The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (17 page)

“I’ll haul you in when the moment’s right.”

“I won’t go willingly,” she returned. “Do ops — and I don’t mean you by any means — do ops do a lot of moonlighting?”

“Smmummm,” McCallum grunted as Dr. Majum dug around in his mouth.

“I would assume. Everyone’s got bills to pay. There are probably all manner of people who need extra security now and again. I’ll get a speeding ticket someday. Or I’ll cut the lawn of the people across the street and they’ll be furious. They keep it so long. Then I’ll need your help.”

“Oh ay,” McCallum said mostly through his nose.

Dr. Majum pulled her hands out of his mouth.

“Tell those boys to cut the lawn,” McCallum said. “Never do the nasty jobs yourself.”

Dr. Majum chuckled again. “Never thought of that. So used to doing my own dirty work.”

“That’s not how the low grades do it.”

McCallum relaxed back into the long, squeaky chair and closed his eyes to fight the small sun Dr. Majum had for a work lamp.

Take your own advice,
he said to himself. A joke. Because he never did.

Chapter Twenty

Emory kneeled on the ground, arms limp to the side, head hung so low his chin pressed on his chest. Four other men worked around him, clearing debris from the tunnel section they’d just removed. He had a few minutes before he had to take down the braces and move up the line. He should’ve helped them. He wanted to, but couldn’t move. They knew, by looking, not to ask. They’d seen the gray face and dark pillow eyes on others.

Emory’s joints ached. When he closed his eyes, he could feel the heat multiply where his eyelids met. The fever put a drag on any movement and boiled him if he stayed still. His thoughts came slowly, like butter through a pipe. In the 76 days that he’d served on the alternative work detail, he hadn’t gotten sick, despite the wet, cold, bone breaking work, stress and lack of sleep. Oh, and the rapes. He’d lost count at 40. He told himself they were losing their impact; he was becoming desensitized. The assaults were now routine. Part of life. His ancient ancestors on the Serengeti were constantly under attack from lions and cheetahs and snakes and bugs. They survived. The race survived. Famine, ice ages, plagues and wars. He’d be fine. So they turned him into a rag doll once a week for 45 minutes. He’d be fine. Damn fucking fine. Humanity had lived through worse.

He wanted to die.

The fever had been through about half the detail, workers and foremen alike. The isolation of the group prevented a lot of common ailments from breaking in. Unfortunately, when one did, it broke out.

The nurse told Emory to ride it out. Drink plenty of fluids. Report for work, but take it easy. Easy, you know, as in don’t lug 60-pound jacks over broken concrete and muck, lift 40-pound pneumatic braces above your head and pound them into place with a sledge. Stay out of the cold. Don’t climb ladders, crawl through tunnels on the verge of collapse or subject your lungs to filthy, grit filled air.

This fever would kill him. He’d never again have to worry about when the attacks would come, when the brace would give out or when some young, out-of-luck idiot might get called down to the chief supervisor’s office for a chat on Emory’s recent lack of usefulness.

“We’ve got this one,” Campbell said.

What was that other guy’s name? Stewart? They carried his jack, brace and sledge in addition to their own stuff. Heavy on heavy. He stood, shaking for a second as his blood flow tried to catch up to his new height.

“You’ll make it, pal,” Campbell said over his shoulder. “You’re doing great.”

What Campbell should have done was leave Emory in the mud. Helping him added to an already impossible day. Working in broken sewers did not get easier with practice. Everyday brought some new challenge. No power. Deadly gas leaks. Live wires no one knew about until they sparked against a saw blade. The cave-ins were the worst. Not so much because they took the most lives. They didn’t. They didn’t kill you all at once, like a good, clean zapping. Caves usually crushed part of you and let you think about the pain until you died. An old fashioned stoning. The kind of punishment once reserved for heretics. The kind of death they wanted for Campbell.

“They,” Emory mumbled.

Was it the company? As a rule, they didn’t kill people. A bit of value always lingered, waiting to be squeezed out. Even saboteurs like Olin Cassavetti, mindlessly wrecking his mindless sponge making machines, could be probed and prodded for the rest of his life. Emory knew, in a way, he’d been lucky to be placed on a chain gang. Some employees caught in breach of company policy ended up in the labs, serving as test beds for pharmaceutical research, establishing the length of time it takes mercury to cross the blood-brain barrier or how much asbestos in the lungs is truly too much.

He wouldn’t mind the drug studies now. Thanks. Had enough. Got to go now.

Emory collapsed face-first into a new section of pipe, splashing the inch deep trough of runoff.

* * *

From the outside, the old fort retained a shred of majesty. The walls and towers stayed sturdy and purposeful. McCallum liked the lack of uniformity in the stones. The builders took what they found and made it work. They did such a careful job, the ramparts still seemed ready to repel canon balls, even though the smoke rising from three points inside made it seem like a couple had gotten through.

McCallum ran his thumb down the right strap of his backpack and walked to the front gate. One of the 10-foot halves had swung inwards enough for two people to pass side-by-side. He got a good whiff of the open fires as he entered. He got a good whiff of all kinds of things he would have taken a pass on, given the choice. With the temperature inching above freezing, stuff frozen and forgotten during the winter loosened and glistened and let its stink melt into the air.

The parade grounds inside covered a triangular acre. Battlements ringed the sides. A couple of stone buildings stood in the back. He’d seen it all in his research. He hadn’t seen what had grown in the middle of the fort. A junk city. A mash-up of anything wide and flat that could possibly be lashed to something else in the hope of creating a shape large enough to hide one or two sleeping humans. McCallum couldn’t name all the shapes— cubes, pyramids, rhomboids, bulging polygons that flashed a middle finger at gravity and the wind. Colors made the shapes even harder to discern. White, clay, yellow striped, green speckled foam-wood predominated, but paled by the side-ways traffic signs, orange tarps and gray corrugated steel, spotted with dirt, rust and sometimes pink spray-on insulation. He estimated 25 huts, guessing where one ended and another began

The ground consisted mostly of mud. Paths of rough pebbles made the earth somewhat passable. His boots stuck to them as he walked. After four steps he sounded like a lazy tap dancer. Not that anyone noticed. Two men sat by an open fire, tending an open pot. They had empty mugs waiting. Another walked aimlessly away from him. All three were well past middle age. He decided to walk straight through the center lane, aimed at the old headquarters on the other side of the parade grounds. If anyone had any kind of control of this place, he’d find them there.

Two women hung clothes on a rope strung between two shanties. It reminded him of a painting— what was it called? Women Tending the Laundry, Pissarro— but with more grime, more stench. He passed another man, this one in his thirties, crouched on the ground next to a stack of empty egg cartons and a box of seed.

“Twelve, two times six, three times four,” he said to himself, dropped fistfuls of potting soil into the cups that used to hold eggs. “Two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve.”

The man glanced at McCallum and chose not to stop his work. McCallum held no interest for him. McCallum understood. He smiled and kept walking. He’d intended to look around the fixed buildings and decided against it. He wasn’t here to ask permission. He circled the shanties, found a fairly dry spot on the north-western edge and threw down his pack. He took out his tent and popped it to life. A milky blue half-bubble big enough for him to sleep in, keep the rest of his pack dry and little else. He took a Bristol board and a case of charcoal pencils from his pack and walked to the back wall. He climbed to the top of the battlement and peered out over the end of the Niagara River and the start of Lake Ontario.

Rock and patches of grass, green and brown, covered the angles of land. The water had a bright sapphire sheen, three shades darker than the sky. This angle had no particular drama to it; no inherent story. What he wanted was to be over there, on the other side, viewing his current location. He turned and looked back at the collection of hovels and, for the first time in months, felt the wave, that inner surge, a welcomed and unstoppable urge to draw.

He worked for about an hour, roughing in a sketch of the grounds before him. Ramshackle huts, set up in the shape of a town, as if 25 groups of boys decided to all move their clubhouses to the same open field. Tree houses without trees. McCallum needed a wider canvas. He wanted to frame the mess in the walls of the fort-a larger, older, more official kind of playhouse for boys.

A woman crossed the field and stopped on the grass under McCallum. He tried not to give her the obvious once-over. He kept drawing, stealing glimpses between strokes. She had no problem standing and staring at him like he was a new and peculiar work of art. Five and a half feet tall, he couldn’t tell much about her build under that big brown cowboy coat. He guessed slim, like someone who spent a good deal of time outdoors, on the move. Her green Wellies held several grades of mud. She had a solid stance, confident, with energy enough to stand straight and alert. He saw a black ponytail every so often. A wide brimmed hat hid her head and shaded her face. On purpose, he noted. All her garments were chosen to disguise the person underneath. Were he on the job, which he wasn’t, he would have taken her for a famous actress who didn’t want to be noticed or someone who was about two minutes away from holding up a jewelry store.

After a good ten minutes, McCallum got curious as to how long she might stare at him without making contact. What kind of person stared like that? A patient three-year-old? Which, of course, didn’t exist. She shifted her weight once in a while, leaning back on one foot, then the next. She kept her hands in her coat’s deep pockets. He started to think she was a bit addled, like the guy counting seeds into egg cartons. One of the mentally challenged the company lets drift out to the fringes. He’d dealt with enough of them in his career. The people who couldn’t go outside. The people huddled in a corner because their office walls got painted, because they could see germs spread or the noises in their heads ran so high they couldn’t hear you begging them to calm down. The ones who snapped, wrecking sponge-making machines or themselves or anyone in their flailing range.

This woman didn’t fit, McCallum decided. She didn’t seem as odd as she acted. This brought an end to his drawing. He stared back at the woman for a while.

“Can I have a look?” she asked.

“Sure,” McCallum replied. “Hop on up.”

The woman walked away. McCallum assessed his drawing, smudging a little, to work in some of the shadows he’d been seeing earlier, but had now faded as the sun moved directly overhead. His hands were cold. He’d have to stop soon or screw up what he’d already done. He put his pencil back in the case as the woman walked across the wall, in his direction.

She smiled at him, thin and long and caught him up in rolling cheekbones under eyes the color of chocolate. They angled up at the corners, pointed like cherry tree leaves. They made mischief just glancing around. Olive toned skin, smooth and unadorned. She’d hit 30, but not too many years after that. His mouth opened a bit and he faked a yawn to hide it.

She stood next to him and looked at his drawing. “Huh?” came immediately. “You can actually draw.”

McCallum couldn’t place her accent. Spanish, in flavor, but geography wasn’t his thing. “Why do you sound so surprised?” he asked.

“Made you for an op not an artist.”

“Maybe I’m both.”

“Hadn’t thought of that.”

“What do you get more of up here, ops or artists?”

“Ops. There is no question. Each of the three companies represents equally.”

“Why? Do you have a lot of troublemakers?”

“Yeah,” the woman said, “the ops.”

McCallum chuckled and held out his hand. “My name is Ed.”

The woman took it — warmer and rougher than he’d expected — and shook it. “In Fort, they call me Snyder. If you’re here to bring me back, let’s get it over with.”

* * *

Another hotel room that looked like a hotel room. Sylvia hated it. They all looked so similar she could never remember where she was. Why didn’t anyone take just a few extra minutes and at least try to give it some identity? Even disastrous, out-of-touch style would be preferable to none. A picture of dogs playing poker, a flaming skull, purple and aqua— anything that she wasn’t used to seeing would be embraced. Didn’t anyone involved in making hotels have any pride in workmanship?

Or was there no workmanship. Did little off-white rooms like this, with their splatter-pattern rugs and formless lamps and brown featureless features simply appear out of a collective, with no one actually making any over-arching decisions? Hotel rooms by committee, but a committee that never met. Hotels grew, she decided. They appeared like pale mushrooms in the vast corporate loam that had become the world. No vision. No dream. Space like this coalesced around need. Plaster, vertical blinds and oil paintings of fruit bowls gathered and poof. A hotel.

“You’ve got to get me out of here!” Sylvia said to an image of Marshall projected on to the ceiling over her bed.

“That should be forthcoming, dear,” he returned.

Sylvia reclined between two sets of pillows, one elevated her feet, the other her head. Her cuff alerted her to another call. “Hold on.” She waved her hand and Marshall’s image shrank by half, making way for Samjahnee.

“Sam the man,” Sylvia said.

“Samjahnee come lately,” Marshall said. “What’s flappin’.”

“When are you returning?” he asked, presumably to Sylvia, face blank.

“I can’t decide if you want me back or you’re worried I’m on my way.”

“Yes,” he said. Marshall laughed.

“I’ve offered to pay my salary plus 15 percent, but the offer didn’t even get opened.”

“Up the bid,” Marshall said.

Sylvia rolled her eyes. “They don’t even know what the first was. They didn’t open the message. They don’t want to negotiate. Besides, Gavin cut me off. I’ve got no additional income stream.”