Tankbread 02 Immortal

by Paul Mannering

  “Fresh population?”

  “Sure, folks get sick and die or they get killed. We need to keep making babies. So we go ashore, snatch up some kids. Too old for Them That Walk Above Us to get what they need. So we bring ’em down here, keep them alive and when they are old enough, we make babies with them. Keeps the gene pool fresh and makes a change from banging away at the same old twat.”

  “Why don’t their people come? Come and take them back?”

  “Aw hell, there’s fuck all left out there. Most of them are happy to find a safe place where they get fed and are safe from the walking dead.”

  “Sarah, she isn’t your daughter?”

  “Kinda. She’s mine to take care of until she’s old enough to take care of me. Then I get a return on my investment.”

  Else’s nose wrinkled. “I wouldn’t have sex with anyone I didn’t love.”

  “Oh, she loves me alright. I saved her from getting chewed on by her brother. He’d died of a fever. They were living in a car and she’d got herself trapped in there with him when he came back. She leapt into my arms and didn’t let go until I set her down on the deck here.”

  “So this is a religious community?”

  “Not all of us. I myself say the words and take the blessings and just do what I gotta to get by. The fishermen, they have their own thing going on. And the engineers, they’re as far gone as the believers.

  “Are their geeks on board this ship?”

  “Not quite. The engineers live deep in the ship. They work on the engines and all the other crap that’s rusting away down there. They’re the ones who want to get this boat fired up and moving. But they can’t because the Captain won’t let them do that, and the Captain, well his word is law.

  “How can I meet this Captain?”

  “You meet him when you are chosen. Or when you die. The priest says he’s gonna judge us all.”

  “There’s electricity here. I saw a camera watching me. That has to be powered from somewhere.”

  Hob swept his hair back with a filthy hand. “Well damn, you are a smart one. There’s batteries. Solar powered. The engineers rigged it up. They keep the bird crap off the panels and the Captain says how the juice gets used. The crew keeps an eye on us holders. Make sure we ain’t doing anything other than fucking and feasting.”

  “And that’s all you want from life?”

  “Sure. I get fed and I get to fuck. What more could I ask for?”

  “Freedom.”

  Else started back up the stairs to the deck. Hob followed her and leaned past when she struggled to open a door that led outside.

  “Don’t you wander off now,” he said as Else stepped out into the dim light of evening. She followed a worn trail through the crusted guano along the deck. Birds circled and scolded overhead. She could see boats of all shapes and sizes floating out in the calm sea. Figures on them were cleaning nets, and the lights from the ship sparkled off the day’s catch.

  She walked until she reached the front of the boat. This deck was wider, and the birds flocked in greater numbers here. She watched as they dived and fought, snatching up scraps of fish guts. Men stood at long tables, slicing fish open and cleaning them. A flapping tarpaulin kept the birds off and the shrieking gulls seemed to have learned to wait for their share.

  After a moment Else was noticed. A lean, tanned man with long hair and a beard crusted with salt and twisted into tight braids came towards her. He wiped his knife clean as he approached and sheathed it through the belt holding up his cutoff shorts.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. I’m Else.”

  “Quint. What do you want?”

  “I want my baby back. I want my baby and I want Lowanna too. She’s not my baby, but I told Jirra I would take care of her. She doesn’t have anyone but me.”

  “Babies go up to the crew. They don’t come back,” Quint said.

  “Why? Why do you let them take the babies? Why don’t you just fight them?”

  Quint shrugged. “We have a good thing going on here. We have food, a safe place to live. We don’t get bothered. We just get to live.”

  “You could live on land. You could live on the beach, or in the forest or in the mountains. I have seen all these places.”

  “The dead are there too. They would come and eat us. We wouldn’t be safe,” Quint said with a rueful smile, as if speaking to a child.

  “You would be free. You could fight for survival. You could build something real.”

  “This is real. The sun, the sea, the fish. It’s all real.”

  “What about children? What about the future of the human race?”

  “The human race?” Quint looked around. “There is no human race anymore. The race is over and we lost. All that’s left are the scraps. It’s not even our world anymore. We had our chance and we blew it. We ruined everything. Here we have a chance to live out our last generation. Live and then return to the sea.”

  Else scowled. “I’m not ready to quit. I haven’t lived long enough to lose interest.”

  “Look out there, you see that?” Quint pointed to the black-green polish burning under the setting sun. “Compared to the oceans we are nothing. We are a tiny mote in God’s eye. The ocean has been here long before us and will be here long after. We are nothing by comparison. Our lives are meaningless on that scale.”

  “I have a son. He was born two, maybe three days ago. To him I am everything. He doesn’t know any of your bullshit. He only knows that he is alone and that I am not there to take care of him. So you can take your philosophy of giving up and you can shove it.” Else turned on her heel and started walking down the guano-encrusted deck. She couldn’t stand still any longer. She couldn’t wait for her baby to be eaten by the crew. She couldn’t fail him like she failed his father.

  Quint watched her go. That woman had a fire in her that he had not seen since his surfing days, and the way she walked the deck reminded him of someone he used to know. By the time Else had vanished among the stacked crates and piles of salvage scrap, he remembered who it was.

  Chapter 6

  The ship had several decks and their layout confused Else as she went up the metal stairs and around piles of wood and plastic junk. There were burn marks on the metal deck where people had lit fires. The walls were marked with scrawled murals of graffiti, their details long lost to the scouring of the salt water. When whatever they painted with had been used up, the artists started scratching messages in the spreading rust. Words of hope and lost meaning—Don’t believe the hype! and Happy Hour 7AM till Fuck nose when!—were carved large into the corroded steel. The birds watched and scolded Else at every step. She kept an eye out for Hob or Eric, not wanting to be taken by surprise again. She worked her way upwards. The crew, the walking dead, the evols who ran this supposed sanctuary lived somewhere above. The doors she tried were locked or rusted shut. Peering in through salt-frosted windows showed only dusty rooms plundered long ago.

  There was no sound other than the breeze and the cries of seabirds out here. Else moved faster, jogging up the stairwells that connected each deck, scattering birds in angry clouds as she burst out among them. Their noise morphed into the cries of children. She started yelling, “I’m here! I won’t leave without you! I’m coming for you, baby!” The setting sun blinded her as she ran along the highest deck. The wide deck was open, up to a wall of steel that ran from one side of the ship to the other. Twenty feet up, the top of the wall turned to glass. Massive windows reflected the view in three directions. Above the glass, spires of old antennae reached up to the first of the stars that smeared the twilight sky.

  Else found another set of stairs and started climbing again. The doors on the highest deck were locked too. Seabirds had nested in every available space and she stepped around their heaped-up donuts of shit and dry seaweed. Solar panels erected along the high points of the deck were dull in the spreading gloom, their photoelectric cells waiting for dawn to start converting sunlight into electricity ag
ain and feed it down into racks of batteries stored somewhere inside the ship. Another way the crew held sway over the captive population.

  “You shouldn’t be up here.” Sarah’s voice took Else by surprise. The girl moved like a ghost.

  “And you should be?” she replied.

  The blonde child narrowed her eyes. “I can go anywhere I want. No one can stop me.” She cocked her chin and stared up defiantly.

  “Show me how to get in there.” Else pointed to the tower of steel and glass.

  “That’s the bridge. Only the crew goes there. That’s where the Captain lives.”

  “Show me,” Else repeated.

  Sarah backed away a few steps and then bolted. Else gave chase. The smaller girl flew down the deck, leaping over bird’s nests and darting past sealed doorways in a way that made Else feel like a lumbering cow.

  Reaching the back of the ship, Else stopped; Sarah had disappeared. She crouched down and examined the crusted deck. Small bare footprints, blurred by speed. Sarah had run through, turned right, and headed across the deck. She wouldn’t have time to reach the opposite rail. So where did she go?

  Else walked forward slowly, looking up the high steel wall. No way the girl could have climbed that. The footprints led to a small hatch. Else squatted again and tugged at the steel doorway. It was locked from the inside. She could see a smaller handprint on it. Sarah had gone to ground. Rising to her feet, Else wondered what other openings might exist up here. She turned sharply at a zipping sound. A shadow dropped through the moonlight. Pressing back against the wall, Else prepared to fight.

  Hanging in a harness at the end of a rope was a hairless woman painted black with grease from head to toe. She wore only a ragged pair of stained shorts and a pair of dark tinted goggles pushed up to her forehead. Brushes and screwdrivers jangled in the harness as she twisted at the end of the rope.

  The girl regarded Else with a somber expression. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Else. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Ratchet. They call me Rache. What are you doing up here?” Rache swung gently in her harness, her dark goggles giving her an alien expression, as if she had four eyes.

  “I’m looking for a way inside. I need to get my son back. What are you doing up here?”

  “Maintenance. Someone’s gotta clean the panels. Salt and bird shit don’t do much for them.”

  “You’re an engineer?” Else asked and Rache’s chest puffed with pride.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why are you covered in that stuff?” Else asked. Rache’s expression soured.

  “It’s grease. Grease comes from hard work. Hard work is what will save us. One day this ship will sail to a safe place.”

  “The man who believes in God told me that this ship is an ark,” Else said.

  “He’s crazy. There is no God. There’s only the engines. The engines are what we need to get us moving.”

  “Why don’t you just start the engines and sail away?”

  Rache glanced upwards, staring at the flaking paint and the rust patches on the white-painted steel. “The Captain is the only one who can set the ship free. We are ready. We keep the engines clean and maintained. All the ship’s systems are ready to go. We just need the Captain to give the order.” Rache sounded wistful and evangelic at the same time.

  “You don’t need to wait for the Captain. Why not just start the engines and take over the ship?”

  Rache reached up and pushed the goggles higher on her forehead. Her eyes were green, the same brilliant jade of the sea. “Are you kidding me? If the crew heard you talking like that they’d tear you apart and throw you over the side.”

  “Why do you let them rule over you? Why do you let them take the newborns and give you nothing in return?”

  “They give us a safe place. They give us hope,” Rache countered.

  “They imprison you. All of you. You don’t need to stay here. You could take your boats and go anywhere you want. You could start a new life, raise children and rebuild society.”

  “I dunno anything about that. I ain’t never had kids.” Rache’s eyes dipped to the deck. “Not for lack of trying, though.”

  “They would take your baby away from you. Just like they did mine,” Else said. “But I’m going to get him back. I just need to find a way inside.”

  “You can only get in from down below. All the deck hatches are sealed. You’d need to go the way the engineers do. Up through the maintenance ducts.”

  “Show me.” Else stepped forward and grabbed hold of the rope suspending Rache off the deck.

  “I’ll take you to the Foreman. But I ain’t promising nothing.” Rache grabbed a loop in the rope and heaved herself up with one hand until the line to the harness went slack. She unclipped it, dropping barefooted onto the deck.

  “This way,” she said, slinging the harness over her shoulder.

  They wound their way down to the lower decks, Else following the engineer as she opened a door and they descended deeper into the ship. This area was marked differently from the hold where Hob and his people lived. The walls here were covered with schematics and scientific formulae.

  “The ones who remember teach those who haven’t yet learned. Then when they die, the ones who learned become those who remember,” Rache said.

  “If you let the crew eat your children, there will soon be no one left to learn,” Else replied. They carried on down the stairs until they passed the waterline and entered the deepest area of the ship.

  It was dark down here, darker than the night sky, always so full of stars. On the nights when clouds covered the moon, even the clouds seemed to glow with silver light. This was nothing like that. For a moment Else felt like she was descending once again into the depths of Woomera. She was plunged back to the place under the desert where the geeks hid from the evols and worked their genetic magic to make better weapons and zombie-killing Tankbread. So safe and perfectly contained—until the lights went out. Then the true darkness was suffocating. A darkness as complete and thick as velvet curtains stinking of burnt flowers pressed against her face.

  “You okay?” Rache said in the dark.

  “Dark,” Else managed.

  “Well yeah, lights are limited.”

  “Can’t . . . breathe.”

  A scratching sound came from somewhere below, a steady winding grind. A few seconds passed, with Else feeling a cloying panic pressing the air out of her lungs. Then a flare of sodium-yellow light cast long shadows up Rache’s dark face and made her eyes shine.

  “It’s okay,” she said calmly. “You’re safe down here.”

  “Don’t like being trapped in the dark,” Else gasped.

  Rache shrugged. “Follow me and the light will stay on.”

  Else pushed on down the stairs, following the moving circle of light. Rache stopped in front of a door, which she rapped on with the knuckles of one hand. Else felt her heart thudding; the close darkness terrified her.

  Claustrophobia is an irrational fear, she reminded herself. But it doesn’t make it any less real, she mentally retorted.

  The steel door ahead rang with the sudden strike of metal. Else growled a warning that Rache ignored. The door cracked open and then swung inwards. A warm glow emerged from the other side. Rache immediately pushed on it and stepped through the gap. “Almost home,” she said over her shoulder.

  Else followed the light. Behind the door and to one side of the corridor stood a young man, painted in black oil against the shadows. The whites of his eyes vanished when he blinked, rendering him almost invisible. Else watched him warily and kept moving after Rache. The girl ahead ignored the doorman and he watched them go before pushing the door shut in their wake.

  Rache walked with Else on her heels until they stepped onto a walkway that ran around a chamber as wide as the ship. Below them, pipes and domed machines were being crawled over by oil-stained figures as black as the shadows. The air hummed with the vibration of feet and the clang of tools str
iking metal.

  “The engines are always ready,” Rache said with pride in her voice.

  “Then why don’t you sail away?” Else asked again. Rache ignored her. A trio of blackened, tool-carrying mechanics came swaggering down the walkway. Like Rache, their heads were shaved and they did not smile as they approached the two women.

  “Hey Giz, Prop, Bolt, this is Else.” Rache crossed her arms, the goggles on her forehead glinting in the light.

  The three nodded. “She’s no black. What’s she doin’ down here?” Giz asked.

  “She’s from ashore. Came here looking for her sprat.”

  The three young men sneered. “Grabbit wants you on turbo stripping,” Giz said. “The landy can turn around and go back to the hold. Ain’t nothing for her here.”

  “She’s walking with me, all the way to the Foreman,” Rache said, drawing herself up to her full height.

  “Well you’d both better walk your arse to the turbocharger,” Giz said. The three boys pushed past.

  “I can’t stay here,” Else said, looking for a way out.

  “You can leave anytime you want. No skin off my knuckles.” Rache headed off down the catwalk. Else hesitated for a moment and then hurried after her.

  The engineers lived in conditions similar to those of Hob’s people. Else saw no babies, just pregnant women with white eyes shining in their dark-stained faces and men with bodies sculpted into lean muscle from hard work. Two guards, armed with swords hammered from sheet metal, stood in front of a steel door.

  “Got a landy. She needs to see the Foreman,” Rache said.

  One of the guards pulled a lever and stepped through the door. Else caught a smell of cooked fish and sweat before the door closed again. The remaining guard moved in front of them and stared. The three of them stood in silence, unmoving until the door opened again.

  “Come,” the first guard said. With Rache leading the way, Else ducked through the door into a room at the bottom of a set of metal stairs. Women lounged naked on ragged cushions and crumbling furniture. The guard climbed the stairs, Else and Rache following close behind. The room at the top contained more cushions and a bed of sorts, with more naked women. Else had only ever seen one fat person, the Greek near Woomera. The man on the bed looked like he had eaten the Greek and his pigs for lunch. The women massaged the sprawling folds of his abundant flesh. Else could smell the sour stink of his sweat and filth across the room.