“Seriously stop asking me that.”
“Sorry.”
“Lie back,” she says.
He lies back. She pulls down the mask and snaps it over his head.
“Breathe in,” she says.
“I have nightmares.”
“What?”
“Every jump. The whole way.”
She doesn’t know what to say. Nobody dreams in the tanks. The mind shuts down completely. She tells him to relax.
“Nnnng,” he says. His eyelids droop. He seems to shrug, making the gel shimmy, then his face sinks below the surface and he is out.
She sits on the edge of the tank a while, watching him sleep and wondering why he decided to share this now, after so many years. Except she already knows. This opening up. Stopping by the clinic. Bearing his soul. Somber Jack. He hasn’t changed at all. He just thinks they’re all about to die.
Chapter 13
The floor of the hut is so cold it will rip the flesh from your soles. They use what little cloth they can scrounge for extra warmth. Jack wraps his feet and stuffs his pant legs with the fabric of dead men’s coats. When the guards burst in, he is not fast enough from his bunk, so the one they call Blunderbuss whaps a baton across his temple, laying him out. He rises slower than they’d like, so Blunderbuss whaps him again. The other prisoners keep their eyes ahead. He knows what they feel because he always feels the same: thank God it’s not me this morning. Blunderbuss gets bored and leaves him to spit blood. He claws along a bunk to right himself. His ears ring over whatever announcement the guards have come here to make. Judging from the sinking expressions around him, it’s another work detail.
Perhaps the most surprising feature of the camps is how military rank has not vanished. In many ways, it has amplified. The CO’s live in huts away from the other prisoners and are rarely forced to work. Jack has puzzled over why the guards allow this. Perhaps it’s psychological. They fear their own superiors so much that they respect the indignant shouts of their enemy officers by proxy. Jack once witnessed Ltd. Davis, a 5’2” bespectacled redhead, scream down a guard twice his size who tried to steal his morning rations. Davis’s head looked like it would pop, and the guard seemed to shrink the more those veins stood out. Finally the guard handed Davis’s bowl back and walked away cursing. Whatever the cause of these odd mercies, the officers lived in slightly improved conditions compared to the rest. They were fed bigger portions, slept on wider bunks, had sturdier shelters, and at one point even convinced a guard to bring them a space heater, though it was stolen a short while later.
Jack is no officer, but he cooked for several of them on the ship. During the early days in camp, he convinced them he could improve their camp food if they let him bunk with them. Now he spends all of his time and energy worrying over how to stay valuable. Finding ways to add spice to tasteless rice and protein blends, stretching meager rations, combining swill to make a stew or rubbery pie. He has good relationships with one or two guards, and on rare occasions, successfully barters for an egg or some grain. There are always prisoners willing to steal from the guards’ quarters—a dangerous but rewarding affair. A sack of flour, a cupful of sugar. He whips up flat cakes, sells some on the side in secret. It’s amazing what a starving man will give for a palm-sized treat, a reminder that somewhere out there, pleasure still exists in the universe.
When the guards leave, the men mill, their expressions sinking further. It is not unheard of for officers to go on work detail. When the number of able-bodied men dwindles (ie: an outbreak or a collapse of ice or an eruption of toxic fumes), the guards do away with their minor mercies and club any officers who protest, no matter their indignation. But if it were a work detail they’d be gathering their shit and heading for the door right now. Instead, they stand or sit with shocked looks on their faces.
They explain it to Jack when his hearing returns. It is much worse than a work detail.
The dream skips ahead.
He is holding a pickaxe and swinging it down into a sick man’s skull. The man’s eyes are wide open, staring. They cross as the axe plunges.
They have to restrain the doctor. He took an oath, he says. They cannot do this.
A splash of brains on concrete, frozen in pinkish clots. Jack twists the axe head free.
The dream skips again. Memory melds with the abstract.
Jack is inside a vacuum-sealed bulldozer, shoving a mound of frozen corpses into a blast crater, and at the bottom of the crater is Jack’s enormous gaping mouth. The bodies roll down the side of the crater and the mouth licks its lips and opens wide and Jack is careful not to leave any bodies behind. He is so hungry. Guards stand watch and clap and when the last of the corpses are gone, they bring out Lana, who has been stripped naked. They hold her arms out. Blood trickles between her legs. It is the same with all female prisoners. She wails but there is no sound. Jack swings the bulldozer to face her. The guards let go. She runs toward Jack like he will help. He aims the bottom edge of the dozer’s bucket for her waist, catches her in mid-run. The force pins her there and her intestines plop out of her mouth. Jack raises the bucket and rams her against the side of the compound, slicing her in half. Her legs drop to the ground and Jack is a hundred feet tall and leans down and picks them up and cracks them like chicken wings and dips them one at a time into his mouth, sucking the flesh from the bones.
Chapter 14
The ceiling undulates, bubbles and ripples and shifts. The plasma has already drained, leaving him slimy as a newborn. The lid lifts from the tank. He waits for the disorientation to pass. The walls quit wavering after a while. Grav jump aftereffects. Worse than any hangover. It used to take a full day, maybe two, before his feet were steady enough to stand.
He hears bare feet approaching. They stop outside the stall. “How we doing?” Lana says.
He teeters on the edge of the tank and carefully slides his feet to the floor. “Peachy,” he says as he opens the stall door.
It’s clear she’s been up for a while, standard procedure for med techs. She’s back in her street clothes, looking fresh and clean. She fiddles with her portable, studying data. Her eyes flick along his body, then back to her work. He can still taste the meat of her flesh, feel the warm blanket of her skin sliding down his throat.
She types and reads. “Your vitals look good.” She’s all professionalism, falling into her old role with ease. He wonders if this is intentional, that she is setting boundaries.
He’s immediately annoyed with himself. What a stupid thing to be thinking with everything else going on.
“I’m going to wake the others,” she says. “Why don’t you go on and take a nice hot shower.”
“Yeah right.” Of course it was a joke. Water is far too precious to waste on bathing. It’s a nice thought, though. Would beat standing in his quarters sluicing the grav juice off with citrus-stinking chemical wipes. They leave him clean but sticky in the crevices. It takes a while to get the gunk out of his hair, and if it dries there it forms a white crust that itches like hell.
He dresses and pulls bedding from the footlockers. He gets the bed halfway made before he stops to wonder what the hell he’s doing. He strips the sheets and folds them and tucks them right back where he got them. They aren’t here for the long haul. For all he knows, they’ll need to make a last-minute jump. Few things are more irritating than waking on the far side of a jump and realizing you forgot to tuck your shit away. Loose sheets tend to tangle and knot as if they’ve tumbled for years in an overpowered washing machine. Anything else is bound to shatter.