Man on Top Pt. 02

He wore a watch to cover the scar. Because watches were forbidden on the left hand, he had to wear long sleeves as well. Should a sleeve ride up, say on a crowded subway or during a window day, one could overlook a wrong-handed watch wearer if they weren't explicitly looking.After five years on the run, only those on the payroll were likely to spot his deceit. Still, risks were risks. And for him, all of them were huge.

Something had changed. One of the last Fertiles was captured during the spring. Incredibly, instead of secreting him away in a lab or forcing him into a procreation camp, the government made an about-face and seemed to concede defeat. Not in a manner one might imagine, though, but in the delusion way only a government could conceive. A great ceremony was announced. It would happen during the summer solstice, and it was said that June 21 would mark the day when humanity would be unshackled from fear, unbound by a history of ceaseless, mindless Manifest Destiny and wanton propagation. The propaganda machine whirred to life, telling people that it was time to celebrate the summer of the Final Generation. It was time to forge ahead a new future, one of certainly at last, eternal freedom, total happiness, inescapable purity. Nobody really knew what any of that meant. But sure, they'd go along with it. Humans could only take so much living under the shadow of doom and gloom. Turning their backs to it wouldn't be asking a lot.

That June day, whether it was warm on their side of the planet or cold, there was no question it was a festive, almost raucous atmosphere. People tuned in to the celebration live on their TVs, stood in squares and watched on big screens, and joined revelatory events all over the world. The last Fertile was there, wearing a white gown, waving his arms and smiling. He thanked everyone for their sacrifice, for their lives and for their tirelessness. What did it matter if they'd been unsuccessful? They had each other, right? The Final Generation, the biggest happiest family was no longer taking applications.

And then he was seized. He was no longer smiling. His arms were stretched out where tethers were slid over his wrists before he was strung up for the masses. People around the world watched, momentarily stunned. And then the Authority appeared on the stage. A spokesperson stepped forward, raising her arms and asking for calm.

"Gentle people, we are the great Final Generation. The first humans squatted in caves and gave us fire, they our Alpha. Now, look at us. Great people, we the Omega, have come so far. Do not be saddened by dark thoughts. Remember now that all is part of nature. From nature we came and back to nature we will go. But! We will go as human! Creators, builders, lovers and friends. We are no longer beholden to instinct, no longer driven to spread that seed. We are free. And so, with the world watching, we thank our friend, this man. He symbolizes the last fertile man in the world. We say to him, no more. We do not need your seed."

At that point, she ceremoniously produced a long pair of sharp scissors. Stepping away from the microphone, she held them up to allow the cameras to catch their brilliant, newly minted gleam. Then she strode across the stage, bowed perfunctorily to the bonded man who could only stare back in horror. Pulling an unseen thread, she managed the almost magical feat of removing his entire lower wardrobe in a single gesture. Without so much as a pause, she snipped. Thanks to the wonder of HD, the Final Generation saw everything.

Hand bloodied, she gestured to a couple of stagehands who approached to help with their now bleating and bloody captive. As they tended to him, the spokesperson for all humanity strode proudly back to the microphone.

"It is done! We are free!"

**

He woke in a cold sweat. He was not alone. Someone was in the furniture outlet with him. They were sitting somewhere near the front window, listening to an old portable radio. He could hear static and the occasional drone of an old song. A news bulletin cut a Duke Ellington joint short to tell the world that the last Fertile had beenset free.

Across the outlet, he shivered, angry that the dream had followed him back to wakefulness. He stretched his neck and peered over the back of the couch he called home. Stupid little shit, creeping in on his turf. How the hell had they gotten in anyway? He'd stuffed enough razor wire through the back entrance to bleed a small army.

Gazing down at his wrist, he slid the watch over his hand and stared at his scar. What if it was true? There really was no Fertile left but he. There was no way to know for sure. He'd had a scanner once upon a time, used it out on himself from day to day, almost praying it would spit back the news that he was one of them. But after eight years—the infertility pestilence should have done its work by now—he'd been as fertile as a freshman football team. Well, that joke used to work anyway.

Getting his hands on a scanner now would be suicide. Catch enough Fertiles with a scanner in his possession, and the government gets wise to the hack, puts a GPS on board, patching up one more loophole. Used to be, he'd scan himself for sport after a jack. Get a hot honey lodged in his mind, take her for a good time in his imagination and scan the mess.

The radio switched off. Inwardly, he cursed himself. Somehow he'd managed to be careless again. All he wanted was to be left alone, alone to carve out a miserable existence without being harassed by every hobo with an empty mind and a greedy gut. The government may be playing at a game, acting like all the Fertiles had been exhausted, but they'd inadvertently done him a favor. The reward flyers that used to litter the cities, offering huge sums and everlasting riches to heroic anybodys who uncovered a Fertile were all gone now. The heat had lessened somewhat.

He thought he heard something to his left, reached into a cut in the couch's seam and pulled the broken mirror shard from within the upholstery. He'd wrapped a strip of fabric around the end to give the glass a sort of hilt, and he clutched it tightly.

"Squatter's paradise," said a mousy female voice over his shoulder. He took start, falling from the couch and dropping the makeshift glass blade onto the concrete floor where it promptly shattered. A piece ricocheted up from the floor and cut his cheek. He lay there wincing, listening to his heart thump wildly, and finally tasting the acrid bite of his own blood on his lips.

"I thought I was clumsy," said the voice. He heard her coming closer, stepping from dusty couch to tattered chaise to wobbly end table, and at last coming close enough that he could smell her perfume.

"Go on!" he shouted, trying to sound gruff. The sound of his voice echoed through the furniture outlet, and for a long moment there was no reply.

"Well, are ya okay?"

He closed his eyes and exhaled deliberately. He forced his weary body to mobilize, pushed himself up, careful not to run his hands through the broken glass, and climbed to his feet. There before him in the dingy light was a figure that did not match the tiny voice it seemed to have produced. She was tall and thin, but full of sharp edges. Her shoulders were bony, and though her long arms seemed stringy the way they hung haplessly at her sides, in evidence were strong sinews of lean muscle running up and down them. Her hair was shaved along the sides, with the longer stuff pulled into a ponytail, except for what hung in wispy strings over the left side of her face.

"I'm not looking to take the pork," she said flatly. "So, let's just dispense with that notion right quick and we'll get along much better."

"I don't want to get along with you or anybody else," he returned.

"Yeah, I could tell that from the way you decorated your entryway."

He was about to launch into his madman's rant, hoping it might give her the idea he didn't want to be her buddy, or share a smoke, but he paused at mention of his razor wire nest. She'd somehow managed to get past it.

"Guess you forget about the air vents in the woodshop next door."

Fuck. He had forgotten about them. "Look," he said. "I don't suppose there's any chance you'd just make your way back up that vent like a stringy little rat, and leave me alone?"

"And leave one hobo to all this? Man, you hit the jackpot. Get to choose a new bed each night, and you want to keep it all to yourself?"

"I see," he replied. "In that case, Pick one you like. The white chaise near the eastern side of the store is a particular favorite of mine. A reclaim I think, because it's already been worn down in just the right places. If it weren't for my bad right shoulder, I'd still be using it."

"Mighty neighborly of you," she said.

"Yes, and when you're good and comfortable, feel free to sleep peacefully. I'll just slip over there when you're sound asleep, and slip my cock into your virgin asshole and rape the living shit out of you." He stood there, his chest heaving, hoping that his words sounded menacing, that she'd turn tail and run straight from that store, out of his life forever.

But she just smiled, nonplused. "Cool. Long as you're okay with getting this slid under your skin." She produced a long blade that gleamed in the dirty light. It looked like a samurai sword broken in half and perfect for concealing down one's trousers. "See," she said sweetly. "Got me a cock of my own. Hope you're into that."

He hung his head.

"Ah, don't be so down about things. I'm a good roommate, and I can tell a harmless hobo when I see one. You, you're about as dangerous as a soft peach."

He sank down on the couch nearest him and turned his back on her. "Fine. Go nuts. Just leave me alone."

But instead of doing that, she plopped down on the end of a coffee table nearby.

"I'm on the outs with my father. Was putting myself through college when the teachers stopped showing up. Kind of hard to attend the lectures when there's nobody there to hand out grades. So, I took a hike too."

"Why are you still talking to me?" He lay there, hardly resting. His mind worked a mile a minute, calculating exits she couldn't possible know, plotting his escape should it become necessary.

"Lonely, I guess." She cleared her throat. "And no, not for anything more than an ear to bend. I'm sort of a wayfaring stranger, just trying to make sense of it all. I mean, this is supposedly the last run for our lot. I just want to see if there's anything out there worth doing before we expire."

He rolled over and faced her. In this light, she wasn't terribly hard on the eyes. The loose strands of hair seemed to match her over all personality, provided she wasn't merely playing an assigned role. Still, she'd said something he never seemed to understand.

"Why now? Why is it now when there's no future, people suddenly give two shits about carpe mother-fucking diem?"

She was thoughtful a moment. "If you ask me, I think we're all tied together. One big long rope, person to person, living to dead. One life to the next. As far as I can see, when all the Fertiles dropped off, it was like cutting the cord and letting us all tumble down into darkness. It used to be like somebody was holding on up there, pulling us as a species into the future, however uncertain. Now, there's nobody on the other end. We aren't going anywhere. Can you believe it? Not a single one of us left to carry the tether ahead into the great darkness of tomorrow."

"But it's not my, er, our problem. Our lives didn't get any shorter."

"They sort of did," she said, by way of explanation.

He shook his head and stared at the shattered glass at his feet, beholding in the fractured reflection a truer glimpse of himself than he'd seen in too many years. Blood was drying to his cheek. He ignored it.

"My name's Isis, by the way."

He looked up and considered her a moment. "Good for you."

He smiled to himself from within the fog of a dream. He felt enmeshed in wondrous, wet warmth. He rocked his hips gently, trying to gain deeper purchase. His cockhead mushroomed and bumped against the back of its ensnarement. He felt that familiar tingling, gave into the sensation and exhaled as slowly as he could. Tightening like a vise, he felt his tool being worked over in an impossibly small, yet velvety soft channel.

His balls lunged and his back seized. He gritted his teeth and groaned through what might have been the best orgasm of his life. A while later, he woke and sat up. Isis' tiny radio was producing static. She was seated across the room, her back to him. Confused at the reality of his dream, he cleared his throat. She did not turn around, but said, "Oh, you're awake. That's good. You were really going at yourself there for a hell of a while."

Fuck. Apparently, he'd been tugging at his junk while he slept. Well, so what? Screw her. This was his home. He couldn't give two shits if she was made uncomfortable by his habits.

Suddenly, a horrible thought rocketed through the danger centersinhis mind. He felt around his stomach, rubbed the fringes of his shirt, felt his boxers, the couch where he lay. No wetness to speak of. What if she'd taken it? What if she'd scanned it and found out who he was? The furniture outlet could be surrounded by now, for all he knew!

Without another word, he bolted upright and leapt over the back of his couch and onto a dining room table. With practiced dexterity, he jumped from furnishing to furnishing until he reached the far side of the room. Ducking beneath the merchant's desk, he dived to the floor, grabbed hold of an a/c vent and slid it aside, having unscrewed the vent months earlier just to be safe. Now, he shimmied through the vent, following the winding metallic tube as it led to the concrete garage below. He slid out near an access hatch, and raced up three flights of stairs.

The stairwell spit him out a block south of the furniture outlet. Without looking back, he descended into the subway, got the very next train heading deep into the bowels of the city, and passed from car to car until he found the one least occupied before settling down in an end seat, putting his back firmly to the wall.

**

Eventually, the revelry wore off. If one were to stand at the edge of a high-rise building and listen into the world below, he could quickly discern the difference in eras.This one sounded a great deal different. Gone was the chatter of tourists, the persistently self-aware honking of car horns. Traffic may indeed be lighter, but even the proverbial five o'clock rush had lost its urgency. Lines for ticketing booths, the subway platforms and taxi stands all grew quieter. Dimness fell over the eyes of men and women, a sense beyond foreboding edging on capitulation.

Schools slowly emptied when the last students finished up and came of age. There was a collective holding of breath as the final graduation occurred at a tiny rural high school in the middle of nowhere. The commencement was a somber occasion—not merely a family affair—attended by more people than would see the succession of English royalty. Tears were shed, young men and women embraced, welcomed into the dying adult populous and quickly forgotten. Libraries, gymnasiums and classrooms seemed to age overnight, becoming the dark mausoleums of our perished youth.

**

He staked out the furniture outlet for a week, watching and waiting for the world to close in around it. But the Authority never came. No suspicious vehicles, no lurking loiterers, no uncanny mailmen. After another two days of squatting in parking garages and under the trees in city parks, he'd had enough. So, maybe she wasn't working for the government, but no way would he let that hobo-come-lately, Isis, take over his furniture outlet.

He snuck back in via the a/c vent in the underground garage, slipping out of the wall behind the merchant's desk and pausing there to listen. Evidently, she was doing without the monotonous drone of her radio today. He wondered idly if he'd have a fight on his hands, Isis having supposed he'd abandoned the place entirely. Many hobos were territorial, resorting to any manner of aggression to keep a place to themselves. Some pissed and defecated on walls and windows. The foulness gave nomadic types the immediately warning intended to suggest that they move on, that they'd have a fight on their hands if they tried to squat there.

Slowly, he got to his feet. His jaw dropped open. Isis had been busy. Every item of furniture, it seemed, had had its legs chopped off. The ends of a hundred or so legs had been whittled to a sharpened point and used to line a path she'd created through the mountains of furniture. Climbing over the merchant's counter, he stood at the entrance of this path. It wound itself through the middle of the showroom and ended at a cleared space that had been lined with couch cushions. The last remaining table and chairs stood there as well. Apart from the hostile jungle feel of the new setup, it looked surprisingly homey.

He took a step.

"I wouldn't." Isis, in her uncannily sneaky way, was perched on a shelving rack to his left, near the bathroom foyer, eating a banana. "At least," she continued, "not until I've shown you how it works."

She hopped down from her perch, entered the path from her side and walked to where he was standing.

"Good to see you," she said, cheerily.

He blinked, and started to reply, but decided on keeping his mouth shut for the moment.

She grinned and changed course. "I'm a bit of a DIYer, so I hope you don't mind that I spruced up a bit and added a little to your line of defense."

"What is it?" he asked, indicating the dagger lined path, leading through the center of the outlet.

"What we have here," she said, "is a dead guy's path. Look," she said, pointing. "There's a wire running along the path. The pikes are all on a single trigger. Somebody we don't like comes in here after we set the trigger, and they get skewered. The more the merrier, too. That's why the path runs the length of the show floor. I can take out a gang of 'em with this."

"I can't believe you did all this."

"Amazing what one can accomplish with the better part of a master's degree, and nobody's hiring."

He simply gaped at her.

"Anyway," Isis said. "Come on over to the living room. I hope you like it."

He followed her through the path, unable to help gazing down at the incredibly savage points carved meticulously into thepikes, as she'd referred to them. Each one leaned in on the path, pointed at about chest level on the average soul.

The living space she'd set up was indeed cozy. Two genuinely uncomfortable, yet spacious couches had been stripped down and re-lined from a mishmash of other plump cushions and covers. He noticed the two had been arranged conspicuously separate, directly across the living space from one another. Still, each couch was wide enough to allow a person to really sprawl out.

"It never occurred to me to do this," he admitted. "Before your...remodel, these were the two most over-hyped pieces of furniture in this store."

"I know!" she agreed. "Did you see the price tags on them?"

He laughed. "I'd initially tried sleeping on one of them, and gave up after being all but broken backed after a night."

"Exactly. Wouldn't you say they're worth their asking price now?"

He gazed down at the jumble of hobo comfort beside him. "Still, no."

She laughed at that. "Wait until you sleep on yours. That'll change your mind for sure.So, now that we're chatting. Gonna tell me your name?"

He thought about it, hesitated and then pointed at the dinner table. "Left one standing, eh?"

"Yeah, I thought we could almost simulate a proper meal. I may live the hobo life, but that doesn't mean I don't still enjoy at least one or two of those old modern comforts."