Sunrise at Dusk

Dusk- The moment the sun dips beyond the horizon, giving its rule to the twilight hours. Here, Dusk is place marked on the Coan’s map with a black dot. 35055 acres of dirt and the desecrated ashes of living things that prayed for a sip of water and died with hanging tongues. The only creature that thrives in Dusk lives by drinking the blood of its brethren. I know because I am one of their kind. Full of hate and jealousy, I dream in my human mind to crawl out of this pit and turn the pipe above and drown this godless place. 

   No one knows as they dance to the Fiddler’s Bizarre. I am in tranced in dark fantasy while I drink Dusk’s toilet water from Malec’s fine china. 

“I’ll have another!” I dropped the mug on the counter and tossed a pennicort, spinning alongside it. 

   “Oh, no! No more for you, Cory. You’ve had enough!” Malec took the mug and wiped it clean with a brown stained rag before he stacked it with the others. “You don’t think straight while sober, kid. I’d hate to see you fall down drunk.” I snatched my pennicort off the counter and swiveled my stool to scan the crowd of sundried faces. 

   Carma leaned against the huge wooden sign that read “Malec’s cold brew and more,” in hand carved letters. That toilet water was the cold brew and Carma was the more. She had a six-foot stooge peering down at her like he was watching work ants moving stone out of the trench. He had one hand on the wall and the other around her neck while she fished in his over-sized denim. He got a kick and lost whatever he kept in his pockets.

   I stuck my hand in my pocket. I wouldn’t miss four pennicorts, but they would have been out of my pants and stuffed down her brazier before I could get a good fumble. It wasn’t worth it. Carma slipped under the arm of the man, leading him with powers that bewitched. Come on Carma, don’t you need me? Carma unhinged the rust eaten door to the back alley. The gold in her hazel rimmed eyes flicked to mine, one wink with her right eye and then twice with her left. Be damned. The high whine of the fiddle became a groan that slowed the room into a hazy dance. I melted into the crowd seen, but not remembered. 

   Coan’s word is law on the hill, but down the trench in Dusk, there are no laws. The latch on the rusted back door dropped, rattling through the alley. The rise in my chest stopped. Eighteen weeks of waiting, spoiled by my fumbling hands. 

   “It’s just rats,” Carma crooned. I had been down that alley, studied it from every angle, seen every trash heap and spilled bottle. In that hour, the alley was foreign. Glass crunched under my boot. Carma’s back was on the wall while her gentleman pressed their bodies against one another. She was a mistress of enchantment. I dragged a school knife from my coat and stilled my breath. With this tipless blade, I would dig out of the godless trench. I sunk to the hilt in the man’s back fat. Blood streamed down my wrist, and his towering frame fell against Carma.

   “Get him off!” She screamed. An elbow the size of my head smashed into my face. My nose cracked like a ball struck by a bat, and blood sprayed the bricks as my head bashed against them. Eyes and hands searched for each other in the darkness, but remained lost. The ground shook like felled Elkmont timbers had smashed the cobbles, and I rolled face to face with the hazy-eyed stare of a dead man. 

   Carma crouched beside me, and we sat side by side in a pool of blood. She held up my trembling hand and stuck a bronze coin in my palm. “You won’t forget me when you get up top, will you?” She said. I curled my bleeding fingers around the cold metal, feeling the sting from where my hand had slipped up the blade. I had killed a man. My thumb slicked over a nick in the coin and my heart lept. The nights spent on Malec’s cheap stools making idle conversation with iron backs waiting for this chance. My thumb slicked over a second nick. 

   “What have you done?!” I screamed, checking the coin over with what I could see from swelled eyes. 

   “I got you a coin.” She leaned over the body and popped the buttons off his shirt, and sticking them down the front of her dress. 

   “I asked for a trapper’s coin! I just killed a man for a damned engineer coin!” Carma snatched the coin out of my hand. 

   “You’ll make an excellent engineer up top.” She slipped her hand in my pocket. “You’d better get going. The bell will ring soon.”

   The sand bowl bustled with iron backs lifting enormous stones with their muscles bulging out of filthy gray shirts. They looked like a swarm of ants. I drug my aching head into the heart of Dusk, gripping my engineer’s coin in my sweaty palm. Carma was wrong. If I could have made an excellent engineer up top, I wouldn’t have been trenched. 

   Course builders with heavy hammers and long yellow satchels stood under the hundred foot slope. While gatherers huddled under white linen, shading themselves from the sun. I was no one. Not a builder, nor could I gather, and I wasn’t strong enough to lift stones. I squeezed the coin in my hand, pushing the two notches into my skin and set my eyes on the hundred foot slope. Hords of men like thundering torrents charged up. Trampling over one another, human bodies fell, twisting into mangled corpses on baked sand. Their coin notched for death.

  I scanned the area for a gathering of engineers while searching my mind for anything I had learned at the foundation. The bell gonged, and the groups of men began their work. Everyone except the single stupid engineer. Control officers eyed me as they rushed to quell the chaos. They pulled men from the hill, beating them until their broken, twisted bodies fell to Dusk. 

   I dropped my coin in the jade sorting bowl. “I’m looking for my team.” Everything under Coan’s sun got done in teams. The coin reader’s huge hands fingered the notches with crooked fingertips, and I wondered who he knocked off to get this job.

   “What is an engineer doing in Dusk?” He smiled a wide, knowing grin. If my stomach hadn’t been stuffed full of Malec’s mind numbing cold brew and more, I may have questioned what an engineer had been doing in Dusk. “Where is my assignment?” I asked. He flicked my coin on the table with a twist, sending it spiraling toward me, and pointed up the hill.

   The reader leaned in and raised an eyebrow. “Two pennicorts and I can send you up by dog.” The hell was by dog? I reached into my pocket for pennicorts only to find a scrap of fabric with “I.O.U” written on it. They had trenched Carma for good reason. “I don’t have any pennicorts but I could trade you a debt owed me by Carma at Malec’s inn.” I slipped the fabric scrap into the reader’s bowl and signed my offer with a wink. 

   Behind an unsturdy fence made from rotted rust painted wood, they kept dogs, with bolt cutting jaws and short legs that looked like tree trunks. A mutt with long white strings of slobber snarled and tore into the corpse into a man who the stampede had trampled.

   “Free dog food.” The reader laughed, yanking a femur, tearing ligaments and muscles. He handed me the glistening white bone. “You’ll need this.” He tied a harness around my waist and chained the dog to my strap. By dog, I went up that hundred foot slope. I watched Dusk grow smaller in the distance as each step dragged me closer to an untrenched life. A life of living creatures, and water that could sustain leafy green plants and fresh air after rain. 

   I looked out over the trench and the 35055 acres of hell I had murdered my way out of. My thoughts drifted to Carma and Malec, dancing to Fiddler’s Bizarre, and the dead body I had left in the alley the night before. I was coined now and they could all be damned.