Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  Critias left his seat to lead Carmen quietly out of the cockpit to the cargo area by their car. “You did a great job,” he praised her. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

  His courteous compliment made her feel ashamed, “I’m sorry I said those things earlier. You’re not an idiot, master. I shouldn’t demoralize you when you need your confidence most.”

  “I have no problem with you speaking your mind,” Critias dismissed the matter with another dash of his stoicism.

  Carmen wasn’t a feminist that wanted equal distribution of ascendency in their relationship. She had never known equality with her master before and wouldn’t know what to do with it even if she had it. His benevolent leadership was the fulcrum of her universe. His equitable dismissal of her chastisable effrontery only made her feel estranged. Carmen hung her head to humble herself before him so that he would at least recognize that she submitted to his decisions.

  Critias discerned her distress and needed her in top form for their mission almost as much as he needed her cheerful companionship. He disconnected his gauntlets then removed his helmet. “Prepare some water to bathe me,” he demanded callously for her benefit. “I’ve been in my mechsuit long enough and I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to be rid of it.”

  She beamed relief to be back in his proper favor and the comforting security of their old routine. As she went for water, Carmen said, “Right away.” He gave her a playfully chauvinist swat on her rump to speed her along and that drew from Carmen an amorous glance that feigned she felt castigated. After she fetched some water from the supply they had brought in their car, Carmen helped him remove the rest of his armor.

  While she washed him standing, Critias considered his plans, “After I get back into my suit, I want you to use the clothes I took from those scum I killed to improve my disguise. The more ragged and filthy I appear the less likely any ghoul will be to take notice of me and you’ll need the same for yourself. We will have to travel covertly if this is going to work.”

  She lightly caressed his back with a washcloth, “When do you want to try?” Realizing her error, she kissed the back of his neck, “I mean to say, how soon till we set out to succeed?”

  “When the sun is setting it will be the time for us to move out. They don’t see in the dark nearly as well as we do and not being seen is our greatest advantage.”

  “We have hours then,” she said softly then planted a kiss on his shoulder blade. “Would you have me comfort you more?”

  “The wretched confines of this aircraft are as unworthy of you as would be a pen for swine,” he rejected the suggestion. “Prepare us a clean place where we can sit together quietly. I would have you bolster my courage with your company. If we must walk into a valley of death, I would do so with peace of mind.”

  Carmen used clean blankets from their car to craft them a comfortable pallet where she could cuddle up in his arms with her head on his chest. They sat quietly just like that as they awaited the sunset.

  They finally opened the side door when the sun sank to the horizon. Carmen went out first in her costume of shredded rags that combined with her superb acting transformed her into a properly bedraggled limper. Her meticulously slow progress made her ideal for reconnoitering without instigating an attack. Critias followed her after he waited about two minutes. He kept far enough away from her so that they didn’t appear to be mutually intent on the same destination.

  They found three small scouting helicopters out in the weather at the landing pad area. They had only their metal cables to secure them from tipping over in strong winds. Three and a half years of exposure hadn’t done them any good. Closer inspection revealed that fruitless escape plans had vandalized each of the aircraft. Various amateur mechanics had attempted to get each of them started. They had frequently looted parts from one in a foolish hope to repair one of the others. The failures had left all of them beyond salvage. One even had a bird’s nest in the engine.

  “No chance with these,” Carmen communicated with whispers by internal radio to his helmet. “They would keep more aircraft out of the weather inside those hangars over there. Would you like to check that too?”

  He nodded that they should look. If any functional helicopters had ever been in the hangars then survivors had already taken off with them long ago. Nothing remained inside the shelters but two mostly disassembled helicopter frames.

  “Don’t get discouraged just yet, princess,” he said to be hopeful. “I really do have a good plan for doing this on foot, so everything will be fine. We’re going back to Jim with the specimen and then I will set a completely new standard for romance to show you how much you mean to me. I just need you to trust me.”

  She had her doubts about the battle plans and especially his pledge to romance her, “You mean it?”

  He meant it, “I guarantee you we can complete this mission.”

  “No,” she corrected him. She would prefer that the mission failed so she didn’t care about that very much. “Do you mean you will be romantic?”

  “Like it’s my mission in life,” he promised her, which it would be. Critias still had an inner pain that the bioengineers made her frigid to his touch, so if Carmen’s sole intimate pleasure came from being a romanticist, then he would provide that delight instead.

  “Just tell me what to do,” she pledged with new enthusiasm born of her desire to win the prize he offered.

  Critias took out their maps, “I need you to lead us west.” He pointed out a region, “All north of here is suburbia death-zone tightly packed as trees to forest so we have to stay clear of that thorny bramble.”

  She made an endearing pout, “Nearly the whole city between here and the building we are heading for is that same kind of death-zone. Once we’re away from this airport, it’s more of that trouble in every direction.”

  “You just stay away from those residential areas,” he cautioned her. “Lead us west for about four kilometers.” He pointed the place out on his map, “To right there.”

  She adjusted her backpack under her rags so that it made her hunchbacked and even more ghoulish in her disguise. Carmen suffered no discomfort while she walked stooped over with a limp. Critias shuffled along in his best zombie imitation ten to fifteen meters behind her. Once he had a clear field of vision, he could see that some of the ghouls had run into his wildfire where they had ignited their filthy rags. After that, those flaming infected had dashed about in mad pain, inadvertently setting fire to other areas of grass. The situation had not yet turned into a threat to the whole city, but Critias realized it could end up that way if bad luck had it in for them.

  “You must be entirely calm and indifferent,” she advised him by radio. “Do not show any reaction to an infected unless it is close enough for you to use your sword for a decisive decapitation.”

  Only moments later, five ghouls ran between Carmen and Critias on their way south toward the fires and its fleeing rodents. They took no notice of the ghouls and they in turn took no interest in them.

  Carmen led them the seventeen-hundred meters across the landing strips in just under twenty minutes. She maintained that walking pace as they went between rows of airport buildings, across overgrown lawns, and eventually into the massive airport parking lot for the many automobiles. They reached the place that Critias had requested in well less than an hour by walking past dozens of ghouls that routinely mistook them for fellow infected.

  While dense suburbia was within sight to the northeast, their way had led across a highway into an indigent area of distantly scattered and well-wooded homesteads.

  Carmen discretely snapped the neck of a ghoul that ventured too close to her so Critias stopped there over the disabled body to check his map again. He pointed further toward the west, “About five-hundred meters over there is this rain channel. I want you to get us there and then follow it north. I don’t see hardly any homes through this area so it will still be plenty safe.”

  Carmen set off again and
made a better pace in the thick cover and deepening darkness as night set in fully. Just as Critias had hoped, she found a manmade valley about forty meters across with a three-meter wide stream that flowed north along the bottom.

  Once they stood in the shallow water, Critias took the lead as they headed north. The sides of the valley completely shielded them from all view unless an infected was down inside with them and close enough to see them in the dark. When the stream encountered a roadway, it went beneath through a concrete tunnel that was large enough for them to walk through without ever having to stoop or even being able to touch the sides. The size of the drains attested to the volume of runoff rain that would channel their way when there was a storm to provide it. As it was, the water remained shallow and hardly tapped the flash flood capacity that their path could receive otherwise.

  Within an hour after they had left the helicopter hangar, Critias had followed the stream to an even larger manmade river that was twenty meters wide.

  Carmen groaned with distaste, “You want to swim there through filthy plague-infected drainage water swarming with alligators?”

  “It had been my plan until I saw those,” he pointed up the hill to the east where at the top of the crest were four giant steel-girder towers that supported the high-tension power lines. “I saw this legless hunter once and it gives me an idea. We’re going along those wires like monkeys.”

  Carmen examined the tall towers and saw that their high-tension transmission cables were going toward their destination. She knew from the maps Kevin had provided them that there was a northbound junction of the same type of lines that would deliver them to a main transformer station that stood only a block away from the pharmaceutical building they were after. The arrangement was so perfect that it was like a miracle of astounding luck. She hugged him with a gush of great relief, “You’re a genius, my beloved master! By traveling along those cables, we could be there in no time without ever coming anywhere close to the ghouls.”

  As Critias headed up the hill to climb a tower to reach the cable, he asked her facetiously, “Who’s the pig-headed emotionally-stunted idiot now?” When he had considered sneaking into the city using the water it had never occurred to him that major predators lurked within it as she had suggested. He asked, “Are there really alligators in that water?”

  “Oh yes,” she confirmed there was. “This is prime habitat for them now with no humans to keep them away from this major population center. I’ve seen three already, though none of them was especially large. In time they will be. From the tracks I have encountered thus far, I can tell there are also large populations of feral dogs, wild hogs, and feral cattle. All three of those are potentially lethal, to humans anyway.”

  Critias climbed the northern-most electrical service tower to reach one of the thick power transmission cables that spanned to the next tower and then to the next after that for kilometers to come. The wires had seemed thinner from the ground, but up close, the bundled cable was the diameter of Carmen’s forearm. Critias went out on the cable headed west. He advanced slowly hand over hand beneath it like an orangutan. His mechsuit would easily support him all day without fatigue.

  Carmen sprang up the tower on her way to the adjacent cable of the four available. After she ascended above the taught wire, she climbed out on its support arm. With elfin-grace, she stepped onto the cable and then ran along it as if a tightrope walker in the circus. Once she got along side of him, she suggested, “Beloved, you don’t need to brachiate yourself along like an arboreal primate. Kevin’s upgrades will allow you to funambulate just as easily as I can. Your onboard computer recalibrates your fine motor balance several million times per second.”

  When Critias saw how she traveled, he stopped at the next tower to emulate her method. The upgrades that Kevin installed to increase his balance made the cable feel like a sidewalk one meter wide so he chased after her in the right lane with the intention of passing her. No ghouls ever made any effort to pursue them while they traveled so high above the ground because the infected never had even the remotest association between food and the high wires for them to watch them. In less than two hours, Critias and Carmen reached a junction of cables that headed northward. They followed those all the way to a transformer station that filled a city block with steel girder towers and electrical power equipment. From there they could see just to the west of them was the trapezoidal business tower that contained the offices and laboratories of Hale-Wellington Pharmaceuticals.

  They climbed down to the ground quietly then made a patiently meandering walk to the building’s front entrance. They were deep in the heart of the city where a sufficiently loud noise might eventually cascade-summon a hundred-thousand infected who could swarm through the area within an hour.

  When a ghoul came into Carmen’s path, she refused to alter her course to avoid the creature and instead seized it by the head to snap its neck. If any other ghoul came close to her, she would do it again.

  Critias preferred to avoid any close encounters.

  “I have good news,” she radioed. “The doors are still locked from the inside so that should mean no man or ghoul has yet to vandalize this place.” Using the twenty-third century skeleton key from her pocket, Carmen applied a simple twist to the amorphously intelligent tool to unlock the door.

  When no infected were in sight, they slipped inside then locked the door behind them. As Carmen had suspected, there was no sign of looters having ever entered the place. They readied their weapons anyway.

  After Carmen walked to a black message board attached to a far wall to read the names and companies situated on the various floors, she told him, “Upstairs we go, to the fifth floor. Are we staying in nightvision?”

  He started left to look for the usual steel fire door that protected stairwells, “We don’t want the infected seeing reflected light out any windows to make them curious so let’s keep the electric torches off for now.”

  “This way,” she summoned him right in the proper direction.

  They saw nothing on the flights of stairs beyond trackless dust, but eventually Carmen paused to freeze perfectly still anyway so Critias followed her example expecting danger.

  “I smell something,” she sniffed again. “Smells like, bile.”

  He didn’t know what to make of that, “Bile you say? That’s just extra swell. What the hell smells like bile?”

  “Your gallbladder,” she joked though serious. “It’s a gastrointestinal thing I wouldn’t normally smell unless I was actually tearing out a liver at the time.”

  Critias called upon his stoicism to reinterpret their situation into something positive, “Let’s call that a good thing then; if we’re looking for some specimen nobody has seen before, it should stink like one too.”

  Carmen picked the lock on the fifth floor door to discover it jammed, so after a moment’s consideration, she just kicked it in to discover that a folding metal chair wedged under the handle had been the culprit.

  Critias saw the stainless steel, glass, and technical equipment of a bioengineer’s laboratory. He certified it, “This is the place.” He imagined Carmen knew what one looked like too since she had been born in such an environment.

  They explored separately until Carmen discovered a video conference room with a stack of storage disks all in labeled sleeves. “This looks really important,” she radioed. “The times and dates on these home movies coincide with their science team while they were in Mexico digging up whatever it is we came here for.”

  He instructed, “Leave them there while we search everywhere first to make sure we have no surprises. We can rest up in there later and have plenty of time for it then.” Critias found an office that seemed to have potential so he sent Carmen there to rifle through the documents so she could commit them to memory. He went on to locate a containment lab with hermetically sealed barriers. Through the window, he saw an ancient stone sarcophagus in the center of the chamber. The weird box had a lot of intricate carving
like from some ancient human culture. There was a bluish slime mold that puked from the many yawning mouths and leering faces that adorned the stone box. The vomit had run down to the floor then spread out to all four corners in a thin layer. He also saw the feint patterns of five human bodies that the gel had presumably digested. They remained visible only as the circulatory systems of otherwise invisible men, like only a color photograph in the slime that revealed where they had been.

  “This must be it,” he called Carmen, “and it’s pretty nasty.”

  When Carmen went to see, she lit the interior of the chamber with the beam from her electric torch. After she had examined the little room, she said, “I can see five bullets on the floor. I believe that they fell from their heads.”

  “Then that leaves one more to account for,” Critias reasoned. “We need to find the guy with the gun who positioned the bodies. Since you had to kick the door open to get that chair out of the way, I assume he never left here unless there is another exit we don’t know about.”

  She pointed to the toilet area doors that were the only place left they had not explored, “What was worth killing those people for?”

  Critias went there, then shoved open the women’s room door with his boot. He searched all the toilet stalls to find nothing. Critias repeated the process in the men’s restroom. In the last stall on the men’s side, Critias discovered a dead junky with a plastic bag taped around his head. The man still had a hypodermic needle that hung out of his arm. He sat preserved like a sort of raisin. The man was definitely a fully transformed infected when judged by his lack of decomposition. The ghoul stayed dormant from lack of hydration.