B The Settlement

The settlement: 2022 A.D.

Colorado

The Vanks were dying like flies that summer. Business was booming. I
got paid fifty dollars for every body I collected. No one cared if they
died - at least no one in authority cared - but the bodies had to be
collected and burned, otherwise diseases from the rotting corpses could
jump out of the Settlement and spread to everyone else. No one in the
Settlement was capable of finding their feet to put their shoes on let
alone moving all those bodies. My name is Colorado and my wife's name
is Wyoming. Two of the most popular names on the legal names list. I
saw President James on TV last night saying that the menace of drugs
was now under control in Australia. Even in his wildest fantasies he
doesn't believe that.

When I came downstairs to breakfast that morning Wyoming was sitting
there with that look on her face.
"What's wrong?" I asked her.
"I feel like shit."
"What's new?"
"That's what I need. Encouragement..."
"If you overdose just once more I don't know if I'll be able to keep
you out of the Settlement. They'll report you next time at the
hospital. They won't have any choice. Stay away from that stuff. If you
feel bad drink some Scotch."
"That stuff's poison. You know what it does to my liver."
She was straight faced. I couldn't tell if she was being ironic or not.
Wyoming is dark and pretty with short hair like a little boy's and very
small ears. I love her but she's a weak vessel. A frail, ethereal girl
who's come back from the dead twice and who carries the shadow world in
her eyes, in her thin, white hands, in her hypersensitive body
language. It's the children in the Settlement that upset me the most.
When we drive in there to take the bodies out (all used up and with
other, ravaged junkies standing around), well, I've hardened myself to
that but sometimes there's a kid or a couple of kids standing there and
you know it's their mother or their father, sister or brother or some
protector they've attached themselves to who's gone and died and left
them to fend for themselves. Kids like that are supposed to be taken
out of the Settlement but it only happens if some relative kicks up a
stink. Then they go in and take them out. I try not to think about the
ones that are still in there.

I know Wyoming's still doing all kinds of drugs but it's smack that
will get her taken to the Settlement. When she's being honest with me
she tells me there's no substitute for that sweet hit. Not sex, not
God, not me, not nothin'. She usually says these things when we're
poisoning our livers with Scotch.
I've never used heroin but some of the people who got off it tell me
that anyone who's on it is either sick or about to be sick. I don't see
the attraction myself. But then I wouldn't, would I?

"At least I don't use cocaine," Wyoming smiles and shrugs like a
child.
"You can't afford cocaine. Only members of parliament can afford
cocaine."
Driving along later in the green sanitation truck (that's what the
government calls them; the junkies in the Settlement call them green
meanies) I could still see the smile she gave me when I made the joke
about cocaine: proud, distant yet completely into it, like a bee
burrowing into a nectar-drenched flower. I loved her.

Wyoming
They put people like me in the Settlement. It's nothing personal they
say, but you're a threat. I see their point. Colorado is so straight
and I love him for it but it makes me angry too. He's my sanity. I say
that even though it's too much to ask, for someone to be my
sanity.

The government spouts regurgitated Marx but they say they are
capitalists. If I still gave a shit I'd be confused. From each
according to their ability, to each according to their needs. Someone
like me produces nothing, of course, so I get nothing, or would get
nothing if Colorado didn't feed me. They call this their manifesto, the
jerks. Jimmy Perkins whose legal name was Kansas but who always called
himself Jimmy said this manifesto was an excuse to hurt others.
"Invented by sadists to protect them from their victim's revenge," he'd
say. He's been dead five years now. Hard to believe. Died raving in the
Settlement they say but you can't believe anything you hear. You can
believe those sad, little pen pushers in Parliament house least of all.
They've never seen what I've seen - great sheets of purple light moving
through a room on feet of fire while the universe moved like some
marvellous machine and I watched it move. I've heard colours singing o
so divine. That's why I'm a threat. Nothing can be the same after. Life
is grey and that other place is so inviting. LSD is the drug they
should fear but you don't go to the settlement for using it. Heroin's
the one. Makes slaves of people they say but what they mean is: we want
you to be our slaves instead.
Chained to the wheel. Mass production. Mass media. Mass
conformity.

I don't want to go to the Settlement. They feed you; they even give you
cigarettes! You get a place to live - it's all paid for by the
government. Aids was rampant once but it looked too bad, even though it
was killing the addicts off very effectively. So those hypocrites sent
people in to hand out clean needles. It's a terrible place, though, and
everyone knows it. People have been known to kill themselves with an
overdose to avoid going in there, where they're going to die
anyway.

The junkies are called Vanks, short for vanquished. Australians love
nicknames and as President James preached in his famous
preachment:
"These are the vanquished." The pompous clown. Don't I know every time
I look at him or hear him speak that he was born vanquished and will
die that way? He's got a lot to answer for. I've even heard that he
likes little boys. I heard that he gets them from the Settlement and
that made my blood run cold until someone told me that he sends them to
school like little male concubines and I decided that they might be
better off. How do you choose between evil and evil? I've never been a
pragmatist. A flaw in my character. I'm actually a very moral person.
That side of me annoys Colorado a bit because he thinks he's made his
peace with all of it. He does what he has to do and if he didn't where
would I be? Morals come at a price and he's the one who pays.

Colorado
"I have a theory," Prairie said, throwing his cigarette out the window
of the truck. "I think all those junkies were once the unemployed.
Sitting around all day they dabbled in drugs - too much free time,
nothing meaningful to do, you know. Then there were fewer and fewer
jobs and more and more drugs. They started to steal stuff, doing break
and enters and all that. That's the real reason they put them in the
Settlement; they were knocking off the burgher's goods. There were
never going to be any jobs, so they locked 'em up. Make sense to you
Colorado?"
"Everything you say makes sense." I gave him a grin.
His theory was what I had believed for a long time. Capitalists don't
care about anything but capital - which's only logical. You had to be
careful what you said or who you said it to but Prairie was my friend.
We trusted each other.

I turned the truck towards the settlement. A short distance away was
the newest in nuclear reactors, so the Vanks were zapped by radiation
as well as heroin on a regular basis. That, at least, was another of my
theories. The government denied it of course and since the reactor
stood halfway between a primary school and the Settlement it was
democratic I suppose. The snotty nosed little kids in the Settlement
got their dose and the little blue bloods in the private primary school
got theirs. At all schools capitalist principles were taught but prayer
was forbidden.
"Their allegiance is to the government and to the government alone. We,
as a society, cannot afford the luxury of a spiritual life," Prez James
had said in tones of phoney regret. "Fate has no favourites" was
another of his favourite sayings. He and his merry men and women seemed
constantly to disprove that one.

"Wasn't the settlement supposed to fix crime?" Prairie asked of no one
in particular.
"Yeah, so?"
"It's a hell hole of crime in there, you know. The guy in charge of
distributing drugs is running black market heroin on the side. Women
selling themselves and their kids to get it, so I've heard. Where do
you think all those bodies come from?"
"Natural wastage. Overdoses."
" You've seen the bodies. They're murdering each other in there.
Fighting over drugs and money just like they did on the outside. Ever
had a good look at the wire fence around the place?"
"What about it?"
"It's electrified."
"Is it?"
"Yep. Hardly anyone on the outside knows. The Vanks know but who're
they gonna tell? Everyone hates them. Everyone 's scared of them. No
one cares."
I said nothing.
"I've picked up bodies they've obviously taken off the fence. Suicides
probably. Burns all over them..."
"Look Prairie do you have to? Can't we just...?"
"Okay. Forget I spoke."
Silence.
I said: "What's all this leading to?"
"I've heard a rumour."
"You're always hearing rumours."
"Untrue Colorado," he laughed. "Anyway you know my rumours are always
true."
"Why is that?"
"Because they come from high up," here he pointed at the roof of the
truck. "that's why."
"Sleeping with a senator?"
"Not quite." A wink and a lascivious grin. "The government's scared of
the situation out in the Settlement. They've lost control. The guards
are on the take and word is a nasty storm is brewing."
I laughed. "What's that mean? The Vanks going to overpower the guards
with their body odour?"
I thought I was very funny but Prairie didn't laugh.
"Think about it! What weapon do these poor bastards have?"
Slowly a syringe evolved into view on the monitor of my mind.
"Syringes?"
"Bingo amigo. Syringes. And heroin. Lots of it."
"What're you talking about?"
"Rebellion Col, rebellion. Some might even call it a revolution."
I laughed again. Mostly in disbelief. I didn't think it was funny any
more.
"Who've you been talking to?" I asked him.
"Someone high up."
"God?" I sneered. I was annoyed. I didn't want to know. I just wanted
to do my job, make money and keep Wyoming safe. "I don't want to hear
any more, Prairie. Leave me out of it."
"You have to turn left up here."
"I know that," I snapped.
When I looked at him he was nodding and smiling. Later I knew that he'd
been trying to warn me. He'd done the best he could but it was already
too late to leave me out of it.

A Man Called Lucifer
The man who would lead the Vanks in their uprising was named Texas but
he had re-named himself Lucifer. Hardly anyone remembered the old
meaning. The professors in Coca Cola University would have known but no
one asked them anything these days. They dressed up in their academic
robes the way clowns dress up for the circus and handed out degrees
that had been paid for the way anything else was paid for. Coffee,
whisky, headache tablets - or an economics degree. Take your pick.
Choose your poison. The professors were shunned these days as
revisionist backsliders always secretly longing for the days when
universities weren't just ed-factories, churning out cannon fodder for
the dollar war, the Yen war, the Deutschmark war.

Being a revisionist backslider was the only thing that still
approximated to a sin in a society that couldn't afford the luxury of a
spiritual life. Someone had told Texas that Lucifer meant "light" and
he liked the sound of it.
"I'll make them fall," he muttered to himself. "I'll make them fall.
Buckets of blood," he muttered. "Buckets of blood."
Lucifer had had no heroin for a month. Though he still collected it
from the centre every day. He stockpiled heroin and syringes waiting
for the moment to strike. There were twenty who had joined him. They
called themselves "triumphalists" as an antidote to the despised name
others had given them - the vanquished.

Lucifer had done a lot of drugs and his brain was like an almost burned
out fuse. It sparked only fitfully but he knew quite a lot. He'd seen
them take his son Salem away and everyone knew where those little boys
went. That day he cried for the first time in years. The next day he
stopped using. He shivered, he vomited, he doubled up in pain but he
persisted. He'd sit with a photo of Salem's mother in his hand. She'd
died of an overdose when Salem was four. In Lucifer's burnt out brain
there was only one thought: kill President James and get his son
back.

Today was the day. Rubicon he thought. He liked the sound of the word
but he couldn't remember what it meant. He turned it over in his mind
like a jewel. Whatever it meant he decided that it was a good word. An
important word.

Wyoming
Sitting on the bed I watched the colours. So beautiful. I looked at my
hand and power radiated out of it. I was safe and warm and back in my
mother's womb. Out the window I could see a hill dotted with little
houses; then this old man peeped over the top of it. After a while I
realized it was my grandfather. He'd been dead for twenty years but he
was huge and smiling. I smiled back. Then he stood up and cast a
gigantic shadow over the hill. I could hear shouting and screaming
somewhere very, very far away. My grandfather strode off into the
distance his head almost bumping the sun. This was great acid. It just
exploded. Rivulets of knowledge seemed to trickle through my veins. My
bed became a boat. I drifted

away, my feet dangling over the edge of the bed, into the cool, cool
water

.When the green meanie pulled in, Lucifer and the others moved
cautiously
towards it. "Where are the bodies," Colorado said, thinking they were
there to put the bodies on the truck.
"There'll be bodies," a grizzled old man growled. "Oh yes, there'll be
bodies for sure," and Colorado noticed the barrel of the gun that the
old man held for the first time. In wonder, suddenly understanding
everything, Colorado turned to Prairie and saw that he was handing out
guns.
"You said syringes," was all he could find to say.
He felt dazed and frightened. This was big. And treasonous.
"We're not gonna waste good shit on these bastards," Lucifer grunted,
taking aim at a guard leaning on a wall in the sun doing some deal with
a dirty, bedraggled junkie who smiled toothlessly, idiotically at his
persecutor. Lucifer dropped the guard with one shot.
"Rubicon," he shouted. "It's destiny."
"We're saving the smack for "privileged" members of the community," the
grizzled old man laughed and showed his rotting teeth.

"What's going on with these laughing loons? What is this?" the blood
was pounding in Colorado's brain.
"It's called a coup brother," Prairie told him. "Go home and look after
Wyoming. The army's on the move in the city and they can't rule out
collateral damage."
"Who's behind this?"
"Who do you think?"
"The rumourmonger?"
"Good name for her," Prairie laughed excitedly, his eyes glittered.
"She's taking over from James. It's been planned for a long
time."
"Who is she?"
"James' wife. We're what you might call friends."
"His wife?"
"You must've heard about his habits. A woman can only take so
much."
Prairie pulled a face. "Don't feel sorry for him. He's a bastard. He'll
be given a fair trial before they execute them. The army's backing his
wife."
Colorado just stood. The men with guns scattered, firing as they ran
and setting the junkie's nerves atwitter. Most of them disappeared into
their wrecked government housing, their children on their heels.
"Take the truck, get out of here," Prairie gave him a push.
He handed Colorado a card. "Keep this on you at all times."
Colorado hastily stuck the card in his pocket.

As he drove out the now unguarded gates he glanced in the rear view
mirror and saw Prairie firing at people he couldn't see. Wyoming would
be off her face, probably in the upstairs bedroom. He hoped she was
asleep and not weaving around at a window where she would probably get
shot.
"Please," he prayed to the God he didn't believe in. "Please don't let
her get hurt."

Colorado
I ran up the stairs stumbling and calling her name. She was lying on
the bed and she was still, so still. I said her name again and her eyes
flickered, then opened. She took a breath as deep as a newborn baby's
and I had tears in my eyes. She was looking straight at me, still
asleep, vague and lovely and lost. I wanted to say, "I love you
Wyoming. You're the love of my life," but I said nothing - just drank
her in with my eyes. Then I lay down beside her and held her, which
after all was what I lived for. I'm a simple man with simple
needs.

I couldn't remember falling asleep but I woke from a hideous nightmare
of deserts and carrion bones and saw that Wyoming still slept soundly.
I looked at my watch and saw it was midnight, the witching hour. I
found the card Prairie had given me and on it I read: "Under the
protection of Prairie Greenslade, Commander in Chief, Australian Armed
Forces, dual code 222111." Gibberish. I could picture Prairie with his
blonde curls and his angelic face, having these cards printed by
another of the revolutionaries. His serious young face as the little
cards popped out one by one. What was the saying? Nothing is true but
that believing makes it so. I thought that Prairie was probably already
dead.

Then I turned on the television in the middle of a newsflash. I watched
in disbelief as Prairie and a blonde woman I assumed to be James' wife
faced a bank of microphones and a wall of flashing cameras. I turned up
the sound.
"Today," the woman said, "there was an incident in the
Settlement..."
I was amazed. But the card had some value after all and that was good
news.

I opened a window and studied the night sky with its sprinkling of
stars. I sniffed. The odour of smoke and death still hung in the air,
and I wondered what the new day would bring. I wanted only two things.
That Wyoming would live and go on being my wife and that we would not
live in interesting times. I put the card carefully away in my wallet.
I had a hunting knife. I found it and put it under my pillow before I
lay down next to Wyoming. I wouldn't sleep but if anyone wanted to hurt
her that night, they would have to kill me first.