Deadstock by Thomas Jeffrey

Author:Thomas, Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forma Street Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN: THE OUTSIDER

Dai-oo-ika lifted his eyeless head to watch Dolly appear out of the labyrinth of sewer tunnels, a plastic shopping bag in hand. She stepped over the streaming brook of a run-off channel and hoisted herself up onto the tiled platform that was their home, pulling the hanging blanket back into place behind her to offer some illusion of security. As she hunched down beside him and started opening her bag, the old woman paused to frown at her companion.

“Did you get bigger while I was gone, or what? I don’t know how you keep looking bigger but you won’t eat a damn thing I give you.” She rustled through her bag. “Can’t say I haven’t tried. How about this?” She extracted a banana, all black and soft except for its end. She broke this off and extended it to him. The tentacles that were all he had for a face, ringed in black and silvery bands, writhed and squirmed but did not reach out for the morsel. His hands remained on his knees. “No?” Dolly said. “Christ, are you fussy or don’t you ever eat at all?” She crammed the good banana end into her mouth, then peeled the gelatinous rotting section and ate that, too.

Watching her, Dai-oo-ika thought of his child mother again. Nourishing him with her love. Embracing him to her chest. He missed her; a yawning canyon of inarticulate yearning. Yes, that was the hunger he always felt.

Dolly settled in beside him, sitting on her stained mattress. She produced her syringe filled with a metallic sand of microscopic nanomites, almost insects and almost machines. “Time for my medicine again, Junior,” she told him. “You be a good boy and watch over me while I rest.” She injected a measure of the nanomites into a vein in her wrist, then sighed and hid the syringe back inside her coat. She leaned her head against the tiled wall, closing her eyes. “Don’t let those punks steal my stuff while I’m resting,” she purred grumpily. “They try to...steal...my mediciii...”

Dai-oo-ika continued to watch her, as she had requested. He watched her eyeballs move back and forth beneath their thin lids as if tossing and turning under a ratty blanket in troubling sleep. He sensed that there was no rest for her species, even at rest. But then, he had his own disturbing dreams, didn’t he? Not only of the past – of his lovely, angelic child mother, kissing his belly – but of a future time that would come, or at least was intended to come. He had been having one of these dreams just before Dolly had returned from foraging. Dai-oo-ika had envisioned a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below him, thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration.

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