtle bots body.  He tried to pull the trigger a third time but the bots gun arm adjusted and erupted with a half second burst.  Holes ripped through the savage and the force of the guns sent a spray of blood several meters as he tumbled to the ground.  Quey could hear his breathing and the pleading tone in his grunts.  He lay there twitching in the dead grass for nearly a minute.

             
Quey was satisfied that neither the bots nor their master was going to harm him any more than they were going to help him.  Hugging himself and wishing he had a jacket he settled against the wall and watched the bot continue its patrol of the perimeter.  It wasn’t long before he found a way to be comfortable nestled in the crook of the ground and the compound.  With the cold of night fluttering around him he slept till morning, dreaming of his parents and his favorite of the stories they used to tell.