City of Ruins by Mark London Williams Page A

a little. “What are you really?”
    “Slaversaur!” I snarl, knowing that human
mammals seek a good scare in order to entertain themselves.
    The man screams and gets his extremities
caught in the bars while trying to pull his hand out of my cage. I
can see some blood on his pink hide. “He bit me!” the man screams,
throwing his paper at me through the bars. “He bit me!” The man
starts running around, holding up his finger, pointing with his
other hand to the trickle of blood. “The monster bit me!”
    And even though it is early in the day for
Visalia’s market square, there are enough people around to stop and
notice the hurt man, and soon there is more pointing, and
screaming, and someone yelling loud worries that maybe slow pox is
spread by blood drops. By the time Strong Bess and Rocket show up,
it is too late: things are being thrown at me, and eventually at
the Bearded Boy, and at Silver Eye in her cage. Strong Bess is
hurriedly starting the trucks, and we’ll be driving out of Visalia
before we even get to show them we are not monsters or apparitions
after all, but jongleurs, performers, with only pretend scares to
offer, so that everyone might forget their real ones for a little
while.
    We will be hungry for a while longer
now, Silver Eye tells me, as we drive along the twice-named 99
into the darkness. I’ve always found humans strange, but they
seem so much more strange — and frightened — lately.
    And it occurs to me if I am too frightening
to entertain human mammals, perhaps Rocket will have to “fire” me,
as they say in the vernacular, and then I can give up performing
for something more comfortable, like outlawry.
     
     
     

Chapter Nine
    Eli: Parable of the
Healer
    February 2020 C.E.
     
    “I see you’re wearing the jersey I had them
send to you,” my dad says to me, when his arms let go, and we can
get a good look at each other’s faces.
    I look down at my House of David shirt, my
number 33 Green Bassett replica. I forgot I even had it on. “This
was from you?”
    “They told me you were…reading up on your
baseball history.”
    “Did you just get here?” I ask him. He’s
probably come to get me and Thea out of here.
    “Well, Eli. No.”
    “What?” I look up at his face — then at
Thirty’s face, and even Mr. Howe’s, to see if I can find more clues
to what he just said. There aren’t any. “What do you mean? You just
found out we were in here, right?”
    “Well, not ‘just,’ but —”
    I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me, but
we can’t really finish our talk since Thirty’s guards are rushing
us down a hallway. The alarms are getting louder now, and people
are holding their ears and shouting at one another as we move
along.
    We pass Mom’s rebuilt hotel room.
    “I’ve been looking for clues in there, about
what happened to your mother, after the war.”
    “What clues?”
    “I haven’t found any yet. I don’t think
anyone knows — not even the people who are supposed to, like your
friend Thirty.” He huffs it out between breaths, as we keep running
along.
    “I didn’t even know this hallway existed!”
Howe shouts toward Thirty. She mouths something about “surprises,”
and then ushers us past what look like steel vaults into a room
that neither I nor Thea, nor apparently Mr. Howe, have ever been in
before.
    But it looks like my dad has.
    It’s like a replica of the lab he had in the
Moonglow. Or a replica gone almost supernova. There’s more of
everything, especially the tubes — the long tubes for sending
particles through the magnet-lined coiled loops where my parents,
and later, just my dad, tried to reverse the charges inside
protons.
    There are Comnet links and screens
everywhere, and even banks of older, hardwired computers that don’t
have any Comnet access or ports, and are therefore easier to
protect from any “unauthorized intrusions.”
    Or from anyone getting a message out.
    There’s heavy electrical wire everywhere,
too,