Richard Kadrey: Metrophage

The majority of the prison's bulk was hidden, sunk deep into the ancient pig iron waste pits. Lichen-streaked, great solid planes of cracked concrete rose at severe angles to a flat roof studded with sealed cooling ducts and dish antennae. A damp ocean breeze kept the walls of the prison perpetually glistening, the concrete stinking with a thousand dock smells: the ozone residue of synthetic fuels, over-ripe fruit, rusting machinery, dead fish.

A common joke was that the average prisoner was doing five to ten while the guards were doing nine to five. They, like the prisoners, were just trying to get by. They were young men mostly, Jonny's age and a little older. Primarily recruits from the Committee for Public Health, at twenty the boys were already considered too old for street duty, burned-out on the Committee's steady diet of speed and anabolic steroids.

Two years earlier, with motives as mysterious to himself as anybody else, Jonny had joined the Committee. Indifference and boredom seemed to be his main reasons. A few years as a petty thief and courier for the smugglers left him fast on his feet and quick with a knife and pistol. Still, he remained naive enough to be surprised when it was these same criminal qualities that helped land him a high-paying job with the Committee.

After his training, Jonny was assigned to what was called Perimeter Maintenance. The mechanics of the job were not too different from what he had been doing all his life- meeting with thieves, tracking down warehouses of stolen drugs and food.

However, the Committee had little patience with prisoners; they paid him a commission for each smuggler he killed above his quota.

Recruits were encouraged to compete. Body counts were posted at Committee headquarters. There were bonuses and prizes to be won at the end of each month.

Jonny tried to make the best of it, telling himself how much better it was to be off the streets and on the side of power for a change. But killing for the Committee did not make any more sense than killing for the smugglers. Sometimes, when he was helping load bodies into transports after a raid, Jonny would see a face he recognized: a junky from the Strip, a panhandler, a street musician.

More than once, in the hallucinatory haze of the synth-fuels fumes and halogen lamps, he thought he saw his own face among the dead.

And he was growing increasingly dependent on the speed. He simply could not let go. The come down was too awful. Without the speed he would begin to think again.

Jonny had never known self-loathing before, but there it was.

He had sudden bouts of vertigo, mouth ulcers, cramps in his gun hand. He found himself growing more sympathetic to the cause of the smugglers; at least he understood their motives. In the end it simply grew too ugly, the self-deceptions too obvious for him to continue.

The manner of his desertion, however, was more complicated. It was generally known that he turned in his uniform, pressed and clean, and picked up the last of his commissions. But he never turned in his pistol. That became significant later when his immediate superior, a one-eyed brute named Cawfly, was found shot through his good eye.

And Jonny, barely twenty one, in his inevitable search for the point of least resistance, drifted back to the streets. No longer resisting the flow of events or pretending to chart a course through them, he existed by luck. But that was before; now it seemed even that had deserted him.

He awoke, with a small cry, to the stink of vomit and antiseptic in a damp, gray holding cell. As the sound of his cry died away, Jonny rolled onto his side where he was distressed to find that the vomit he smelled was his own. His left hand was resting in a small pool of the stuff. His mouth burned with bile.

He lay on a bare aluminum cot frame, his head spinning, wondering where he was. Eventually, he was able to focus on the wall. GAMMA LOVES RAMON and DEZ were scratched there, and THE EXQUISITE CORPSE WILL DRINK THE NEW WINE. Much of the graffiti was in Spanish and Japanese. He was too tired to translate, but he did not need to. He already knew what it said. "Fuck you!" or "I didn't do it." or just "Let me out!" The international language of the dispossessed. He grinned; it was almost comforting. Jonny knew where he was now.

When he tried to sit up, he found that hisright shoulder was wrapped in gauze and a thermoplastic carapace. For a terrible instant, he panicked, but relaxed when he felt the reassuring bulge of his arm, intact under the cast.

Rubbing his injured arm, Jonny tried to figure out who had turned him. It was clearly no coincidence that the Committee had been waiting for him outside Carnaby's Pit. It was possible, he thought, that it had been a routine sweep for all pushers, but that did not seem likely. Deep shit," he said to the empty cell. Extremely deep shit.

He was almost asleep when the polarized glass panel on his cell door blinked to the transparent, then darkened. Jonny lay still on the aluminum frame as the cell door scrapped open. He heard whispers-three or four distinct voices. Annoyance and nervousness. He kept his eyes closed. The door opened further, then closed quickly. The voices stopped. Jonny was aware of somebody standing over him.

"Is that him?" came a low, adolescent voice.

"Yeah," I think so, said a different voice.

"He's a skinny motherfucker. Looks like a chica," came a third, huskier voice.

"That give you ideas, man?"

"Yeah- I'm gonna cut him."

"Hey, don't- "

Jonny heard the metallic snick of a switchblade opening. He did not move.

"Touch him and we're muy morto. He's tagged, man."

"Doesn't look special."

"I seen his files. Interrogacion especial."

"Man, I'm not going to kill him," came the husky voice. "Just gonna get a knuckle or part of his ear.

"No!"

"Who's gonna stop me?"

Jonny swung one steel-tipped boot into the gut of a blonde boy and the other onto the floor, screaming like a lunatic, letting his momentum carry him up and toward the door. The other boys fell back without being touched, too surprised to stop him.

He almost had the door open before they came to their senses and grabbed him. But he kept moving, biting fingers, kicking shins, not letting them get a good grip. Finally, a boy with some sort of scarring on his hands and neck caught him with a smooth uppercut to the jaw.

Jonny went down on his face. The scarred boy rolled him over and dropped onto his chest, bringing the switchblade up level with Jonny's throat. The other boys crowded in behind him, grumbling and shaking their injured hands and legs. Jonny realized that the hands of the boy holding the knife were covered with sores, similar to leprosy lesions.

"You funny, man?" the boy with the knife demanded. "What's your story?

"Fuck you, la chinga," said Jonny.

The boy sliced Jonny's cheek. "You're dead, man. I don't care who you are", he said.

"You haven't got the cojones."

"You got to stick him, now. He'll tell," said the blonde boy.

Jonny twisted around and kicked the blonde boy, again. The boy on his chest punched his throat.

"What are you doing?" came a new voice.

The boys drew back abruptly, staring guiltily at the door. The boy with the knife stood up and glanced at his nervous accomplices, then back at the door. All Jonny could see from the floor was a pair of highly polished boots and a sleeve with lieutenant's stripes.

"I asked what you were doing," said the lieutenant.

The boy with the lesions pointed to Jonny. "He was trying to escape. We stopped him."

The lieutenant nodded. "What were you doing in this cell?"

The boy glanced at his friends for support. They would not look at him. "I told you, man. He was trying to escape," he said.

"Don't lie to me."