Rash (10 page)

“There it is, boys. Number three-eight-seven, the jewel of the north,” said our FDHHSS escort. “Up here they don’t even bother to put razor wire on the fence. They let the polar bears take care of anybody decides to take a walk.”

“Are there really polar bears out there?” asked a stocky afro kid.

“They’re out there.”

“Polar bears are extinct,” I said. I thought I’d read that somewhere.

“There’re still a few,” the escort said.

“You’re just trying to scare us,” said the afro kid.

“Take a look for yourself,” said the escort, pointing out the right-hand side of the airplane.

All of us strapped into the right-hand seats looked out the windows. Just outside the fence, at the end of the airstrip, were four huge dingy yellow brown creatures standing around a pile of something red and brown.

“Polar bears are supposed to be white,” I said.

“Not these bears,” the escort said.

“How do we know they’re real?”

The escort laughed. “You’ll know they’re real when they rip your arm off, kid.”

Ever since the USSA annexed Canada during the Diplomatic Wars of 2055, McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing has been moving their factories north. They have about 200 plants in Ontario alone, making everything from cheap survival chairs to synthetic chocolate to walking helmets to suvs. I had no idea what I’d be doing.

According to Gramps, McDonald’s used to only sell food, back when French fries were legal. But in the 2020s, they merged with a suv company called General Motors under the name the McMotor Corporation of America. A few years later, McMotor was bought by a Chinese company called Wal-Martong. In 2031, during the Pan-Pacific conflict, Wal-Martong was nationalized and privatized by the USSA government and renamed
the McDonald’s Rehabilitation and Manufacturing Corporation.

I guess I learned something in school after all. For all the good it would do me. For the next three years, I would be a worker drone for McDonald’s. They would use me however they saw fit, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The pilot circled again and brought us in for a landing. The bears looked up as the plane passed them. We came so close I could see the red stains on their faces and paws.

“What are they eating?” I asked.

“Same thing you’ll be eating, kid. Leftovers.”

The first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane was the smell of garlic, oregano, and cooked tomatoes. The tundra smelled like an Italian restaurant.

“They’re all yours, gentlemen,” said the FDHHSS escort as he turned us over to four stone-faced, blue-uniformed guards with stun batons.

The guards herded us along a narrow walkway protected by chain-link fence on either side, then through a set of gates and out onto a field of trampled brown grass and dried mud. One side of the field was bounded by the metal wall of one of the windowless factory buildings. On the other side was a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence that surrounded the entire compound. The guards lined us up against the fence, instructed us to stay where we were, then walked back across the field to stand in the shelter of the building.

A chilly wind swirled around us and cut through our thin shirts. None of us were warmly dressed. We hadn’t
been told we were being sent halfway to the North Pole.

We were a motley crew. There were browns, whites, and every-shade-in-betweens. One kid was the largest human being I had ever seen. He was average height, but he must have weighed at least 400 pounds. All we had in common was that we were all male, all teenagers, and all guilty of crimes against society. And everybody was carrying a ton of bad attitude. You would think that since we were all in the same rotten situation, we’d try to get along, but instead we exchanged tough-guy stares.

I ended up standing next to the fat kid. He was so bulbous his arms wouldn’t hang straight down at his sides. He kept shifting and bumping his hand against my arm. I got tired of that real fast. The next time he did it, I slapped his hand away.

“Hey!” he said, looking at me through little red pig eyes.

“Keep your hands to yourself, Chunko,” I said.

The kid stared at me so long and with such red-eyed intensity I began to get a little worried. He really was enormous. But I figured I could always outrun him. When I couldn’t stand his staring anymore, I left the lineup and walked over to ask the guards what was going on.

“Hey,” I said, “how long you gonna make us stand out here?”

One of the guards smiled and jabbed his baton into my belly. I fell gasping to the hard-packed turf.

“Any more questions, asshole?” one of the guards asked.

I shook my head.

“Then get your punk ass back in line.”

I staggered back to the fence, clutching my gut. The fat kid didn’t say anything, but he had a little smile on his face.

More minutes passed. The pain in my belly eased, but the shivering increased. We were hugging ourselves and stamping our feet to stay warm. My teeth started to chatter. I thought that only happened in cartoons.

I don’t know how long they left us out there. It probably wasn’t more than twenty minutes, but it felt like hours. Finally we heard the sound of an engine. A six-wheel atv came skidding around the corner of the building and rolled up between us and the guards.

A man wearing insulated coveralls with the McDonald’s logo on the front climbed off the atv. He was a big man—tall, broad-shouldered, and thick-necked, with bristly white hair, black eyebrows, and a red face. His hands were big and red too. The only thing small about him were the deformed, shapeless lumps of cartilage he had for ears, and his tiny blue eyes. He walked slowly down the line, pausing in front of each of us individually, looking us up and down, then moving on. I had the distinct impression that we were a disappointment to him.

When he had finished his inspection, he stood back and crossed his thick arms over his massive chest.

“My name is Hammer,” he said in a deep, hoarse voice. “You are my nails. Do you think you can remember that, nails?”

Most of us nodded.

“You get out of line, Hammer pounds you down. When Hammer speaks, you listen. When Hammer tells you to do something, you jump. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about the way I run my plant, feel free to keep your thoughts to yourselves. Now, are there any questions?”

“Yeah. How long are you gonna make us stand out here?” I asked, surprising myself. You’d think getting punched in the belly once would have taught me something.

Hammer gave me a long, hard stare. “What’s your name, nail?”

“Bo. Bo Marsten. Look, we aren’t exactly dressed for the cold.”

“Cold?” He raised his black eyebrows in mock surprise. “It’s practically high summer! That sun won’t set till almost midnight! You want cold, just you wait a few months.”

“We could die from exposure,” I said. “You could be charged with neglect.”

“Neglect?” He threw back his head and laughed. “Charged by who? Let me explain something to you, nail. You gave up the benefits of civilian life back when you did whatever it was you did to get put here. This is the real world. You belong to me and Mickey D. Nobody gives a damn if you catch a chill. Now step away from the fence.”

Nobody moved.

“I said, STEP AWAY FROM THE FENCE!”

I stepped forward a few feet.

“ALL OF YOU!”

Everybody took a couple of steps forward just as a metallic crash came from behind us. I looked back, instinctively ducking. For one interminable second I did not understand what I was seeing. It was large, it was yellow and white and brown and black, it was almost as high as the fence, and it was rattling the chain-link. Then I saw it for what it was. A bear, nine feet tall,
its long black claws scrabbling over the metal links.

My legs turned rubbery and I fell back on my rear. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The bear pressed its filthy belly against the flimsy-looking steel mesh and leered down at me, dragging a huge blue black tongue over its furry, pink-stained mouth. The smell of dead fish, rotting meat, and Italian spices washed over me.

“Don’t worry, kiddies,” Hammer said. “He can’t get in.”

The bear was not alone. Two more polar bears came lumbering up to join him. They stared in at us with expressionless black eyes.

“Nails!” Hammer looked around at the scattered inmates, a few of whom had run a considerable distance. “Get back here. C’mon now, boys, I’m not done talkin’ to you.” The four guards were moving to intercept some of us, like dogs herding sheep. “Last one back in line gets a baton up his ass.”

That had some effect. A few seconds later we were once again lined up in front of Hammer, but with a good ten feet between us and the fence. The fishy, tomato-saucy reek of the bears hung in the air like bad breath in an elevator.

“Now listen to me,” Hammer said. “Your welfare is not a priority. In fact, we have contracted with the government to take on more workers than we need. I lose a few nails, no problem—there’s plenty more where you come from. Something happens to one of you—and things do happen here—we just toss you over the fence. Attempted escape. Those bears won’t leave so much as a shred of gristle behind. But don’t worry. Do your work, don’t try anything stupid, and eventually you get to go back home. Simple as that. Now, how many of you
boys like pizza? Let’s have a show of hands.”

A few hands went up, but not mine. I’d never eaten one of the things. Pizza was grandma/grandpa food. It had gone out of style with burgers and fries.

“Only four?” He grinned. “Well now, ain’t that tragic.”

With that, Hammer climbed back onto his atv and drove off. Behind us one of the bears let out an impatient growl. We all turned to look. I could swear that bear was smiling.

One by
one we were escorted into the building by a guard. I had never seen so many hard surfaces and sharp corners in my life. The floor was hard unprotected concrete—no carpeting or rubberization. There were spots where the slabs joined unevenly. It would be easy to trip and fall. Even the walls were dangerous. There was no padding on the corners, and in several places along the walls I saw exposed bolts and rivets. The place was a death trap.

“You could get hurt here,” I said to the guard. He laughed and gave me a jab in the back with his baton.

When we reached the infirmary, the guard made me strip down naked. A bored-looking medtech came in and poked, prodded, scanned, and measured me. When he had finished examining every square inch of my body, he gave me a small white plastic-wrapped packet about the size of my palm.

“Put these on,” said the tech.

I unwrapped the packet and shook out a pair of thin, white paper coveralls. I put them on.

“Not very comfortable,” I said. It felt like wearing a paper bag. “There’s no padding at all.”

“Get used to it,” said the tech. “You won’t be wearing anything else for the next few years.” He was holding a device in his right hand. It looked like an overly complex staple gun. “Hold out your arm.” He grabbed my wrist and jammed the device against my forearm and pulled the trigger. I let out a howl and jerked my arm away.

“What the hell was that?”

“Locator pod,” said the tech.

Given that we were in the middle of nowhere surrounded by polar bears, I don’t know why they bothered with that. I guess if somebody escaped they could use the locator to find out which bear had eaten the escapee.

He gave me a small bag containing a toothbrush, soap, comb, and several pamphlets listing the rules and regs of McDonald’s Plant #387.

“Enjoy your stay,” he said.

A guard escorted me to my new home, a nine-by-ten-foot cubicle with a bunk bed, a metal toilet, three walls of unpainted concrete block, and one wall that was all bars. A thin slit of a window about four inches wide looked out over the tundra. I put my bag on the bottom bunk, took a piss, then sat on my bunk and stared at the wall. At first I thought it was just dirty, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw the shadows of words that had been scrawled on the concrete, then scrubbed off. Mostly it was illegible, but I could make out fragments of names, numbers, and assorted obscenities all tangled up with each other, layer upon layer. I wondered whether I would be adding anything to the mix.

I heard the door slide open and looked up. It was the huge fat kid. I stood up, returning his red-eyed glare.
The guard behind him prodded the kid with his baton. He squeezed through the doorway, and my cell got a lot smaller.

The kid looked around, taking in his surroundings, then tossed his bag on the bottom bunk.

“That’s my bunk,” I said.

He moved my bag to the top bunk. “Bugger off,” he said.

I took a step back, my heart jumping. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was far worse than anything I’d ever said to Karlohs Mink.

He sat on the edge of the mattress and stared glumly at the wall, just as I had been doing a minute earlier.

Clearly this whale had been assigned to the wrong cell. I looked out through the bars, hoping to catch the guard before he disappeared, but I was too late.

Looking back at the fat kid, I considered my options. What I wanted to do was grab him by his paper coveralls and yank him off the bunk and shove him out through the slit window. All of which was impossible—he looked like the rock of Gibraltar.