by Marc Horne
Chapter 11
Xolo was given a tent. It was on a little hill, the implication being that they had found a nice safe place to put a man who might pop at any minute.
Xolo thought about a plan where he killed the king and fought his way out of this camp of ten thousand knights and fanatics. That was more of a fantasy than a plan, really.
He meditated in the tent. The dark green canvas caught and suggested the movement of the sun with subtle fabric seasons as he tried to calm and empty his mind.
It was almost working, as the canvas turned to a shy moss that had never crept out anywhere. When night came he knew he would have an empty mind. Then he wiped that knowledge away and left it on the floor. Self-knowledge was the enemy of the empty mind.
The remnants of the mind fled to the muscles. The fear tried to sign itself as a knot in the sinews, for the mind to read later and infect itself anew. Xolo controlled the body. Xolo eradicated the fear, then he eradicated the sense of victory, then the shadow of the sense of victory.
It took long hours. It was almost done when the sun finally moved below the horizon.
Then the zombies came.
No one had any idea they were so close. They were last sighted three hundred kilometers to the south. Such a rapid advance was unprecedented. But at about 22:00 the scanner boys picked up an army of zombies digging out from the ground no more than forty-five minutes walk away. They spilled out from the soil and loam like foam from a beer filled too fast.
Snipers started sniping. Headshots were useful, but seldom fatal. They popped a hundred heads each. Snipers were used to being killers, not annoyers. They were losing the pleasure of their job. Balloon poppers: that’s what some wiseacres were starting to call them. But they did their bit anyway. They were good soldiers of a good king.
While the snipe shower fell, orders rang out. The king would be moved back out of mate. The traveling guard would go behind Black Mountain with him, and the kids and the old and their defenders would go with him. The others would tighten the fort and send riders out to try and corral the enemy into a head-to-head fight with the advance guard.
The advance guard armed up, Gomez among them. They had cannons and sabers plundered from the last decadent warring days before the Grand Exodus from the Earth. Killing machines made to last a lifetime, black and evil and without honor and well suited to the task at hand. But you could tell they were made by desperate men. Take the rail rifles for example. One in fifty shots, on average, the damn things would blow up and kill the shooter him or herself. Gomez had fired about twenty rounds off his own gun. He tried to keep it good and clean and well maintained, but that hadn’t kept anyone else from triggering a fireball. Choose your shots wisely, was the best advice the tech team could give anyone.
“These are fresh neverdeads, mates. Right out a mass grave next to the ruins of Berlusconia. They’ll be risky, but hopefully won’t have had the most recent battle tactics fully mastered yet so we’ll do a tarantella type of play on them, like we’ve been talking about.”
They nodded, even though at least half of them thought that was a crazily complicated deployment and weren’t entirely sure who it would confuse more…them, or the zombies.
They rode out as the camp rapidly disintegrated and got ready to move.
On a hundred strong horses - Arabians, mantis and horned - they pounded out in the blackness, night vision contact lenses painting the battlefield in kiddy crayon hues.
Gomez took a group of ten men for the first strike at the central core. The horses were good and they had lenses too and they never stumbled so Gomez felt safe taking a bit of time to zoom his augmented eyes in on the enemy and inspect them. Lots of meat still on these zombies. They just had a ring of black plastic around their foreheads and then snaky black wires that went down their limbs like an exoskeleton, making them move like puppets. It looked like this was a mass grave from a mass execution within the last few months, a shot through the temple for each of them. There were thousands. It must have taken hours, maybe even days if you included the time taken to bury them.
In Gomez’s experience it didn’t matter how far away and in how obscure a place people did these mass killings, they would always take the time to bury what they had done.
“Look out!” screamed Schweinsteiner, just as an energy beam burst from the zombie core, shredding all of the flesh off Tamano’s horse’s head and twisting it practically all the way round.
¡Merda! Zombies with guns. That had probably been a lucky shot but it meant they had to be on the look out for stray projectiles. Gomez looked up to see if there was a good shot waiting for him. There was: four zombs were doing something to the core flesh-processing unit. It looked like it had got jammed on a rock. Gomez locked on his rail rifle, whispered a prayer to the All-Likely, and popped off a shot.
Like piss and lightning the rail gun fired, and did not explode. Supercharged particles crossed space in microseconds obliterating the four zombies, the core unit and chunking up ten nearby corpse people.
A cheer went up and the riders went in to mash up the flesh chunks with horse hooves and keep them from being grafted on the remaining exhumans.
Big old Schweinsteiner got in first and his dirty angry old horse, Brutus, mashed and smashed, making a fine battle-pâté. Meanwhile the rider himself swung his sword in a helix, shielding him from attacks below and from the spray of fleshnet cables that hung in the air like sperm in a womb, hunting for something warm and welcoming.
Tamano went in using her famous low-rider style, dropping to the horses flank and scything legs away from the brittle enemy. “They truly don’t like it up ‘em!” she cried, and her partner Shalit came bursting in behind with an antique machine gun pulping up the pile of thrashing stump pumpers.
The horses came on again, making this child’s play. Unusually easy work.
It took Gomez ten minutes to smell a trap. But once he smelled it he had no doubt.
“The King! The King! Rally to the King!” he yelled, and his men turned in a second and headed back toward the mountain, pushing down the surging, choking certainty that they would arrive too late.
…
Xolo stepped out of his tent, because someone started pulling it down. He had one foot still in the sublime realms and couldn’t really take in what was going on behind him. All of the flesh had gone from the camp, just heavy coral left. The big black mountain glowed with superstitious energy. The radiation was gone, but a megablast like that left behind psychic residue that wouldn’t be gone until the last man was dead. That’s why they camped here. It was thought to scare the dead or anyone who was not partying and living and generating life like the King’s tribe tried to do every single pulsing moment of their existence.
Now the people were almost gone, except the slow and greedy who crawled around the carcass looking for greasy leftovers. The mountain was back. It pushed out the subtle sensation of a nuclear explosion. It pushed out the grudge that geological things feel when biological things set them ablaze and shrink their mighty shoulders. It was mad that men had nuked it and so it pushed out slow and limitless hate at them, at their little hairs on their arms and in their ears that made them so cowardly.
The Black Mountain even scared Xolo a little. In space, he felt big, but back here on Earth the part of him that was a lemur in prehistory was predisposed to fear. And the exact form of the thing it feared was this black mountain.
But Xolo just shrugged his shoulders. Fear was ultimately just like the sensation of heat or cold: useful information for survival. He tapped his glove and sent his spaceship cruising into the skies with instructions to map what was going on. Meanwhile he strapped up for battle and headed in the direction of the stragglers. His instructions were to follow the King’s affairs, not follow the king’s warriors into the battle he could hear far off in the distance. Follow the king, don’t do anything to cause trouble for Haja Gukkool and maintain your head in its current state and position. That was the thing to
remember.
Fire and rot competed for rule of the night air. Xolo ran well through the dark, skipping over tree roots or fallen waste from the fast fleeing tribe. The battle sounded weird, like a retreat but not quite. His glove pinged him and he looked at the overhead feed from the cameras on his ship. He quickly saw the situation. The warriors were scrambling to get round the mountain to the trap that was waiting for the king. But Xolo had to zoom, twist, enhance and finally even imagine so he could figure out what that trap was.
You could call them sphinxes. Or dragons. Or krakens. Giant animals, made of wires and corpses. Long limbs that were several families interwoven. Heads that were a mesh of black plastic and a dozen scrunched torsos and several kilos of skulls and brains. Tentacles made from one arm holding the stump of another arm and another and another all married by barbed wire.
Big bizarre monster made out of zombie flesh and machines. Nightmares from the ancient past that (it turned out) actually lived here at the end of time.
Five of these sphinxes waited very quietly behind the black mountain for the cautious king. He would be well eaten by the time the brave knights made it back.
Xolo ran faster toward the place where the king was going to die. He was fast, but not fast enough to get there in time. He could call his space ship down, he realized. But he was holding off on doing that. There was the matter of the Conscience Bomb, making him wary about everything he did. He sent his mind back to the time when they were unbreaking his arms and letting him know the terms of the contract they had just signed on his brain.
Get close to the king.
Observe his actions.
Make sure no one else left Earth. Kill anyone who tried.
Report back to Belaarix what he learned.
Let no one know the terms of the contract.
Don’t do anything that would harm the Sultan Gukkool or his family.
It was that last clause that was going to kill him. It was foggy. Xolo could see all kinds of ways that saving the king would screw with Gukkool. He knew that the rise of a strong king on Earth, who might fight for the ancient rights that the galactic constitution prescribed, would be bad for all of the space lords. But a king who was dog-meat…that was a good king. Especially when the heir to the throne was a little girl.
Xolo called down the ship. He was going to save the king. His brain began to hum like a window catching bass tones. But the decision was made. He hoped that the foggy clause was foggy enough to fool the bomb in his brain.
The ship landed, with a round gust of wind that he chose to ignore. He got in the ship and pointed it to a high point over black mountain as he strapped himself in at the controls. There were no weapons on board, unfortunately. But the atmospheric flight engines put out lots of plasma. They could maybe do something. He went up in the air thinking. He tried to ignore the buzzing which was now also a rattling, like a boiling pot.
The king was five minutes away from the zombie sphinxes. The knights were twenty minutes ride away. Xolo was in a golden spaceship trying to stop his brain from killing him.
Life was born of simple elements but that was a long, long time ago.