When being exiled to a remote island that once served as your nation's capital, you would expect to be treated rather roughly. At least, I expected it somewhat. Throughout my sentencing for the murder of a man who deserved to die anyway, I found myself thinking about the movies I'd watch from the rental store down the road. While I would always pick out fantastical tales of true love, my father, who brought home the paycheck each month, was the sort of man who preferred crime dramas. Astoria's Old Country once made up the entirety of our country's borders. Where Astoria now stood was once untamed frontier, without any indigenous populations or signs of prior intelligent life. The rough climate and frequent natural disasters made the land undesirable for long-term use, but war had forced civilization to retreat off our utopian island and onto a proper continent ripe for expansion.
I bring this up as necessary context to understand that the Old Country is truly beautiful. It was not through any willing desire to leave the over-developed island a few days' trip off the coast. Rather, with the booming population and looming threats from the neighboring country, Astoria simply had to pack up and move. As a largely peaceful nation, it was only natural we would leave our weaponry and undesirables behind in Heaven.
My father dreamed of moving to the Old Country someday. He would watch these films of mobsters and cowboys who were cast out from Astoria and sent to the lonely, seemingly post-apocalyptic island. These hardened criminals in the movies would establish crime rings and seafaring smuggling routes. They would construct their own towns and communities. Some of these movies were particularly fantastical. I remember one where a brilliant scientist was framed for the crimes of his partner, and when he arrived on the island he worked in a foreign-run underground laboratory for nuclear weapons. I remember the cowboys (my favorite of these types of movies, as they were always played by handsome men with strong morals who happened to end up with the short end of the stick somehow) would try and restore order to the Old Country's outskirt villages and save the farmers' daughters.
In a rare instance of bonding with my father, he gave me his old magazines containing interviews with the actors from some such movies. One of them, the illustrious Adam Hazelton, was my father's favorite. He would flip through the magazines and tell me about how Adam had grown up in the Old Country and acquired citizenship in Astoria through war efforts. I remember being puzzled by this, as I had only known Astoria as a largely peaceful country without any sort of military. This was a mistake to vocalize, as my father then went on a several-hour-long tirade about how the youth these days were bought into propaganda. I learned that day that, in fact, Astoria still maintained several military bases along the outer edges of the Old Country, and Adam Hazelton had spent his entire youth serving at the front. How horrible, I thought, that a boy younger than even myself should hold a gun like that, as I looked at a bright-eyed, ten-year-old Hazelton wielding a rifle nearly as large as himself.
I was startled out of these memories by the yanking on of my handcuffs by a tall woman. Without a word she guided me through a series of steel pathways that I could sense immediately were the interior of a ship. Without having the chance to say goodbye to my family or confess an apology to Alice, the Crossover Ocean was beneath me through some several hundred layers of ship. It was a fault of my own that it had come to this. "Guilty," I had answered to everything without a second thought. I was merely going through the motions as my eyes glazed over for several weeks. Perhaps it was the lack of fresh air to clear my mind.
My new temporary quarters wouldn't help to ground me either. The rugged woman with an apathetic stare left me to my closet-sized space, handcuff-free, guilt-free. I couldn't imagine how someone could leave another human being in these conditions without a second thought. The space was around six feet in height, six feet deep, and four feet wide. There was a foam mattress on the ground, if you could call it that, with a single blanket and a blatantly mildewed pillow. I never realized how coldly my otherwise warm country treated the expendable. Perhaps in another life I would have found out sooner and devoted myself to the cause of bettering these conditions. I doubt it.
There was no place to relieve oneself in the closet-sized cell. One didn't need to worry about that when there was no food or water to need to expel. It became apparent that part of the purpose of this trip was to softly euthanize my population, not truly transport them to the Old Country. If not for my ability to revert back into an animal form, I'm certain I wouldn't have survived. Survival mode had kicked in, thankfully. I wasn't panicked or erratic. I merely slept away the days, conserving my energy as I did in my youth to evade family holidays. From the smell in our section of the ship, I knew many were not so able.
Without an ability to tell night from day, the time passed by quickly. When we arrived at our destination I was not awoken at all. I would come to find out much later that a sort of sleeping gas was pumped into the holding cells to allow for safe retrieval and hauling. We would be loaded up into various trucks and dumped off one-by-one along the coast of the Old Country, en route to military bases that the drivers needed to make their next shift at anyway.
No, what would awaken me was instead the clamping of my hand by something cold and metallic. I stirred awake with a fright, unaware of my location or how exactly I had returned to my human form. Pain echoed in every part of my body, my head throbbed, and my throat burned from dehydration. All I could make out through my blurred vision was someone attaching a peculiar-looking device to my right hand, which had been propped up on a rock for easier access. Beneath me was a field that was significantly more comfortable than the bed in the ship. Heavenly, it seemed. Perhaps I was in Heaven right now. I closed my eyes, drifting off into a blissful slumber that I hoped would ease the pain.
I'm not certain if I was able to sleep at all before my face was inundated by a splash of cold water. All of my senses kicked into gear at once as my body lurched forward, spilling out contents I wasn't aware it had. Before I could take any time to process what was happening, the distinct metal taste of a flask met my lips and quelled the burning of my throat. I must have drunk it dry in under a minute, as I heard an annoyed grunt and some mumbling about "sharing being caring."
"Feeling better?" A voice as dry as my throat had just been brought me back to my senses properly this time, though I was still struggling to make out a face. "Now, I don't know much about why," the distinctly masculine voice stretched out the word why with a sort of whining, annoyed inflection, "or what or nothin', so don't ask me, capiche?"
". . . What?" I managed a tired grumble, only to realize I must have missed an earlier explanation regarding all of whatever it was that was going on.
"Now, you can get up whenever you feel like it," he continued to speak, disregarding my confusion. "If you take that glove thingy off, you go boom, got it?" This time he would wait for a response.
I didn't know how to respond other than with "Got it." I'm not sure it mattered at all anyway.
"It's gotta GPS thingy in there and all sorts of shit, so don't fuck around. If you even think about turning it on me or suicide bombing me or whatever," he paused for what was clearly dramatic effect, "I'll bury your butt so deep in this prairie they'll be pluckin' radishes out of you."
I paused, then stifled a laugh. The contrast of the word butt being spliced in with his earlier vulgarities, as well as the not particularly intimidating threat, made it difficult to take whatever it was that was happening seriously.
"Somethin' funny, you pebble of cow shit?" The voice became more harsh.
"You. . .," I tried to speak, though my throat stung fiercely each time I opened my mouth, "word stuff weird." Despite the pain I giggled again, coughing afterward as penance to my body.
"God dammit!" The unknown man hollered as he pulled me up by the neckline of my county-jail-issued uniform. "Just do yer job and don't go askin' for handouts! No one gives a hoot 'bout you now, got that? No fancy lawyers are comin' to save you, your family don't miss you, and your only job is to do exactly what you scoundrels get shipped over here for!"
I stared in shock as this unknown man shouted instructions into my face at close range. It's admittedly disgusting, but the way his spit hit my face and was then cooled off by the breeze felt rather nice. Even the feeling of being grabbed forcefully was nice at a time like this, the feeling of his arm pressed into my chest to hold me off the ground. I hadn't realized how weeks of no direct human contact would eat away at my mind like this.
He was much taller than me, despite having lifted me off the ground several inches. Looking up at him from that angle was straining my neck, and the light from the sun caused me to squint awkwardly to really examine his features. He was by every definition of the word a true cowboy. His skin was dry and tanned from long hours in the sun, stubble growing on his rough jawline that matched his sandy blonde hair. I'd never met a man like this before, not in person. I'd seen them in my father's crime films and magazines, but not in the flesh. It was like encountering a unicorn; I could hardly believe my eyes, and I certainly didn't want to take them off him. I stared as deeply as I could into his glowering brown eyes, hoping to establish some sort of connection. I'm certain to him I must have seemed insane.
And, perhaps I was insane. Here I was enjoying the feeling of a stranger's spit residue on my face and enjoying the closest thing to being held I think I'd ever come to again. Isolated, starved, confronted with the cruelty in my heart I didn't know I had. For the past few weeks my mind was in just as much of a prison as my body was.
"I. . .," I began in a strained but monotone voice, "always wanted to marry a cowboy."
Immediately I plunged to the ground as his grip loosened. I caught a glimpse of his red-tinged cheeks from my new angle. He stared down at me, speechless. It wasn't until I giggled again that he began shouting about something I didn't have the energy to process. He was so lively in contrast to myself. I wasn't certain if it was because his appearance and manner of speaking were so distinctly a work of fiction to me that I couldn't take him seriously, or if it was instead the feeling that I would always be able to get a harmless rise out of him. Teasing. I wanted to tease him for some unknown reason. I wanted to play a prank on this overly stern man who was babbling about bombs and killing people.
"Look," he let out an exasperated sigh before pulling me back up by the collar of my uniform again. Instead of dangling me again, he leaned me against the rock he had once used as a table to operate on my hand with. "You're going to kill anyone you see with a yeller bandana, got that?"
I stared at him blankly. "Yeller?" I found my left hand sneaking its way up, then planting itself on the man's stubbly chin. My right hand was weighed down by the still-mysterious contraption, and I didn't have the energy to attempt to lift it all the way up. If I was going to die, I was going to do so without inhibitions. I wanted to touch the scruffy stubble and by God I was going to do so. He seemed confused and mildly flustered by the sudden touching, but he continued to talk regardless. I don't doubt he was chalking this all up to me just being clinically ill in the head.
"Yeah-low!" He enunciated clearly, growing agitated again. "Then, you're gonna take them bandanas off 'em, and bring 'em to me. Every bandana is five silvers. A scalp will get ya ten. If you—," he paused, visibly annoyed by my fingers creeping their way around his face, and took my hand into his, away from prodding range, "if you need an explanation on somethin' just ask. I'll give ya a walkie-talkie as well." He stared at me sternly for a moment, his expression growing softer and then angrier. I could almost see the gears turning in his head as he attempted to muster up some sort of final response to the situation.
Instead he crossed his arms, tilting his hat down at me with a measured gaze. Whatever conclusion he had come to about the whole situation wasn't readily apparent. He was already crouched above me, and so it was no problem for him to slip an arm beneath my shoulder and stand me upright. The feeling of being pressed up against the rugged stranger was a welcome one, the smell of his body an oddly pleasant earthiness. After a few days at sea it was nice to feel stable in the legs. This happiness was short-lived as he pulled his arm away, causing me to slip back to the ground again. Repeating the situation again, and again, and then for the fourth time, it became apparent to the stranger that I truly didn't have enough energy to stand, let alone walk anywhere.
"Pain in the ass cat," he spat at the ground. "No handouts. Figure it out yourself."
He paused, looking up to the sky. It wasn't long before nightfall.
"Or die trying."