Death’s Head

by David Gunn

  I’m hoping it’s the Enlightened, but it’s a man very like me. Young, but old enough to have seen something of life. A soldier, who reaches automatically for a gun, because instinct is already running ahead of his thoughts. Our eyes meet and outrage flicks to resignation, without passing through fear.

  He dies cleanly, on his feet and facing me.

  Silently I say a prayer for a similar death when my time comes, then touch stone to keep that time away.

  The other guards die less well.

  A shot to the chest, a shot to the throat. A kick to the balls, a twist of someone’s head, and a snap loud enough to wake a silverhead in the room beyond. He gets his shot in first and I find myself hitting a wall, my face flattened by an expensive wall hanging as the blow spins me around. That’s my blood, splatter-patterning antique cloth.

  It’s bad, almost as bad as when the ferox took my arm. Reeling that thought in, I check my status…My prosthetic arm is in place, my legs are unbroken, and my head turns, though it hurts like fuck, which is good, because not hurting at all would be far worse. All that’s wrong is a hole in my chest. He’s missed my heart, but that’s probably not difficult. Half a dozen women will tell you I don’t have one.

  He stands over me.

  He’s as tall as I am, probably taller. Seven braids stream back from his skull. He’s the most senior silverhead I’ve yet seen.

  “That’s illegal technology,” he says, kicking my gun across the floor.

  “And you can fuck off, too,” says the gun, then goes dark as all its diodes switch off at once.

  The silverhead smiles. “This is where you die.”

  And in the back of my mind, a skull grins.

  “Not here,” I say. “And not yet.”

  His reply is a steel-capped boot to my guts. Another kick like that and something will rupture. So I curl myself tight, trying to make it look like instinct while fighting the very instinct that makes me want to curl up into a ball in the first place. It’s a tough trick.

  The next kick catches me in the ribs, breaking a couple. The seven-braid smiles at the crack and draws back his boot for a final go. It’s the moment for which I’ve been waiting. Another rib breaks, and my gut muscles barely survive the blow, but I reach right around his ankle and grip the toe of his boot, then pull…

  A single twist locks him into the present.

  His foot dislocates before his knee, but it’s a close call, and his knee only gives to stop his hip from dislocating entirely. The seven-braid falls, because there’s nothing else he can do, and I slam my elbow hard into his throat. I’m not sure what all those silver torso tubes do but I rip them out of his body anyway.

  And then I remove his head without bothering to check if he’s dead first. It hangs from my fingers by all seven braids and leaves a trail of blood as I make my way downstairs and out into the street.

  “Wow,” says the gun when we’re clear of the house. “Five broken ribs, a smashed shoulder, and a ruptured spleen. Cheap at half the price.”

  I get the feeling it’s just being kind.

  My feet are heavy as lead, it’s cold, and the temptation to lie down in the snow for a few minutes is overwhelming. So overwhelming that the gun curses me from one side of a deserted square to the other.

  And I’m back at the pumping station before an explosion two blocks away tells me someone has just opened a bedroom door they should have left closed.

  “Kaboom,” says the gun.

  I have to agree.

  CHAPTER 42

  I’M GRINNING, also bleeding and trying to climb a rusty metal ladder while holding the head of a self-elected god, not necessarily a good mix. It takes me longer than I’d like, but I manage it anyway, and then make my way home.

  The head goes in a bucket, because I’m fed up with the mess. The food, taken from the kitchen of the first house, goes into the larder, leaving me with what I’ve been putting off.

  Seeing how bad my wound really is.

  My uniform is half glued to my side with dried blood, and my jacket peels back reluctantly, although water helps the cloth to pull free. I can see splintered ribs and torn muscle, a pulsing artery, and sinew that looks like it should go somewhere. Straightening the ribs makes me wince.

  “Leave it.” Shil’s voice is fierce. “Just fucking leave it.” She steps up beside me and turns me toward her flashlight. “What happened?”

  “Someone shot me.”

  She sighs. “Obviously. Who?”

  “A silverhead…”

  My answer stops her in her tracks. “Where was he?”

  “Into the outer city. I killed three Enlightened, plus several humans. One of them could have been me.”

  “Believe me, sir,” says Shil. “No one could be you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No,” she says. “You’re not.” Without being asked, she banks a fire, finds me a chair, and pours me a glass of brandy. A moment later she has a second glass of brandy mixed with two glasses of water, and she’s heating the whole lot in a saucepan over the fire.

  “I can do that myself.”

  She stops midstride, then squats in front of me. Her face is hard, and something unforgiving has fixed itself behind her eyes. “You don’t want me in this group, do you?”

  I shrug. It hurts.

  “What did I do?” she demands. “To make you hate me?”

  Twist away from my caress, offer yourself as the price for demoting your brother, hate me yourself… There are a dozen things I could say and all of them would be half true, and none of them would be honest.

  I know the real answer.

  It goes back to those locked gates, the high fighter seeding the ghetto with fire, and how Shil and Franc feel about our militia’s slaughter by the Silver Fist. Franc’s better at keeping her disgust hidden, but then she’s been a possession most of her life and that has to be good training.

  “Listen,” I say. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “Yes there was, sir. You could have stayed here. Not gone into the outer city.” She thinks I’m ignoring her question.

  “I mean the gates…”

  “Sir, now’s not the time.”

  “Yes,” I say, “it fucking is. So I’ll say it, and you’ll listen.”

  She waits.

  “The code to lock the gate was broadcast by a hiSat. A hiSat dumped up there by General Jaxx’s mother ship. I could no more break its coding than could Haze. Even the colonel was powerless to stop what happened next.”

  “Why, sir?” says Shil.

  She’s asking why the general had the gates locked in the first place. Shil already understands why none of us could break it open, even if we’d dared try to disobey General Jaxx’s orders.

  “To save food, maybe to save ammunition. Because he knew the mercs would fight to the end once they knew they were trapped. God knows I’m not the general…”

  “You could be,” she says. “One day. Everyone’s afraid of you. No one ever knows what you’re going to do next.”

  “You’re not afraid of me.”

  “Me?” she says. “I’m fucking terrified.”

  The water is hot and the alcohol stings. Shil keeps her mixture just below boiling, which is ninety-six degrees Centigrade on this planet. And when she’s dressed the wound, she pulls the saucepan from the fire.

  “This is going to hurt,” she tells me, not sounding as upset as she should be by the idea.

  She’s right, it does. Although she tries not to wince as I grip her hand. “What were you doing anyway?” she demands, folding her injured fingers into the crook of her arm when she finally gets them back.

  “Killing silverheads.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “You said. The question is why?”

  It’s a night for the truth.

  “Wake Haze,” I say. “Ask him how he feels.”

  Shil does. She wakes the others as well, sending Neen for a doctor. He goes without question, despite the fact that he out
ranks her and she’s his sister. Franc comes down, takes one look at the bread and cheese I stole from the three-braid’s kitchen, and smiles.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  The house still has furniture to burn and we can always hack up doors when that’s gone, so I tell Franc to bank up the fire and make some toast. I’m hungry; hunting does that to me.

  And then I wait, second-guessing whether Neen will return before Haze can be coaxed up from his cellar. My coffee goes cold and the griddle gets hot enough for Franc to make toast for everyone. Our kitchen smells of bread and wood smoke when its door finally bangs open and Neen comes in, leading a tired-looking old woman.

  She halts, smells the air. Envy is obvious in her eyes.

  “How the other half live.”

  “He stole it.” Shil’s voice is fierce. “Got half killed doing it.” She speaks in an accent the old woman recognizes. If not from this city, then from this system.

  “Took it from a silverhead,” says a voice in the doorway. The final word is laden with scorn, although mostly that’s bravado. Haze looks like shit—his face is haggard, a bloody sheet is wrapped around his skull, and sweat drips from his jaw—but his eyes are clear.

  “How do you feel?” I ask.

  “Looks like I should be asking you, sir,” says Haze, glancing at my shoulder.

  “Like shit,” I say. “And you?”

  “Also, shitlike, but better…” He hesitates. “Do I want to know how you did it?”

  “What has seven braids and takes a long time to kill?”

  It sounds like a riddle, but my question is straight. I’ve seen three-braids and five-braids, but the last of my kills was taller, harder, and faster than anything I’ve faced since the ferox. And a bit of my mind is burned, as if something cold seared it along the edge. When I look up, Haze is frozen about three steps into the room.

  “Seven?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Ugly bugger.”

  He doesn’t even break a smile. “A general,” he says. “How many chest tubes?” Haze mimes pipes going in and out of his own chest.

  “Three, maybe four,” I tell him. “Fat as my arm.”

  “And he was tough?”

  I touch my chest, watched by the doctor, who is undoing what looks like a tiny jewelry roll made from black leather. “Very tough, also very reluctant to die. Until I cut off his head.”

  Haze vomits.

  He makes it out of the room and into the night, but we can all hear him spew onto the cobbled courtyard. On the way out he passes the silverhead, staring from its bucket. I’m not sure that helps.

  “Lazlo,” says Haze, when he returns to the room. “General Lazlo…He was leading their troops.”

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugs. “I hear things.”

  The boy might mean rumors, but somehow I think he means exactly what he says. Haze hears things, and that’s fine, because I hear things, too. Not recently, and not since Haze decided to stay out of my thoughts, but I hear things all the same.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No,” he says. “It’s not. They’re going to slaughter you.”

  WHEN I WAKE the doctor is gone, my shoulder is bandaged, and I’m tied to a chair in the kitchen. The towels beneath my chair are blood-soaked, and some of them have been ripped apart for rags. Franc is emptying a bucket of pink-tinged water and Haze is ashen, clutching his stomach as if someone has just kicked him in the guts.

  “What’s with him?”

  “So,” says Shil. “You’re back.”

  She drops to a crouch in front of me and everyone suddenly decides they want to be someplace else. One after another the Aux traipse from the kitchen, until only Haze is left.

  “Thank you,” he says, then shuts the door behind him.

  “You know,” says Shil, “I’m really tempted to leave you there.” But she doesn’t; she cuts the ropes on my chair, helps me upstairs, and puts me to bed, then takes off half her clothes and climbs in beside me.

  “Molest me,” she says, “and you’re dead.”

  These are the last words I hear before sleep takes me. She’s still there when I wake, next to me when I sleep again, and still there the morning after, although my sense of time is screwed and three weeks have gone before I reach for Shil, and it’s for more than the simple comfort of knowing someone is there.

  She slaps away my hand hard enough to mean it.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Later.”

  “No. We want to know who you really are.”

  “Sven,” I tell her. “Sven Tveskoeg, lieutenant, Obsidian Cross second class.”

  For a second Shil looks as if she’s about to punch me.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I say, then grab her wrist before she can launch herself off the bed. She’s fully dressed, which must mean I’ve been getting noticeably better.

  “All right.” My voice is resigned. “What do you want to know?”

  When she turns it’s her thinness I really notice. Her arms are shrunken and her wrist is sticklike beneath my grip; as for her face, it’s made mostly from hollows.

  “Have you been ill?”

  She looks at me, and there’s something dark in her eyes. “You’ve been gone for three weeks,” she says. “It was a good choice. We’ve begun walling our dead into cellars to stop the living from eating them.”

  I remember soups and stale bread, softened in water.

  “You gave me your food?”

  “Everyone did,” says Shil.

  She pushes me back when I try to sit up. There’s enough strength in my body to get past her, but I stay where I am and let Shil sit next to me. “No one had to give you their food,” she says. “We chose. And we understand about the gate. It’s just…”

  “Say it.”

  “Haze says you’re like him. NewlyMade.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “And Colonel Nuevo’s been sending some kid hourly to see if you’re awake and everyone says the Silver Fist will attack any day.”

  “The colonel?”

  She nods, scowling.

  “How’s the weather?”

  Shil looks puzzled by my change of topic, but something’s been worrying away at the edges of my thoughts since I killed the seven-braid and I’ve just remembered what it is. Any attack on us is going to come before the river melts.

  “It’s getting warmer,” she says.

  “Get me my uniform and my gun.”

  My jacket’s been washed and patched. Someone’s pinned an enamel star onto my sleeve. Serious wound—I don’t need a badge to remind me of that. Just putting my feet on the floor and trying to stand reminds me.

  “About fucking time,” says the gun as it swallows a battery pack. “Next time you go walkabout inside your own head, try feeding me first.”

  CHAPTER 43

  FOUR OFFICERS I don’t know guard the door to the old bank. They’ve all been awarded the Obsidian Cross third class. And I’m pretty sure that at least one of them was a corporal the last time our paths crossed.

  Not good. In fact, so not good that I understand before I’m even through the door that we’re into the end days, and Colonel Nuevo expects to lose. So do I, but it’s the colonel’s job not to let it show.

  The officers salute.

  I salute.

  My gun snorts.

  I start to give my name and rank, but the four know it already. The youngest knocks on the door, three raps, followed by two, followed by another three. As a piece of code or security mechanism it’s worthless.

  “The colonel will see you now.”

  A girl stands at the top of the stairs. She’s beautiful; she’s also roughly the same age as Franc and speaks the local patois. The kid should be keeping her distance from us because most of the inner city will soon discover that their lives depend on swearing they hate us, have always hated us, and have never collaborated in any way. Even that may not be enough to save them.

  “Pretty,
” says my gun.

  “The girl?” I ask, surprised.

  “Her rig.”

  Looking closely, I can see she’s wearing a neat little holster beneath her left arm; it obviously carries a very slim gun, because I’d missed it.

  “Local?”

  “Doubt it,” my gun says. “Not built like that. Way too foxy.”

  It’s still talking about the weapon.

  “Come in,” says a voice when I hammer on the colonel’s bunker door.

  Colonel Nuevo wears full military uniform. A silver stripe runs down the side of his dress trousers. Medals hang in an imposing row across his heart, and braid cascades down his chest; chain-mail epaulets protect each shoulder.

  His rank is declared by his collar badges, while his Obsidian Cross first class hangs on a black ribbon around his neck.

  “Join me,” he says.

  His first bottle is already empty, so the colonel pulls another from his desk. Someone’s used my glass before me—maybe two or three people, judging by the overlapping fingerprints. The spirit is bitter, clear as ice, and so strong that inhaling its fumes makes my throat tighten.

  “Got a room full of this stuff,” he says. “I can spare you a few if you’d like. I mean”—Colonel Nuevo smiles almost happily—“it’s not as if I’m likely to have time to drink it all.”

  On his desk is the same map as last time. Only it has significantly more glass stains and several more rows of crude blocking to indicate enemy rocket damage. We’re surrounded. That is, enemy reserves have crossed the river. The colonel is carefully shading in enemy mortar positions; there are dozens of the bastards.

  “Silver Fist hacked my slab,” he says. “So now I use only this. Got to keep my plans secret.”

  I wonder about the girl, how much she sees and hears, where she lives, and who, if anyone, she tells…Not that it’s going to make much difference. We’re obviously fucked anyway, mere hours from a full-on attack.

  “You stirred up a real hornets’ nest,” he says, “slotting that seven-braid. I’d award you a first-class Obsidian, but we’re right out of those and you’ve already got a second.”