Authors: Chad Leito
When I awoke I flailed my arms back and forth and felt that they were pinned down, “Sir!” someone yelled at me. I opened my eyes and the blond flight attendant who had carried me was standing over me, his face swimming in my field of vision. “There will be no need to fight anymore, I’m trying to help.”
The effects of the drug were still heavy in my mind. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked around and began to giggle. Things were moving too slow. My head felt like it was full of mud and noises echoed through my mind. Colors seemed duller and looked as though they were melting off of the flight attendant’s shirt. His face was growing so big that I could see the pores of his ruddy skin, and then shrinking down in the background to where I could barely see him in the distance.
The blonde man, Brandon, opened his mouth wide to laugh, but I only heard the noise after his mouth was closed. I blinked and his face danced before me, now glowing with white light. He spoke and the shape of his mouth and the words that I heard didn’t fit. “You’re a little confused,” he said. “Drink this,” and he handed me a small cup plastic of purple liquid. I tried to ask him what it was, but my lips turned to rubber and I couldn’t talk. I tried to reach for the cup, but I missed. I felt the blond man’s hand tilt my head back and pour the purple liquid in my mouth. The thick, bitter concoction slimed down my throat and then the blond man told me to rest. He said that he had given me something to fix my condition. The block of ice. Again, it was like I was trying to hold onto a block of ice.
I had slipped out of consciousness again and when I came back my head felt sturdier and the objects around me had more permanence to them. I looked around and saw that I was seat belted into a soft cushioned blue chair and that in front of me was a chain link fence blocking my way out to the rest of the ship. I unbuckled myself and tried to push the fence open before noticing the lock on the outside. The chair I was sitting in was completely caged in and I guessed that this was where they put violent people that they needed to detain.
My fists clenched and I stood up in anger. They had detained me! And what for? Because I wanted to help an old man! That was ridiculous! Infuriating! It was uncalled for that…
I sniffed. “What is that smell?” I heard myself whisper. The anger had left me at the advent of this new smell. I breathed in deeply and my head cocked. I moved and pressed my nose through the fence and sniffed in as much of the aroma as I could. There was a scent going through the ship that I had never smelt before. I breathed in deeply again. My lungs felt as though they couldn’t pull in enough air.
The blonde man came up to me with a set of keys. He held them before me and said, “If I let you out of here are you going to behave?”
I nodded and as he worked the lock I asked, “What’s that smell?”
He pulled open the door to the cell and said, “It’s Mungus. It smells a lot better than the ship does. It smells fresher.”
I walked passed him and into the main cabin of the ship. I saw rows and rows of hundreds of empty seats with heavy buckles to keep passengers strapped in. Above the seats were small TVs and outside of little windows against the walls I could see the green grass below. I turned around to Brandon. “Where is everyone?”
“They’ve already gone outside,” he pointed towards an opening in the cabin where a thick light shone in. I could see dust particles dancing in the light and as I walked toward the opening my eyes opened wide and I gasped in that beautiful aroma until my lungs felt tight with pressure.
There were bright blues and whites in the sky and below this, a landscape that stretched with trees and hills. Birds sang in the warm air and I stepped towards the opening. My skin seemed to smile with the freshness of it all. In front of me, the land stretched. There were hundreds of my shipmates on the ground, frolicking through the grass. I could see butterflies drifting above the earth. Beyond the group of people that had come down on the ship were a group of people that looked like they were wearing cowboy attire. They were lined up and talking with the blond flight attendant who had smacked on her gum.
“C’mon down,” Saul shouted from below me and I looked down to find that they had situated an inflatable slide on the side of the ship. The grass was thirty feet below me with a great orange slide coming up at a steep angle. I hesitated, looked at Saul’s smiling face, the beautiful grass, and jumped down. My stomach dropped as the slide caught my body and I was brought down to the grass. I laughed and Saul helped me up to my feet and shoved a few blades of grass in my hand. “It’s grass, Walt. Just like at Yankee stadium.”
“It sure is,” I said. Tall grass was standing as far as I could see. I had never seen grass before. I knelt down and felt it. It was tougher then I had expected and I compared the feeling of it to a soft plastic. Saul put some of it in his mouth. I watched him curiously and th
en he made a disgusted face, spat it out and began to scrape the stuff off of his tongue.
“It doesn’t taste good,” he said.
“Why did you try it?”
“I don’t know. I was curious.”
All around
me, the Grecos who had just gotten off of the ship were running around like school children let out for recess, examining their new world. Grown men were on their hands and knees, digging into the earth. People were standing around, gazing up at the sky—the clouds were at an incredible height compared to the ceiling of the ship. Women and men were rolling around in the grass. Children were yelling as they trotted over the ground of their new home. “I wish that our parents could have seen this,” I told Saul.
The grass came up to my knees and I bent down to pet it. I then saw a green stem sticking out of the ground with a white ball on top. I had seen one of these in movies. A
dandelion. I walked over and picked up the plant. “Saul, watch this!” I blew and the white seeds on top detached and the fuzz floated out into the blue sky. Saul laughed with joy and picked one up to do the same.
A deep voice filled the air, “Saul Higgins, Walter Higgins, Marcy Anderson, Verne Foster, Mike Nelson, and Na
ncy Nelson—come over here and line up.”
The source of the voice was
a tall man wearing a cowboy hat, a checkered long sleeve shirt and blue jeans that covered the top of brown leather boots. Beside him stood another man in the same attire. Saul and I walked over to where he had called us. The closer I got to the cowboy, the odder he and his friend looked to me. They were both tall and lean, with strong, veiny necks, and were both completely bald. The skin on their scalp, above their eyes, and faces where their beards should have been was completely smooth. They were pale and their lips were almost nonexistent. Their noses were small as if part of them had been cut off. They had great strong canine teeth. They had told us in school that the people on the other ships were exposed to different gene pools, and could therefore look different. The idea hadn’t been real to me until I saw it in person.
A Greco man came up beside us. “Hello, Mr. Nelson,” Saul said whenever we made it over to the group. Mike Nelson was Miss Mary’s son and he had been called to the same group that we had.
“Hey Saul. Walt.” He shook hands with both of us then asked, “Have you met my wife, Nancy?”
“No,” I said. She shook hands with both of us and we exchanged ‘nice to meet you’ s.
The two bald men in cowboy hats walked over to our group. The taller one began to talk to us, “my name is Di, and this fellow over here is Hank.” Hank waved at us and then Di went through a list that he was holding to make sure that everyone that he had called had found his or her way over to him. I noticed that both Di and Hank had bows and arrows strapped across their backs and whips and swords resting on their hips. Di sucked all of the spit in his mouth to the center and then spat darkly onto the ground. I had seen people dip tobacco in movies but never in real life before. “Hank and I will be your guards for the remainder of your stay here at Mungus. You will be working for my boss, Glen Taylor. Now put out your hands so that Hank can get the cuffs on.”
Hank pulled a long chain with handcuffs off of a trailer behind a spotted white and brown horse. The horse’s ears flicked and
it shook its head, rattling the reigns.
Hank came over to the group and Mike Nelson shook his head and stepped forward. “I’ve got an issue with this, guys.” He smiled and tried to be nice to the guards and they just sneered back at him. “There’s been some kind of confusion. We’re not supposed to be working for the remainder of our lives, just for the next seven years. And we’re workers, not slaves or criminals. I will not put those handcuffs on.”
“Really?” Di asked, and walked up so that his cowboy hat was shading Mr. Nelson’s head. He was so close that if they had extended their lips, they could have kissed. “You won’t put those handcuffs on like I told you to?”
“Really.”
Di moved quickly. He spat in the man’s eyes, brought a knee up into his groin and then brought his boot heal down on Mike’s foot. Mike let out a yelp and fell to his knees. Hank grabbed his hands and secured them in the cuffs. I looked around to see if anyone had seen the injustice that had just occurred and found Captain Geoffrey Chalmers standing out in the breeze, the grass dancing below his knees. His carefully styled black hair reflected the sunlight. He was wearing sunglasses and smiling in my direction. He gave a wave at me to let me know that he had seen and didn’t care.
The rest of us complied and put out our hands. Hank came over and secured the cuffs onto my wrists. “Hey Di,” Hank called over.
“Yeah?”
“Doesn’t this one look like a Salyer with a wig on?” Hank grabbed me by the collar. He smelled like horses.
Di laughed and said, “Yeah, he does.”
Hank told me that my new name would be “little Salyer.” I looked up at Hank’s hairless and lean figure and could not see how I looked anything like him. The cuffs locked around my hands and Hank moved over to cuff Saul. The metal was warm and I let my hands hang by my side. The weight of the metal chain and cuffs pulled down from my shoulders. I hadn’t known that handcuffs were this heavy.
When we were all secured, Di got onto a tall black horse and began to walk along the grass and away from the ship. Mike Nelson was in the front of our chain gang line and when Di hollered for him to follow, he obediently limped along. Once we were walking, Hank and his spotted brown horse began to follow us. Behind the horse was a trailer with all of our possessions in it. Our chains clanked at our waists with every step that we took. We were moving further away from our ship and further away from my home.
4
The Theatre
Only a few days ago I had been excited to be on Mungus. Only a few hours ago I thought they were good people. Only a few minutes ago I still held out hope that I wasn’t a prisoner.
These were my thoughts as I walked under the hot sun. The handcuffs pulled at my wrists as I trudged along in the chain gang. I followed Saul, who followed Verne (he had already fallen down twice), who followed Nancy Nelson, who followed Mike Nelson who followed Di on his horse. I watched as Di’s brown boots flipped up and down against the horse’s ribs with each step of its hooves.
Up ahead, the tall green grass turned short and well groomed. Buildings and carriages rose up in the distance. It looked like the kind of small town that I had seen in Western movies. I wondered if this was where Glen Taylor, my new boss, lived. We walked on and my shoulders became tired with the weight of the cuffs. The chain made a drastic dip from Saul’s hands to mine and it swung back and forth with each step that we took. Hank called up from behind us, “Di, are we going through town?”
“Yep,” Di called back and then he spat tobacco juice to the side.
We took a few more steps and then Hank called up, “Why’s that?”
Di’s horse stopped and he looked back at Hank from under his cowboy hat. “Don’t you listen to anything?”
“I do, Di.”
“Apparently not, because I’ve already told you that Mr. Taylor wanted us to get him a newspaper! Listen when people talk!” Di’s horse turned back around and again began to trot towards town. His boots flipped up and down and soon we made it onto a dirt road labeled “Main Street.” Di spat and his saliva hit the ground just short of the wooden sign.
The town was alive with people and animals bustling around. Most of the people had the same hairless bodies and thin frames as the two guards who were leading us. I gathered that these were the Salyers—the passengers of the first ship to arrive on Mungus and the founders of Ramus. They rode horses and walked on bare feet. Children played ball and drew in the dirt with sticks. It was almost impossible to tell the bald Salyer boys and girls apart except for the clothes that they wore. The little girls wore dresses in pastel colors that ran down below their knees and the boys wore pants and suspenders with old button up shirts underneath. Most Salyers wore hats to keep the sun off of their hairless heads. There were straw hats and cowboy hats. I saw Saul looking enviously at a blue baseball hat that a little boy was wearing—it almost looked like the ones that the Yankees wore. Clay buildings rose up on either side of us as we walked down the dirt road of Main Street. There were vendors on the sidewalks standing behind wooden counters and selling fruit, water, bread, and toys. Signs rested atop most of the buildings to indicate what they were. “Barber Shop.” “Saloon.” “Tom’s Grocery and Drug.” I looked and saw that in the glass window of Tom’s Grocery and Drug there was a ‘Wanted’ poster. They were looking for a man who had committed a triple murder and at the bottom of the page, below the man’s picture, in red letters was the word, “REWARD.”