PARCE: This is the third session of interview with Unknown Patient #307, “Snapper.”
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Sheepskin, Volume I
Part 1: The Old Ram
Chapter 3
307: I was late to school that morning, but I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people had stopped to watch the incident in front of City Hall. The hallways were still crowded in Little Piggy Primary School even though the bell had rung a few minutes ago.
Despite the bright pink sign on the outside, the interior wasn’t much different from the rest of the city. Flat grey walls, spotless floors, bathed in that fluorescent light that’s designed to give everyone headaches. As we went through the hall, we had to walk between these rails that angled closer and closer together until we were forced to walk single file. You couldn’t see anything but the ass of the sheep in front of you, but you had to keep moving or you’d get run over by the one behind you.
Right in the center of the building was a control panel built high on the wall, overlooking this chute we were all running through. A starling sat on top of the control panel. I don’t know how he did it, but his sharp little eyes recognized each student on sight. He would peck at switches to open and close swinging gates, sorting us as we passed underneath him and shunting each student into a different hall that led right to their classroom.
That room was a lot more interesting to look at than the halls, but not in a good way. The neon pink walls were back. Bright green carpet. Barf. At least there was a window. On every wall except the front, where the blackboard was, they’d hung up posters. Almost all of them showed the same thing: Charlie Chugg.
This smug pink bastard was the mascot of the Chugg Corporation. He was everywhere. He was in that TV commercial I wrote out for you earlier. He hawked all kinds of products, medications, and subscriptions to get us to hand our cash right back where it came from. But here at the school, he mostly existed to remind us to be good little citizens. The posters showed him making clever sayings or giving pro-social advice. He was in all the PSA videos the school showed us every so often. I prayed I wouldn’t see much of him anymore since I was at the end of Primary School.
My teacher that year was a blue macaw. She had a desk that was way too big for her, and she sat on a little wooden perch nailed to the top of it. I can’t remember her name, but I’ll never forget the migraines she gave me. She was always shrieking at the top of her lungs, and she had to say everything at least twice. My classmates and I lurched out of the hall and into the room to hear “Sit down, sit down, you’re late, you’re late!” We were two feet away and she was screaming like we were across the town square.
I went to my desk just to shut her up. I was in front next to the window because I got in trouble too much. One of my classmates, like an idiot, tried to explain why we were coming in late. The teacher just hollered that she didn’t want excuses because it was exam day. Twice.
Then she said we could take the final in groups of two, and almost everyone was paired off. She straightened up and stretched her neck high to look at the whole room. “Swifter, you’ll have to partner with Snapper.” I’ll spare you the repetition.
The last guy to enter the room made a face like she’d told him to jump off the roof. Nobody in the room would have wanted to pair up with me, least of all Swifter. He’d been the first of us to hit puberty—tall, athletic, handsome, you know the type. And his coat was stark white. Most of us saw some fade to grey by the time we were teenagers, but not him.
He rolled his eyes and slid into the desk next to me. And before you ask, Doc, they were the same desks you’d see in schools on this world. We were expected to contort our bodies to fit in them, sitting on our hindquarters and propping ourselves up on our forelegs.
PARCE: Why?
307: That’s just how it was. Some of the pigs, and I’m talking a tiny minority, walked on two legs and had arms and hands just like you do. They were the elites. They said it’s because they took after the gods, who also had hands. However they justified it, they built the whole world around themselves. We lowly quadrupeds just had to make do. Things that required hands were difficult for us, like I said, and I was always awkward, but we made it happen.
I couldn’t tell you how. Just like I can’t explain how my father built our house, I couldn’t tell you how I used my hoof to turn a doorknob or write with a pencil. I just did.
PARCE: That’s hard to imagine.
307: It was even harder to experience. It messed with my head, Doc. That world… it was off. It probably deserved what happened to it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Did you study?” Swifter asked without looking at me.
I shrugged. “No.”
He turned on me. “What? Why not?”
“It’s the same material every year, every test. You don’t have it all memorized by now?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot, you’re just so smart.” He shoved his way out of the desk and stood up. “Teach, can I pair with someone else?”
The macaw knew right away what the issue was. She’d put up with enough trouble from me over this year. She let him join up with another pair, leaving me taking the test alone. I preferred that anyway. He’d have slowed me down. Any of them would. That’s not me being a jerk, I promise. They had to study this stuff. I didn’t. That’s just how it was.
Tests were passed out. I flew through it in a few minutes and turned it in. That gave me plenty of time to sit and think. My eyes made a lazy trip along the wall from poster to poster on their way to the window.
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I sat up so fast some of my classmates turned to look. But I barely noticed. I couldn’t look away. That red eye. There it was. The creature at my bedroom window. It had come out of City Hall and followed me to school.
For a few seconds my eyes were fixated on that crimson gaze. Behind the glass eyeball, an irised shutter closed in like a camera lens, shrinking the red light down from an orb to a pinhole. I finally forced myself to turn away and wave for the teacher.
The macaw turned her head, giving me the profile so she could glower at me with one eye. “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”
I pointed with a trembling hoof. She glanced and then clicked her tongue.
“Durdge. Durdge. Someone’s stepped out of line and caught his eye.” Of course, she couldn’t be discreet. She had to say it so loud that everyone in the room stopped working. “Was it you, Snapper? You, Snapper?”
I just set my head down on the desk to stop my chattering teeth.
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She graded my test, congratulated me on passing Primary, and sent me out early. The square was almost deserted. No sounds aside from the gurgling of the fountain and the distant drone of Charlie Chugg’s voice muffled by the glass window of the electronics store. More than ever, the clean sidewalks and trimmed grass gave off a sense of unwelcoming. I felt like I was trespassing. And I felt eyes on me.
I stuck the folded paper in my teeth and set off for home. The guards let me pass without a word; their job was to control who entered Fleece City, not who exited. But even they looked perturbed about something. Their faces were stone, but their ears were on a swivel.
A stiff breeze bit through my wool and into my skin as I followed the dirt path. My ears tingled with the rustling of the tall grass on either side of me. My sheep’s instincts were on high alert. Things moved out of sight up ahead.
As I clenched my teeth and pushed forward, I began to dwell once again on how unfair it all was. They were powerful. They preyed on us, but they were smart about it. They ate us slowly enough that most sheep could dismiss the dead as rulebreakers and accidents. Anyone who sensed a conspiracy looked like they were crazy. Chugg had already won. How could I possibly threaten them? Why did they need to do this? Why couldn’t I just stay out of the way with my dad, in our house out in the country, and be left alone?
By the time I could see the house, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was just angry. Perfect timing, too, because that’s when I saw him.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
The red-eyed creature from my window stood in the middle of the path, no more than fifty yards away from my house. This time he didn’t startle me, as he had in the classroom. He was out in broad daylight. And I could finally see him clearly. He was shaped like a pig, one of the elites that walked on two legs. But he was tiny, barely taller than I was. He looked like a rag doll. His skin was a filthy, thick material, maybe burlap, poorly stitched, with stuffing bursting out all over.
The red camera eye stayed fixated on me. His other eye was a cheap plastic doll eye, rolling loosely in its socket, always pointing down. The pig nose had a metal grating inside the nostrils. There was no mouth.
Durdge, my teacher had called him. I had done something to bring him out in the open. And I had a feeling I knew what it was.
I veered off the path, pretending I hadn’t seen him. I took a few casual bites of grass and started to mosey back the other way. He didn’t buy it, of course.
My danger instinct was validated a second later when two more pigs appeared. These guys were quadrupeds, and unlike Durdge they were flesh-and-blood animals. They had identical pointed cheeks and tusks like meat hooks. And their eyes were just dead. Not mechanical, like Durdge’s. But like the eyes of a pickled corpse, thick and clouded.
They closed in from either side of the road. I was surrounded. There was no choice but to turn back and head for Durdge. The two warthogs fell in beside me. I was force-marched back to the red-eyed monster. He snatched the paper out of my mouth and unfolded it to read. Now I was more afraid, which made me angrier.
“That’s right, you’re Snapper.” His voice issued out of the grating behind his nose. The only way I can describe it is if you think of the sound of a spool of barbed wire being unrolled. Now imagine someone recording that sound and then playing it back over a hundred-year-old radio. That’s about what Durdge sounded like when he talked.
“You might say that,” I answered. “I bet you know my real name.”
“I know your birth name, which we both know you had best not say. You are legally Snapper, now and forever. And I know many other things about you. I have been keeping watch over you for your protection for a long time.”
“Out of the kindness of your heart?” I rolled my eyes. I don’t know why I acted this way. I dealt with fear by trying to act like I had none. Some people fell for it. Not everyone.
Durdge’s head tilted, making his doll eye skew to one side. “It is my duty to supervise sheep identified to have potential. You know, Snapper, I have seen you pretending to sleep, spurning my attempts to come visit and chat with you when I had a spare moment. This didn’t have to be our first formal meeting.”
“I know you try to get in my house at night. Why? What do you want from me?”
“I’m concerned about you, that’s all.” Durdge stepped aside and gestured with his stubby arm. “Walk with me.”
I did as I was told. We walked side-by-side along the path and the warthogs followed. My house was close. I hoped my dad would come out, but he had no reason to. The school day didn’t end for several hours.
“I am tasked with keeping peace and order in Fleece City,” Durdge said. “So when citizens have trouble fitting in with the culture, I take a special interest in them.”
I gritted my teeth and said, “I don’t fit in, huh? What gave that away?”
“You witnessed the unfortunate incident outside Town Hall this morning. I was afraid you might have been rattled, appalled, perhaps even traumatized. I looked in on you to make sure you went to school. And that you did well on your final exam. Congratulations on finishing Primary.” He turned his head, making the doll eye roll around again. “Have you given thought to your future?”
“I’m going to University.”
“That’s good, Snapper. I hoped you would say that. I worried that your father’s… unconventional ways would influence you away from your education and down a more troublesome path.”
I kept my eyes forward and tried my best not to look at that grotesque face of his. “Oh, I see what this is about,” I said. “You and your masters are afraid I might turn out like my dad. That’s why you’ve been spying on me. And now you think I might have gotten some ideas from what that sheep was saying before Entomber got him. Look, if I promise you I don’t want to cause you any problems, will you bug off? What do you want to hear? All hail Chugg?”
Durdge put a hand on the back of my neck. The scratchy burlap made me wince, but I kept it together.
“I’m only interested in your safety, Snapper,” he said. “Of course I don’t want you to turn out like your father. That would be the worst thing for you. The Old-Timer is just that—old. His horns have no place in our civilized world of commerce and reason.”
Now I was too pissed off to hold my tongue. “Civilized? After what I saw today, I’m doubting that. What happened with that sheep Entomber swallowed up? Was that just breakfast, or did that sheep end up as a tribute to the pig god?”
“What rumors are your classmates telling you now?”
“It’s no rumor. I’m not stupid, Durdge. I know all about Toxid. The flesh-eater. The Chugg Corporation sacrifices sheep to keep his favor. Everyone pretends it doesn’t happen.”
Durdge stopped walking and went quiet. “I won’t have you slandering my fellow pigs that way,” he said after a minute.
“It’s not slander if it’s the truth.”
“Do you know what your father and his horns really stand for, Snapper?”
“What are you talking about?”
“He represents the primordial mire that all other animals lived in before the pigs came to show them the light.”
He turned my head to the right and then craned my neck back until I was looking up Ptera Peak. “Look up there.”
I tried to pull away, but of course I couldn’t. Whatever he was made of—his fingers felt like steel under the rough cover—he was way stronger than I was. “My father says I’m not supposed to look at that.”
“And he’s right. No one is. But I want you to. Take a minute to really see it.”
I looked at the dead tree and the thing hanging from it. I had snuck a glance here and there before, of course, but this was my first opportunity to examine it without my dad barking at me to look away.
If my map earlier (here) didn’t make it clear, Ptera Peak was huge, visible from anywhere on our little continent. Up near the top was a cave with a waterfall. They said there was a natural spring inside the mountain. That waterfall fed a river that cut through the field on the far side of Fleece City. Beside the waterfall, about halfway up, was a dead tree. And hanging from that tree was a wooden figure.
A doll or mannequin or something, tied up by ropes and stuck through with iron hooks. Back then, I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be, you know, it wasn’t a sheep or dog or pig or bird. But now I can say that it was shaped like you or me. Like a human. The ropes and hooks pinned its chest and arms to a horizontal branch, looking like it was crucified. Its legs just swayed in the breeze.
And there were words carved into the branch, big enough that we could see it even from way down there on the field. The words said: “LET THE OLD WAYS DIE.”
Durdge shook me. “Do you understand now, Snapper?”
“Not at all. My dad said it’s there to be ignored.”
“Exactly. Just like him. From time to time you all need to be reminded of where you came from. That wooden figure serves that purpose. As does your father.”
“Oh, it’s not just about forgetting. You want us to have something to turn away from. You want the conscious choice—live like this and not that.”
Durdge squeezed my neck. “Snapper, do you have any idea how many of your peers are unable to grasp that concept? You have a good head on your shoulders.”
“Thanks. Can you let go before you pop it off?”
He leaned his face close to mine. He smelled like mold. All I could see was the red light, the lens tracking back and forth behind the glass. “I want your reassurance that you have not been affected by your unfortunate upbringing and the events you witnessed today. Remember what we’ve discussed here. As you turn from the wooden idol, turn from your father. Stay on course through University and come out on the other end as a productive citizen. Do we have an understanding?”
“My son told you to take your hands off him, Durdge.”
Both of us jumped. Durdge dropped my test to the ground and let go of my neck in a hurry. I didn’t waste a second in backing away from him. The warthogs didn’t stop me—they weren’t paying attention to me anymore. My father was standing on the trail about ten yards from us.
“Good morning, Old-Timer,” Durdge called out. “I thought your boy could use an escort home, seeing as he was let out early. These fields can be dangerous. There are roving packs of wild dogs, hungry eagles, and swindling magpies out here.”
‘Not to mention ass-kissing corporate lackeys who don’t honor their agreements,” my father shouted. “Snapper, go inside.”
I ran away from Durdge, but I stopped to watch as soon as my dad was between me and the pigs. He walked up until he and Durdge were only a few feet apart.
“I did my part,” my father growled. “I’ve been encouraging my son to ignore you, but you don’t seem to be getting the hint.”
“You know I won’t go away until my official duties are carried out.” Durdge tilted his head, keeping his camera eye squarely in my father’s face. “Your bargain with my employer is a separate matter.”
Old-Timer glanced to either side. “If you want to keep harassing my family, Durdge, you should probably think about bringing more than two next time.”
“You are awfully sure of yourself, old man. These warthogs happen to be perfect clones, exact genetic replicas of the elite soldiers that brought Chugg to ascendancy.” Durdge gestured with his hands, and his two bodyguards fanned out to either side of him.
“For someone who wants my son to forget the past, you are keen to bring it around with you.” My father coughed. “And it shows your ignorance, Durdge. Those warthogs… well, there’s a reason they aren’t around anymore. I’d guess I killed about twenty of them myself. I wouldn’t call them elite soldiers.”
My stomach dropped out and my eyes went to the red points of his horns.
Durdge tapped his finger against the side of his head, making a muted iron clang. “These are a mere security detail. I can have a hundred more here in minutes. You’re not the fighter you used to be.”
“You’re right. I won’t make it, and neither will your two thugs here, but by the time your reinforcements show up they’ll have to rake the grass to find all your pieces.” My father shifted his weight to stretch out his injured leg. “Your call, Durdge.”
I couldn’t have moved a muscle if I wanted to. Every bit of me was rooted to the spot. I was no longer scared of Durdge—but I was terrified of what I was about to see my father do. In that moment, facing the creatures, he was not Old-Timer anymore. He was Trampler again.
But he never made a move. The warthogs lost their nerve and scrambled back behind Durdge. My father laughed.
“Even though they’re clones, they know,” he said. “Fear of the ram’s horn is written in their blood, as it well should be. I’m glad they’re not going to do anything stupid.” He walked forward, causing the warthogs to retreat further. Even Durdge took a step back.
“My son may be different from most sheep,” my father said, “but he is no troublemaker. He has not used his healing power, as we agreed. He is smarter than I am. He’ll go to University and you won’t hear from him any longer. And I expect this to be the last time I have to remind you.”
“He nearly did use his power this morning,” Durdge grumbled. “In front of Entomber. Your boy gives no thought to consequences. I cannot allow such a disruptive influence in Fleece City.”
“Tell Entomber,” my father answered, “to back off.”
“He doesn’t answer to me. Tell him yourself.”
My father nodded. “It looks like I will have to.”
Without another word, Durdge turned and scuffled off down the road, back toward Fleece City. His two bodyguards followed, meek with fear and shame.
I stared after them and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding. Once they were out of sight, I turned to my father. He wasn’t there. I caught a glimpse of him disappearing back inside the house. Before going after him, I found my final exam in the grass. I grabbed it by a corner with my teeth, knowing my dad would ask to look at it. After today’s events, he would want to know I had done my part and said all the right things.
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Suggested Listening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT99C1WQfw4