Dogboy Who Waits yanked the blade back on the nylon lanyard knotted to the little hole on the tine, which had once served to secure a polypropylene handle. The lanyard itself consisted of woven lengths of fishing line. Dogboy Who Waits, of course, had not the slightest idea of what the origin of these items was; putting them together like this had just, somehow, felt right.
Dogboy Who Waits wasn’t even his real name. Indeed, he had only the barest rudiments of conceptual language. He merely knew, in some basic nonverbal sense that he was a Boy, that he felt akin to what he knew as a Dog, and that Waiting was one of the things he did most of. He had been lying patiently in wait for his prey, under the cover of a discarded maintenance pallet, for what those who reckon time in the usual sense would reckon more than thirty-six hours.
Such people who reckoned time would also consider Dogboy Who Waits as maybe fourteen years old, but of course he didn’t think in those terms. He was simply there and alive in the faintly fungus-phosphorescent dark that was all he had ever known.
Now the time had come for movement and speed, even urgency. It would not be long before others sensed and smelled the kill.
Working quickly with his blade, Dogboy Who Waits gutted the okapi, identified those lights that were best to eat by touch and wolfed them down. This was the quick nutrition that needed no cooking. Then he began the less hasty business of jointing the carcass and laying up the choicest cuts of hock and haunch in his salt sack.
The kill had been an adult, and large enough that Dogboy Who Waits could countenance leaving some proportion of it for others; the impulse to claim it all and defend it to the snarling death was surmountable. And this was fortunate, because torchlight was winding its way cautiously through the debris strewn through the tunnels.
As the torches drew closer, Dogboy Who Waits recognised those who were holding them: three boys of roughly his own age, a slightly younger girl trailing behind. A stable and viable breeding-group-insofar as stability and viability had any meaning down here in the tunnels. An actual tribe.
And to the extent that he could know anybody, Dogboy Who Waits knew them, and knew their rituals.
The leader of them-of middle-size, but with the alert look of one who led by resource rather than by means of sheer, mere physical bulk-grunted in what passed for the sub-language peculiar to his tribe, and gestured with his torch to the small pile of entrails which Dogboy Who Waits had, with some consideration, left to one side when butchering his kill.
It is possible that some practices and rituals are basic to human beings, ingrained and dormant in the backbrain and only resurfacing when some imposed and overall patina of “civilization” is absent. On the other hand-and far more plausibly-people just do stuff. All kinds of stuff.
People do certain things in the past and then, quite by chance, they’ll do something similar a thousand years later. It’s just what people do.
In any case, it just so happened that this particular tribe had evolved an interpersonal ceremony in common with that of plains-dwelling Indians from several centuries before. The leader of the tribe planted his torch in the accumulated mulch of the tunnel floor.
Dogboy Who Waits picked up the entrails, and slowly drew them through the flame. The partially-digested fungus within cooked with a strangely pleasant small, like frying mushrooms.
Dogboy Who Waits and the leader of the tribe hunkered down, facing each other. Each took an end of the length of cooked intestine in their mouths, and then they began to swallow. And swallow. And swallow until their faces were no more than inches apart.
Now would come the actual test of strength-and Dogboy Who Waits had the uneasy feeling that he didn’t have it in him. Or, rather, that he had too much. He was beginning to wish that he hadn’t filled up on fresh lights after making his kill.
Dogboy Who Waits risked a glance at the other two members of the tribe, the boy and the girl, who were watching the contest expectantly, hungrily. They might fall on him in anger if they saw him cheat-but it was certain they would fall on him, and tear him limb from limb, if he lost.
Dogboy Who Waits decided to risk it, and do what the leader of the tribe, immured in ritual to the point where doing so would never so much as occur to him. He bit down hard on the length of cooked intestine in his mouth and heaved…
And later.
Dogboy Who Waits clambered over a twisted mass of scaffolding and swung himself up onto the sagging remains of what had once been a maintenance gantry. From here it was a clear run to the place he called, in his nonverbal way, home-a ruptured and ketone-reeking tank that had once fuelled the electrical back-up generators of a Transit Authority depot.
The tribe had tracked after him, angrily, for the better part of half a mile, but there had been a sense of squabbling half-heartedness about the pursuit. Their leader had, after all, suffered a lapse in authority-he might have lost the ritual contest by way of trickery, but he had still lost. He might not end up with the others falling on him and tearing him limb from limb, in much the same way as they would have done to Dogboy Who Waits, but the sense of dissention had given Dogboy Who Waits the edge he needed to escape.
Now Dogboy Who Waits made his way along the gantry, senses alert for the slightest evidence of movement or danger-and all unaware that others were hunting, waiting in a manner that would put his own skills to shame…
The explosion set Dogboy Who Waits on fire and knocked him from the gantry to fall thirty feet and hit a loose pile of garbage and concrete scree crumbled from the tunnel walls. Free hydrocarbons, produced over years by the decomposing garbage, briefly and fitfully ignited under the body’s immolation.
The pain was immense, impossible to bear-and then it was simply gone. It had reached the point of overload, where the neurosystem could not recognise it as such. Dogboy Who Waits lay sprawled on the rubble and smouldering garbage, breathing in flame. The mucus in his lungs converted instantly to steam, expanded catastrophically in his lungs and burst them. In the salt-sack slung from his body, choicest cuts of nocturnal okapi meat roasted merrily alongside his own.
“Aw, fuck! ” came a somewhat irritated voice to one side. “Why’d ya have to use an incendiary round, Karl? Is there any way we can at least save the fuckin’ head?”
Radio None
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“And our top story is, of course, that Freak-E has officially announced her split, both romantically and professionally, from manager, Slee-Z. In an official statement she said: ‘You nothing but a scrub, Slee-Z. All you ever done is cash in on my talent, motherf____________________ r. Well you can kiss my round black a__ if you think you ever gonna make another cent out of me. I’m Big Master X’s b____________________ h now. Word to your motherf____________________ g mom!’
“The rest of Freak-E’s statement is unfit even for broadcast on this station but highlights included allegations that Slee-Z has one of the world’s largest collection of porcelain teapots and isn’t adverse to the use of a strap-on when it comes to bedroom fun.
“Big Master X is CEO of Big Black Beats Inc and a self-made multi-billionaire. Born in the Brooklyn No-Go in 2007, Big Master X-real name Justin Jones-overcame the combined handicaps of having a pronounced stutter, being massively obese and hitting every branch of the ugly tree when he fell out of it, to record his first number one single by the time he was nine. The following year he set up his own record label and within six months accepted an eight-figure offer from Eidolon Corp to buy out Big Black Beats. Freak-E is the latest in a string of female recording artists signed to BBB with whom Big Master X has been romantically linked following high profile affairs with Russian teen rap sensation Ivana Sukayov and all three members of Afghan agit-pop trio, Bombs Not Burkas.