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Parched and weary, we below-born toil away for yet another sun, hauling ore out of the barren earth, hands worn and mangled, lips cracked from the blistering heat, while the above-born luxuriate in the capital, trains moving them to and from their mansions in the sky.
We down here, working the mines, know only the foreman’s lash and too little pay for our backbreaking work, yet, we watch the carts we fill ascend to their aureate heavens, upon magnetized tracks we’re whipped for looking upon too curiously, delivering the fruits of our labor, the precious metals that keep their gears turning, ever cursed with knowing that we could feed ourselves for a year if we could sell what they burn in a day.
While I lie awake each night in the barracks, sweating, the hum of their flying city ringing in my ears, or when I drag my feet through the sand in the line to the pits each dawn, I’m torn between a resignation to my lot and a thirst for vengeance. A fever of hatred, burning and unbreaking, consuming me from the inside, even as my fingers tremble and my knees buckle.
I’m forced to wonder: whose blood could cleanse this affliction?
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2. |
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One day each week we are granted but a few hours to ourselves, out from under the glare of the foreman, the threat of his boot coming down on you if you pause to catch your breath.
Most of my fellow haulers go into town to spend their coin on drink. Who can blame them? A few moments of forgetting never hurt anyone, and with so few joys, we take what we can get.
Yet, I always prefer to head out to the waste, steel at my side, to squeeze off a few shots. Ma taught me how to shoot on the farm, when folks like us could make a living off the land. She always said I had an eye for it. I set up bottles on a fence and dust them off, or maybe train on something to eat if I’m lucky.
One day, I’m following a bird as it flies, the barrel of my steel lagging just behind, when I find myself looking right down the sights at the floating fortress in the sky.
As the bird gets away, unaware of his luck that day, I squint into the sun, studying the fortress, covering my eyes with one hand, and feeling the weight of my steel in the other. As I grip it, I remember my ma telling me she never met a problem that a little bit of lead couldn’t fix.
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3. |
A Turning of the Wheels
06:07
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For weeks, or maybe months, now, I've devised my plan.
When I arrive at the mines, I study how the guards search us- distracted, just trying to keep the line moving. If things slow up, they face the lash, same as us. I can use that to smuggle in my steel.
A cart is my way into the sky, of course, but I’ll need a few comrades I trust to help. If one can distract the foreman then I can get in an empty cart, while others load ore on top of me.
I begin to practice holding my breath in the barracks at night. Under 8 stone of metal, breathing won’t be easy, and I won’t trust myself to make the trek lest I can do three counts of 50.
I practice by sneaking bits of contraband past the guards, never getting caught.
I make excuses to climb into empty carts, to see how much room I have.
On my days off, I bury myself in sand, getting used to those long, dark minutes.
And finally, I beg my fellow miners for their help making a distraction and covering me up. By some miracle, they agree, and the wheels of the plan begin to turn.
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4. |
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I strap my loaded steel to the inside of my leg and get in line like it was any other day. Trudging slowly, sweat beading on my brow I approach the guards, running it over in my head.
I catch my comrade's eye and give the slightest nod.He and another begin to fight to distract the guards. They swarm the two of them, sticks and whips in hand, swinging and kicking, wrestling them to the ground.
Distracted, the guard patting me down lets my steel slip past him as he watches the melee unfold.
I work an honest day, as I have a thousand times before, waiting until the perfect moment. The sun beating down, I can see the sentries sweltering, as tired as we are, and so I make my move.
I catch my comrade's eye, and give the slightest nod. He drops to the ground, feigning illness. Workers gather round as he writhes in pain. The foreman barks at the crowd t.o get back to work.
By the time two guards haul my comrade away I've used the commotion to climb into a mine cart where my fellow workers pile ore on top of me. I inhale deeply, close my eyes and wait.
I feel the cart moving, buried under precious stone, as I ascend the rail to the fortress in the sky.
I think of my comrades who took a fall for me today. Each of them will face the lash as punishment for slowing our work.
I swear upon the gravestones of all ancestors: I will make sure their suffering wasn’t for naught.
I won't return until I've put a bullet between the boss’s eyes.
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5. |
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The cart screeches to a halt and spills me, gasping for air, onto a silver platform. Machines, walking on legs and gliding on wheels, busy themselves all around me, gathering ore and sorting it onto conveyors, moving in every direction.
I grab my steel and spin around the room, aiming for anyone who might have seen me.
No one. Not a living being in sight. Just whirring machines collecting and moving rock.
Cautiously, I exit through a nearby door and make my way outside to the city, each step of the way, passing metal workers, doing the same jobs my comrades and I do in the wastes below.
I try to speak to them, asking them what they’re doing, where their foreman is, or who they work for, but get no response.
They just keep moving, as if I don’t exist. On the streets outside, it’s the same.
Empty mechanical carts steering aimlessly, driving no one living, machines running here and there, busy, with no human in sight whose orders they’re obeying.
I’m uneasy as I make my way down the opulent street. Life below is hard, but the wastes at least teem with life. Cacti and birds and bugs and rats, not to mention those of us working the mines. Yet, up here, a sense of metallic unlife permeates the city. Machines and metal moving along predetermined routes.
As I arrive at the fortress at the center of the city, I feel my steel, heavy in my hand. A knot tightens in my chest, as I kick in the door, still having not spied a single living being.
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6. |
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I’ve only once or twice seen his face on screens around the mine, telling us he values our service while he smiles like a snake.
Yet I’ve heard the foremen fearfully whisper to the overseers about “the boss.”
What I know is that the men who subject us to the lash do so on his behalf
So I’ve believed forever that if I could get in here and put a bullet in his head it would solve every one of our problems. The foremen, they’d have no power behind them. We could rise up against them if the boss who runs the show was dead.
But now, standing in the entrance to the boss’s fortress at the center of the city, that same sterile feeling of unlife permeates the air.
Machines rush around, but still no living beings. I see no evidence of anyone as I make my way from room to room, steel drawn, before finally happening upon what I seek.
A gilded room with an ornate wooden desk. Shelves of books and cabinets of paper, a scale model of the mines on a table and a giant safe built into the wall, and yet.
Slumped at the desk was a long rotted corpse still dressed in its regal finery.
A machine enters with a cup on a silver tray and delivers it to the desk in front of the corpse.
Yet, I’ve heard the foremen fearfully whisper to the overseers about “the boss”
Is it that the men who subject us to the lash do so on this dead man’s behalf?
I stumble out of the office, still searching for answers. I wander into a side room and find a pile of bodies, clad in rich man’s clothes, stacked with precision and tended to by robots who serve them drinks, even as they rot.
Finally, I see it clearly: the boss and his cronies? Long dead.
But the machines they built perpetually whirr.
There’s no one in charge who I can kill to make it stop.
As forever we labor below to serve their moribund engine.
Pallid scavengers on a necrotic husk
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Huntress of Stars Illinois
"Are those the stars, and not their furious eyes, that now before her coming chariot glare?"
revisionistwestern.blogspot.com
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