Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

he’d had the privilege of sharing. And he was terrified of losing her, for without the dark woman he was nothing...nobody, soon forgotten.

  Memory was all. Memory was susceptible.

  Sitting in the chair she appeared waxen.

  She had talked to him of the past, of incompleteness. She sought what was missing, racial memories of other worlds, private memories of her kind.

  Jenny wasn’t human, less so than Luther, who had found tinned carrots to feed his greenness, his fated nightvision dancing with colour.

  Patiently, he waited. He didn’t know how to pray, or if prayer was sufficient. He dozed, weary, empty, terrified of losing Jenny. It couldn’t be over, he thought, not when it was just beginning. Having discovered true empathy, two minds in one body, Luther was not prepared to endure such loneliness as had seemed destined for him. He refused to believe in nothing. Instead, he concentrated on summoning nameless powers, begging help from unknown sources.

  She had talked of sisters.

  He was convinced she would find a way of returning.

  Around noon he'd walked into Police Central on the corner of Turner and Hopkins, avenues broad, tree-lined and near identical. The desk sergeant eyed him suspiciously, but was too busy to stop and question the hunched individual. A steady flow of bodies jammed the lobby, citizens awaiting news of lost sons and runaway daughters, spouses the victims of accidents and violence, a toll of claims and injustices. He took the stairs down past interview rooms and holding cells, policemen staring yet choosing not to apprehend.

  Luther hoped to find the morgue. Almost certainly in the basement.

  It was 1930s New York, spring-hinges noisy as he entered the slab-room, chemicals muted, death present, tags on toes and shapes immobile under sheets and in sliding-drawer cupboards. Small hotel suites lined the far wall, monochrome tinged with yellow. From an adjoining theatre came the sound of rubber gloves peeling.

  What now? Luther had told himself it would be easy. Security was lax, unnecessary about a morgue.

  Pulling back a sheet he discovered a face more grotesque than his own, a body mutated. Proof, if it was needed, that here lay an alien expired.

  Company.

  Quickly he checked the others, each similarly warped, a row of emptied containers, their contents shifted or leaked down a drain.

  The transfiguration, he knew, was not always so obvious, might even be constructive; an amputee growing a new appendage, those with phobias inexplicably cured. A whole range of dormant applications and bizarre talents. But these were ugly without exception, nameless trophies on stainless steel hospital trolleys. More wrongly, they were denoted by serial numbers in the hundreds.

  From the adjoining theatre came a sneeze. Luther approached the partly open door, its pebbled glass smearing. The chemical smell was stronger here. He caught sight of a stained lab coat, a grey-haired man methodically reassembling.

  ‘Come in. Don’t be shy.’

  Luther hesitated a moment, then entered.

  ‘Friend of yours, is she?’

  ‘Huh?’ Caught by surprise.

  ‘The deceased,’ clarified the man, not looking his way. ‘I asked if you knew her.’

  He made no reply. He watched, fascinated. In an enamel tray lay blood and bullets.

  Vermilion and blue.

  The man turned then, smiling benignly. ‘I’ll let you in on a secret. The mayor of this city insists on cremation for all unidentified cadavers. Put them in the ground, he says, and they’ll rise!’

  Luther maintained his silence.

  The man wiped his hands, peeled off a successive layer of rubber. ‘She died of internal injuries; massive haemorrhaging; heart failure; shock. Take your pick. Er, low velocity slugs entering the chest and abdomen, some with explosive heads. I’d guess one in three. Random distribution. Most probably homemade. At least I’ve never seen any that colour. Lethal. Am I distressing you at all? I mean to. You must realize...’

  Footsteps approached.

  ‘Here. Under the table.’

  Luther scuttled round and crouched as if before an altar.

  The door swung open, energizing a draught.

  ‘Forrest - body.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ He winked at Luther. ‘Be with you in a minute.’

  The draught again, backward.

  ‘Another secret,’ whispered Forrest, bending over. ‘A while ago one of my clients resuscitated. Gave me quite a shock. He babbled for hours after. Totally crazy. Anyway, if you want to take her out of here I’ll understand. Burning is such a waste.’

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘Sure. If they do rise again, it’d be worth it just to see the mayor’s face.’

  ‘Forrest! Get out here!’ boomed the voice from the slab room.

  ‘Coming, boss,’ the pathologist answered. And to Luther, ‘You have friends in the strangest places.’

  Yes, he believed that.

  Jenny’s face was peaceful. He stroked her hair, waiting, a clock ticking loudly the eight minutes it took Forrest to deal with his superior. The way clear the grey-haired man helped him trundle Jenny to a rear entrance by means of a clanking elevator. To the rear of Police Central was a compound, vehicles clustered round its edges, centring it a large cement square overlooked by numerous oval windows.

  ‘Here are the keys,’ said Forrest. ‘Good luck.

  Luther accepted without thought, Jenny wrapped in a blanket in his arms as he wandered casually toward the holed sedan. He lay her on the stained back seat and got in behind the wheel. The pathologist waved from the door. It was an easy matter driving out of town, as if suddenly no-one was looking.

  Expecting me?

  Luther’s eyes opened. It was two in the morning. From outside came the low rumble of heavy traffic.

  He rolled off the couch and made his way through to the empty shop fronting the service station. Headlights advanced in a long pearldrop chain, a string of armoured transports and heavy military vehicles mostly invisible against the night. Luther stood watching for ten or more minutes, the realization slowly sinking in. The EXPRESS was two hundred kilometres from Moss City, with poor farmland, scrub, a handful of scattered villages between. The convoy wound up from the south, from neighbouring Combulo. Earlier he’d empowered the TV, only the picture was lousy, so he’d left it, not bothering to rig an aerial. Now, returned to the apartment, the tyre and engine rumble still extant in his ears, he reconnected the set to the salvaged batteries. Static growled. Light snapped, blasting blue and green hues. Too much interference. Voices raged, the transmission direct from Moss but incoherent.

  Sensing his mistake Luther snatched the leads from the TV, killing it.

  Too late, however, as a splash of electromagnetic waves had cast tell-tale surf across sweeping, active hardware, and a vehicle was dispatched to investigate the signal.

  Heaving Jenny over his shoulder he ran out the back door and continued in a straight line toward the security fence twenty metres distant, reaching it just as beams sprayed the rusted chassis and burnt steel wrecks in the lot. Luther headed for a hole in the fence, a blackmarket letterbox. Crawling through, the blanket covering Jenny snagged on a wire, exposing her features, luminous and oddly gratified. Beyond huddled trees, a thick copse nursed by the same spring that fed the service station, its stream part clogged with ancient wheel rims and corroded bumpers.

  He scrambled on, the ground rising, eventually pausing for breath on the shadowed crest of a hill with a view of the undulating plain below. From this vantage it was possible to see the convoy for what it was, a fully-fledged invasion force. Not from the stars, he thought, but from closer to home, an enemy whose disposition could only be guessed at, the world’s nascent stability facing its first real threat in the dubious guise of a ground army.

  The EXPRESS lit up a final time, then exploded.

  v

  Irving Courtney left his day job at five, shedding his Forrest persona the moment he struc
k pavement, the polished stone facade of the monolithic Police Central building behind him for the last time. He knew exactly what was coming and why. If he had ever wished to implement a grand scheme of his own, that dream had died.

  His father’s murderers were here, drawn to Oriel by greed, a hunger easy to understand. Once the planet had enjoyed a peaceful cycle of creation, without blueprints or outside interference. But with the arrival of man all that changed. And his feet were not the first. There had been an earlier explorer, a lady whose person was forgotten, whose latent soul remained. And that soul? Inherited, let us say, by Runner Heidelberg. The missing pathologist had laughed on finding her, on finding that humanity was not alone.

  What definition of life prevailed? Was there a contradiction, or merely a misapprehension?

  Courtney had studied the mortal remains of countless mosaic forms, members of a company workforce whose short term cerebral and visceral ingestions transformed them beyond recognition, accelerating their evolution along myriad random avenues, often with shocking consequences; albeit these were largely cultural, visible, contextual deformities and self-image aberrations that resulted in death via suicide, not as an after-effect of the mutation, a process frightening in speed yet corporeally, if not spiritually, sound.

  A merging of realities? Courtney smiled at passers-by.

  Yes, everything might change.

  vi

  As dawn approached Luther resisted the winter cold, arms busy, hands shovelling as he dug a hole. An engineer, he’d sat through the night