by Nate Crowley
The questions were sincere. Wrack had read very little on the dead. While the use of dead bodies as machinery was a common enough trope in myth, it was scarce almost to the point of absence in reliably recorded history. What little there was began and ended at High Sarawak, a city long lost to the decay of the lemniscatus, and so reduced almost to myth by default. The place was a cautionary tale to the schoolchildren of Lipos-Tholos, and any further enquiry into the matter tended to be severely discouraged.
There was another long silence before Mouana responded.
“Probably tiny machines,” she said. “That’s what Aroha used to say. Whenever we had to deal with hard tech and couldn’t find a workaround. Tiny machines. The old stuff.”
The name of Mouana’s fellow soldier hung on the night breeze for a long time. Wrack felt he could have let it pass, but there was no way he could let it be word-weather.
“Aroha...” he murmured. “I have to tell you... he didn’t make it.”
The waves lapped at the side of the skiff. When she spoke again, her slashing whisper of a voice sounded almost carefree.
“It’s fine, he was dead anyway,” said Mouana. “I already missed him.”
There was silence. And then one of the zombies started singing.
It was a sea shanty. Or a river shanty, to be precise. Wrack knew it; one of the syncopated boat-loaders’ songs from the mud-black deltas of Grand Amazon, offworld and bungled with strange dialect, but no different in rhythm from the salt-stained songs of old. It came from the broken-jawed woman, and sang out into silence for a minute or so before another voice joined in.
Of course, the voice that joined the river song took no care to use the same lyrics, or the same tune; it was some dreadful kuiper miner’s dirge, full of lost love and slurred consonants, but hitting the harmonies where it mattered.
Once the solo had become a chorus, more joined in. A man in the shredded tunic of the Blades of Titan opened up with a crude soldier’s song about rutting, causing Mouana’s eyes to widen with delight in recognition, and a zombie with legs mangled to zig-zag tragedy piped up with an ode to forgotten woods.
The song was woven like a braid from a dozen minds, each captive to different memories, but allied in purpose, driving the oars on to cohesion. That is, thought Wrack, why sea shanties were invented after all.
It made their rowing stronger, and their husks of voices swelled to drown out the crash and hiss of the oars. Those with words bellowed them as loud as their worn pipes would manage, those without them hummed or shouted or stamped their salt-clotted feet in the bilge. Each sang their own song, but to the same rhythm, the same loose tune, the same rough, proud purpose. Dead men and women, rowing their own boat.
In time, even the two slumped zombies at the back of the boat began to sing too, or at least do something close to it. The skeletal teen began to keen in rough time to the song, while the withered fat man beside him took to roaring angrily whenever one of the other singers rose to a peak that called for a response. Whether their outbursts were expressions of solidarity or just bewildered pain, at least they were drifting towards consciousness.
The tune went on, as did the sweep of the oars, for a long while into the night. They had no lights, and so rowed in darkness, under a starless sky. Only the faintest glimmer of ugly light on the horizon told them the location of their home, and they kept on course with barely any need of nudging. Wrack and Mouana took to the oars, and found their own songs to add to the chorus. Warmed by the bottle, or at least by what it represented, they shrank into themselves and fell away for a while.
Long into the journey, when the omnishanty had faded to little more than a rhythmic hum, a blue light began to flicker across them. Faint and ghostly, it brushed the undersides of their jaws and labouring arms with faint cerulean. Wrack rose from something like a trance; as his fellows were brought into focus by the phantom light, it was as if he were seeing them for the first time. It was like waking in the depths of the night to see bedside furniture looming like watching demons, unreal but threatening. He shook his head; there was no threat in the boat. Something was below them.
He looked over the side. There, wavering in the clear sea, were bright blue lights, like constellations cast down into the deep. He leaned down, blinked, and saw that the lights were shining from lengths of glass. Shreds of spectral white hung from them, wavering in the night currents, lit in gentle blue. They were hanging from man-sized needle teeth, in a mouth as wide as a valley.
Quiet and calm as if he were rising from picking up a dropped fork at dinner, Wrack sat upright. None of the other dead had noticed what they were rowing over. Knowing how long it would take to get to the skiff’s weapons, and how little chance they had of being able to coordinate a defence even if they did, Wrack made a rash choice. He began to sing louder.
Working alongside the hymn of the dead, Wrack opened his throat and belted out the first words he could remember, from the first maritime song he had learned.
“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea!” he roared, and the dead sailors answered.
“Awaaaaay, down Rio!” some of them sang in reply, while others just screamed their own words. Forty oars hit the water at once with doubled force, and the boat surged forwards.
“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea!” repeated Wrack, as he acknowledged to himself that he had no such song to sing, just the first line.
Luckily, that didn’t matter to the mariners. They shouted their own answers back at him, and drove their oars into Ocean with the ferocity of people with nothing to lose. The song found its own tune, its own words, and the boat ploughed on.
Wrack hunched his shoulders and waited for the sepulchre jaws to close, but nothing rose from the brine but a great shrug of upwelling water and the dying of the blue light. The predator had left. He carried on singing.
Hours later, they reached the Tavuto. It appeared less a ship, and more a country raised out of the sea. As they approached its starboard flank, Wrack saw it for the monster it was. At least a mile and a half from stern to bow, it glowed with the fire of its gargantuan try-pots, its rows of towering cranes, and its encrustation of bridge decks, pricked with a thousand cold windows.
Mouana made sense of it, had a plan for getting aboard, long before Wrack did. She had barely stirred when they had moved over the glass jaws, but now she was suddenly all over the boat, urging the sailors to be silent, to quiet the oars on one side and move them towards the great lagoon with the smashed gates where the Bahamut still lay rotting.
When they got within fifty yards of the lagoon, with the boat slipways in sight, it was time to take action. But the immense main arm of Dakuvanga was dipping to take a mansion-sized chunk of Bahamut out of the lagoon, and the dead were swarming over the corpse to free the lump. There would be no way to get closer without drawing attention.
“Let’s swim,” said Mouana, without ceremony, and leapt into the water. Wrack waited a moment to make sure the dead had heard, and then moved for the front of the boat when he saw them leave their posts en masse. Even the wailing teen at the back of the boat was heading for the prow; this was no moment to hold back.
Wrack swore, dived into the black, and swam. Bodies bumped against him in the water, slithered past him. Whether they were his fellows, or mean, whiptailed things come to snaggle at the leaking Bahamut, he had no idea. Frankly, after looking down into the bottomless water as the ET had taken Aroha, a speck of flesh above a carnivore god, he didn’t really care. In comparison with that moment, this was about as frightening as taking a drunken dip in the Fellows’ koi pond on a student dare.
After the brief, determined swim, he found himself on one of the shallow ramps leading up and out of the lagoon, clinging to the metal grates alongside two dozen other corpses. Mouana stood at the top of the ramp, a black shape against the floodlights of the Bahamut’s disassembly. Wrack climbed out of the surf and walked to meet her.
“Home again,” he remarked,
the ice-cold wash of Ocean still swirling around his feet. A grey tentacle slithered out of the water, groped blindly at his ankles, but he stamped on it in annoyance and it slunk away. That made Mouana smile. Her lips began moving silently, as she counted the eager zombies hauling themselves up the ramp to join them.
One-Arm was there, and Broken-Jaw, whose name was Kaba, and the Bruiser, who had only offered “fack off” in lieu of name. There were the three Blades, though Mouana knew none of them, and the woman who had sung the miner’s song, her teeth wrecked by biting into a metal can. Last of all, hobbling up the ramp slumped on the struggling shoulders of the wailing teen, came Once-Fat Man, his face now set in strange serenity.
“Huh,” said Mouana, turning to Wrack as the sagging pair made it up the ramp. “We only lost three.”
“Well then,” said Wrack, slapping her on the shoulder and offering a friendly grimace, “let’s go and find some more mates.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
GRIM, SILENT, TOGETHER, they crept through the industry of the lagoonside and into the silence of Tavuto’s aft decks. No overseer challenged them. With the aftermath of the failed ET hunt on their hands, the ship’s crew were doing all they could to move chunks of the gargantuan fish out of the lagoon and into the processing yards, with little heed paid to errant dead. As they snuck out of sight of the lagoon and into the ship, they met no human resistance.
Once, as they rounded a pitted cracking tower, one of the Sniffer Rays came to challenge them. Remembering his first encounter with one of the spider-legged elasmobranchs, Wrack had flinched when it came skittering out of the dark. But as he saw the way the other dead circled it, dashed in on its flanks, clamped wrinkled hands on its flapping skirt of ammoniac flesh, the fear fell out of him. With orgiastic relish, they tore it apart.
Its metal legs flapped, its tail thrashed, but the creature was nothing before the mob of dead. Before he could say a word, handfuls of stinking meat were being pulled from the central disc, flesh was sliding from cartilage, and dirty water poured from the creature’s spiracles as it shuddered in second death. In seconds, it was less than metal and halfbone.
The mob moved on, stringy nitrogen chemistry hanging from their gums, their knuckles drumming on railings as they moved for the far decks of the ship. They were like chimps on the hunt: shaved, stinking apes with drawn gums and shaking claws. Wrack laughed recklessly; this clearly wasn’t stopping until someone made it stop.
This was an insurrection. They were in trouble, and they were going to be in trouble until they were put down or caused a lot more trouble. It felt good. Better enjoy himself while it lasted, he thought, as one of the zombies leading the mob started screaming its own name.
Wrack was amazed when they made it to the aft hangar where they had first been rounded up for the ET hunt. The dregs were still there, the drift of ruined dead still stacked against the wall, moaning with arms outstretched. Clearly, no cleanup crew had come. Their salt-sodden band of survivors rushed over, hollering their triumph over the ray, and began to chatter with the less mobile dead. The conversations grew from the shaking of shoulders to the exchange of names, through the agony of remembrance, and into companionable rage. Seemingly crippled corpses rose from the pile as their wits returned. The hangar filled with human speech.
Some time during the night, zombies went out for food. They came back, dragging something like beluga whales. Fires were lit. Who had matches? Fuel? Wrack had no idea; it was bewildering to be out of control, but wonderful. No longer being the one who worked out what to do next, at least for a while, made his rotten shoulders feel lighter. More zombies came to them, either dragged there by search parties or blundering, lost, as he and Mouana had done before. It became a strange sort of party.
In time, he found himself pulled to the edge of the fire-circle by One-Arm, the wiry corpse tugging urgently on his wrist and cajoling him into the light. “We’ll find out, won’t we, we’ll see?” chattered the strange little creature, and to Wrack’s astonishment, dead men and women all around the fire repeated “we’ll see!” and fell into raucous laughter. As their eyes watched him, twinkling in reflected flames, he twigged what was going on. This was the exorcism of life stories turned into a game—and cackling, cracked One-Arm, with its one line of dialogue, had found its place as host.
And so Wrack found himself talking about his life as if there was a real story to tell; as if he remembered more than just a fragment of it. Still unsure whether he had been a Piper rebel caught at scheming, or just a librarian caught in the jaws of a militia with a quota of arrests to keep, he decided to play up his uncertainty for comic effect. He would veer wildly from prim statements about reorganising tactician’s manuals to stories of alleyway snitch-stabbings, waggling his hands alongside a theatrical sneer to indicate it was all—probably—total bollocks.
The dead laughed as he played the fool with his broken memory, but their faces hardened in solidarity as he reached the firmer, rawer memories. They cheered fiercely at the discovery of the pamphlets, they cheered at his branding, and at his father’s helpless tears. And they cheered when he died. They cheered hardest when he died; they cheered for him, and he cheered with them. For a moment, the cheers made him brave enough for it not to matter. But then his story was over, and the cheers faded, and still he had no heartbeat.
As if knowing he had no more to say, Mouana piped up with the name of some long-ago regimental victory, and the Blades in the hangar cheered again. One of them opened up with a fresh story, and Wrack felt the eyes of the circle slide from him. After a while he retreated from the firelight, and sat himself down at the edge of the crowd, against the cold metal of the hangar wall.
For a time he sat and listened to the voices of the chattering people, watching their shadows thrown against the broken warplanes in flickering orange relief, and allowed himself to forget that they were all dead, that a terrible sea lay beyond the mouth of their metal cave. But then he began to notice another sound under the human murmur: the slow, rhythmic, scraping tick of a knifepoint on old bone.
He turned to his left, and a skull grinned up at him from the dark, yellow teeth mischievous in a wispy halo of beard. It was the skeletal man he had seen the previous night in the hangar, sat up to his hips in rot, still patiently whickering away at his exposed bone with his scrap of metal. While just a day ago the creature had seemed horrifying, a ghoulish remnant reminding him of his own decay, there was now nothing remotely threatening about it.
“Alright, mate,” said Wrack, and nodded at the skull.
The skull nodded back, prompting Wrack to bark a delighted laugh, and opened its jaws like a shoddy ghost train animatronic. The skull looked at him, mouth open and grinning like a bad comedian waiting for a reaction to an appalling one-liner, and emitted a barely audible wheeze.
“You keep doing what you’re doing,” said Wrack, then lay back in the filth and lost himself in the fire-cast shadows of the nostalgic dead. What came next was not sleep as he had once known it, but neither was it the turgid black dreaming that had ensnared him before he had woken in the flensing yard. Whatever it was, it was devoid of much thought, and that was good enough.
Morning came, and silence with it.
The fire had burned down, its embers blackening as the sky outside lightened, and the zombies were still. They had gathered back in their drift, slumped against each other but no longer moaning and twitching as they had done before. Their eyes watched the horizon, gleaming pale as they waited for the sun to undrown itself. Scraps of flesh dangled from the picked ribs of the beluga-things, fluttering in eddies of the dawn wind.
Wrack stood, stretching muscles turned to wood by rest and the weird processes of undeath. It felt dreadful to ease himself out of the muckpile and into thought, but it had to be done. If they lay here any longer, they were in danger of ending up right where they had started off, sunk beyond the responsibility of consciousness. They had to make a plan, and start waking the others.
There was so much work to do: somebody had to start it.
Wrack stood by the embers of the story-fire and clapped his leaden hands, and the pile began to stir. He was just about to address them, when a familiar clattering came from the hangar’s mouth.
Not again, thought Wrack, rolling his eyes, and turned to the sound. This happened every fucking time he was about to make a speech. The same overseer, the one with the grille for the face, was at the door, huffing with her wheelbarrow of offal, the thresher shark skittering at her heels. She foraged in the red mess, cursing to herself, not yet aware of what had changed.
“Come on, arseholes,” she barked tiredly, then looked up and froze, a gelid kidney in her hand. Eyes narrowing to slits above her corroded muzzle, she took in the smoldering ashes of the fire, the stripped carcasses, and the mass of still, silent zombies staring right at her. Registering Wrack alone in the centre of the hangar, her head swung round and she dropped the kidney, brows leaping in shock.
A strangled noise blurted from her grille. She recognised him. Knew him as one of the zombies she had herded down the ship the previous day, as one of the dead sent miles out to sea on a disastrous hunt. Knew he should not be there, standing stock still with teeth bared in an animal grin.
“Morning,” said Wrack, and the dead erupted from their pile like a swarm of flies. There were near a hundred of them, loping across the hangar with arms outstretched and shrieks rising from their ruined throats. Wrack ran ahead of them, eyes fixed on the overseer’s blanched face, veins flooding with a terrible hunger.
The shark came at him, sliding on the deck in its haste to catch him between its jaws, and overshot Wrack by a good three feet. It wheeled round like a hound, raising sparks on the deck, and lunged for his leg. But the mob had grabbed it by the long lobe of its tail, and it was tugged back away from him.
