continued from part 1

It was two weeks before Pash got up the nerve to stage a proper escape. During that time, the old man had him pull weeds in a ratty garden, haul water from the nearby stream, and dig up rows and rows of potatoes, which he then had to clean and store in a damp, spider-crawled root cellar shoved into the side of a hill like a nose bone into a brain. Pash worked every day until his finger nails tore, knuckles cracked, and tongue thickened from lack of water. Then the old man would give him a drink and have him work some more. Pash felt his brain slowly falling behind his body, tired and listless in thought, which might explain why it took so long to come up with his first escape plan.

He was working in the garden, on his knees. Altoid sprawled at the theoretical boundary between garden and rough, panting through her nose, turning her head this way and that in the balmy sunlight. Pash’s plan was simple: run like hell as soon as the dog fell asleep. The garden was nestled some distance into the forest, close to the stream. The wide plain and the bluff were half a mile away, through thick unexplored brush.

Pash worked slowly, clearing the carrots from his reach, inching forward to a new section of the patch. He cast frequent glances at Altoid; the dog looked bored, blinking in the labored way that dogs have. Pash’s skin again was crawling with invisible filth; his hands were writhing under it. Perhaps it was the closeness of potential, but Pash felt that he could take no more of the work. Each time he plunged his hand into the soil, he froze a shudder of revulsion. Altoid watched.

Finally, she laid her head on her forepaws and closed her eyes completely, her nostrils flaring with each breath. Pash wiped his hands on his pants and waited to see if the dog would notice he had stopped his work. She sighed, her huge chest inflating to the width of Pash’s torso.

That was good enough for him. He set his eyes on his point of escape, on the city miles away through hills and trees and leaves. He scrambled to his feet and ran.

Altoid chuffed as dirt flung up by his shoes pelted her fur. She opened her eyes.

Pash reached the underbrush and flung up his hands to ward away branches, berating himself, as he did so, for not blazing a trail beforehand. Dew from the ground covering and devil’s clubs leapt into the air in front of his shoes. It wasn’t long before his lower legs were soaked. He tried to run as quietly as possible, pussy footing around brittle twigs and aiming to land on the balls of his feet. He was not a runner. He was a watcher, a guy who would go to cheer on Oasa at her track meets while cartoons unspooled across his eye. He tripped and fell head first into a trunk. He wrapped his arms around it, hugging it, shoving himself back to his feet with so much force that he feared either his spinal cord would slip and shatter or the tree would uproot. In this moment of scraping silence, he heard the three soft repetitive taps of a running four-legged beast. He shoved away from the tree, leaving a finger nail in a sap-filled crack.

He ran. His body dissolved into points of pain. One just right of the stomach, pulsing on each breath — it was better when he didn’t breathe so hard. One at the end of his torn finger; he couldn’t slow his blood to ease the throbbing. A constellation across each foot, the hundreds of bones unused to what he asked of them. One large nova from his sinuses, a bright flare that threatened to engulf his whole head. I have paid enough, he thought. This is debt free, right here, and then it was easier just to curse god with each breath in, the old man with each breath out.

He stumbled again, this time on a sudden clearing, as when you expect there to be another step on the ladder and there is not. He whipped his head left and right; he was standing in the middle of a road. It was old, the ruts paved over with a layer of dry pine needles. The road lay parallel to freedom, but Pash could hear Altoid’s never-gone bark closing behind him, so he picked a direction and tore away.

Altoid howled, which wasn’t the bad part — the bad part was that Edge returned the howl, and she sounded no more than a hundred yards away. Pash beat his feet against the road, cursing in and out. 

He rounded a bend and slid to a halt. It was a dead end, and blocked with a dump, a barricade of rusty metal. There were three red hulks, machinery that looked completely foreign to Pash, all boxy angles and heavy gauge iron that wouldn’t fly in a million years. They looked like nothing more than prisons to Pash; but, he though, prisons not only keep prisoners in, they keep other people out.

He ran to the nearest one. There was something that looked like a door. He gripped the handle with the tips of his fingers and tugged. Something creaked in the metal, and something snapped in his elbow, but the door popped open, not swinging, but rushing between closed and open without passing through the intervening points.

Altoid hit him in the back, then. He flung out his arms to stop his fall. One hit the top of the door and the jagged remains of the window that used to be housed within. Blood painted a diagonal across his hand and over his wrist. He fell beneath the weight of the albino bitch.

Goodbye, Oasa, he thought. No, goodbye everyone.

“Git, Altoid. Edge, stay.” The weight on Pash’s back rose, leaving behind one rotten breath. “You owe me, boy,” the old man said.

“I hurt— I—” Pash panted. Every point of pain expanded, consuming him in a ball that he pretended kept growing until it devoured the old man, the dogs, the swine, the frozen magic wilderness.

#

“Ten minutes. I’m impressed.” Pash opened his eyes. He tried to move them, but it hurt, and a simple shift in focus left a trail of blurred images behind, as though his eyes were frantic to send their signals, had been afraid they never would be able to again and now never wanted to stop their work. He pulled in a long breath. He was cold, and lying in a shaft of sunlight.

“What’d they breed out of you, boy,” said the old man. “You faint at a little blood and you stay fainted. My god. You keep an eye on that hand. It’s clean, but you start seein red trails, you tell me. Don’t want you dropping dead before you done paid your debt. So, you start seein red—”

Pash nodded. His eyes felt coated in heat, like early tears, but no wetness. They took in how brittle the old man was, inflated with his shirts and hide coat, and how easy to break.

Edge and Altoid were there, licking themselves with that complacent air that comes from the confidence that the spirit of the hunt can be summoned any moment, and will take no more than a moment to arrive. 

The old man nodded at his dogs. “I’d like to stop em sometimes, but I can’t. You understand that, boy? I want to, but I can’t. Not when they really want it. So don’t test em. They like you, but don’t test em.” The old man slouched down the road, shaking his head at uneven intervals, and, once, laughing abruptly.

Pash lay in the sun, pillowed on his right hand, the fingers of which crawled to his ear lobe and gave it an habitual tug with no result. It took almost an hour, and a centipede’s tickling walk across his thigh, to get him on his feet.

#

The passage of time was marked for Pash by escape attempts. He had no way of keeping time equidistant between them, so it became a sort of calendar of significance. He could assign vague notions of time to each interval — it was quite a while between the rusty car and the long day spent hiding in the root cellar. It was not very long between the root cellar and the cold mad dash down the stream. 

He didn’t make so many as the weather turned bad, not because he was getting tired, but because he couldn’t run very far in the snow. Pash had never seen snow before. He had seen ash, from time to time during school cookouts and such, and more recently when he had to clean it from the old man’s stove every third day, so his first impression of the change in the weather was that the end of the world had come, that pure ash and cinders were raining from sky.

The old man laughed when he heard this.

Winter was hard; Pash had never known such cold in his life. He spent the majority of his daylight hours chopping wood, which kept him almost warm, so that he could burn it at night, which kept both him and the old man warm, though Pash had to wake up every hour to refuel the stove. They ate venison the old man had shot with his rifle. It didn’t take long to become sick of salt venison.

When the days reached their briefest, the old man had a surprise. He took a bucket packed hard with snow and disappeared into the cabin while Pash split and stacked rounds on a tarpaulin. In an hour or so, the old man beckoned Pash inside for a break. There, he gave Pash a bowl of the snow and a spoon, and said, “Dig in.” Pash stared at his reflection in the concave face of the spoon. “Well, come on,” said the old man. Pash dug a trench in the snow and took a bite.

The stuff tasted like old sugar, a little dusty, but cool on his throat. He smiled. The old man grinned back and dove into his own bowl. 

Pash finished what he had been given and set the bowl on the floor. He got up and went to the door, turning back to look at the old man. The old man was chewing slowly, staring at the wall. “Never tasted anything like it, I’ll bet,” he said. “No sir. It’s my own concoction,” taking another bite. “Won’t find this in your city.”

Pash opened the door and went out.

#

Spring followed. If Pash could have looked at himself, he would have seen a profound change since the previous summer. His arms were thicker and he could hold them still if he wanted to. His hair had grown down to his shoulders; he dipped it in the stream when it felt too greasy, but even so it lay on his neck in loose filthy curls. His clothes had been torn and left unmended and didn’t fit right anymore.

He had long since ceased trying to talk to the old man, and he didn’t think the old man minded.

With spring came time to plant the garden. Pash, using his hands for a trowel, dug clean rows for the carrots and potatoes. Altoid watched, grinning. Pash grabbed a handful of seeds from a plastic bag the old man had given him and squat-walked down the trench, sifting the seeds through his fingers and into the soil. By the end of the row, his knees were wailing for a break, so he stood and stretched them. Altoid grumbled.

“It’s okay, girl,” said the old man’s voice. Pash turned in the middle of a yawn, met the old man’s eyes, then finished it. “You’re puttin too many in,” said the old man. “You’ll just have to thin em out again.”

“Gives me something to do, yeh,” said Pash.

The old man shrugged weakly, his shoulders compressed by the weight of his two shirts and his long coat. He strolled over to a rotten stump and sat, letting his legs loll apart, bracing his hands on his knees as though he intended to hold the position for a while. When he didn’t offer any more criticism, Pash returned to the bag of seeds, dipped another handful, and started his squat-walk down another row.

“Beautiful day, ain’t it,” said the old man. “Sun shinin, trees doin their thing.” Altoid yawned. Pash waddled down the row. “Smell that air,” said the old man. Pash couldn’t help it. He could smell the air, the soil, the sweat from his arm pits, the stink of human grease built up over weeks, which was a smell he could not get used to, could not accept and let fade into the background of the senses.

“Yeh,” he said. He worked in silence; he could sense the old man’s discomfort, a pressure of unspoken words.

Finally, the old man said, “Doin good. Keep it up.”

“Yeh,” said Pash.

#

“It’s time,” the old man said. The first buzz of summer was in the air. Pash no longer had to keep the stove burning through the night and had taken to sleeping rather heavily. The old man repeated himself a couple of times, and then kicked Pash lightly in the head. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s do it right this time, yeh?”

The old man waited with his hands in his coat pockets while Pash levered himself to his feet. 

“What are you gonna do after,” said Pash. 

The old man shrugged. “Get the tools,” he said. Pash went to the cubby hole behind the stairs and retrieved the felt roll of butcher blades. 

The old man led the way to the pen. There was a new feature, an inverted wooden L, like the arm of a gallows. A chain dangled from its end over the pen. The hog was sniffing at the end as it shifted in the light wind.

“Do it right,” said the old man. He had Pash unroll the tools and selected a long thin knife. He climbed over the fence and beckoned Pash to follow. “Quiet, now,” said the old man. “Adrenaline makes em taste like shit.” Together they approached the hog, sticking in the mud and scraping over clumps of tough inedible grass. Pash hadn’t yet crossed completely into wakefulness. He felt the breeze, as though in a dream, lifting his skin and cooling him off underneath. He watched the sun’s reflection on the old man’s knife as it bobbed and traced illegible words on his retina. 

“Where are the dogs,” he said.

“Tied em up,” said the old man. “They spook the hog.”

Pash nodded and watched the knife, burned heart shapes in bright green which he saw during every blink. 

The old man stopped and held the knife out to him. “Reckon you could do it.”

Pash looked to the hog and beyond to the bluff. A hawk circled in the sky a decreasing spiral centered on a lone tree. It landed, shaking a branch, too gently for a killer.

Pash shook his head. “I’m a pacifist.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll pass a fist right through ya.”

The old man laughed and spit and nothing more needed saying.

#

When the hog was butchered, Pash went down to the stream to wash off what he could of the blood. He didn’t notice the old man come up behind him.

“Know what day it is,” the old man said.

“No,” Pash replied, digging at his finger nails.

“You done quite a bit of good, boy. Kept us alive.”

“No,” said Pash.

“It’s been a year and a day since you and your friend killed my sow, vandalized my property.” The old man leaned back on his heels and sighed outward. Pash stood up and faced him. 

“So,” said Pash.

“So you paid your debt. I won’t stop you leaving.”

“The dogs—”

“Still tied up.”

Pash wiped droplets of water from his chin. He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it to dislodge a bung of wax. He tugged his ear lobe. He was singing a song in his head, a song he hadn’t heard for a year and a day; it was popular during the last days of school. The teachers didn’t like it. Oasa had the DJ play it at prom. She and Damper had danced, and cemented the banal lyrics into Pash’s mind. He couldn’t stop repeating them, couldn’t stop seeing their rhythm reflected in the sparkling chaos surface of the stream, in the melancholy waving of the trees, in the listless hums of winged insects.

His breath came on the downbeat. He brushed past the old man, who said, I’m sorry, as he did, and didn’t follow.

Pash found his feet walking automatically to the old man’s cabin, but he had nothing to take with him from there, so he lifted himself from the rutted path and stamped through the grass, past the pen, past the grave the old man had, grumbling, dug for Oasa’s body, to the bluff, to the hawk’s own tree, to the long hills, to the city.

#

It looked different. The skyline had changed, and, as Pash drew nearer, he saw that the wall had changed as well. It was twice as tall as he remembered it, and the outer surface was a different color. With his hands in his pockets, fingers playing in the holes, he approached the gate. The ground was dusty, the grass perimeter had receded a few feet. Pash kicked at the foot prints surrounding the gate, looking for his, for Oasa’s. They had long since blown away.

“Let me in,” he said. He knocked on the gate, the sound swallowed deep within the wall’s body. “Hey, you burks, let me in.” No answering activity came. He sat down in the dust, grateful for the solid wall behind his back, and closed his eyes.

A wash of cold air made him choke and cough. He opened his eyes. Four armed men stood in a semi-circle in front of him. A man in a white suit and jacket was kneeling next to him, probing his body. 

“Get off,” said Pash, slapping his hands away. “Where did you—”

“His pace was off,” said the man in white, whose face was turning the sick gray of old meat. “My god, how long— Get him inside. Right away.”

The four armed men picked Pash up, one on each limb, and carried him through the gate, which now stood open, though Pash hadn’t heard it. He thought about struggling, about going limp fish on the officers, just to make it hard on them, but figured being carried wasn’t so bad after all. He felt tired, a deep tiredness that makes everything comfortable as long as it smells like home. He took a deep breath and fell asleep.

He woke up in a small room; muted light came from a heavily shaded floor lamp. He was lying on a long soft bed, facing the wall. Experimentally, he pressed his head into the mattress and then raised it again. The mattress took a few seconds to return to its former shape. A real bed, he thought. His back hurt.

There was a knock at his door, closely followed by the squeak of disused hinges folding open. 

“Hello, Terrence,” said a feminine voice. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.”

“Ain’t my name,” said Pash, rolling over. The voice belonged to a young blonde woman in a nurse’s uniform that probably was meant to convey cheerfulness, but looked to Pash like a frozen fever dream. She was smiling.

“What is your name?”

“Pash,” said Pash, and realized he hadn’t heard it, except in memories, for three hundred sixty-six days. It sounded foreign, as a word does when you repeat it too often, but in reverse.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake, Pash. Welcome to the Scott Variety Children’s Home. I’m Monica, and I have the pleasant duty of reacquainting you to the city.”

“Let me go home,” said Pash.

“I also have the unpleasant duty of informing you that you no longer have a home, except for this one.” Monica moved closer to him. Her shirt billowed around a hidden body. She got down on her knees, her head blocking the lamp.

“You might think this is pretty damn special, Pash,” she said. “But you’re the oldest man in the city.”

Pash sat up and rubbed hard granules out of the corners of his eyes. “How long was I out,” he said.

“You were out there for eighty years,” said Monica, smiling. Her lips were black in the occluded light. “The news thought you were dead. You were a cautionary tale when I was growing up, a boogey-man. How does it feel to be back?”

#

She wasn’t joking. Pash escaped that night, after a string of doctors and nurses and smiles and Monica standing next to him with an occasional possessive hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t hard. The windows weren’t even locked. He sat on a slidewalk and let it take him from one end of town to the distant other. He was drenched in advertisements for products he had never heard of. The Callow haunts were gone. The school was still there. Pash threw a handful of sod at the library. Then he went back to the children’s home.

He slept with Monica that night, and a few nights later he moved out of the home. He got an apartment near the wall and a job caddying at a nearby golf course. Monica called him every other night, for a while, and then every third night, then once a week. He spent his time away from work sleeping and reading the news —not what he had missed while he was gone, but what he was missing right now. It was an exciting time to be alive, to hear of it.

One day, at the golf course, he was hauling irons for two old men and idly listening to their conversation. His eyes climbed up and rolled down the lay of the fairway, touching on the paper-thin grass, the bunkers that wouldn’t grow a cactus. One of the old men was complaining about all this walking, and joked that Pash ought to carry him from tee to tee. His friend laughed like a car horn and said, Scott, you sorry weak sack.

Pash got a good look at the sack’s face on the seventh hole. It was Damper’s, brought low by gravity. Pash laughed at his jokes. The sun traced arcs on all their eyes as it clattered for a hold down the length of each swinging club.

Soon after, Pash started taking kendo classes. He liked the challenge and the long minutes of meditation while his hands twirled a rattan sword through the differentkata. He stopped reading the news and slept more. He caddied every Thursday afternoon for Damper and a rotating cast of pals. He started to joke with them, told them his name was Emilio. Damper’s attention always came accompanied by a faint puzzlement at one corner of his mouth. 

After a year or so, Pash quit the job. Monica called to ask him out to dinner, to ask why. They agreed on spaghetti at seven. Instead, he went to a weapons shop and bought a sword, a wakizashi. He was ready to test for the rank of nidan at the dojo, but hadn’t yet. He walked to the edge of town, each step amplified by the speed of the slide. He made good time. There was a guard on duty, asleep. Pash hit him over the heat with the hilt of his sword, opened the gate, and left with the sound of sirens boiling slowly in his ears. They wouldn’t follow as far as he planned on going.

It didn’t take long to retrace his steps to the old man’s cabin. Even a year out, the hills seemed familiar, like a childhood memory revisited, and had the same ethereal white hot quality of memory. Pash reached the bluff, looking over his shoulder for following city folk. As far as he could tell he was alone, except for the hawk in the tree, airing its wings. Its eyes were on him but couldn’t follow. He knelt for a stone and found only dirt. He packed a fist-sized clod and threw it at the bird. The clod exploded as it left his hand, and its particles sank into a dull cloud a few yards off, slowing, nearly stopping.

The implants that the doctors had rewired him with were pulsing in his head and neck. He reached a hand around to the hidden panel near his spine, the power center of his internal webwork system. One more look over his shoulder revealed nothing. He turned off the power.

The cloud of dust exploded into motion, drifting to a fine coating on the grass. The hawk flapped twice and took off, crying once.

Pash slid down the bluff; at the bottom, he drew his sword. The pen stood empty, dominated by the gallows swing that had held the hog, back feet in the air, while he and the old man worked it. Pash flexed his fingers around the sword’s hilt. He thought he saw a face at the cabin’s one window, but it may have been a cloud in swift pursuit of the sun.

On the watch for Altoid and Edge, Pash crept around the cabin to the front door. He waited, but heard nothing from inside except for the nail-wrenching sound of the old man’s rocker. Pash opened the door, closed it behind himself, and dropped the latch.

The old man was sitting in his chair. On a table next to his elbow stood a half-empty jar of amber liquid. The old man picked this up and took a swig from it.

“Been drinkin off my hangover,” he said.

“Where are the dogs,” said Pash.

“Still tied up.”

“How long has it been.”

“A day or so for me. I keep passing out, though; ain’t too reliable.”

“Okay. Okay. Last one,” said Pash. “How did you do it.”

“Electromagnetic pulse in the grass. Someone gets to close, no matter what time they livin in, it goes off Shorted your pacemaker, and everything else.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Pash took a step closer, falling into stance and shifting the blade around so it would be ready to fall across the old man’s belly.

“You should thank me, boy,” said the old man. “I took you that much closer to utopia.” He laughed and spat right onto the floor. Pash could smell tobacco and alcohol, mixing together in a forbidden perfume. “You want a drink?” The old man offered the jar, drew it back and took another drink. “You’re looking good, strong,” he continued. “How long was it for you?” Pash didn’t answer, but the old man didn’t seem to want him to. His eyes had rolled  back in his head and his lips were moving as though praying to a god that listens. “Little over a year, huh,” he said, finally. “Yeh, not bad.” A sob burst from between his lips, forcing them open like flapping tent leaves, once, twice. “Not bad.” He leaned back in the chair, stopped its rocking. “Old men reminisce amongst themselves,” he said. “And I’m the oldest man in the world. So you’re going to listen to me; you’re going to listen to me bitch and moan and, damn it, you’re going to bitch and moan back so I don’t feel so alone. You owe me that, don’t you, don’t you.” The old man trailed off. Pash’s calves were complaining; he held them still. “No,” the old man went on. “You don’t owe me nothin. Less you killed those dogs. Didn’t, did you. No. No. My wife gave them to me, as puppies, as a joke. She was a woman of irony, and of little forethought. You woulda liked her. She worked sixteen hour days in the code shops; I worked tens at the fish and game. She thought the pacemakers were a great idea — she thought they were Christ come again. I didn’t like em. She said we’d be able to eat dinner together again. Split us up, damn things did.”

“Nobody told me,” said Pash.

“What’d be the point,” said the old man. Then, “I’ve seen cities rise and fall in an afternoon. It’s fun to watch; you should do it some time. But the cities don’t move. You notice that? Got no need to. Less power drain on the individual when your pacemaker fields can overlap. Get more done in a day.” The old man took a long swallow and the sun wrapped itself in a cumulus cloak.

“You knew,” said Pash.

“I knew,” said the old man. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, kid.” A silence stretched out, drawn by the tip of Pash’s blade in the air. He lowered the sword. It was getting heavy. “But I didn’t do it just to punish you. I never had kids of my own. I didn’t do it just to punish you. I needed your help, with the sow gone. Hard winter, you know. It was. It’s gonna be again, but we got time.”

Pash pulled himself from the waking dream he had entered and crossed to the old man, who stared up at him wit  dumb animal eyes. Pash slipped the jar from his grip and raised it to his lips. The liquid tasted like honey and bird meat, but mostly like alcohol. He gave it back.

“Damn you,” he said, and didn’t even remember opening the door.

The dogs were tied to two saplings down toward the creek which bent and bowed against the beasts’ lunges. Pash felled Edge with two clumsy strokes, and got a heavy bite across the wrist. He cried, sloppily. Altoid near ripped her lungs with barking, but the old man remained in his chair. Pash could hear its squeak, wrenching at his nails, as he passed one last time on his way to the bluff.

He walked back to the city with his pacemaker off, abrading his slow thoughts against the southern breeze. At the top of a hill, in view of the city, he watched the sun set, and the flickering artificial days and nights within the walls. Something sparkled like a jewel; something sang like a dove.

#

Damper had died. Heart attack, or a string of them. Pash found himself on the cemetery green, in silence. He had turned on all his systems, again, but one by one had shut them down — his cartoons, his music, his cameras and palm viewer —until just his phone and the pacemaker were live.

He could hear kids across the street, laughing in their secret way. He stood beneath the leaves of a great dying oak and watched a group of three climb a porch. One carried a brown paper sack. She set it in front of the house’s door. Another, sidestepping the sack, rang the doorbell. The three took off at a dead sprint down the slidewalks. 

The door opened and an old man stuck his head out. He saw the bag, scowled, and then shot a glance either way down the street. He spotted the kids; he disappeared, then emerged a moment later with a camera.

Pash tore the sod as he shot off in pursuit. It didn’t take him long to catch the kids up, though they tried their best to dodge him.

When he got close enough, he panted, “Don’t stop.”

“Bain’t gonna,” said the girl who had had the bag.

Pash grinned. “Don’t stop. The old man tagged you. Don’t stop. Keep running. Keep—”

He breathed a full breath.