Rattlesnake Necktie
By Sean E. Graham
Smashwords Edition
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PUBLISHED BY:
Sean E. Graham on Smashwords
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Rattlesnake Necktie
Copyright © 2011 by Sean E. Graham
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Smashwords Edition License Notes
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*****
Table of Contents
*****
Maggie watched through her expensive sunglasses as the workmen finished laying the last of the bright green shag carpet. She was indoors and the room was dimly lit, but she wore the glasses just the same—they hid her black eye well.
“Ma’am,” the crew leader said, “we’re all finished here. A few things to be aware of… Let the carpet settle for a few hours. Try to stay off of it. I see you declined the sprinkler system, so you’ll need to water it about once a week if it doesn’t get any action, and if I were you I wouldn’t be standing around about nine o’clock or so; this model tends to prefer a late supper. If you have any concerns, call the service number on the invoice. You declined the warranty also, correct?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. She didn’t believe in warranties; they were a scam and a tax on the stupid.
“Ooh… You know if…” he started.
“No.”
Without skipping a beat he continued, “Well, you shouldn’t have any issues anyway. The Shag 3000 is a solid carpet, been around for years. No failures, no convictions to date. Now the 2000…that was a different story.” The installer shook his head. “A real mess.”
“I wish it was available in different colors though,” she said, running a foot over the lime green cords.
“I’m told the factory is working on a wine red color. That should help with stains, but yeah, for now it’s just this green color. Have a nice day, ma’am.”
*
Roger stepped through the front door, tossed his keys into the dish on the foyer table and set his briefcase down. One step into the living room he was stopped in his tracks, thoroughly confused by the yards of lime green shag carpet that now covered his once-oak floors.
“What the…”
A note folded like a tent sat on the sofa table. I’ll be home late. Don’t wait up. He put the note back down.
“Figures.” Defeated, he shook his head. He pulled a black velvet case from his inside suit jacket pocket and placed it next to the note. Was he a fool? Could such a gift really work?
In the kitchen he pulled a microwave dinner from the fridge. Lasagna is what the box said and the outer picture reflected this promise, but the actual product was something different entirely. It spun in the microwave, bubbling and popping as he watched and thought of times not so distant when they would eat meals together. The machine dinged and he returned to the sofa with a bottle of wine to help take the edge off. He considered the meal he’d laid out on the coffee table. It looked so wrong—a good wine next to a steaming pile of dog shit in a cardboard tray. Almost right, and in a bizarro world it would have been, but here it was wrong, wrong like his marriage. How had it come to this? The present course seemed so drastic yet necessary and ultimately unavoidable. He hoped that the velvet box would set things straight, right so many wrongs. They had been in love once.
He toasted love and downed five-year-old wine from a plastic cup. The bottle of wine was emptied before the tray of lasagna product, and soon Roger lay with his head back on the sofa snoring like a yeti.
The first sensation felt like a dog tugging at the sheets, eager for a walk on a bright Sunday morning; just a gentle pulling at his socks. All in with the bottle of wine and not a natural drinker, Roger was able to ignore this. The second sensation felt like his feet were being fed into a wood chipper.
Roger screamed, rocked forward on the sofa and tried to jerk his feet up, only they didn’t move; they were held fast to the floor. Pain shot up his legs and he doubled forward screaming. Eyes staring down at his bloody feet and the new carpet, his mind reeled, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.
Each two-inch curl of green shag had transformed into a segmented worm-like creature, a hideous annelid rooted at one end to the carpet under mesh, with a mouth like a circular buzz saw on the other. They latched onto his flesh like tiny bear traps, some chewing so deep they had embedded themselves in his foot an inch deep. The blood from his anchored feet spattered and ran in rivulets into the carpet, where it disappeared in a rush of slurping sounds. To his compounding horror, Roger saw that the entire carpet was made up of these carnivorous crawlers, every one writhing and twisting in a blind quest for prey.
Roger stood and pulled at his legs with his arms, but they hardly moved, the carpet cords stretching then retracting like elastic bands. The effort threw him off balance and he fell forward, crashing through the glass coffee table and hitting the deadly carpet with the full length of his body. The carpet-worms made quick work of his clothes and dug into his soft flesh with their razor-sharp mouths.
He tried to regain his footing by pushing off with his arms, but his hands were caught by the worms and he was face-planted hard into the carpet. The screams reached a crescendo before stopping as his mouth was torn free and his face vanished in a spray of crimson. His jaw, no longer attached to his skull, danced along the carpet like a marionette as the worms fought for their share. Roger’s corpse twitched and undulated for a few more minutes like a rock star riding a wave of cheering fans, growing smaller and smaller as the carpet feasted until absolutely nothing remained.
*
Maggie returned home later that evening, saw Roger’s keys on the entryway table, the shattered coffee table in the living room, and called out to her husband, who did not answer. She smiled with relief and walked gently across the satiated carpet to the sofa table. The coffee table had been her choice, it added a certain something to the room, but he had always hated it. Even with his dying breath Roger had managed to take it from her, but it was all over now, the fists, the screaming, the infidelity, all over.
Noticing the velvet jewelry case, she cocked her head like a dog who has heard a sound only dogs can hear and then shook her head. Roger, Roger, hopeless till the end. She longed to add “romantic” to the description of her husband, but “hopeless” was more accurate. The lid folded up and inside was a sparkling diamond necklace. Well, she had earned it. No sane person would dispute that. Maggie draped the jewels around her neck and fastened the clasp. The center stone hung at the crest of her cleavage. Before stepping back to the foyer mirror, she noticed a small envelope tucked into the box’s lid. She pulled it out and unfolded it. Inside was a picture taken from a distance of Maggie and her new friend, the most recent one, entering a hotel. The picture slid from her fingers and wafted to the carpet. She unconsciously read the note aloud, “I know.”
As she spoke, she felt something jump on her neck and instinctually swatted at what she assumed was an insect. It jumped again, then something slithered along her chest. That sensation started Maggie’s hands flapping at her chest and neck, throwing her hair up as she stomped up and down with the heebie-jeebies.
The slithering persisted. The necklace drew up tight around her throat. She pulled at it, but it wouldn’t give and actually seemed to shift away from her. The necklace constricted, tightening around her lithe neck, a four-figure garrote, as she clutched at it, digging manicured nails into her own flesh in vain effort as her vision narrowed. Darkness encroached. The front door, the end of a narrowing tunnel, was a thousand miles away. Her knees hit the carpet. She gasped, fumbled for her cell phone, dropped it and landed on her face. The diamonds glimmered, winking in the light. A thin ring of blood appeared around her neck as the necklace pursued its death embrace. The wound, a slow-leaking faucet, dripped onto the shag in sparse red droplets. Maggie was almost unconscious when the Shag 3000 woke.
The End
*****
The game was Shocker. It was your basic trivia challenge. Contestants were asked general-knowledge questions on random topics ranging from the mating habits of squirrels and dung beetles to pop culture and historical events. The format was a nod to the old-school days of the industry when reality media and gaming was just a fad and not the foundation of the economy.
Several hundred would-be contestants formed a line that wrapped around the dilapidated studio and down the block. They huddled under threadbare tarps and other makeshift protection against the drizzling acrid rain. Smog, thick, gray and black, obscured a hand in front of your face and drew tears from your eyes. It was like a living thing, an ancient being, a tenement neighbor swirling and permeating every crevice of the shrouded city. The fire-stack walled citadel was an aquarium. Man lived amidst the smog like fish in the sea.
Prize money, one hundred dollars to the finalist, was the reason so many braved the outdoors. It was nice money, would put food on the table, but it wasn’t big money and ninety of the hundred were studio-bucs. Only ten were actual, real open-market dollars. But the entry fee was nominal for freelancers, nothing at all for licensed union members, and the physical price of failure was low… potentially.
But Reginald Holms, a.k.a. Grinder, wasn’t in line for the hundred bucks. He needed the money, everybody did, but he wasn’t destitute like the rabble behind and in front of him. He still had company chits left over after his unceremonious release from the ShowPro-Reality Corp stables that would keep him in corporate housing and corporate store NearFood for a few more months. And that’s all the time he needed to get things right.
Rotary carts rolled through the street. You could hear them minutes before you saw them. Street urchins—kids, criminals and washed-up adults that couldn’t cut it as pros—pedaled bicycles with a fan blade apparatus suspended overhead or mounted out front, each pedal crank turning the gears that turned the wheels that turned the blades. Coal smoke parted before them, driven away by the pressure of the sweat-powered fans like demons before an exorcist, temporarily revealing the mass-consumption street monitors hanging like billboards. Brilliant LED light struggled through the haze, casting idle watchers in yellow-white sheen.
The rotary carts rolled through, their masters, their slaves struggling over massive potholes and the garbage that littered the streets. Years ago officials attempted to make a game of city maintenance; government crews competed for prizes by completing the most road repairs, but in the end there was just no getting around it: asphalt was boring and no one was watching and soon no one was competing. Now no one maintained the roads. All the laborers had moved on, tasted manufactured fame, saw the dollars and set out to become reality stars independent of their government handlers.
Dozens of screens played the latest episodes of reality television; people trapped in a house, the poor and starving alongside the pros all competing for food, races, sex games and on and on down the street, each new obscenity revealed with each cycle of the rotating-fan gear. A series of smaller screens running along the road at eye level displayed people living out their lives perpetually watched by a million tiny cameras cast like a net across the city and the world: an Asian woman cooking NearFood noodles in a wok; a split view, one side showing a man reading a paper while defecating in an outhouse, the other side revealing snow drifts so high the small structure was nearly buried.
One row above the squatting man Reggie watched an uptown family eating actual beef sandwiches while they watched a tenement family of five struggling, searching dumpsters for food. On the uptown family’s living room screen a black man, skeletal and lean, dug through a pile of alley rubbish. Above him was a row of screens that ran the length of the brick alley wall displaying the same channel of the up-towners watching him. He stopped, picked his teeth with something he’d just dug out of the trash and stared at the screen. The scene perpetuated into the ether, one watching the other on and on.
A commercial played on the giant screen nearest the Shocker contestant line. It was a ShowPro-Reality Corp recruitment piece: A young woman’s voice overlaid flashing images of healthy, athletic men and women competing in a variety of events. “If you want to be the best, you need help from the best. ShowPro-Reality has more Elite Class reality gamers on the circuit than any other professional management firm in the world,” dramatic pause. “Go Elite. Go ShowPro.”
The shining text and the ShowPro image of a chrome globe held by a chrome, featureless, genderless giant gave way to Grinder’s sweating, bleeding face. It filled the three-story screen. Reginald watched himself rappel down a cliff side, scramble across a beach strung with barbed wire and dotted with fragmentation mines and leap across a finish line just as a second man dropped from the cliff, hitting the beach hard. Close-up of leg fracturing. Close-up of face contorted in pain and determination.
The screen cut to Reggie, froze on his face in mid-flight across the finish line. It was twisted with exertion. “Elite” appeared on the screen and then he was gone. The smog pushed itself back in and obscured the screen as it transitioned to this week’s episode of Outcast where two women were beating each other with rubber clubs in an effort to grab a steel hoop and drop it over a stake in the ground. The winner moved on to the next round. The loser went home, if they could still walk. The show cut to a closed interview with one of the women taken prior to the onscreen action. She began badmouthing her opponent and the other contestants she shared a house with.
The ShowPro commercial footage was from the final episode of Do or Die, shot a full year earlier. Minutes after Reggie crossed the finish line, the man dragging himself across the sand behind him was pulled into the ocean and drowned on worldwide television. He had lost. There was no second place in Do or Die. The show, and that episode in particular, garnered the highest ratings in Media Mass, Inc. history and catapulted Reggie, screen name Grinder, into the limelight.
The coal smog filled the void behind the rotary carts completely. It rolled in like a living thing, groping, clinging to everything it touched. As it washed back in Reggie thought he saw a pair of shredded sneakers tied with wire and twine around small feet. But the smog was relentless and the shoes disappeared. He almost gave up his place in line, stepped into the street after the wearer of the shoes, but something in him held him back, the greater cause. Soon, pal, soon.
An older couple ahead of him in line was staring at him like they had seen a ghost. He hoped they hadn’t recognized him, weren’t going to ask for an autograph. He dropped his head and pulled his poncho hood down over as much of his face as it could manage, tightened his tattered overcoat and welcomed the ashen air. For the first time in his life he was grateful for the smog.
*
Reggie won Shocker. Knew he would. Trivia was part of basic training. Any corporate-sponsored gamer knew every useless fact conceivable. Catalogues of the stuff had been implanted in his subconscious while under hypnosis. Many times even Reggie wasn’t aware he knew something until the words fell from his lips. He had sat confidently and watched his closest competitor, an old guy with five kids and a wife, get cooked alive with electricity released into wires clamped to contestants’ bare flesh while they sat naked in frigid buckets of water answering stupid-ass questions about squirrels screwing.
The electricity was cued by incorrect answers and released from its copper confines by a monkey trained to throw a lever whenever a midget tossed him a NearFood cookie. The camera always zoomed in on the animal’s face. The little prick seemed to be smiling every time he dropped the lever. Adding insult to injury, the poor bastard had lifelines still on the board when his own life was carried away on the current. Amateurs: they paid in blood and tears every time.
He pocketed the ten real dollars and gave the studio-bucs to a kid in the audience because he reminded Reggie of someone. The kid smiled, said “gee thanks, mister” and ran off to the studio store, probably to waste the bucs on mugs and t-shirts plastered with the studio logo while he and his family would go hungry tonight and the next and probably the next.
Most of the audience had recognized him from Do or Die and later from Gross Me Out, How Much Is Too Much and the rest of his pedigree, and Reggie had to break into a trot and lower his shoulder a tad to get through the mob. They wanted his signature, wanted professional tips, wanted to know why he had done it, why he threw it all away for a kid. But ultimately they wanted his ten bucks.
The ten real dollars would come in handy no doubt, but Reggie had played Shocker because oddly enough it was a qualifier. The winner logged ten professional qualifier points, union-backed credits. The runner-up, or the runner-up’s next of kin, logged five. Shocker was small time, low on the ratings. It sat somewhere below Rancor on the charts and just barely above the street games played for NearFood scraps and filmed for dead-air filler between the blockbuster hits on worldwide. No, it wasn’t qualifier material, not by the traditional standard, but what the hell: credits were credits.
Two girls ran past him in the smog as he made his way home, one nearly colliding with him head-on. “Out of the way, asshole,” one girl said as she tried to decipher a map or clue or some such shit written out on studio paper made to look ancient and mysterious. Cameramen clambered behind them, trying to run with relic cameras weighing them down like anchors. Low budget. Run, Run or Last One Home Loses a Digit or one of a thousand other struggling shows.
A thirty-minute walk later, Reggie was pushing through the lower door of ShowPro-Tower. It was a nice building, lots of chrome and glass. It rose high above the city’s unfettered coal-smog cap and most other buildings, providing the top-level residents, the reality professionals and studio execs, actual exposure to the sun. Reggie knew this because he had lived in the top levels; eighty-seventh floor, compartment 2C, to be exact. Of everything he had given up, he missed the sun the most.
That was before Do As I Say, Not As I Do.
Now he lived on the fifth floor, a move he made to stretch the remainder of his corporate chits and one he regretted more often than not. The entrance for floors three through thirty was in the rear of the building. The front door, the door to floors thirty and above, was guarded around the clock by large men with a list. If you were not on the list you did not try to enter the front door. Once, a young producer looking to make a name for himself ramped up a black market spinoff of Catch Me If You Can where teams of contestants tried to outsmart various corporate security and snatch artifacts from inside the gleaming towers. Filming was cut short when the producer’s body was found stuffed in a pothole the morning after the first shoot.
The hall was cluttered with garbage and overflow tenants. A person could sleep in the hall for a real dollar a day or fifty studio-bucs if they were redeemable at the right studio. Media Mass money got you an extra night. Global Messenger, Inc.… eh, not so much. Union credits were a different story. Cashing in a single union credit could get you a day in a private room, with heat, cooling and running water.
Reggie stepped over the sleeping bodies and a woman with a foil bowl cooking something that might have been wind-cart kill from the night before, until he reached his door. A soft voice almost startled the key card from his hand.
“When will you be finished? It’s lonely here.”
Reggie turned and a small boy was standing behind him. He was filthy, wore too-large clothes and had a gash running left to right across his forehead. The blood was dried, dark and mixed with the grime on his face seamlessly.
Reggie knelt to meet the boy’s sorrowful eyes. “Sorry, buddy. Still working some things out. Won’t be long now.”
The boy smiled. “Okay.” And he kicked at an empty can of NearFood paste and headed down the hallway the way Reggie had come. The can skidded against the road kill cooker’s foil, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“See ya later,” Reggie yelled after him, but the boy didn’t look back.
Reggie’s room was ten by ten. He shared it with three other minor league players and they shared a community bathroom down the hall with fifty more minor leaguers and hallway dwellers. Gerald was sitting on the sofa-thing that lined the east wall watching the giant-screen television that made up the entire west wall of the room.
“There he is, the man!” Gerald said with faux adoration. Gerald weighed five hundred pounds, which would have been fine if he was eight feet tall, but he wasn’t. The top of his skull was five feet two inches from the bottom of his foot. He made a living competing in televised eating contests. The man had once eaten ninety-seven NearFood pies. The screen bounced from Haters to the worldwide standings as Gerald mashed the remote with sausage fingers. A list of names filled the screen in vertical columns. At the bottom right a page indicator told them they were viewing page one of four thousand four hundred and fifty-two. Gerald skipped to the last page. Eight names from the bottom flashed “Reginald Holms.” They didn’t even list his screen name anymore. Grinder: there were studio t-shirts printed with the name once, coffee mugs too.
“Ten big ones. Nice work, my man,” Gerald said and extended a closed fist. Reggie bumped it with a closed fist of his own. He was humoring his roommate. He didn’t feel like celebrating. His participation in Shocker was borderline humiliating.
“This cat, Tiger Lily, is making moves though. Check him out,” Gerald said, shaking his head. Several hundred slots above Reggie was someone with the screen name of Tiger Lily. Tiger had nearly five hundred union credits. The name was flashing, which meant a change in ranking within the last twenty-four hours.
“Thanks, man,” Reggie said in response to his roommate’s initial congratulations before moving on to someone neither of them knew. He edged past the sprawled man’s legs and found his place on the room-length couch and plopped down, dimly aware that he was being followed and focused on by uncountable cameras within his own room. He wondered sometimes what screen his life was played out on and who might be watching, who might care? “Where’s Jim?”
“Haven’t seen or heard from him in a day or two. He went down to StudioCom to get into As Nasty As You Want To Be. New season. ShowPro gig.”
“He already did Nasty,” Reggie said, confused. He let the ShowPro reference drop. The agency had shown a lot of interest in Jim since Reggie’s fall. It was a point of tension between the roomies.
“Some kind of survivor reunion series circle jerk, you know—a ratings bit.” Gerald flipped back to Haters and the two watched as racists and purists and nationalists and every other kind of -ist screamed their points of view at each other. At the end of each episode one contestant was voted off the island they were all secluded on. With enough votes, the banished, along with their extremist views, could be sentenced to rotary cart duty, an actual correctional facility, or even death.
Reggie indicated his understanding with a grunt and lay back into his corner of the sofa bed. He paid most of the rent, and that entitled him to certain things like the third of the sofa with the armrest/headboard. Gerald paid the least, which put him sleeping on the floor or in the middle of the sofa with his head next to Reggie’s feet, but since Jim would be away for a while the two enjoyed the extra leg room and Gerald’s use of Jim’s share of the sofa bed would be their little secret. But if the fat man left any stains behind the jig would be up. And Gerald was the type of guy who left stains behind.
“Thought you had more credits though, Reg? Seems like you did,” Gerald said. The last words fought their way through a mouthful of NearFood. “Fucking studios, man.”
“Eh, studios. Someone’s got to pay the rent.” Reggie pulled an overused, sleep-soiled sheet over his head and tried to doze while people screamed at each other on the wall screen.
*
Reality stars, the good ones anyway, liked to say the world was home to two kinds of people: stars and props. You were either in the spotlight or you were background. But sometimes even the background could make a buck.
Reggie stopped caring about life several months back under the fixated gaze of ten billion eyes condensed into a few hundred street cams that watched him from around the world as he lived the life of a reality star. Do As I Say, Not As I Do, or DAD as it was called on the street, was the big show, primetime. If you were a reality gamer—and everybody was—you wanted your shot at a show like DAD or maybe the two or three other big-money, big-future shows like Do or Die and All Ate Up. It meant food, real food, on the table for a long time. It meant sleeping in an environmentally controlled space. It meant survival. And it took five hundred union credits and three top-place finishes in any other ranked show just to be considered for entry.
This season’s scenario was a legal drama. A retro bit that had Reggie “Grinder” Holms playing the part of a sleuth, which meant something like a detective back in the day, a cop. Now it meant something totally different, which was part of the show’s premise, its draw: humiliation. He was to be Her Majesty’s Royal Sleuth Holms for the next five months, if he lasted that long, which in today’s vernacular meant something along the lines of Her Majesty’s Royal Prick. Hilarious.
He was walking down a side street. Giant stationary fans mounted in the streets and on rooftops blew continuously overhead, keeping the smog at bay and providing a better viewing experience. On the ground in the mouth of an alley perpendicular to the street, a man and a woman were having sex. They wallowed in the filth of the alley tearing at each other’s clothes like animals. The man was screaming, “Spank me, spank me.” His voice had energy. His eyes did not. He wore a wedding ring. She did not.
DAD was a game of virtual control. Viewers, and upon occasion the studios when things got boring, told the participants what to do and when to do it with the end goal of completing their assigned task. Reggie doubted that copulating like wild pigs on the street had anything to do with the completion of these two participants’ weekly tasks. It was something to liven things up, get the show’s pulse pumping.
Several times throughout an episode a participant would encounter a Rubicon, a decision point in his character’s story. Viewers could enter possible plot twists and activities through their interactive wall screens. Those activities with the highest agreement ratings from other viewers were forced on the contestants. Fan favorites proceeded nicely through the game with the aid of helpful, progressive activities that moved them toward their weekly episode finish line and inevitably the seasonal finish line and victory.
Participants with low ratings in the polls, however, usually found themselves fucking in the streets while their wives and family watched on television, asking people to kick them in the balls for no apparent reason or other hysterical acts that caused them pain and/or humiliation at best and at worst prevented them from reaching the finish line altogether, thereby jeopardizing their continued participation on the show. The three contestants with the worst finishing times each episode were at risk of being voted out.
Grinder was a fan favorite.
The man Reggie recognized as Bob the Butcher, the leading suspect in a murder case Reggie was following. The woman, probably a prop, Reggie couldn’t place and he didn’t want to stare. Her eyes were no more alive than those of the man on top of her. She may even have been crying, but at least she was getting paid either way—probably in studio-bucs, but hey, it was something. If the Butcher was eliminated he got exactly squat for his troubles and maybe less than that if the polls didn’t go his way. All those union credits, a fortune, wasted. Ol’ Bob took a shot at the big time when he could’ve kept his family in NearFood for years, heated their tenement for ten winters or even moved them uptown. The pro circuit was no place for a family man.
Reggie idly wondered why he wasn’t arresting Bob right there, but it wasn’t in the cards for him tonight, and besides, it was only the third episode of the season. He would have to putz around their closed-course game world for weeks before getting close to Bob. Following instructions, Reggie continued down the alley pretending not to notice the suspected killer spanking an unnamed woman; he was looking for a yellow cow. That’s where the instructions left him. The yellow cow undoubtedly held another Rubicon.
The street twisted and turned, but finally he came to the yellow cow. It was plastic, battered and hanging from the arch of a butcher shop aptly named…The Yellow Cow. It was Bob’s place. Reggie expected to find evidence of murder: hacked-up bodies, jewelry from the deceased, something like that. A little bell jingled overhead when he stepped through the door.
The place was empty and dark, but the low smog kept at bay by the studio blades reflected a gray, hazy light from public viewing screens all over the city so he could still make out hanging carcasses of animals behind the counter. Below a pig hanging by its hind feet was a red button mounted into a podium-like stand, and below that was the word “Rubicon” imprinted in black letters against a bright yellow background. He walked over and pressed the button.
All contestants wore a wrist monitor. Reggie’s began to vibrate immediately after he pressed the decision button. Reggie pulled his sleeve back to reveal a wrap that extended up most of his forearm and contained a digital display. So many viewer suggestions blazed across it Reggie gave up trying to read them. Each one was followed with an associated ratings number: burn the place: 57; look through the back room: 150; turn around and leave: 40; kill him: 400.
Kill him? Him who?
A boy jumped out from behind a butcher’s block holding a six-inch carving knife. He wore jeans several sizes too large, a bloody t-shirt and shoes held together with twine and wire. A prop. The boy was crying; his tears cut grooves through the gritty muck that clung to his face.
“Leave my pa alone,” the boy managed. This was apparently Bob the Butcher’s son. He was not in the script. The boy was a prop.
The wrist monitor vibrated and the suggestions toggled between calm the boy and kill the boy, with calm the boy leading in popularity by a hundred ratings points. One eye on the blade the other on the wrist band, Reggie circled, waiting, breath held, for direction from his masters. He wasn’t a killer. He would not kill…period. His actions led to the death of others in game play, but never by his own hand. They knew the rules, the consequences of second place. He simply outperformed them. A justification no doubt, but it was all he had, all that kept him marginally sane. He wouldn’t kill.
The vibrating stopped.
Reggie looked down, eyes closed, took a deep breath. He opened his eyes and exhaled heavily. Calm the boy had won out by a slim margin of thirty points.
He kneeled and reached out to the kid. The boy, sobbing now, stepped in and jammed the knife into Reggie’s shoulder. Reggie screamed, fell back on his ass and the boy kept coming, shaking his head, crying, “Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me. I’m sorry,” even as he stabbed again. This time the blade missed and Reggie rolled and let the boy fall on his own momentum.
“What are you doing?” Reggie snapped, clutching his shoulder. “I’m supposed to calm you. You don’t have to do this.”
The boy shook his head. “They made me.” He tried to whisper.
Hand a starving kid a stick of NearFood and a blade and tell him to kill someone. The fucking studios. I guess random sex wasn’t enough to keep the ratings rolling.
His wrist buzzed again and both players stopped. Reggie slowly pulled back his sleeve again and bit his lip. Kill him: 500.
Their eyes met for just a second and Reggie’s grew wide as the boy lunged.
“Don’t hurt me!” the boy cried, his words diametrically opposing his actions.
Reggie caught the boy’s wrist, again letting his attacker’s momentum take him, and flung the kid into the shop’s wall, twisting the knife free as he did. A move he learned in ShowPro training camp.
The boy lay in a heap, crying loudly, clutching his broken wrist. Reggie held the knife now. It caught hazy light and gleamed. His arm vibrated—Kill: 700. Kill: 800.
Reggie knelt beside the boy, this time not reaching out to calm him, but to grab him by the hair and pull his throat closer. The penalty for disobeying the Rubicon commands, the viewers’ commands, was immediate elimination from the show, a lost contract with ShowPro and probably public execution. There were not a lot of rule breakers walking the streets.
The fucking studios.
But Reggie was no killer of kids and he found it hard to believe that the world at large wanted to see kids be killed. Maybe overall ratings were low. Maybe tonight had been a ratings dud. Maybe the producers needed something to give the series a shot in the arm, stir some controversy. Whatever the case, the situation Reggie now found himself in felt totally contrived; it reeked of studio manipulation.
Damn it all. He was no kid killer.
Reggie let the kid fall back onto the floor and tossed the knife across the room well out of his or the kid’s reach. He didn’t believe the kid was a killer either, but clearly his back was against the wall both literally and figuratively. His mother and father probably had pneumatic bolt guns to their heads at this very moment.
Reggie’s wrist band stopped vibrating, went dead. Men in riot gear seemed to materialize from the ether and batons rained down on Reggie. One of the last things he saw, an image that would never leave his mind, was of a black club caving in the top of the boy’s skull. Watching the life drain from those young eyes.
In that moment something changed in Reggie. People described critical points in their lives, times where they could bear no more, with words like snapped, breakdown, collapse. But for Reggie it was more of a fusing, a mending of something that had snapped long ago. As he watched the boy die, he realized that he had been broken down for a long time; he had been born into brokenness. The world was broken.
Reggie escaped death after a massive outpouring of viewer support spared him. He lost his ShowPro contract, status and relatively plush lifestyle, but he lived…and they would regret that. He would make them regret that.
*
Everyone worked for the studios. One way or another.
Reggie sat on his third of the sofa bed with a small folding keyboard in his lap. A thin cable ran across the floor and into one of a dozen serial ports behind the wall screen used for maintenance, updates and other tasks that Reggie was not authorized to perform. The wireless keyboard issued with the room and mated to the wall screen lay on the floor, its activity LEDs amber in idle mode. And idle is just where it would stay. Transferring credits illegally was not something he wanted the studios or the union to know about, and an unprotected wireless connection of any kind, much less a studio-provided connection, was tantamount to posting a sign outside his door: hacking, do not disturb.
Gerald was at the MediaMax gymnasium training for a NearFood wing-eating competition to be held in three days. And the last time they had seen Jim it was on the apartment wall screen. He was being voted off As Nasty As You Want To Be for trying to do something particularly heinous to a housemate. Apparently Jim could not be as nasty as he wanted. That was weeks ago. They decided a few days ago that they needed a new roommate. Gerald didn’t know it just yet, but he would soon need two new roommates.
His fingers played across the keys like a concert pianist. The wall screen, usually displaying the latest programming, now jumped from database to database displaying only command line prompts and drive indicators. Reggie found his file, found Tiger Lily’s file and stopped.
He tabbed down from the database window to a small single-line oval window at the bottom of the screen. A blinking cursor awaited him. At the cursor Reggie typed when/where? and waited.
A moment later there was a response: 1350 Planters, Warrens—30mins. Credits now.
Reggie tabbed back up to the database window and pressed enter and watched as his queue of credits dumped into Tiger Lily’s. Grinder dwindled to zero as Tiger’s topped out at seven-fifty. He closed out the session as soon as the transfer was complete, unplugged the keyboard and stuffed it into the duffle bag that was his closet sitting to the side of the sofa. Fifteen minutes later Reggie was walking in the clean wake of a small pack of rotary carts into The Warrens; a dozen square blocks of downtown that made Old Town look new; slums within slums. The carts broke off and headed back uptown on their endless route through the city and Reggie continued on through the haze.
He followed the muted glow of television screens grimy and unattended down Planters Avenue and into a warehouse so bleak and dark that even the screens and their LED images could not penetrate its abyss. A bay door with the numbers 1350 painted above it had been left partially open and Reggie ducked and slipped inside without a glance behind him. With any luck he was nothing more than an apparition in the muck, gray against swirling gray. He could not afford to be the focus of any street screens for passive viewers to ogle. Not yet, not now.
Inside all was darkness. He stood for a moment, unsure of what to do next. Water dripped into more water from somewhere in the deep. Plop. Plop.
“You’re late.” It was a scratchy voice, harsh.
Reggie struck a match. The yellow light fell on a hunched man in blackened coveralls and bandana. His eyes were slits and laced with red. Black soot covered his face except for almost white skin around his eyes where goggles perpetually rode like ticks on a dog’s back.
The man shot across the room quicker than Reggie would have ever imagined. He scurried low like a crab and swatted the match from Reggie’s hands. It went out and darkness prevailed.
“Fuck’n idiot,” the soot-covered man snapped. “We’ll be on fifty thousand TVs in seconds. That what you want, Mr. ShowPro?” his voice was a rasp hamstringed by a mounting case of lung rot.
They stood in silence for a moment then Reggie asked, “Tiger Lily, huh? The name doesn’t suit you.” Everyone worked for the studios one way or another, and this filthy, hunched man was no different. He was a miner. If they had screen names at all they were called things like Thrasher and Macerator, not Tiger Lily or anything else ending in lily. They spent sixteen hours a day or more, sometimes living in the pits for weeks at a time, walking on their knees in spaces kept narrow by the studio-owned mines to keep operational costs low, pulling coal from the earth beyond the stack walls in the Wastes to feed the electrical plants that turned the sky into ash and powered the studios—the lights, the action, the screens, the cameras…the hundreds of thousands of cameras.
“Funny man, ah? You think this is for me, Mr. ShowPro genius? You think I risk this for me, a busted miner?” He shook his head in disgust and irritation then cut to the chase. “You got the rest of the money?”
Reggie pulled out a paper sack and stuck his hand out blindly. He knew the miner was watching him. A lifetime in the mines and generations worth of miners, the man could see him in this pitch nearly as well as Reggie could see under studio lighting. The miner took the sack and Reggie heard him rifling through its contents. Five hundred dollars real money and another two in studio-bucs.
“What’s this shit? Studio-bucs? We didn’t deal for no studio-bucs. I got plenty of shit paper, boy.” Ruffle of papers hitting the floor.
“It’s all I got.”
“It ain’t enough.”
“This is happening tonight. You can cash in or not. Either way the payments stop. The union credits stop.” Reggie half expected to get brained with a miner’s pickaxe, but the silence stretched without word or action from either man.
The miner grunted, “The stuff’s in the corner. Everything you asked for. Don’t move. Count to fifty. Use all the damn matches you want after that.” Reggie heard the man shuffle off in his awkward miner’s crab walk.
Reggie didn’t count, but he did wait, motionless, barely breathing for a long time. Long enough for another pass of rotary carts outside, their operators’ faces slathered in grime and contorting with each press of the pedal. When the smog returned and the darkness with it, Reggie eased his way further into the warehouse, feeling his way with an outstretched foot before making his step until he felt deep enough that a match light would not draw attention from the streets or the focus of unseen cameras. A final glance under the half-open bay door and he struck the match.
Miners had lung rot. Miners were hunched and broken-kneed from living their lives in shallow shafts walking more like insects than men. Miners had pink saliva and red-tinged teeth from bleeding esophagi. Miners had explosives.
Partially obscured under a canvas tarp were two crates marked with skull and crossbones stamps and the words “HiTech Boom-Boom, Inc. DANGER.” The deal had been for four crates, but Reggie didn’t think it would matter. He had guessed at the amount required to begin with. Blowing things up wasn’t something they taught in the ShowPro stables. Although ratings would have soared, explosions would be hell on studio gear.
*
Like a massive fence of concrete pickets, the series of great stacks extended into the smog cap that they endlessly vomited. They ran on for miles, surrounding the city, growing smaller before finally disappearing into the close, gray horizon.
The plant was awash in white light, a bastion in the perpetual grayness. Dozens of pole-mounted spotlights panned the grounds and the sky. The razor-wire fence was lined with smaller lights. The gate was crisscrossed with more lighting. More strings of lighting and light towers lined the working areas of the plant—conduits, burners, transformers, catwalks and scaffolding. Plant-funded, private brigades of rotary carts continuously patrolled the campus in circles and figure eights.
The scene was gluttonous. Millions went without electricity for such basic needs as heating and cooling while the studios gobbled up all the wattage they could get their hands on. Unless you could pay in cash or credits your outlets could handle only enough watts for a wall screen. More draw than that and there’d be a knock on the door. Lights out.
Although the extreme lighting had not been unexpected, it was not planned for either. For all his intelligence, natural and ShowPro given, beyond the illegal siphoning of his union credits in exchange for explosives, Reggie’s plan had not been well thought out. All he knew was that he wanted to hit the studios where it hurt. Hit ShowPro where it hurt. Make a point. You couldn’t hurt people, humiliate them and get away with it. You couldn’t hurt kids. Not if Reggie Grinder Holms had anything to say about it.
The hard part would be getting the explosives, and he had worked through that. Once he obtained the explosives, in his mind’s eye, he would simply march into the plant and blow it up. And that’s what he intended to do.
Reggie walked up to the front gate. A guard stepped from a small shack as Reggie appeared from the smog. Looking Reggie up and down he said, “I know you. You’re that guy, the cheater. You lost or something?”
Reggie stood there for a moment just staring at the man. Slowly he lifted his poncho to reveal the sticks of explosive taped to his body and the wiring run up his sleeve. With his other hand he held out a detonator. “Open the gate.”
The guard hesitated, turned and eyed the shack, took a step towards it.
“Don’t do it. You can go home to your family tonight, have a nice dinner, kiss the kids, or you can die. Your choice.”
“What kind of show is this, pal? Plants are off-limits. Everyone knows that. You’ll pay.” He was nervous, but still trying to hold up the security guard bravado.
“I’ve already paid. Just open the fucking gate,” Reggie said with the right amount of hysteria. He was fine, felt good, calm. ShowPro had taught him how to stay calm in tense situations. Thanks, ShowPro.
The guard walked backwards and entered a sequence into a number pad mounted near the gate latch. The gate opened, lurching and jolting. “You know everyone is watching. They’ll catch you,” the guard shouted after Reggie, who was already inside and disappearing into the maze of the plant’s inner workings. A few seconds later the alarm sounded.
People burst from doorways running. Most of them were working men and women, but security was not far behind. They came visors down, batons at the ready. Their eyes searched frantically for someone to hurt. From one doorway marked “Control Room” stepped a young boy wearing denim jeans too big for him and sneakers held together with twine and wire. He strolled over to Reggie as people barreled past him.
“Hey,” the boy said softly. There was no gash across his forehead.
“Hey, bud,” Reggie said.
“Didn’t think you were going to make it.” He took Reggie’s free hand, the one without the detonator in it, and they walked together into the depths of the electrical plant.
*
The plant was fully functioning within twelve hours of the explosion. During that time district substations took over the lost load. Not a single broadcast to a single wall screen was disrupted.
Thousands watched Reggie strapping explosives to his body by match light in an abandoned downtown warehouse. As interest peaked, thousands more street screens were auto-tuned by intuitive ratings sensors to Reggie’s impromptu staging area, and thousands of other viewers consciously flipped channels as word and auto-advertisement spread. By the time he reached the plant gates, millions of screens worldwide were broadcasting Reggie’s actions to billions of viewers. When Reggie blew himself and a portion of the plant up, the event registered the highest ratings in media history, surpassing Reggie’s previous record with Do or Die by millions. The studio-bucs rolled in faster than they could be printed. Everyone wanted “Grinder” Holms memorabilia.
*
The miner stepped through the front door, hunched and tired. The company house they lived in, paid for in company chits, sat near the mines beyond the stack walls and the city. The window pane shook around the clock from the aftershock of exploratory blasting. It had taken him hours to walk the miles into the Wastes. His knees and hips screamed at him. He took his soot-caked boots and coveralls off in the mudroom and walked into the kitchen where his nightshift counterparts were brewing NearFood chickaree in the gloom of candlelight. They exchanged grunts and he continued through into the single room he and his wife shared with their baby girl and two other night-shifters who had already left for the shuttle. His wife was feeding the child, swaying gently back and forth on a rocking chair he had found in an uptown alley years ago.
When he entered the room she gestured with a finger to her lips for him to be quiet and as usual to take off his clothes before coming inside. She fought a tireless battle against the coal soot and dirt that permeated their home, owned it. He hung his undergarments on their designated wall hooks near the door. She had tried to get him to hang them in the mudroom, but there were other women and children in the three-bedroom home, families of the other miners that would see his nudity, and she would not have that. Official studio policy was no more than two families to a single home. Five families lived here.
Naked he walked over, kissed his wife on the head and pulled the shawl away from her breast, exposing the silently suckling baby.
“I saw the wall screen, earlier. That man…he…” his wife whispered and coughed into a tissue misted red.
“It’s done,” he confirmed without really answering her unfinished question. The man had died, had blown himself up. For what reason they would never know and he didn’t really care and in time neither would Missy, although he knew she would dwell on it for weeks, feeling responsible in some way for the man’s death, wondering if what they had done was right, if the end justified the means.
But for him there was never any doubt, never more than a passing thought about the man who had traded his credits for boom-boom. He was fully grown and made his own decisions. Once, when Ezra was a teen, he’d applied for a spot on Rancid. His legs kept him from passing the trials; too slow, not built for the kind of speed needed to compete in the game. A min’ah always a min’ah, boy. Only future the pits for you, his dad told him with a smirk the day he returned from tryouts with a pink rejection slip in his soot-stained hand. Looking back Ezra wasn’t sure if things wouldn’t be better if he’d died a reality star rather than lived a miner. Before he stepped into the first runner’s chute he had to sign a waiver freeing the studio of any liability should he be injured or killed in the course of the competition. In the document he was referred to as a “willing participant.” That’s what Grinder was: a willing participant.
On the screen now, in the lower corner was the timed-out messaging session with Grinder. The words Your session has expired due to inactivity blinked on the screen in white letters against a black background. Grayed out behind it were her last words to the person that would save her daughter: 1350 Planters, Warrens, 30mins. Credits now.
She had waited for a response, but gave up after several minutes and tuned into the warehouse where Ezra waited even though he told her not to, that ratings sensors would follow and send a thousand others after her, but she had to see for herself that the deal was complete. When the man, screen name Grinder, appeared under the door her heart caught in her throat and she didn’t breathe for a full minute. It was actually him: Reginald “Grinder” Holms, ShowPro champion. When Ezra came home that day months ago and pulled her into their back room and shut out all the lights and whispered into her ear that a man had been hanging around the mine for the last week or so and that evening at shift’s end the man—who was the Do or Die champ from last year, that Grinder fella—approached Ezra, she hadn’t believed him. And when he told her what that Grinder fella wanted she definitely hadn’t believed him.
It was a trick, she said, probably a show making a fool of poor mining folk. But Ezra was firm: no, not this time, not this guy. He’s done, washed up since he flipped out. It’s real, Missy, it’s real. This is our chance. She followed her husband’s instructions, created an account under their baby girl’s global identification number after she made him promise that the girl would never be a part of the games, the shows, and he did, swore it. The man Grinder had handed Ezra a fancy keyboard and instructions and she, being more technically inclined than her mate, followed them to the letter.
She waited three days, staring at the screen night and day watching for contact as she’d been told to do, tiny keyboard in her lap, and the first time that oblong bubble popped up on their wall screen she almost screamed out loud. It started with a single word of white letters on a black screen: Hello. She had typed back the word hello, not sure what else to do, and after a few choppy statements Tiger Lily, a.k.a. Mira Johansen, only daughter to Ezra and Missy Johansen, had one hundred credits in her account. Missy started to cry.
It went on that way for months; her crying both with joy for her baby girl and sadness for what this Grinder man might be going through—what could push a man to barter his lifeline for boom-boom?—and Ezra coming home each night counting the credits in silence while he shoveled in ten thousand calories in NearFood grits.
“Is it enough?” she asked, looking down at the baby at her breast.
“It will have to be. She gonna have better than we ever did. She ain’t gonna die of no lung rot, no coal miner’s daughter.” The child Mary Shaw, screen name Tiger Lily, pulled away from her mother’s breast, stretched a tiny arm and curled up for a nap.
The End
*****
(Originally published by Blood Bound Books featured in Seasons of the Abyss)
The radio crackled on the kitchen table. A man’s voice emanated from the speakers, raspy and dry. He coughed. “This is WJGK, government radio.…” He went on to the day’s pollen count, “…so stay indoors,” the disc jockey finished.
“And try not to breathe,” Aaron said to no one. He was alone downstairs in their suburban home. His wife, Ann, was in bed upstairs. Outside a thick fog of allergens floated through the air, shrouding the world in a yellow-white haze. Across the street, over his waist-high grass, he watched a car smolder. Mowing had become impossible months ago, the idea of maintaining a lawn laughable now, and he had been concerned the fire might spread, but it hadn’t. A dead dog lay in the street, its body covered in pollen. Half a dozen red blossoms grew from its carcass.
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