Free King's County by James Carrick

done?" Clarke regained
some of his confidence. He spoke over Braulio’s right shoulder.
"Yor in a lot of trouble now. You just assaulted a
Dean!"
    I took a step in their direction.
Braulio closed his eyes and held his palms out in front of him.
Clarke jerked backward to trip over his feet and fall on his
ass.
    "Alright, I'm leaving now. Right?
So...fuck off then, the both of you. And you need to stay away from
me from now on. OK, fellas?"
    They were listening. Braulio even
nodded his head.
    &
    There was no directory that I could
find and the few sad sacks at the cafe said they didn't know her. I
went searching room to room through the maze of the colony
building.
    Starting on the ground floor there were
some large common spaces, an auditorium, offices and supply rooms.
They were all completely empty and looked to have not been used in
years. I took the elevator to A, the first one up.
    I learned this night that most of the
colony inhabitants lived between A and C and that many of them
rarely ever left. I don't believe this was known to many outside
that region of the building. I wonder if even Braulio knew what was
going on here.
    The door opened on A and the first
thing I noticed were the ceilings. They were low, not higher than
2m, and rounded at the top like an egg. The floors were made of a
dark brown, soft, almost spongy material. The yellow walls were
gently lit by sconces embedded at the corners. The entire area was
in this design. There were, I’d guess, as many as two hundred
residents on these floors.
    The hallways sloped up and down
interconnecting clusters of 8 or 10 pod-like rooms. The cluster
nearest the elevator was fully occupied. They all were just kids,
twenty year olds in their forties.
    There were no doors. I could see
directly into each small single room apartment. A simple bed was
the only furniture.
    I walked through the first cluster, my
presence seemingly unnoticed. The people on A were all sleeping or
lounging, obliviously high or burned out in some way or another.
One room was empty. The last room had two on the bed having a go at
a slow, deliberately paced form of sex under a ratty
blanket.
    I kept moving, intending to
methodically search the whole building. I didn't want to imagine
Opal living like this. I was starting to worry if I’d find
her.
    Past the first cluster, the hallway
wound upwards and to the left then forked. There was no numbering
or distinctive markings on anything. I kicked at the wall with the
sole of my boot until it made an decent enough dent and took the
downward branching hallway to the next cluster.
    It was worse. An active vent in the
ceiling carried away a lot, but not all the smell. It was that of
the dead not allowed to die.
    The first room held an enormously fat
person. I didn't even recognize him/her as human until I saw its
face, seeming to float on a mound of swaddled flesh. Its soft dark
brown eyes blinked a few times as they watched me pass.
    The next room was empty and spotlessly
clean. The room across from it held one man, terribly thin and pale
with long colorless and brittle hair. He was cutting his arm with a
piece of a broken cup and watching the wound quickly coagulate and
seal itself in the space of several seconds. He ignored my watching
him to concentrate on pushing the shard through the tougher skin of
his leg. There was a pop as it broke through. He withdrew the blood
soaked porcelain and examined it like an expert craftsman before
licking a drop off the end.
    Another man brushed past me in the hall
to enter the room. He was carrying a short length of hose and a can
of the red tagged strong beer. The two men looked like they might
have been brothers. They shared the same washed-out, underfed look,
and reticent, gently broken demeanor.
    The self-mutilating man accepted the
hose and beer from his friend without comment. They had obviously
done this before. The second man got onto his hands and knees and
pulled his pajama pants down over his thin