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His only rule: once he was running he would not stop for any reason other than being physically unable to continue. That had never happened.

The Sunday run was the only time he was ever tempted to stop and it had nothing to do with avoiding the agonies he caused himself. A few miles along the hidden path, the slopes on each side fell away gradually and the trail became an embankment rather than a cut. The growth of dense brush still surrounded him but now and again he would catch glimpses of the wasteland beyond the town. The wasteland formed a natural, roughly circular border that no one crossed into. His own house was nearer to the perimeter than most people cared to be but there was a broad swathe of fields and woods between. Here, though, as the embankment approached the stagnant waters of the old canal, he could see out into the barren, eroded landscape where nothing grew.

There was no soil with an ounce of nourishment in it. Instead, a heavy black dust was swept across the dark, carved expanse. It was like looking at a black sea of sculpted waves that never moved, or a black desert of tiny dunes. Occasionally, a glint of white would sparkle from below the dust when funnels of windblown dirt exposed the glassy rock below. There was nothing in the wasteland. Nothing but thirst, hunger and solitude until death. He was tempted by its void. The wasteland was a place where he could run to his conclusion. Death would be slow but certain. It seemed the perfect end to the life of an executioner.

For just a few moments, the dense shrub, usually twice his head height, would thin out and he would be running along an exposed ridge.

Where the ridge met the old waterway, there was a route back towards his house along the outskirts of the town if he turned left again. If he continued straight on, the path, and the embankment it ran upon, ended; swallowed by the wasteland. The canal, at right angles to it, also stretched a little further before narrowing, blunting and ending in the sterile wilderness that held the town in its black fist.

Richard lay on his back, eyes closed, already asleep. Maya had banished the girls to their bedroom upstairs. She shut the door behind her as she entered and stood watching the long, shallow breaths coming and going from her husband’s diaphragm. He was so thin it hurt to look at him. He seemed not to have smiled at her in a decade. He could be on his deathbed, she thought, looking at his pale skin and the lines stitched deep into his face.

She undressed quietly, not wanting him to wake yet. When she was naked, she looked in the mirror, turning one way and then the other in order to catch the curves of her buttocks, stomach and breasts. Dear Father, I’ll be as thin as the rest of them soon. She put her palm to her mouth to stop the sob that wanted to come out. Recovering herself, she cupped her hands under her breasts and felt the weight of them. They should have been fuller and heavier like they used to be, but now they were slim and less shapely. Narrow. She hated to see it.

Richard had only been in bed for ten minutes. She slipped in beside him and slid down below the covers. He wore a night shirt but he was naked from the waist down. She kissed his soft, lifeless penis and took it between her lips. As gently as she could, so as not to wake him too quickly, she worked it around inside her mouth with her tongue until it began to swell. Soon it was throbbing the way it had every night in their early years of marriage. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she too felt the warm rush of erotic interest and tension fill her belly and seep from inside her.

He stirred. A moan came from him that sounded like pain or torment. She didn’t stop. He gasped and she knew that he was awake now. Awake and not stopping her. She made her attentions lighter to prolong it. In the old days he had never wanted it to end and she would tease him until he almost cried for release.

He spoke:

‘I don’t have the energy to reciprocate.’

She paused:

‘This is just for you.’

For the next fifteen minutes she worked on him until the skin of it was so tight it seemed it might burst. She knew the final pulses were not far away.

She stopped again.

‘Please, Maya. Don’t stop now.’

‘I want you to do something for us. For me.’

‘No, Maya. Don’t. You know I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’

She took him back into her mouth, brought him back to the edge and took her mouth away.

‘Can’t you see how thin they are? They depend on you. We all do. I’m begging you, Richard, just this once. Don’t let us starve like this.’

Her head moved over him again. The muscles in his stomach and thighs tightened.

‘No,’ he said.

She sucked him harder, stopped again.

‘Please, Richard, we need it. Just a few kilos. You can bring it in your backpack. Fill it up.’

‘Do it to me, Maya. Let me come.’

‘Meat. Say you’ll bring us meat.’

He was crying, shaking his head but agreeing. Shaking his head and saying, ‘I will. I promise.’

He put his hand on her head and urged her downwards.

She took him in deep.

Two

BLUE-792 pads a rhythm onto the aluminium wall of the bullpen with the tips of his incomplete fingers. The rhythm is interspersed with ‘hhaa’ and ‘ssuh’ sounds that issue like panting from his half open mouth. The padding is too stuttered to be the tapping of a rhythm, too lumpy to be the notes of a tune. Yet the stumps of his fingers are dextrous. The whispered shapes of his exhalations are not practised, repeated lyrics. They are manic sighs of focussed intensity.

BLUE-792 stops padding and sighing and leans his fat, muscular bulk against the cold metal panelling. It bends outward a little but it is strong; reinforced by criss-crossed bars. The metal sends gooseflesh outward across his body in a wave of pleasurable discomfort. He lays his right ear to the steel. His hairless head reflects rows of dim yellow lights above. He is never quite warm enough.

He hears a padding, a sighing within the metal and a smile breaks his face open. BLUE-792 is a bull; a heavy set, club-boned reproductive giant – a fighter honed by generations before him to physical and sexual superiority.

BLUE-792 is round-headed. He is grim-mouthed. He is bulldog-faced. Three hundred pounds of meat and between his legs swings a rare set of testicles. He is twenty-two years old and can procreate all day without tiring. It is this that keeps BLUE-792 alive and he knows it. None of this is enough to make him smile, not even the dutiful rutting.

But sometimes, like now, he does allow an upcurling of the lips and an opening of the mouth into a grin. The smile reveals his slickened, toothless gums and behind them his yellow-coated tongue. Soft drumming comes to him. Rasps and sucks and breaths. His eyes close and the smile broadens. His face is that of a huge child – a deaf child hearing private inner music far to the back of its mind. Saliva spills from the corner of his mouth in a watery string and drips to the straw-covered floor.

A monumental erection rises at his groin as he listens to the noises from the wall. It’s a frightening cock with a bulbous helmet, a shaft too thick for fingers to meet around and too long to be anything but painful when in use. He hears footsteps and pads three beats, three times on the panel before moving to the front of the bullpen.

The erection is still beating a silent, swollen tattoo when a face appears at the upper hole in the door. The face is topped by a curly black mop with occasional corkscrews of grey. The beard is even thicker and much darker, no hint of steel or silver in it yet. The eyes in the face are dark brown. Soft, deep eyes. The face doesn’t speak. It does not smile. A hatch opens at the bottom of the door and a broad aluminium pan the size of a washing-up basin is pushed through. The hatch closes. The face moves away.