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Victim Prime
By Robert Sheckley OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1987 Robert Sheckley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-3518-0
CHAPTER 1
At the town meeting in September, the citizens of Keene Valley, New York, voted to arm Harold Erdman with the town's best handgun, a vintage Smith & Wesson .44, and send him south to the island of Esmeralda to enter the Hunt.
Harold had been picked because he had volunteered, had no living kin, was single, healthy, pretty good in a fight, and was considered honest enough to carry out his part of the bargain, namely, to send back fifty percent of his Hunt prize money to the town, assuming he lived long enough to collect any.
In order to get into the Hunt he'd first have to hitchhike and take buses down the American coastline to Miami. From there he could just afford the air fare to Esmeralda, the small island in the southeastern corner of the Bahamas where the Hunt was legal.
The journey from upper New York State to Florida was known to be dangerous in the extreme. There were said to be bandits of incredible ferocity lurking along the way, men fillled with bloodlust and delighting in cruelty. There were devastated regions where foul mists from long-buried industrial dumps burped noxious gases under a traveler's feet, as though the earth were trying to rid itself of its burden of concentrated chemicals and radioactive wastes. A burp like that could poison you in midstride, and you'd be stone dead before you hit the ground. And if you got by all that, there were still the rapacious towns of the south to contend with, places filled with scarcely human creatures who killed anyone they came across, took his belongings, and sometimes ate his flesh.
That's what people said in the word-of-mouth travel advisories by whose means fable is spread, and sometimes fact.
Harold was not much bothered by these stories. He was willing to take a lot of risks to get out of this dying village wedged into a fold of the polluted Adirondacks. He wanted to do something with his life, and the Hunt was the only chance open to him.
Harold was large, but he moved lightly for a big man, and he was faster than he looked. He was a big, round-faced, amiable-looking country boy with an ingenuous smile and calculating eyes. He had black untrimmed hair that came down over the collar of his worn red plaid mackinaw, and a few days' stubble on his face. He was twenty-eight years old at the time of his journey and he looked like a bear who's been woken up before he's finished hibernating. Large and sleepy and sort of cute. Which goes to show how much you can judge by appearances.
CHAPTER 2
"So you're really going," Allan said. "You're really going to Esmeralda."
Harold nodded. It was an hour after the town meeting.
They had eaten together, and now were sitting on the front porch at Allan's house on Spruce Hill. The sun was just going down over the mountains.
Allan was Harold's best friend. He wanted to go Hunting, too, but he was the only support of his mother and two kid sisters. To leave them in times like these would be the same as killing them. Harold had no one. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was fifteen. His father, a sour, silent man, had taken off soon after her death, gone to look for work in the south. Nobody had ever heard from him again.
"It's warm all the time down there in the Caribbean," Allan said. "That's what I hear. And they've got everything modern and new. Like in those old magazines in the school. They've got bathrooms with hot and cold running water. They've got restaurants with real food. Everybody's well dressed and happy."
"That's because all they got to do is kill each other," Harold said.
"Well—nothing so tough about that, is there?"
"I don't know," Harold said. "I haven't killed anyone yet. But I figure I can turn my hand to it."
"The trick is not to get killed yourself," Allan said.
"So I hear," Harold said.
"You'll see Nora down there."
Harold nodded. Nora Albright had left Keene Valley two years ago when the buses were still running between Montreal and New York City and stopping at Plattsburgh. She left with four other girls to find work. There was always more work for good-looking women than for men, though some of that work wasn't too savory. The wealthy foreigners, the Asians especially, liked to hire pretty American girls for domestic service, just as Americans once used to hire pretty German and English girls for servants and nannies. The other girls from Keene Valley got jobs in the south, but Nora went all the way to Esmeralda in the Caribbean, the independent little island that lived under the laws of Huntworld. She sent back money regularly.
"You take care of yourself, OK?" Allan said.
"Yes, I'll do that."
"And tell Nora hello from me."
"OK, Allan."
They sat for a while and watched the sun go down over the mountains, the light draining out of the sky, the lonely chill of the north coming down over them. Evening comes down majestically in the Adirondacks. It occurred to Harold that he'd probably never see that sight again. A lot of others, but never that one.
CHAPTER 3
He left Keene Valley the next day, with the Smith & Wesson, thirty-four cartridges, and two hundred and seventy-six dollars and seventy-three cents they had managed to collect for his expenses. Although it was still September, there was a chill of impending winter in the air—the winter that follows the fall so quickly in upper New York State you'd think they were related.
Everything he had fit into a light knapsack. He carried the Smith & Wesson in his belt, the rounds in his right pants pocket where they'd be handy. He wore his only suit, a heavy almost indestructible serge handed down to him by his Uncle Luke who had died last spring of the T virus.
He took his last look at the mountains, early sunlight glinting off their rocky faces, a scattering of trees still remaining since the last blight, and swung his knapsack into the cab of Joe Billings' truck. He'd said his goodbyes the previous night. They drove off and he didn't look back.
Joe Billings was going as far as Glens Falls to pick up parts for the Farmers' Cooperative tractors. It was getting tougher and tougher to keep the old McCormicks running, and the harvests were so poor they seemed hardly necessary. But there was also a shortage of horses and mules, and the newly introduced yaks hadn't reproduced yet in sufficient numbers to make a difference.
Human shortsightedness had finally caught up with America in the late twenty-first century. The forests were gone. The overbred grains and cereals were failing. The American countryside was filled with poisonous places where radioactive wastes or chemicals had been dumped. A lot of the soil had simply given up trying to regenerate itself. Even the air seemed to be going bad. There were no jobs because nobody had any money. Machinery was breaking down and so was the machinery to fix the machinery. Worse, the will to fix things seemed to be gone.
The Cold War still existed and the nations occasionally rattled their sabers at each other. But nobody gave a damn anymore. A lot of people hoped they'd just drop the damned bombs and get it over with. Call this living? Might as well finish it sooner rather than later. Because the good old earth was going to the dogs.
They should never have cut down the forests and jungles. They should have done something about the acid rain when there was still time. Harold was twenty-eight and he could still remember when there was still some green on the brown Adirondack Mountains. The government had gotten serious about ecology about fifty years back. But it was too late and there wasn't enough money. The earth's a big place and bounces back from almost endless amounts of abuse, but people had finally pushed it too far.
There were hardly any animals left in the barren wastes that once had been forested wilderness. The big game animals had gone first, in America and Africa. Then the rest of the earth's delicately balanced ecological system began to come apart at the seams.
The formerly fertile prairies and savannahs dried up and blew away, and it was dustbowl time. Desertification spread, and disasters piled up faster than you could count them. Then the influenza epidemics came, and the other plagues. The survivors scrabbled around a decaying America and tried to get along, to hold on, to wait until things got better. Would things get better? Nobody was counting on it.
Death was everywhere on the face of the North American continent, death by starvation and death by disease and death by the endless varieties of misadventure that man comes up with all by himself.
And still there were more people than the land could support. The human race had exceeded its range, gone beyond the possibility of feeding itself. A universal die-off was inevitable. But that didn't make it any easier to take. Death was so common, so ubiquitous, that it was inevitable that places like Huntworld would come into existence, places where, in paradoxical reaction to the horror of the times, men applauded death, paid men to enact it for them, and rewarded the survivors.
CHAPTER 4
After Glens Falls, Harold hitchhiked. A ladies' notions salesman in a New Stanley Steamer gave him a lift. They went past field after field, bare, rocky ribs showing through the dusty soil, the land unproductive ever since the accumulation of past and present chemical and nuclear mistakes had turned Lake Champlain into a cesspool and killed the Hudson once and for all.
Just past sunset the salesman dropped him off at a crossroads south of Chestertown, in a region of stubbled fields and stunted pine. Harold decided to hole up for the night, since hitchhiking after dark was not advisable. It was a mild evening, and he had beef jerky and a canteen of safe water. He found a little hollow sheltered from the wind and out of sight of the road. No use calling attention to yourself.
But somebody must have noticed him anyhow. It was twilight when three men and a dog appeared from over a ridge.
Two of the men were bearded. They were small, skinny men with floppy hats pulled down over their eyes, dressed in shapeless gray and brown clothing. The third man was big and burly, even bigger than Harold, who was no lightweight. He was dressed in worn blue jeans and a faded Civil War-style foragers' cap. He had a weird lopsided grin that made him look dangerous and more than a little crazy.
The dog was some sort of a bird dog, black-and-white-spotted, and it bared its teeth when it saw Harold but didn't growl or make a sound.
"Take it easy, Dilsey," the man with the forage cap said. "She don't mean no harm, mister, and she's right useful for flushing out birds."
"Nice-looking dog," Harold said. He sat with his back against a tree, his knapsack at his feet.
"Stranger to these parts?" forage cap asked.
"Yep. I'm from further north, over to Keene."
"Fixin' to stay around here?"
"Goin' south," Harold said.
"You won't find nothin' down there. Not since that last T virus came through."
"So I heard," Harold said.
Two of the men sat down on the ground, one on either side of Harold and about five feet away. The man with the forage cap sat down on his heels facing Harold. He said, "Maybe you're going to Florida, try your hand at fishing?"
"Might," Harold said.
"Forget it. The fish are all dead and stinkin'. Used to be, you go far enough south you could live off the land. No more, believe you me. You might do just as well staying around here. You could join up with me and the boys. This here is Carl, and his brother Dave. I'm Tag Sanders."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Sanders. I'm Harold Erdman. Thank you kindly for your invitation to join you and your friends, but I guess I'll just keep on going south."
"Suit yourself," Tag said. "It's getting late, so if you'd be kind enough as to kick your knapsack over this way and turn out your pockets, we'll take what we need and be on about our business. You can keep your clothes. How's that for fair?"
"Real nice of you," Harold said. "But the truth is, Tag, I don't have much and what I've got I need."
Tag sighed and shook his head. "That's what everybody says. They need what they got! But me and the boys, we need what they got, too."
"You'll have to get it from someone else," Harold said.
"It seems to me," Tag said, "that there are three of us and only one of you, even if you are a big one. I thought I was being pretty nice, offering to leave you with your clothes and your life. Isn't that so, boys? But some people ain't got no manners. Now you got two ways of proceeding. You can hand over that knapsack nice and peaceful-like, and turn out your pockets, or we'll do it for you."
The brothers were edging closer to him. Harold stood up. You could just see the Smith & Wesson in his hand glinting blue in the deepening twilight.
"No," Harold said. "I'll keep what I've got and you keep what you've got. That's the best offer you're going to get. Now get up and get out of here."
Tag and the brothers moved back a few feet. They didn't seem too concerned about the gun. Tag said, "Everybody's got a gun these days, but nobody's got ammo. You got any ammo for that thing, Harold?"
"Don't try to find out," Harold said.
Tag laughed. "Goddam, he's a mean one. The meaner they talk, the less cartridges they got. Dilsey!"
The dog lunged for Harold. Harold fired once, a chest shot which knocked the dog down. Dilsey lay kicking and whining on the ground until Tag knelt down and cut her throat with a clasp knife.
"Poor old Dilsey," Tag said, wiping the knife blade on the grass as he got up. "She was our ammo tester. You're the first pilgrim we come across with ammo and the guts to use it. You got any more shells for that thing, or was that it?"
"I've got all I need," Harold said. "It's getting dark now, Tag, and I don't want you boys messing with me. I hate to use up cartridges, but you leave me no choice." He raised the gun.
"Hey, hold on!" Tag said.
"Turn around," Harold said in a quiet voice.
"Sure," Tag said, "we'll turn around. You're not about to shoot us in the back, are you? It's OK, boys, we'll just turn around and walk away quiet-like. OK, Harold?"
Tag turned around, then swung around suddenly toward Harold, the knife in his hand held low, coming in for the kill. Harold had been expecting something of the sort. There were bushwhackers in upper New York State—not too many, because the pickings were too thin, but everybody knew they were hard to bluff. Bandits figured that ordinary citizens were reluctant to shoot, even with a gun in their hands, and when they did come across someone who was armed, they counted on a moment's hesitation. As Tag came at him, whooping, Harold shot him in the shoulder, the big old .44 bucking hard in his hand. The brothers yelled as if they'd been hit instead of Tag and took off running. Tag was spun off his feet and knocked down by the impact. He got up quick and ran after the brothers.
Harold let them go. It was getting too dark to shoot, and anyway, he didn't want to kill anyone. Not without getting paid for it, like people said was how they did in Huntworld.
He gathered up his stuff. He stood for a moment over the body of the dog.
"Well, Dilsey," he said, "I'm sorry. But you didn't give me no choice. Now I've got to find another place to sleep, because I sure as hell ain't going to share this hollow with a dead dog." He moved about half a mile away, found another hollow, and camped again. They used to say back in Keene Valley that Harold didn't have a mean streak in his body. But he was determined, very determined, and he didn't push worth a damn.
CHAPTER 5
The next day he got a ride into Albany. There he found that he'd have to wait four days for the bus south. He found lodging with the Salvation Army. They had taken over an old warehouse and put a couple hundred men and women in it. They were doing their best to feed everyone, but the soup was getting pretty thin. There was no room inside, but they gave Harold a bowl of soup and told him he was welcome to camp outside.
At last the bus arrived. It was a beat-up old Greyhound with armor plating along its sides. There had been trouble with bandits and hijackers along lonely stretches of the Interstates. The dispatcher said the state police had the situation pretty well in hand, but you could never tell.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Victim Prime by Robert Sheckley. Copyright © 1987 Robert Sheckley. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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