by Nate Crowley
“Yes, the zombies,” he agreed. “Ridiculous, isn’t it? But there we are. We need to talk to them, to wake them up, like us.”
“What then?” said Schneider’s friend, as the water around the benthocetus slopped and churned with red-gummed mouths. The carcass dipped in the water again, tugged from below.
“I don’t know,” said Schneider. “Let’s see if they’ve got any ideas. At least it’s quiet here. We’ve got a place to think, and to talk, and work out what we’re going to do.”
The water exploded in a surge of spray. Schneider had seen it coming a second before it breached, huge and pale and rippling through the water as it rushed up. Then it was there, a great blunt head, grey cathedral jaws distending to clamp round the whale’s girth.
It shook from side to side and the sixty-ton carcass moved with it, raising walls of white water. The crepuscular titan glowed a weak yellow in the dawn, and the clusters of copepod parasites trailing from its eyes glistened. At last a good quarter of the whale’s body came free in its mouth, and the head disappeared.
For a second one of the great scavenger’s fintips breached and hung in the air as it turned. Then it was gone, taking its meal with it and retreating into the depths for the day. What was left of the whale sank from view less than a minute later, gone back to join its fellows in the deep.
“I’d like to find somewhere to shelter,” said Schneider, at exactly the same time his fellow said, “I’m hungry.”
When he came to think of it, Schneider was very hungry too—he had been for as long as he had been conscious, although he hadn’t recognised the sensation for what it was. After watching the scene off the stern of the Tavuto, there was little in the world he wanted to do less than actually eat, but apparently his companion was made of sterner stuff.
More pressingly, as the sun rose, the stern deck felt extremely exposed. If another one of the rays—or worse yet, an overseer—came round this end of the ship on patrol, there would be nowhere to hide. For that matter, there was no guarantee they were not already being watched from any of the darkened windows that festooned the ship’s aft decks.
Looking round at the Tavuto’s rear (and feeling a rush of relief to be looking away from the sea), the darkened entrances of its lower warehouses suddenly seemed hugely inviting. There was no sign of any movement there.
“Let’s go inside,” urged Schneider, gently turning his companion away from the endless water and pointing. “Maybe they have food stored there. And it’s safe. Maybe.”
Shrugging with wasted, bony shoulders, the other zombie stepped away from the rail and loped for the ship’s interior.
He was so tired; the short walk to the nearest entrance felt as long as the night’s march up the flank of the ship. They collapsed just inside the mouth of the metal cave, Schneider feeling as though his limbs were little more than salt-soaked driftwood, his feet sodden lumps. He didn’t dare think about their condition inside their gore-stained wrappings.
There was no doubt, he was growing weaker. While he had no idea when—or what—he had eaten before becoming conscious, whatever metabolism he had was screaming for fuel. It had not escaped his notice that he had not shat yet, either—so far as he knew. But that was another thing he just did not want to think about. It was best just to focus on what went in. This was a ship that existed to gather meat; whether he liked the idea of putting any in his mouth or not, there had to be some nearby.
The warehouse was dim, as the sun had not yet hauled itself high enough to shine over the parapet of the stern, but looked dispiritingly empty. What he hoped at first to be the angular bodies of sharks revealed themselves, as his weak eyes adjusted to the dark, to be the corroded bones of aircraft, half-dismantled and surrounded by littered parts. The warehouse was actually a hangar, and—judging by the look of it—one that had not been used in an extremely long time.
There was no food here, no company, no answers. Just him and his companion; two knackered corpses slumped in a derelict building. Schneider closed his eyes, and was positively urging the ever-present interior night to swallow him, when the gurgling of his companion’s chest wound, which always preceded their voice, caught his ear.
“Look: meat,” they breathed, and he craned forward with open eyes to see it for himself. Sure enough, as the sun’s light began to filter into the rusty cavern, the back wall was coming into view; and against it lay a six-foot drift of flesh. He thought to plead for a moment’s rest before they went to investigate, but his friend had already risen shakily to their feet and was scampering past the shattered jets to the prospect of food.
Schneider rose to follow, and was halfway across the hangar before the first wash of sunlight spilled onto the pile, revealing what it was made of.
Bodies.
CHAPTER
SIX
“THEY’RE PEOPLE!” SHOUTED Schneider, surprised by the volume of his voice. “They’re people!”
To his immense relief, his companion slowed—he had briefly thought they would continue on with jaws open and eyes dulled by hunger, but with the sun shining on the pile, there was no doubting the provenance of the meat.
At first, he wondered if it was a heap of the truly dead, but then he saw movement. Just a fingertip at first, twitching weakly on the end of a scab-crusted arm, but once he knew what he was looking for, he saw more. Here a bandaged foot scrabbled mindlessly at the deck, there an arm waved slowly in the air as if signalling for help, there a shattered jaw opened and closed, sickeningly mechanical below unmoving eyes. For a queasy second, the image of the bloated fish in Exhibition Plaza returned to Schneider’s mind: it was horrible that seeing corpses move didn’t seem unusual anymore.
They were stacked haphazardly, slumped against each other like sozzled friends, as he and his companion had been when they first walked into the hangar. Schneider wondered: had they come here consciously, or had they sleepwalked here unaware, driven by the vague instinct to get away from the horror of the foredeck? More to the point, in either case, were they any different to him?
Towards the bottom of the mound, the zombies looked markedly more decrepit, and less motile. Under the sprawled forms of the more recent arrivals, there was a midden of muck-encrusted forms, either lacking in limbs or so thin and drawn they seemed incapable of movement.
At the edge of the drift, separated from his fellows by a few feet and lying in a mound of wet black detritus, was the most harrowing of all of them.
He was little more than a skeleton, clothed in nothing but a ragged grey beard, his limbs worked down in places to grey-red bone and strange black tendons. Yet he still moved. Despite being reduced to a wet, filthy parody of a human form, he still moved, scratching absently at his right humerus with a fragment of metal like a caged parrot gone mad.
Schneider wondered, looking down at the emaciated figure, whether this was what he had to look forward to. A gradual erosion of function, followed by an interminable slump against a wall somewhere as he waited for his bones to fall apart.
He was just plotting out his excruciating demise in some reeking corner, when it occurred to him he had not heard from his companion in all the time he had been inspecting the writhing people-pile. Looking over to his right, he saw them hunched over the form of a prone zombie, arms outstretched, and a cold shot ran down his spine. His friend was eating another human.
Stumbling over, toes stubbing brutally against the riveted decking, Schneider waved his arms and panted for the other corpse to stop, before he realised there was no cannibalism occurring. His friend was bent over, holding another zombie in their arms, and repeatedly saying the word “Aroha” into its face. It knew their name; it was trying to wake them.
Rather than interrupt, Schneider watched, and waited for any explanation of what was going on. The two dead people were wearing the same clothes—or at least the remnants of them. They had the same sucking chest wound. And, looking closer at the forearm his companion had clamped alongside that of the prone zombie, th
e same tattoo. It was a brusque, military job on the inner wrist, a sword in black ink superimposed on a stylised image of a ringed world, somewhat duller than it would have been on living flesh.
“Aroha!” urged his companion. “You remember? Stay still, you told us. The railgun was charging. It got the shot off, you know, after you went down. The railgun!”
“The railgun,” echoed the slumped form, like somebody trying to remember a dream.
“Burner division. They managed to get it to fire again! A hundred drums it took them, but they got it to fire again. Ripped an almighty hole, when it did. Made enough room for a pithecus charge. You did it, Aroha. You bought them the time.”
The sun glowed on the two tattooed wrists. “The siege,” croaked the cadaver, then rattled for a time, as if searching for a word. “Mouana.”
“Yes!” hissed Schneider’s friend. “It’s me! It’s not over. They got us, but they’ve brought us back. Do you remember...” Mouana continued, gesturing at the hole in her chest, and then at the other zombie’s.
The answer was a long moan—the waking moan, all too familiar to Schneider from the flensing yards—that echoed around the flaking hangar and brought echoes from the dead elsewhere on the pile. As he looked around, he realised more than a handful of the heaped dead were dressed in the same maroon rags, had the same wounds.
The siege. The besieging force. The Blades of Titan, the baby-eaters. The newest and the largest of the mercenary armies that had encircled Home since before his grandfather had been a boy. They were here, same as he was. He had laughed with one of them. He had dragged them away from a shark’s jaws, despite everything their barbarian army had inflicted on his city and his countryfolk.
He had never seen the enemy up close before. The city walls were high, and strictly off-limits to civilians, a great sheltering hand of concrete and masonry that kept the ever-present threat of the siege abstracted to a distant rumble. One of Schneider’s drinking mates, who had drawn a service ticket and spent a summer manning a gun on one of the Eastern scarp sections, said there was bugger all to see anyway: for the most part, the enemy spent all their time under cover, in the miles of jagged trenches, flak silos and gun nests that surrounded the city like an infested sore.
Once every so often—sometimes three or four times over a season, sometimes not for years at a time—there would be a big push for the city. It generally began unannounced, with the splashing of overshot artillery against the sky-shield followed by the thunder of the distant guns. Sometimes a squadron of the city’s triremes would fly out over the parapets, and sometimes a district next to the wall would be evacuated for a day or so, but it was rare that the fighting would intrude any further on daily civilian life. Even the defence itself was conducted largely by the city’s own legions of mercenaries, with just a token levy drawn by lottery from the general populace to act as a reserve.
In general, the siege was felt more as an emotional presence, an ever-present national claustrophobia. From time to time it would assert itself through the occasional taking of an uncle, a colleague, a grocer’s assistant one barely knew—but it had no human face
In fact, the only time Schneider could remember having seen the face of the enemy had been on a midwinter afternoon, after an attempt by the city to break through the siege and link up with an allied army had led to a week of particularly heavy action. The city had come under heavy enough bombardment to see shells push through the shield more than once, and for two nights in a row the sky had been lit bright orange by the fires of a distant armour duel.
When it was all over, a stream of prisoners—the remains of two full enemy regiments, the news sheets had said (they had been less clear on whether the breakthrough had been successful)—were led to the top of the wall above the immensity of the Farmer’s Gate and turned to face the city they had spent the season trying to capture.
Schneider had been part of the crowd gathered to watch as the soldiers, many of them sagging from untreated wounds, looked out over the sprawling factories, the teeming docks, and the bulbous immensity of College Hill. The wall’s defenders stood behind their enemy counterparts, close as lovers, looking at the same view with their faces set in grim pride.
“This is what you will never have,” came an amplified voice from atop the wall, as the sun glared coldly from its descent into the western sea.
“This is all you get,” said the voice, and the day’s last light glinted red from the points of a thousand sabres, as they punched forwards through the prisoners’ chests.
Watching as Mouana cradled her commander in the light of a different sun, rising above a different, despairing world, it became utterly clear where all of those prisoners, and every prisoner captured during the long years of the siege, had ended up.
By the time Schneider’s mind caught up with itself and asked what in the world he was doing among the prisoners of war, he found his hands were already one step ahead, checking his chest for a blade’s exit. But there was nothing, just a clammy linen shirt and prune-wrinkled grey skin beneath. There was, however, something on the back of his hand. It was caked in filth, and faded by the ongoing death of his skin, but its form was unmistakable: the outline of a tobacco pipe, painted in livid scar tissue.
Other sights had brought images of the past slowly to mind, like tea diffusing from a bag, but this one smashed into him like a haymaker from a Bull Aug. After all, it had been one of his last.
CITIZENS OF LIPOS-THOLOS, the text had proclaimed below the image of the blazing pipe. SISTERS AND BROTHERS in the COLONIES and all across the LEMNISCATUS. We have PLAYED THE FOOL LONG ENOUGH. WE’VE BETTER THINGS TO DO than keep COLLEGE HILL comfy and FAT... JUST ASK OLD KING PIPE!
The words, hurriedly printed on rough brown paper, were spilling all over the floor as the constable emptied a gutted almanac onto the library floor. Behind her, two rough men standing among the overturned shelves of the agricultural research section were picking out one book after another, prising them open to check for more pamphlets. Dust billowed; the city hadn’t maintained fields for decades, and the racks of books on fertiliser efficiency and irrigation technology had been badly neglected.
Until, apparently, they had become a repository for seditious material.
“It’s nothing to do with me!” Schneider had gasped, as they had fastened the cuffs. “How would I know they were there? I’m not a Piper!”
The maddening thing was, while he remembered saying the words, he had no idea whether he had been lying or not. All that came to his mind were the averted glances of his colleagues, the slews of exclamatory handbills on the floor, and his own frantic protests as he was dragged out of the stacks, past the front desk, and into the snow.
He remembered garbled fragments of a trial, his dad crying like a kid, the dumb certainty that things would all somehow work themselves out, that things like this didn’t happen to people like him, even as the hairs on the back of his hand shrivelled blackly away from the branding iron’s glow.
Then there had been a night in a cell, the livid brands on the hands of the two men and the old woman sharing it with him as they sat up through the night. And then the chamber, with the steel walls, where he had been all alone, a magistrate looking in on him through a little glass portal. A weird cold smell had come into the air and he had blacked out, and that had been the end of his life.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
THAT WAS IT, thought Schneider, after a moment of utter blankness. That had been his death. Truth be told, there was nothing too distressing about the event itself—compared with the screaming nightmare of waking up again, it was not such a bad thing to carry in his head. If anything, it only served to make everything that had happened before less real—the memories were like reading somebody else’s diary, looking through their photographs and guessing how they might have felt at the time. Looking at it that way, he was really just a very intimate spectator to somebody else’s death.
Frankly, everything felt
easier to deal with if he imagined he was something entirely new, grown into the architecture of someone else’s memories like a hermit crab curled up in an old skull. When he looked at it like that, imagined the man whose memories he was reading had just vanished in that chamber, everything seemed less shit by comparison. After all, if Schneider had died and he was something new and weird, then this was all he had ever known.
At the very least, he thought, this all explained why the city’s courts had been based in the same building as its commercial fishing administration, named the Ministry of Fisheries & Justice.
It was all quite a shift in perspective. He only became aware of how long he’d been standing and staring when Mouana, long since finished explaining things to her old comrade, addressed him.
“You’ve remembered him dying, haven’t you?” she said. “It helps when you remember.”
“Yes, I think it does,” he whispered, letting his gaze slide across the drift of restless, lychee-eyed cadavers, each one writhing in the grey blankness between being one person and another.
All of a sudden, the disgust and antipathy he had felt when recognising Mouana and Aroha as Blades was gone; the hatred felt alien, as incomprehensible as eating stones. For a start, the citizen whose city had been besieged by them was long dead and gone, as were the soldiers who had taken part in its assault. Whatever they were now, they shared in common the fact of their existence—the fact they had been killed, reanimated and enslaved by the city of Lipos-Tholos.
Besides, putting philosophy aside entirely, he was strongly beginning to suspect that even in life, Schneider had not been that emotionally engaged with hating the enemy. For some people it had been something to sing songs about while deep in their cups, or to mutter darkly about over boiled huss. For him, it had been a lukewarm conviction at best, something understood on an intellectual level rather than felt.
