Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  The twine he kept knotted around his hand, fingering it when he needed to coax his mind on to the next tactic. He breathed easily working alone, as he had as Executioner, back when finishing the hunt was all that mattered.

  In the shadow of the city, it was nearly as cold as the wine cellar in the chateau, the air heavy and fragrant with mold. The four came upon a stream and took a break to refill some of Flam’s plastic bottles. Rohm even took a quick bath, each mouse diving in and popping out in turn, shaking off, and joining the others.

  Clyde went downstream a bit, stepped into the water, and plodded around, trying to free some of the dirt that had been deeply driven into the tread of his shoes. He glared at the loafers at the end of his narrow ankles—shoes not intended for walking on anything but marble, mahogany floors, or plush carpet. He was taking to the adventure better than his shoes were. He liked being out here in all this, making progress with each step in his unenthusiastic footwear.

  As for Flam and Nevele? Well, they seemed to be in the same category as his shoes. They looked tired and browbeaten. Especially Nevele.

  He was about to ask her how she was doing, but before he could even get her name out, she was waving, telling everyone to move on.

  He kicked the last bit of moisture out of his loafers and carried on.

  Much to everyone’s relief, Flam and Nevele had decided to put aside the squabbling and take turns leading. Since the valley, Nevele didn’t seem to want to argue anymore. When she agreed to let the Mouflon lead, even Flam himself looked surprised.

  Flam led the four around the base of Geyser’s stem, using his bent blunderbuss as a walking stick, maneuvering around and over boulders.

  Clyde slowed to let the others go ahead so he could walk beside Nevele. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, watching where she walked, bounding over a rock elegantly. “I don’t think we should talk. They might still be nearby.”

  “But I just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

  Nevele stopped and looked him in the eyes. “What’s with you? Why are you so doting? Has a lifetime of service made you into mush? Show some backbone. I said I’m fine; now leave me alone.” She went on, leaving Clyde in a cloud of confusion.

  “If you want to get something off your chest,” he called after her, “I assure you, the jinx won’t be bad, as long as you didn’t do anything that despicable.”

  “I don’t have anything on my chest,” she returned flatly, maneuvering around a sharp rock, then ducking under the mossy bole of a fallen tree.

  Clyde followed, swerved and ducked just as she had. “We’re in this together. Even if your brother is an awful person, we’ll get what we’re after. We’re a good group. Everyone has something to offer. Flam and his brawn and mechanically inclined brain. Rohm and their mathematics and being able to scout ahead undetected. Your fabrick—I don’t even need to tell you how that’s so great. And me, the conscience sponge for whenever anyone needs to confess something to feel better. It’s like it was meant to be or—”

  Nevele’s boots crunched on the loose pebbles as she spun around. “You’re such a dolt. You talk about this whole thing like it’s some kind of game, like we’re just out on a stroll in the woods for a good ol’ time. Do you have any idea how many people are displaced because of Gorett? I can tell you for a fact that the refugee camp they got sent to isn’t exactly a tropical resort. Think about how many people lost their homes and their livelihoods because of his greed. Your Mr. Wilkshire, the poor man, died believing he was to blame for all this. I’m beginning to think you were dropped on your head when you were little.”

  “I have to stay positive, though. It’s the only way to get through all this. If I start thinking about the death and despair, I get too anxious to think about the task at hand.”

  Nevele sighed and continued on. Her voice echoed weirdly among the rocks, weeds, and dark puddles of water collecting here and there. “Is that the reverse side of your fabrick, how you’re personally afflicted, then? You’re optimistic to a fault?”

  Clyde’s expression flattened. “Not exactly . . .”

  “Because you should consider yourself pretty lucky to not have been cursed to a worse degree by your fabrick.” In the cold air, Nevele’s scoffs came out illustrated in loose puffs of steam, trailing up and around her hood’s hem as she picked her way ahead of Clyde and up a tall heap of fallen sediment rock.

  His patience was bested. As much as he tried to hold it back, he felt a wall crumble between him and his temper.

  “I’m cursed, all right?”

  Cursed, all right? came the echo.

  “Oh yeah? Sad story time, everyone. Gather ’round. Clyde is going to tell us how it’s so hard having to listen to rich old men tell him how they cheated someone out of their retirement funds and how they feel so damned bad about it.”

  Clyde stopped in his tracks.

  Nevele took one more stride, stopped, and turned around. She sighed. “Clyde, I’m sorry. With all this with my brother and us out here in the open and no visors between us and his gray light, it’s just—”

  “I have a reverse side to my fabrick, okay? One that I personally suffer from. And even though it hasn’t really been an issue in the past, because of the masters I had before, it was quite . . . the plummets, as Flam would say, when I was living with Mr. Wilkshire.”

  Nevele said nothing, merely stood and listened.

  Ahead, Flam and Rohm had also turned around.

  “I can’t tell anyone how much I care about them or how much they mean to me. I can’t ever do it. I don’t remember my parents, because I must have told them I loved them once. I might have living parents, perhaps even siblings. I’m not sure. But I know if I ever express feeling love for someone, I won’t be able to hold on to their memory the second they’re out of my sight.”

  “And Mr. Wilkshire?”

  “I never got to tell him how much I cared about him. I tried to explain it to him, to tell him that I wanted to tell him how much I liked walking with him around the gardens and talking with him hour after hour about everything in the world, and how great it was that he always brought me books—but I could never tell him that I was thankful for letting me live with him, that I cared for him like he was my own father, and that I loved him, because I knew I’d forget him the moment he was out of the room. Nearly slipped once, too. The day he told me what would happen if I did.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  Clyde marched on, brushing past Nevele without another word. He drove his hands into his pockets. “I know the double-edged way of fabrick, Nevele.”

  He caught up to Flam and Rohm, where they were posted on the rim of a boulder, overlooking the landscape to the south. As he approached, Clyde noticed something trailing up the smooth rock stem: a column of black smoke. “What is it?” he whispered.

  Flam pointed toward a rocky clearing close to the stem base. Several things were still smoldering, most of which Clyde couldn’t make out. Just black and sooty marks among the smattering of red stone.

  Flam stared ahead. “I reckon they found my auto.”

  Clyde followed his focus to the thing smoking most exuberantly. It looked like a big fish at first glance, but Clyde realized it was the husk of a vehicle. Flam’s auto, smashed to the point it had folded itself in half.

  “Do you suppose they’re waiting there for us?” The pack of frisk mice posed this question to Nevele, who came up last to join them, standing farthest from Clyde.

  She stared, chewing her bottom lip. “I can’t say for certain. But Vidurkis is restless. I doubt he would want to wait. He’s probably moved on to circle the island again.” She glanced over her shoulder, a gesture that appeared wholly involuntary.

  Clyde leaned forward to peer at the distant scene. “What is that all over the ground? It doesn’t look like just charred auto. It looks like giant bugs, sort of. On their backs with their legs in the air.”

  Rohm trembled. “The B
latta.”

  Nevele looked closer. “You mean those things by the tree line there?”

  “Yeah. What are those?”

  Nevele stepped back, realizing. “They’re the Patrol walkers, all burned up. When they passed us in the valley, there were ten of them altogether. And I count only . . . nine walkers there.” Her shoulders sank. “They were slowing him down. He’s moving on his own, just as he used to when he was in King Pyne’s security detail.” She sighed. “He killed them.”

  Flam turned, a grimace on his furry face. “Your brother killed his own men? What kind of Meech-damned bastard is he?”

  “A bastard of the worst degree. Let’s get up there and check if there’s anything left of use. We’ll go toward the beach and set up camp for the night. The mines aren’t that far off. We should be able to reach them no later than by the suns’ highest tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll be able to stay ahead of him.” She checked over her shoulder again and caught Clyde’s gaze. He looked away first, stepping to join Flam and Rohm as they descended toward the horrible vista.

  A hand alighted on his wrist. He turned.

  Nevele hiked in a deep breath and met his gaze. “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled, patted her hand. “It’s okay.” Their touch gave his heart the same feeling—a better one—than anyone’s confession could. His heart didn’t just feel sated; it sang.

  She gently took her hand back and walked on ahead.

  He was sad to let the moment end, but it wasn’t like they could remain like that forever, sadly. They had things to do.

  As he walked, a sensation slithered in slowly—the awareness of being around the bodies of murdered people. Nine charred skeletons. The metal had gone weak in the fires and melted around the blackened bones. No one deserved to leave the world that way, even if they served a man as bad as Gorett. Clyde remained at the fringes of it all, keeping his back to the sight and trying to not breathe through his nose. It felt as if the very place had been stained by the evil perpetrated here, as if he were suffering a different bout of gray light, one that wasn’t so direct.

  Clyde hurried to join the rest of them at what they were doing but kept his eyes averted from the smoldering dead men.

  Flam’s auto had cooled enough for Rohm to scour within. The frisk mice emerged and recompiled. “Mr. Flam, I’m afraid everything was ruined.”

  Flam groaned. “I had a lot of good stuff in there, too. Guns, some decent clothes. Even stuff that wouldn’t be of any use during this journey; I still would’ve liked it back . . . There was a picture of my uncle in there. Only one I had of the old sod.”

  There was now nothing to look at but the bodies. Clyde forced himself not to stare. Nonetheless, a question bobbed against the roof of his mind until it couldn’t go unsaid another moment. “Why would he do it?”

  “He likes to work alone.” Nevele kicked over a ruined walker, the legs snapping off.

  She tried to stop it from rolling since they were still trying to keep it quiet, but it picked up momentum quickly and tumbled down the hill, spraying nuts and bolts off with each flip. It reached the edge and spiraled off, everyone wincing at the noise she’d accidentally set in motion. After a slight delay, it hit the hard terrain below in a crash.

  Nevele cringed. “I’m kind of surprised he bothered working with them as long as he did, actually.”

  Clyde approached the edge to see where the walker had fallen. He immediately regretted it, having noticed a corpse on the rocks below. Unlike the others, he hadn’t been burned at all. The sight of the body, with the left eye stabbed into a gory slit, made Clyde’s stomach lurch. He turned away and walked up the hill, choking. There was no good place to look here. So much death.

  “What is it, Mr. Clyde?” Rohm asked.

  Clyde crooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Another one, over the hill.”

  Nevele went first, carefully slipping down the grade of the hill in a seated position until she reached the edge. Her boots hit with a couple of thuds. She just goes right down there, Clyde thought, as if the sight of death is nothing at all to her.

  The others remained as she rooted through the guardsman’s pockets. She glanced up at them watching her but returned to work unbothered, pulling the flap off the guardsman’s holster and removing his sidearm. She broke it open and saw that not one of the twenty rounds within its magazine had been spent.

  “Patrol issue,” Flam remarked. “Good find.”

  Nevele held the gun for a moment, unsure where to stow it. She closed her eyes, and the material of her belt rearranged, flipped around, and shaped a hip holster for her. She slipped the gun into it, a perfect fit. Next she removed the guardsman’s helmet and donned it. She nodded sharply, and the visor flipped down. Nothing of her face could be seen. Muffled, she said, “They wear these to protect themselves from the gray light.”

  “I just thought it was a spooky fashion statement,” Flam said.

  “Nope.” She rapped a knuckle against the visor. “We can definitely make use of this if he catches up to us.”

  “That’s just dandy,” Flam said, “but did you bring enough for the rest of the class?”

  Nevele removed the helmet and tossed it to him. “We’ll have to take turns.” She smirked and negotiated the remainder of stony grade to the tree line at the foot of the hill.

  The rest followed, dropping down in turn. Clyde still tried not to look at the dead man but failed. Part of him wanted to see—a part of him he didn’t much like.

  The Patrol guardsman was pale, and his head was turned in such a way that when Clyde glanced, it was as if the man knew and had already begun staring in Clyde’s direction. While one eye was just a gaping red hole, the other was open wide, terror in its frozen stare. Clyde moved on, resisting a tremor.

  They were a few yards down when they realized one of them was missing.

  Behind, Rohm looked at the corpse forlornly. “Shame to let it go to waste.”

  “Good Meech.”

  Clyde was speechless.

  “Go ahead.” Nevele sighed.

  But not a one among them stuck around to witness the resourceful display.

  Chapter 24

  One of the Gang

  The following morning, Aksel lay in his holey cot and looked at the shafts of daylight that managed to steal through the rust-rimmed holes in his shack’s roof. They didn’t help his hangover much. He now regretted having tasked Ricky to go out with Aksel’s last few spots, freed from his boot heel, in search of more beer. Regardless, he had a job to do. He sat up, the invisible clamp on his head spinning tighter as he did so. He strapped on his eye patch, got dressed, bade farewell to his humble abode, crossed the mud alleys cutting this way and that through the shantytown, and reached the square.

  Ricky was already there, at his usual spot, and they exchanged nods. Ricky always wore his emotions like little flags that popped up over his head. The one he flew now read, Be careful, brother.

  Aksel tipped an invisible hat and walked on, cutting across the littered agora to the other side of town, where he seldom dared to tread, where Neck Scar Steve lived. He found his shack and ducked in to ensure it was empty. It was, not surprisingly, seeing as how the Odium spy probably kept a full schedule; the old men and women weren’t going to bully themselves, after all. Aksel treaded in quietly.

  His shack wasn’t much better than Aksel’s own, but it had more than one room and its own private bathroom of three walls set up around a hole in the floor. He had a bed, which was made from the hood of an old automobile with some frayed linens piled into it, and a lantern that worked on batteries. Aksel knelt on one knee and felt the blankets. Cold.

  It wouldn’t take much to find someone in the camp. All you had to do was walk and keep your eyes open. The guards had set up a lot of the shacks themselves and had made it in the style of a panopticon, every shack and alleyway easily observed from the watchtower at its central point. Unable to help being observed, Aksel continued to stride the perimeter clockwise, t
hen counterclockwise.

  Finally, without having spotted Neck Scar Steve or any of his buddies, Aksel returned to the agora.

  He hadn’t had breakfast yet and was already drenched in sweat. He sidled up to Ricky’s stand and leaned under its meager patch of shade, his elbows on the counter.

  Ricky got up from his lawn chair and looked around. “How’d it go?”

  “It didn’t. I can’t find him.”

  “The place is only so big, man.”

  “I know. I looked all over.”

  “Did you ask anyone?”

  Aksel took a second to scan the area as well. “And let word spread that I was asking about him? I kind of think that’d be a bad idea.” He turned back toward Ricky. “I wonder if I scared him more than I thought with the . . . you know.” He indicated his eye patch and what lay beneath it.

  “Well, the first time seeing that thing bust out isn’t exactly a comforting experience.” He lifted the counter, levering Aksel’s elbows off, and produced a bottle of water. It looked clean enough. “Rehydrate. You’re leaving a puddle.”

  Aksel uncapped it, took a sip, and gave the bottle back to his friend. “We really tied it on last night, didn’t we?” He jammed his finger under the band of his eye patch to massage his temple.

  “You drink too much. Especially when something’s eating at you.”

  “Well, what if I can’t find him? Of course it’s eating at me.”

  “Then you’ll be out there.” Ricky indicated the wasteland beyond the fences, the dead limitless Lakebed that the camp butted against. “Along with the handsome son of a bitch who’ll never stop reminding you that you got him thrown out there with you.” He winked. “No pressure or anything.”

  Aksel looked through the links of the fence to the wasteland. How long would they last? No water. No means of quick travel. No defense against the Odium if they happened to swing by overhead and use them as target practice. Not to mention all the other life-forms, both sentient and not, that could easily kill a man if even accidentally provoked.