The Lottery by Damir Salkovic

The Lottery by Damir Salkovic

When Danny woke up, a gray pall hung outside the windows, obscuring the grim lines of downtown. It persisted through his morning ablutions, a seal keeping out the sunlight. By the time he sat down to his morning cereal, the grayness seemed to have invaded his cramped studio apartment, the ugly corners of his housing block, his very thoughts.

His daily planner showed a list of outstanding tasks, but when he tried to concentrate on them, his fuzzy mind was distracted by small, irrelevant details: the lights of the intercity express train clattering eleven floors below, a distant ghostly argument inside the thin walls, the maddening, not-quite-inaudible clicking of his water meter. This last made Danny think of overdue bills and ominous marks on his credit report. It was time to put a dent in his caseload.

As he got dressed, he could feel the edges of the room close in, his heartbeat pick up for no identifiable reason. It was time to see a doctor about his tranqulizer prescription. Maybe talk about upping the dosage. But the very thought of the company clinic filled him with vague anxiety. He managed to button his shirt despite the tremor in his hands, closed his eyes, and went through his breathing exercises. After a few moments, he felt calm enough to face the day. He went out into the clammy hallway, the sound of the apartment door locking behind him like a final judgment.

The air on the still-dark street tasted of cold and fog. Slablike and decrepit, massive housing blocks towered above Danny, their tops lost in the poisonous haze. A few struggling lights were the only sign of habitation. People were moving out, or being forced to leave, the property being demolished to make room for new development.

Further down the sidewalk, a great hole gaped in the concrete, surrounded by construction barriers. The site was an unwelcome reminder that he would soon join the ranks of the displaced. There was talk of another round of layoffs at the hospital, and Danny’s quotas had not looked good for the past several quarters. Dismal as the place was, he couldn’t afford to live here anymore. No one would move in to take his place: those who could afford better had long since fled, those who couldn’t had drifted away over the wall, into the condemned zones.

Loud shouts, laden with cruelty and the promise of violence, echoed through the walls of the underpass. Footsteps followed them, hurried and frantic, either fleeing or pursuing. Danny pulled his frayed jacket collar up and picked up his pace, trying to make himself as small as possible. The gangs were everywhere: groups of youths, many of them boys barely into their teens, looking for anything that could be stolen or resold. With valuables becoming scarcer by the day, carted off by the armed repo squads, the youths would usually settle for inflicting hurt. They prowled at any time of day or night, strung out on the latest designer drugs, or simply on hormones and sociopathic rage.

Luckily for Danny, the footsteps seemed to be receding, swallowed by the concrete squalor of the next housing block. Still, he was glad for the bright lights and blaring hologram ads of the district center, the false safety of the subway station he was walking toward. Comforted, he stepped on the escalator and lost himself in the anonymity of the groggy, bleary-eyed crowd.

Faces surrounded him on the train, flickered past like pale circles. A film reel of darkness and rectangles of colorful light played on the other side of the windows. Danny scrolled through AcuraCare’s daily feeds in his dataglasses, ignoring the blare of hi-res ads, the hologram visages peering down from the tower facades. From time to time, his attention was caught by terse references to cost-cutting measures and the restoration of rundown urban areas. But he could not correlate any of it to the changes in his neighborhood, or to the retreating infrastructure. Before he could unravel the meaning of the phrases, the train was pulling into his station, the pressure of the crowd pushing him forward, through the gaping doors, like a peristaltic spasm.

His first few visits went off without a hitch. The home-care patients were elderly, or deteriorated past the point of comprehension. They inhabited tiny apartment units crammed full of garbage bags, old clothes, and other debris of a life lived away from public scrutiny. Several of the buildings didn’t have regular electricity anymore, only pay-by-the-hour meters for which the denizens had long run out of tokens.

Danny navigated through the clutter and darkness and the furtive scuttling in unlit corners with the ease of a veteran. He had long lost the ability to be shocked or saddened by the depths of neglect a human organism could sink to without relinquishing its hold on life. With endless patience, he sat by their filthy bedsides, breathing in the reek of trash and sickness,  of dried urine and unwashed flesh, as he waited for them to stammer out a few barely coherent sentences. These breathing corpses were AcuraCare’s paying customers, and it was his job to find affordable solutions for them, to evaluate their assets against the company’s long-term care plans and find a policy that fit their circumstances.

People weren’t dying quickly enough to keep pace with urban redevelopment. That was the essence of the problem, drilled into Danny’s head by the instructors at AcuraCare’s indoctrination course. Change always comes at a cost — that was one of the corporate maxims. Without his help, these wizened, ailing men and women would fall through the cracks and die. To the company they might be figures and statistics, but to Danny they were human beings. The thought of helping them gave him strength when the going got tougher than usual.

The patients seemed to sense it too. Maybe they found Danny’s very presence soothing. Once he’d completed his appraisal, some of them thanked him, some of them grumbled, while others said nothing at all. Just stared at him, their bloodshot or cataract-rimmed eyes unblinking in their lined, sunken faces, often above the plastic of a breathing apparatus. But when he drew up the paperwork, they always signed. A corporate hospital, no matter how overcrowded or understaffed, was better than dying alone in a lightless, airless hovel.

Some time after noon, his app led him to a peeling door in a row of squalid apartments. Its neighbors were already vandalized and hanging askew on their hinges, the windows boarded up. Obscenities drawn in LiveGlo spraypaint flared and preened on the dirty walls. There were no lights inside and when Danny knocked nothing happened for a long moment. Then heavy bolts turned and a face appeared. A woman, thin and tired and so pale she glowed in the hallway shadows. She stared at him with a mix of apprehension and hard, embittered resentment, not saying a word.

Danny fumbled with his tablet. AcuraCare’s files showed a male patient at this address, no registered dependents. He felt his cheeks warm as he scrambled for the right way to phrase the question.

The door closed in his face. He heard the scraping of a chain and it opened again. The woman motioned him inside. As soon as Danny crossed the threshold, she hurried to engage the lock and bolt again.

They stared at each other without speaking. In his years with AcuraCare, Danny had sometimes been confronted by clients who were rude, or even physically hostile. But the woman’s silence lashed him like a physical force, worse than any shouts or curses might have been. As he groped for something to say, he saw a small arm appear behind the woman’s legs, followed by a child’s wary, pinched face.

The woman followed his gaze and clutched the child to her side, none too gently. Danny felt all his usual opening lines fly out of his mind in an instant, leaving him tongue-tied. He had the uncanny conviction that the woman would laugh out loud at them, her laughter scornful, mirthless. Shielding himself behind his tablet, he managed to stammer out the patient’s name.

“He was taken away,” the woman said. Her voice was low and mournful. “The day before yesterday.”

“Taken away?” Danny felt sluggish and stupid as he scrolled through his case file, which suddenly seemed to be written in a foreign language. “There’s got to be a mistake,” he said, immediately realizing how ridiculous he must appear to this woman and the child, hollow-eyed with bereavement. “The policy has not been drawn up yet.”

“The company men said you’d come by,” the woman said. “To sort out the paperwork. They made it sound like they were doing us a favor. Because Mark always paid on time. Special credit offer, or something like that.”

Towing the child — a girl — behind her, she waved him into a space that served as the living room and bedroom and kitchen, all in one. A Newscan played soundlessly on the screen, icons flashing around the presenters’ faces. Danny made sympathetic noises as his trained eye scanned the tiny apartment. The furniture was used, but of good quality, the appliances almost new. By the rented hospital bed, he saw a bank of monitors and an emergency autodoctor, all still under warranty. So the repo team had not come calling yet.

He busied himself with the financials, feeling the two pairs of eyes stare at him. Mark Harrington had apparently made good money. The little girl was evidence of his social status: reproductive permits were all but unheard of among Danny’s usual clientele, especially in these blighted parts of the city. AcuraCare must have known that he would make good on his credit. Which made the oversight with the papers all the more unusual. Something about the situation felt off to Danny, but whatever it was, he knew he wouldn’t figure it out by interrogating this pained, withdrawn woman.

“What was Mister Harrington admitted for?” he asked the woman. The information was in his file, but Danny knew the importance of building rapport with the client. Show empathy. Be reassuring without making commitments.

Her thin back was bent over a pot on the stove. The little girl peeled herself off her mother’s side and was kneeling in front of the screen, flicking through the channels. She seemed to be ignoring Danny’s presence, shutting him out.

“Multiple organ failure.” The woman’s voice never rose above a flat monotone. Her shoulderblades shifted as she kept working at the stove. Focusing on one task at a time was probably how she kept herself from falling apart. “They were supposed to be under warranty. He went back to the firm that sold them to him, but it was no longer in business.”

Danny read through the intake forms. Both kidneys and bladder, transplanted by a no-name, unaccredited outfit. A shady chop shop that grew the organs in illegal vats on the other side of the wall, in the cordoned zones. People were ready to cut all kinds of corners if it meant saving a few bucks. Maybe Harrington didn’t have a choice. Having kids was an expensive hobby.

“He couldn’t afford to buy on the market,” the woman said, turning to face him. “Costs are up again. The organ brokers wouldn’t return his calls. So Mark turned to his insurance company. Your people told him he was at the bottom of the list.”

Her dark eyes flared with some emotion that was more than anger, but not quite hate. Then in an instant she got it under control again.

“It’s the law, Missus Harrington. Your husband got the organs from an unincorporated firm. We can’t insure those.”

“Brother,” she said. “Mark is my brother.”

“Apologies.” That explained the unregistered dependents. Declaring the sister and niece would have increased Harrington’s premium. “Your brother signed the acknowledgement form. He knew the risk. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Five years offshore.” There was no anger in the woman’s voice anymore. She suddenly looked like something had gone out of her, leaving her an empty husk. “Breathing in and drinking that toxic sludge. Then a decade in an ore leaching plant. All those damn chemicals.”

“I hope your brother took legal action.”

She nodded, her gaze absent. “The owners settled. That’s how Mark was able to buy the organs in the first place. Just a temporary thing, he told me. Until he’d saved enough for better ones. But they went bad inside him. Started poisoning him. He couldn’t work anymore.”

“Let’s find a solution for you,” Danny said. “Your brother — Mark — is a valued customer, Ma’am. He’s in good hands now.”

The woman looked like she wanted to say something, then only looked away.

“Do you know which hospital he was taken to?”

She shook her head. “I was at work,” she said. “Insurance wouldn’t cover a weekday caretaker, so it was just Mark and Jenny here. He called me later. He’d been admitted Said he was in some kind of waiting room. He told me not to worry, that everything would be all right. That was the last time I heard from him.”

“Sometimes it takes a few days for the patient registration to come through,” Danny said. “I’m sure you’ll be notified.”

“We have nothing without him,” the woman said. “I can’t afford this place on my own credit. Not if I want to also keep Jenny fed and clothed. Mark’s illness has taken everything we had.”

She sounded indifferent, as if she were describing someone else’s tragedy. A hurricane hitting the coast, maybe, or another refugee boat sinking in the Atlantic, dragging hundreds to a watery grave. It made Danny fidgety, anxious to leave.

“AcuraCare is here for you,” he said, reciting automatically. “We care for our clients like family. I think I have good news.”

He flipped over his tablet so she could see the screen, belatedly noticing the sweaty imprints his palms had left on the edges. “Our appraisal came back,” he said. “Your policy is backed by good collateral. If you’re amenable to the terms, I’m authorized to sign off on the offer. Your brother’s treatment plan could be approved by close of business today.”

Distrust rose in the woman’s eyes as she read through the contract template. “Where does this leave us?” she finally said.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

She waved the tablet around, as if to indicate the tiny apartment. “If I sign this, you people own everything. Then what do Jenny and I do? She needs food and clothes, and her school fees are almost due.”

Danny wiped his palms on the knees of his trousers, as surreptitiously as he could. His smile was starting to feel like a grimace, sagging at the corners.

“Your brother’s plan does not cover dependent care,” he said slowly. Do not give up ground. Be firm, but decisive. “Of course, there’s always the option to upgrade. Once Mister Harrington is back from the hospital-”

“Mark’s not coming back,” the woman said, cutting him off. There was no rancor in her tone, no accusation. It was a flat, resigned statement of fact. “They’re not really hospitals, are they? That’s the word on the street. No one ever comes out. Especially not terminal cases. They’re going to die anyway. No point in treating them.”

“AcuraCare provides the best treatment options available on the market. I can assure you of that. All paying customers will be taken care of.”

“What happens when they can no longer pay?”

The woman did not wait for Danny’s answer. She swiped her finger across the tablet, accepting the offer. A green light lit up in Danny’s dataglasses: his commission was being credited to his bank account, pending approval. “They’ll be coming for us too,” the woman said, as if to herself. “We’re not dying quickly enough. Isn’t that what they say? We’re holding back progress.”

“Maybe you can go somewhere else,” Danny said. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to hide from the open despair in the woman’s eyes. “There are jobs in the rezoned Districts. Affordable housing and utilities.”

He realized he was jabbering and shut up, feeling his cheeks heat up.

The woman gazed at him with open pity. “Thank you for stopping by,” she said, guiding Danny toward the door. “Please take good care of Mark. I can come up with more money, if there’s anything to be done for him. You tell your people that. You tell them to keep him alive.”

Danny stammered out a few inane phrases as he found himself back in the hallway. The door closed behind him, leaving him alone with his confusion. The sound of his own footsteps, multiplied several fold, followed him down the dim, dark staircase, like an army of ghosts surreptitiously marching alongside him, here one moment, the next lost to oblivion.

Outside the sky was still the same dishwater gray, the streets even more devoid of movement, yet thrumming with suppressed fear. Over by the station, Danny saw an AcuraCare van parked on the curb in front of a tenement building. A repo team was busy at work, bulky figures in pale green overalls passing behind the windows of a second-floor apartment, moving with trained efficiency, marking and hauling away collateral. As he watched, two of them emerged carrying a massive chest of drawers. They loaded it into the back of the van and secured it with straps, then sat down on the edge of the cargo space to catch their breath.

One of the men recognized Danny and waved at him. “Finishing a job?” he said between gasps. “Might as well get it over and done with while we’re still here.”

“Save us a trip,” the other man said, mopping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief.

Danny wasn’t sure what they meant. It occurred to him that he’d never ridden with a repo team before, that he only had a vague idea of what their job was. “Just wrapped up my visits,” he said, doing his best to appear casual. “About to call it a day. You?”

The men exchanged a disgusted glance. “We got a kicker,” the first man said. “So now we’re stuck hauling him back with us.”

“Ain’t our responsibility,” the other one said. “All we do is pick up the stuff. But those lazy bastards from Clearance must’ve messed up. So who do you think gets the short end of the stick?”

Danny nodded, although he had no idea what they meant. “Got room for one more?” he said. The woman’s words rang in his ears, making it hard to think straight. No one ever comes out. “You’re going my way. Anything beats taking the train.”

“Sure,” the one with the handkerchief said. “If you don’t mind a tight squeeze. We weren’t planning on bringing the kicker with us. Gotta stick him in the back, with all the stuff.”

Two more repo men appeared from the building entrance, wheeling a stretcher draped over a lumpy form. When they got closer, Danny saw an old woman’s face peering out from under a plastic mask. Her body sat in a nest of wires attached to incomprehensible machinery, like a spider in a web. The repo men tucked a blanket around the figure and carefully slotted the stretcher between the furniture in the cargo hold, strapping it firmly into place.

“Hop in,” Handkerchief said, getting into the driver’s seat. Danny squeezed in between the seats. He had a final glimpse of the condemned block, the grim, empty streets, before the van doors slammed and the engine coughed to life, pulling away from the curb.

They went over a bridge, the water in the concrete canal below perfectly murky and still, reflecting the patchwork of housing blocks and sky. The driver stuck to the speed limit and hummed tunelessly under his breath, keeping time by tapping the wheel, clearly in no hurry. Up in front, the repo men chattered and chuckled.

Danny watched the ancient face on the stretcher, the rise and fall of the woman’s breathing support. More and more he felt like he was watching a film in a foreign language, that some crucial understanding was evading him. Perhaps his own mind was shielding him from the meaning to protect his sanity. He wanted to say something encouraging, to hold one of the woman’s gnarled hands, but a strange paralysis had taken hold of him, tightening his throat.

No one ever comes out.

We’re not dying quickly enough.

The van was slowing, stopping in front of a low, square building with double-glazed windows. Lost in his thoughts, Danny had not noticed them pulling into a compound surrounded by a tall concrete wall. The driver turned to look at him expectantly. “You getting out?” he said, nodding toward the door. “We ain’t got all day, pal.”

“Where are we?” The question was out of Danny’s mouth before he could stop himself. The repo man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“You said you needed a ride, didn’t ya? Well, this is it. Admin entrance is round the other side.”

“Aren’t you taking the patient to the hospital?”

A chuckle passed between the repo men. “Sure,” one of them said. “This is the hospital.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” the driver said to Danny. “We’ll take good care of her. Be seein’ ya.”

As Danny climbed down from the van, he could feel their stares on the back of his neck. A ball of frozen fear sat in the center of him. He hadn’t lied exactly, he tried to reassure himself. But he had no reason to be here, no authority. After a long moment, the driver put the engine into gear and the repo men drove off, disappearing around the corner of the building.

Danny glanced around, trying to figure out where he was. Past the gate, he could see more housing blocks, a few glass-fronted office buildings rising between them. The high wall blocked the rest of his view. But he was in an AcuraCare facility: the sign above the entrance and the logos on the few parked vehicles left no room for doubt.

The wide yard was all but deserted. A few company employees in white lab coats stood by a side door, enjoying a smoking break. Another group of men in overalls was maneuvering a huge piece of machinery down an underground ramp. Danny hunched his shoulders, feeling conspicuous. One of the company’s slogans repeated irrationally inside his mind. Idleness is money straight out of the bottom line. It was best to move with purpose, to look like he belonged. If he was caught, a couple hours’ docked pay would be the least of his worries.

There was a formless crawling in the pit of his stomach, like hundreds of insect legs. A nagging sense that something was wrong.

He walked toward the nearest entrance, but veered away when he spotted the facial scanner above the big glass panes. Forcing himself not to run, he went round to the other side of the building. There was more activity here, figures moving between the parked vans and an overhead door leading into what looked like a warehouse area. Electric lights glared inside, even though it was still daylight.

Lingering off to the side, Danny watched the repo men unload their cargo. It wasn’t just valuables, he realized. There were people in the vans. People on stretchers, in wheelchairs, strapped to walking frames. With mounting confusion, Danny watched them being escorted into the brightly lit space. Was this some sort of overflow hospital? It did not seem set up for admitting patients.

Unreality settled over him, a filter over his senses, cutting him off from the world. On feet as heavy as lead, he walked toward the door, into the lights.

Harsh glare reflected off rows of rectangular chrome boxes, overgrown with creepers of tubes and cables. A few of them were open and patients were lying in them, while white-clad medical techs fussed with IV lines and monitored their vitals. Danny saw some of the ailing folks being helped out of their wheelchairs and frames, into the boxes. With a rattle, the big overhead doors closed, cutting off his view. A few minutes later, they opened again to admit a team of figures in full hazmat suits, carrying body bags.

Danny stood in front of the entrance as if rooted to the spot. If he didn’t allow his mind to add up the pieces of what he was seeing, if he ignored the realization pushing toward the front of his consciousness, he wouldn’t have to accept it. He could marvel at the sterile orderliness of the killing floor, the practiced efficiency of his coworkers as they removed the bodies from the chrome boxes, the precise gliding of the whole smooth, well-oiled mechanism. Even the low rumble of the incinerators at the back of the area, the faint but unmistakable smell emanating from them, were only unconnected vignettes, engrossing but irrelevant to the greater whole.

His stomach, however, was not so easily fooled.

The concrete yard spun around him and he dropped to his knees, vomiting a thin brown trickle of coffee, the only content of his slick, heaving guts. He managed to stagger back to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the ground unsteady beneath him.

Holding the wall for support, he scanned his surroundings. A pair of hazmat suits had paused in rolling their gurney and were looking in his direction, their faces hidden behind their visors. Terror cut through the anger and disgust that were threatening to choke him. He’d been noticed. He had to get away. Away from this human stockyard, from that sleek, noiseless machinery.

It was dark by the time he got back to his housing block. The lights were on in his windows and a repo van was parked in front of it. Dimly he understood the meaning of this. But it felt oddly impersonal, an atrocity happening to someone else. A profound numbness took hold of him, robbing him of thoughts, of intention, of direction. His body no longer belonged to him, if it ever had.

He could still run. He could keep running. Or he could stay here and face whatever awaited him in the van. No matter what he chose, he suspected the outcome would be the same.

The lights in his windows went out.

Danny stepped into the gloom of the hallway and started up the stairs, leaning heavily on the handrail as if hauling himself up. Waiting for the first pair of boots to appear at the top of the flight. Waiting to be told what to do next.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Damir Salkovic 2025