The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

by Nate Crowley

  Hands trembling as the silence hardened, she slid one of the leatherbound boxes from the crate and walked over to Mouana with it. She snapped open a fastener, reached inside and withdrew a matte black rod, its surface inscribed with a spiralling filigree of printed gold. It looked indescribably alien, and sickeningly familiar all at once.

  “This is a necrod,” said Pearl. “It’s even older, and a lot harder to explain.”

  “Try,” hissed Mouana, with a queasy sense that she knew what the woman was about to say.

  “It programmes the miasma. Miasma itself is easy to make, but without these it’s just a colloid of inert theurgitons—it won’t do anything. These canisters have already been activated.”

  Mouana snorted in bleak amusement. Theurgitons; tiny machines. She remembered old Captain Aroha cursing the things, as they had spent a roasting afternoon failing to repair a collapsed coolant pump on one of the antique railguns. “Tiny fucking machines,” he had ranted, wiping grease from his brow, “it always comes down to tiny machines.”

  Pearl had stopped at the half-laugh, but Mouana glared at her, and she continued.

  “Nobody knows how the necrods work, or how to make them. We looted them from another city, which looted them from somewhere else, centuries ago. All we do know is that when you run the right current through them, they... well, they put out something like a neural signal. But definitely not a human one. It activates the miasma, makes it do—well, what it does.”

  “And it can’t make it do anything else, can it?”

  “No. Miasma could probably do a lot of things, but these rods will only make it reanimate,” said Pearl, as Mouana stalked closer.

  “And how many rods are there here?”

  “Just the ones on this crate.”

  Thunder rolled as Mouana took the rod gently from Pearl’s hands. She called softly to the bar, where the Bruiser, having grown bored with the technical discussion, had a Piper in a headlock and was making them drink lager. Nodding at his leader’s summons, he dropped the spluttering rebel and lumbered over to Mouana, who handed him the ancient machine.

  The Bruiser turned the thing over in his hands, brow furrowed, then weighed it like a cudgel as he looked Pearl over. After some calculation, he gave Mouana a questioning glance. She in turn looked to Fingal, who drew deeply on his pipe and shrugged, and then to Pearl, standing with her jaw clenched and her eyes fixed on the floor.

  Mouana knew what she had to do. Here was a woman who had worked the factory floor for years, making slaves of her friends and sending them to rot on an alien sea. Even the ex-vapourer’s own comrades knew she’d earned her death, no matter the mitigation since. It would be justice, and fair revenge, to give the Bruiser the nod.

  She summoned all of her anger, let it pool like hot oil in her rotten head, but all she could think of was Wrack. Poor, mad Wrack, who still couldn’t quite cope with it all. As she gave the tiniest shake of her head, she told herself she was still a soldier; that the mercy was all his.

  The Bruiser looked profoundly disgusted, but nodded back all the same, then raised the necrod like a bottle in a brawl.

  “Fack off!” he screamed, smashing it to pieces on the bar counter.

  WRACK HAD THE most terrible headache, all of a sudden. Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t had a headache of some description, but this was different. It felt like broken glass ground into his nerves, like his axons had been stretched tight and plucked like guitar strings. He could taste it, like a mouthful of hot vinegar.

  It took him out of himself, left whatever lay beneath writhing and snapping its beak in the sudden light.

  Then it passed, as quickly as it had come on. It was as if a wind had blown through him, leaving his mind thrumming and muddled. Vision returned, but he had no idea what he was looking at, let alone what he had been doing when the pain came on.

  The number 32, brass on chipped paint. Chipped green paint, of the most familiar colour. A colour that smelled of book-dust and roast cod, metallic like die-cast toys, stale like pipe smoke. Like... like home.

  Schneider lit up with joy; he was home! He was going to visit Dad, after his long trip. He rapped jauntily on the door, grinning at the prospect of the old man’s surprise on seeing his son again. There was no answer, but that was fine—his father’s hearing had never been great, and he was probably out in the conservatory, fussing over herbs. He would have to take his old route in, the one he had used as a teen when coming home at dawn.

  Schneider moved to the bay window beside the door and fished in the gap in the wooden slats, worn smooth through years of covert entry. After some fiddling, the catch released, and the sash window slid silently upwards.

  He hopped over the sill and into the study, but it wasn’t a study any more. The furniture was all wrong, and the pictures on the wall were different from how he remembered. Where was the painting of the viaduct, the watercolour with the badly-painted dog in the background? It didn’t look right, and it didn’t smell right either.

  Then the door swung open, and revealed a grimacing man with a kitchen knife. It was not Schneider’s dad. Behind him was a woman in a nightgown, her eyes bulging and her mouth twisting around the beginnings of a scream. Behind both of them was a monster. It reared above them in a mound of tattered flesh, eyes white and edges flapping like a ragged, wobbling skirt.

  Schneider was about to warn them of the devil behind them, when he realised it was his own reflection in the hallway mirror.

  The man waved his knife and the woman screamed, but all Wrack could do was laugh. Of course! He was a massive, rotting stingray on mechanical spider legs! How had he forgotten that? He laughed and laughed, and the thing in the mirror shook with it, spraying black gore from its spiracles. What a thing to forget!

  Wrack wanted to double over, to shriek and giggle until he was sobbing for breath, but of course he had no lungs! Somehow, it made things even funnier. That poor baffled family, he thought, as they ran screaming to the front door. Woken in the night to find a monster in their house, getting confused by paintings.

  Wrack roared with mirth as he stared at the mirror, and the ray laughed back. You had to see the funny side of things, he thought to himself as phantom tears began to pool.

  And this was fucking hilarious.

  Drawing back from the ray, Wrack began to laugh with all of himself. With the sharks and worms and the crabs that capered through the streets, with the quivering pallor of his mind, with the raging, shattered heart of Tavuto. His sides throbbed, his bones glowed. His laughter belched from him like a thunderhead, rolling over the city and dancing with the growl of the guns.

  You had to laugh.

  TO HER UTTER astonishment, Mouana was giggling. Maybe it was the release of tension, or just the relief of knowing it was all over—she had no idea. But she was shaking with it, and as she looked around at the mayhem in the bar, she saw it wasn’t just her.

  The dead were laughing. Not with the black, sardonic grunts that had passed for humour on Tavuto, nor with the elation of warriors with nothing to lose, but true laughter—the kind that shook ribs and wetted creased eyes. It was infectious. As Fingal lined up his crowbar to smash a rod balanced across two chairs, he had to stop to wipe away the tears. Even Pearl was grinning, and Mouana could hardly begrudge her.

  When the first rod had exploded into gravel on the bar, so had the tension, and a mad sort of playfulness had developed around the destruction of the rest. Eunice had managed to crack one with a squeeze of her hydraulic bicep, and sailors and Pipers alike had cheered her on. Kaba had struck up one of her boat-loaders’ songs, and the rest of the dead had joined in, bellowing together as they took hammers to the instruments of their enslavement.

  Catharsis had become carnival. Zombies were lined up before the Bruiser, who sat atop the cart of miasma, cracking the canisters open one after another. As the sailors passed, he would spray the grey gas into their mouths, baptising each with a merry cheer of “fack off
!” before slapping them on the back and sending them back into the chaos.

  At the other side of the bar, a dead man had stuffed a lit rag in a bottle of brandy, and was looking in Mouana’s direction for approval. She put on an expression of mock severity but flashed him a thumbs up; he returned it, before hurling the firebomb through the glass wall and onto the factory floor. The flames rose and their shadows danced, dead and living both made indistinguishable by the fire.

  A cheer went up, and Mouana’s attention was drawn back to the throng. A circle had formed, and at its centre stood Fingal, with the last of the necrods. He held it out to her like a party cracker, eyebrows raised in invitation, and the crowd began to chant her name. She took the rod, warm and light as charcoal, held it up in the air with both hands, and brought it down hard across her thigh. The noise as it snapped was drowned in roaring.

  The chanting and the clapping died down, leaving only the crackle of the flames as they spread through the factory. Mouana was just looking down at the shards of the necrod and wondering what to do next, when Pearl spoke up.

  “Well, that’s all of the ones here!” she said, beaming.

  Mouana turned to her, very slowly, and asked her what exactly she meant by that.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  SIX

  NEARLY EVERYONE WAS gone from the library. A man had scurried past Wrack with a stack of books as he climbed the stairs, but had been in too much of a hurry to offer any challenge.

  Wrack was relieved, as he didn’t feel remotely in the mood for confrontation. After the laughter had faded following the fiasco with the stingray, he hadn’t felt very well at all. Things he had just about accepted as reality at sea felt freshly horrifying on the streets he grew up in.

  Seeing his demonic reflection in the hall where he had played as a boy had done something foul; had forced the grey horror of the Tavuto and the warm, safe memories of his youth into the same reality, leaving him cowering at their vertex. No longer could he tell himself he was an accidental consciousness, a jockey on the memories of a dead man now at rest. He was Schneider Wrack, the boy who had grown up in that house, and he had come back to it a monster.

  It was all a bit much, really.

  Figuring he might as well confront the familiar head-on, he decided the library was the place to go. He had taken the crab again; climbing the stairs was a bit of a labour as the thing had cracked two legs when Mouana booted it, but it had a much better chance of handling a book than a gore-caked stingray.

  Wrack picked his way across the empty lobby, claw-clicks echoing on marble, and headed for the fellows’ reading room. It too was abandoned save for a vinegary-looking old man, deep in an armchair and scowling at a book of poetry.

  Somehow the sight of the Doctor of Poetic Engineering, in the same chair he’d sat in each day for as long as Wrack could remember, was oddly comforting. It would take more than the return of the City’s dead to distract him from his work. The Doctor murmured his usual greeting as Wrack clicked past, not so much as glancing aside from his text, and Wrack waved back with a claw as he passed into the librarians’ tower.

  The old electric lift took him up to the belfry, nine storeys above the library’s roof. It was where he’d gone to read whenever he’d felt overwhelmed (although, Wrack mused, he’d never really known the meaning of the word)—a place of cool stone and pigeon shit where nobody went, and nobody looked for missing books.

  He had no lantern, but the lights of the bombardment were enough to read by; the sky pulsed and blazed, smeared itself across the brass of the old bell like summer fireworks.

  Wrack’s claw levered away the loose panel beneath the belfry’s inner window ledge, then rummaged inside. Ah yes, there they were. The crab dribbled a froth of foul bubbles from its mouthparts as he allowed himself a sigh of contentment; he had found his old stash of books. Dragging them out one by one with his claw, he looked at what he had been reading when he died.

  “HONESTLY, I DON’T know anything else,” stammered Pearl, her eyes flickering nervously to the harpoon pinning her jacket to the table. “It might not be anything. I just overheard they were thinking about getting more!”

  “From where?” growled Fingal, grabbing a fistful of the woman’s vest. He was furious as Mouana was—clearly, this was the first time he’d heard of this too.

  “Wherever they came from? I don’t know! I barely heard anything. A rod failed last winter, and it was the second in fifty years, and the ministers were getting jumpy. It was the end of a quota meeting, I was walking past. I heard one of them talking about an expedition, about them not being able to spare the forces because of the sieg—ah!”

  Eunice snorted and twitched her harpoon arm, raising a line of blood on the side of Pearl’s neck. Mouana was about to berate her for failing to mention the existence of other rods before they had set the place on fire, but the words caught in her throat.

  She had been in command: why hadn’t she stopped them torching the place before she’d made sure they didn’t need anything more from it? One look at Pearl’s face told Mouana she was telling the truth—she didn’t know anything else. And if there were any record of what the ministers knew, it was almost certainly now cut off by fire.

  “Who else would know?” Mouana asked Fingal, not really expecting a response, and was startled when Pearl answered.

  “You could try the Chancellor?” she suggested, tilting her head towards the miasma cart as far as she could without cutting her own throat.

  WRACK TURNED COMEDY of the Sandwiches over in his claws a couple of times before putting it aside. He wasn’t really in the mood for fiction, and besides, he had no hope of remembering how far he’d gotten—death hadn’t been kind to memories like that.

  Next was a doorstep of a text, a treatise on the nature of music by a long-dead academic. Wrack was fairly sure he’d been reading this to try and impress someone, but he had no idea who, or why. It was the kind of book you soldiered through a few pages at a time; the kind where you found your eyes sliding along sentences without taking in meaning, just to move down the page.

  Wrack shoved it aside, and picked up the next book—Winter in the Labyrinth: A History of the First Canyon Wars. This one seemed fascinating in theory, but had tested his attention span almost as much as the last—it turned out the Canyon Wars had involved a lot of senatorial wrangling and arguments over tax before the ironclad duels and the amphibious landings had kicked off. And in any case, Wrack was fucking sick of war.

  There was something on stone ants, and a related volume on cloudsifters—great things to talk about in the pub, but which rapidly dried out when reading through pages and pages of population density charts. Then there was Recipes of the Herring Men, the curated notes of a mining platoon that had been stranded on a kuiper fish farm for a decade. It was good for a browse, but it got repetitive.

  Wrack pulled the books one at a time with bloodstained pincers, not fancying anything, with a creeping dread that he had simply lost his taste for reading. The thought made him all the more anxious to find a distraction; if he was no longer able to sit and enjoy a good book, his efforts to convince himself he was still human would become very precarious.

  It was with a rush of relief, then, that he dug out an old favourite. Its weight, its texture, the flaked gilding of the letters on its spine, all triggered the warm anticipation of a familiar pleasure. He couldn’t smell, but the phantom musk of dust and binding glue swirled in his head as he pulled it from the pile. This book, he had read for pleasure alone.

  GRAND AMAZON, proclaimed the spine in tattered gold, A personal narrative of a journey through the equinoctial regions of the reclaimed world, by Gustav Waldemar.

  It was a rare text, and one the library had been missing for years. Wrack had seen it once as a boy and been enchanted—and when he had unearthed a copy during the excavation of one of the south wing cellars, he had quietly pocketed it for his own reserve.

  Waldemar had been a pa
ragon of the Rückgewinnun, that optimistic age when the Confederacy—long-since shattered—had managed to reopen half the world’s ruined gates and bring them back into the Lemniscatus. He had made his expedition to Grand Amazon right after the gate-mines had been defused, along with the fur trappers and the first, hard-faced pioneers, to a world isolated since the wars of antiquity.

  Wrack dove into the book with a clumsy claw, parting the pages where a strip of card marked the start of what he had come to think of as the ‘exciting bit.’ Struggling a little to focus with the crab’s peculiar vision—it was less about moving his eyes and more choosing which part of a wider image to bring into focus—he began to read.

  After transition, we found ourselves some way up one of the tributaries of the Rio Sinfondo, the primary river feeding the Cloud Bay delta. It was an hour past dusk on orientation, with a warm katabatic breeze blowing south across our bow. Turning to align with the current, we made for the Sinfondo; by the charts we should have been nearly within sight of the Torsville colony, but we saw no lights. Anticipating that the colony had faltered during the disconnect we had packed with no expectation of resupply, but a sense of disquiet spread among the boatmen as the banks offered nothing but mangrove and cottonbark thickets. When we reached the place marked on the charts as the colony site, we steered close to the bank and swept it with the searchlight. Other than a few rotten pilings and the remnants of walls, there was no sign of human habitation. Regardless, the Torsville bank gave the first demonstration of the world’s fecundity: moths and fat-tailed riverflies swarmed against the lights, while the eyes of moss-bears and tree porcupines shone in the dark as they ambled the bank in search of fallen fruit.