Shalom (1)

Something burned, a big chemically smell was snapping and biting at my nose.  I tried to sit up, heading ringing and screaming with a real bad pain.  I couldn’t see nothing.  My face felt hot and sticky under my fingertips.  Curling into a ball I cradled my head in my hands, trying not to move.  The floor shook and something beyond the cramped walls screeched in the kinda pain that was pushing my eyes out of their sockets.  A whimpering tickled my ears.  My own moans where hushed in my ears, as if I was underwater.  Was that me making those noises?  I sure hurt enough.

Everything sounded strange.  I opened my mouth as wide as I could, trying to get my ears to pop, but they wouldn’t.  Gritting my teeth and pulling myself to my knees, I rubbed at my eyes.  Dried blood tasted salty on my lips.  I got one eye open.  This was wrong, something real bad had happened.  As much as I tried to think about where I was, I couldn’t think of it.  It was like part of the darkness was in my head and there were no lights coming on any time soon.  Throbbing pain pulsed inside my head, sucking at the back of my eyes and leaving my mouth dry.  There was a crash and a clanging as something hissed somewhere in the dark behind me.  I turned and looked, trying to rub the dried blood away from my other eye.  A real big rumbling echoed beneath me, like a great stomach aching with hunger.  The smell of burnt hair mixed with the taste of my own blood was sour on my tongue as I crawled through a whole mess of wires and pipes that had fallen down from the ceiling.

The world exploded in front of my eyes as my body stopped, arms and legs locking up as I chucked through clenched jaws.  Invisible fingers dug at the backsides of my eyes and pulled at my heart as I fought to breath.  Just as sudden as the pain came, it left.  Breath coming in ragged, gasps, I looked down and spit, trying to get the sharp burning taste out of my mouth.  Smoke curled off my leg, a whole burnt through my pants.  Put up against the pounding in my head, the chuck on my tongue and all that ache in my chest, a burn on the leg was just another hurt.  Coughing, I wriggled out from the mess of wires and pipes, spitting.  The leftovers of my chucking still burned at the back of my throat.

A snap and a hiss cut my heart up and dropped it into my toes as I jumped forward, a rain of sparks pouring out of the busted open ceiling behind me.  The grated floor shook all sudden like beneath my feet.  I took a few quick breaths, expecting to chuck again from the rolling and pitching.  The growl and tumble in my gut felt different this time.  I tried to smile, but could only take a deep breath ‘cause my face hurt.  I was hungry.  Keeping an eye out for snapping wires, I went hunting for food.

It felt like a dream, stumbling as best I could through the flickering darkness.  As much as my body felt stabbed through with sharp pains and aches, my chest felt hollow and my mind numb.  The bodies on the bucking, grated floor were tossed all over, torn up and motionless.  I was thirsty, real thirsty.  I almost missed the ladder.  The bottom few rungs had been ripped out of the wall, a thick pipe leaking watery black stuff all over the grated floor.  I tried stepping in it, jumping back when my shoe started melting with a bubbling hiss.  There wasn’t nothing the way I’d come and further down the hall looked like even less.  Taking a deep breath that kinda hurt in my side, I dropped back a step, paused for a moment and then jumped the puddle.  The ladder jerked when I grabbed it and almost came out of the wall, but it held.  Coughing as the fumes clamored up into my mouth and nose, I crawled up the ladder and into the dark.
I kept climbing, hand over hand.  I couldn’t tell you how long I spent climbing.  Probably not more than a minute or two, and I took my time.  My legs were still stiff and my ribs hurt.  There wasn’t any light at the top of the ladder, I figured out I was in the next room when there wasn’t another rung on the ladder.  I also near fell back down when  metal screeched against metal, someone moving deeper in the room.  A light flickered in the corner, illuminating a dark shape.

“Hello?”

The light kept on flickering, playing shadows across the room.  It was a big room, crowded with turned over tables and busted up stuff from where the ceiling had fallen in.  The dark shape was a man, moaning and shuddering against the wall.  I made my way as quite as I could on over to him and tapped his shoulder, stumbling back a step as he turned.  His face was pale and his lips stained with blood.  He coughed, eyes all red and teared up, and reached for me.  I fell, foot catching on a broken table leg.  The man’s hand trembled for a moment before he slumped back against the wall.  He whimpered, waving his hand real weak at me, like I could do something.  I couldn’t tell what was wrong with him, but something was.  I stayed back away from him, sitting, watching him as he took a few heavy breathes and slumped over on the floor.  He wasn’t breathing as much as I could see, so after a few moments I got to my feet and went over to where he lay.  He lay there in a pool of yellowish blood and what looked like half eaten bread.  I looked around and found a bag of bread not too far away.  I was sure as anything hungry.  Part of the bag seemed like it had melted against the bread, flecks of something dark blue staining the thin plastic.  I looked at the dead man and then again at the bread.  I could almost taste it.  Maybe he died of something else.  Maybe he didn’t pick a good piece.  I just stared at the bread, wanting it so bad.

“Don’t, please don’t.”

I crouched low to the floor, looking around for that soft, quiet voice.

“Please.  It’s bad.  He ate it.”

I saw her then, tucked back behind a table that was piled up with all kinds of bent up metal, pipes and wires.  The table had her pinned against the wall just above the waist.  The rest of was covered by the big heap of stuff holding her tight.  I looked back at the dead man and the bread sitting on the floor.

“You looking for your ma?”

“I was…I…I’m hungry,” I said slowly, no picture coming into my head of what my ma should look like.

“I saw them, them that snaked the ship.  They-”

She stopped talking then, looking at me funny like, in a way that made me real uncomfortable.  My head still hurt but it also started to feel some kinda strange.  The smell of pure clean soap washed hands slapped away at the harsh, sharp stink of puke.  I half kept the cry in, looking around.  Ma.  Mama.  That one word started my head aching like my brain wanted out.  Short brown hair and nice brown eyes and- and-  The fresh soapy smell hung just beyond my nose somewhere.  Mama.  I couldn’t see her face.  I was hungry.  But Mama.  I should have been looking for her.  I looked back at the man lying there dead.  I screamed, no words at first, as panic gripped my chest and set whatever was in it beating all the faster until I couldn’t breathe. 

“Boy, I-”

My legs felt heavy as I took breath in quicker and faster.  There was no one else in the room other than the old woman and the dead man.  I could barely hear her yelling after me as I ran over to the ladder and climbed down as fast as I could.  The backs of my shoes hissed as I near fell into the stuff at the bottom of the ladder.  I ran over to the first body I could find.  A man.  The next wasn’t her.  I could only get bits and pieces in my mind, like a small word or two in a voice I knew was hers or a shadowy ghost of a smile that I could almost picture.  I was sweating hard and breathing even harder, hands dark with blood.  A few of the bodies were half crushed under a broken piece of the wall.  Some were too mashed up for me to look at long enough to figure on who they were without heaving up.

I checked every one of them.  I would have known if one of them was her.  I knew my own Mama.  I should know my own Mama.  Mama.  Brown hair.  Her eyes, skin around them moving like she was smiling.  The last one I looked at was a boy about my age.  His eyes were open, staring with no life somewhere past me.  His face looked scared.
I looked from his face down to my hands.  I wiped my hands against my shirt, but the blood wouldn’t come off.  It wouldn’t get off my hands.  I cried then, sitting on the floor trying to remember my Mama.  I should have been able to remember my own Mama.  There it was, just beyond the tip of my swollen tongue, past my cut and itching lips, whispering real quiet in my ears.  Mama.  It was as if I could almost hear her voice.  How did the old woman know I had a Mama?  Maybe she was just guessing.  I wasn’t all that old that I could be by myself.  Or was I?  I was pretty sure I was fifteen.  It seemed like a certain number when I thought of it.  But what if she’d seen me with my Mama.  I wiped my nose on my sleeve and stood up.  Mama had to be alive.  The old woman would know her, or at least what my Mama looked like.


“I saw her get grabbed.  Before all this,” she waved a bony hand at the mess of pipes, wires and flickering lights.

“What did she look like?”

She looked at me again, as if trying to figure why I’d ask such a thing.

“She was short, hand or so under you.”

“What color was her hair?”

The old woman took a deep breath as I noticed for the first time the pain that scratched and clawed at her eyes.

“I- I think it was brown.  Your mama was pretty.  Probably why the grabbed her.”

I looked at the man lying dead on the floor.  Being dead, having that dead look in your eyes, has a way of making you look like you ain’t real.  Grabbed.  Mama.  My Mama was-

“Boy, you alright?”

I wanted to yell at that old woman.  How did she think to say it would be alright?  I didn’t know my own Mama’s name.  It was like missing your heart and your lungs and not knowing what they were, only that you needed them.  I just stared at the dead man, eventually sitting down with my arms wrapped around my knees.

“What’s your name boy?”

I looked up from the dead man and frowned.  I tried to tell her.  It would have been great to here my mouth say my name so my ears could hear it and tell me.  But I was tired, and didn’t say nothing.  Nothing.  I didn’t know my own name.  Staring at the floor, I did my all best not to start crying again.  After a while I just looked away and scooted over to the wall, getting right under the light that still flickered.  It was kind of hard to breath, so sitting felt better than standing.  My eyes felt like they were pulling down towards me cheeks, so I didn’t fight it, fading into some kind of sleep.

What happened next I can only guess at.  I suppose I fell asleep.  Felt like dreams of a flickering light and a bag of bread and the kind of pain that locks up all your body so you can’t move, but I suppose that really happened.  I dreamed of other things too, but none of them really made any kind of sense.  Hands grabbed me, pushing and pulling.  People screamed.  The world flipped upside down.  Blood flashed in my face as I felt someone’s hand take mine.  It had to be Mama.  With one hand I tried to wipe the blood out of my eyes, the other hand in hers.  She shouted something at me.  I knew it was her, even though she sounded so quiet and so far away.  The lights went out.  Sharp, cracking thunder broke out over the crowd, the screaming grew worse.  I could see a little now.  Had to see her.  I knew that if I could see her now I would remember.  More cracks.  Someone fell on top of me, my Mama losing her grip on my hand.  I shouted and tried to get up.  My Mama was just a shadow, turning and reaching for me as shadows wrapped themselves around her and dragged her, screaming, into the darkness.  As soon as she was gone everything grew quiet, the other people around me now lying sprawled out on top of each other, blood splattered against the heavily scored and pock marked wall.  I stood, crying out for my Mama.  Something moved in the darkness behind me.

“By saint aunt Jauncy Fay I’ll search these groundbounders if I please.”

I’d heard that voice somewhere.  It came up behind me as I tried to turn, but the shadows swallowed me, thrashing me about until all I could recall was my mother’s shadowy form struggling weakly as the darkness pulled her away and a hard cutting against the top of my head.

I woke with a quick, empty breath and a twitch that sent my legs and arms out to find something to keep me from falling.  I breathed easier when I realized was sitting with my back against a wall.  Looking through the flickering light, I saw that the old woman was sleeping.  I got up, thirst begging my tongue for some kinda water it didn’t have.  Maybe the old woman knew where some water was.  Not likely, but worth asking.
I went over to her and got down on a knee, touching her lightly on the shoulder.  She didn’t move.  I noticed then that she wasn’t breathing.  The floor around were her belly was pinned to the wall was covered in blood.  The smell hit me then like a slap in the face.  She was dead.  I didn’t hurry none, but I left that room, the jump over the shoe melting puddle easier now.  This was it.  I weren’t pinned to no wall and I hadn’t eaten no bad bread, but I was sure as all gonna die.

Somewhere in the darkness, away in the blinking light, something screeched and whined, a new noise against all the rumbling and agony in the walls and the floor.  At first there was nothing, only the horrible sound of…something.  A showering cloud of sparks leapt from the wall, casting blue shadows in the blinking yellow light.  A loud pop slapped up against my ears a moment before I was thrown backwards, feet leaving the floor.  I clenched my teeth and-

I was floating.  The sparks had stopped, replaced with a real bad smell that jumped up over the blood and the stink of dead that had started to rot.  A rough circle of the wall shivered and then leapt out on a heap of busted up pipes and a few bodies.  A white gloved hand reached up and into the flickering darkness as I put my hands against the ceiling to steady myself.  A big, wide helmet all gold and shiny came through the hole and then the rest of whatever kind of getup it was.

I decided waving wasn’t such a bad idea, so I did.  Whoever was in the suit must have thought I was dead ‘cause they jerked back real sharp, thick booted feet kind of coming off the floor.  I pushed at the ceiling, grated floor tapping against the bottom of my shoes after a few moment’s of floating what I felt like was down.  Some of the bodies were floating now, half stiffed up blood sticking to the wall and floors.  The sharp snap of cut wires shook me up, my foot catching the wall and sending me in a kind of lazy, gut-wrenching spin.

As the suit moved in close the shiny gold helmet whisked back to reveal a rough looking face brushed up with a whole lot of unshaven scruff to go along with a big old moustache and bushy eyebrows.  They wriggled as if alive as the man spoke angrily into a roughed up looking headset taped to the side of his dark leather headcap.

“No boss, I ain’t starryeyed.  He’s got breath and had pull until I chopped the main power lines getting in.”

The man’s sharp eyes looked away beyond us as a faint, whispery reply echoed from the earpiece to us.  I couldn’t figure out what the boss had said.

“Yeah, could do that, but what if the Man finds out.  Cosc didn’t go easy.”

The man nodded and gave me a hard look.

“I know boss, I’ll keep him outta the way.  You, boy…English?”

I nodded.

“If you want to get off this lode of junk, you’ll have to give your honests to stay quiet and not touch nothing.”

I nodded.