Chapter 4
Ramon and Tyrell approached the small crew quarters located near the far end of the “West Wing,” just beyond the exercise room. Ramon led the way and was first to reach the door, finding it sealed and locked. He struck it as hard as he could several times with his fist, but realized he would never be heard that way.
“Here, try this,” Tyrell said, handing him a length of pipe he had been carrying as a weapon. Ramon took it and hit the door several times, pausing as the dissonant tones of vibrating metal plates faded.
“Watch out,” Tyrell warned. “I think that miner guy, Biggs, is still in there. I heard he throws stuff when he’s drunk. And you don’t get no drunker than when there’s no tomorrow for a hangover.”
Ramon nodded. “Biggs, open up!” he shouted. “It’s important. You need to let us in.” He rapped the door again several times. The noise died away and the silence that followed spawned a grim thought: what if it wasn’t Biggs inside? Ramon swiftly handed back the pipe and motioned for Tyrell to step off to the side of the door out of sight. His eyes swept the area for an intercom he could use in case of trouble. Just as he spotted one some five meters down the corridor, the door unlocked and slid open with thunderous force.
It was Biggs. The drunken miner filled the doorway with his impressive bulk. Under the same beard restrictions as dockmen, he had let his sideburns grow down until they connected under his jaw in what was called a chinstrap. After two full days in complete weightlessness, he had acquired the usual puffy cheeks of newcomers, giving him the look of an overstuffed junior high bully who hangs around the schoolyard looking for trouble. His piercing eyes warned that he was the type of man that alcohol made unpredictable and mean.
“Leave me alone!” he bellowed. “Get out of here or I’ll break your neck, you stupid dock rat!”
As Tyrell tightened his grip on the pipe and stayed out of sight, Ramon backed away from Biggs slowly and smoothly, trying not to alarm him with any sudden moves. “It’s cool, it’s cool,” he said, both hands open in front of him. “We just need to check the crew quarters real quick. There’s somebody on board and Cory wants—”
“I know all about it,” Biggs slurred. “Beat up a preacher. Heard it on the inner—” He stumbled over the word a second time and then gestured to the intercom on the wall behind him. “He ain’t in here. But if you find him, you bring him here. You bring him here to me. You got that?”
“I think Cory has different plans,” Ramon said.
“You just bring him here, you understand? Forget what Cory says. I know what to do with him. I’m not stupid. I’m not no stupid guy, you know. You’re not saying I’m stupid, are you?”
Ramon quickly assured him that he wasn’t.
“That’s good, ‘cause I’m not. I’d hate to think you was saying I was, ‘cause I’d have to put an end to that. You understand what I’m saying? I can’t have people saying things about me when it ain’t true, and that ain’t true. I ain’t stupid, cause I remember things. Lots of things. And I know what those cons done and I don’t forget anything. And I’d teach ‘em all a lesson. Don’t you think I wouldn’t, ‘cause I would.”
Ramon used his smoothest voice. “You sure would, Biggs. I can see that now. So I’ll be sure to let you know just as soon as Cory’s done with him, ‘cause I can tell you’re a really smart guy. Thanks for your help, and I’ll let you get back to, uh, whatever it is you were doing.”
“Cause they’re all trash,” Biggs continued. “Sorry, low down, no good…”—he searched for a better word, but gave up—“trash. That’s what they are, a big bunch of trash, every stinking one of ‘em.”
He leaned forward, closer to Ramon, nearly overpowering him with his rancid breath. “Let me tell you something. I ain’t ashamed to be no blue collar working man. It was good enough for my Pop and good enough for my Grampa. I ain’t no Alfred Einstein, but I ain’t stupid. I just punch the clock and do what the boss man says and get my pay at the end of the week. I bust my hump for every dollar I make.
“But that ain’t good enough for those cons, those trash types. See, they think they’re smarter than me—better than me. They think they’re too good to work an honest day like me. I might not have much, but what I got I earned. Then they want to come along and steal what’s mine. Take what don’t belong to ‘em ‘cause they won’t work an honest day. ‘Cause they got hands only for swiping things instead of for working. Little delicate hands that ain’t never been dirty or banged up or cut up from real work.”
Biggs gestured out with his massive hands and Ramon glanced down at them. They indeed showed the history of a working man’s life. Rough as coarse sandpaper, chapped and callused, with bruised knuckles and numerous cuts in various stages of healing. The dirty grime of mine work had worked its way deep into every crack in his leathery skin and into the cuts that had healed over, leaving permanent lines like tattoos. Ramon’s own hands, which were amply muscular and work-weary, looked soft and ineffectual in comparison.
“Look, Biggs,” Ramon started in a pacifying tone, but his appeal was ignored.
“And it ain’t bad enough that they won’t work like the rest of us. Once they get caught and locked up, they still ain’t got to work half as hard as we do. Most of the time they just sit in their cells watching vids and reading magazines ‘cause some convention says it ain’t human to make ‘em work more than six hours a day. And when we run short on a job and need some extra hands, we got to pay the prison regular wage for every man we use, even though you can’t get half the work out of ‘em you could from a free man. They’re lazy and they talk back, and you got to watch ‘em every minute. They call us “moles” and talk to us like we’re stupid. Like we work hard ‘cause we don’t know no better, and if we was smart like them, we’d be living the easy life. And if the guards look away for even a minute, they’ll spit on you. Or worse.”
Here he paused for a moment—almost long enough for Ramon to interrupt, but not quite.
“A couple months ago they busted a few guys’ arms. And about a week later, they jumped ol’ Zeke and put a knife in his back. He’s dead, and we ain’t forgot about it!” Biggs appeared to swell before Ramon’s eyes. Ramon tried to inch back and give him space, but found his back up against the wall of the narrow corridor. He saw Tyrell moved in as close as he dared.
Biggs stared at Ramon with his penetrating eyes for what seemed like an eternity, and then slowly began to deflate. He hesitated, as if to say something else, but the thought seemed to escape him. Instead he squinted in a directionless way, gazed blankly for a moment, and fumbled the door shut.
Ramon let out a deep breath and looked over to Tyrell with relief. Tyrell lowered his pipe and scowled at him. “Ain’t you going in? Cory said check everywhere.”
“Did you see how big that guy was? Jackknife may have muscle and a mean streak, but this guy could take him with one hand. If you want to go in there then have at it, but not me. No way.”
“But what if the guy we’re looking for is another miner and Biggs is hiding him?”
“No, the mining companies got their guys out of here first thing. Only a few guys were left this long to shut down the camps, and they all came up when Biggs did. There’s nobody left down there but the cons and a couple of guards. Besides, Biggs is only looking out for one guy: Biggs. I can guarantee there’s nobody else in there. Let’s keep moving.”
“I’m tired of this!” Tyrell erupted. “Tired of nobody listening to me, and tired of everybody fighting, and tired of this stupid hunt. We’re gonna die, Ramon. If we don’t do something, we’re gonna die for sure. You understand that? In a few hours, you’re gonna be dead, and I’m gonna be dead, and everybody here is gonna be dead, dead, dead! And not you, not Cory, not nobody’s doing nothing about it.”
Ramon affected a thin veneer of patience to cover his growing frustration. “Tyrell, we’ve all done what we can do, and we managed to save an extra twenty people by lightening the transport and overf
ueling it. I don’t think you’d be complaining that no one’s done anything if you’d been onboard.”
“Well, that’s the problem, now ain’t it? ‘Cause I ain’t onboard. I’m not saying I don’t care about nobody else, but I’ve got people counting on me being alive, and I ain’t gonna give up until I figure out how to make that happen. If you want to help me, maybe we can both find a way out of this. But if you want to give up and waste what time you got left on this stupid duck chase, you can do it without me.” Tyrell flung his pipe down defiantly.
Ramon’s face reddened, but he maintained an even tone. “There’s such a thing as dying with dignity, Tyrell. Dying the same way you tried to live, by doing your duty and doing justice to the end. Keeping your cool and knowing that a whole life spent in control is a lie if the last hours are spent like a wild animal caught in a trap. You can kick and scream and fight all you want, Tyrell, but it won’t change anything—except maybe the truth about who you were all along.”
“I’ll tell you who I was all along, Ramon, a survivor. I never was a quitter and I never will be. If you’re saying that the end shows who you were all along, then that’s all we agree on. And it’s gonna show me being somebody that survives, or a least dies trying. Dying with dignity is still dying, Ramon, and once you’re dead it don’t matter how it happened. So if we both die here, your ‘dignity’ ain’t worth nothing. But if I find a way out, that’ll be worth everything.”
“Tell me, Tyrell, what are you going to come up with in the next few hours that nobody else has thought of in the last two weeks?”
“I don’t know, cause I ain’t come up with it yet. But it’ll come to me—it has to. Don’t look at me that way, Ramon. I know what you’re thinking. You think that just cause all the smart guys couldn’t come up with something, then I don’t got a chance. But maybe they were thinking wrong. Maybe they were thinking too big. They were looking for ways to save twenty people, but I only got to find a way to save one. I figure that made their job twenty times harder than mine, so I got an advantage. And since nobody around here seems to care what I think, and nobody wants to help, then I’m gonna have to do it alone. Nobody’s been looking out for me, so why should I be looking out for them?”
“You know that’s not true, Tyrell. Cory’s hardly slept for nearly a week. And ever since the word came about that transport breaking down, all he’s done is work this from every angle. He managed to save twenty extra guys, and that’s all he thought he could do without risking the forty already on that transport. If he could have saved even one more, he would have done it. And if he could have picked one person himself, you would have been at the top of the list. You know he’s always looked out for you.”
“Cory ain’t done nothing for me!” Tyrell hissed. “I got what I got cause I work hard. I would’ve got the same anywhere I worked.”
Ramon’s fists clenched as he took a deep breath. “Don’t say Cory hasn’t done anything for you, Tyrell. There’s things you don’t know.”
“What I know is that he slaps me on the back and calls me ‘son’ and says he likes me. But whenever there’s a dirty job that nobody else wants to do, I’m the one that gets stuck with it.”
“That’s because he trusts you to do it right,” Ramon said. “You and me are probably the only guys he really trusts, so, yeah, he expects more from us. But he also treats us good and rewards the extra effort. You know how many people on this station got a pay raise in the last two years?”
“I’m sure you’re gonna say two.”
“That’s right—you and me. And it wasn’t any five percent raise like anyone else would have got, Tyrell. He had to pull strings to get us twenty. He had to call in favors on that one, but he did it.”
Tyrell was unmoved. “You’re acting like it was his own money or something. He might have had to bend the rules, but it’s still the company’s money he was spending. I don’t see anything personal he’s done for me. I just know that he worked me like a dog and I let him get away with it ‘cause he’d throw me a little bone sometimes. Tell me one thing he ever did for me that was more than business, Ramon. Go ahead!”
Ramon held his breath for a moment. When he finally released it and spoke, he did it in a controlled tone. “Cory’s done more for you and your family than you’ll ever know. But as for details, it ain’t my place to say.”
Tyrell’s face was the picture of disgust. “That’s what I thought. He ain’t really done nothing for me, so I don’t see no reason why I ought to waste the time I got left doing what he says. I don’t owe him nothing. He didn’t listen to me, and I can see you’re not gonna help me either. Go ahead and die with your dignity if that’s what you want.” Tyrell reached for a handhold on the wall, and a strong tug sent him sailing down the corridor. “From now on, it’s every man for hisself!”
“And God for us all,” Ramon added softly. “I hope.”