The Clink

11Nov09

Victorvale Penitentiary was a privately owned and operated minimum security prison. A place where those who need a little more than a wrist-slapping and some social scorn were sent for a few weeks of being out of the public eye where the constant scrutiny of the press and their peers could not force their character to waiver or their behavior to twist.

It was also a place where an escaped group of scientists fleeing from the Great War found a sympathetic hear in the form of Madame Kaminski who used contacts to sneak them in and install labs. It was here that the three doctors of scientific disciplines as broad and deep as the entire science department at Harvard got back to work doing what they did best; turning the fabric of people inside out to answer questions that need not be asked to find answers that were not to be uttered.

Germaine Lavinson was the proto-physicist and geologist and botanist.

Mikhel Gorbolav Gavinson was the psychologist and biologist.

Sandra Kirkwood Fleuer was the physiologist, the doctor of medicines, and the anthropologist.

Victorvale was located about a days drive from The City to the northwest. Here the forests had not yet succumb to the beast of progress an the air winnowed back into a breathable, low-calorie substance that purified the mind and froze the lungs. A mountains region it was not, but there was something about the location of the lakes to the north and the canopy of trees that gave the valley of Victorvale a sudden and stark temperature drop from places only a few miles away. It was a valley of secrets and seclusion before it became a retreat. Before it became a captive set of lab rats.

Here the Exiled worked at their task. The great thing about using socialites as test subjects is how remarkably pliable they were to invasive and innovative techniques. How poorly they fought when taken in the night. How quickly they gave in and became infatuated with their captors.

Sadly, though their weak wills allowed for a quick acquiescence to experiments and tests it also continually provided a series of predictable and lackluster results. So it became necessary within only two years to gather a more diverse set of subjects. And fearing the outside world and how it would react to the work, as they had done in the old countries. As they had done in the villages and towns across Eastern Europe where they began their work and were forced to leave by a small, well-armed minds.

It took little time to brainwash and reprogram the socialites. Converting them from self-absorbed and self-obsessed mindless consumers whose only goals were to obtain more wealth and status through influence without effort to kidnappers and sleeper agents that could spring up and conduct fringe experiments in their lavish homes with little scrutiny from the law and only mild scrutiny from their peers, many of whom became agents themselves, was not just a simple task but a nearly redundant one.

But nothing is perfect or sacrosanct in a place with as many eyes and ears as The City. Rumors of kidnappings, of strange and ungodly things being done in the basements of the rich of a camp in the wilderness in a cold valley where devils tortured the innocent became a common story to keep children in, to explain the deaths and disappearances of the homeless. A truth that became a legend that served its creators as well as any experiment.

Which was interesting data for The Exiled. Interesting indeed.

Filed under: 100 Ways to Find Yourself in the City   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Germaine Lavinson, Madame Kaminski, Mikhel Gorbolav Gavinson, Sandra Kirkwood Fleuer, The Exiled, Victorvale Penitentiary

Thorn Bridge

10Nov09

Mid morning was a cursed time to be awake and tromping through the summer heat. An observation lost on those not in the moment. An observation that would be to familiar, however true, to be nodded at and recognized by those who also had felt the heat as they plodded through the garbage streets of The City’s south west corridor to the outside world and lands beyond.

Natty Nape Truit was working his way through that blighted open suburb of The City in the bald heat of 1955. The skyline behind him a mirage of heat lines and traffic noises. A place so close and so far that it might be a dream and it might be a reality but it would never be reached. And he was headed south away from the center, away from the savage realities that he refused to meet. Refused to lean into for support. He would walk on his own two legs no matter how hot and tired and parched he became.

Which is about where he was. Marching to his death on his own fragile legs. Hours since his water supply had grown from thin to gone. Hours since he could last feel anything but the heat of the world surging up through his feet and taking to his knees with hammer blows of strain and fatigue.

He searched his canteen with his eye then his tongue. Finding not a single drop of collected condensation he tossed it over his back and heard it rattle and clatter to the scorched pavement. He grimaced as the neck step burst the blister that had been forming over the last day. The pain of it was concise, necessary. Not like the pain she had left him in. That pit and well of burning recrimination.

She had told him off, thrown him out, claimed that she would never have anything to do with him. She tore his heart out and roasted it in the sun for everyone to see. They say that we might be blown to hell any time now, the Reds had bombs, we had bombs. Natty Nape Truit was just as happy to see it all blown to smithereens.

His heart had already been nuked. His life long commitment to her dashed against a wall with the force of it. He would not shed a tear for her, for what they had. Not that he had any tears left to shed. He was headed out of The City now to Thorn Bridge, a community to the far south. A place where those that had been battered and rejected by The City and its vices and vile were said to cluster.

It was a long trip, and he had packed poorly. But there was so little left after she had crushed him. He had given her everything in the end, the severance stipulated that she received everything but the clothes on his back and the money he had on hand. Money that was now as useless as the hands that could not hold on to her or the lips that could not comfort her. If he had more time he could have purchased more supplies. Lasted longer. Maybe found a new life in Thorn Bridge, far away from Morning Oak where they had shared a life for such a brief time.

A voice shot out into the baking day, “Nate? Honey, its really warm out here, get inside and have some lemonade. I heard you had a little fight with your friend Samantha, I just talked to her mom and we both agree that you are too young to be getting all mixed up and dating. You’re only nine, there will be other girls. And stop putting your toys in that bramble patch. When your father gets home I’m having him rip that thing out once and for all you are covered in welts.”

Dames, Natty Nape Truit thought, they just don’ understand how a man feels out here in the baking sun of oppression and loss.

Filed under: 100 Ways to Find Love in the City   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Morning Oak, Natty Nape Truit, Thorn Bridge

Narcissist

09Nov09

It was there again when he woke up, lingering and unavoidable. Chronic. Agonizing. Words that didn’t approach the whole of it. Words that couldn’t sum up the way the memory mixed with the present and spiraled out of his grasp. A pain part betrayal, part physical, wholly unwanted.

Memories of that night twelve years ago when he was lured into a field. Lured to a place where they were waiting. Chopped up into raw beef by machetes and a shoved through a threshing machine. None of which killed him. All of which stuck with him.

They say that what does not kill you makes you stronger. In the case of Seth Logan it did half a dozen of one and six of the other. He was dead in places, a rotting soul and broken mind in a resilient body. A form that was broken but not destroyed, a man that was maimed but without the good sense to close his eyes for the big sleep.

She was laying next to him, porcelain in feature like a hand-crafted doll. Her skin was milk and honey. Her hair silk. Her love for him an electric balm, a thing of healing that was intangible and magic. He was a monster, covered in cuts and scars, stitched together and held by twine for almost six months while it all came back.

She was too young for him and too soft and too right. He deserved none of it and he knew it. They don’t tell you, but you can become obsessed with how worthless and inferior you are. And you can be proud of those things. And you can use them as a tool to combat the world.

Seth had a reputation. A man that got things done. Not because he was clever or had a sharp eye and a quick hand, no. Seth was the walking corpse. The Cadaver they called him. The man you hired for suicide missions into dangerous places to do things that men did not walk back from.

Seth would walk out of the pits of hell every time. Scathed, tortured, burned, maimed, nearly killed a hundred times since that bright summer eve with the men and the thresher. But alive. Always alive.

He lay there in that pool of darkness a poorly constructed rag doll next to his perfect porcelain companion. A cruel joke, a juxtaposition of the world. He was wrapped, as always in bandages. Another job come and gone. Another night of injury and old wounds and being wrapped up in himself the same time he was wrapped up in her.

And she so beautiful and perfect and exquisite. But so broken, everything in her was mush and she couldn’t hold a job, have a friend, strike a conversation. You could look into her eyes and see the mists of Limbo, but you couldn’t find a soul.

Together they were everything they needed. The broken and the damned clawing forward in mutual usury, sopping at the wounds of their hearts and bodies and souls with the broken bits of the other. A perfect symbiosis of want and need and desperation.

A unit that stared at itself in the mirrors of each others reflection, content to know that as broken as they were, they were never as damaged as the thing laying across the bed from them. A love born of the idea that there was always someone who had it worse, even when you knew it wasn’t true.

Filed under: 100 Ways to Find Love in the City   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Jenny Stahl, Seth Logan, The Cadaver

Coffee Run

06Nov09

The border patrols and port authority were working together again. A floater had been found near the north pier and the floater in question was a diplomat from Columbia that may or may not have been in The City negotiating trade deals for legal and less-than-legal goods.

The Five Heads were not happy. And the dock was littered with top brass and lead detectives and every last person on the payroll that was getting some on the side.

It was a who’s who of dirty cops and pocket politicians. Leading the charge was mayor Charles W Blint. Now, one might say that he was obviously corrupt or that he was obviously going to show because of the status of the floater. And they are fine guesses. But they are both wrong.

Blint was the one who did it. Then he shoved the man into a sack of coal and dropped him into the river hoping he would wash to sea. But like all garbage he washed back up in the north harbor reeking of fish and flesh and a dozen years of the kinds of foods and drugs you can only afford when you live a dirty life.

Blint read a speech. It was colorful, just a touch sad. Ended with an off color joke about tourists in The City. He stepped down from the podium and made the rounds. Hands were shook, money was slipped from sleeve to sleeve and palm to palm. It was the single largest bribe in the history of The City but it was all the same money. The buck was literally passed on until it landed in the lap of the man who would end up taking care of things.

A man that just happened to be at the harbor that day. A man that was, at base, a good man. A man that followed through and did a job when he was paid to do it. Kenneth Reed was well known in the parts for his quiet stature, his large calloused hands, and the dark pressed circles about his eyes that made him look like a raccoon or an undertakers haunt.

He wore a grey shirt and blue vest over dark jeans and worn boots. He fidgeted, when he fidgeted it was like the creaking of a mountain in a quake, by pulling at one of the vests buttons until it came off. Not that he fidgeted often, not that it took a lot of fidgeting to remove a button. Just once and one button each time. The pulling of the button like the straining of his mind as he contemplated.

And those who knew of Ken Reed watched him pull three buttons off of his vest that day with bribe money bulging in a pocket a few inches away. At last he finished is nervous ponder and a large worked hand moved into the air and punched through the silence.

“Isn’t that a dent in the mayors car?”

The crowd lurched forward and inspected the vehicle. Finding within the dent the twisted remains of the diplomats wire rimmed glasses wedge up into the fender and ground bloody glass in the tire.

When they turned, some to congratulate and some to incriminate, Ken Reed was already gone.

Filed under: 100 Ways to Die in the City   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Charles W Blint, Five Heads, Kenneth Reed