The Bone Puppets: A Hard SciFi Zombie Soldier Story

by Doug McGovern

  Elias thought he was imagining it at first, but as the fire climbed Yim’s leg she put her arms out wide. Her bones glowered with a cherry red flame, like hot iron left on coals too long. Her jugular veins were pumping something auburn, as her blood was transformed by a something like a chemical reaction that exceeded the bounds of scientific understanding and natural balance.

  Collectively, Yim’s team took a long step back. She burst into flames and took a deep breath concentrating the extra layer of skin close to her body with what felt like a magnetic pull. Elias strained to see her through her radiance. Yim chuckled.

  “Now you see me, boys? Behold, my young and impressionable friends. This is what they call an aura. It’s my greatest weapon but also something I have barely begun to understand.” Yim paused, letting the liquid fire cascade up and down her body like the contents of a lava lamp. She smiled. Only Elias could look at her without having a panic attack. The others had thrown themselves on the ground and covered their heads.

  “Well, you’ve really proved yourself to me today, Mr. Walklate. I think I’ll run this whole thing by you first and we’ll see what you can do with it.” Yim walked closer to Elias. He nodded. Something about her transfiguration had actually inspired him. Maybe this world of altered reality was a place they could overcome?

  “It’s impressive, yes. How did they do this to you?” Elias folded his arms and tilted his head to the side. He wondered for a split second if it hurt.

  Yim giggled manically. Her fingers curled around the handle of a Russian ornamental dagger. Her eyes danced with memories of her home. It dawned on Elias with the same intense white that was her fire. She had absorbed the incineration of her entire family and people into her own body.

  “Shocking, isn’t it, how opposite the effects actually are of their best efforts to break us, hmm? You know, before the world ended, I was a shrink.” Yim nodded and sparks shot from her eyes like tears.

  “They burned you and your world down,” said Elias. “You want revenge. I’m helping you to get what you need to get the justice you and your people deserved.” He shifted feet. Whether he was ready or not, his own experience with the world’s fire was creeping over his skin now.

  He could still hear the screams of dying people in his ears. This was one of the many downfalls of always being in the cockpit of the broadcasting unit for the World’s End. He had seen enough live coverage of the Crescent’s civil destruction for six lifetime’s worth of wars. He gritted his teeth and let the dying people of the World harmonize in his ears. Their life was a beautiful thing and their final song a rare art form that no one else would ever be able to resume. The world was too empty now.

  “The name of the place was Butte, Montana. Remember that name. The Crescent and the disgusting elephants that established it came in by the truck-fulls…” Yim caught her breath, twisting her mouth around the flames. She nodded.

  “It was a long time ago now. Probably before you were even born. Worlds don’t always end overnight, my friend. You have to understand how alive they all were. How alive they were before they were suspended from the social strings and medical manipulations that cause humanity to become puppets of rust and bone and regretful mantras. I had a huge family. A husband who practically worshiped me…A little son.”

  Yim’s hair turned to flames that shot up in great spikes like a halo. Elias nodded. He understood now.

  “I was left alive,” she said. “Alive only because of something as stupid as my psychology degree. They wanted to perform tests on me to make me a superior being to the Bone Puppets. Something just as controllable, under the influence of the Dark Arts, in which I was completely manageable but scientifically altered in ways where I could lead out troops of Butte’s citizens that had once been my friends into psychological takeovers.” Yim rubbed her arms. Her fury was shooting from her like eternal psoriasis.

  Elias nodded and grinned. Their souls were cut from the same cold iron that had shaped the atrocities of this bastard world.

  “If you possessed the secrets that the Witchdoctor stored in his infamous shrine, you would have power over their minds,” he said softly. “That would be the ultimate revenge for you. It’s not enough to bring about their unnatural deaths. You want them entombed in their own flesh for Eternity. Want them engulfed in your flames. For them to feel what you have felt and know what you have known and never stop dying.”

  Elias nodded. He could climb onboard with this. If there was one thing Elias Walklate craved for himself, it was a tiny slice of vindication. Here, in this mighty company, he might have a shot at that.

  Who was to say that the eldritch power of the Witchdoctor’s shrine didn’t hold enough secrets for them all to glean something? Elias could fulfill his dream for justice a million times over if he took his fair share from the source of Dark Practice.

  “Yes, you and I are marching to the same drummer now, son. Absolutely!” said Yim. “There is only one way to reach the atonement we so desire. We must go into the heart of Africa and find the Witchdoctor’s Shrine, even though they tell us it was only a story. That he never had just one place where he stored the artifacts of his raw power. We must be dreamers and dare to dream. We must be world-shapers and rebuild all that was lost to us. It’s the only way. The road lies through Hell itself, my boys. Are you in or are you out?” Yim extended a flaming hand to Elias.

  Elias looked over his shoulder at Riff. Low in rank, the young man couldn’t cast his vote verbally. Elias and Riff had come to a silent agreement that one would not make a decision without the other’s input. It was the only way that they would be able to keep track of each other in this lost world.

  “Both feet in the grave, Yim. Cross my heart. Do or die!” Elias shook Meredith Yim’s hand.

  It had begun.

  *****

  Chapter 5

  They moved like wolves through the low-rising smoke. Elias stumbled along behind Riff, catching him by the belt many times as cracks opened in the earth at their feet.

  “What the hell are we walking into, man?” Riff shook his head. Something about this plan was off. Not just the fact that it was suicide, either. There was something else that didn’t set sell with either of the two friends. They just didn’t know how to discuss it. Elias could see that Riff’s thoughts mirrored his own, though. He’d learned how to read the kid’s body language over time.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” Elias studied his young friend’s face. His eyes were distant.

  Elias paused in the path. The ground beneath them was growing darker. Smoke and steam perpetually rolled up from the spliced highways that had once run to Baltimore. This city was a vampire in its own right, drawing all the life’s blood out of the soil, wrapping the air in the soot of its eternal fire.

  “I mean, I really don’t get this. Like this city, for one. They don’t call it the Blood City because of all the vamps, right? I thought it was something else. Like the power struggled or whatever. I’m not really up to speed on news of the weird, you know?” Riff scratched the back of his neck. He pulled an EMP-round revolver out of his coat. Yim had outfitted them all with the electromagnetic tech she’d had back-stocked in supplies for this stage of their journey.

  “No, it’s actually been dubbed that because of its extreme crime rates. After the American government collapsed, the Bloods gang that had been bought out by Crescent supremacy took over the upkeep of Baltimore. They worked off contracts from Nali’s father to build up this city into the prison fortress it had become.” Elias cleared his throat. He watched Riff’s eyes. The kid was dying to tell him something. He just couldn’t find the words to produce his thoughts.

  Elias was haunted by the look in his best friend’s eyes. Yet there wouldn’t be time to question it. Yim and the others had come back from their truck-scouting party.

  “We found one. An old Ford Raptor. It’s not got much to it, rusted out floorboards and the whole nine. It will serve our purposes, though. How many of you ever hea
rd about the Trojan War?” Yim chuckled. She skipped from stone to stone. They were walking through the bottom of a washed-out riverbed that once led to the Chesapeake Bay tunnels. Now this dry vein led only to the Fire Tunnels that made for the hellacious bowels of Blood City’s vicious prison.

  “Shockingly, I have,” said Riff. “I saw a classic movie about it called Troy. My mother was the stewardess for the old theater that Reece left standing in Atlanta. Guess the lords of our wasted generation needed entertainment after the sparks went out.” Riff shrugged and studied Elias’s face as he spoke. Elias felt a jolt pass through him, the top of his head buzzing.

  It had been years. His memories and emotions concerning his early life were vague. Elias barely remembered his biological mother. One thing had stuck out to him in bold colors. She had been a slave of Reece Walklate’s entertainment studio just the same as he was. But instead of being forced to endure the newsroom like young Elias had, Mrs. Walklate had been condemned to a life in the old inner-city theater. The theater that had become a gentlemen’s club of sorts for the Crescent officers.

  It could not be a coincidence. Riff could only mean one thing by this claim. There was only one theater in the City of Faces after Atlanta was ransacked.

  Elias chided himself for being foolish. That theater had been the hub of all debauchery, a slap in the face of all those once innocent pastimes of filmgoers. The snack bar and ticket booths had been ripped out and replaced with liquor cabinets and Jacuzzis. Several of the arcade rooms had been converted into cigar and brothel lounges. Having become a whore house, that theater could have had many “stewardesses” or madams in its time.

  Riff smiled at Elias’s wide-eyed gawking. This non-verbal exchange between them was going to have to be enough for now. Riff had conveyed what his eyes had pleaded to say before without blowing the secret to the others. They wouldn’t be able to talk about it now, in the crescendo to their kamikaze mission. He had taken the only chance he’d had to drop this tidbit of information to the uncaring Meredith Yim. In case he didn’t live, he needed this trivia to be known.

  Because the message wasn’t meant for Yim or any of the others standing nearby. Just the fact that Riff had bothered to say it made it valid. There could certainly have been more than one female custodian of the old gentlemen’s theater, but Riff would have been born about the same time Elias’s mother had been banished. She was famous for being the keeper of the theater for at least five years after that. Elias had kept careful tabs.

  All of these things led to one conclusion. Riff was Elias’s little brother.

  “To me now, gentlemen! We’ve got to haul this. This is where the money’s at. Let’s move!” Yim waved with her thumbs.

  Elias stepped close to Riff and gripped his shoulder. He would demand an explanation later if they ever had the time. Just the idea of having a family, true blood family that was loyal made Elias’s spirits soar with rocket propulsion. He was ready for this. Champing at the bit, in fact.

  *****

  Chapter 6

  “Alright, man. Wing it and make it pretty.” Elias felt his own heart counting down the seconds before the men on the walls saw them. He had heard that these guards were called Wall-Dogs because of the howling sounds they made when a prisoner was spotted trying to escape, but at this moment the landscape was eerily quiet.

  Elias was messed up. He couldn’t take his eyes off Riff even though the kid was walking several paces ahead of him now. Yim always gave her “omega wolves” the most dangerous jobs. One such critical position in this endeavor was making sure the old Ford Raptor didn’t capsize in the quicksand pits that opened sporadically on the way to the Blood City.

  Elias would have been given this job under normal circumstances. The task was simple. Spy out a pit of black goo and guide the mostly dead vehicle’s floating, rusted frame away from it. Knowing what he knew now, he wished he was the one to be put to that risky task. The reason he was not was that he was slightly more valuable now to Yim than Riff’s worm dirt. Plus, he was a better shot. Approaching the Blood City head on was open-faced suicide. Elias’s devil-may-care strut made him the poster child for such a kamikaze mission. At each rest stop, he perched like a vulture on piles of carrion, an omen of death reveling in death. While they moved, his golden hair stood out as the perfect walking target. That’s exactly what Yim wanted. In a world of blurred red and carbon dust, gold would stand out above it all.

  Elias walked with his old Thompson trained on the many dead faces that had been erected as sign posts to warn escapees. He shuddered, trying to ignore Riff or the risk factor of his every move.

  How the hell does a kid like him come from someone as despicable as Reece Walklate? Elias puzzled this to distraction. There was an infinity bound up in Riff’s single confession. The axiom of Elias future now hung in the balance of understanding this secret and knowing the fine-print implications that came along with it.

  Elias snapped to attention. All too soon the shadow of the Great Blood Wall hit them. Elias felt his stomach leap frog inside him. His nausea seemed to carry his soul away from his body and linger out in the midst of the reek, lost in the translation of his mind’s poor processing attempt. Because there was no processing the absolute revulsion in the body to the smell of the city’s infamous mote. Its namesake.

  The Blood City was surrounded by a reservoir that had once been the Baltimore City limit’s parameters. It was now filled three miles deep with siphoned blood and the entrails of all those who tried to escape the Fire Tunnels.

  Elias wanted to stop. The air was so thick with the gas of entrails that had been ruptured by exposure to the sun’s heat it was almost impossible to see through the awry haze. It felt like walking through a bubbling vat that smelled like elephant fat. Rotting blood permeated the air with fumes diluted by chemicals. It was strong enough to vacuum-seal one’s nostrils.

  “Ha. I see you, fancy. You’re not bulletproof.” Elias smirked to hide how angsty he was growing when he saw the enemy’s shadow move through the wall’s frame. His head buzzed as he tried to think up a plan. Yim hadn’t given him specific orders on how to engage the enemy so far.

  The Wall-Dogs whooped and bayed, just as their name had promised. They popped over the wall, sporting their new, fearsome, cutting-edge arsenal.

  “Halt in the name of Nali!” The man at the head of the SWAT team looked familiar. Elias felt like he’d been punched in the gut. That guy had been one of his dad’s assistants in torture.

  Elias swayed. It was nerves aside from nausea for a moment that threatened to bring him hard to his knees. The possibility had never crossed his mind. Not until now. Yet it only made sense. He was walking into a Hell his father helped create. Should he be surprised if some of his father’s demons were stationed there?

  Riff stumbled and looked sidelong at the other men in the team.

  “Okay, so I get that we’re trying to get them PO’ed on purpose so they’ll give us a lift. So like what do we do? Just stand here?” Riff swallowed and flung his hair out of his face.

  Elias licked his lips. His hands sweat and his knees knocked. He knew that the only way to conquer the demons that his father had made was by facing them.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Elias strode ahead of his friends. He lifted his hair out of his face. Did he need a flashing sign that announced who he was? He raised the Thompson high above his head as if saluting them.

  “Other than the total lack of brains? You. In smoke.” The Pack Leader twisted on his heels. He started shouting in the Pidgin English language that the Blood City had developed to make sense of all its psycho-babble. Kuru had deteriorated the mind of this people as even the drinking water was contaminated with thin wafers of human flesh, so much so that all those who passed through this place were cannibals by or against their will.

  “You always have been a cocky little SOB, know that, Delancey? Don’t recognize me do you? Shame… I’ve got my typewriter with me if you’d like me to spell it out for yo
u.” Elias opened fire on the wall. There were screams and return shots that stuck in the spongey sand.

  “You are crazier than a mother, you know that? There’s only one guy out there in this ash dump that could be that crazy. Elias Walklate. I’ll be damned if you didn’t survive the streets of the Face City!” Delancey smirked, whistling a low harmonizing whistle that his infantry gunners emulated.

  “Yo! Hey, boys! So much catching up to do, right? Pose for a quick pic! Say cheese!” Elias burned through a 20-round clip, aiming frenetically for Delancey and his wing man.

  Elias felt his guts congeal and cling to his spine under his rage’s weight. He remembered Delancey clearer with every round he nicked him with. Delancey, his father’s solo-assassin. The same guy who always managed to be dressed in the bloodstains from Elias’s ritual beatings, although always insisting that he was Elias’s “advocate”.

  “Way to make a comeback, kid! Elias Walklate, everybody.” Delancey applauded. The confused Wall Dogs lowered their rifles, standing sentinel as they waited for new orders.

  “You will find, young Riff, that there are many ways to start and to sink a rebellion,” said Yim. “Elias rides the line. Please don’t attempt to emulate his level of insanity. I need someone with a sound and stable mind to rise in my ranks for the brighter future after this is all done.” She put her hands up, inching forward.

  “The vigilante queen herself. Somehow you managed to dredge up our one-hit wonder boy. Elias sang like a bird in the newsroom, didn’t you, Eli?” Delancey clapped. Elias reached into his boot and pulled out a small razor disk he’d wrapped in its leather tongs. He’d been waiting for months to use this weapon. He plucked the plastic guards away from the blades, brushing the dust off its body.