Migration of a Hunted Herd

This is her eleventh time doing this.

It’s busy. Crowded. Claustrophobic as always. Too many people for what the chipped placard at the sliding door allots. Yet here they all are. The commuters. The citizens. Standing like birds in a storm, they sway with each turn or dip in the tracks. There was a time when people sat. But she can’t remember it. Just another memory the older generation tells the younger. Another inheritance from a time without relevance. A distant golden age of ancestors who built this city and then moved on, having either escaped or died. The seats were stripped from the compartment long ago. Now everyone stands rigidly upright, staring this way or that. She beholds those buildings beyond which occlude the falling sun, imagining its light warming the skyline’s far face.

The wrong face.

Enter.

Pardon me.

The train squeals to a halt and opposing crowds charge into or flee from the smog that blankets this end of the city. One of those long-dead people had once designed the station to feel larger and cleaner than it was—or so she had been told. Optics play an important role in making people feel a certain way, even when their instincts scream that things are not right. In reality this is a place of lurking, unseen danger. Objects and people move much too quickly to be anything but threats. They must be predators. For this is a city of enemies. It is the territory of everybody and of nobody.

A place where all live and none are welcome.

Her spot at the window is overcome by this horde of suits and luggage, and she is pushed to the middle of the pack. It elicits the memory of a program she had once watched. A soft-spoken narrator had explained the movements of some animal of the plains. Bison. Wildebeest. Something big, wary, and long-since gone extinct. They would run, then stampede when chased by lions or wolves or humans. Fur, horns, bulging eyes. Insanity. But where there seemed to be a madness to them, this invisible commentator calmly pointed out that the larger members of the pack, in fact, moved to the group’s perimeter, guiding the young and small inward. Protecting them from those that chased them. This behavior was instinctive for them, so naturally selfless as it was.

But with an unexpected shift in the topography, with a sly maneuver of the hunters, these little ones were sometimes trampled in the heat of the chase. Left crippled on the plain. Abandoned to die and feed the ones who started the madness. And the herd charged on without pause. So survived the obstinacy. So survived the pride.

Exit.

She wonders under what conditions might the prey stop and face their attacker. How much grass has to burn before a grazer turns to fight instead of turning tail. How long before their tastes change, and they bite and tear at the enemy the same way they have been preyed upon for centuries.

Pardon me.

Bodies jostle her ever more tightly, making it difficult to think or breathe. A flap of someone’s jacket catches her in the cheek, stinging her skin. The underbrush of the commute. The flora of the metropolis. Cloth and plastic and faux leather.

The tenth time had been easy—in and out only a few stops later. That day the necklace had appeared out of the throng, sitting calmly on a nondescript shirt. As always, the cue. His face had been pale, but assured. Never making eye contact but also far from dismissive. The greeting was curt but polite. He had pressed a capsule into her hand. Data, perhaps. A biological agent. Poison. It wasn’t her place to know. She departed two stops later and dropped the pill into a beggar’s cup. Just as she had been instructed.

Enter.

The doors open again. The stops are frequent. So many people avoiding the hardscape world. Seeking the temporary refuge of this space. Shifting from one artificial mass to another. She doesn’t fault them. Out there is an environment conducive to nothing like life. Harsh and abrasive. Every footstep a potential disaster. Cause for a glitch. A summary execution. One might be grabbed, beaten, robbed, taken away. Sold into an unimaginable life. The kind of life the programs stay quiet about in their nightly broadcasts. But word spreads, censored or not. Day or night these shadows prowl the streets, either in the search to sate their innermost hungers or to fulfill a contract. The powerful ignore the problem. Or they sign and date the forms that facilitate it.

Apex predators—those in the natural world—fail to dominate their habitats because they are not equipped to cultivate their subordinate length of the food chain. They eat and mate when the need arises. They strive for little more than that. It’s the tendency toward the “little more” that causes inequity in more intelligent species.

Exit.

Pardon me.

Another stop. Another grinding lurch, a paradoxical second’s worth of eternal delay, and then another sickening acceleration. She might be here mere minutes. The exchange might take hours.

She waits.

The ninth time had lasted an entire day. That’s when the corporation had terminated her for delinquency. That night the pendant had swung violently on its chain, its bright reflections flashing frustration and fear. The contact had been a woman, whispering her phrase in a near-panic. Her hair and accent were different from the time before. Maybe. She couldn’t be sure. The two of them switched bags, as instructed, and then the woman was gone.

Earlier meetings haze together like the smog. Always a different face. Always a different job. The only constant is the locket. Such an unfamiliar shape. Anatomical in a grid of angles and edges. Soft in a city of grit. Silver where everything else is pock-marked grey. Trying to distinguish any previous interaction is like trying to remember any one passenger. People come, looking the way they do. People leave, looking the same. Or sometimes they change. It depends on the light from the sun or the halogen. In the end they all blur into one homogenous visage. One rendering of what an average person might look like.

Commuter. City-goer. Human. Animal.

This is the eleventh time. The number holds some significance in her mind but she isn’t sure why. Maybe today is her birthday. Nobody had ever told her. She wonders if instincts can sense such a thing. She is lost in thought again. The mechanical sway feels more organic as time goes on. Like an orangutan carrying her baby from tree to tree. There had been trees in the city at one point—or so she had been told. It isn’t a subject covered much in the programs. Trees. As if they expect people to forget. People can’t forget, no matter how much they’d like to. The trees were there. And then they weren’t. The aura remains. Phantom limb.

The day is dragging on. It started dragging the moment she boarded. It is that kind of gruesome wait where one dreads the end. She must return home when it ends. Home. It’s a loose term. It’s a space. A volume that belongs to someone else and they let her stay there in exchange for the imaginary currency so recently provided by the place that fired her. She’s not sure what happens when that number hits zero. It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.

Enter.

They slow and halt once again. An influx of creatures pushes her across the rubber flooring and she is once more by a window, crushed toward the city by those who inhabit it. It is night now, she is forced to realize. And just as the songbirds of the forest will quiet when they sense a new presence, if only the moon, the train goes eerily mute. People chatter or type on their devices, just the same as before, but there is a hush inside of her. It might be that same instinct that tells her to get away from certain buildings. To hide her face from certain people by the way they dress or stand.

“Pardon me.”

Now the voice is not in her head, caught in that awkward bubble of expectation that makes every noise mimic it. This time it’s here. In front of her. The locket in the shape of a heart. It shines brilliantly upon the stranger’s chest. It has a hinge, indicating something is inside. She looks up. It’s a young man. Around her age, maybe. His lips smile but his eyes say everything else. His sadness is like the rain. Acidic.

No.

Like the rain she has heard about in the tales told by the people who vaporized it. By the invisible narrator. Heavy. Refreshing. Full of life. That which quenches the herd. That which brings green to an otherwise inhospitable environment.

She’s been told to never speak to the contact. But her mouth opens anyway. This one is different, yet remarkably the same. His smile falters. The situation is designed to feel fine but she can sense the danger. The train is slowing where there is no station. No over-designed platform awaits. Unplanned stops are unusual, but not unprecedented. Her heart hammers inside her chest. She looks away.

And then her hand is in his.

Her eyes snap downward. His knuckles are scabbed and bloody. Something bad has happened. Trouble in the acquisition of whatever item she is about to receive. Looking up once more, she finds the face that is unfamiliar but so arresting. It bears the weight of ten prior meetings behind it. Ten separate days over the course of her new life. Her new affiliation.

The resistance.

“It’s been you the whole time,” she says.

With a grimace she realizes he doesn’t speak the language. He, she, they never have. This person is of another world. Another herd. But while the two of them may come from and are hurtling toward different places, their paths have intersected. Two lonely beasts finding one another on the edge of the oasis. Two trains colliding, tragic and beautiful.

The brakes clamp shut in an unexpected jolt, bringing them to a silent halt in the middle of a bridge. Commuters gasp and then regather themselves, but otherwise stay put. Frozen. The less movement, the better. With a hiss the doors snap open. Metallic footsteps and a swishing of coarse, synthetic fibers against pedestrian fabric. The other people aboard all find some other place to look.

The man nods downward. His face—this version of it—is bruised. She looks where he wants her to and doesn’t look away.

“Pardon me,” he whispers loud enough for only her to hear. She wishes to claw at his hands. His neck. His face. To kiss him and hold him so that he might not be taken. But she remains perfectly still. As instructed.

A bag is pulled over his face, the strange and wonderful face, and is zipped tight. She doesn’t need to see it to know it’s happening. He grunts inadvertently as his body is wrenched from the compartment.

Exit.

No jostling this time. No clamoring to get in or out before the doors shut again. The sliding panels hang open for a long time. A gaping maw. An invitation. An open space leading to a void beyond in an empty part of the city. A place none of them have been. The blackness calls, lonely, but receives no answer. The doors shut and the train begins its route anew, taking these people to or from some artificial mass. One pasture to another.

She dares to open her hand. Only a little. Inside she ruefully sees the gleam of silver. The clasp and the hinge. The broken ends of a chain that hung around so many necks but always the same life.

The heart-shaped locket with so much inside.

And she knows this is her last time doing this.