Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

plume of smoke caught the last rays of an omelette sun, a thin grey line like a tall metal pin in a map of the world, marking, Schilling believed, the site of the abandoned hover. He handed the binoculars to the pilot, who adjusted the intensifier, frowning below plastic.

  The house was built in a niche, sloped against the steeply terraced mountainside. There was no furniture. Schilling hoped it would rain, just so they might be dry on the bare boards of a lacquered floor. Johnson lowered the binoculars and shrugged. A waste, her expression read.

  A quick exploration of this lonely domicile uncovered a serviceable kettle, and they gambled on a fire, the fireplace cut from the grainy stone of the rear wall. The house couldn’t have attracted much light during the day. Facing northwest, it was shrouded on both sides, although the windows were large. There was no electricity, no cables or wires, no evidence of a generator. The kettle was primitive, thick blackened steel ready to the flame. Schilling was allowed to pick from among a dusty handful of anonymous pellets which to drop in the boiling water, afraid of what he might subsequently taste. Soapy and Knox ranged in the closing night in search of food, while the big man’s guts rumbled at the odour of, thankfully, coffee.

  Johnson breathed a sigh of relief.

  She sipped the brew, savouring its bitterness.

  They waited quietly in the coming dark.

  As the fire died, a sonic grenade knocked them unconscious.

  Thinking back, it had been foolish to take refuge in such an obvious place. The house was a trap sprung with only modest bait. Schilling and Johnson found themselves in a whitewashed cell, a thin mattress and a stinking chemical toilet between them. Meals were shoved at irregular intervals through a slot at the base of the door. He paced and she complained of wasted muscles. There were no bars, no windows, their concrete abode, ten steps by six, illuminated by a recessed bulb.

  Schilling imagined he could see bloodstains under the fresh paint.

  Johnson implored him to sit down.

  They talked little, sure of ears pressed to the walls and a camera’s secreted eye.

  Time was disorientating, the bulb on or off according to the whim of their jailers or the availability of power. If the latter, then any light was a kindness.

  After sleeping twice, fitful periods of dreamless torpor, the heavy iron door opened and in stepped a gaunt young man. His chin was elongated, his brow deformed. He wore a white lab coat, ink stains blue and green about a frayed breast pocket.

  ‘If you would follow me,’ he said to Schilling, nodding apologetically, two or three larger men behind.

  The pilot stirred.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ the man added, as if to appease her stare.

  Schilling pushed from his crouch and walked to the door. ‘Couldn’t we just fill in a questionnaire?’

  The man blanched. ‘Oh, we don’t mean to interrogate you. This is purely routine. A check-up.’ The last in response to the wrinkled man’s obvious bafflement.

  He gazed over his shoulder at Johnson, who while listening, remained quiet.

  He shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  The men escorted him down a narrow corridor, the smell of paint disguising that of dank air. There was mould under the wash, a welcome alternative...

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Popular conception has it as a nuclear fallout shelter.’

  ‘On Oriel?’

  ‘Just one of many anomalies. But I’m sure you’ve knowledge of those.’

  ‘Yes. We’re in the mountain then?’

  ‘Correct. Approximately two hundred metres below ground.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Your surprise is noted.’

  ‘Eh?’ Schilling was groggy, still hung over from the cell and the preceding grenade.

  ‘You’ve been under observation,’ confirmed the technician. ‘It was feared you were enemy agents.’

  ‘Ah...’

  The corridor widened, the evidence of activity amplified.

  ‘Nearly there.’

  They ran tests on him, mixed his blood with a series of reagents, peeled strips of dark skin from his lips and palms.

  Nothing was discussed.

  Schilling remained patient through it all, merely inquiring after Johnson.

  ‘Receiving similar treatment.’

  He made no mention of the twins.

  He wondered whose side he was on.

  How many factions disputed the globe?

  His physical presence no longer required, they marched Schilling to another room. There was a bed and blankets, a salad sandwich and a magazine. He buzzed the intercom, enjoying its archaic crackle, and requested a glass of milk. It was delivered by an Ologist, this information gleaned from the artificial gloss of her eyes.

  Expensive baby eyes.

  Rich family.

  She was perfect.

  The milk was like none he had ever tasted.

  She noted his expression. ‘It’s real - or as near as.’

  Yes, better a questionnaire.

  ‘My name’s Ula,’ said the Ologist. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘You know already.’ They would have bounced that off a retina.

  ‘True, but I’d like you to tell me.’

  ‘Hubert Schilling.’

  ‘Thank-you, Hubert. Now...’

  ‘I’m in love with another woman,’ he stated, the rock of his sanity.

  Ula smiled.

  He lay back on the bed and peered at the white ceiling. ‘She used to be a man once, Johnson.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘It shows? In the tests?’

  ‘A lot of things show. A colleague of mine is with her.’

  Schilling closed his eyes. Drowsy. A narcotic? He sensed Ula’s fine-boned fingers seek his pulse.

  Lloyd Monk entered the room. Tall and angular, he came and stood over the bed. ‘You might have let him shower or something.’

  ‘I didn’t want to risk losing any surface nutrients. I thought you’d prefer to see him this way, in his natural state.’

  ‘Okay. Help me get him undressed.’

  They carefully stripped the man of his jumpsuit, revealing the full extent of his barklike folds, brown and corrugated waves of loosely draped skin.

  The lanky dendrologist ploughed digits through his hair, pulling it back from his forehead.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ queried Ula, spurring her husband on. ‘Take your sample.’

  Monk produced a burnished hunting knife.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Sure; it won’t hurt him. I’ll wager his sensitivity is near zero over eighty percent of his limbs and ninety percent of his torso.’

  ‘All the same,’ remarked Ula.

  ‘Queasy?’ he teased, pinching the flesh of Schilling’s right ankle. ‘Not like you.’ Crusty, dusting the sheets like over-baked bread, the skin stood proud when released. Monk tugged the arch, testing its elasticity. He turned the knife on its side and gently sawed through the raised section to leave an oval opening. A sweet perfume rose from the wound, which quickly filled with a glutinous fluid. There was little actual blood. ‘If I was in a facetious mood, I’d swear that was xylem.’

  ‘Very droll,’ she commented. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Almost.’ He took a syringe and drew back the plunger, extracting some of the fluid. ‘That ought to do it.’

  ‘Finished?’ Ula hadn’t enjoyed the procedure, surprised at her depth of compassion for the big man, an individual she barely knew.

  ‘Finished,’ he echoed, the syringe drained into a test-tube and corked with a bung, the knife wiped clean and returned to its leather sheath.

  Ula passed a template over Schilling’s ankle, peeled the mould from the canister and lay it on the wound, where it set in its final configuration, a neat plug.

  When she looked up Monk had already left the room, off to rendezvous with his microscope. She wondered
what he might find. Hubert’s baggy tissue was the stuff of Hallowe’en masks.

  The patient’s eyelids fluttered like the spotted carapaces of winged beetles, then retracted.

  Maybe she jumped. It was unprofessional, whatever her response.

  Dancing in his irises, black like the wicks of candles, were two small yellow flames.

  Wax tears pooled in his crumpled orbits.

  The flames swelled as the pupils dilated.

  And soon he was enveloped, blue and green fire pouring from him into the room, a blaze that drove her beyond the door. It was a full three minutes before the sprinklers managed to dampen the inferno, such was the heat at its source. Of Hubert Schilling only ash remained, a charred husk. Ula ran the hundred metres to Monk’s laboratory and found him standing with his fingers under a cold stream of water.

  ‘Spontaneous combustion,’ he announced, jovial. ‘Can you believe it? Fucking test-tube blossomed in my hand like a match.’

  iii

  She lay awake through the night. In her lying awake she saw herself and the big man, not in the room where they had talked, where her husband had operated with his knife, but in the open air. It was midday and they walked along a path worn by countless feet, the mountains either side cool and high, coarse with greenery; two kilometres from the nearest bunker exit, winding a slow passage up the gradient of an extinct volcano. Ula had travelled this way before. Indeed, it was a favourite place of hers. Lloyd and she had attempted to cross the mountains here, flying between greater peaks, yet failing to gain sufficient altitude. Fortuitously, as it turned out, being met on landing by a contingent from the shelter beneath. Their adapted wing was similar to that Issac Waters had left Base 1 aboard, his quest for self twisted by Smith into a task of murder. And it had worked. Base Central had fallen, Joplinski either dead or vanished - to return, as