by Arthur Stone
He found a heavy ax in one of the sheds. This will come in handy. But there was nothing else useful to be found in the houses.
The ax came in handy mere minutes later, since the boat shed was locked. No watercraft was inside, but the pair made a number of other discoveries. Boiler took a crowbar to keep in the boat, and his partner found a can with some gasoline inside. He looked inside and sloshed a bit on the floor.
In the meantime, Charcoal showed up. He proudly placed a slain mouse on the threshold, eager to display his superior agility and luck.
A bang was heard far in the distance. Boiler tensed.
“Something just blew up.”
“Thunder?”
“No. It was an explosion. Something big.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“Something familiar.”
“Nah. That happens around here, every hour or two.”
“Some kind of strange phenomenon?”
“Might be artillery, might be something else—I’m not sure. There’s no news radio or papers in this world, so either you know what it is right off the bat, or you’ll never know.”
“Edgers?”
“They’re not the only ones who have heavy weapons. Those serious commandos who hunt the edger convoys can be well armed, too. The edgers have plenty of weapons, ammunition, and vehicles, so they’re certainly rich targets. Plus, many of them are following moral principles. Nobody likes being harvested for meat like cattle.”
“I haven’t seen or heard a single proper airplane this whole time. Is the edger air force made up exclusively of drones?”
“No. They use all kinds of other planes. But the higher you fly, the harder it becomes to cross cluster boundaries. Even at lower altitudes, it’s tricky business, and at medium altitudes you risk disaster. Just imagine, flying over the clusters at the speed of an airplane, zooming through one border after another. The variance in airflow, the sudden shifts in turbulence, would tear you to pieces. And you wouldn’t even notice entering a dark cluster. A dead cluster can wreck any technology. A bicycle can barely deal with it, much less anything electric.”
“I don’t get it. You just said they use planes.”
“They do. On well-established flight paths, where there’s no chance of hitting a dark cluster, you might even see a fully-equipped attack plane now and then. It’ll fly low and quiet, but it can still rain death from above. They use helicopters most of all, though. As far as planes go, they only have a few, and they’re all prop planes. So you’ll see choppers and drones, mostly. No other groups have any serious air presence. The bastards have towers, too, radio beacons placed in their own stables or in empty stables. Some kind of advanced navigation system, but without satellites. Edgers come in all kinds, though, and their system only works in areas where they’re all from the same world. If you get lucky, though, you can find one of their pocket navigators. Very useful gadget. And very easy to sell for a great price, if you need. OK, we’re good on fuel. Let’s get going.”
Fisher touched a finger to the wood where he had splashed the gasoline. Suddenly the wood, the walls, the shelves were engulfed in flames, and smoke stung Boiler’s eyes.
“Why would you...”
Fisher, bewitched by the flame, interrupted him absentmindedly.
“I don’t know. Just wanted to.”
They paddled out always, and then Fisher set to refilling the gas tank. The shed was in flames, hitting them with surprisingly high heat. Suddenly an explosion shook the building, and a plume of red-hot flame rose into the sky.
Fisher shook his head.
“We missed it. Damn.”
“Missed what?”
“Looks like there was another can of gas in there. Alright, Boiler, hopefully that’s our last stop till the end of this leg. Off we go.”
Chapter 24
The motor chugged along, with only occasional stuttering. Those monotonous green banks flew by on either side, and now and then clones of the same boring tiny islands approached them, demanding their boat step aside. There was no sign of recent human activity, or even animal activity, except for small birds, a dozen or so wild ducks, and a single heron.
Now and then, a few buildings would whip by. Usually hovels, but sometimes respectable towns. In one such town, a trio of runners rushed to the riverbank and followed after them for a time before returning to “civilization.” In another town, something like a raffler leaped out and watched the boat pass. But it was smart enough to know that pursuit was hopeless and so did not give chase.
A little after that, the waterway changed. Fallen trees and other natural rubble along the coast became less frequent. Fisher killed the engine. “Time to use the oars.”
“For the rest of the way?”
“What? No. The bridge coming up is a bottleneck. Someone might be traveling across it, might even stop on it, and our motor can be heard from miles away.”
“In the middle of this river, they’ll see us no matter how quiet we are.”
“That’s why we’ll be paddling along the edge. It’s covered in tall reeds, so we’ll be practically invisible from any reasonable distance.”
“These oarlocks creak.”
“Not that badly.”
“Enough for the beasts to hear.”
“Like I said, the bank is a swamp in that area, so there’s no easy way to approach it from land. And the beasts are no serious threat in water, as you’ve seen for yourself. So quit being such a downer.”
“Downer? Are you serious?”
“Things got to me when I first came here, too. Soon I was scared of everyone and everything. Even started getting suicidal. But then I got used to things.”
“I’m not about to go suicidal.” Boiler paused. “It’s foggy up ahead, and I really don’t like it.”
Fisher whipped around and scanned the horizon. “Where?”
“Along the shore. Strange time for fog, right in the middle of the day.”
“Shit! We’re in trouble. Oars up.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s the deathveil.”
“Uh, deathveil?”
“You seen a reset before? Smelled the putrid fog prior? That’s what this is. We can’t go that way or we’ll get caught in it, and going through knockout is bad. Really bad.”
“Is that what you call it when you’re stuck in a cluster during its reset?”
Fisher nodded. “Best case, you come out of it with your mind gone. Plenty of idiots try to go into the deathveil, though. Especially newcomers.”
“Thinking it’s their ticket home.” Boiler might have been one of them, if not for Nimbler’s early advice.
“Exactly. Some people just refuse to believe that there’s no way back from the Hive, no matter how loudly you insist. Soon they’re spending the rest of their days walking around drooling and smiling like a bunch of lousy clowns. If they even make it to ‘days.’ Even the ghouls avoid reclusters. If there’s one universal rule for all life in this place, it’s that no one can ever go through knockout.”
The tension on Fisher’s face began to fade. “It’s clearing up now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I can see the reeds through it, where before it was just an impenetrable wall.”
“We’ll wait a minute longer to make sure. The deathveil gets very thick just before the reset, then dissipates rapidly. Sometimes ‘rapidly’ means hours—especially in the lowlands, where how long it will last is anybody’s guess—but sometimes it’s just a minute or two. In any case, it loses strength as time passes.”
After only a few seconds, Boiler confirmed the disintegration. The fog was barely visible.
“Let’s keep going,” Fisher replied.
“You sure it’s safe? The fog is still rippling across the river, and we’ll hit it downstream.”
“The clusterfuck is complete. No one’s ever died just from breathing in deathveil. We can’t stick around. The Edge has a lot of people, and they’ll all be heading to the ne
w cluster. If my leg was better, we could stop here and look for some loot to snag, but my current health makes that a bad option. So let’s pass on the risk and get going.”
The oarlocks no longer creaked as loudly as they had, Boiler noted—until they hit the strip of fog. There, the silence was deafening, and the rhythmic sound of the oars cut through it like the loudest of alarms. Fisher stopped and muttered, “Oars up. I’ll give it a little gas. It’s got some oil in it, at least enough for a bit.”
The whole apparatus lurched to life with an ear-shattering squeal. No other sounds interfered, for none could challenge this dominator of auditory nerves. The life that had inhabited the river had evaporated, disrupted by the reset. The fog itself was dissipating but still thick enough to limit visibility.
A huge bridge emerged unannounced from the mist up ahead. Fisher pointed left, indicating which way they’d loop around one of its sizable concrete supports. The swamp ended here, and a current came under the boat with aims to increase its speed considerably. A wall of tall reeds dominated the other side of the bridge, tempting them with shelter, but to reach them they’d have to clear several hundred feet of open water.
“Look, Mommy, a boat!” they heard from above. Boiler looked up to see a little girl leaning against the side of the bridge. She was pointing through the railing, directly at them. Her dress and the bows in her hair were pure white, and her eyes showed no fear. It was all he could do to keep his jaw from dropping at the spectacle, a sliver of peaceful life in a world of violence.
“Mommy, look, they have a cat!”
A young woman in a bright, colorful summer dress was nearby. With a kind softness, she unwittingly told her child one of the worst falsehoods the girl would ever hear. “They’re fishermen, darling, out catching fish.”
“And giving their kitty some fish?”
“Of course, honey. All kitties love fish!”
Both disappeared as the boat ducked under the bridge, and Boiler heard the girl’s voice, now disembodied in his senses, filter down through the stones with the gravity of a child conversing about the mysteries of the universe.
“When will they give him some fish? What? Why doesn’t your phone work, Mommy? What does ‘no signal’ mean, Mommy?”
“Newcomers,” Fisher said unnecessarily. Their bus rumbled off, no one on board any the wiser that each stop might be their last.
“So they just arrived, huh,” Boiler asked, also unnecessarily.
“Yeah. From that reset that we waited out.”
“To think they don’t know anything.”
“Absolutely nothing. They’re currently surprised and angry about their cell phone service suddenly dropping. None would believe us if we told them. In fact, they’d try to get us thrown in the madhouse.”
“We should’ve hidden the gun, and probably the crossbow. I doubt it’s hunting season, and the cops could give us trouble.”
“How? Their phones and computers and systems are all down. Unless, of course, they’re still on card catalogs and courier pigeons.”
“We could run into a patrol.”
“No one patrols this place but the edgers.”
“No, I mean the local cops.”
“I was just being an ass. Forget it. We’ll hit a new cluster in about half a mile, anyway, so no need to worry. Who would think to chase a couple of fishermen like us, anyway, just because we have a shotgun and a crossbow on board? Soon that’ll be the least of their worries.”
“Do kids get infected, too?”
“If they’re old enough. Preteens and teens are no different from adults as far as infection goes. But young infecteds don’t last long.”
“Why not?”
“When the infecteds start eating each other, the smaller ones are the first to go. Easy prey.”
“What about child immunes?”
“Just as bad, really, and for the same reasons. That mother and daughter we just saw, for instance. Let’s say the mother is infected but the daughter immune. How long do you think the girl will survive?”
“She was six, at most. Not a chance in the world.”
“That’s right. Even if she managed to find help from some capable adults, most capable adults lack immunity, too, and soon the child would be no more than a snack—or, if they were immune, a dangerous burden. The little ones only make it once in a blue moon.”
“So why doesn’t anyone organize a rescue operation? Quarantine the cluster, filter out those who have already turned, and kill them while they’re in the early stages. Then none of them will reach maturity.”
“And who could do that? There’s no government here. No agencies or authorities. There are unions of stables, though, if you travel away from the Noose. They’re no vast dominions, but they have managed to absorb decently large amounts of territory. And even they don’t ‘filter’ clusters that reset.”
“Not enough manpower?”
“Right. When only a handful of people are immunes, and the clusters keep resetting time and time again, how would they staff such an undertaking? During this short conversation of ours, there have probably been anywhere between forty and a hundred cluster resets throughout the Hive. But not only is such action unfeasible, it would also threaten our very livelihood.”
Boiler nodded. “The spores.”
“Uh huh. If we prevented the infecteds from developing at all, we’d be out of spores, meaning we’d be out of luck.”
“So put them in pens and cages, let them eat each other, and then cut the spores out of the strongest.”
“Some have tried that. They simply don’t flourish in captivity. They fail to develop and fail to produce any appreciable number of spores. Some theorize that infected meat alone isn’t enough for them—that they also need fresh meat. But one stable tried feeding them cows, with the same poor result. Apparently the parasite that controls the infecteds doesn’t like being treated like that. It wants freedom. It wants space. But maybe all of that is just a fairy tale.”
Boiler gazed off into the distance for a moment. “Goddammit.”
“You feel sorry for the girl?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course. I’m not a monster. But there’s nothing we can do. We can’t exactly go back and tell her mother to climb into the boat with two scruffy men since the world is about to end in a zombie apocalypse, now can we? What would you have said to that, back in the old world?”
“I would’ve called the police to report the creepy pedophiles. Or tried, anyway.”
“Exactly. We’d attract attention without actually helping anyone. So just put her out of your head, Boiler—you’ve got enough to think about as it is. In the Hive, you have to think about yourself first of all. And second of all. And third of all. In the end, the Hive is the Hive, and here no saint ever lives long.”
“How far do we still have?”
Fisher raised his paddle and gestured for Boiler to do the same. “We’ll hit the motor now and be there by evening. Not to the stable, but to the end of our river voyage, at least. We’ll have to go on foot then. If there is a better way in by boat, I haven’t found it.”
“Will there be a place to sleep?”
“There’s a quarry on one of the riverbanks there. The office is a decent place to sleep, and I’ve never seen any threatening ghouls prowling around the place. Maybe the quarry has long been abandoned, or maybe it just operates during the day and the resets come at night.”
“The first manmincer I ever ran into was in a quiet, empty factory far from civilization.”
“Like I’ve said, anything can happen, but that hasn’t happened at this place yet. The man who showed me the place also swore he never saw anything dangerous there. So that’s where we’ll stay.”
The men fell silent, and Boiler was left to the sounds of the spinning motor and the swirling conflict of his thoughts.
* * *
The last leg of their journey was one of the most painful, as if Boiler’s story hadn’t include
d enough torturous legs already. They turned out of the large river into a narrow creek, a waterway with no palpable current, and the sides of the boat continually grazed the thick growths of reeds and canes on either side. The situation worsened as the water grew more and more shallow. The craft began to scrape bottom, forcing them to kill the engine and proceed with oars alone. Sometimes, when the vegetation denied them any place in the water to row, they had to stand and push off the creek bed with their paddles.
Moving on foot would have been much faster, but Boiler had no plans to suggest this since the place did not actually possess any dry land. Sometimes he caught glimpses through brief gaps in the walls of reeds to their left and their right and saw standing water covered in a thick, disgusting film of duckweed. Beyond that stagnant water stood yet another impenetrable wall of reeds, but the ground beyond was no more firm than the stretch of duckweed.
Just as he began to feel a touch of claustrophobia, the waterway improved, growing wider and deeper. Fisher frightened away a colony of birds by starting the engine again.
The boat jerked with such force that Boiler barely stayed inside—and yet managed to grab the airborne Charcoal by the tail, saving the howling cat from plopping into the water just ahead. The engine roared loudly, but the water did not oblige them with its accompanying churning, and the only movement the boat provided was a painful tailbone massage.
Fisher killed the engine, swore angrily, and assumed an incomprehensible calmness as he explained. “Well, we’re fucked. Our propeller is gone.”
“You pushed it too hard.”
“Dammit, everyone drives their boats through here like that, but this has never happened before. What the hell kind of propeller doesn’t have a guard, anyway? I used to operate boats back in the old world, and nothing like this ever happened. They made them like they used to, back where...”
