Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

no longer occupied a body, but journeyed instead through a pale gelid continuum. Immersed like a foetus. She did not see. She did not breathe. Her lungs worked and her eyes opened. She was carrying a string-pull bag and an umbrella. The ghosts of children harried her.

  There was dirt in her hair and between her toes.

  And missing wounds.

  Touching her forehead she found nothing peculiar. It would not have surprised her to discover a neat hole.

  And inside? An icecube part of wholly melted.

  ii

  Morning. The sun the colour of peaches. She took a drink from her canteen and shivered. The landscape had altered, become hillier, verdant, tall trees rocking back and forth, crowns of tiny clustered leaves sussurrating. She wondered if she was any nearer her goal, decided against speculation, and folding her umbrella climbed a grassy ridge, the drop it neighboured cut by a broiling river.

  The cataract spilled noisily between green and grey strata, water arching, creating split-second sculpture as it flowed in blackness. The river disappeared below ground, the echo of its passage howling, resounding off the steep canyon walls. She stared into that swallowing maw, fifty metres across, lips of mottled stone. She tossed a stick and watched its rapid progress, spun high in the mist-spangled air before vanishing down the lightless throat. To the left of the opening were what appeared to be steps hewn from the bare rock, slick and rounded. Johnson traced them back to the ridge and stood at their beginning, at the beginning of a second journey, a new pilgrimage. Spray wet her face. Resolved, she stabbed the earth with the umbrella, leaving it vertical, marking her starting point with its rough black wings. Then began the descent, a true peregrination into the unknown interior of once boisterous Oriel. Her naked feet clung to the glassy stairway. She adjusted the position of Hubert’s bag on her shoulder, knowing a fall would see her drowned, tumbling helplessly as the hydraulic force of the current swept her in and down, smashing her bones and tearing her flesh long before the cataract met its rocky close deep in the stygian bowels of the world, deep inside Oriel where perhaps boisterousness still reigned.

  seventeen - mastic man

  There were kobolds. There were goblins. There was Hubert...

  Schilling knew from Franky the situation involving Mother and Irving Courtney. Courtney senior had been murdered while in residence, his castle afloat the gaseous clouds of Saturn. Assassinated, as the motives were political, Mother consisting of eight captains of such wealth and power that all or none might be implicated, all or none might be guilty. Junior had stumbled upon a means of judicial assessment peculiar to Oriel, and all those seven were here.

  Franky’s role was uncertain. The postbox of his brain had received a communication. Only there was no return address, no obvious clue to source. Her rescue remained uppermost in his mind. But there were problems.

  Presently Schilling squatted in a cave, the pearly light variegated, shifting hues of blue and yellow offering the soft pretence of shadows. His body reflected each shade, taking its solidity from the motile floor and walls. His shape was borrowed, changeable; yet to implement any change meant broadcasting his status to stronger, belligerent, more practised minds. For now it was better to take cover. Easier to hide than fight. The cave was left over from some creatures’ coupling of hours before. If he was to probe the space it might be possible to discover what manner of beings had trysted here. What, if anything, they had sporned.

  There were goblins and kobolds...a deliberate generalisation, as it was impossible to tell one from the other. He knew only that the former were hostile, the latter benign, and neither to be trusted.

  He may have died. He was unsure. His body, his original body, had been destroyed. But was that so unusual? Did not a body replicated itself during the course of a life under normal circumstances? Circumstances here were responsible for accelerating his perceptions, the means by which he ordered reality forced to adapt rapidly, altered by processes beyond his control. He had yet to catch up, he thought, staring at the palms of his hands.

  Where did the light come from?

  Schilling grew.

  eighteen - irregulars

  Harry’s usual approach was heuristic. He saw no reason to change. His captor’s were apparently satisfied with what they’d managed, quite literally to squeeze out of him. Things Harry didn’t even know. The suitcase was a revelation; but he failed to gauge its significance or why the various factions were interested. Unless, he thought, there were more than two such portals opening onto a multitude of worlds. In which case (bad pun, Harry) there was more at stake here than Oriel, the company/agency power struggle, and heroic deeds.

  He’d never intended to harm anyone. Martin and Pamela Mortmain, he believed, were fake. A trap successfully baited, the penthouse’s occupants unreal, everything staged. He recalled the impact of face and fist, the doll-like collapse of features thereafter veiled. Had he paused to uncover that visage, lifting the shroud of her dress, what might he have seen? Then there was the printout. Seized by his captors, the roll Harry had stashed. An earthquake? Someone knew better. But they were nameless, unseen antagonists.

  A calendar on the wall told him it was January, 2073.

  i

  War came as a shock to Jakob. Until a few weeks ago High and Low Combulo were places he hoped to export to. Chaos put an end to that. He gripped his rifle, a private in the Free State militia, an irregular appendage of the army waging a high cost guerrilla campaign through the alleys and back ways of Moss City.

  Ellen was a casualty, as was the sweet factory. He counted ammunition: bullets 13, grenades 1, bayonet.

  No communication. Jakob fought as part of a cell, a nail-clipping division of himself and two others. Down from nine that morning.

  Yalman, the eldest, sat chewing.

  Gus was asleep and Hamish meditating.

  Jakob counted ammunition.

  Gus wasn’t in uniform.

  The small bear stretched and rolled over, blinked several times, yawned and curled once more in the ample lap of Hamish Livingstone, corporal.

  Rank was according to age in the irregulars. Yalman was sergeant, mouth busy with Leapers.

  They’d found the bear out near the park. It had been hit by a vehicle. Hamish rescued the creature, feeding it on salvaged rations and Coca-Cola. It led to arguments, but those passed with Juno and Helpaka, killed by flame-thrower while hunting for dogends at the junction of Venus and Lester. Their charred remains were indistinguishable from countless others. Yalman said the flame-throwers were remotes. He doubted the physiological authenticity of their attackers. Jakob agreed, but for his own reasons. The one dead Combulon he’d seen was around a metre tall and sexless, melding quickly with the pavement, a thick cloud of yellow smoke obscuring the whole dissolving carcass. But remotes? Controlled by whom? He wished Ellen was here to answer the fundamentals. He would have liked to have discussed it with Yalman in greater detail. Their experiences, however, were entirely different.

  Like all of Moss though, they had death in common.

  The bear growled softly and Hamish flattened its ears with one hand, opening a supermarket sandwich with the other, using his teeth to breach the polythene wrapper.

  Jakob toyed with the idea of priming the grenade and placing it in the damp circle made by their boots.

  ‘What’s the biggest target this side of the Mile Avenue barricade?’ whispered Yalman.

  Jakob and Hamish exchanged glances.

  ‘The airfield,’ said Candy.

  ‘Right. And we’re what, half a kilometre from there?’

  They nodded. Hamish shared his sandwich with Gus.

  ‘So what do you say we attack? Tonight, as soon as it’s dark.’

  ‘We’d never get inside the fence,’ Jakob commented, although he liked the idea.

  There was a lingering silence.

  ‘We could follow the sewer,’ offered the corporal, first to realize the sergeant’s meaning.

&
nbsp; Yalman laughed with his mouth shut.

  Jakob shook his head. But in accordance? He knew better than most what lived deeper down the sewers.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ Yalman concluded. He sighed resignedly, chin on left shoulder. ‘Wake me at the appropriate hour.’

  Gus soon joined him sleeping.

  ‘Superstitious, Jake?’ queried Hamish.

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither of us will be around tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah - big miss.’

  Jakob uncovered his watch. ‘Have you any idea why it’s happening, this war?’

  Hamish grinned splendidly, igniting the tunnel. ‘None, private, none whatsoever. And you know something? I don’t give a shit.’

  Spoken like a man who understood he was dying. He’d been shot that morning along with Reeb, Kemler, Dowdy, Bando, Jones and Mynnisov, the last an employee of Candy’s, his late father’s private secretary who had opted for a return to the factory floor. ‘From whence I came,’ his last words on the subject, Jakob unsuccessful in keeping him in his office. ‘My legs grow short under that desk. So if you don’t mind...’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Okay.’

  Reeb and Kemler were students. Dowdy, Bando and Jones all worked for an insurance company, women whose mobile phones had never stopped ringing. An assortment of lives.

  ‘Get some rest,’ ordered Hamish, bleeding under his shirt, leaking like a punctured apple.

  Jakob closed his eyes. Three, maybe