Read The Deadheart Shelters for Free Online

kids, pay for things… stuff like that. Things cost money, you know.”
    “I know.”
    “You’ll need something to do.”
    “Well what do you do?”
    “We are the sort that works all day and when we get home the true work begins. That is this; killing the synthetically born. There are other things but mostly it’s just this, now.”
    “Don’t you feel guilty?” Dirt asked. “Don’t you get ashamed?”
    The old man looked down at him and his eyes got suddenly lifeless and uncaring. “It would be better for you not to say things like that.”
    I helped Dirt to his feet and then we were standing there. The man started to say “It was good to meet you” but I spoke rapidly over him.
    “What will we do?”
    The man looked down. “Ours is an ugly work. Many of us are sick from it.”
    “I’m used to ugly work.”
    “We lose friends too frequently. The roof collapses on them or else they’ve just breathed too much of it in. Soon their bodies become useless, and it’s only luck that prevents this.”
    “What is your work?”
    “Coal mining. Would you like to do that?”

It was not long before we began. We spent the night in the old man’s apartment complex. He told us his name by then; it was Felt, because that was what his mother made; his brother was named Bluestone for his father’s work and he always wished it was the other way around.
    “Or at least a name like Chris. How about a normal name?”
    “Should I be named Chris?” Dirt asked.
    “No, because you are not normal.”
    We slept together on the floor, for already every cushion was taken by the men on the stairs or others like them. I missed my mattress however thin, and all night through the window I heard people still talking and hums from electric throats. Like vocal cords perpetually plucked and gongs bashed reckless, unstopped. The noise kept me unsleeping. I missed the conversations in the dark where I’m from, which softened gradually as we all sank to its lullaby.
    In the first morning an airplane exploded outside our window and left a dandelion stain on the sky. Inside, you couldn’t hear it. Like vanishing into a shower drain in blue, then a dandelion. Accordions of ash fell out of the wings and powdered the fire escape.
    I went to the window; everyone else was still asleep. On the sidewalks you could see the tops of their heads still moving. I climbed down the fire escape on ladders that could slide out like trombone valves. So I was on the floor faster. Then I could see the front of their heads, like pale melons with spilt wine for the lips.
    I looked down. It made me nervous to look up, where they were looking back. I followed my feet on the sidewalk and listened to the sounds, imagining where they came from: dumpsters rolled into each other, elephants getting shot. Knives. Dice inside the megaphone, the conversations you hear in sleep. Upon the layers of silence from before it seemed like crashing boats. Then I heard a sound like an underwater drum shaking out and stretching so that it soaked into your head and sat there, staying.
    I looked up. There was a man made of metal twice as tall as regular men, coming towards me. He came and sat down, legs crossed, in an empty parking space. Then his forehead opened up like an orange peel coming off and four men came out, dressed in black uniforms with disembodied teeth stenciled white on the chests.
    They went into a corner store, and the machine stayed put, nodding its head back and forth like someone half-asleep at a bus stop. Dozing. I crossed the street to look at it, then the uniformed men came out. They had an old man fighting to get out of their arms, screaming into a sock in his mouth, his eyes wild like chicken eyes when we held them down against the tree stump. A ladder came down from the machine’s vertebrae and they walked up, dragging him.
    Then the machine was walking away. Someone else walked past and I grabbed her by the arm. “Was he a slave?”
    “A