Firefly--Life Signs Page 10

  He could have debated her interpretation of events. Had she not singled him out? Instead he said, “It’s just… I’m thinking about somebody I know. Somebody I’m convinced ended up in #23. A friend of mine.”

  “Another embezzler like yourself?”

  “No. This guy is a doctor.”

  “We don’t have any doctors at Hellfreeze, that I’m aware of. I mean, there was that one fella who got on the wrong side of Mr. O’Bannon. This was a few weeks back, not long after I got sent to Atata, and as I recall…” Meadowlark abruptly broke off, shaking her head.

  “As you recall…?” Simon prompted.

  “Nuh-uh. My mistake. Don’t know what I was saying. Must’ve been confused. There’s never been any doctor at #23. Leastways not while I’ve been an inmate.”

  “But you just said…”

  “I was talking about some guy who got on the wrong side of Mr. O’Bannon, yeah, but now that I think about it, he wasn’t a doctor. He had ‘Dr.’ in front of his name, but he wasn’t a doctor doctor. He was a dentist. That’s what he was. A doctor of teeth.”

  “Are you quite sure about that?”

  “Simon.” A hardness had entered Meadowlark’s voice. “If I tell you there’s never been a doctor at Hellfreeze, there’s never been a doctor at Hellfreeze. It’s a fact, and you’d best remember it.”

  Simon wondered how far he could push this. If Meadowlark liked him as much as she appeared to, there was a good chance he could convince her to open up. He didn’t credit her excuse about a dentist for one second. She had quite evidently been referring to Dr. Weng but had remembered that she was under constraint not to talk about him, just like the two inmates earlier.

  It wouldn’t hurt to show her a little affection, would it? Openly reciprocate the attraction she was showing towards him. Soften her up that way.

  “Meadowlark.” He spoke her name tenderly, with a smile. “I’ve got to say, meeting you… For the first time since they dumped me on Atata, I’m not feeling like I’m completely alone.”

  Her face brightened. “You mean it? Because I feel that way too.”

  He felt terrible doing this. Meadowlark was naïve, needy. He shouldn’t be manipulating her like this. Yet he had to.

  “I do mean it,” he said. “There’s something… The way you homed in on me when we were walking behind the Slugger. It’s like we were drawn to each other.”

  “Oh my God. Yes, Simon. That’s just how it was. Like we were made for each other.”

  “Yes.” Guilt was welling up inside him, twisting his stomach in knots. He forced himself to think of Inara. This was all for her. Toying with Meadowlark’s emotions was wrong, but if it helped with finding Dr. Weng, that made it justifiable. Just about. “Is it crazy to think that way?”

  “Crazy, but who cares?” said Meadowlark. She was beaming from ear to ear now. “Maybe, together, we can make Atata make sense. You and me, Simon. The two of us can be like our own little boat and we’ll weather any storm.”

  “I’d like to feel that we’d never have any secrets from each other.”

  Was that too much? Had he overplayed it?

  Meadowlark was now pressed up against him so tightly that her breath caressed his face. “No,” she said, the word as soft as a sigh. “No secrets. I’d love that. I’d know everything about you, and you’d know everything about me. Oh, Simon. You’re such an open, trustworthy guy. I knew that, soon as I set eyes on you. Makes me mad how your company treated you. But then that’s only to be expected. I told you I have a problem with authority figures, didn’t I?”

  “Uh, yes. You mentioned it.”

  “What it really is,” she said, “is I have a problem with dishonesty.”

  “How does that relate to authority figures?”

  “Oh come on, Simon! They’re the most dishonest people of all. We’re supposed to trust them, because they’re in charge, they’re theoretically the best of us—and yet they always lie. They always let us down.”

  “Well, I suppose quite a few of them do.”

  “Your department manager did. Your board of directors did.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And that’s typical of authority figures. For instance, there was this Shepherd I knew in the town where I grew up, back on my homeworld Salisbury. Handsome fella, he was, and he preached righteousness and morality, and he did it with fire and fervor, and to look at him you’d think he was the noblest, holiest, most upstanding man you’d ever met. But you know what? All along he was carrying on with a local woman, a married one, behind her husband’s back. It was like this open secret. Everybody in town knew—except maybe the husband himself, who’d always been kinda slow on the uptake— but nobody did a thing about it. Nobody called the Shepherd on it. He just went on doing it, betraying God’s word, the same word he hammered on about from his pulpit every Sunday. Hypocrite in a back-to-front collar was what that man was.”

  She spoke with frank disgust.

  “What happened to him?” Simon asked. “Did he get found out? Tarred and feathered? Run out of town on a rail?” On a backwater planet like Salisbury—famed for the export of a fertilizer product based on bat guano, and not much else—it wasn’t impossible that residents of some small, remote community would dish out summary justice.

  “Not really,” said Meadowlark. “He did get what was coming to him, though, in a way. There was this bum who’d been hanging around town for weeks, causing trouble. Big, mean drunk. He broke into the chapel one night, hoping to steal the communion wine. The Shepherd caught him in the act, and the bum killed him. Cut his throat.”

  “Oh. Poor guy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said poor guy. The Shepherd. So, okay, he shouldn’t maybe have committed adultery. But the way you put it, it’s as though getting killed by a hobo was some kind of divine retribution. As though he got his just desserts. Whereas in fact it was senseless murder, nothing more, nothing less. What is it, Meadowlark? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Her face was creased up, her eyes narrowed. It took Simon a moment to realize that she was furious with him.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” she snapped.

  “Say…? I was only… I mean, I just think you’re being a mite hard on the Shepherd, is all. He did something wrong, sure, but he’s only human. Nobody’s perfect.”

  “He should have gone on lying to us, is that it?” Meadowlark growled. Her anger was so intense, Simon felt himself shriveling before it like ice under a blowtorch. “Playing us for fools? Treating the scripture that he was supposed to live by like it didn’t matter? Like it was a bunch of rules for everyone else but him?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying… I mean, dying in such a horrible manner, it’s…” Simon was flailing. “Look, Meadowlark, I’m sorry, okay? I misspoke. I never meant to upset you. Can we agree to disagree?”

  “Why don’t you just go?” She shoved away the loose section of paneling. “Go on. Git.”

  Simon gave her a beseeching look. Meadowlark refused to meet his gaze.

  With a hapless grimace, he crawled out of the hole. Meadowlark slid the section of paneling back into place behind him with unmistakable finality.

  Simon stood in the laundry for several seconds, overcome with bewilderment. The change that had come over Meadowlark had been as stark as it had been sudden. He must have inadvertently touched a nerve, although he didn’t know how.

  All he knew was that he’d learned something about Dr. Weng from Meadowlark Deane, albeit not very much. He had also, through no fault of his own, lost any chance of eliciting any further information out of her.

  Maybe that was no more than he deserved. Leading Meadowlark on like that—it was unfair on her. She was far more vulnerable than she appeared, her insecurities well concealed but near to the surface nonetheless. He had trampled all over her like some sort of devious, heartless cad. If Simon Tam had a motto, it might be, “Treat others as you yourself would
like to be treated,” and in this instance he had not lived up to it.

  The sound of a gong reverberated through the building, ringing repeatedly.

  Dinner, he guessed, was served.

  He made his way towards the refectory, praying that the other three crewmembers had had better luck than him.

  25

  After parting ways with Simon, Mal roamed through the building but saw no sign of Dr. Esau Weng. Nor could he find anybody willing to be drawn into a discussion about the presence of a doctor at Correctional Unit #23.

  He did discover a no-go area, however. One end of a row of cells was cordoned off from the rest by a partition made of drywall with a doorway carved into it. Standing guard outside this crude portal were two intimidating-looking individuals. One was a heavyset man-mountain, with a chest like an oil drum. He was missing an ear. The other was a sturdy woman, not tall but very broad, with a lopsided haircut, half close-cropped, half down to her chin. Each of them had a metal star attached to the front of their clothing, fashioned from what looked to be a piece of tin can, with a crude “R” stamped in the middle. The star reminded Mal of a sheriff’s or deputy’s badge of office, but what the “R” stood for, he had no idea.

  As Mal wandered towards this pair, the one-eared man-mountain twirled his finger in the air in a “turn around” gesture, while the woman folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head to one side.

  The message was clear but Mal chose to ignore it and kept walking.

  “Where d’you think you’re going, pal?” the man-mountain challenged.

  “Mr. O’Bannon ain’t seeing visitors right now,” said the sturdy woman.

  “Well, I may not have an appointment with Mr. O’Bannon,” Mal said, thinking on his feet, “but I was wondering whether he—”

  The man and the woman, in unison, moved in on him.

  “You deaf or somethin’?” the man-mountain said, looming over Mal.

  Mal could have said—but didn’t—that if anyone here was deaf, it was likely to be the fella with only a single ear.

  “You best go back the way you came, right this second,” the man-mountain went on, “or you’ll be picking up teeth from the floor.”

  “Your teeth,” the sturdy woman added, somewhat superfluously.

  “Yeah, I figured that about the teeth,” Mal said. “Wouldn’t make sense as a threat if they were someone else’s. There any way Mr. O’Bannon would make an exception, just this once? Only, I’m new here, and I thought I should drop by, see the man in charge, say hello. Seems the polite thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” said the woman, “we heard there’d been some people come over from #22, and I thought I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Don’t change a thing,” said her male counterpart. “If and when Mr. O’Bannon wants you to see him, he’ll arrange it. He will at some point, just to give you and your buddies from #22 the once-over, check you out. Till then, you all should keep your heads down, your noses clean, try to fit in, don’t make waves.”

  “That’s sound advice, Otis,” the woman said.

  “Why, thank you, Annie,” man-mountain Otis replied. “I thought so too.”

  “Okay,” Mal said, weighing up his options. He didn’t much fancy the idea of mixing it up with these two. This was one of those occasions when discretion was the better part of not getting your face bashed in.

  Offering Otis and Annie a pleasant salute, tip-of-the-hat style, he beat a retreat.

  Shortly after that he met up with Zoë and Jayne, who had also drawn a blank in their search for Dr. Weng, and shortly after that the dinner gong sounded and they filed into the refectory along with the other inmates.

  There, having collected tin trays of food from the serving hatch, they sat down at a table. Simon soon joined them.

  Unlike the others, Simon at least had something to show for his investigations, albeit not much. He told them what Meadowlark Deane had said about the doctor who’d “got on the wrong side of Mr. O’Bannon” a few weeks ago.

  “That it?” said Mal. The four of them were keeping their heads together, their voices confidentially low. “Got on the wrong side of?”

  “That’s all she said. She claimed straight afterward that she’d been talking about a dentist, but it was just a clumsy attempt to cover up a gaffe. I’m certain she was referring to the unmentionable Dr. Weng.”

  “You couldn’t get more out of her than that?”

  “I tried, but Meadowlark, it seems, is a little… delicate,” Simon said.

  “You mean flaky.”

  “You could say that. We ended up arguing. She was arguing with me, at any rate. I don’t think she likes me very much anymore.”

  “Shame. You two lovebirds seemed to have a good thing going on.”

  “You know what I think this means?” said Jayne. “Means Weng’s dead.”

  “Could mean that,” said Zoë. “Could mean anything.”

  “But if he ain’t around in this dump anymore,” said Jayne, “odds are he’s six feet under. Where else is he gonna be?”

  “He could have left this place and moved to another Correctional Unit,” Simon said.

  “Ain’t an easy thing to do, though,” Jayne countered. “Those guys we met at the depot had a hard time believing we’d come all the way over from #22, and that’s the nearest unit to this one. ‘A few weeks ago’ was back in the depths of winter, when it’d have been even worse for traveling.”

  “Also,” said Zoë, “it seems unlikely Mr. O’Bannon would simply allow someone who’d crossed him to just up and leave. From what I’ve been hearing, he’s not a man you can piss off and expect to come out of it unscathed.”

  “That’s what I’ve been hearing too,” said Simon. “Meadowlark told me about these enforcers Mr. O’Bannon has. Regulators, they’re known as. It’s how he maintains order. Do something wrong, and they’ll step in and set you straight—with violence.”

  “I think I came across a couple of ’em just lately,” Mal said. That explained the homemade metal stars with an “R” on them. The Regulators’ badges of office. “Right friendly pair.”

  “What do you reckon, Mal?” Jayne said. “If Weng’s quit, or dead, then we’re on a hidin’ to nothing here, right? May as well call Wash in to pick us up. ’Less you’ve taken a liking to prison life and want to stay on and keep eatin’ this…” He paused to look down at his meal, his lip curling. “This whatever-it-is.”

  Their dinner consisted of a brown slop that was based around lumps of protein bar and seemed to think it was some kind of casserole. Accompanying it were mashed potatoes and creamed corn, although since both were made from powder it was hard to tell which was which, plus a limp, anemic-looking bread roll on the side.

  “You talkin’ about giving up, Jayne?” Mal said.

  “I’m talking about cutting our losses. We’ve tried. We’ve looked for Dr. Weng. He ain’t to be found. No point hangin’ around any longer. Ping Serenity with that transceiver of yours, and we can be offworld in a couple hours.”

  “And then what? I go back to Bellerophon and walk into Inara’s room and tell her sorry, we could’ve saved you but it was just too much effort?” Mal was keeping his voice even but there was passion in his eyes, and pain. “You didn’t see her, Jayne. You have no idea what this sickness has done to her.”

  “She wouldn’t let us see her,” Jayne pointed out. “Only you.”

  “That’s by the by. She was a ghost of herself. She was fading away right before my eyes. That xī niú cancer has eaten her up and left just a husk. But if there’s still a chance we can bring her back, even if it’s a chance in a million, then I ain’t giving up. Not unless I know for damn sure that Weng’s dead.”

  “There must be some way of establishing what’s happened to him,” Simon said.

  “At least one person here knows the answer, and that’s Mr. gorramn O’Bannon. We need to get ahold of that guy and have ourselves a serious chat with him.”

  “He doe
sn’t sound to me like the sort of man you can schedule a meeting with,” Zoë said.

  “He ain’t,” said Mal, “but it seems, from what Simon’s saying, that there’s ways of catchin’ his attention. Or at any rate the attention of those Regulators of his.”

  “How?”

  “By doing what I do best: misbehave.”

  “You mean start a fight?” said Jayne.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, Jayne.”

  “But you’ll run the risk of the Regulators hurting you,” said Simon. “That’s how they operate. You crack someone’s head, they crack yours.”

  “Lucky thing I was born with a thick skull,” Mal said.

  He cast a look around the refectory. His gaze alighted on a large man seated at a table nearby. He sized the fellow up. The inmate was massively muscled, but it looked like gym bulk, there for show rather than power or efficiency. His shaved head was as round as a soccer ball and covered in tattoos. So many images crowded together on his scalp that they merged into a single indeterminate mass of blue, red and green.

  Mal got to his feet, tray in hand, and strolled over to the large man.

  Simon buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t look.

  Jayne, by contrast, could look, and was grinning in anticipation.

  As for Zoë, she just shook her head resignedly. “That’s right, Mal,” she murmured. “Go for the biggest, meanest-looking person you can find. Because that’s going to end well.”

  26

  Picking the biggest, meanest-looking person he could find made sense to Mal. Taking on someone smaller than himself would look like bullying. Taking on someone his own size would be more sensible but still lack impact.

  He needed to get noticed. He needed to create a ruckus. And big, massively muscled men with tattooed heads did not like strangers coming up to them and starting trouble.

  Tattoo Head, he was sure, wouldn’t submit meekly. He would kick up a fuss.

  Mal was a couple of yards away from his intended opponent when he appeared to stumble. His tray went flying. He had left half his meal on it, and this now went splattering all over Tattoo Head. Globs of brown and yellow foodstuff showered his multicolored pate and oozed down his blue-gray jumpsuit. The tray itself slid off him and clattered to the floor.