The man set the knife in his lap, opened the bag under his nose, and inhaled deeply. He sniffed again and again, then began to lick the insides of the bag until every grain of the stuff had been consumed. He slumped back against the wall, grinning, his eyes rolling up into his head.
Another man dropped down next to him and took the knife. He slit the seam of the ragged trousers and ripped away the cloth.
Raleigh put his hand to his mouth. With a length of surgical tubing, they began to tie off the man’s leg, just above the knee.
He gagged, turned away. They held him more gently now.
“There, there. Do you see? There’s no need to be afraid. Do you want some Easy?’
He gasped for air, shaking his head, but someone shoved a bag against his face, and he couldn’t help breathing it.
“Every now and then, someone comes along, someone young like you, someone with promise,” said the woman. “We don’t mind making the sacrifice. Our strength will become your strength. But everything we give to you, you’ll eventually pay back.”
He felt numbness, acceptance, a sense of purpose. He would never forget these people. He would do everything in his power to help them. Yes, he would make it out of here. He would find the monsters, the mutants, who drove these human beings down into the cracks of the earth, and he would destroy them. The strength to do all this was about to come into him.
“It’s not so bad is it?” said the woman. “The Easy, I mean? We won’t give you much. Wouldn’t want to get you hooked. But believe me, it’ll help you keep down your supper.”
“Uneasy Street” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1989.
THE DEMONSTRATION
As they approached the site of the company picnic, Dewey and his parents saw a crowd of weird-looking people standing along the roadside waving picket signs. Dewey’s father muttered, “God damn” under his breath.
“Roll up your window, Dewey,” said his mother.
“Who are they?” Dewey asked, putting up the rear window of the station wagon.
“Anarchists,” his father said. “They’d like to see us all turned into animals—and worse.”
Animals? Dewey wondered. He got up on his knees to see them better. By now the car had slowed to a crawl. Dewey’s father sounded the horn. “Get out of the road!” he shouted, though his voice didn’t carry with the windows all rolled up.
“Daddy, why do they want us to be animals?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Mommy said.
But the anarchists looked halfway to animal already, like the creatures of Dr. Moreau. They wore their hair long and ragged; their cheeks were slashed with black-and-white zebra stripes, their eyes wild and beseeching. Some of them looked like living skeletons, zombies in tattered clothes.
“There’s a spy in the company,” Daddy said suddenly.
“That’s ridiculous,” Mommy said.
“How else could they have learned about the picnic? They’re trying to spoil everything—first the Project and now our private lives. God damn them!”
“They have their own beliefs. They’re concerned citizens.”
“They don’t give a damn about civilization.”
The skulls and animals lurched toward the car, spilling onto the road now. Dewey jerked back as a woman with long claws raked the window an inch from his face. She screamed into his eyes: “Make them stop! It’s your generation that loses! Your own father is killing you!”
Dewey felt his insides turn cold. “Mommy…”
“Don’t listen to them, sugar.”
The horn blared, and the station wagon sped up. The woman stumbled away, losing hold of her picket sign. Dewey read it as it felclass="underline" BRING BACK THE NUKES!
Just ahead was the private gate, standing tall between high bushes. Guards waited there with hands on their holsters. The crowd stayed back on the main road, still shouting and waving signs. The guards stepped aside and let the car pass through, nodding in recognition to Dewey’s father. The station wagon rushed down a dusty road between summer-browned oaks, dry-baked hills.
“Daddy,” Dewey said, “what’s a nuke?”
“You don’t need to know,” his father said. “They’ll soon be obsolete.”
As they pulled into the small parking lot among fifty other cars, Dewey saw that the barbecue pits were already smoking and a softball game was under way. Plenty of kids were playing around the picnic tables, but he didn’t know any of them. This was the first company picnic since Dewey’s father had come to help supervise the Project. There hadn’t been time to relax until recently. Daddy was always griping about deadlines. But now the Project was finished. The new power station had been in operation for a week, running smoothly in the nearby hills. At last the company had granted its employees an afternoon to picnic with their families.
While his parents unpacked the station wagon, Dewey wandered toward a small group of kids who were kicking a soccer ball between them. He stood at the edge of the game for a few minutes, trying to figure out if there were any rules—until someone kicked the ball too hard, and it flew past Dewey into the heavy underbrush that surrounded the picnic grounds.
Dewey shouted, “I’ll get it!”
He plunged into the tangled brambles, thinking that if he retrieved the ball, he could make some friends. The others shouted encouragement as he stooped ever lower; soon he was almost crawling. Then, just ahead of him, he saw the ball. He ignored the thorns that scratched at his face and arms, and pressed forward.
A black hand darted out of the thicket and grabbed at his wrist.
“Hey!” he shouted, tearing himself away.
Something moved inside the hedge, struggling after him. Whoever or whatever it was grew trapped in thorns; the hand fell out of sight. He stumbled backward, terrified. A black hand! It hadn’t been the chocolate brown of his own skin; no, it had been the black of something badly burned.
A second later Dewey was free of the bushes. The other kids were waiting for him. “Well, where is it?” asked a tall blond boy.
Dewey couldn’t catch his breath. “There’s someone in there,” he gasped.
“Someone stole our ball, you mean?” said a girl.
He looked back at the bushes, but they were silent, unrustling.
“Naw,” said the blond boy, “he’s just chicken.”
“He does look scared,” said another kid.
“You go get it, then!” Dewey said angrily, turning away from them so that his fear would be hidden. He decided that he didn’t want to play with them after all. He walked slowly past the picnic table where his mother was setting out plastic bowls full of salad. His father was standing with a few other men, all of them drinking beer in the shade of an old oak tree. Dewey went up to them and waited for his father to notice him.
“Daddy,” he said, when the men kept on talking. “Daddy, there’s someone in the bushes over there.” He pointed, but now saw that the kids had their ball back and were kicking it across the dry grass.
“What’re you talking about?” his father asked.
Dewey stared at the motionless thicket; there wasn’t even a breeze to stir the branches. Suddenly he remembered the people on the road.
“Those animal people,” he said.
That got his father’s attention. “What do you mean? The anarchists?”
One of the other men laughed. “Those idiots. How did they ever get it into their head that the Project was dangerous?”
“I saw one of them, Daddy. He was—”
“Where?” Dewey’s father whirled around, searching the hills, the hedges, the trees. “You saw them, Dewey?”