Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  “Miss Dearly is, ah … awake.”

  “Awake? She was awake when I left her.”

  “She’s … very awake,” Dick said as we exited the mess and started across the courtyard. “She asked for you by name, though! I think that’s progress, all things considered.”

  “Asked for me?” Oh, happy day. “For what?”

  “Well, the thing is—”

  “WHERE IS HE?”

  The scream carried out of my quarters, shot down the hall, and boomed out a window. More birds took to the skies. Zombies everywhere stopped to look. I stopped to look.

  “I think, perhaps,” Elpinoy said, his lips as pale and soft as an uncooked fish fillet, “you might … under certain circumstances … be permitted to tell her a little bit more about where she finds herself, and why.”

  I couldn’t hold back. “Oh, really? Are you sure? Because I wouldn’t want to frighten the little lady. Didn’t we talk about this earlier?”

  “Bram, just go up there and take care of it!”

  “No, no, I definitely think she needs to talk to the living.” I stepped back and held up my hands. “I’d just disgust and disrespect her—and besides, how much could her feeble little high-bred mind be expected to absorb, huh?” My crew gathered behind me as I spoke.

  “What’s going on?” Tom asked.

  “I’m not sure why she’s so upset, and she won’t talk to me!” Elpinoy admitted.

  “I WANT HIM NOW!” Whatever it was, she was obviously growing impatient.

  Chas’s head sailed in the direction of the scream, her eyes widening. “Wow, Bram. Tommy here totally needs to take lessons from you.”

  I was gone before I could hear his retort, running full tilt across the yard.

  The afternoon launched bright and dry, and I pushed myself out of bed.

  This was a bit of a challenge with only one leg, but I managed.

  The instant I moved, the Doberman posted at the door began barking. He didn’t try to test the reach of his rusted chain—if anything, he backed away from me—but he put out the warning cry. I’d suspected he would. Hence, why I’d remained curled up upon the straw-filled mattress in my mysterious prison long after regaining consciousness. I wasn’t sure who he was meant to alert.

  “Hush, boy,” I managed to say, my voice strained. I leaned heavily against the wall, dry bark flaking off beneath my fingers. My head was swimming.

  This was not good.

  The dog shut his jaw with a whine. He turned several times, his chain rattling. The relative silence gave me leave to think, but one thought crowded out all others.

  I am an idiot.

  When Wolfe had come bursting into my office with news that we’d finally managed to intercept a transmission from the Grays—after months of scouring the airwaves, the Aethernet networks, the telegraph wires—and that it had to do with a plan to kidnap my daughter, I hadn’t asked questions. This was probably due to the fact that in that moment I ceased to be a civilized man. The idea that anyone would dare lay a hand on my girl caused my head to pound and my vision to blur. I began producing snarls and other vile sounds with an astounding ferocity. I had been as much an animal as my canine jailer. My only thought was that I had to get to Nora, somehow. The idea of sitting and waiting made me eager to invite death—either mine or someone else’s.

  It should have occurred to me that it had been at least a decade since I last flew an aircraft. But I have a very bad habit of doing very impetuous things. I had no idea what went awry. The air currents must have steered me wrong, for I ended up far off course, and by “far off course” I mean “headed in the opposite direction entirely.” Then the navigation system jammed. By the time I’d been willing to cry uncle and contact Z Base, I was crashing. I crawled away from the wreck, leaving my left leg behind.

  That was the last thing I could remember. How long had I been out? A few hours? A few days?

  Wherever I was, I had not gotten there under my own power.

  With this realization in mind, I began a slow visual inventory of my surroundings. I appeared to be in a hut of some sort, crafted of bleached branches and twigs. The ceiling was not solidly constructed, and white daylight filtered through it. The only furniture was the filthy mattress. The door was made of thick branches lashed together with rope. The floor was made of … sand?

  I slowly bent down, using the wall for support, and reached out with my right hand to rake up a handful. No, not sand.

  Salt.

  Just then the door flew open and crouched figures filled the doorway. The Doberman began barking again, twisting on his chain, dancing away from them.

  I pushed myself to my feet. “What is the meaning of this?” I overstressed my vocal cords and ended up choking on the words. The figures advanced. Once they slipped out of the sunlight and into the shadow of the hut, I recognized them, through my coughing, for what they were.

  They were Grays. They were zombies. Some of the worst I’d ever seen—monsters crafted of bone and bare muscle tenuously knit together by rotting skin and sinew.

  I couldn’t speak. They grabbed me by the arms and dragged me outside. My eyes were overpowered by the light and I went blind. The world became disorienting, frightening, as I simultaneously tried to stop my diaphragm from convulsing, willed my eyes to adjust, and tried to support myself with my remaining leg—all the while fighting against the many arms that had taken hold of me.

  Unfortunately, the world didn’t make much more sense once I could see it.

  I was in some sort of fort. That, I could accept. It was what lay outside the fort that challenged my understanding of reality.

  Time, climate change, and terraforming have fundamentally altered the Central and South American landscapes, but the land upon which the fort stood seemed untouched. Desert stretched out for miles in every direction around it, an endless expanse of white salt covered in places by a few inches of shallow water. The hazy gray sky above seemed merely an additional part of it, welded to it at the horizon. Its reflection in the water suggested the disconcerting idea that one was floating inside a mirror.

  I recognized it even as my brain struggled to remember which way was up. I knew it from my studies. I was in Bolivia. I was in the immense salt flat they call the Salar de Uyuni.

  “Come,” one of the zombies holding me growled, pushing me forward.

  The fort reminded me of etchings I had seen in my grandfather’s history books as a boy. He’d had a small collection of First Victorian books, bound in leather, each one surprisingly heavy for something that seemed likely to crumble apart at any moment. The fort sat on a raised, flattened mound of salt. Nothing but the trunks of small trees formed the outer wall, wide gaps between each, their tops hewn to points. The buildings were made of wood, poorly and inexpertly constructed as my hut had been. Sunlight and salt had bleached everything, giving it the appearance of a boneyard.

  How apropos.

  The Grays were everywhere—hundreds of them. I realized that their clothing had been similarly weathered by the elements, resulting in the appearance of matching uniforms. Several of them stopped to snarl at me as my escorts hauled me past. Fear and uncertainty aside, I couldn’t help but feel a swelling of pity for them. They’d not asked for this fate.

  Turning my eyes forward again, I saw where I was being taken—the main building of the fort. It was a longhouse with a flat roof, the door blocked by a flap of cracked leather. Crates and barrels were stacked up around it.

  When we reached the building, the men holding me shoved me inside. Unable to support myself on one leg, I fell. Once more my eyes were startled by the sudden shift from bright to dark. It took a few more moments for them to adjust, far longer than it would a living person, leaving me prone and helpless on the ground.

  “Dr. Dearly,” a rasping voice said. “How nice to see you looking so well.”

  Squinting, I pushed myself up. Undead soldiers, perhaps fifteen of them, stood at attention along the two longest walls. Th
ey were equipped with long pikes crafted of salvaged metal and wood. At the end of the building were two wooden desks and several upended crates, all littered with radio equipment and tattered paper maps. Behind one of the desks sat a figure clad in a mismatched assortment of salvaged military issue and a brown cloak, with a dirty linen shawl swaddled about his shoulders and the lower half of his face. His hair was dark.

  I didn’t try to speak. Instead I looked forlornly at the equipment. All I needed was five minutes alone with it, five minutes, and I could send a message back to base.

  All right, so there was some hope that I’d make it out of this. Shape up, Victor. Game on.

  “You know who I am. Who are you?” I finally said. My voice had grown a bit stronger.

  “Major Dorian Averne, of the Forty-second,” the man informed me.

  “Major,” I said, with forced politeness, “I’m not familiar with the Forty-second.” I decided that my initial survival strategy would involve declaring my complete ignorance of what was going on. This would not, naturally, be terribly hard to do.

  The man stood. His cloak obscured his figure, making it impossible to calculate exactly how tall he was, or guess how big or how strong. He walked with a quick, snappy gait, which was unusual for a zombie. If he was a zombie.

  “I doubt you would be, Doctor, seeing as we’re on opposite sides of the conflict.”

  “You’re an officer in the Punk army, then? Well, respectfully met.”

  Averne stepped closer to me. The skin on his upper face was dry and cracked, heavy lines marring his forehead and the area around his eyes. I began to suspect that he was dead. “I would sooner chew my own arm off than respectfully greet you, but I will admit that it’s nice to speak with a man capable of producing more than a syllable at a time.”

  I shifted back onto my hips. “I’m sure it is. Now, may I inquire … am I a prisoner of war? If so, I ask to be put in contact with those who can negotiate for my release.”

  Averne tilted his head to the side. “Do you think that anyone would?”

  I began to suspect that something was very, very wrong. “Yes. They would.”

  The man turned from me and acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “I have a gift for you.”

  Wonderful. “Oh?”

  He gestured to the back of the room. I turned my head, slowly, to behold more of the large wooden crates. Now that my vision was clearer, I could make out the markings on them.

  What I saw made me wish I were blind.

  They were New Victorian army supply crates.

  One of the crates had been pried open, and a few of his soldiers—new recruits, I couldn’t help but suspect, from the haunted looks on their faces—were working at unloading its contents. My heart sank as I saw vials, bottles, kerosene burners, all of the trappings of chemistry. “I wish you would do me the favor of inventorying the contents of these boxes,” he said, “and letting me know if I need to have my troops fetch anything else for you. I don’t want to hold up your research.”

  “Research?” I asked, no longer playing dumb. I was dumb. Completely adrift.

  Averne nodded, a hypnotic bobbing motion. “I’ve read your papers. I know how close you are to a vaccine.” He flicked his hand toward the boxes again. “I want it. Now.”

  I decided to drop all pretense. “You’re mad. First of all, there is absolutely no way I can do my work in an open-air laboratory in the middle of a salt flat. I don’t care if those boxes contain supercomputers the likes of which we have never before seen, it will not happen.”

  I saw his hands tightening within the folds of his cloak.

  “And furthermore,” I said, suddenly feeling plucky, “there’s no cure, and there never can be. The nature of the disease prevents it.”

  “I didn’t say that I wanted a cure,” he hissed. “I said that I wanted the vaccine. I know that that’s possible—and if you lie to me and tell me it’s not, I will take immense pleasure in cutting off your other leg.”

  He snapped his fingers, and one of his guards stepped forth, sweeping his pike down. It slammed against my sternum, knocking me backward. Averne leaned over me as I lay upon the salty earth, noisily sucking in air. “Your precious ‘heroes’ managed to get to your brat first, you’ll be happy to know!” he bellowed.

  My heart sang with gladness. Thank God.

  “But my troops up north have their orders! If so much as one of my men has survived, then your people are as good as dead! They’ll infect you, as you’ve infected us! If you want any of your people to survive, you’d better make the vaccine, and quickly!”

  Dread filled me anew as I realized what he meant. “I can’t. I truly can’t. I don’t have—”

  “Her blood?” Averne’s voice was filled with sick amusement. With his unnatural quickness, he launched himself at another nearby guard and dragged him, by the throat, to stand before me. Before the rotting creature could fight back, Averne twisted his head back, rendering him alert but paralyzed. I saw the zombie’s eyes rolling wildly in his head as he fell to the earth, his brows and lips twitching spasmodically. I stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “He does have her blood. She was wounded and he took a sip. Find it. The dead don’t digest anything, so it’s in there, somewhere.”

  The very idea was absurd. He was bluffing. My mind yelled math at me, told me it was impossible that the creature before me had been hustled this far south that quickly. But … how long had I been unconscious? What if he had?

  At the very idea that anything had tasted my daughter’s flesh, I lost all control. With a cry, I pushed myself up and grabbed Averne’s cloak, pulling him down to my level. I got one punch in before his guards were on me. One of them kicked me, and I heard a rib crack.

  “Take him to his cell!” Averne ordered. His voice was toxic with rage as he stood up and straightened his scarf. “Bring the equipment to him! If he does not begin tonight,” he pointed to my leg, “start slicing.”

  I spent the rest of the day sitting on the mattress in my cell, watching Averne’s maggot-men pile up boxes of medical and scientific supplies. By the time they brought in the refrigerated box filled with the familiar little vials of my daughter’s blood, I knew I’d been set up.

  I tried to piece it together. Had someone wanted Company Z distracted? How had they gotten their hands on my daughter’s blood, or on my classified research? I refused to believe that someone within Company Z was involved. In fact, my fellow scientists would have known that I didn’t need her blood to work from, or most of the lab supplies—all of my efforts lay in computer modeling. It had to have been someone who didn’t understand what we were doing or how we were doing it.

  They couldn’t have known I would hop on a plane, either—so how did Averne’s men know where to find me? Did they have radar? Had a Punk infiltrated the Victorian army? Where had the crates come from?

  I nursed a growing sense of sick, helpless dread—the sort of dread I had fought so long and so hard to keep any capable, moral zombie from feeling. What was going on?

  “Dear … ly?”

  I turned in the direction of the rough, barking voice. Its owner was a fresh zombie, a middle-aged man with dark skin and dreadlocked hair. He sported a massive bite on his neck, dried blood caked around it. He had a bewildered, lost look in his eyes, and the uncomfortable body language of someone completely unprepared for the sort of situation in which he now found himself. He was accompanied by two of the Grays from earlier.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  The zombies stepped through the doorway and looked around. The Doberman backed up and watched them warily. When the one who had spoken failed to do so again, the Grays grunted. One shoved him in the back.

  “I’m … sorry,” the man said. He paused every few syllables, his face screwing up as he attempted to get the words out. “Av … erne … said to … come … watch you work. These two … don’t speak.”

  I sized the man up. “You are his envoy now?”

  �
�No … no idea. My name … is … Henry Ma … Macumba, I … I was … brought here … yesterday. I just … happened to be … there and … and he told me … us … to … watch you.” Something in his voice sang to me of his imminent mental breakdown.

  “Do me a favor.” I gestured to the walls. “One of these branches must want to come out. I need a crutch if I’m to do anything.”

  The man stood there a few moments longer, before wandering to the nearest wall and starting to grope about. I needed him to focus on doing something simple and concrete. Usually, I made fresh zombies concentrate on shoving shaped wooden blocks into little holes. The Grays watched him narrowly as he worked.

  “You’re … Victor Dearly?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “I … don’t know how … you’re here … or me … but it’s an hon … honor … sir.” He took a wheezy gulp of air in an instinctive attempt to steady his voice.

  “That’s good, there. You have to concentrate on forcing the air in and out. There’s a muscle beneath your lungs, your diaphragm. Try to feel it and move it.” Some people talked very easily after death, others did not.

  Henry took several breaths. “Okay.” The next branch he pulled on came out of the wall easily, leaving a gap. He held it for a few seconds before bringing it to me. “How … is that?”

  I used it to push myself to my foot, shakily. “It will do. I thank you—but how do you know of me, may I inquire?”

  “I’m from … Shelley Falls,” Henry said. He spoke with more control this time. “Just a … little … Victorian village, the other side of …”

  “I’m familiar with it.”

  “The … monsters came … yesterday,” he went on, his eyes darkening. “They k-killed everyone. They brought … two of us here, but the other one, Quinto, I think they … he wasn’t there when I … woke up.”

  “When did you wake up? Did you see the sky?”

  “It was … dark still.”

  So he wasn’t but a few hours old. I felt a surge of hope. “Have you eaten anything today, perchance?”

  Henry shook his head vehemently, his features tightening in fear and disgust. “N-No! I saw … I … I would … never …” He looked at the other guards, his eyes widening.