Walking Dollar Bills

Chapter 32: Between Bone and Metal

Dim yellow lights illuminate Dictator Beneficence's conference room. Flashing on the wall, to the left of the room's long table, is a projection of the events currently taking place in the fourth ring of the Benevolent district. The Dictator folds his hands on the empty table and silently observes the events on the screen.

Piles of his book, the sanguine pamphlet, fill the inside of pull-along wagons. Citizens drag the wagon to the fire, pass copies of the book to those standing around, and then hurl them into the enormous flame building in the center of the arena. Other citizens cheer and hug in obvious celebration of their criminal acts.

Dictator Beneficence does not react to these images. He only watches them. Suddenly, the images on the screen turn to black. Dictator Beneficence drops the remote on the table and shuts his eyes. Quietly, he exhales through his tiny nostrils.

"I'm growing sick of people."

He opens his eyes and speaks to the empty room,

"I installed those cameras around the fourth ring specifically to keep track of the black markets, and merchants attempting to swindle me. But this is perhaps the ultimate form of treachery."

"Yet, I don't care at all. I've gotten sick of the Human race just as I've gotten sick of the Viper race and the Hornet race. There's a new race making its claim of supremacy" says Dictator Beneficence

He exits his chair and steps out of the conference room.

***

Sparks fly and machinery growls. Inside of a laboratory, roughly the size of a bedroom, a man wearing welding goggles burns a metallic substance sitting in a tray with a welding torch. Tables of machinery jam into the room at odd angles. Atop the table is a disorderly assortment of knives, blades, scissors, and other surgical tools of all shapes and sizes. Along one wall of the room, sits an enormous shelf stretching across the width of the entire wall and ten rows high. The shelf is not full of books. Instead, the shelf is full of medium and large cylindrical glass containers with bones inside of them.

Femurs, skulls, sternums, rib cages, spinal columns, and hundreds more neatly fill the inside of the containers and fill the massive shelf. Not an inch of space exists between the containers. They too jam together side by side.

The man switches off his torch and drops it on the messy table. A loud clang vibrates throughout the room. The man wears dark blue insulated coveralls with a white apron over it. Black steel toe boots cover his feet and smudge-stained latex white gloves cover his hands.

As the man walks over to the shelf crunching noises spring up from the floor. All over the ground are bones. Seas and seas of bones. It's as if he has a carpet made of them. They chip and snap as he steps on them.

The man pulls his goggles away from his face and allows them to dangle below his chin.

Then, he pulls a glass container, with a long ulna bone inside, off of the shelf and places it on the end of a nearby table. Next, he grabs the tray holding the metallic substance and sits it beside the ulna. The glass container flashes the man's reflection across its surface.

The man's face is as hard as the metal and bone he works with. His pinkish puffy eyes appear swollen and the skin on his face is full of pockmarks. There is no hair on his face; although his eyebrows are bushy. Lastly, he has a bald head full of dents and scars. Instead of a smooth skull, his head mirrors the curvatures and rigidness of a rock.

"At last," he croaks with a voice as low as a bass that almost sounds robotic.

The metallic substance on the table is the mirror-image of the ulna bone next to it.