Runner

by Alan Bao

  Bullard’s voice piped up behind him, close and confidential.

  ‘Don’t fret, little man. Death is only horrifying to the living. Perspectives change when you’re on the other side.’

  ‘It’s all instinct and narcissism, you know.’

  The runner gulped down water, unstrapping his boots and choking in pain as blood rushed to the swelling. It was midday, and he could run no more. His toenails poked through his socks, cracked and bent backwards – the nail of his little toe had come loose with a sickening tug, stuck fast in the rubber of the toe box.

  ‘Think of it, the aeons that passed before you were born, the aeons that will pass after you’re dust.’

  A layer of skin sloughed away as he peeled back the fabric from his feet. The blister-fluids ran cold in the subarctic air. Salt burned his heels where he rested them on the permafrost.

  ‘Your existence is only an aberrant blip, in between two infinite threads of un-life.’

  The runner laid supine on the salt bed, his muscles limp with exhaustion.

  ‘Ah well – nobody blames you. You can’t help what you are.’ The voice bounced between Bullard’s earthy wisdom and Machinist’s pompous philosophising. ‘Life exists to beget life. Your point of view is so irrevocably biased by your biology that you revile the perfectly natural state of un-living, and lionise the aberration of your own messy existence.’

  ‘Instinct,’ said Tinker-man disapprovingly.

  ‘And narcissism,’ said Old Sarge.

  ‘Shut up,’ the runner muttered at the empty tundra. He flexed his toes, watching his body heat curl away in ribbons of steam into the milk-white sky.

  ‘I’ve never known you to be incurious, little man. Is it really so bad to exist without pain, or striving, or the constant competition of kill-or-be-killed?’

  The runner plugged his ears with salt-crusted fingers, but the voice pierced his mind like a las-shot.

  ‘There is peace here. Certainty. Comfort.’

  A gust of wind picked up salt and dust and threw the stinging droplets onto the runner’s ravaged feet. Anxiety thrummed in his chest – he knew he couldn’t lie here like this but his exhausted muscles had no means of obeying the nervous jolts shooting through his limbs.

  If I live through this, the runner thought, clutching his rebreather and licking his cracked lips. If I make it through alive…

  There wasn’t much room for regrets in the Guard – if only because there wasn’t much that was within one’s control to begin with. But he swore that if he lived, he’d make sure to at least recover well and sleep for a week. And after that… well. Most likely die fighting in some other thankless war, on some other shithole planet. But if by some Emperor-blessed miracle he made it through his whole term of service alive – if there was ever a chance of going back home…

  The runner clutched the antique rebreather in his pocket. He remembered the last time he’d looked on the peaks of Intinti. The thought surprised him. He didn’t think he could still remember the name of his home world after all these years, but there it was: a clear, cloudless sky, aqtipi doves scattering over a high andesite plateau, a procession of the wamani’s fifty healthy boys making its way sombrely up to the sky-temple, the runner among them.

  Three ringing blasts from a bear-bone horn, and a tribute delivered.

  The runner remembered grasping his ears as a roaring metal beast parted the clouds. The night before, he had indulged in the ritual feasting and the copious amounts of maize wine it had provided. The priests had anointed him with a dab of cinnabar, intoning, ‘Wanlek Dir, third son of the third wife of House Dir-ek, chaquec-in-training for the Imperial Couriers. You are anointed by the gods.’

  He had embraced his mother and wept openly, earning him the teasing jibes of his brothers – but even they had tempered their teasing with a soft touch of melancholy. In the morning, he would be gone forever from the wamani, plucked by the sky-gods into the realm of the sun. In the morning, he would be Wanlek Dir no more. And so they cried and laughed and feasted and drank, and the priests scattered gold leaf and maize at their feet, finishing the initiation rites for the tribute to the sky-gods and their flying metal beasts.

  How small the world was back then, the runner thought. He had known so little – all the wise and holy men had known so little. Closing his eyes, he could still recall the presiding nobles chanting their sun-prayers in rhythmic High Tahuanti.

  ‘Qulonqu-ek tapa, ik tapa ak qhapaq pat dwil…’

  And then, only the dark hold of the spaceship. The interminable screeching of metal, the sweat and piss and sick from the other boys as the beast bore them into the sky, their hearts beating in their throats, their spirits humbled by the mounting expectation of divine revelation. And then the final docking jolt, the stench and the anti-climax as the gunmetal doors slid open on a sea of men. Mundane, sweaty, trammelled, frightened men.

  ‘I remember that day,’ Bullard’s voice rumbled in the cold present. ‘You looked like you were ready to faint – the whole sorry lot of you.’

  The runner heaved a misty breath into the sky. His compatriots from Intinti had not lasted long in the Astra Militarum. By the end of their indoctrination, most had either died or been discharged to menial duty in the slave corps. He missed them, though he could not remember any of their faces clearly. He missed Bullard – the living, flesh-and-blood Bullard. He missed the half-remembered peaks of his childhood, where the sun was warm and he could run barefoot along the mountain paths without pain or exhaustion or the constant thrum of anxiety in his chest. He missed his mother and his many, many brothers.

  If there was ever a chance of going back home…

  ‘What would you do?’

  The runner thought about that for a second. For one, he would find his mother, if she was still alive. Maybe give the high priest a dressing-down about what was actually out there, in the ‘realm of the sun’. And then he would find the footpaths of his youth, and, under a warm yellow sun, he would run until all the awful off-world memories evaporated like sweat from his brow.

  ‘And after that?’

  The runner ruminated in silence. After that? Grow old, retire on a mountain estate somewhere, raise children, grandchildren, and then, when his time finally came…

  ‘That’s the thing, isn’t it?’ Bullard gurgled knowingly. ‘You let the story go on long enough, it all ends the same way.’

  The runner’s fingers clutched feebly at the earth. A good sign – at least his muscles were responding again. He dug out a wad of gauze from his waist-satchel and painfully manoeuvred his legs into a position where he could bandage his feet. The gauze stuck fast to the semi-dry blisters. He noticed that the bite from the rodent thing had begun to ooze, and he bandaged that too.

  At least the hunger pains have stopped, he comforted himself. They had faded sometime during the day, replaced by a constricting tightness in his gut that he hardly noticed.

  Resting his bandaged feet on the ground, he reached into his boots and scraped out the grit from the insides. Clumps of half-dried fluids and dead skin fell near his face. He dug his fingers into the toe box, extracting the nail that had been tugged off his little toe with a sick wave of satisfaction.

  The runner pulled on his boots and stood up in a panoply of pain: the piercing, dry pain of the fresh bandages and the wet, dull pain where unbandaged skin rubbed up against the pus-moistened insoles of his boots. His joints protested his every move, and the muscles in his thighs and back would not stop shaking under his weight.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ said Bullard in rumbling tones, stoking his exhaustion. ‘I don’t like seeing you suffer, little man.’

  The runner put one foot in front of the other, and ran.

  Night fell on mist and shadows. The runner stumbled through the cold dark in a feverish chill. The soles of his boots had started to fray in the early
evening, and now the rubber flapped in tatters with every step he took. He had fashioned a makeshift tourniquet to bind the boot together, stringing the gauze fabric under the sole and looping it through the bootlaces – but the sharp crystalline salt had quickly lacerated the fabric into a useless flapping rag.

  The runner moved his feet in time with his prayer.

  Our Emperor deliver us from plague, deceit, temptation and war.

  Our Emperor deliver us from the scourge of the Kraken.

  Behind him, the last sliver of sun vanished under the horizon.

  ‘I am Wanlek Dir, and I have been chosen by the gods,’ the runner addressed the darkening sky. His voice was cracked and delirious. ‘The Emperor protects.’

  His flapping soles caught the ground and he tumbled forwards. A mouthful of salt and blood.

  Rolling onto his back, Wanlek snuffled in weak laughter as the apathetic stars careened overhead. He spat out salt and grit and reached for his canteen. He held it above his lips for a full minute before realising it was empty.

  ‘Revered Emperor of Terra,’ he wheezed. ‘Deliver us from thirst and shit boots…’

  He wondered briefly where Terra might be, and what the Emperor might look like. Summoning up all the prayers and ancient stories he knew, Wanlek painted a picture in his mind’s eye: a big man on a golden throne. A non-specific, holy light. And…

  And that was it.

  Nothing else came through the haze of mindless reverence. For all the beatings and indoctrination, for all the practised veneration and conditioned awe, there was precious little he knew about the Holy God-Emperor that supposedly watched over all of mankind.

  Wanlek raised his head, seeing the glow of mammalian eyes gather around him. He thumped the ground weakly with one hand, and they scattered back into the darkness.

  Once, on his home world, Wanlek had seen an emperor. A scrawny old man in a golden-feather headdress. The emperor had been on a state visit, so there was no golden throne, only a painted palanquin bejewelled with pyrite and emerald. A tiny, frail old man – but as good a God-Emperor as any, for all either of them had ever done for him. After all, where were they when the keep fell? Where was the Emperor when Bullard got taken in half? Where was the Emperor when Old Sarge screamed and the mists closed around them?

  All hail His holy impotence, the scrawny God-Emperor of Terra! Wanlek thought, deliriously giddy at the irreverence of it all. If any of his commissars could hear him now, he would surely be shot.

  Wanlek rolled onto his stomach and crawled to his knees. The map declared another eighty miles between him and regimental command. He pulled himself out of his flapping, useless boots, and convulsed as his feet hit the piercing salt of the tundra. Only the parched dryness in his throat stopped him from crying out in pain.

  ‘Why not just rest for a while?’

  Wanlek tuned out the gurgling voices of his dead squadmates. Little rodent creatures darted in and out of the shadows, trailing him with their glowing eyes.

  They know that I’m dying, Wanlek thought. He took another agonising step. He could not remember feeling pain or exhaustion like this before in his entire life. Adjusting his magnoculars, he scanned the landscape desperately for any sign of water – the winding terrain of a riverbed, perhaps, or the reflective glint of snow or ice under the starlight.

  A boundless desolation stared back at him. The dark tundra stretched to the horizon, endless and ageless. Mists swirled in longing tendrils. Wanlek Dir stared into the darkness, shivering as his muscles strained and his skin oozed.

  And through it all, where was the Emperor?

  A chorus rolled across the landscape, low and jovial, under an oppressive mist that smothered the stars. The rumbling backbeat soaked into Wanlek Dir’s exhausted muscles like seeping molasses.

  ‘I am flesh and I am rot.

  ‘I am flesh and I am god.’

  The words came simultaneously from the darkness beyond the mist, and from deep inside his bones. Wanlek Dir hummed along in feverish delirium. No words came out, only a tuneless wheezing.

  ‘I am dirt and I am pox.

  ‘I am the flesh that time forgot.’

  Salt and dirt pockmarked the naked flesh of his soles. A trail of prints extended behind him in pus and blood – though, for the last three miles or so, the impressions had mostly been made by his hands and knees rather than his feet.

  Wanlek crawled onwards in fever and cold sweat. The palms of his hands were salt-flecked and raw, and his combat fatigues had been torn to reveal similarly bruised and ragged knees. He counted out his progress in multiples of seven. I am flesh and I am rot – and that was seven lurching movements. I am flesh and I am god – and another seven ragged handprints.

  Bullard’s voice rang out over the chorus.

  ‘Lie down and rest, little man. You deserve some peace.’

  Wanlek swivelled towards the sound, but saw nothing except mist.

  The big bastard is always hiding from me, he thought. Bullard liked his practical jokes. Wanlek wheezed through his parched throat. Water – that was the main thing. He could not go much further without water.

  I am the flesh that time forgot.

  Wanlek crawled onwards, fading in and out of awareness, his mind thick with fever. The mist tightened around him; shadows within shadows churned with what might’ve been human forms. After an indeterminate amount of time, he woke to find himself propped up against the side of a rock formation, his bare hands shaking against a crook in the underside. He reached up to brush a stinging fleck of salt from his face, and his fingers came away from the rock cold and damp.

  A primordial thrill cut through his mind-haze.

  Moisture! Dew-frost on the underside of the rock. A simple, bestial urge leapt in his chest. Wanlek Dir lowered himself quivering to the ground, thirsting and needing, and licked at the stone.

  Pain shot through his tongue. Wanlek gagged. The grit of salt lacerated his mouth, and the frost-moisture only served to spread the brine in a thin adhesive that stuck to his tongue and palate. He gagged again and tried to spit, but could not muster the saliva. His tongue split open in salt-damaged fissures.

  Wanlek Dir collapsed in abject despair, moaning in half-forgotten Tahuanti. There was no Emperor in the galaxy that could help him. As the dryness caught in his throat and no more sounds would come, he mouthed mutely at the sky.

  ‘Mami. Mami, help me. I want to go home.’

  The glowing eyes skittered closer. Wanlek tried to shoo them away, but the muscles in his arms would not obey the command. Beyond them, deep in the mist, roiling shadows enfolded themselves into human shapes. Indistinct edges became solid, and Wanlek could just make out the familiar outlines in the haze: Old Sarge, with his skin sloughed away as if doused in acid; Tinker-man, with half of his face bubbling with pox; Bullard, rocking and clicking on his severed spine, a black, grimacing hole where his mouth used to be. Squinting deeper into the darkness, Wanlek thought that he could also see the rest of his regiment gathered in a throng, their faces and outlines indistinct, fading endlessly into the all-consuming mist. There were Guardsmen wearing unfamiliar uniforms, too, and civilians in attire he’d never seen before – even Intinti men and women, some in priestly headwear.

  ‘All things must die,’ intoned the shadows in the mist.

  Wanlek Dir laid his head back and closed his eyes. One of the braver rodents skittered up to his feet and nibbled at the ragged, pus-drenched gauze.

  ‘We are the flesh that time forgot,’ Machinist’s voice rumbled in the darkness.

  ‘We can make the pain go away,’ said Bullard, stepping from the mist and extending his hand in a gesture of aid.

  Wanlek wheezed helplessly. There was a jolt from far away as one of the rodents bit into the flesh where his toenail used to be. He tried to kick it away, but again, his muscles failed to respond. As more rode
nts congregated around him, the sharp nicks of their incisors sent a hundred jolts of pain through his flesh. His skin flaked in the air as he tried to call for help, mouthing silent nothings through a tongue that had split apart in cracked, parched canyons.

  The mist became as thick as tar. The rodents swarmed up to his waist, squirming over each other in their rush to feed. Bullard leaned over him, sickly-green, hand outstretched.

  Wanlek Dir heaved one last breath into the sky, and reached up to take it.

  He walked through the depths of a vast, impossible garden.

  The soil squelched under his feet. The atmosphere was warm and moist enough to be tropical, though the skeletal vegetation around him looked much too black to be of any tropical variety, and no birdsong disturbed the still, humid air. He picked through the pathways with a purposefulness that surprised him. He knew that the soles of his feet were flayed raw, yet he felt no pain – each footstep gurgled into the ground with an odd, comforting numbness.

  In the darkness, indistinct shapes shadowed his movements. Their forms morphed from Old Sarge to Machinist, from Bullard to the Intinti boys who had been lost ages ago during their Astra Militarum training. One shadow stepped out from the foliage – it wore the face of the old Intinti priest at his feast-day.

  ‘Wanlek Dir, third son of the third wife of House Dir-ek, chaquec-in-training for the Imperial Couriers. You are anointed by the gods.’

  The shadow-form priest dabbed his forehead with a spot of pus, and scattered ash and buboes at his feet. Wanlek trudged onwards. A familiar face rose out of the mist to greet him.

  ‘I told you,’ Bullard gurgled as they embraced. ‘No more suffering, little man.’

  Wanlek closed his eyes and listened to Bullard’s severed vertebrae crack to the rhythm of his breathing. He felt a deep, faraway sadness, but could not remember why. Vague memories of a yellow sun and thin mountain paths fell away from him. For a second, a fragile voice pierced the gloom, bright and ethereal.