The Iron Swamp (10 page)

I patted Lola on the head, feeling guilty that I didn't have the energy to walk her. Collapsing onto my sofa, I didn't even bother to turn on the network screen.

I woke up several hours later in darkness to the sound of Lola's bark. Unable to see my way to the light switch, I felt her paw under my right foot as she scampered away.

The table was still littered with the various plates and microwavable packets of the last fortnight, possibly longer. In a character transformation greater than the Mad King's clemency to his sister's spies, I began to remove the plastic containers with congealed food stuck to the edges, and the plates of spicy chips where only the most charcoaled bits remained. I made a new pile in the kitchen as the food bag was full and smelt too bad to remove, but it made the living area more bearable.

The only item left on the table was a replica of the Hiltron Sada Astra from my currently favorite series The Yugon Wars, which I had partially constructed three weeks ago and then left to set. It was only the day after that I realized it had been glued to the table. I thought about getting a knife and prying it off, but the hours I'd spent sleeping had eaten into my procrastination time. I sat down at the table, commanded the screen to turn on, and began to write.

It was far from my greatest piece of work, but I was done with an hour left before work started. I messaged Rake. We needed to talk before I handed my report to Vins, though I did not want him to back me up. Once Clazran was told we had a suspect, the case was shut. Every person fighting against that outcome was just discarding their careers.

By the time I got to my slider round the corner from Elvedeer, Rake had not replied. I called him, but there was no answer. I tried twice again, and still nothing. My thoughts returning to the possibility of him doing something to Welker, I left him a message to contact me ASAP.

My arm seemed heavy as I pressed the button for the basement. I wasn't coming back here. When Vins told me I was off the case, I would quit.

The dark, squalid room was quieter than the Bronn Wastes as Vins stood up from my chair. For a pendulum swing, I considered retreating back into the elevator, but my legs wouldn't turn that way. They just kept walking until I could see the specks of gray amid his black hair.

"You have the report?" he said.

I nodded.

"Make it."

I wasn't going to go out sniveling. "Peti didn't commit the crime."

"Pity." The word vibrated with threat, as if he were about to bite through his own teeth. "And you are basing this on the evidence provided by Dr. Fache?" He was already ahead of me. It happened just as Fache predicted. Dollews had found out about our meeting and told Vins.

I nodded.

"And would it change your mind to learn that the hack scientist has since been fired for incompetence?"

"What do you think?"

Vins' eyes narrowed to the point of closure. "You're fired." He paused, tapping his tablet, as if he had been waiting to do this since the first time we talked. "I trust you are not stupid enough to make trouble over this?"

I nodded. "And Rake?"

Vins smiled. "He handed in his report just before you did. It says Peti is the chief suspect. We've decided to base all further inquiries on his report."

So Rake was ignoring me. His father must have told him what was happening, and he was dissociating himself. It hurt more than it should have. I did not delude myself that we were friends, but still it felt like betrayal.

No one said a word to me as I walked back to the elevator, not even a nod. They all just watched vacantly, like masks on a wall. I wanted to tell them to frak themselves, but I didn't. I could feel Vins' eyes on my back holding me rigid with his will.

Finished for the day, and every day to come, I made my way back to Elvedeer intent on drinking myself to death.

I collapsed on the sofa without even patting Lola on the head and cogitated on my options. I could either continue lying on the sofa, or I could get a drink. Both had attractive and unattractive attributes, but I decided there was plenty of time to lie on the sofa, so I got up to inspect the sparsity of my wares.

I didn't even want to jack-in. The knowledge that I had once again been the agent of my own demise made the image of the Pirate Captain stretch and bend until it formed a noose. If I went into the ether now, I would never come out again. Captain Dae Daniel Sun and human garbage Simon Nidess would die together.

I was now in my second basement, subject to the same slow rot as my exiled father. Perhaps he would be proud, but what good would that do me? His sacrifice and mine meant nothing, because they achieved nothing. In rejecting his philosophy, I had hoped to save myself his fate, but all I had done was fail in spite of it. I had not changed enough. To survive, I needed to feed Fache to the dogs, but there were some weights a conscience couldn't bear without breaking.

Far from correcting the issue, downing the remnants of a 50cl bottle of Jack's Evil Eye only worsened the feeling of internal rot. As I Inserted my tongue into the bottle to get the last dregs, the only solution appeared to be to order more.

I ran down the list of beers, spirits, ciders, and wines on sale at Kaeromar and selected as many of them as I thought a man could carry in one journey. Interacting with a person once was bad enough. I had no wish to see the same person twice.

While I was waiting for the arrival of enough booze to drown a kraaken, I found a suitably comfortable pair of trousers – basically thick pajamas covered in the super heroes from my Hotary comics – and sank back into the sofa. I considered reading a comic, but short words above large pictures sounded exhausting. Watching the network was less involving.

For a while I watched Klios Pane, a film about a man with the ability to read minds who used his power to bring down the corrupt government regime. It was banned in The Kaerosh as the ruler was based on President Granian, previously thought to be the worst dictator we'd ever had. I turned it off half way through when Klios had the chance to kill Garman – supposed to be Clazran – and chose to let him live. It seemed selfish to consider his honor above that of the welfare of an entire nation, and yet in the film the character wasn't execrated for his poor judgment but lauded for his morality.

I found a show about a family living in Picto whose house sank into the swamp as they slept. It wasn't exactly clear on how they managed to stay asleep while all the house's supports and flotation devices broke and burst, but what was made abundantly clear was how much they'd suffered. Seeing as I didn't care about that, I looked for something else.

My collection of drink soon to arrive, I realized that there was not a single item of sustenance on the list aside from Lola's chum. The cupboards contained nothing but igueenie pasta, which tasted like normal pasta covered in wax, and maybe there was some rice. What in Cythuria the first human settlers were thinking when they invented igueenie pasta was one of the universe's greatest mysteries. Having brought wheat with them, there seemed little need to start farming the rancid Cos vegetables for substitutes. The worst were gexes which tasted like fermented cardboard, or cranberries which tasted like vomiting up gexes. A millennium distant, I wasn't totally sure they were Cos produce, but as a general rule, if they tasted worse than eating the soil beneath the plant they grew on, then they came from Cos.

Watching some program about horny teenagers instigated my first coherent thought about suicide. It was the notion that if I wasn't there, then they could continue whining in the privacy of my living room. Saved by the buzzer indicating the arrival of my alcohol, I raised myself from the sofa to go to the door. A fat man held out his tablet for my thumb print, two crates stacked full of drink in front of his legs.

"Planning a party?" he said, smiling.

"No," I said, handing him back his tablet.

His smile vanished as I pulled the two crates in and shut the door. I lifted the top crate off with some difficulty to survey my selection. There were tall bottles with colored liquid, small bottles with brown liquid, and colored bottles with mystery liquids; pretty much every type of bottle a man could want. I grabbed one at random and ripped the top off.

Chapter 7

14/09/2256 FC

It must have been a cycle since the crates arrived, and my insides twisted and contracted as if I'd eaten Kenrey's raw remains. Only when I made the mistake of adding orange liqueur to the igueenie pasta did I consider ordering some more food and facing another human being.

A second look had revealed there wasn't any rice, forcing me to extract what energy I could from pasta and booze. I had little of it left, but as the intoxication made standing for more than a few minutes at a time literally impossible, I rarely noticed.

I almost didn't recognize the sound of the buzzer against the chatter from the network screen. The room was in a fairly constant spin which made it difficult to identify the origin of specific noises. I ignored it the first few times, but after four or five rings it seemed that peace would return faster if I told whoever was outside to go frak a swamp badger.

I was unsteady on my feet, pushing myself off the wall a couple of times before I made it to the door. I stepped on a few of my figures which I'd thrown around the room at some point or other, as well as the screen of my booklet which crunched beneath my weight. I didn't care. I'd done the last of my comic reading.

It took me a few moments to locate the handle before flinging the door open in a semi-fluid motion. The five or six figures, all wearing black cloaks and hoods, were SP.

Oh frak!

Suddenly aware that I was wearing nothing but a rib vest and pants, I briefly considered running. But even if I hadn't spent the last cycle sitting on a sofa, I stood little chance of outmaneuvering six SP in a single exit flat. Instead, I fixed them with an eye. I could probably take them if they came any closer. At school I'd hit someone once, and he didn't seem to like it.

"Mr. Nidess? Will you come with us?"

I staggered sideways a bit, but no one noticed. On recalculation, I could probably take one or two of them, but the whole lot seemed unlikely. I needed an escape plan. I had to convince them they were at the wrong flat. "You know," I said, "I'm not entirely sure I am Mr. Nidess."

I squinted to gauge their reactions, but they were spinning too fast.

One of them stepped forward. "You need to come with us, sir."

"He's wasted," one of them added.

I stepped away from him and sat down on the ground. "I find that infensive." I pointed at the one I thought said it. "I'm perfectly sober. You're looking for Nidess; my name is Nediss. I can see why you'd make the mistake." I got up, narrowly avoiding tumbling over the other way, but none of them seemed to notice. "It's a very common name, Nidess; lots of people called it round here."

The nearest one grabbed me by the arm. I pulled away, slamming into the wall. "I need to go to the toilet."

One of them laughed as the nearest one was about to grab me again, but another one stopped him, nodding at the bathroom behind me. His consent was sufficiently surprising that I was still thinking up arguments why he should let me go as I stood in front of the bowl.

I emptied my bladder over pretty much everything within a fairly wide radius, which by this stage was nothing new, and seeing as I wasn't coming back there didn't seem much point in flushing it. I donned a pair of trousers, grabbed my coat and gloves so that I didn't die of cold, and went back to the agents.

Lola barked, finally exiting the hiding place she used under the hall table when anyone except me was at the door. "Who'll feed my dog?" I said, feeling a rush of sadness.

"We'll put someone on that," said one of them. "You need to come with us now."

I patted her on the head. "Good girl, Lola. Everything will be alright. I'm just going for a walk with these men." I could feel the water welling up behind my eyes, but I wouldn't let her see. It would only scare her.

"Maybe we could give her to a neighbor to look after?" I suggested, but the nearest of them shook his head. "Could I just leave her in the corridor then?"

Again the hood shook his head. Lola barked a few more times as the door closed, and I vomited on the floor.

Someone might find her. She would bark when she was hungry and someone would come. I wiped the gobbets of drool from my mouth and spat out the last of the acid. Perhaps when someone came to clean it up they would hear Lola's distress. Not even the residents of Elvedeer tolerated piles of vomit in the corridor for long.

The motion of the elevator made me feel dizzy. One of the hoods put his hand on my shoulder as I began to sway too much to one side, a fresh nausea rising in me with every floor we descended. The puddle of vomit that trickled down the doors as they reopened could have been avoided only by choking myself on my own stomach acid.

I sat in the back of a slider-van with four of the six SP. There was only one window, partially obscured by a hood. When they stood, I was short enough to see their faces, but sitting down all I could see was the occasional chin.

I knew exactly what would happen next. Firstly, the buildings would be replaced by trees. Then the trees would get shorter and fatter and be replaced by swamps. Then we would stop. I would be taken out, knelt down, and shot once in the back of the head. My corpse would then be shot one more time in the head to ensure I was dead, and I would be thrown in the swamp. They didn't have to be discrete. No one was going to do anything about it.

It wouldn't take long to reach the nearest swamp. Even Abaconsaye and the Ring of Six couldn't escape the smell of dank rot. Someone told me that
kaerosh
actually meant swamp in old Rathjarin. The last vestiges of the language used by the race that once ruled Cos before the advent of humanity.

I was past fear, or possibly too drunk. It was regret that tugged at me. The thought of what I could have been. The things I could have done. I never even went to see Sariah in prison.