Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"There's someone in that doorway," Martlet said, deliberately not looking.

The scrap of pride left Fisher then, and his terror returned. Terror was a sense of his being big and soft and very easy to kill.

Mr. Blue had started to say something, but the person in the doorway interrupted him.

"Stay where you are." It was a young grunting voice using an old loudspeaker that seemed to shred the words.

They saw it was a small ugly child with a thumblike nose and long dark nostrils and tiny eyes. It wore a long shirt and stood on bare feet, but whether it was a boy or girl they could not tell.

Echols said, "See, they put kids in all the dangerous jobs aboveground. They're expendable."

Vaida said, "What bastards!"

The force of her outrage distracted Fisher and made him see this woman as almost human. Until that moment he had not imagined any of them to have normal emotions. She cared about the child!

The child had given Fisher a fright. This little creature intimidated him more than a full-sized adult would have done. He found most small children subhuman, apelike, and dangerously unpredictable. Even ones in Coldharbor upset him. "Children" was a horror-word,

The child's grunting came again. "Use the phone!"

Mr. Blue slung down his pack and left the group. He went through the doorway, where the child still stood watching, but he was not gone more than a minute.

"It's just me and the Fish," he said when he returned. "The rest of you wait here."

Fisher said, "I changed my mind."

They looked at him.

Fisher said, "I've decided I don't want to be sold."

"Dippy," someone said.

"Don't say that!" Fisher cried out. "Don't leave me here."

But the others had stopped listening to him. More faces emerged from behind pillars and window frames — they were children of remarkable similarity, with round, sunburned faces, rather doglike and snub-nosed, and squinting and frowning at the strangers like bad-tempered old men.

Fisher had become very afraid. The aliens hadn't answered him. He had told them his decision. They didn't care! And now, at the moment of being separated from the group that had abducted him, he stopped seeing them as savages and stopped believing they would eat him. Valda had convinced him by saying disgustedly What bastards! He began to fear the unknown Diggers who lived like moles in this ghost town of Varnado.

They entered the building, just the two of them, Mr. Blue leading, and descended the fire stairs — three flights to an old concourse, with lamplit tunnels leading from it. It had once been an underground shopping center — the troughs still stood, holding dead ornamental trees. The store signs were intact above shop fronts: shoes, salads, sandwiches, jewelry, books, bedding, drugs, flowers, chocolates, ice cream, auto accessories, clothes. It was so odd in this buried mausoleum to see the empty shops and the dirty signs: Casey's, Hi-Rite, Soop's, Van Allen, Heather, Speed-King, Grover's Drugs, Hax, Mackie's — there was even a cavernous Allbright's, one of the old retail outlets.

This large underground area had the smell of humans. The light was poor — there was no electricity. That was very scary. There were oil lamps and reflectors and ceiling wells where shafts of dusty sunlight came from street level. And there was a stink of burning fat or grease — probably the lamp fuel— and a smell like dead cats.

Mr. Blue said, "Let me do the talking."

Fear had silenced Fisher. They were following another ugly child.

Mr. Blue turned. Was he smiling? He said, "I was just getting used to you."

The quack that came out of Fisher's nose was pitiful — even he was startled by it. Mr. Blue's features softened when he heard the harsh despairing sound.

"They call this the Mooseworks," Mr. Blue said, in a chatty way.

It pained Fisher to hear this man be friendly now, as he was about to sell him. Perhaps that was why he was being friendly, because Fisher no longer mattered, and the man was relieved at the thought of getting rid of him and making some money. What good was money here?

"To distinguish it from the Buffaloworks. That's another network of Diggers."

They were met at the far end of the concourse by a man with a flashlight. He held it and twirled it in a self-important way, as if it were his badge of authority. And because he kept it shining on Fisher for most of the time, Fisher had only the dimmest sense of the man's appearance — merely an impression of clumsy fatness, and whiskers, and greasy overalls. The man breathed loudly through his nose. This was an alien! He made Mr. Blue seem rather tame and gentle.

"What have you brought me, Mr. B?"

From behind the light Fisher heard the disgusting scrape of the man's fingers scratching his scalp.

"I've got a valuable hostage."

"He doesn't look very healthy." The fingers reached beyond the light and pinched Fisher's arm. "Where did you get him?"

"Out of a rotor, in a gully in our quarter. Hunters, probably. New Yorkers — the rotor was registered. They're looking for him, but we've avoided them. We can't deal with ransom. We don't have any resources. We had to leave our camp two months ago because of a raid. We lost two people. We're on the move. This kid's just in the way,"

"What makes you think we can handle him?"

"You can make radio contact," Mr. Blue said. "There's some big bucks to be made out of this kid. See his suit?"

"You only took this creep? You didn't take food or weapons?"

"Nope."

"That's got to be a lie," the man said, flashing his light into Mr. Blue's face and giving Fisher a glimpse of the man's own head: he had the flat broad frowning face of those children, and was dirtier, and had hair to his shoulders, and tiny eyes— hardly a face with so much hair.

"I wouldn't trust their food," Mr. Blue said. "They put poison in it. And they never leave weapons behind."

"Yet they left this kid," the man said, and made Fisher wince with the flashlight. "I don't blame them! He's a bone, he looks sick, he's probably carrying something infectious. Unless he's hoopy. What's his name?"

As the man asked, he reached out, and thinking he was going to be pinched again, Fisher recoiled with a squawk, crying Wah! He had also gotten another glimpse in the shifting light of the man's face, his bad skin, his cracked lips and matted hair. He received a strong gust of the man's stink.

"His name's Fish," Mr. Blue said. "We haven't got a machine to read his ID. It's coded. I'm telling you, if he's not an Owner he belongs to Owners. They pay big bucks."

"He's a dip," the man said, and scratched his head. It was like a rake dragged through sand.

Fisher had reacted to the man in a monkey movement, and he was still whimpering. But he had already processed what he had seen so far. This large filthy family of Diggers had been undetected because they lived underground, at the lowest level of this abandoned town. There was no way a scanner could reach them, and any shooting missed them too: Fisher's own shooting had missed them. Wrong again!

"I've got enough dips," the man said. "We'll take him off your hands, but we're not buying him unless we get some food and weapons."

"We need food too," Mr. Blue said. "That's why I'm here. We're hungry. We can't feed hostages."

"You mean this dip is all you've got?"

"He's worth money. When they come looking for him—"

The two men argued. Fisher had long ceased to feel that he would be saved here. He doubted that he would even survive in this awful place. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness: he could see enough of these littered shops and tunnels to fear them. It was bad enough on the ground — but belowground it was ratholes, with suffocating smells.

Mr. Blue was saying, "These hunters and prospectors have money. They're going to want this kid back."