By the time he reached the Academy, he had fallen solidly asleep, and the driver had to wake him.
14
Alex looked at the pig, and the pig looked back at him. He wished it had fur. Its pink, knobby skin was altogether too close to human for him, and its bright little eyes even more so. Then it made a noise that his mind insisted was simultaneously questioning and pleading, and Alex couldn’t swallow past the knot in his throat.
“I’m not sure I can do this…”
“Yeah, I noticed that in Mitsuru’s notes,” Alice Gallow said, flipping through pages on his clipboard until she found the one she was looking for. “You’re kind of a wimp, aren’t you, Alex? Well, I don’t plan on coddling you the way Mitsuru did.”
“Hey…” Alex protested weakly. “I just don’t want to shoot the stupid pig, okay?”
“You eat meat, right, Alex?” Alice said, grinning at him. He’d never met a person, he decided, who smiled more often or looked less friendly when they did so. “If that little piggy was already conveniently turned into delicious bacon or pork chops, you would eat it, right?”
“Well, yes, but…”
Alice advanced on him slowly, menacingly, her grin displaying her white, sparkling teeth.
“If you won’t kill it, you don’t deserve to eat it,” Alice said, reaching out to poke one black-painted nail into his chest. “If you won’t defend yourself, then you don’t deserve to live. According to the notes Mitsuru left, you do, in fact, want to live. Is that right?”
“Uh, yeah…”
“Then don’t give me that crap about being more comfortable with someone else doing the killing when you’re planning on doing the eating,” Alice said, turning away from him and back to the class. “This is the Program, kids. What you don’t take, you won’t have. You all want to have dinner tonight, right?”
There were cautious nods and affirmative noises, though Alex noticed that none of the other students wanted to make themselves too noticeable either. He didn’t really blame them, looking again at the gun in his hand, and then again at the pig, who was cheerfully wandering around the radius of what the cord around his neck would allow him to explore. Alex related to the animal, on a number of levels.
“Well,” Alice said, turning back to Alice and licking her lips, “tonight we are having pork. Except for the Jews and the Muslims, of course. Wouldn’t want to upset poor Rebecca’s sensitivities. Then again, dinner could be very late,” she said, taking a chair in the corner of the classroom, “considering we have to wait for Alex to provide it.”
“You’re saying that if I converted…” Alex said slowly.
“Nope,” Alice snapped. “I’ve seen them raise and slaughter pigs on a kibbutz in Israel; they just didn’t eat ‘em.”
“Oh,” Alex said, his voice sounding funny and somewhat hollow to him, as if he was hearing it at a remove. The pistol was the same S amp;W 9mm that he used for target shooting two hours ago, but it had taken on an evil import, a menace that pervaded its cold weight. “That’s good, then.”
He did it in a rush, raising the gun and firing quickly. To his utter shame, he closed his eyes at the last moment, something that Mitsuru had cured him of weeks ago, by slapping him in the back of the head every time he did it until he stopped. His shot went wide, hitting the ground a few feet away from the pig, causing it to squeal and run in blind panic. Alex felt hot shame, and heard the beginning of Steve’s laughter before he started firing wildly.
Alex was a terrible shot, and the pig was moving. He got it eventually, but it took several tries, and it wasn’t pretty — he hit it in the foreleg, causing more blood and noise, and it took another shot to put it down. Alice inspected the carnage grimly while Alex shook and wiped tears from his eyes that he hadn’t realized he cried, all the while trying not to notice Steve and Renton smirking and exchanging superior looks.
“Well,” Alice said doubtfully, “I’m not sure how much of this one will be edible, but we all have to start somewhere, right?”
She slapped Alex on the back.
“Don’t worry,” Alice confided. “I already talked to the kitchen. It takes them a while to use up a whole pig. You won’t have to do it again for two, maybe three days.”
“Great,” Alex said numbly, the gun hanging, useless and forgotten, from one hand. Somehow, this hurt worse than shooting Steve, although that didn’t really make any sense to him. “That’s great.”
“Of course, man doesn’t live by pork alone,” Alice said cheerfully. “Tomorrow you get to practice decapitating chickens.”
“Oh God,” Alex said, swallowing back bile, his eyes smarting and watering.
“And we’re supposed to have hamburgers for lunch Friday…”
Alex calmly returned the gun to its locker. He didn’t have to run to the bathroom. He found his own way back to his seat without stumbling. He watched Timor, the new kid, take care of his pig with a ruthless dispatch that was almost boredom. Alex didn’t get sick.
And it wasn’t that he didn’t care. Rather, he was trying to tell himself that this represented progress on his part; that he was closer to becoming something definable, to an identity. Maybe not something he could be proud of, he would have been the first to admit, but something that, at the very least, he could put a name to.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been, but he was still surprised, watching Timor’s pig bleed into the gutter inset in the floor for that exact purpose, how badly he wanted that.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am sure!” Eerie insisted, stomping her foot in frustration. “I see it! Every day!”
“Okay, that’s weird, but you know how boys are,” Rebecca said. “One minute they’re all over you, the next minute they’re off with someone else. Maybe he and Emily just, well,” Rebecca hesitated, trying to find a way to finish her sentence that wouldn’t set the poor, frantic changeling into another fit of anxiety, “maybe they’ve gotten… closer.”
“I am not as petty as you think I am, Rebecca,” Eerie said sternly. “I would not be coming to you if I thought they were sleeping together. I am coming to you because she is making him feel things, you know, with her protocol.”
“Well, you pretty much had to come to me, because you’re stuck working in my office until field study comes up next week,” Rebecca added. “Can you spot empathic manipulation in the first place? It can be pretty subtle.”
“You don’t know what I can see with these eyes. I’m not broken, Rebecca,” Eerie said defiantly. “Besides, I noticed you doing it to me, didn’t I?”
Rebecca had to give the girl that one, even if she didn’t openly acknowledge it. She looked for a place to stub out her cigarette, but found the ashtray so overwhelmingly full that it wasn’t possible. She dumped out the contents into her trashcan, wrinkling her nose at the ash it kicked up, and then finished the job on the blackened bottom of the ceramic tray she’d been given so many years before, when she’d been a student here.
Eerie was in one of her rare lucid moods today. The shimmer in her eyes was diminished, and when she spoke, it was careful, pained, with an air of profound reluctance. It was unkind, but Rebecca had more affection for the girl’s other, more pitiable persona.
“But Emily doesn’t have that kind of empathic ability,” Rebecca insisted. “She’s quite weak, actually. I doubt she could do any kind of significant manipulation, let alone a lasting one.”
Eerie tossed her head and threw her hands up in the air, gestures so dramatic by the girl’s standards that Rebecca startled back in surprise.
“She was touching him,” Eerie said insistently. “At the time. All the times.”
“That’s why I think — ”
Eerie stomped her foot again.