Machine Of Death (15 page)

The tale was interrupted here by the arrival of our main courses. One bite of his entrée—some sort of duck in a sweet-smelling sauce—and my friend was delighted. “There really is nothing better than a good meal with fine company.”

“Very true. Let’s have a toast.” We raised our glasses of beer. “To chance meetings!” I said.

He nodded and responded, “To civilization!” And we drank.

The restaurant was filling up. The new patrons looked dressed for the theatre. A large group behind me were calling for wine. We ate silently for a few minutes before I brought us back to his story. “I get the feeling the revolutionary camp wasn’t quite like this.”

“No it wasn’t,” my friend replied, staring down at his plate.

MJ sent one of his companions ahead to get preparations started for the feast, and the other got a series of straps together to help him carry the Machine on his back.

We set off in the direction I’d need to go to get back to the bus, which did alleviate a few of my apprehensions. Soon, though, we left the main path for a narrow muddy trail through the trees. I hadn’t realized how I’d been hiking on the equivalent of a freeway the previous weeks. Those main paths had room for you to press up against a cliff face when you met a train of donkeys. But this trail seemed like we were the first to travel it. The density of the trees gave loads of shade, so the snow I’d hiked through and seen melt a few days before here made our way even more treacherous. We were descending, and often I found myself falling on my ass for safety’s sake. And I wasn’t the one with a Machine of Death on my back.

The walk had been quiet, mostly me cursing at the slopes I was sliding over, but when we arrived at the camp, MJ took charge. Before talking with a crowd of eager kids who’d congregated, he told the guy with the Machine to bring it to a large tarp-covered lean-to. Soon I could hear the sputter of a generator inside.

The camp wasn’t large. A dozen canvas tents and a few shanties made out of the local trees held out the snowdrifts. The ground was a mess of wet mud with a few planks thrown down at random. You couldn’t see the sun through the needly canopy.

And there were revolutionaries. I hadn’t expected them to be so young. Almost all of them were skinny teenagers. They seemed to look up to MJ, and were getting in a lot of questions that seemed to be about me. I’ve been in enough strange places that being the centre of attention wasn’t a novelty anymore, so I let my mind wander.

A young girl brought me a bottle of beer. Like always, the bottle was huge. I took it from her with a smile and my best “thank you” in her language. Instead of the giggle that usually produced, her eyes went wide and she bolted to a group of older girls standing near what looked like a kitchen tent. They all looked nervously across the camp at me. It took a few moments of fumbling with my bottle opener to get that drink into me. This wasn’t going how it was supposed to.

MJ finished with his mob and came over, smiling apologetically. “I am so sorry to have to tell you that our leader is out on an operation and will not be able to get back in time to meet you this evening. Unless you would consider staying until tomorrow?”

I explained that I couldn’t possibly, but thanked him for the consideration. We wrangled politely for a few minutes but eventually I won. Arrangements would be made to guide me to the nearest guesthouse on the main path after the celebration was over.

Once all those niceties were out of the way we could get down to the tour of the camp. MJ told me how long they’d been encamped and how dedicated they were to the cause of freedom from the tyranny of the capital. He talked about corruption in the towns, how farmers couldn’t afford to grow anything and instead had to turn to letting foreigners into their homes, while they bought their food from the outside.

“And now they want us to stop using firewood!” he exclaimed outside the tent where he’d shown me their collection of rifles and ammunition. “‘It’s bad for the environment to cut down so many trees,’ they say. They’ve never lived through one of our winters. Do you know how much it would cost to use their gas stoves?” I didn’t, but was soon informed.

The whole tour had just been a way of killing time while the feast was being prepared. He could have pointed out each tent and told me its contents from almost any point in the little camp. As we moved off from the armoury tent I spotted something off behind it a little ways. It looked like an animal pen of some sort, but the fences seemed a bit high for pigs.

MJ noticed me looking and thought for a second before speaking. “Would you like to see?”

“Yeah, what is it, your chickens?”

“Not exactly.”

The pen was the most sturdily built thing I’d seen in the camp. When we got closer I realized that it was in a bit of a gully and the fences were much higher than I’d assumed—maybe ten feet tall—and covered with chicken wire. We stopped on a small ridge where we had a good view over and inside.

Eight people were in the cage.

“Like I said,” MJ said in a conversational tone, “we’ve had some problems with traitors recently. These are our current suspects.”

Once one noticed us looking in, all of the prisoners began staring. MJ talked about the reasons why each of them might have betrayed the revolution, but they mostly looked at me. The oldest might have been fifteen. Two of them were girls. I’d imagine none of them had seen a foreigner before. There were a few muddy blankets inside and everything was sodden. I couldn’t see even a pit for a toilet.

“And now that you’ve brought us the Machine, we will be able to tell which of these are guilty,” MJ finished up, clearly pleased with the situation. “The innocent ones will, of course, receive the revolution’s deepest sympathies and positions of honour.”

When he finished with his oration, which because it was in English they had no way of understanding, most of the prisoners started talking at once. They were pleading with MJ, but he replied dismissively, then patronizingly. At least that’s how it sounded, but it’s so hard to tell when you don’t know the language. He turned back to me. “They all say they are innocent, of course, and don’t want to be in this cage, but it won’t be much longer. I told them how you’d brought the Machine that would exonerate they who truly are innocent.”

They were all staring at me with horrible looks. A few deep scowls, some wide-eyed terror, and one calm gaze you could tell was a mask for calculating how to get over that fence and cut my throat.

MJ wasn’t the kind of guy who liked silence from his guest of honour. “It’s too bad the plug is damaged, or we could get all this justice out of the way tonight.” When I kept on staring into the cage, he went on. “We have a few boys who are good with these kinds of things though. They should be able to get it up and running very soon.”

And with that we headed back to see if the feast was ready.

“How did we get on this story again?” My friend hadn’t stopped fidgetting with his water glass for five minutes.

“A time you felt scared, like you might not make it back.”

“Right.” He stared at his glass for a few more seconds. Somewhere in the restaurant a woman was laughing at what she wanted everyone to know was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

“They had this feast for me, I sat at the head of the table, got the choice pieces of goat, the whole deal. And through the whole thing everyone’s faces looked like those eight prisoners’ did. Like they couldn’t believe the monster they’d let in to their home. Just scared of me and what I’d brought. They didn’t say anything weird, didn’t spit at me or anything, but I’ve never felt so hated in my life. The girl who’d brought me the beer when I arrived wouldn’t look anywhere near our direction. I wondered if she had a brother in the cage. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

“The worst thing was fearing that one of those bright kids would come running from the generator tent saying he’d fixed the plug: that the Machine could pass sentences that very night! I ate bits off my goat haunch and smiled at MJ’s jokes, just waiting for the horribleness to play out.

“Everyone would have to gather by the generator to witness each judgment in turn. They’d lead each prisoner over, get her drop of blood and wait. Each one of their deaths would say ‘Firing Squad.’ There’s no way around it. I could feel it in the air. It wouldn’t matter if they were traitors or the most fervently loyal revolutionaries history had ever known. All of those prisoners were going to die. Because of my good deed they’d be shot by a squad of teenagers.

“And then when the prisoners were all dead, MJ would start to think, ‘That was a lot of traitors. More than I’d thought even.’ And he’d get inspired to test everyone he’d had any suspicions of. And each of their deaths would say ‘Firing Squad’. And then they’d start to run out of suspicious people and have to test everyone. The little girl that brought me my beer, all of his little sycophants, even those two I’d met him with, they’d all be revealed as traitors. By the Machine I’d brought.

“Clearly it would come to just the two of us and he would need to take my blood and I would submit and it would come up ‘Emphysema’. He’d give an impassioned speech about how I was the only one who truly understood struggle while the bodies slowly froze around us. Then he’d want to go find his leader and the rest of the revolutionaries to test them and it wouldn’t stop until everyone in those mountains was dead. And I’d have to run for home and safety, knowing what I’d set loose.

“So yeah, none of that happened.” Both of our plates were gone and dessert menus lay in front of each of us, unread. “In reality we ate a fake-jovial meal and gave toasts all around. Everyone was scared, like they could hear barbarian hordes just over the hill, but there was nothing they could do except eat their bits of goat.

“MJ kept on treating me like an honoured friend right until the end. I wanted to hit him. Hell, I wanted to shoot him and send all those kids home. But I didn’t. A kid was my guide to the path after the feast was over. I didn’t warn him to get the hell away from that machine. Couldn’t have really. I stayed in a guest house, barely sleeping. I took off before dawn and didn’t stop until I was on a bus and far away. If I were any sort of human being I would have wrecked the Machine before I left. I didn’t do that either.”

My friend had let all this out in a quiet rush, much quicker than the measured pace of the rest of his storytelling. He had another gulp of water, and caught his breath. “I guess I’ve never told this story before.” He tried one of his usual self-deprecating smiles. It didn’t quite work. “Harder than I thought.”

I couldn’t let it go there. “But then what happened? Did they get the Machine working? Did they all kill each other?”

He looked hard at me. “I don’t know. After I left, I refused to pay any attention to the news from that area. Plenty of other things in the world to care about, right? Besides, maybe I didn’t affect anything. The Machine might have done exactly what they thought it would do. Maybe they never got it working. Who knows?

“But I’ll tell you this: I’ll never go back. If that means I miss a few mountainscapes, so be it. I knocked about in the third world for a few more months but my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I tried keeping clear of revolutions but there are just too many kids out there with guns. Too hard to forget.

“Eventually, of course, I came back to civilization. And here we are.”

Here we were indeed.

I stared at my dessert menu and decided on an inconsequential tiramisu.

Story by J Jack Unrau

Illustration by Brandon Bolt

“
THE
BLOKE’S
A FUCKIN’
WHACK
JOB
.”

Billy, the Director of Marketing, tells me this while he’s picking his nose with a paperclip. “He wasn’t right to start with; he’s the last bastard who should’ve got that blood test. He’s been treading water all his life, but he’s sinkin’ now.”

He straightens the paperclip, then slides it between his thumb and finger to squeegee the snot off. Unimpeded by my
Ugh
face, he wipes his fingers on the fabric of my cubicle wall. In the background a phone has been ringing for five minutes without kicking into voicemail, and in the next cube, somebody’s screaming at a subordinate employee on another line. I want to kill them all and dance to the sounds of their suffering through the junkyard of smashed computers and office plants and overturned desks.

I ask Billy, “What did it say?”

Tilting his head back, throat tight, Billy inserts the straightened paperclip once again into his nostril. He’s wearing a tailored Armani suit that probably cost more than I make in two months. This time he keeps pushing, until the wire disappears into his skull. 

“It doesn’t talk,” he informs me. He makes quotation marks with his fingers. “It didn’t
say
anythin’.”

If I whacked the stub of the wire with the heel of my hand, Billy would be dead in a second. If he took the test, it might say
Paperclip
or
Bastard
or
Whim
. Instead of killing him, I say, “I know it doesn’t talk, you facetious prick. I meant what did his ticket say? How’s Frank gonna die?”