by Nate Crowley
The predator’s howl came again, and Wrack saw the sea beyond the Tavuto break in the roll of a mountainous carapace.
“There she blows!” came the shout from the radio, a distorted cry of ecstasy, and Wrack tumbled from the truck in a mound of disgorged bodies.
CHAPTER
NINE
HE WAS HERDED down a steel ramp and into darkness, one of a numberless press of zombies being funneled below decks and into thundering industry of the Tavuto’s underworld. Down they went through channels and conduits, merging with other streams of zombies and sorted at junctions by hard-handed overseers. Chains rattled on pulleys, hammers clinked in the depths, and radio chatter echoed along the low ceilings like the rustle of bat wings.
There was no way to turn around in the press, nor to see more than a few feet past the jostling heads of other cadavers. For all he knew, Mouana and the others could be an arm’s reach away, or gone entirely. They had become a sort of liquid, like the slurry of plankton caught against a whale’s baleen in the straining of its jaws.
A rhythmic thunder came from his right, as if boulders were rolling through iron tubes somewhere below; as the corridor’s side opened up into a row of columns, he saw red-ochre boats slide past on steel rails, lighting their own passage with slews of sparks. They cannoned past and round a bend, disappearing in rings of fire on the tunnel walls.
To his left, monsters were being made. Ancient-looking zombies, their flesh patched with plastic and bursting with cables and pipes, stood on hydraulic legs as terrible armatures were lowered onto them from above. Teams of overseers fell upon them as the jointed rigs came down, riveting hinges shut and hammering wingnuts into place.
In the light from a welding torch, one of the lumpen constructs looked right at Wrack—or right through him. The skin of its face was blasted, leathery, as if it had been cooked, and its eyes were sightless as stones. A cluster of lenses jutting from its shoulder glinted, reflecting a shower of sparks as a hulking steel pincer was grafted to its side, and Wrack wondered what it saw.
Then the monster rocked back on its feet, the overseers stepping away as it flexed its construction site of a torso, and turned away to follow its cohort into the dark. Wrack was jostled past the assembly platform into a corridor barely higher than his head, and then into a long room packed wall-to-wall with corpses. Between the railings along the walls and the cluster of machinery in the middle, all was flesh. Wrack was just wondering why the crowd had stopped moving, when a heavy door slammed shut behind him.
The darkness was crushing, ringing with the muffled clamour of the hammers and the rails outside. The floor shuddered. Wrack realised he was holding a breath he could not breathe. And then, with a ratcheting crack, the floor dropped six feet all at once.
Before he could register what was going on, there was a groan of steel, and the entire room pivoted forwards sickly. Wrack fell against the zombie ahead of him, and was trying to free his trapped arm when gravity seemed to collapse entirely. The enclosed space exploded with the hiss of steel on steel and shuddered madly: cold, briny air blasted against his face and the world shot forwards, downwards, at a reckless incline.
Wrack was smashed back into the bodies behind him, the acceleration shoving the air from his lungs, and the roof thundered past in a blur. Then daylight exploded into his face, followed instantaneously by a wall of salt water, and the boat’s engines growled into life.
They were in some kind of pinnace, an iron trough full of zombies, with a spluttering engine at the back and a block of generators amidships. Blinking sore eyes against the light, Wrack looked around and saw more boats hitting the water, surging ahead and carving white valleys in the grey. Through the wall of black smoke kicked out behind them by the engine, the Tavuto rose like an iron cliff, its side pitted with chutes from which more vessels shot and slapped against the waves.
The engine shifted pitch and the pinnace lurched forward, the overseer in his chair at the bow gunning the handlebars like a dirt biker. The flat bottom of the craft skimmed and slapped over the swells, causing its cargo to bounce on their feet, heads nodding as if captivated by music. As they reached full speed, there was an almighty crash, and a grey shape filled the world to their left, heralded by walls of displaced water.
For a moment Wrack thought part of the Tavuto’s side had fallen away, plunging into Ocean like a calving iceberg, before he recognised the new arrival as another launch, a ship in its own right, dwarfing the rest of the swarm like a pike cutting through a shoal of minnows.
The behemoth craft surged forward, making the sea rear up around them, and the pinnace’s pilot leaned left hard to bring them swerving close in alongside it. As they blasted along its flank, Wrack saw it was armoured like a siege tank, its hull buttressed with rows of squat cylinders and braced with steel ribs.
Up where the hull gave way to the deck, the edge of the ship bristled with turrets, in which were fixed the mechanised zombies he had seen being assembled in the mothership’s bowels. They faced the spray with sightless eyes and blank snarls, withered bodies sagging at the heart of industrial weaponry. Ahead of them, the boat’s prow was emblazoned with the flaking, crude image of snarling teeth, and its name, Akhlut, scrawled like a curse in white stencilled letters.
As it reached full speed, the killship sounded its horn, a terrible blast that raced ahead of it like a black wave, and seemed to haunt the silence it left behind. Fleetingly, against his every wish, and despite the endless grey that stretched out in every direction around the hunting fleet, Wrack felt like part of something lethal.
As the racing armada gathered around the Akhlut, he tried to count their number—there must have been more than thirty boats in all. Some were sleek and long, sparsely crewed and bristling with harpoons, launchers and other weaponry. Others, like the craft in which Wrack was crammed, were crude barges, built around bulky electrical machinery and packed to the gunwales with restless zombies. At the head of the pack, a hundred yards ahead of the Akhlut, a catamaran with a deck enclosed in armoured blisters cut through the water with the urgency of a shark on a wound-scent.
Before long, the water around them became marbled with oily white swirls—the blood of the ET. White, translucent bodies thrashed weakly in the slick; whether they were scavengers, or strange parasites leaked from the shell of the alien devil, Wrack had no idea.
The trail waxed and waned, but they kept on it; the chase became a marathon. Even mortally wounded, it seemed, the ET could keep up a monstrous speed. Tavuto shrank to a stain on the horizon, and sank from sight. The open Ocean stretched: borderless, bereft of detail in every direction, and empty.
Once, the onrushing flotilla disturbed a swarm of Jenny Hanivers; they came bursting from the water in tan arcs, demon tails flapping and gnarled wings beating uselessly at the air. Later, their wakes were chased by shadows for a time, weaving beneath the white like hungry phantoms, always out of sight. Then there was nothing; just the clouds above, the grey plain of water below, and the stripe of chemical leakage promising prey.
Wrack passed the time by staring at the faces of his fellow passengers, trying to guess at their former lives by their scars, the fragments of their clothes, the washed-out tattoos on their waterlogged skin. To his right, a woman with a broken jaw and a ring-puckered ear stared blankly ahead with her smashed mouth yawning. Had she been a student, or the septuagenarian matriarch of a factory clan? With the skin of her arms hanging in withered bunches from wasted muscles, her skin clumped in folds, death had muddled decades.
Beyond her, a man with the bricklike features of a classic pub bruiser stood, a string of black drool looping from his lip, as he gazed absently at the filth sloshing around their feet. Ahead of him, a zombie whose sore-pocked head had shed all but a few clumps of greying hair swayed, oblivious to the fact its arm ended just past the shoulder, in a roughly-bandaged and rapidly unravelling mess.
It was then that Wrack spotted Mouana’s comrade, wedged in between the one-armed zo
mbie and a block of machinery, his head turned to look out at the sea. Wrack went to shout his name, but it was as if something had clotted in the misfiring channels of his brain; he had forgotten it, there was only a maddening greyness in its place.
He cried out anyway, desperately hoping the word would come to him, but all it did was set the other zombies off in one of their dreadful concatenations of moaning. Trying to shoulder his way through the crowded deck, he found their faces turning towards him, mute confusion etched on their brows as they shouted wordlessly and shoved back. For every foot he managed to squeeze through the press, he seemed to be pushed back eighteen inches by their flailing.
Wrack was on the brink of laying in with his fists, when the mortars began firing.
Dull thuds rang out from the Akhlut, and were echoed after a moment by popping detonations from a nearby weapons pinnace. Heavy projectiles tumbled through the leaden sky in low arcs, before smacking into the water ahead in plopping plumes of brine. A second volley fired, and then the detonations began. They were felt rather than heard, battering concussions that felt as if the boat was being smacked against from beneath. Depth charges. The hunt had begun.
At once, every boat in the flotilla increased speed. A third volley of charges went tumbling into the water, and the weaponised dead on the Akhlut’s flanks raised their enormous arms, as if prompted by an unheard signal. The overseer at the helm leaned forwards in his saddle and twisted his huge wrists, opening the throttle to full.
They pulled out ahead of the fleet, engine screaming, and the other corpse-carriers pulled out beside them. Smoke blasted from the backs of the black barges, and they advanced in a loose knot, smashing through the tips of waves and raising curtains of spray.
Beneath them the water turned pale as the speeding body of the ET ascended like a rising beach. It could only have been fifty feet from the surface, its plates, tubercules and jointed limbs visible as patches of shifting colour. They matched its speed, and jockeyed on the surface to surround its mass with a loose ring of boats.
The Akhlut’s horn sounded once again, a call for blood, and was answered from below by a subsonic scream that rattled the teeth in Wrack’s jaw.
Joining the cacophony, the machinery at the heart of the pinnace began to thrum, building to an aggravated whine. All around the circle, the other boats’ machines were coming to life, a swelling chorus that crackled with electric menace. Wrack began to feel lightheaded.
The overseer’s radio burst into life with an urgent string of exclamations, and he reached hastily for an iron helmet, sliding it over his head with obvious urgency. A warning klaxon began blaring from the Akhlut, and the sound of the generators ascended to a barely-audible shriek.
Then the blackness came. Wrack felt it an instant before it hit, like a flash of lightning seen in the heartbeat before its passing tore the air apart. It came from beyond the horizon, a shockwave of invisible dread with only one possible source. That spiteful tower on the Tavuto, squat and glowing with baleful green light, the source of the awful sleep that he had slipped from back in the flensing yards.
Back on the ship it had been a conquerable presence, like tar tugging on his heels; this was something violently physical, a wall of angst that advanced across the windswept distance at impossible speed and knocked his mind aside like a flower before a tsunami.
The world went away.
His lips touched hers, an instant before they thought they would, and began moving softly, making strange, tiny wet crackles. His thumb rubbed a slow circle in the soft hair at her temple, and he was surprised at how her mouth didn’t really taste of anything. His eyes flickered open, saw her eyelids tremble above heavy lashes, and closed again. What had they even been saying, before their eyes had gone out of focus and their mouths had dipped in together?
The firelight danced through the bottle’s green glass as he swirled the whisky in its bottom. Cool air, the last breath of a summer sunset, ruffled the hair on his brow as he leaned back into the coarse grass. Laughter blossomed in the shadows, twigs crackled in the flames. He leaned over to answer Tom’s question with a joke, but he had forgotten the question.
Oof, but it was cold. Groggily, he pulled the thick duvet over his shoulder and up to his chin, wriggling down into the body-hot cavity beneath. Warm hips cupped his arse, and he slid his shin in between sleeping legs, a shiver passing through him at the pleasure of the snug contact. Who were they, again?
He couldn’t believe he still had half the book left to read. Better yet, there were three more to go in the series once it was done. As he turned the page the torch slipped from its crook between his head and shoulder, and he rummaged on the mattress to retrieve it, eager to get back to the story. As he grabbed the light, he looked for a while at the way the light shone through the webs at the base of his fingers, translucent and pink with warm blood. The book had closed on itself. What page had he been on?
His father showed him again, defining the horse’s jaw with a swoop of his pencil and then blocking in the curve of its neck. He scribbled out his own effort, which looked like a sort of ill crocodile, and reached for a new sheet of paper. Frowning in concentration, he put his pencil to paper and drew a wobbly line to define the horse’s nose, but he was pressing too hard and the tip broke off, leaving a black starburst on the page. He turned to his father to ask whether he should start a new drawing, but his dad didn’t really have a face.
Sunlight fell in an orange stripe across the stuffed toy rabbit, motes pirouetting in front of its worn smile. Its woollen ears flopped across his shoulder as he picked it up and hugged it. Then it was gone, and his hands were white, cold claws, branded with the mark of a violent rebellion. He was a wretched thing, on a monster-haunted ocean, clutching the fading memories of a dead man.
Schneider Wrack howled at the sky, the sound tearing from his throat as if it could take him with it, and the world howled along. All around him the dead screamed as their former selves were snatched away from them forever, and their horror shook the miserable boat, drawn to the generator like lightning grounding through a rod. The generator whined and overloaded with a deafening crack, blasting everything it had gathered downwards in a single black pulse. All around the ring the other boats did likewise, their machinery cooking off and sending shockwaves of grief into the fathomless sea.
It was despair, weaponised.
The ET reacted immediately, and violently. With a bellow of confused rage that seemed to come from the whole of Ocean, its great pale back began surging up through the water like an onrushing storm. The overseer turned hard, nearly capsizing them as the boat banked to avoid the breaching monstrosity, and only just made it in time: it erupted from the sea like a fist through paper, a tower of ragged wounds with claws spread like vengeful wings.
Empty, broken, standing only because of the pressure of other bodies, Wrack looked up with a strange serenity at the leviathan’s jaws, hanging high above in a halo of crashing water.
The Akhlut opened fire. Harpoons as thick as treetrunks slammed into the ET’s neck from ports in the killship’s grinning mouth, while a fusillade of smaller projectiles whistled across from its hull, each trailing a thick steel line. Half bounced off the otherworldly armour, but enough lodged between the plates and spines to secure a hold. The beast writhed as spearheads detonated beneath its skin, twisting in a mass of cables like some fiendish marionette, then began to shudder as the gun-limbs of the turret zombies sounded at close range.
It crashed back into the sea, obliterating a weapon-pinnace that had made too close a pass under its bulk, and put on a terrible burst of speed. Its twin tails thrashed beneath the surface, kicking up titanic waves in its bid to evade its pursuers, and the immensity of the Akhlut was dragged behind it like a sledge.
Its tails rose above the surface, fanned planes as wide as city streets, and it dived. A few of the harpoon-zombies broke free of their mounts and were sucked into the abyss, and the whole prow of the Akhlut dipped almost to its
tip in the surging water.
Then the rockets came on. Without warning, the squat cylinders along the Akhlut’s hull roared into life, two dozen tongues of plasma jetting straight into cold sea with a force intended to fight hundreds of tons of surging muscle. Instantly the world filled with steam, intensely thick and scalding hot even at a hundred yards’ distance. No wonder the weapon-zombies arrayed on Akhlut’s flanks had looked as though they’d been cooked: they had been.
With the world obscured by the boiling ocean, it was impossible to tell how the battle was progressing. The rocket burst came to a halt, and all that could be heard was the breaking of steel cable under tension, the revving of motors and the popping of gunfire, all muffled by the blanket of steam.
In the boat around Wrack, bobbing motionless now its purpose was done, the spent dead leaned against each other, faces even emptier than they had been. Beside him, the broken-jawed woman had slumped to a half-crouch, head still craned to the sky as if waiting for her shout to fall back into her mouth. The commander was invisible through the mist.
After a few minutes of unseen chaos, a weapons pinnace swung past them, its pilot leaning from his seat to gesture at theirs. The engine started up again. Seconds later, the Akhlut’s horn sounded from the fog; long, triumphant and tired like a wounded animal over a fallen rival. The radio chatter was clear, even from the back of the boat: “It’s dead! It’s dead! It’s dead!”
The Akhlut swam into view as a dark shape, resolving into predatory angles as they drew alongside. Beside it, a great armoured carcass bobbed peacefully in the water, strung to the killship by a forest of cables. The leviathan had been hooked. Atop the ship’s forecastle an overseer stood, leaning on a radio mast, and raised his fist in salute to the pilots of the circling boats, as steam swirled around his pillar-like legs.
He was unaware of the ghost-white shape, almost invisible against the rolling mist, looming behind him with mantis claws raised as if in greeting.
