Jonesbridge Read online

  Jonesbridge:

  Echoes of Hinterland

  M.E. Parker

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2014 by M.E. Parker

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition July 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-635-0

  With special thanks to Elizabeth Kracht, whose insight and tireless devotion was the beacon that guided Jonesbridge through the smoke. The literary landscape is a brighter place with her in it, and I am grateful that she couldn’t have imagined a world without Jonesbridge. And to the talented and lovely Kate Parker, wife and reader, without whom the inspiration would wane.

  “In Soft Regions, Soft Men are born.”

  —HERODOTUS

  Chapter 1

  As Myron’s arms and legs adjusted to the pull, the clock struck again. Pain shot through his limbs when the gears, one at each corner of the table, advanced another notch, threatening to tear him apart.

  An unseen projector parted the darkness with a beam of light. Flickering to life on a screen above him, a grainy film entitled A New Day in Jonesbridge began with a panoramic sunrise over mountains and a bugle corps sounding the anthem of the Alliance. “Welcome to the Jonesbridge Industrial Complex, the jewel of the Continental Alliance,” a pleasant female narrator stated. The reel skipped, filling the screen with lines, interrupting her statement, and resumed with sweeping views of the factories, mines, and Industry workers, slogs she called them, performing their duties with purpose in the “New Jonesbridge” under the glow of morning sun.

  Myron tugged at the chains shackled to his wrists and ankles, hoping for a moment of relief, but his restraints had him locked down in spread eagle, his bones popping in rhythm with each tick of the stretcher clock behind him.

  The film continued with two slogs loading a cannon barrel onto a barge. The artillery assembly plant shimmered beneath a clear blue sky behind them. “The survival of our Alliance and our way of life depends on the secret location of this facility and its capability. Black market privateers and traitors who aid the enemy are always at the ready when loose tongues spill information.” The scene showed two men in orange jumpsuits apprehending a woman whispering into another woman’s ear. “Travel to and from Jonesbridge is restricted to train operators, who are dedicated members of the Defense Administration.” A man in a gray smock saluted two men on a train platform. “Leaving the complex is therefore prohibited and unnecessary until the grand conclusion of the war. As a wise man once observed, three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

  Myron tried to wiggle his toes and discovered he had lost feeling in his extremities. He wished the same would happen to the rest of his body, but he ached and throbbed as though his bones might break right through his skin.

  “…Jonesbridge is a safe place bound by the protective Great Gorge. Spanning more than 2,850 feet and plummeting to depths of 700 feet, where the outflow of victory production waste flows, the Great Gorge is deep enough to keep the E’sters at bay and wide enough to thwart their artillery should they ever find us.” A curtain of smoke masked the other side of a smoldering fissure in the earth, dissolving into scenes of busy workers dismantling a wrecked war wagon.

  “Recent success in battle has given our intrepid mobile salvage squads new territory to scour for usable materials. What this means is more rewarding work and less idle time for everyone here at Jonesbridge. No matter what your contribution, be it a machinist,” the film showed a man holding a set of calipers to a part in mid-formation on the lathe. “Assembler,” the pictures continued with a close-up of a woman fitting an armored fender over the wheel of an overloader. The list went on, zooming in on factory slogs performing duties expeditiously. “Miner, forger, cleaner, maintenance, riveter, tool and die, salvager, each of you is an invaluable gear in our industrial machine.”

  Myron’s tongue sat in his mouth like a piece of shoe leather. He tried to siphon sweat droplets from his upper lip to quench his thirst, but even his perspiration had dried in the chill of the brick chamber.

  Images of fields replaced the factories. “Our uncontaminated farmlands continue to dwindle and must now produce more food per acre than ever before to supply soldiers with the nutrients needed to wage battle. In Jonesbridge, slogs have learned the value of food through many years of wartime scarcity.” Footage of slogs enjoying their daily rations in the commons filled the screen. Myron’s anticipation of a meal like that one gave him the drive to endure his pain.

  He rocked his head, the only body part he could still move, as the film resumed with more images of the mines and factories, all hands satisfied and working hard. “Everyone at Jonesbridge pulls his weight. You will be paid for your efforts piecemeal. The more you do, the easier it will be to afford your daily rations and your domicile. While you are here, you will have nothing to worry about except the duties the Industry Administration requires you to perform. Loyal, patriotic, hardworking citizens in the Industry Administration will be rewarded for their sacrifices when we emerge victorious—when we finally secure enough uncontaminated farmland to feed our people.”

  When the narrator’s voice faded and the screen went black Myron hoped his agony would end soon. He waited for release, for the tension in his limbs to subside, but instead of a reprieve, the projector resumed its vibrato hum. The triumphant call of bugles gave way to pounding drums and a chorus of voices shouting and crying, pleading for mercy. Flames danced on the screen, reflecting red up the walls of the brick chamber. Black smoke and ash fell from the sky in the film, blackening the sun.

  Myron jerked his hips up, hoping to relieve the tension on his legs while images of wreckage and explosions filled the screen—maimed and weeping people, dead men and women piled up in a hill. Watching the carnage, enduring the tug of his bones, Myron feared he would share the same death as the soldiers in the film, disembodied and broken.

  The narrator’s diction transformed into a harsh staccato scolding. “This is what happens when our countrymen don’t have the proper equipment for battle. This,” she said, flashing another gruesome picture, “is what happens to your countrymen when you don’t do your job.” A collage of dead and burning farmland persisted on the screen. “That agonizing stretch you are now experiencing is the way everyone feels when you shirk your duty. With ten people to feed and only one piece of bread, ten fireboxes to fuel and only one piece of coal, ten filthy E’ster soldiers to shoot with only one bullet. We are all called upon to make sacrifices in our troubling age. Take pride in your work. Take pride in your shift mates. Take pride in the Alliance. So that they take pride in you.”

  Myron’s stomach wrenched and then he wet himself, relief and dread in the same instant. Lying in his own fluids, the clock struck again. The chains moved. Myron screamed. The film began anew.

  He tried to count his way through a playing of the film, agonizing over how many times this would happen, how many ticks of the clock, how many pulls of the chains until his arms and legs slipped right out of their joints, yanking his flesh right along with them. He didn’t know how long he could endure the narrator, a voice that sounded so much like his mother who had died when Myron was only six.

  The air in his
lungs thinned as the stretching continued. He sipped breaths, one at a time, to quench his thirst for oxygen, certain he would die on this table. In his seventeen years, Myron had broken both an arm and a leg, cut his stomach on a wire fence, and been struck on the head by an errant steam piston, but never had he felt his life leaving his body—the way his mother’s had—all for the protection of future generations.

  His heart slowed, thumping harder, pushing air to his numbing fingers and toes as his head spun. If he were to croak at this very moment, he longed to see his mother’s face. He tried to summon her, but all that appeared was the horrible picture of the last time he saw her with the vegetable hatchet lodged in her forehead. Everything went dark. He struggled to hang on, but only the ticking of the stretcher clock tethered him to the world.

  When the door swung open, new sounds filtered in. Myron felt a sting on his face, a slap. The tension on his limbs released. He moaned, sucking in a deep breath. A bright light switched on. Two guards’ faces floated in and out of the spectral light above him, making them look like spirits, their voices intertwined with the sounds of tugging chains. The ghosts lifted Myron up and put a skin of water to his lips and handed him a burlap sack with two protein sticks no wider than his finger and a hunk of bread.

  His arms hung motionless from dislocated shoulders. His knees buckled, and his ankles gave way as they dragged him through the door and up toward a gray sky, the ache in his joints overpowering the relief of no longer being stretched. On the stairs he passed two orange shirts, two ghosts, escorting another slog down to the stretcher block. A choking cloud of sulfur greeted them as they emerged into daylight. Flanked by his escorts, Myron stumbled down a roadway where countless chimney stacks towered in the mountains’ shadows like soot-blackened gatekeepers holding the sun at bay.

  They stopped in front of a rotund building with arched doorways encircling it. A single wall, lined on both sides by smock hooks, divided the building in half, one side for men, the other side for women. The guards shoved Myron to the ground and waited under one of the archways, leaving him with no idea of what to do next. He observed large tubs filled with dozens of his fellow slogs, naked, waist-deep in sand, rubbing the grains on their skin, using the abrasion of the sand to clean their skin instead of wasting fresh water.

  “What do I do?” Myron whispered.

  In the nearest basin, a much older man motioned to Myron, averting his eyes from the ghosts at the door. “Bath.” He gestured by running his hands up his torso and over his head. “Take it off.”

  Myron crawled toward the edge of the sand basin and removed his smock, covering his private areas with his hands. The man waved him into the basin. “First, coarse grains. Then move to the fine grains.” He pointed to another set of tubs across the room.

  “Where’s the water?” Myron asked.

  “Boilers and hydro. Clean water’s for drinking only.”

  “Quiet over there!” One of the ghosts under the archway marched to the edge of the basin and smacked the man next to Myron in the ribs with a discipline rod. The man doubled over with a moan.

  The warm sand soothed Myron’s muscles as he burrowed low into the grains, scooping handfuls over his stomach. He imagined lying on a beach near the ocean, something he longed to see someday. Before the orange shirts took him away, Myron’s grandfather had given him a relic from a long ago time, a postcard of a beach paradise in a place called Bora Bora.

  A bell tolled. Scores of naked slogs emerged from the sand, heading for their smocks along the wall. Still nearly immobile from the stretcher, Myron crawled for his smock, concealing his privates. A sudden jolt from one of the ghost’s rods stole his breath. He fell back, clutching his stomach as he rolled on the ground. “Up.”

  With the aid of the guards, Myron trudged through an archway down a narrow corridor, head down, trying to muster enough energy to keep from collapsing. They stopped at a jagged opening, greeted by a wall of hot air. After a jab from a rod, Myron stepped through the hole into a circular chamber with a bed of coals glowing under a chimney vent.

  They helped him into the farther of two antique chairs, the kind his grandfather called dentist seats, and strapped his hands, palms down, on the armrests and secured his legs to the base. “Industry, Martino,” the ghost hollered to a geezer stoking the coal fire.

  The old man turned around and opened a drawer next to the chair. “Open up.”

  He tapped Myron’s cheek to open his mouth. Martino shoved a wad of dried leaves under Myron’s tongue. “Billet thistle. For pain.”

  After that, he placed a strip of leather in Myron’s mouth. “Bite down.” Martino, close to seventy, kept his head down. He showed Myron the back of his own hand, the wrinkly mark of a hammer, gear, and wheel.

  The billet thistle reminded Myron of a grassy version of his mom’s turnip soup, but the leather tasted like dirt, sweat, and the drool of a thousand people who had sat there before him. He tried hard not to vomit at the taste and then the stink of his own burning flesh. When the red hot branding iron seared the image of a hammer over a gear and axle and Myron’s personal identifier on his right hand, he coughed and let out a faint scream.

  “Bite down.”

  After Martino branded Myron’s other hand, he wiped them clean of blood and wrapped them with burlap, then pulled the leather strap from Myron’s mouth. He returned to the drawer and produced a pair of blunted rusty scissors. As chunks of hair trickled down Myron’s back, his mind raced about how he could possibly make it all the way to Bora Bora now.

  Martino glanced up at the two ghosts by the door, never looking them in the eye, and nodded. Each grabbing an elbow, they aided Myron to his feet. The room spun when he stood. With his stomach grumbling, he spat out the billet thistle under his tongue and vomited.

  “Quad 14,” one of the ghosts said, checking his clipboard, ushering Myron outside. His hands, now bearing the mark of Industry, stung when the icy wind whipped under the burlap wrapping. First left, then a right—they traversed the network of brick roadways that connected domicile quadrangles to factories and delivery depots to coal yards. Against a gray sky, the rows of smokestacks and red bricks blurred together with the hum of turbines as he concentrated on not collapsing, until he was jarred by the sound of a scuffle. A girl, about his age, fought her two escorts as they tried to corral her.

  “Where are you taking me?” she screamed, turning to run.

  Two other ghosts jogged up to help restrain her. She slung her arms in all directions, keeping her escorts at bay until the biggest ghost of the four smacked her in the back with a discipline rod. She fell to her knees, head down, her hair resembling scattered hay.

  Myron rubbed his hands, still covered in burlap to protect the raw branded flesh from the sting of the wind. He saw no such protection on her hands and no Industry tattoos as a ghost on each side grabbed her arms. The girl’s eyes grew wild before she bit the ghost’s arm so hard her jaw bulged.

  “Whores hairpin!” He jumped back, swatting the girl’s face off his arm. “This carpie needs a lesson.” The guard rubbed his arm, while the others, now four of them, each took a swat at her with their discipline rods.

  “Doc’s going to have his hands full sterilizing this one.” One of the ghosts tied the girl’s hands. They led her away toward the stretcher chamber by a rope, the girl twisting and screaming and kicking up dust. Witnessing her defiance gave Myron hope.

  Chapter 2

  Standing behind his grandfather’s house in the twilight of early summer, fireflies wheeled around him, blinking on and off. Mesmerized by their flight, Myron followed their path through the air until one landed on his arm with a sting. Behind that one, other blinks of light, sparks, fluttered through the air, alighting on his workbench where they twinkled into darkness taking his grandfather’s house with them. Myron extinguished the cutting torch and hammered flat the points of an iron gear he had just reshaped into the form of a star, which ended up only about half the size of the palm of
his hand.

  With a dull thud he banged the star a second time, flattening it as much as he could. Then he pinched the tongs around its middle and held it under the overhead lamp to inspect its shape. Mostly star-like he figured, with the exception of the fifth point, which was folded over a bit.

  When Myron noticed the starry shadow climbing up the brick wall by his table, the star having been under his lamp for several seconds, he checked over his shoulder to see if anyone else had seen it. Then he dipped his creation into a bucket where it responded with a hiss, after which he situated the star into a clamp, reached for his awl, and scratched the words Sindra’s Star across the middle. It wasn’t a real engraving, but still something special, though stars of any kind, especially real ones, were a rarity through the blanket of smoke over Jonesbridge.

  “What was that?” Rolf, the salvage floor boss, turned on his heel. Myron froze. “Let’s have a look.” Rolf positioned his magnifying monocle over his good eye, squeezing the other socket shut, and leaned over Myron’s workbench. Rolf was a scraggy rope of a man. He was bone-thin, same as the rest of them, but he had more of what passed for muscle than anyone Myron had seen in Jonesbridge, and he stood at least a head taller than any slog on the line—everyone but Myron. Standing eye to eye with Rolf, maybe even a smidge higher, made it difficult for Myron to avert his eyes.

  Myron looked away, but that showed disrespect. Down, right, then left, and finally his gaze landed on Rolf’s head—of all places, Rolf’s scalp—a landscape of moles and freckles between paltry tufts of hair. That view gave Myron a grim reminder of what he had to look forward to in the near future. He dreaded winding up like everybody else, but, of all the duties in Jonesbridge, Myron was glad they’d assigned him to salvage. It allowed him to follow in the footsteps of his tinkering grandfather who constructed useful contraptions from nothing but junk.