by Nate Crowley
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WRACK CLAMBERED UP her body through the throng of zombies pinning her, and crouched above her face, alongside Mouana. He could only imagine how they looked to the overseer; a ring of stinking, dripping rictuses, staring down and growling. It nearly ended there, quick and bloody as it had done for the ray. The overseer only lived through the first ten seconds because the others were waiting for Wrack to take the first bite. And although his belly was full of beluga meat, his mouth urged dreadfully to bite: to tear, and gnash, and take back every act of Tavuto’s sneering cruelty with his teeth.
But he couldn’t, because the overseer was terrified, and helpless, and—mad as the term was on this ship—human. Just like they were. “Please don’t eat me,” she whispered, like a little girl trapped inside a steel drum. “Please don’t eat me, please. Please.”
Yellow tears pooled in the corners of her eyes as she stared into Wrack’s face. “Please,” she whispered again.
He clenched his jaw, and understood there had to be a reason, and quickly, for this not to end in torn meat. If he didn’t want to preside over the dismemberment of another human being, no matter how callous they were, this had to become an opportunity. But so help me, thought Wrack as she babbled, she was going to have to work bloody hard with him to get things that way.
“Shut up,” he snarled, letting his voice siphon the hate swollen in his jaw. “Shut up, and breathe.” She breathed.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” spat Wrack, cocking his head. “Now, tell me why I shouldn’t eat what’s left of your face.” After all, he thought, there was absolutely no reason not to scare her shitless.
The overseer’s eyes bulged in her bloated face, edges pink, as she made a strangled sound in the mess of her larynx.
“You can talk,” she gargled.
“So can you,” snapped Wrack. “So talk. Reason with me.”
If this oaf really wanted to live, she would give him the speech of her life. Even beyond the thundering mess of his conscience, he hoped against hope that she would. Dead, she was just another bloody smear, another reason for his mob to be wiped out like bacteria when authority in sufficient numbers found them. Alive, she represented at worst the information they needed to make a plan, and at best an ally.
So far, she was not doing well. Choking, aborted words kept garbling from her grille, her eyes flicking wildly to the dead faces closing in on her.
Feeling a disturbance by his feet, Wrack looked back and saw the pub bruiser, attention span exhausted, gnawing at the overseer’s leg through her thick hide trousers. Wrack kicked him in the head, and growled at him to pack it in before looking back to their prisoner.
“We really are keen to eat you, you know,” he said, as if remarking on the weather. Suddenly, she found her words.
“Listen,” blurted the prone ogre. “I always knew you could think, could talk. You heard rumours, and they always got talked down, but I always th—”
“Oh, fuck off!” interjected Mouana, smashing a fist into the centre of her forehead.
“Yes,” Wrack interjected, in a hurry. “We’re not going to be friends, so don’t bother with all that. We hate you. But you might walk away from this if you can do something for us.”
The overseer’s face changed, very subtly. The panic etched in it ebbed as she found she was in a position to make a deal, and Wrack realised with a surge of disgust that at least some of her fear had been theatre, a desperate appeal to compassion that had drawn him in like the illicium of an anglerfish.
“Like what?” said the overseer, her voice steadier.
“You’re going to tell us what’s going on here. And you’re going to tell us how we stop it.”
“We’re criminals, the same as y—” started the woman, before retching as Mouana’s fist slammed into the folds of her throat.
“We already made it clear you’re not getting the pity vote,” spat the soldier. “So stop your sob story.”
“No, listen,” croaked the overseer, more in exasperation than pleading. “I’m trying to tell you what’s going on. I’m trying to explain. Nobody’s here by choice. We’re prisoners just like you are.”
“You’re not dead like we are,” said Mouana.
“We’re not far off. They fill us with chemicals, to keep us next to death. To keep us ill, sick, falling apart. For five years. Before we came to Ocean we needed surgery, steroids, implants; months of bulking up, just to have a hope of surviving it. Most don’t make it past three years. They take our medicine away if we can’t make quota.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Mouana exploded, fists smashing against the pallid face again and again, shreds of her forearms tearing away on blunt metal. “You expect me to pity THAT?” she screamed, jaws wide. “You expect me to care for a bastard instant that you’re sick? I will show you sick!” she screamed, and lunged for the overseer’s neck with grey teeth bared.
“Hold on!” shouted Wrack, throwing himself on Mouana, grabbing her head desperately, wincing as her teeth sliced into his forearm. “Why? Why do you have to be nearly dead?”
The overseer stared at Mouana, panting, eyes dulled with genuine terror, then flicked her oily gaze back to Wrack.
“Because Teuthis hates life,” she said, simply.
From the back of the crowd looking down on the prisoner, a voice piped up: “What the hell is Teuthis?”
“It’s a monster,” she answered, voice slithering in revulsion.
“So’s everything, here,” snapped Wrack, still straining to keep Mouana from lunging. “What kind of monster?”
“It’s different,” said the overseer. “Very old. Very clever. Came from the polar reach, up under the icecap. Horrible, armoured, squid thing. Got hunted years and years ago, and brought back here. Says it’s the last of its kind.”
“Says?” hissed Wrack.
“We can talk to it, in a way. But we have to be nearly dead; we need to be right on the edge before it’ll talk to us. It won’t work for the living. That’s why they bulk us up to take five years of poison; so it can’t tell the difference.”
“Where is it kept?” demanded Wrack, moving his face closer to the overseer’s.
The huge woman was silent for a moment, hesitating, perhaps wondering if she had said too much. Wrack disabused her of the notion by pulling his arms from Mouana, letting his friend surge forward to within an inch of the overseer’s jowls. Then the words flowed.
“On the bridge. It’s just a brain, and some other bits, kept in a glass tank. Drugged way beyond high and plugged into the ship’s servers. It’s got a pilot seat, where we direct it. It controls the cranes, the drones, the forges. Creates the signal that controls—ah, guides, the—ah... you.” Her voice petered out in a grating squeak.
Those zombies in the pile able to follow the conversation hissed in awed fear. Even Mouana paused, turning her head slowly toward Wrack. The black signal. The green light. The marsh of despair and grief that sucked at them as they wandered, lost in consciousness.
“Let’s go kill it,” said Mouana, her anger at the overseer replaced by something deeper, something hotter.
“You’d never get halfway up,” the overseer insisted, less a taunt than a statement of fact. “The tower’s fortified, full of us.”
“So that’s our deal,” said Wrack. “You’re going to do it for us.”
The overseer’s eyes lit up above her ruined face.
“And if I do?”
“You get to live, you bloody idiot,” said Wrack. “And so do the others, if they don’t fight us. You said you’re prisoners. We’ll free you.”
The ogre’s eyes turned sly and she nodded, grumbling her assent. Wrack felt suddenly outmanoeuvred. Despite being on top of her with a pack of raging ghouls, he was desperately aware that any promise the overseer made to buy her way out of the hangar would last as long as it took her to find a radio and call in a team of shark handlers.
He was going to have to do some really s
olid lying, and do it quick enough so it didn’t sound like he was making things up on the spot. He started by standing up, and stepping off the overseer’s chest. Every head in the circle snapped up to look at him; Mouana in particular looked as if she was going to gut him herself. But he just nodded back at them, and waved his hand, carefree.
“Go on, you heard her. She severs the link with this squid thing, we let her and her mates live afterwards.”
Even the overseer looked suspicious at how relaxed he was—though Wrack quickly turned his attention from her, as if she was a problem solved. In fact, he was desperately trying to meet Mouana’s eyes, doing everything he could to say trust me with a casual glance. It worked. The soldier stood up, expression wary, and the others followed her lead.
The overseer soon found herself prone and unpinned, surrounded by a circle of retreating cadavers. Giving Wrack a very queer glance, she rose to her feet, and brushed corpse-slime from her lapels. Then with a nod she turned, shouldered her way through the watching ghouls, and walked slightly too quickly to the hangar’s exit.
“Oh,” said Wrack as she walked into the swelling dawn, “I should point out—you’re welcome to turn us in, but you’re pretty much buggered if you do.”
That was when Wrack heard the crackle of the radio, and turned to see Mouana holding it up with a grin. He was relieved beyond measure, because he had just run out of plan.
“It’s been on the whole time,” gloated Mouana, her chest wound dripping with the exertion of speech. “And broadcasting.” She was a magnificent liar. “To two dozen more radios. Stolen, hidden away all over the ship. There’s lots and lots of us who can talk, you see. And we’ve been talking.”
She paused to wheeze for a moment, before spluttering through gritted teeth and carrying on. “We told them we were going to have a word with you. Now they’ve heard. They know who you are, ‘WK3.’ They’ll be watching you very, very closely. And they’ll be very cross if we tell them you’ve snitched on us.”
“So see that you do help us,” added Wrack. “This ship is going to change, and you have a chance to determine how bloody things get in the changing. Even if you do call us in for slaughter, and even if you run fast enough when you do, the rest of us are going to riot.”
Wrack paused for a moment, as if he had said his piece, then continued.
“And granted, we might not win. But if we all get cut down, if we wreck the place in the process... well, either way, you’re not going to hit quota. And what’ll they do with your medicine then? You’ll be the next batch.”
“But we will win,” cautioned Mouana, stalking forward, wound bubbling. The overseer actually backed away. “We’ll overtake this place. And whether it’s me or someone else, we’ll find you, and we’ll get you. We’ll get you worst of all. I don’t even know how we work, but you had better hope that if we bite you, you’ll become one of us. Because if you don’t, we’ll eat you. One bite at a time.”
The overseer quaked, frozen on the spot. The power they had over her now was far greater than it had been when they were propped inches from her face, slavering. The work was done.
“What’s your name?” asked Wrack, doing all he could to seem reasonable in the aftermath of Mouana’s terrorising.
“Whina,” yelped the overseer, too quickly to be a lie.
“Well then, Whina: help us,” concluded Wrack. “Station yourself at the bridge. Find a reason to be there as often as you can. And watch for our signal—I promise you, you won’t miss it. Sever Teuthis from the ship, and we will free you. But don’t you dare ask for a guarantee.”
“Now fack off,” interjected the pub bruiser, and put a neat end to the meeting. Whina fled.
The second she was gone Wrack doubled over into silent, hysterical laughter, completely unable to process what had just happened. It was the most human he had ever felt. He staggered over to the hangar’s edge with his head in his hands, and collapsed against the wall by the skeletal man, whose ecstatic gape threw him into a fresh fit of giggles.
He came to his senses when Mouana delivered a wet slap across his jaw, nearly putting it out of joint.
“It’s no time for laughing,” she warned, as he mumbled grinning apologies. “We’ve got until she calls our bluff to make all of that bullshit into reality. And I’ve done enough talking. Your move.”
“I know, Mouana,” sighed Wrack, wiping away tears that would not come. “Just give me a minute.”
He breathed in deep, not caring whether it did anything for him, and looked around at the mass of alert, upright corpses waiting on his next words, silhouetted against the dawn.
Then he looked to his left, and saw the skeletal man in sunlight for the first time.
Every inch of exposed bone on his wasted body was covered in carvings. Intricate scrimshaw covered his pelvis, his ulnae, his radii and his sternum; abstract patterns dancing with serpents and sea-devils, tendons and streaks of grime. His scapulae rippled with tobacco clouds, steaming from the bowls of long-stemmed pipes; Wrack’s eyes narrowed in wonder.
But the scraped bone of his brows crowned the work—for there, inscribed blindly by a frail, patient hand, was the image of a vast ship, half-sunk in a raging storm. Behind the stricken hulk, rising like a wicked moon, was the image of a grinning skull.
“We’ll find out!” shrieked One-Arm, capering in the dawn light while all the other zombies remained still. “We’ll find out, won’t we!”
PART THREE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY WORKED AS quickly as they could. They finally had a plan and, so long as Whina remained too scared to interfere with it, the freedom to make it happen. Their first priority while that freedom lasted was to spread the idea of rebellion beyond one easily-sterilised cave at the arse end of the ship.
To that end, interviews were held, of a sort. Wrack would ask questions of the zombies one by one, testing how much they had taken in of the makeshift interrogation. As soon as one’s eyes slid out of focus, or as soon as they resorted to singsong repetition of familiar words instead of making a sensible answer, he shoved them aside.
Those that seemed to have worked out what was going on, he shoved towards Mouana, who started telling them, punctuating her speech by shaking their shoulders, how to wake their fellows—and where the overseers kept their radios. After all, the fiction she had come up with on the spot, of knots of conscious dead clustered around stolen radios, seemed a workable plan once they thought about it, and so was worth putting into practice.
Groups were clustered together around those dead that seemed to have a clue, and were sent from the hangar, under instructions to look clueless and defeated lest they be suspected of having purpose. Each went off with a radio frequency to remember, and instructions to listen out for a plan coming together. Until then, the only priority was to spread the word, and look inconspicuous.
The groups went willingly away; they understood there was a high likelihood of being caught and torn apart, but it was a rare zombie for which this was a terrifying fate: they genuinely had nothing to lose.
The Blades were the most useful among them as group leaders; whether it was some sense of cohesion borrowed from their living memories, or something to do with the way they had died, they seemed more together than a lot of the others.
Of course, there were exceptions. Broken-Jaw Kaba took one group of ten or so (Wrack wasn’t keeping count), and they even let the bruiser take a rowdy knot of cadavers. Sure, his comprehension wasn’t up to much, but he’d proved he had spirit at least, and that was worth sending him out with a team, even if the best he could do was swear into the faces of his fellow dead.
Even some of the people from the dreg pile, those too broken to be roused by the prospect of Whina’s food on that other morning, went out on the hunt. They went out slowly, or dimly, or hobbling along on knuckles and a single leg, but they went out.
When they thought the hangar was empty of the cogent dead, Wrack and Mouana were approached by Once-F
at Man, with his teenage saviour in tow. His voice was almost polished, his attitude impossibly calm, as he told them how impressed he had been by their bluff against Whina, and how he wondered if he could help.
For someone who had been so recently struggling to achieve more than wordless screams of anger, he was strangely eloquent. And while Mouana balked, unsure of how to react to his odd sincerity, Wrack figured that everyone took death differently, and urged the sagging man to take his wordless squire and find others like himself. They would need talkers.
In fact, of all the dead to return with them from the ET hunt, only poor, gibbering One-Arm elected to stay in the hangar with those too decayed to move. It seemed the best place for the capering, grinning cadaver. And in any case, thought Wrack, with the sort of logic that would have seemed callous with lives on the line, if they were betrayed and the overseers did come to the hangar to exterminate the rebel threat, how foolish would they feel in finding One-Arm in command.
When their oddest charge had scampered over to the dreg pile to engage the listless dead in enigmatic winks and thumbs-ups, Wrack and Mouana found themselves the only speaking people left in the hangar.
“Which way do we go?” asked Wrack, shrugging in the dawn.
“You’re taking the starboard side, where the Bahamut is. I’m taking port, where the bridge is. I’m going to get them worked up, right in the shadow of this bloody squid thing.” Wrack opened his mouth to argue, but Mouana was already thrusting the stolen radio into the inside of his shirt.
“You said to the fat bloke: we need talkers. And you’re a talker, Wrack. Just make sure you talk to those boiled bastards with the weapons, if there’s more of them left. Talk, and listen. Keep one ear on the radio,” she said, repeating the frequency she had told the others. “See who else calls in, keep them on plan, and let’s talk when we’ve got some work done.”
“But you’re the soldier,” protested Wrack. “Why give me the radio? How are you going to get—”
