What Rats Do - Julie Steimle (best ereader for pdf and epub .TXT) 📗

“It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”—Krishnamurti—

School finished like a dull dream that passes through consciousness and is forgotten when morning begins. Jafarr would have joined his friends at the Surface Gate, but he had a promise to keep to his father. He left the school building with Alzdar, who could barely get a word to him since the trip to the Surface Patrol. Dzhon had left class early to take the Adult Test, and Jafarr was sure he would not see him until the next day. 

Jafarr walked down the middlecity streets back to the transit hall with the others, his mind still going over the trip to the Surface Patrol. Entering the hall, passing the shops and picking their metro lines to return home, or ones that would take them higher to the Surface Gate, they departed, leaving Jafarr standing on the edge waving to them as most of his classmates climbed onto the same metro car. He turned and walked to the metro stop that would take him further into the middlecity.

The subway car pulled up with a deep hiss, and the doors opened. Already packed with people returning home from factories after a long day of work, a few thirty filed out, and such like that squeezed back inside the metro car as Jafarr stepped on, him finding a spot inside the sardine can-like spacing somewhere near the door. He held onto the nearest pole as he watched the doors slide close. Once again the metro rumbled off into the tunnels, rolling downward on a slope, the dark walls enveloping the metro car as it started again into the tunnel.

Inside the car hummed higher and higher in pitch as they sped faster and faster. People stared blankly at one another, minding their own business as they listened dully to the whirr of flight cars overhead though some to their personal music chips. Jafarr discreetly scanned the faces in the car through his long bangs, spotting mostly middlecity workers until he recognize a cluster of groupies that stood in the rotating stand where the one metro car joined the one following it, talking low under their breaths though it would not have carried past the bottom-frayed rubberized accordion-style flaps that kept the two cars attached. They kicked the chips of rubber and plastic that lay on the metal floor grate under their fashionable and therefore stolen shoes, grinning back at him with fixed leers, rubbing their knuckles. The clear tattoo of O2 was permanently etched in nearly all their necks, though some had it written on the backs of their hands. 

Averting his eyes, Jafarr felt a trickle of sweat develop on the back of his neck, despite the cold of the air around him. Glancing through the car, Jafarr let go of his pole and squeezed his way through the commuters to the front end of the car where he knew was a regular security station as well as another pair of doors to exit out of. He nodded to one man who let him by though mostly staring at Jafarr’s black head of hair. The woman nearest to the door stepped back from Jafarr when he reached for the pole there, then looked over his shoulder to the back, grimacing. She ducked closer to the security station herself.

Looking up at the man stationed as a metro guard, the insides of Jafarr’s stomach contracted, his throat going dry. It was People’s Military officer there, not a policeman. Holding back a groan, Jafarr peeked once more to the back of the metro car, hoping the O2 punks did not follow him as a quick exit was probably the only thing he could count on by that time.

He stared out at the repeating lights of the tunnel wall once more, listening to the hum of the car. Jafarr could almost make out the sound of the flight traffic above the metro, but he was never too sure if it was not just the metro engine rumbling with the wheels grinding along the tracks. He glanced again at the P.M. out of the side of his eye to see what sort of man he was. The People’s Military officer’s chin was up stiffly, though not out of their usual boredom. His eyes were watching the crowd behind Jafarr with a flicker of interest, the corner of his mouth curling up a little. Jafarr glanced back also.

Five heads of spiked out, undercity style hair bobbed through the others, moving. Those five heads were heading to his end of the cabin, passing the midsection door, and though Jafarr could not see their faces he turned, stepping closer to the metro door and praying with his might that the metro would stop soon so he could get out.

“Jafarr, where do you think you’re going?” a voice he knew well said from behind.

A firm hand lay on his shoulder as a warm musty breath blew out onto his neck. Jafarr closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. Already his heart pounded in his chest, echoing in his ears with panic. He had to get out now.

Of course the P.M. stared past the punks as if they were not there, his smirk setting firmer on his lips. He would do nothing. Jafarr’s rat status was evident in every move he made, despite looking racially O’rras[1].  It did not matter if the groupies pounded a rat to the ground. He would be one less rat to watch, one less rat to bother with. 

Jafarr, however, refused to be a statistic on a P.M. crime sheet.

The metro rumbled to a halt and the doors slid open, its passengers pouring into the cavern in a mad rush. Jafarr bolted with the stampede hoping to escape into the crowd. However, the groupie behind him still held onto his shoulder and intended not to let go until his business was finished. Jafarr could not break away.

The five boys swarmed around their fellow undercity dweller in the middlecity transit hall with all the intent of a pack of wolves as they dragged him through the crowds to an open space. No one paid attention to it. There were no police around to stop them.

Who hit him first, and kicked him and punched him, Jafarr could not tell, blinded by the pain of every blow. He was not yet beaten when they slammed him up against a wall. Jafarr still had strength in his legs, though they pinned him so forcibly to the wall that he was unable to move even an inch from the hands that rifled through his pockets, yanking out his data cards and his identi-card.

They broke his school card into three pieces, rendering the data chips useless, along with his homework. They did the same to his identi-card then they stomped on the other data cards for spite when they found nothing else in his pockets. No money card or cred vouchers; nothing useful that they could understand anyway, such as music albums or players.

“I thought all Zeldars were musical!” The leader shoved Jafarr harder against the wall, banging his shoulders. “Don’t you even have a data album of your great great granddaddy, Kerzan? What kind of Zeldar are you?”

The punk pressed Jafarr harder against the tile, shaking him by his jacket and shouting obscenities by the dozens until the meaning of them had no value. But Jafarr stared at him blankly: no response, no anger, no fear, no sadness—not anything. He just stared silently with dark eyes like a seer rather than an undercity boy so much that it gave the leader the creeps looking at the depths that went on forever.

Seething, spit flew from the head groupie’s mouth when he could not get a single response out of the boy, and he rammed Jafarr harder into the wall before loosening his grip with disgust. Within microseconds after he let go, everyone in that circle heard a loud crack. In that same instant, the leader of the gang O2 collapsed, howling and clutching his leg.

Everyone looked down where he fell, staring dumbly at him then his leg, which bent backwards as if his knee had been split in half and decided to fold the wrong way. First frozen, the boys of O2 gaped at him, though three of them leapt down to catch him with the improbable possibility of refolding his leg. But in that same second, Jafarr sprang over the leader’s head, ramming two of the three punks out of the way then scrambled through the crowd into the commerce center.

As the two toppled over backwards, blinking once more in surprise, the other two chased after Jafarr, pushing anyone and everyone aside. The crowd was so thick that they had to shove more than they could look, and despite being one black head in a crowd of mostly blondes and redheads, they could not spot him. There were at least five different black-haired men in the hall each going different directions. The punks searched inside the kiosks for him, shoving customers aside, sure he was hiding close by, but as they hunted, the boy with a Seer Class face walked low in a crowd of people riding up the escalator then exited into the open middlecity cavern.

[1] Seer Class

With the metro behind him, Jafarr marched quickly down the pedestrian zone toward his father’s workstation in this more industrial part of the middlecity, listening for pursuers but not looking back. He felt a cold wet sensation run down the corner of his mouth. He tried to wipe it clean. Then he looked at his hands. A dark red stain smeared across his palm. It also spread thinly down to his chin though he could not look at his reflection to see it. Jafarr grimaced, and wiped the remainder of the blood onto his pocket-handkerchief. Most of the people on the street avoided staring at the undercity boy, continuing on their own paths. In this part of the middlecity the people were much like those of his own neighborhood. Some were classless and some were of the Guard and Servant Class. It was not a typical neighborhood where High Class men lingered, and in a great way that gave him comfort.

The journey was short. Jafarr scanned the street for traffic as he ducked at the marked crossing zone near the rather rusty part of town filled with old metal walls, non-plastered, and some aged machine factories. He entered though an open garage door of a shop with sliding rusty doors with chipping blue paint and creaky window vents to let out toxic vapors. He peered through the dim doorway for signs of his father inside the shop. Machine parts and computer panels were strewn around in an orderly disarray that only the men there understood. Broken transit cars and metro doors sat the length of the periphery, some hooked on the walls, others leaning along the edge. Several grimy gruff men peered up