The Platform Pounds

A woman levels her rifle at my chest. I keep walking.

She has the face of those who haven't tipped over yet — slack mouth, a gaze that slides off me without catching. Behind her, fifteen or so bodies sit on the platform concrete, wrapped in thermal blankets that stopped warming anything a long time ago.

I don't raise my hands. I ask for nothing.

Jolanda strikes. Boom-tak. The hide drinks her blood. Marisol hammered that rhythm on gutted drums, and she laughed while she did it.

I walk to the woman, push the barrel aside with the back of my obsidian arm, and take her wrist. Then I press it flat against the taut skin of the drum.

A sound comes out of her. Not pain: shock. The first noise she's made in weeks, maybe months. Her fingers bounce. The impact travels up to her shoulder and an ember relights behind her eyes, under twenty centimeters of white.

I knock three times against the pillar.

"Again," Jolanda translates. "He says again."

The woman strikes. Badly. Too hard. She splits her palm on the wooden rim, looks at the blood, and starts over.

An old man stands up behind her. Then a kid. Then three others. They understand nothing of what they're doing, they obey the racket because the racket is the only thing moving on this dead plain. Lio shoves scrap into their fingers: sheet metal, a pipe, a torn-up rail.

The platform starts pounding.

Malik crouches under the severed cables, measures, curses through his teeth. He taps twice against the steel. Four minutes. Maybe six.

Nobody here will sign anything. Mutation is caught by the hands, like a fever.

I climb onto an overturned crate and open my arms toward the void. I show them the horizon. The column of steam I spat out back there. The pack I called down on us.

They understand. Two back away toward the stairwell.

The woman with the rifle tightens her sticky fingers on the drum and strikes harder.