Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 101280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 506(@200wpm)___ 405(@250wpm)___ 338(@300wpm)
Still, I tried to make the trip at least once a month—it was the only kind of retail therapy I could afford now. Plus, it always made me feel marginally better to find something I needed or could use to brighten up my dark little world. Call it a mental health day.
Anyway, back to my hole. Across from the bed is the “necessary chair”—the only piece of furniture the hole actually came with. It’s basically a wooden commode with a hole cut in the seat. Mine was covered with a neatly fitted chair cover I’d also found at the dump, which disguised its true purpose.
I’d also had to scavenge a heavy, flat piece of wood to fit over the round hole in the middle of the chair. Moving it in the middle of the night if I had to pee was a pain, but it served several purposes. First, it kept the terrible smell of the sewage system that ran below from filling my little space. And second, it kept out the narchers—which were the Naggian equivalent of rats. Only these were the size of small cats and they had weirdly mutated-looking heads with two sets of eyes and two mouths—one right beside the other. Basically they looked like an animal that was supposed to be twins but had stopped dividing at the head, if that makes any sense.
The first time I saw one of these monstrosities poking its horrible double-faced head out of the necessary chair, I screamed so loudly the girl in the hole next to me came banging on my door to see if I was being murdered. When she found out it was just a narcher in the toilet, she was disgusted at my weakness—but that awful double-head and those four beady red eyes really scared the hell out of me! I guess the mutation allowed them to eat with one mouth and bite and fight whoever was trying to steal their food with the other—I don’t know. I was getting my PhD is Sociology, not Biology before I got abducted.
Needless to say, the idea that a horrible, mutated rat thing could bite my ass at any time I was using the toilet kept my bathroom trips to a minimum. I waited until I was nearly bursting before I went and I always threw a few small stones down the hole first, hoping to frighten off anything that might be waiting down in the darkness before I sat down.
Beside the necessary chair was a rickety counter space which folded out from the wall. This was where I kept my hotplate with its single functional burner and my limited supply of water in a large plasti-glass jug. Because of course there was no running water on most of O’nagga Nine—it would freeze in the pipes immediately—so indoor plumbing was only for the rich. Which meant there was no way to take a proper shower.
One of the Blood Whores down the tunnel from me had a larger “deluxe” hole that included an ion shower. I could usually pay her a cred chip to use it once or twice a week, as long as I happened to catch her when she didn’t have a client with her. It got me clean but I never felt really refreshed, the way you do after an actual water shower.
On a shelf above the hotplate and water bottle was my meager pantry, which at the moment was bare, since I hadn’t had the time or the money to do a grocery run, down to the little bodega-type store that serviced my tunnel. However, even when it was full, it mostly consisted of the Naggian equivalent of instant ramen.
Only instead of nice, springy noodles, the pasta the packets contained were brown and flat and brittle. They tasted like some kind of whole grain like buckwheat with a bitter aftertaste and they fell apart the minute you added hot water to them.
Still, the noodles were cheap—almost as cheap as the tubes of nutritional paste, which were my main form of nourishment—and they came in a variety of flavors. I had tried almost all of them by now and knew which ones I liked—and which ones to avoid.
For instance, because the Naggians have to consume blood to survive, that’s actually one of their favorite flavors for foods, too. And let me tell you, Naggian blood flavored noodles are truly nasty. They have this intensely bitter, metallic taste that fills your mouth and takes forever to get rid of. Zero out of ten, cannot recommend. But you can generally tell when anything is blood-flavored because the packaging is dark blue, which is the color of Naggian blood.
So that’s my hole—that’s the whole thing. I’d been living there, in cramped, third world conditions, for the entire time I’d been on O’nagga Nine. Despite all the things I had scavenged to brighten it up, it was a horrible, depressing place.