The Mammoth Book of Terror (40 page)

“I forfeited them.”

“Correct. Now we try to minimize the discomfort of wake-up as much as we can, but ultimately, you’ll have to do what they’ll say until your obligations are
discharged.”

“Wait, wait . . .” My skull felt like a crockpot of acid, broken glass and infection. “What about my head?”

“That’s sealed with a polymer cap. Your structural damage has all been repaired.”

“What obligations? Do I have to
pay
for all this?”

“Look,” she said, leaning closer. “We’re not supposed to discuss this with wake-ups. Counselors usually deal with inauguration. I don’t know anything about you,
other than you wound up here. I don’t know what you did or why they picked you. I’m just here to smooth your transition into a wake-up.”

“Why am I here?”

She sighed and made sure the door to our room was closed before she spoke. “Most of the wake-ups? They killed themselves, or arranged accidents, to avoid substantial debt. That’s why
they started the program: too many people were in arrears. Too much debt, foisted off onto relatives who couldn’t pay. Scam artists and fraudulent insurance claims that paid off triple on
accidental death. It was like an open faucet of money, and eventually, it needed to be fixed. That’s why the government endorsed the wake-up program.”

Death was no longer the end of the billing cycle, apparently. I said, “How?”

“That’s a little mysterious, too. Your engrams are sort of flash-frozen. But it also involves voodoo, magic, and that’s the part the mission breakdown never mentions, because I
think they’re just a little embarrassed to have to resort to a combination of science and sorcery. The process was sped up, then simplified, then streamlined, until we have the system we have
now. We process dozens of wake-ups per day.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Assignments are the responsibility of the individual counselor,” she said. “Mostly it’s industrial labor, from what I hear.”

“You mean like slaves?”

Her expression pinched and she exhaled in a snort. Obviously, she was running out of time. She probably had to get another wake-up in here and start her spiel according to a clock. “Try
not to think of it that way. Remember, you divested yourself of human rights when you—”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s all nice and legal,” I said. “But what about my identity? My home? My relatives? My stuff?”

“That’s just it.” She lent me a tiny grimace. “You’re not supposed to remember any of that. Maybe your name, maybe a few basic residual facts . . . but you’re
talking in whole sentences. Most wake-ups act severely autistic, or comatose, or zombiatic. They told us the personality prints through in one out of a thousand clients.” It was clear she now
suspected somebody of fudging the curve.

“Well, then, I’m a special case and we should—”

“No.” She overrode me. “There can’t be any special cases.”

“Who says so?” I felt
twinges of remote-control strength in my arms, my legs. Perhaps if I could keep her talking long enough, I’d muster enough energy to be more assertive.

She showed me her clipboard,
helplessly. “
They
do.”

That’s when my quiet time was up.

“Surely you must agree that lost revenue via self-termination has always been an increasing problem,” Hockney said, not looking at me in particular, not searching me for signs of
comprehension, just spilling out his rationale. “The data prove it. People try to – eh, do away with themselves, and stick
anyone
else with the bill. Old lovers. Ex-spouses.
Heirs. Employers. Banks. Well, the credit companies just wouldn’t put up with it anymore. A country can’t function without viable credit and liquid assets. Do you know that some people
actually
run up
their credit to the limit while they’re planning on killing themselves all along? And they expect to just skate on picking up the tab, their responsibility. Well, no
longer.” He flipped pages, apparently disgusted by me.

“I don’t suppose—”

“Aht-aht-aht!” he overrode. “I don’t care. You have no rights. What I do see is an outstanding cumulative debt of $178,000. That gets you a standard Class Two work
package – twenty years.”

I hadn’t put anything in my suicide note about monies owed, or regretting my expenditures.

“It’s basically robotic manual labor. You don’t retain any higher functions. If you
think
you do . . . well, those will fade.”

“What happens after twenty years?”

“Huh. Then you get to have a funeral. Cost is pre-figured into the package.”

It was not my bad finances that drove me to take my own life, but – possibly – the reduction of my character to no more than the sum of my debts. The badgering, the hectoring, the
humiliation. The exponentially increasing lack of human connection in a world where
everyone
was the sum of their debts. “Death” and “debt” sounded alike for a
reason, I concluded.

If what Hockney was saying was true, then I’d spend two decades lifting or slinging or swamping or whatever, losing pieces of the memory of my life every heavy step of the way. My wives,
my lovers. My joys and ambitions. My concepts of beauty, or what was fair. My despair, which had driven me to purchase a handgun for several hundred dollars on credit. Pain, and my mistaken notion
of how it might be ended.

I didn’ t forget that finest day of my life came unexpectedly in late 1990s, and that I realized what a flawless moment it had been, only in retrospect. Like most people. I didn’t
forget abysmal black mood that prompted me to pick up gun. I didn’t forget that Victor Hugo wrote:
Supreme happiness of life is conviction that we are loved.

Other things slipped away gradually.

My taskwork was in a large industrial foundry, using a ring-shank-handled skimmer over a crucible of ferrous lava that was channeled to several behemoth injection-molding machines. I live at
foundry with other wake-ups. Constant labor is only interrupted by replenishment time: six hours of rest and an orally-pumped diet of fecal paste. Bodies relax, but no here sleeps. Sleep would
provide oblivion. We are either awake, or
more
awake.

In this environment, flesh of wake-ups becomes tempered like steel, all leathery callus. No need for safety goggles, helmets, outerwear. Air swims with free silica and lead dust. Soluble cutting
oils contain nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. There’s sulfuric acid, mercury, chlorinated solvents, potassium cyanide, xylene, carbon monoxide, infrared radiation, nickel carbonyl, toxic
plaster, ethyl silicate. In this atmosphere, hexamethylenetetramine decomposes to formaldehyde. We can receive thermal burns from spattered pours. If molten metal slops on floor, heat will vaporize
water in cement, causing steam explosion. Sharp objects. Falling and crushing hazards. I do not know these things. I read them, on warnings for supers, who are normal humans. I can still read.

I can read control number on forehead of wake-up working next to me. 730823. Used to be black man, half his head gone, replaced by a mannequin blank – half his number is printed on
plastic, half tattooed on flesh. A tear falls from his single eye and makes a white path through black soot. When I weep, my tears leave black trails on white skin. My number is 550713.

Children work here. Ex-kids. Not suicides. Others, who damned sure didn’t kill themselves. Victims of others. I think supers are lying about program for wake-ups.

We cannot feel sparks of forge, though they hit us and sizzle.

I think:
We are not supposed to be abk to read, or feel, or cry, or remember.
But I do.

And if I do, big vat of steel below might be crucible not of rebirth, but of re-death. I am special case. Exception. Maybe exceptional enough to will my foot closer to edge. Drop isn’t
far.

Very odd, to submerge in metal hot enough to instantly vaporize my eyes . . . and feel nothing. Hot solar light and shock of obliteration.

Then a voice, saying, “Welcome to Phase Three debriefing, Number 550713.”

KARL EDWARD WAGNER WAS
one of the genre’s finest practitioners of horror and dark fantasy, and his untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one
of its major talents.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Wagner earned his M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1974 and trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a multiple British Fantasy and
World Fantasy Award-winning author, editor and publisher. His early writing included a series of fantasy novels and stories featuring Kane, the Mystic Swordsman. His first novel,
Darkness Weaves
With Many Shades
(1970), introduced the unusually intelligent and brutal warrior-sorcerer, and Kane’s adventures continued in
Death Angel’s Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade
and the collections
Night Winds
and
The Book of Kane.
More recently, the complete Kane novels and stories have been brought together in two volumes by Night Shade Books as
Gods in
Darkness
and
Midnight Sun.

He edited three volumes of Robert E. Howard’s definitive Conan adventures and continued the exploits of two of Howard’s characters, Conan and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the
novels
The Road of Kings
and
Legion from the Shadows.
He also edited three
Echoes of Valor
heroic fantasy anthologies and a collection of medical horror stories,
Intensive
Scare.
He took over the editing of
The Year’s Best Horror Stories
in 1980 and for the next fourteen years turned it into one of the genre’s finest showcases.

Wagner’s own superior short horror tales were collected in
In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I
? and
Unthreatened by the Morning Light. A
tribute collection entitled
Exorcisms and Ecstasies
was published in 1997.

“Health is such a chancy thing,” explained the author. “And so precious.

“That’s why there are doctors.

“That’s why you go to them.

“But you are
afraid
of them. Afraid of their offices and hospitals. Afraid of their questions and examinations. Afraid of their poking and probing. Afraid of their pills and
needles. Afraid of their scalpels and sutures. Afraid of lying helpless and naked beneath the sterile murmur of fluorescent lights.

“Helpless.

“Can you understand their jargon, their professional aloofness? The half-hearted words, distracted frowns, and flutter of charts and lab reports? The impersonal cluster of peering faces
over your bed?

“Best not to try. Just lie there and trust. And pray. What’s your choice?

“But then . . .

“Suppose the doctor
isn’t
just what you imagined?

“You’re lying there on the bed, vulnerable and half-naked in a humiliating hospital gown.

“You see, scalpels don’t care who they cut.

“And no one ever gets well in a hospital.

“You’re never closer to death. Never more helpless. This is
real
terror.

“Trust me.

“I’m a doctor.”

“I
HAD A FRIEND
at St Johns you would have liked to have met,” observed Dr Metzger. “At least the idea you’ve brought up reminds
me of some of our old undergraduate bull sessions.”

“Bull sessions?” responded Dr Thackeray, his frosty brows wavering askance.

Geoff laughed easily. “Never underestimate the value of a liberal arts background, Dr Thackeray. St Johns men could find loftier subjects to drain a keg of beer over than the matter of a
cheerleader’s boobs – especially with cheerleaders in short supply.

“No, Kirk Walker was something of a medievalist – and certainly a romanticist. Fancied himself the last of the Renaissance men, or some such, I imagine. Anyway, he used to put away
booze like a Viking raiding party, and often he’d kick around some impossibly half-assed ideas. Argue them with dignified tenacity through all our hooting – and you were never sure
whether he was serious, or handing us another piece of outrageous whimsy.

“But one of the points he liked to bring up was this idea that modern science, as we call it, isn’t all that modern. Maintained that substantial scientific knowledge and
investigation have existed on a recondite basis since early history – and not just as hocus-pocus and charlatanry.”

“As I have suggested,” Dr Thackeray nodded, drawing on his cigar and tilting his padded desk chair a fraction closer to overbalance.