King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2)

by Grist, Michael John

  "Maggots," says Ti dully. "They're following us."

  Doe highlights the rear camera and walks on. Soon she sees one, a fat white bole flung up from the mud, arcing through the air, then plunging back into the mud.

  "They've grown," she murmurs.

  "They're as big as whales," says Ti. "I've been watching them for hours. They're getting closer."

  Doe does not know what to do with this information. They cannot walk any faster. The sled slows them down too much.

  She turns to Ti. She looks at the sled.

  "No," says Ti fervently. "Not again. Not after all that."

  "How many are there?" Doe asks.

  "I count three near us, and dozens more following behind, but I can't be sure. They don't all leap, or they don't all leap at once. Some of the rumbles we're hearing don't coincide with a leap."

  "Then what do they mean?"

  "It's them eating something," Ti says. "Burrowing through buildings and pyramids underneath us."

  Doe peers forward at the HUDs highest resolution. The White Tower is closer, but far still. Hours yet. She can pick out the white bricks it is made of, the scaly green lines working up the sides like an infection. Everything here is sick.

  "They're the Lag," says Doe, trying to think in a clear line. "They're only cleaning up the dead matter."

  "I think they'll eat us still," says Ti. "They took a bite out of So when they were babies. And we are aiming for the Solid Core."

  "The White Tower," says Doe.

  They walk on a time longer.

  "What do we do?" asks Ti. "Doe?"

  Doe wants to say we'll fight. She wants to say we'll stand our path and frag these worms to bits, but they don't have any weapons that can do it. What use is a knife against a horde of whale-sized Lag-maggots? The grapnels would only make them angry.

  There is nothing they can do. There is only one thing they can do. They have to leave Ray behind.

  She stops. Ti stops as well. They are both too tired for tears. This is only reality. Doe unhooks her tether, and goes over to the sleeping figure of Ray.

  And stops. There is a new message daubed across his chest in thick yellow paint, just like So's, just like Ti's.

  WAIT

  it says.

  Ti looks at it. "Wait for what?"

  Doe doesn't know, but it seems a better idea than abandoning another note in the chord. She doesn't know where the message comes from, if it's somehow Me or Far leaving them clues or something else entirely, but she doesn't care. It's enough.

  "We wait," she says.

  "How long?"

  "Until it's too late. You tell me how long that is."

  Ti goes quiet for a time, running calculations. "I estimate we can make it to the White Tower in one hundred thirty six minutes, unencumbered. If we can gain access quickly, call it two and a half hours until we're safe. Judging from the lead worms' speed, if it's constant, we need to start moving in forty minutes to stay ahead. Any later than that, they'll catch up to us, and…" she trails off.

  Doe slumps down on the mud. The sled has stopped groaning now, perhaps as tired as she is. She sets an internal timer for thirty-nine minutes, and closes her eyes.

  "What about the next tsunami?"

  Ti runs more cycles, then comes back. "Judging from all the information we've got, I'd say the next one is due some time shortly after the worms eat us. Within an hour."

  Doe snorts. It is not a choice of any kind.

  "We wait," she says, "then we run for our lives."

  She closes her eyes and drops into an instant, dreamless sleep.

  She wakes to gunfire and explosions, two minutes before the alarm is set to go off. Perimeter alerts flash in her suit, and she bolts upright.

  There are bursts of incendiary fire in the mud behind them. The landscape is a patchy inferno, studded with burning candle-white lumps. From the nearest welter of fire leaps a great white maggot, only to be strafed by rapid-fire shells from above.

  It falls to the ground and burns, like all its fellows. Doe is not looking at that though. She is looking into the sky, at the last thing she would have ever expected.

  A helicopter. It is black all over, six rotor blades blurring like a wasp's wings, and as she watches another bomb drops from its underbelly, exploding when it touches the dirt.

  Vast gouts of mud spume up, in the midst of which Doe picks out a splash of torn white maggot.

  "What in fuck is that?" comes a deep voice at her side. She turns and sees it is Ray. He is leaning on one of his broken elbows and pointing out with his broken arm. "A helicopter?"

  Doe laughs, unable to stop herself. It is all too ridiculous to comprehend.

  "Woman, what's going on?" Ray goes on, sounding faintly aggrieved. His voice is gravelly and rough, but the color is coming back into his face. "Shit's really gone to pot."

  "It has," says Doe. She doesn't know what more to say than that. "I'm glad you're back."

  "I feel like I'm only half here," says Ray, "like I'm held together with sticky-tape and elasteel." He blinks. "How many helicopters even are there?"

  Doe spins back to see a second helicopter, and this one is bearing down on them. Its front rack guns are spinning, and out from the doors two marines dressed all in jet-black combat gear are leaning with howitzers trained on the ground. The backwash tumult of its rotors are already thunderous, and a thick red liquid streams down from the blades like dark rain.

  "Fuck me," whispers Ray. "What a thing to wake up to."

  Doe takes his hand. She looks into his big dark eyes, and hopes he will understand all the ways she tried to keep him alive.

  "It's bleeding," Ray murmurs. "Raining blood."

  Then the helicopter is upon them. Its downdraft batters the mud and sends ripples spreading outward. This is the end, Doe imagines, and any moment the bombs will drop.

  Then it overpasses them. The downdraft is gone, the deep chop of its rotors Dopplers deeper as it flies away, spattering a trail of red liquid behind it.

  "I swear that's blood," says Ray. He tries to push himself up off the stretcher, but something in his arm clicks and he says, "Ow," then drops back flat. "Shit, that hurts."

  Doe is torn between tending to Ray and watching the helicopter. It is buzzing away from them on a straight line, headed for the Tower.

  "Just lie back," she says absently, patting at Ray. "You'll be fine."

  A pillbox atop the White Tower opens fire, with a jet of bright purple flame. At the same moment the helicopter drops two missiles from below, which ignite and zoom off toward the pill-box atop the wall.

  First the helicopter is engulfed. Purple fire torrents around it, some kind of primitive QC effect, and the machine stops being a machine and starts being a lump of fused metal and flesh, dropping from the sky.

  Instants later the missiles connect with the White Tower wall and detonate, chewing a ragged bite-mark out of the rampart and spraying white stone everywhere.

  A brief silence descends, until the fused helicopter crunches down into the mud. Doe turns back to see the other helicopter flying away. Ray is up on his other elbow, pointing again.

  "What is going on? Who the hell was that?"

  Doe has an idea. Looking back at the field of burning white maggots, every trace of the Lag aflame, she remembers seeing something like this before, when she did it herself.

  "It's an assault on the Solid Core," she says.

  "White Tower," Ti corrects.

  Ray stares, looking between the two of them. "Assault by who? By us? Do we have helicopters now?"

  Doe shakes her head. There is only one other possibility. "It wasn't us. It was another chord."

  SPARTAN'S CRAG G

  My name is Harim Ongshoy and I am a lieutenant skirmisher on the Orinoci, New Aleut nation. We were patrolling a routine beat around the last Arctic shelf, sonar-hunting other boats in our vicinity. I heard the first bomb go off, then everything went dark.

  I woke up here, in this dark an
d fevery mulch of other nations, other people, all crammed so tightly together there is no room to breathe.

  Everyone is screaming. There are dead bodies underfoot. My captain rallies us and we carve out a section in the dark for ourselves, pushing the wailing others aside, throwing corpses and bones at them.

  We try to communicate, but half of these people are mad. Half of them speak the languages of other nations. One man talks to our graysmith in a foreign tongue, perhaps proto-Rusk, and describes a horrific three months spent in this fetid cell.

  "How do you know it's three months?" our captain asks.

  "They came for one of us ninety times," the man says. "Every time I saw that it was dawn outside. Every time I tried to flee."

  He shows us the place where he lost an arm, trapped in the door when they closed it on him.

  "It didn't fall off," he says, "I only got free when they opened the door the next day. I had to bite it off myself."

  When the graysmith translates this, one of our crew vomits. The stench goes nowhere, only remains around us, clinging with the scent of death. It is this place, there is defeat and rancor in the air. Wails ring out incessantly in the blackness. Some of our men start to sob, others cry for their mothers.

  "Let me stay with you," the man says. "I'll help you. Together we can rush the captors. I know when they come. We can charge the door. These others are disorganized, they don't know what to do."

  "Who are the captors?" our captain asks through the graysmith. "What do they want?"

  The man shudders. "I don't know. All I know is, they throw them ones they take back in here a day or two later, sometimes a week, and if they're not dead they're different."

  "What do you mean, different?"

  "They can't speak," says the man. "They've been amputated. They have no eyes or ears, no face or throat. Some come back as limbless worms, to root around and groan in the bones and shit. Some have no skin, and no tongues. Some have their skull tops sitting on their brains like the lid on a porcelain sugar jar. Many of then are already dead, and the others die within hours."

  It takes a long time to translate this. The captain pulls the graysmith, the man, and myself aside to hear it. It is too much for the crew.

  As I listen, I become aware of the wheezy silence around us. Bar the occasional squall, of bodies stepping on other bodies, out in the mess we made when we herded them all together and hurled the dead upon them, there is only the slow pulse of their breath.

  This dank, foul prison becomes one giant lung around us, breathing in the same foul humors, breathing them out.

  Pus, rot, shit, and putrefaction. I can smell the despair and madness. Already I feel it upon my tongue like a thick black fur.

  The captain gathers the men and we plan. There will be an escape attempt- we will work together and charge the door. We'll get out, he insists. He makes us repeat this. I already know he is wrong, deep inside. These other men are skirmishers. They are no weaker than us, no more foolish than us, and they were here first.

  The floor is slick with slime I cannot see. We arrange a patrol in the darkness, communicating by touch and feel.

  Gibraltes has long hair, so I know it is him. Locklan has the muscles, so I know it is him.

  With every touch across their hot pulsing bodies I say my farewells.

  "It is hours yet until they open the door," the captain tells us, relayed through the graysmith from the armless man. "Squad one sleep. We'll clear a space."

  I am squad one, so I lie down in the drek. Already the foul smell is becoming normal to me. I feel it griming into my hair, into my pores, filling me up. Slowly, a dark and stinking sleep takes me. I dream of drowning in rank blood.

  I wake to the slaughter. There are only screams of pain, and the hard flat smack of bodies impacting, as the older prisoners bludgeon their way through us. I hear the armless man's voice rise above it at times, directing them on, describing us each by our features and our positions.

  Gibraltes by my side fights, and goes down to a gang of men who bite and use their long fingernails like claws. They tear him apart. Locklan is strong but it doesn't help him, as the sheer weight of bodies holds him down. He screams that they're blinding him as it happens. He screams that they're biting through his thick neck.

  I shuffle backward. I bury myself in old corpses so deeply I can barely breathe.

  Afterward I hear them patrol. I slide deeper into the wasted corpses, but there is no way to escape the sounds that follow, as they fall to eating.

  Raw flesh tears like wet cloth. The chewing is obscene, and goes on and on. A few they keep alive and eat pieces of raw. I hear their cries for help, and they change me. I begin to understand.

  These men do this because it is all they can do. Their suffering is so dire, the only relief is to visit a more dire pain upon another.

  They revel in the screams, that mean they are strong. For a time they are the victors. After a number of hours, the screams become intermittent. My crew are all dead, and I am alone. I listen to these other men sup at the air, their breath rising like a mist, pregnant with the meat of my fellows.

  I am sure the same fate awaits me. I have only delayed it. I lie in the hot press of the dead and wait for my turn to come.

  It does not. Rather, a long time later, the door of the prison opens.

  The light blinds me, even shielded by the dead as I am. Some kind of stupor descends upon me, and I am unable to move. In the burning white light, I see figures dressed all I white come in and collect the men who slaughtered my crews. These survivors now bow their heads like penitents, their straggled hair and naked bodies matted with blood, and go.

  It is almost a greater terror than the feast. Soon all of them are gone.

  I am left alone. They close the door, and I lie for hours more in my tomb, trembling as the numbness wears away, as I begin to grasp what will happen next.

  Days have passed already. I am starving already. At last, I emerge to eat.

  In time, as my supplies dwindle and rot in the dark, as chewing through cheek meat and muscle becomes commonplace, others arrive.

  They are dumped in a trance. I kill half of them with strong bites across their throats while they lie there breathing. The rest I spare, to last as long as the others will sustain them.

  More come. The prison fills, and for a time I am the ghost amongst them, slipping in and out of their ranks. I know the confines of this cell, and have learnt to travel it blind. Now my hands and feet are my eyes, my nose and the skin of my belly as it drags low over bones give me more information than I need.

  My ears I ignore. The men speak, and many of then I understand. They talk of the skirmish, and who their captors must be. They follow the protocols of command still, and set up a space to sleep within, set a patrol.

  I see myself within them. I don the mask of the man I once was, and speak.

  "I can help you," I tell them. I move into their ranks. I am petted and touched and beheld with wonder. "They open the door once a day," I tell them. "We will charge them together."

  They let me in, and they assign shifts to rest. They have no idea I have slunk out, when I do. They are unaware, as I rally the others to attack.

  We eat well. I check every pile of corpses for men who hid like me. I will not be reminded again of what I once was. What I am now is strong. What I am now is beautiful, an embryo in its cocoon, waiting to be born.

  Time goes by. The prison fills so full I can scarcely breathe, swimming between legs, a predator in the thick of prey. I take my snacks wherever I wish to, a hank of calf-meat here, a knob of big toe there. In my wake I leave screams and murder. They kill each other for me. Their cries and confusion are sweet music to me. They tell me I am above them. I am better. I adapted and survived.

  The figures in white come for them, sometimes. They return them again, unthinking dummies for the others to cut their teeth on. Men with only a brain do not fight back. Men with no jaws cannot cry out their protest. Men with no limbs
become a larder for us all.

  Throughout, they do not come for me. The prison fills and empties like the pulse of a heart, and they do not come for me. At every cull, I am left alone. It must be years. It must be a hundred times I have betrayed my own men. It is easier every time. I acquire a taste for tongues, and the soft cartilage of the ear. Men bite these away and give them to me as tribute. It is my role.

  One day, the figures in white clear the prison again. The door remains open, but I know better than to leave. Those who leave never come back, only broken.

  But the door stays open. In time, the sense of numb compulsion upon me fades, and a figure comes near. My eyes are useless by now, they only sense the dimmest of difference between dark and light. The figure is a bright upright band before me, viewed from within the boughs and brambles of my corpse nest.

  It speaks with a voice that fills my mind.

  "I'm proud of you, Harim," it says. "You have done so well."

  It fondles my head. No one has spoken my name for years.

  "There are so many years ahead for you," it goes on. "I look forward to them."

  Afterward, alone in that dark and sweaty place, I finally see the scope of my fate. This is all there is for me, betraying men, killing men, eating men, and I don't want it. I have lived as an animal and murderer for long enough. I have done this enough.

  My strong sharp teeth bite through the thin skin of my wrists and bite out the veins. I suck on those blood spigots as I have a thousand time before, letting the heat run down my chin and chest. I suck until I grow sick and light-headed, and wonder that for the first time in years, the prison is truly dark.

  Then I die.

  I lurch through the bones and memories like a drunkard. Harim is but one of a thousand minds reaching up to me, their bonds fraught with suffering. The scope of their horror dizzies me.

  "You shouldn't-" my men call from behind, but tail off as I blend into the darkness. They are hard men who have done hard things, but the scale of this death flattens them.