Route S99

Route S99 is a story set in the Highland Republic's Southern Frontier Zone, where the need for labor has driven the regional authorities to seek criminals and other societal or legal rejects for forced labor projects. Prisoners of these camps live a harsh life with few comforts, often for years at a time. They are overseen by a cadre of guards, and are rarely guarded closely. Escape seems impossible in the unending vastness of the Frontier Savannah, but one man is determined to be free.

Paco awoke to the sound of the Tender's boots walking across the crusted earth. He stared at the ceiling of his tent as it shook gently in the pre-dawn breeze. Three dozen other men lay as he did, asleep in their uncovered cots. Some of them snored, they slept so soundly. The guilty ones Paco thought. He was not like them; he could not sleep. Despite what the others kept telling him, he did not get off "lucky". Paco glanced out the screen window of his tent, at something which he could not see yet but he knew was there; a granite upcropping of stone in the distance. During the day, it could be seen from camp. He wondered what the camp looked like from the top of its thirty foot peak.

The Tender stepped up onto the wooden flooring of the tent and rapped his long, white deadwood swagger stick against the metal pole of the nearest bunk. It made a hellish ringing, and in the still silence of the early morning, it sounded like firecrackers going off.

"Rise and shine, goffers! On your feet!" the Tender shouted, his final words lost in the rustle and shuffling of unwashed bodies as they leaped into their work-boots and picked up their dusty canvas rucksacks. Paco laid upon his cot for a moment longer than he needed. It was his way of rebelling. If that damned Tender got one less second of work out of him, it was Paco's victory. To wait too long, however, would mean that this unfortunate skunk would be left with no food for the day. If he went without eating for two days in a row, he might collapse from exhaustion on the job, which results in far worse treatment from everybody.

Paco swung his legs over the side of his cot, and tipped his boots over onto their sides with his feet. A dust-beetle came screeching out of his boot, disturbed and angry to be robbed of the nice, damp, shaded cover it thought it had found for the punishingly hot day ahead. Paco looked up at the vulpine man who occupied the bunk next to his. He wasn't watching. He didn't see Paco slip his field-crafted knife out from under the back of his tanktop into his boot. That knife was his protector, but if he were ever to be found with it, would be his death sentence.

Outside the tent, the workers shuffled together into a four-man-deep formation, standing more or less at the position of attention, hands down by their sides, heads looking straight forward. Some of the men yawned loudly, others closed their eyes and tried to sleep, even while standing. The sun turned the sky a foreboding red. Be extra careful today, Paco thought. The Jerod-worshipers here thought it particularly fun to torture others on days the sun rose red.

"Herrroooiiiggghhhtttt..." the Tender boomed, "HACE!" With a lazy shuffle, the men obliged, turning to the right. Again, Paco waited as long as he could without being noticed to do so. Ahead of them was a bare flagpole, and behind it, more interestingly, the mess tent, alive with activity and light as the cooks finished enough meals for the entire day.

The tender nodded to the flag detail, then commanded, "Kneel before the Colors!" The workers quietly dropped to one knee, and placed their right hands over their chests. Two of the Cadre approached the flagpole, attached the black and red Tricorn, and quickly drew the Highland Republic's flag to full mast. Once it reached the top, the hooks made a loud clang, and the workers rose back to their feet.

The tender waved them forward with his walking stick and moved out of the way. In a great hustle, the workers raced for the mess tent, trying to grab what appeared to be the largest of the paper-wrapped bundles of food. Paco raced with them, and tried his best to grab what would have been the perfect one, but, instead, was beaten to it by another, and found only one which must have been made after running out of a ingredient item. It was light, and perhaps half the size of the other bundles. Several of the men laughed at his misfortune, but all shoved their bundles as quickly as they could into their rucksacks, next to their assortments of goggles, gloves, and sunscreen caps. Sand and dirt was everywhere, and even after a short six-hour night, just moving the flaps and pockets of the rucksacks around cast up huge clouds of dust into the air.

"On the trucks!" the Tender ordered, smacking whomever was in reach on the backs of their heads. "Move! Move it! Move it!" The crowd shuffled over to the trucks, the excitement of receiving food now gone and the reality of yet another day's work staring them in the face. Lupine, Ursine, Feline, Canine, Rattus, Latrano, it didn't matter. Workers clambered aboard the trucks, no one man turning back to help the next up. Nobody talked to each other. Some men sat down and immediately attempted sleep. Fewer still were able to stay asleep when the diesel engines roared to life. With pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows rattling noisily at their feet, piled as high as their shins in the beds of the cargo trucks, the convoy rolled out. Behind the last truck was the Tender and four Cadre in a converted civilian sport utility vehicle. It had its suspension raised and heavy-duty frame reinforcements installed, which made it ride almost as high as the transport trucks. Paco sat at the rear of the truck's bed, staring at the Tender in the passenger seat of the SUV. The Tender stared back. Paco did something he hadn't done since he arrived eight months ago; he smiled. It would be the last day the Tender would see him. The last day any of these workers or anybody working on Frontier Route Southern Ninety-Nine Innsaway/Shankhead would see him.

Escape was on Paco's mind since day one. Many months ago, he stood before a judge, his feet chained to the floor like he were a wild Quetz.

"You stole from an established business, convict!" the judge roared at the sentencing. "A thief! Had it not been for the size of your pockets, you would have run him out of business by your larceny!" The canine judge, with his loose jowls, floppy ears, and deflated cheeks, shook his head as he spoke, jiggling the flesh on his face as he waved a damning finger at him.

"I stole a loaf of bread! To survive!" Paco pleaded. "I have no money! I have no job! I had to! I'm willing to repay the owner but--"

"Enough! Enough of you! Had you petitioned your city for an emergency stipend, you would have had enough to survive until it was able to re-locate you. You could have remained within the bounds of our law. Instead, you chose crime! You chose anarchy! You chose treason in the most petty form. You betrayed your fellow countryman's trust in us all."

Paco thought it a particularly cruel punishment when he was sentenced to three years' hard labor in the frontier. "You'll be fed, and you'll have an opportunity to put those strong survival instincts to the test." The judge was right. Today was the day. If he was to survive, he would escape.

What the judge never asked of Paco was what he did before he lost his job. Paco was one of the few men to ever perform a detailed analysis of subterranean rivers in the southern frontier. It wasn't hard to convince his overseers to assign him to one of the hardest working details the Republic had to offer. Paco knew every inch of the plains he was on. He had spent hundreds of hours memorizing maps for his research, and it had yielded interesting results. There was water barely ten miles from where they were working on the roadway. Paco could make it there in less than a day, and he intended to.

He had the route mapped out in his head, and a plan firmly in place. During the day, roll call was only taken at the work site three times; the start of work, the start of mid-day break, and the end of work as they got back on the trucks to return home. It was the last day they were working on this stretch of roadway. Tomorrow, they would be who-knows-where, working on some other portion. Paco had stashed enough supplies to get him there. For the last four days, Paco had been stashing items under a stony hollow not far from the work site. Workers were not chained together or watched particularly closely. The mentality was that there was over a hundred miles of scorching savanna between their work camp and the next known source of water, which happened to be the next work camp.

The workers disgorged from their trucks and picked up their tools: one spade shovel, one pick axe, and one banana-yellow plastic flask of water. They stretched and yawned more in the early morning sun, and were counted.

"One!"

"Two!"

Paco waited for the number before his to be called.

"Fourteen!"

He didn't say anything. It was his custom.

"Where is fifteen?" the Tender barked.

"Fifteen," Paco droned. He could see the Tender look at him and scowl from under his cap.

"Sixteen!" the next man shouted. The Tender forgot about Paco and moved on to the other men, berating those who hadn't picked up the right tools and smacking around those who stood too close. They stretched out along the road and hefted their pick axes in the air. The Tender held a whistle to his teeth and blew hard upon it, letting the air be ripped by its shill call. The clang of tools began immediately. Nobody looked up to the Tender or the Cadre as they leaned against the SUV some distance away, breaking fasts on some crackers and peanut butter, their scoped semiautomatic rifles resting on the hood of the vehicle, ready to be used if a worker dared step beyond the parked trucks.

Paco shoveled debris off the side of an escarpment, down into a dry ravine. It kicked up huge tufts of dust. It hadn't rained in days. It would make his initial escape easier, for certain. The sun beat down upon the workers, and by two hours in, the pace of work had slowed significantly. The breeze that had kept them cool the day prior had disappeared, and the few scattered clouds which offered blissful moments of shade were nowhere to be seen. The temperature soared into the forties, and soon the workers were tapping the bottoms of their water flasks, shaking the last drops out into their dusty, gaping mouths.

Mercilessly, the Tender and the Cadre sat on folding chairs beneath the shade of a blue tarp strung between the SUV and some posts, drinking chilled water from a large sports cooler. When their Legion surplus canteens ran dry, they would hold it under the spigot and refill, only to take another big gulp of the icy cool drink. Workers would steal glances at the SUV, and curse under their breath. Paco knew it was a method of control. By keeping the workers thirsty and hungry, they would have less energy to escape. If he were a cruel man, or a man in the position of the Cadre or the Tender himself, Paco admitted to himself he would do the same thing.

Ages passed. Spit turned to mud in the men's mouths, the sand and dust grinding between their teeth when the clenched their jaw to swallow gritty mucus. Just when it seemed the day would never end, the Tender blew a long blast from his whistle. He held the mouthpiece for the vehicle-mounted loudspeaker to his nose and pressed down the toggle.

"Ten minutes," he growled, returning to his half-eaten cold cut sandwich. Two of the Cadre returned to their naps, propping their feet up on an empty water drum. Paco sat, legs folded beneath him, rucksack on his lap, pretending to unwrap his meal for the day. Around him, the inmates were too busy to notice and too hungry to care. They tore into their stale half-loaves of bread packed with beans and rice, and never once looked up.

Paco was staring at the Tender as he checked his watch. The Tender stood and picked up the mouthpiece, staring at what Paco imagined to be the second hand as it neared the twelve at the top of the watch's face.

"Count off."

"One!"

"Two!" the men shouted and raised their hand at the same time. Paco smiled inwardly. This was it.

"Fourteen!"

"Fifteen!"

"Sixteen!"

The Tender didn't glance twice. He was already walking toward the edge of the finished portion of the road, unzipping his fly to relieve himself onto the grass. As the count continued, Paco readied himself. The time between now and the end of the day's count was the longest in any twenty four hour period. He would have eight and a half hours, if he did it right, before his absence was known. He still had a full flask and a meal in his rucksack. It was now, or never. His shovel lay beside him, the spade still full of the softest rubble he could find. Once he threw it down the escarpment, there would be no way to tell a five-ten skunk followed and ran headlong into a gullet.

It was the last damned whistle Paco would ever have to listen to. When the men stood, they dragged their feet and groaned as they picked up their tools. Paco hopped up, still watching the Cadre and the Tender. There was only one set of eyes observing the workers. Paco slipped his rucksack over his shoulders, pulled his cap down tight around his forehead, and threw the rubble into the ditch. He darted down into the dust cloud and sprinted as fast as his legs would carry him before diving into a shallow gullet, no more than two feet wide and four feet deep. He laid there, on his side, his pack containing all his worldly possessions crushing him, for five minutes. He listened for any sounds of alarm. He heard only the sounds of continued work. Feeling flush with victory, Paco poked an eye above the wall of his trench. His fellow workers hadn't even noticed his escape.

He crawled through the razor-sharp stones, staying as low as he could. Paco had looped his rucksack's top handle around the top of his boot, as to drag it behind him, lowering his silhouette further; a technique he'd seen in a documentary on Legionnaire Rangers. Keeping his cheek in the dirt, he pulled himself forward, arm length by arm length. His heart pounded inside his ribcage, his whole body shaking with adrenaline. It took all of Paco's willpower not to stand and simply run as fast as he could toward the ridge. Instead, he kept himself down and crawled like a snake.

With his hands and arms bleeding from dozens of small cuts, Paco reached the end of the gullet. The final stretch between himself and freedom was a fifteen meter traverse between where he was and where he needed to be to avoid being seen. He risked a glance up out of his gullet. Paco could see the work detail in the distance, still pounding away at the roadsides. They had begun to mix the cement which would be laid down in order to form the base for the roadway in the future. Over a stretch of road, a trio of workers poured the cement, filling in gaps and smoothing out the surface with a plank of wood. The Tender and the Cadre sat by their SUV. One of them scanned the horizon with binoculars. Before Paco could react, he realized the Cadre member was staring at him. He froze in fear. His mind raced with thoughts. Most prominent was the urge to run, followed closely by a string of internal insults and comments on the stupidity of the decision to peek. Paco stared back with his one peeking eye, hoping beyond hope that--

The Cadre member turned away, yawned, and sat back down, tossing the binoculars onto the backseat of the SUV. Paco laid his head down in the dirt and laughed. He covered his mouth with his raw and dirty hands and stifled the spasms of laughter that were fighting to be let out. He calmed himself and righted his rucksack on his back. He lifted himself just an inch or three off the ground, enough to wedge a foot underneath himself, in a very squatted sprinter's position. With a deep breath, he lunged forward. The broken shale made a sound not unlike creaking glass as he ran, a sound that seemed like it would echo all the way to the Endeavor Sea, but it made no dust as he passed over it. Paco threw himself over the last two yards, landing face-first onto the ground. He tumbled down a steeper-than-expected hill, and came to a rest at the bottom. His green tanktop had developed a new hole in the front, and the loose flap of cloth danced in the breeze just below his neck. Paco sat up and looked out over the painted desert. It was no time to rest. He made use of the adrenaline he was feeling and set off at a running pace. The sun was still eastward, so he ran towards it, towards the watering hole.

Paco ran for fifteen minutes before he stopped and turned around. The only sound was that of the crickets playing amid the thin grass, calling to each other. The road was nowhere to be seen. The hill seemed far taller from this side than from the other; there was a good chance the Cadre wouldn't know about it, and would need an extra day to figure out the route of escape. Paco started walking, taking big strides, letting his hands hang freely down by his sides. It was the first time he'd walked somewhere without carrying anything for almost a year. His hands felt light and naked without a shovel or pick axe. The lightness he felt made him feel euphoric. In so many ways, the lightness his body felt mimicked the lightness of his spirit. He had overcome his fear and survived his first great test.

The sun began to set to the west. Paco ate half of one of the two meals he'd brought along, and managed to skewer a passing beetle with his knife. Though unappetizing, he knew it was a matter of survival, and managed to swallow it with a few pieces of bread. He joked to himself that it was a beetle sandwich. Right about then, Paco figured, they were figuring out that he was missing. He grinned to himself, tilted his head back and let out with a mighty,

"Fifteen!" Laughing and pleased with himself, he packed his trash into his bag and made for himself a pillow out of his kit. The water flowed cool, fresh, and clean over his bare feet. Paco lay naked, his clothes drying on a tree branch, his pelt cleaned of months of dust. With the stars above more brilliant than he'd ever seen, he closed his eyes and slept.

Clean clothes had been something that came "before", but not "during,", and now were his again "after." Paco laced his boot up tight, genuinely pleased with the way he felt. The breeze felt cooler and the desert smelled sweeter now that he'd cleaned up. He dropped his foot off the stone and squinted his eyes into the distance. The next watering hole was two days' walk. He filled his canteen in the clean water of the spring and scanned the horizon. There was a sharp cliff that jutted out of the ground seventeen miles away. If one didn't look for it amid the blue and brown haze, or if the weather had been less cooperative, it would be lost to the eye. Paco found it after a short climb up one of the flat-leaved trees he camped out underneath. Even though he could see it, it was still a long way's off. What was just a tiny speck on the horizon would eventually turn into a thirty foot tall granite rock face. The forces that lifted the stone out of the earth were the same which placed the water right beneath it.

Paco tucked his thumbs behind his rucksack's straps and marched, whistling to himself as he went. Intoxicated by his freedom, he let whistling turn into humming, and humming turned into singing, even if it was horrifically off-key. The day passed quickly, and he found himself with more energy than he knew what to do with. Months of breaking stones by hand had given Paco a strong back and a firm neck; the weight he carried did little to crush him down. That night, he stopped and drank fully one flask of his water. He finished his bread, bean, beetle, and rice, and resolved to save the other for later, despite his hunger.

Morning came. Paco scanned the horizon. He'd made more progress than he'd thought. Walking only during the early morning and late afternoon to save energy should have put him back, but not having a heavy weight to carry propelled him forward. Just seven miles to go. Paco would make a two day journey in a day and three quarters.

The water beneath the rock face was as cool and clean as it was seventeen miles back. After all, it came from the same source. Paco hummed a happy tune as he washed the sweat from his face and neck in the water. He hummed loudly and contently. Didn't, however, make the distinctive sound of an engine revving. Like a wild beast disturbed, he swung his head around this way and that, trying to identify the source of the noise. He crept around the north face of the monolith, peeking carefully as he went. Somewhere, a vehicle ground against its suspension, creaking noisily. Paco tried to track the noise as it went. The sound bounced off of stone surfaces and echoed across sand. Frantic, Paco scooped up his bag and went in the only direction he could find assured concealment from a vehicle on the ground; up. He sprinted around to the gentler side of the upcropping, and used bushes and stone like ladder rungs to ascend as quickly as he could.

Paco crawled belly-down across the top of the mesa, arms burning from the rapid climb. The sounds of the vehicle had stopped. He wasn't sure if it had left or not. Remembering the gullet, Paco just laid there, patient. He let fifteen minutes pass, then another just to be sure. With his shoulders baking in the sun, he pressed himself to lift his head up from the dirt. It was quiet again, with only the crickets chirping. He stood and looked out over the desert. There was nothing. If a vehicle was coming or going, he would be able to see it. In the distance, he could just make out his camp. The smoke was rising from the mess tent, as it always was.

Paco shrugged inwardly. He guessed it was only his imagination playing tricks on him. He turned to walk down the gentle part of the upcropping, down the southern face. With a sudden jolt, he froze in his tracks. Staring up at him were the stern but patient faces of the Tender and two Cadre members.

"Fifteen," the Tender growled. "Come down here." Paco gulped hard, looking over his shoulder at the work camp, and contemplating the jump from the top of the cliff. He calculated his chance of dying to be low. Too low. There was no way out.

They handcuffed him and searched him right there on the top of the cliff. They dumped the contents of his backpack onto the hood of the SUV, and drank water from their sports cooler. They took off his boots and threw them directly onto the back seat, leaving his socked feet to get dirty again on the ground.

"You know, Fifteen," the Tender said, almost as if he was speaking to a colleague or a friend, "you picked the worst time to try this shit. Did you know that? We just got new maps from the Survey Grant, and someone figured out where all these little underwater rivers come up to the surface. All we had to do to find you was go, one by one, along these holes. We did all the ones going south yesterday and this morning, and we searched the ones going north today. If you'd done this six months earlier, we would have never found you, Fifteen." His tone was frightening. He never spoke this way to anybody. Paco just stared at his feet.

"Camp wants an update. They want to know if we found him," one of the Cadre said from inside the SUV.

"Tell them he's still at large," the Tender said. Paco looked up, amazed, perplexed. Was this his lucky break? Was he finally free? After all that he'd been through, it was the Tender who showed mercy?

"Tell them I have a feeling he'll be returning to camp on his own accord." The Tender and the second Cadre closed the remaining doors of the SUV and started the engine, leaving Paco handcuffed and shoeless on a stone.

"W-wait! Where are you going?" Paco cried, terrified of what was happening.

"Back to camp, Fifteen," the Tender said. "Its going to be dark before you know it, and the weather tomorrow's supposed to be particularly bad. Hotter than today, even. I suggest you get moving." The tender pointed from the front passenger seat to camp, which was just barely visible, some twenty or more miles away.

"You can't do this!" Paco pleaded, trying to stand, but finding it hard to gain a balance on his feet with his hands still bound behind his back. "I can't make it back to camp like this!"

The Tender furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. "You're right. We can't do this." He reached into the backseat and found Paco's water flask. He unscrewed the cap and threw it to the ground at Paco's feet, letting the water splash out.

"See you around, Fifteen."

On the drive back, the three men sat in the rocking SUV in relative quiet. The music playing on the CD changer skipped occasionally. One of the Cadre was filling out a single-sided sheet of paper in the back seat.

"So, just checking. Status of fifteen?" he asked, swinging the pen between his fingers.

"Dead," the Tender grunted, turning the music up louder. "I'll just save you the paperwork. Nobody ever makes it when we do that."