Free Rash by Pete Hautman Page A

back onto his atv and drove off. Behind us one of the bears let out an impatient growl. We all turned to look. I could swear that bear was smiling.

One by one we were escorted into the building by a guard. I had never seen so many hard surfaces and sharp corners in my life. The floor was hard unprotected concrete—no carpeting or rubberization. There were spots where the slabs joined unevenly. It would be easy to trip and fall. Even the walls were dangerous. There was no padding on the corners, and in several places along the walls I saw exposed bolts and rivets. The place was a death trap.
    “You could get hurt here,” I said to the guard. He laughed and gave me a jab in the back with his baton.
    When we reached the infirmary, the guard made me strip down naked. A bored-looking medtech came in and poked, prodded, scanned, and measured me. When he had finished examining every square inch of my body, he gave me a small white plastic-wrapped packet about the size of my palm.
    “Put these on,” said the tech.
    I unwrapped the packet and shook out a pair of thin, white paper coveralls. I put them on.
    “Not very comfortable,” I said. It felt like wearing a paper bag. “There’s no padding at all.”
    “Get used to it,” said the tech. “You won’t be wearing anything else for the next few years.” He was holding a device in his right hand. It looked like an overly complex staple gun. “Hold out your arm.” He grabbed my wrist and jammed the device against my forearm and pulled the trigger. I let out a howl and jerked my arm away.
    “What the hell was that?”
    “Locator pod,” said the tech.
    Given that we were in the middle of nowhere surrounded by polar bears, I don’t know why they bothered with that. I guess if somebody escaped they could use the locator to find out which bear had eaten the escapee.
    He gave me a small bag containing a toothbrush, soap, comb, and several pamphlets listing the rules and regs of McDonald’s Plant #387.
    “Enjoy your stay,” he said.
    A guard escorted me to my new home, a nine-by-ten-foot cubicle with a bunk bed, a metal toilet, three walls of unpainted concrete block, and one wall that was all bars. A thin slit of a window about four inches wide looked out over the tundra. I put my bag on the bottom bunk, took a piss, then sat on my bunk and stared at the wall. At first I thought it was just dirty, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw the shadows of words that had been scrawled on the concrete, then scrubbed off. Mostly it was illegible, but I could make out fragments of names, numbers, and assorted obscenities all tangled up with each other, layer upon layer. I wondered whether I would be adding anything to the mix.
    I heard the door slide open and looked up. It was the huge fat kid. I stood up, returning his red-eyed glare.The guard behind him prodded the kid with his baton. He squeezed through the doorway, and my cell got a lot smaller.
    The kid looked around, taking in his surroundings, then tossed his bag on the bottom bunk.
    “That’s my bunk,” I said.
    He moved my bag to the top bunk. “Bugger off,” he said.
    I took a step back, my heart jumping. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was far worse than anything I’d ever said to Karlohs Mink.
    He sat on the edge of the mattress and stared glumly at the wall, just as I had been doing a minute earlier.
    Clearly this whale had been assigned to the wrong cell. I looked out through the bars, hoping to catch the guard before he disappeared, but I was too late.
    Looking back at the fat kid, I considered my options. What I wanted to do was grab him by his paper coveralls and yank him off the bunk and shove him out through the slit window. All of which was impossible—he looked like the rock of Gibraltar.
    I decided to try for friendly.
    “What are you in for?” I asked.
    He ignored me. I sat down on the toilet because it was the only place to sit. His eyes slowly moved from the wall to me. He blinked, as