Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

bones. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome. We’re lucky. You’re metal friend here predicted the attack.’

  ‘He did?’ Harry was unsurprised.

  ‘Yes. He spoke with Issac and they agreed it best if we abandoned ship; only we couldn’t find you, so you got wet.’

  ‘I see.’ Gazing at the shimmering automaton, canvas draped over its chrome pate, he knew intuitively the reason behind the Derringer’s action. Dan himself, who or whatever he was, writ large in flat eyes and stencilled across cheeks like grimy mirrors.

  Shaking, Harry drifted toward sleep, the cigarette damp between his lips. That was enough excitement for one day.

  xvii

  Marshall Kay had funded the agency from the outset. It was an open secret. He rendezvoused with Niaan and they discussed, among other things, a strategy. Seymour wore a cherry in his ear, one finger twiddling its stalk as the reception was poor.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘Okay, where were we?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘Which girl?’ To Niaan there were many.

  ‘The cross-over,’ clarified Marshall, meaning Johnson.

  ‘Not the other; the crazy one?’

  Captain Kay buffed his brooch. ‘The cold one.’ He smirked balefully, something he’d practised in recent days. ‘Rum?’

  Niaan dabbed his lips. ‘Thank-you, yes.’ He accepted the glass, resigned to the inevitable drunkenness and mutual slaps on the back.

  ‘She has the capacity to deceive, that one. The immunity to undo. A freedom both priceless and bold.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘She freezes and she boils, the girl with poisoned eyes...’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

  ‘It’s not a quote,’ Marshall told him. ‘It’s her. She’s disappeared.’

  ‘You tagged her?’ queried Niaan, reminded of another lost woman on another world.

  ‘Yesterday I raised an island and built a hotel. Seventy thousand mature palm trees, Seymour. Air-conditioning in every room. A thirty metre bar. But I can’t find that girl.’

  ‘Maybe she’s on the moon,’ Niaan suggested glibly, stopping them dead with the thought.

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘Yeah...’

  ‘Manda Heluski, she’s quiet up there.’

  ‘Too quiet.’

  ‘We should visit.’ Marshall knocked back his drink and refilled.

  Niaan drained his glass and placed it on the bulkhead.

  A plan was made.

  xviii

  Muscling for the surface, burrowing through loam and rock, the firelord and his retinue of slavering miscreants emerged as if from an ovipositor, slick and round in their glutinous shell, a sea-bottom egg.

  A black shape awaited; hovering like a predator, some carnivorous insect.

  The focus of scattered armies, these rivals surveyed one another for two whole days, communicating via blood.

  They would fight, they agreed. But when the time was right, they would sup.

  twenty-one - warriors

  Schilling walked bald-headed into a crowded tavern. The L-shaped room fell silent, A moment passed, a pool ball clicked, and normal volume was resumed. He manoeuvred toward the bar, peering down amid an array of feet and boots, dust and polish, buckles, laces, straps, wafting pungent smoke from his face and self-consciously elbowing aside rigid patrons while ignoring each grimacing facade. Dropping a bag of coins onto the scratched mahogany counter he smiled at the barmaid, her left eye a shade blacker than her right. She had a tattoo on her shoulder, a dragon and fist. Schilling toyed with the strings of the bag, pull-strings like those of the larger carrier he’d possessed.

  The barmaid sidled closer. ‘What’ll it be, handsome? Hm? Draught or a shot?’ Laughter erupted behind him. Dominoes toppled. Glasses broke. ‘Hey!’ The barmaid was insistent. She regarded him strangely, as if recalling his face. ‘We want no trouble here.’ Her voice flat with menace. The room was again silent. ‘I think you’d better leave...’

  Schilling placed his elbows on the counter. ‘Ice-water,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t you here?’ questioned a man to his left. Burly and hirsute, he supported his weight on a bowed cane. Noise filtered through the throng. The man, it appeared, had taken upon himself the onus of ejection.

  Schilling wandered over to the empty table by the window and took his seat. Sighing inwardly, resigned not to failure, but victory, he gazed about him at the white-flecked lips.

  The burly man sat opposite.

  His ice-water arrived on a tray along with the bag on coins.

  In the bag the amount was always the same. Outside the bag change was at stake.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ quizzed his opponent, echoing the barmaid. He sweated profusely, trembling in his chair.

  The crowd began to gather. Schilling allowed it to thicken. This time he not only manifested but directed the silence. The small round table became the focus of the room, a locus for a tableau of glistening teeth.

  ‘A meal,’ he said. ‘A bed.’ It was all he ever asked. A night’s sleep, he added to himself. Dreamless rest. Peace.

  ‘And if you lose?’

  Schilling grinned, a lopsided effect. This was the only part he enjoyed, picturing his own expression in that unlikely event.

  ‘My head on a plate.’

  In numberless contests he had yet to meet his match.

  His muscles ached.

  i

  Early morning sunshine lanced across his features, grated like cheese by the ill-fitting boards: a seasonal repair to the roof. He’d slept well, laid out like a corpse in an attic, his host a wine merchant who had drawn the short straw, a tall thin man with a cluster of nostrils centring his concave face, corkscrews substituting the fingers of one hand, a specialization the survival potential of which was lost on Hubert Schilling. But who was he to criticize another’s fate? He had his own misfortune. There was no bowl or obvious receptacle to piss in. He took a bottle from a shelf.

  Emerging as he had from a rabbit burrow, covered in soil and excrement, spending the night above ground, albeit in a dank attic, came as a welcome respite. Below the earth his visual landscape had been in constant, dramatic flux. Above, places, people, happenings, encounters, all seemed reliably solid. Here nothing jumped out of emptiness to assail you. The surface world turned more predictably. But its normalcy was relative. Who knew when it might end? Already he’d lost count of the days. Each night found him in another town, a string of similar - although often profoundly different - outposts, dog-eared and ragged, some less ordered than others, split along factional, territorial, geographical lines - homes and factories divided by trenches filled with oil, kindling stacked and sentries on watchtowers. Some ghostly quiet. All self-contained. Units, they functioned individually, these towns, border communities tight-knit and hostile wherein the stranger, if not unwelcome, was greeted with a savage mixture of surprise and contempt. Few travelled between, he imagined. Few if any. They were universes to themselves, the ex-trooper a rogue asteroid. They lined the route south, a day’s walk one from the next. And no matter which road he chose, or how fast he progressed, evening saw him scuffing his soles on the outskirts of yet another nameless conglomerate.

  It occurred to Schilling that perhaps he had never emerged and that the sky was artificial, the terrain false. But where did such thoughts lead? Back to the womb, he realized with a shrug.

  It occurred to him to travel north.

  He dismissed ideas, both.

  Treading carefully, he descended the stairs, the dewy light diffused by heavy shutters. The wine merchant was wary of being robbed. Schilling passed quietly along a narrow hallway to the kitchen. Here a basement trapdoor was closed and padlocked. He tore bread from a loaf and gulped sweetened milk straight from an earthenware jug. Refreshed, he opened the back door after first loosening several bolts and standing the oak beam against the wall...

  Turning sl
owly, he found his eyes sucked down the pitted copper funnel of a blunderbuss, his host behind it in his nightgown, bed-socks and cap.

  The ugly gun smiled round a mouthful of nails.

  Schilling made a quick inventory of the kitchen, assessing each item’s potential, whether any might prove useful either as obstacles or weapons. He did not doubt the merchant would fire. Blithely, he estimated the spread, the lethal radius of such a crude piece of hardware. If he ducked he could make it our alive. But Schilling was too stubborn to give way. So he stood where he was while his stomach grumbled, patiently digesting its haul.

  The wine merchant turned the colour of his finest reserves.

  The ground was dusty and flat, piling on the toes of his boots.

  The sun was full.

  The blunderbuss had gone off. He’d been right about that. It had blown up in the merchant’s face, seeding his brain with tacks, pinning the top of his skull to a smoke-drenched rafter.

  Schilling paused to drink. Water flowed under a bridge, predictable and cold; often no more than a trickle, a rocky stream, but always present in the diurnal scheme, gurgling in his ear shortly before midday. This river was bloated as if by melted snow, its current brisk, swarming noisily about a bridge’s foundations to his right. A lone figure guarded the approach, turning his back and walking toward the stone centre as Schilling wiped his face.

  A new twist. He welcomed it. An unknown factor creeping into his daily sojourn between towns.

  His shadow wrinkling, he made his way to the smooth edge of the span, shielding his eyes from the yellow rays to better see the figure who’d