Project Purple

19 - The Pickleherring

Jannie was night-peeing in the squatter.

This was never a good idea, because it was so dark at night she had to memorize where the day's hole had been dug, or she'd be stumbling around, blindly tapping the ground with her foot for a good long time.

When she found it, she hitched up her skirt, moved aside her cumbersome undergarments, and squatted to do her business.

She had been rising with the others at sunrise. Since her ten minutes of shame in the pillory, she had done her utmost to submit to all the exacting rules; Jannie would try her darndest to be a compliant colonist.

Living in the rough had honed her senses, no doubt about it. With the absence of modern-day distractions, her vision and hearing had become especially sharp. Sensory deprivation will do that, she supposed.

It was the smell that told her of the intrusion-an anticeptic, hospital smell. Jannie hated hospitals. For her, there was no worse odor than disinfectant, not even the sickly-sweet stink of their food supply, most likely spoiling in the furkits (and even that made her want to retch).

Her nose told her the ammonia odor was coming from the Linganberry vines, and when she had finished her pee, she stood up, repositioned her garments, and stepped toward the Linganberry.

Then she saw it, a human figure in the moonlight, draped under a few of the vines.

"Who's that? ... You menfolk should give a lady some privacy," she half-snapped at the worrying outline of the intruder, probably male-though she wasn't sure.

She stepped closer, the reek of the twentieth-century cleaning solution now tremendous. And Janie Adamson sniffed the air unpleasantly and took another step toward the figure by the Linganberry vines.

Then she stiffened, like a cold worm had squirmed in her stomach.

'He's back!' went her rattled thoughts, 'Has Lindsey returned for me?'

Her eyes poured over him, as he stood before her, erect and splendid-though still very dead ... Those eyes, that baby face-such beauty in a man! Jannie had always been a fool for love, though she well knew the Cowleech would never return the feelings she had had for him.

Yet he was back, accompanied by a gross formaldehyde stink ... 'Is it embalming fluid coursing through his veins? Who would do something so barbaric as to stuff another human being?'

She remembered the words of their team leader in that frightening hologram: 'You're a team. You stay together.'

"I won't run," she mumbled, taking a somnambulant step backwards.

Her legs felt leaden, which was a good thing, because Jannie wasn't going to sprint off in fright-baby flight, no matter what these murderous freaks did to them. If they were so cruelly capable of disregarding the human decency of returning the deceased to their loved ones, then there would be no reasoning with them.

Another step back, and she heard the squishing sound before realizing her predicament-that her right leg had fallen into the squatter!

Jannie thrashed there like a one-legged puppet, up to her knee in the hole, unable to extract, as if it were quicksand, sucking her down through the feces-with the dead Cowleech staring at her, as if Jannie were some incompetent nincompoop, unable to separate herself from a hole full of poop, like they were one and the same.