Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  I could bite his face off. My brain kept throwing that option out at me as I stood there, toe-to-toe with him. I could turn him into one of the things he hated most.

  But I didn’t.

  “You’re working on the rigs today,” Wolfe said, his glare never abating. “Till nightfall. I don’t want you anywhere near that girl till then, got it? Take the time to get your head right. Dearly ain’t here to protect you now, so you better start doing what I say.”

  “Yes, sir.” I was glad to hear that it came out as threatening as I’d meant it to.

  “By the way—Elpinoy’s not going to play your little games any longer. I’ve already spoken to him. That girl comes within five feet of a phone or a computer, I’ll cut that much flesh off of you.”

  Wolfe dismissed me with a flick of his head, and I beat it.

  When I exited the gates that led outside the compound and stepped from the road to the flat, barren area where our vehicles were stored, the others on the rigs watched me closely. They could tell that something was wrong. Good for them.

  I might’ve failed more spectacularly than I’d ever imagined, and the idea almost made me sick. I thought of the living trapped, dying there in the EF, and prayed that it wasn’t my fault. I trusted my fellow soldiers; I knew they’d followed my orders and done all they could. But what if my refusal to do what Wolfe wanted had resulted in the Grays attacking the living, starting the whole mess, while we sat in the water and twiddled our thumbs?

  Even as I envisioned the carnage going on, even as I swore myself up and down, I entertained a selfish, terrifying thought: what if the living figured out what they were facing? What if they figured out that there were more of us? They’d come after us. They’d pile us like logs and burn us. Destroy us.

  Please, please, don’t let me be responsible for that.

  I had to focus, before I went mad or made another mistake. Before someone started trying to figure out what the matter was.

  It only took me a minute to find Renfield. He was in his denim grungies, working on a monowheeled automaton in the middle of the yard. Another ’bot, with insectoid arms, sat motionless beside him. For a guy who’d been raised as far as physically possible from Punk lines, he’d always struck me as someone who would fit in perfectly there. He was, to put it simply, a genius—of literature, history, mechanics. There was nothing to him physically, though, so he always stayed behind to serve as our base support.

  “Show me something that needs banging on,” I said.

  He slowly looked up from the machinery and cocked his head owlishly at me. “You speak of banging with a big hammer banging?”

  “You got it.”

  He rubbed his wrench against his jaw and shrugged, pointing over my shoulder. “We just got her in last night. Antique, practically. Her engine is good, but some parts just need to come out entirely.”

  I looked. He was pointing to an airship—a real Punk airship, its wooden body worn and battered, its deflated balloon draped over a couple of nearby trees.

  My body went slack with disbelief. “You have got to be kidding. Where’d they find it?”

  “I like to think it was Santa finally coming through on years of passionate but ignored childhood letters.” Ren shook his head. “I don’t ask. I usually don’t like the answer.”

  “How do they expect us to use that?”

  “Well, first they’ll pick out ten of us who still have good lungs, then—”

  “Har de har har.”

  Ren chuckled. “I’ve no idea, my man. Perhaps as an aerial base from which to drop Things What Go Boom?”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “But those things can’t maneuver worth—”

  “Manners,” he said, interrupting me before I could get to the dirty word. He started over toward it, and I trailed behind.

  The ship was called the Black Alice, going by the words carved into its prow. The figurehead was a little girl in a pinafore and hair bow. I thought of Nora’s shortened dress and bit my tongue.

  We climbed the gangplank onto the ship. I gripped the railing, the black wood hard and polished beneath my hands, and my throat tightened. To any Punk these aircraft were as common a sight as sand, practically a symbol for the entire culture, and yet I hadn’t seen one in a year or more. I wasn’t so sure how I felt about the reunion.

  “She might not be able to maneuver well,” Ren was saying as he opened the doors that led belowdecks. “But come and see.”

  It was dark below. Ren grabbed a lantern suspended from the spare rigging and turned it on. It cast a cold electric glow on our surroundings, one that my eyes instinctively interpreted as wrong. Electronics did not belong on a proper airship. Nothing digital belonged on a proper airship. The equipment I saw bolted to the floor and tied to the walls was all any good Punk crew needed—heavy brass astrolabes, open-work globes with rows of peg holes for the recording of measurements, leather-bound books full of figures, shovels and tools.

  Ren aimed the lantern away from the wall, toward the middle of the ship’s belly.

  Holy …

  The thing had a major engine in it.

  “Did I say ‘good’ back there?” Ren was asking. “I should have said, ‘so good that my desire to keep company with pretty young ladies has been completely and forever erased.’ ”

  I was starting to agree. I approached it and ran my hand over the metal. This was like mounting a jet engine in a wooden buggy.

  “Once we fix it up, this thing will be a rocket,” he said. “We’ll practically be able to fly to the moon. We will be capable of some major buzzing of the living bases. Imagine the roar! They’ll vomit up their own livers in fear.”

  I shot Ren a bemused look. He cleared his throat. “What? I can’t be immature occasionally?”

  Lifting my arms up, I gripped a beam and half hung there. “Okay, then, Mr. Immaturity. Tell me what I’m banging on.”

  We’d made major progress on the Black Alice by the time the sun was setting behind the limp canvas of her air bag. As far as we could see, even now she’d fly. It was just a matter of making her pretty and efficient again.

  After I returned to my room to take a shower, I found myself spending a little more time on my reflection than usual—rubbing my skin to see if I could bring any more life into it, combing my hair. After fifteen minutes or so I came to the sad realization that there was very little I could do to make up for the fact that I was up way past my bedtime, biologically speaking.

  I gave up and headed to the med unit.

  It was time for a staff change-off, and some of the doctors and technicians were busy donning their coats and locking up their cabinets. Things had quieted down a lot, but I could hear voices coming from Samedi’s lab.

  Nora was perched on a spinning chair, arms and ankles crossed, expression dark. When I entered the lab she hopped off the chair and came running over. The fact that she made this beeline for me both warmed my soul and made me want to turn around, walk out the door, and find a cliff to fling myself off of.

  Her city was facing a freaking plague, and I couldn’t tell her.

  I’d managed to forget this fact through physical labor, but now I had nothing to do but look at her, my mind burning with my betrayal. She wanted me to be honest with her. I wanted to be honest with her. But if I was, she’d be left alone in a place that she was only just coming to accept. Hell, she’d probably blame me for leading that plague to her home in the first place.

  And I might never see her again.

  “Bram, I need to call home!”

  “Thank goodness you’re here, Bram,” Samedi said. His head was on a nearby counter, but his body was animated, hands gesturing wildly as he talked. “You explain it to her.”

  “Elpinoy was in, eh?”

  “Yes!” Nora shook her head like an angry horse. “No one will let me look at the news, or call my friend Pamela, or my aunt. You don’t know Pam, she’s probably close to spontaneously combusting over this! I did my part, I came out of your
room! Now no one will tell me anything!”

  “Phones and computers are on password protection now,” Sam pointed out.

  Great. How to tell her this? “Nora, it’s Wolfe’s decision. Far as we know, any bit of intel the Grays get, they’ll act on. Best to be cautious. That’s why you can’t call out.” There, that sounded okay.

  “Then why won’t anyone tell me if they’ve told my aunt where I am? Why can’t I watch the news?” she demanded.

  Samedi looked at me with a shrug. I wasn’t coming up with anything, either. “That’s Wolfe again.” Might as well give blame where blame was due. “He probably wants you to just … calm down. Let us handle it.”

  Nora looked into my eyes. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Look, Miss Dearly.” Sam turned to face his head, so he could see the front pocket of his lab coat to put his stylus away. “When either one of us gets an order from Wolfe that isn’t mind-bleedingly stupid there will be no way you will miss it, as we will both be leaping up and down and screaming uncontrollably, like adolescent monkeys, in our shock.”

  I decided to be as honest with her as I could. “Remember what I told you earlier, about being a goner? I’m still here talking to you. And that means we have to obey the rules—at least for a little while. Something tells me you know how that works.”

  Nora sighed deeply. “I’m too tired to argue with you people anymore. I’ll just guess the password on my own, how’s that sound?”

  “Good luck,” Samedi said. “It’s something danged complicated. I doubt I can even remember it. Whatever happened to using the name of one’s pet?”

  “Yes, because you know your name is my password.” Beryl stepped out of the next room over, drawing her coat on.

  Samedi turned around again, holding his head so he could look at her. “You’re not rotating out yet, are you?”

  “Only for one night,” she informed him. “Some of the girls and I are going to go into town.”

  “Oh,” he said. He seemed to shut down with that syllable. “Well, enjoy yourself,” he offered weakly.

  “I will.” Beryl moved to shake Nora’s hand. “Stay strong, okay? Good night, Bram.”

  “Good night,” I said as she parted from Nora and headed out the door.

  “I’m starving,” Nora said when she was gone.

  “Why don’t you go rest in your father’s quarters, and I’ll get your dinner? Won’t subject you to the mess twice in one day.” Nora nodded and walked out of the lab.

  The doc watched her go, and then said, very softly, “Don’t let it happen.”

  “Sorry?”

  Samedi yanked his head back on, and once it was in place, looked at me very seriously. “Just … don’t let it happen.”

  He shuffled off into the other lab then, leaving me to stew in his words.

  * * *

  I ate with Nora in her father’s office. She gorged on salad and bread and jam; I pushed my mush around my plate.

  Eventually she slowed and started moving her fork in a similar way. “Bram?” she said after a few minutes.

  “Yeah?”

  She looked up at me. “I just wanted to say … thank you. Again. For all you’ve done for me today.”

  Uh-huh. “Sure.”

  She looked back to her uneaten tomatoes. “What’s Wolfe’s story?”

  “He was sent to oversee our base a while ago—before then he worked with the Punks, fighting the undead along the border. For some reason, he came out of the woodwork to support your dad’s idea of a zombie company, and asked to head it up. Before then this was mostly a research facility, and there were only a few zombies on board. Only a very small percentage of the undead keep their minds. That’s why our numbers are low, even now.”

  Nora put down her fork. “So there’s a living captain now, and a dead captain.”

  “Nah, I’m captain in name only. Wolfe was here before I was. I took the battlefield commission test on a whim and passed, and your dad made angry phone calls till someone gave me my bars. He thought it’d be good for undead morale. Wolfe’s the captain. I have no input. I’m just his eyes and mouth on the ground, mostly.” I smiled at the humor of it. “Spare parts.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s not doing that great a job. Or that you guys like him much. Maybe you’ll get a new one.”

  I wiped my mouth. “I hope not, honestly. Our existence is a crap shoot on a good day. The army could wipe us out at any moment. Especially with Dr. Dearly gone.” I hated to admit it, but, “We need him. Better the devil you know. But it’s weird, ’cause I guess everyone was happy to have him at first … Back then every living person who chose to side with the dead on this project was greeted like a hero. Samedi was here when he came. He says everyone thought Wolfe was really enthusiastic about the dead contributing to the national defense. I don’t know what changed.”

  She didn’t respond to this. When she did speak next, it was to ask a question. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “What is it?”

  “Can I sleep in your room tonight?”

  I almost choked.

  Her eyes got big again, and she laughed nervously. “No! I mean … there aren’t any locks on the doors here, and I don’t feel as safe as I did in your room. Can I stay there, just one more night? Trade you?”

  I cleared my throat and wheezed out, “Sure, sure, no problem!”

  After cleaning our plates up, I took her there. She put her bag back on the bed and slowly removed her guns. I got a satchel of my own out of my closet and started packing a few things. I was aware that she was watching me, although nothing was said.

  When I opened my desk drawer to get out my digital diary, she asked, “Who’s the picture of?”

  I turned to look at her, the muscles in my neck tightening in anger. “You went through my things?”

  She at least looked abashed. “Yes, I’m sorry. I just wanted to see.” She pouted. “And anyway, if you woke up in a strange room, wouldn’t you look through everything to see if there was a clue, or something?”

  I would. I calmed myself down. I opened the diary, looking at the photo that sprang up on the screen. “Me, and my little sisters. My friend Jack took it.”

  Nora sat down on the bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. She wrapped her arms around her legs. “Is that before you died?” she asked softly.

  So she wanted my story now. Great. I didn’t want to talk. I was afraid of giving too much away. As I looked at her, though, I recalled how much I had been told about her, and I knew it was only fair.

  I slowly sat down in my desk chair. “I’m from a little town called West Gould. It’s just a strip of road with a few businesses, really, to serve the farmers. We’re farmers, too … well, were. The funny thing about the soil there is, after you clear the trees off it, it’s gorgeous and you can grow almost anything—but it’s thin. Few years later it’s useless, and you have to let the forest take it again.”

  “What’d you grow?”

  “Lots of stuff. Corn. Pomegranates.” They seemed like such useless details now. “After we decided to let the forest back in, I went to work in the coal mines in East Gould. There’s still a lot of coal there, deep down. Good work, if kind of dangerous. Mom took in sewing, washing, but there’re so few people around West Gould. She did all she could. She could have had work elsewhere, but she had to stay with my sisters …” I ran my thumb over the screen. “Adelaide and Emily.”

  “How old were you?” Nora asked, resting her chin on her knees. “If you joined the army when you were sixteen …”

  “I didn’t join the army when I was alive.”

  She went quiet.

  “They came for us in the mines. Whole bunch of ’em.” I tried to speak quickly, both for her sake and my own. “They got Jack. Ripped his throat out. I managed to get us into one of the big elevators and close the door, but I’d already been bit … and it was too late for him. They chased us, they watched me as I locked us in. Watched whi
le he died. They kept trying to get us, beating themselves at the door.”

  I looked at Nora. Her expression was sorrowful. I couldn’t take it, and glanced down again.

  “I took the elevator to the surface. The elevator wasn’t even supposed to work. If I’d known it would, I could have saved someone else, maybe, but …” I shut my eyes. “The elevator stopped twice. I figured it was going to be my coffin, but both times it started going again. The mine was chaos. There were monsters up there, too. I heard later that the army got there and caved the whole thing in, but there were no soldiers around when I reached the surface.

  “So I ran. It was cowardly, but I was hurt, and Jack was dead, and I didn’t know what to do, so … I ran. And then I walked. All the way to West Gould. Ten miles. I don’t know how I did it … just determined, I guess. I hadn’t seen myself yet. I didn’t know that being bitten would do anything to you. I thought I’d made it out alive, that I’d escaped.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Settling back, I continued, “At one point I remember stumbling, and then coming to and just continuing on. I mean, I was in pain anyway, I was scared and lost, and … I didn’t realize that I’d died while I was walking. Sam always tells me he bets I was awake again before I hit the ground. It just didn’t register.

  “When I got home, it was past nightfall. I knocked on the door, so relieved to be home. And my mother answered it, and … screamed … I’ll never forget that sound, like everything she loved had died. I tried to hug her, tried to get inside … I was covered in Jack’s blood … Anyway, she got the rifle, and she shot me in the leg.”

  I patted my hip. Nora made a little “oh” of recognition.

  “It didn’t hurt—just kind of pinched. And that’s when I realized what must have happened. I got away from the house, limped off, hid in the tree line. That’s when it all hit me, and I saw how I might’ve hurt my family, and I was so sick. So sick. I stayed there for a day or so. I just wanted to die. I would have killed myself, but I was too sick and scared to even move, to go find something to do it with.