Chapter 17: Rest in Peace
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He wanted to fight. He shot at me like a spaceship from a launching catapult, reaching for my knees in a diving tackle. I sidestepped and reached for his neck and took it under my arm. He scrapped the dirt hard and got his feet under him enough to use his hands on me where it hurt. I twisted him around and heaved him a little higher. I took hold of my right wrist with my left hand and turned my right hipbone into him and for a moment it was a balance of weights. We seemed to hand there in the misty light, two grotesque creatures whose feet scraped on the road and whose breath panted with effort. I had my right forearm against his windpipe now and all the strength of both arms in it. His feet began a frenetic shuffle and he wasn't panting any more. He was ironbound. His left foot sprawled off to one side and the knee went slack. I held on half a minute longer. He sagged on my arm, an enormous weight I could hardly hold up. Then I let go. He sprawled at my feet, out cold. I went to the rickshaw and got a pair of handcuffs out of a compartment and twisted his wrists behind him and snapped them on. I lifted him by the armpits and managed to drag him in behind the hedge, out of sight from the street. I went back to the rickshaw and woke the bot and told it to move thirty metres up the hill. He was still out when I got back. I unlocked the door, dragged him into the house, shut the door. He was beginning to gasp now. I switched a light on. His eyes fluttered open and focused on me slowly. I bent down, keeping out of the way of his knees and said: "Keep quiet or you'll get the same and more of it. Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can't hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you're black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you're going to breathe right now, but that you're sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber and when you take that breath you're fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won't be air you'll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that's what they call humane execution in our habitat now." "Go fuck yourself," he said with a soft stricken sigh. "You're going to cop a plea, brother, don't ever think you're not. And you're going to say just what we want you to say and nothing we don't want you to say." "Go fuck yourself." "Say that again and I'll put a pillow under your head." His mouth twitched. I left him lying on the floor with his wrists shackled behind him and his cheek pressed into the rug and an animal brightness in his visible eye. I put on another light and stepped into the hallway at the back of the living-room.
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Part 1