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 ^{(it's beta!)}

For a moment, just a short moment, I stopped, breathing hard. I felt tired, vulnerable, almost powerless. I knew they couldn't be far behind me. I turned and looked ahead: the last stretch of the path of my freedom. But this stretch was the most difficult, and I looked with despair at what lay ahead. It seemed impossible. I felt doomed. Suddenly, I heard a sound behind me.

It was a whirring, punctuated by the sound of cold, mechanical impact against a hardwood floor. That clanking could mean but one thing. I was in more danger than I had imagined. That my own kitchen would become the scene of my death was hardly conceivable, and yet here I was. I steeled myself to bolt through the limited cover of the dining room table into the white, open, fluorescent lit kitchen, whose very openness had once seemed an attractive feature, an incentive to purchase the place. I was no hand at cooking myself, but I knew that waitstaff could be procured.

The whirring grew nearer, the clanking softer as those four metallic feet were cushioned by the knotted rug that lay just before the entrance to my refuge. Less than fifty feet away now, and the legs of the upholstered chair beneath which I huddled would become a cage, as my pursuers would smash through the china hutch and through each chair down the length of the long, formal table, until it found me.

Spurred by the image of my transformation from man of the house to diced meat, I gathered the last of my strength, supplemented it with my newfound adrenal terror, and ran into the kitchen. Halfway to the door. Another ten feet ahead of me, and my knees gave out. I lay my face against the cool, stainless metal of the refrigerator, and gasped. The splintering of antique chairs reminded me of my still imminent peril, but I could not move any further. Rising to my knees, I grabbed the only defense which made itself available, a heavy wooden cutting board left ready on the counter, a result of the absolute dedication and constant preparedness of my butler and head chef.

The tread echoed on linoleum now, and they approached, through the swinging kitchen door and closer. I could see their terrible raiments, the cloth across the butler's bent arm, the knife glinting in the hand of my chef and reflected in his deferent, steel face. I raised my improvised shield to block out their terrible, ball-jointed figures, wrapped in waist coats and mocking the human form.

"Master-it-is-time-for-dinner."

"Master-let-me-prepare-you-the-meal."

"Master-it-is-time-for-dinner."

"Sir-it-is-time-for-dinner."

Their voices were as full of programmed cordiality and as lacking in emphasis as when they had a hundred times before brought me a cigar or cutlet in my study. No outward twitch or mechanical error relayed their absolute malfunction. My legs would still not support me, and so I scurried like vermin along the floor, another few precious inches, until my back was against the supporting cabinets where were kept the enormous pots for the making of stew.

"Master-I-must-dress-you-for-the-meal."

"Sir-you-must-be-dressed-for-dinner."

The tiny fraction of energy left to me tensed in my arms, as the two servitors rounded the corner and advanced towards me. Still I made myself wait. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes. Closer. The chef leaned in, sizing me up, I knew, to decide the most efficient cut. I sprang forward, smashing as hard as I could into his torso, ramming against him with all my strength and all of my weight.

"Master-there-you-are." The butler bent down and lifted me by the arms, holding me with the absolute strength and precision attainable only by the machine, the same almost delicate brutality with which he would bring up crates of wine from the cellar without breaking a single bottle, a perfect sommelier. I struggled, and still he held on, and my arms began to bruise. On advanced the chef, cocking his head like a parrot, examining me from either eye. And then I knew nothing.

It's almost hypnotic, thought Anton, as he stared through the reflective pane of the train's window at the blurry slipstream of city lights rushing past his gaze.

He drifted, his mind hovering somewhere between consciousness and sleep. He began to daydream, his tiredness letting him sleep into reverie, if never sleep itself. Perhaps this time, he'd be allowed to look for work. The city kept getting bigger, Anton reasoned, so they must eventually run out of desirable citizens to work. Eventually, there would be a job that he could take.

The window of the bullet train was an uncomfortable pillow, by turns pressing his cheek flat and jolting it entirely away when the train hit an uneven portion of rail. It was cold, though, and smooth, and he could stare out at City and think of what it would be like to live there.

City. The name meant freedom, meant opportunity. Meant a chance, maybe, to bring his parents over, to move them out of their tin shack where they pecked out a meager existence. Citizenship could be bought, through some channels, if you came from outside City's borders. It was granted automatically to anyone born inside City, or in one of the eight suburbs which paid City taxes.

Outside of City and the Burbs, there was no work to be had. Anton's parents raised chickens, but they had been rendered obsolete by new trade agreements with a distant state. A commercial train, faster even than the passenger liner Anton rode, whispered past the window. He rotated his head against the window, watching it until it was blocked by one of the enormous billboards which the train passed at regular intervals, set up by the tracks to entice City residents. This one showed a cold girl with painfully high cheekbones, dressed in some bits of gauze and an expensive necklace, being handed down from a train by a man dressed black formal attire. It was advertising wine.

The conductor, dressed in a smart uniform with an antique hat walked by, checking tickets. Anton watched the conductor's reflection as he checked the man on the aisle's ticket, and then reached across to tap Anton on the shoulder.

"Hey, buddy. Ticket?"

Anton fumbled in his bag, found the two inches of heavy, green cardstock he had purchased from a Burb friend for three times the standard price for Citizens, and handed it to the conductor.

"Here." The conductor would know it was scalped, of course, because it was authenticated at a different station than the departure, but it was a ticket nonetheless, and not his job to do anything about it. He punched Anton's ticket without examining it, looking with amused knowledge at the dust that still clung to Anton, and handed it back, taking care that his fingers never brushed any part of Anton's hand or sleeve. "Thanks. You heard of any work opening in City lately?"

"There's jobs, and then there's work. I don't know anything about the kind you people are looking for. You ask me, you better find another ticket heading back out."

"Thanks anyway, friend."

The conductor walked down the line, and Anton rested his head on the jolting window again, letting it throw and rattle his head like litter on the platform when a train pulls into the station. He would be in City, and then he would find work. If everyone in City were as hostile to strangers as the conductor, he would never find a job, one sanctioned by the Governor and the Council, even with the papers his friend in the Burb had made for him, but he could find work. He'd take any work that came his way, and he'd move his parents off the slate-grey dust, into the green and golden City. Anton let the rails soothe him again, and gradually his breathing evened with the tossing of the window pane, and he slept.

If a skeleton is a memento mori, it is also an object of scientific interest. It has been cleaned, either picked or bleached free of meat, and what remains is a tidy pile of bones. A skeleton is long term planning.

There's nothing long term about a corpse. It is bloated, more fleshy and full than in life, partly with air and partly with maggots. A corpse is the week after a flood, before burials have begun but after the streets are drivable.

A corpse is not to be confused with a cadaver, the recently deceased presented for study, for the preparation of the curing of ailments. These are serviced, frozen, stitched and excised. Somebody loves a cadaver.

He had tried to throw the thing away three times, in different trash cans, but the janitors kept finding it and bringing it back. It had his name on it, and his room number, so the kindly old man who swept up and emptied cigarette butts would deposit in in front of his door. Sometimes, his roommate would find it, and, feeling neighborly, put it on his desk. Sometimes he wouldn't, and instead Charles would trip on it as he let himself in.

Once he had tried the incinerator, putting the thing on top of a pile of trash headed directly to the basement to be burned. Some freshman had been on work study, had seen the thing, noticed it's label, and brought it back at the end of her shift. She stuttered, didn't make eyecontact, and fled from his glare, down the hall and two sets of stairs back to the quad.

He buried it, inside a small bag of trash, in a larger one, and at last in the great big bin which was brought out nightly to the dump. The person tasked with the nightly removal of refuse tripped, and sitting up among the piles of waste, it caught his eye. He pocketed it, picked up the scraps one by one, and left it at the campus mailroom the next morning, after rinsing it in his sink at home.

The finger was smallish, and alarmed no-one except for Charles. Only he witnessed it wriggle it's one remaining joint, or saw a night-bound insect poke it's curious head out into the air where there once must have been a manicured nail, or noticed the manifest swelling or felt it ooze at a touch.

Charles alone among his classmates knew the difference between a bone from a corpse and a cadaver. And only he knew which had loyally held on to his keys, attached to a jumping as a trophy from a night of unparalleled clarity amongst his early pub crawls. He hadn't been alone when he found the thing in the alley, hadn't been alone when he used a compact to check for breathe, hadn't been alone when he borrowed a pen-knife to check for reflexes by pricking a fingertip. He had a crew of cheering, laughing friends behind him every step, and he was the most responsible, checking for vitals like the pre-med major he had declared six weeks prior.

No-one at the morgue had found an ID for the John Doe the group brought in, and, without dental records, the only distinguishing feature was the missing index finger on the right hand. No missing person with such a trait had been reported, although the wound looked recent enough it might have been received after the event. The staff would keep them posted, tell the boys how their good deed turned out.

He tried to throw it out again, this time in the dorm kitchen, under a pile of spuds. Three cooks at once fell on an unnoticed peel, landing on the bin, and the floor was strewn with shavings. Charles gave in, and picked it up himself.