by Peter Bunzl
She gave up and threw up her hands in surrender. Miss Buckle took her arm and led her to the observation booth, and when she opened its door, Lily stepped willingly into the room to join her friends.
Miss Buckle stood in the open doorway of the booth, arms folded, guarding the four of them, making sure they didn’t try to escape and do anything else. Robert stared desperately past her, into the room, at Dane as he fiddled with the machine. “What time is it?” he asked Lily quietly.
Lily took out her pocket watch and flipped it open. “Quarter to twelve. Fifteen minutes to New Year’s Eve.”
Robert took his cap off and picked at its rim. “Fighting might have failed,” he muttered. “But there’s still persuasion. We’ve got fifteen minutes left to change Dane’s mind.”
He was right, Lily realized. There was still reason left to try.
“You don’t need to go ahead with this, Dane,” she called out desperately to him.
“Please don’t,” Caddy shouted, joining her. “Can’t you see? What you’re doing is wrong. It can only cause more death and destruction.”
“We know how you feel, Dane,” Robert chimed in. He took a shaky breath. “When my da died, it felt so unfair. I felt like John Hartman had the technology to save him, but he didn’t. I couldn’t understand that in Da’s case, it was already too late. You can’t bring someone back who’s been dead that long. They’re truly gone.”
Lily felt a sudden heart-wrench at this. She hadn’t seen it before, but it was true – if things had been different, maybe her papa could have saved Robert’s da. But in the end it had been too late.
“Robert’s right,” Lily said to Dane. “With me and with you, there was only a brief window to save us. I don’t know what’ll happen if you try to use Professor Milksop’s Ouroboros Engine to bring back people who’ve been dead for so long.”
“It may not work,” Caddy said. “Or worse, they might return as something else.”
“Or it might hurt us all, Dane,” Robert added.
Dane shook his head. “No,” he shouted back at them, his voice shrill and jaggedly off-kilter. “None of that is true. I can bring my parents back just as they were. And then we’ll be together. My aunt’s engine will work. If it woke me, it can wake them. I think I remember how to set it up.” He unwound a heavy-duty wire from the back of the machine and screwed the end of it onto some sort of power point nearby.
Through the porthole windows in the lab, Lily glimpsed the black ocean beyond, where the massive underwater turbine was spinning like a giant windmill. The deep-sea currents were still turning its metal sails, which meant it was still creating electrical energy.
Dane had nearly finished setting up the machine. He adjusted the lenses so that they were aimed directly at his parents. The last thing he did was walk over to Miss Buckle and to take the Ouroboros Diamond from the teeth of the snake necklace around her neck. Then he returned to the table and slotted the stone into a gap in the machine’s interior workings.
“There,” he said, his voice wavering. “The last piece of the puzzle. Now we just need to open a connection between the turbine and the machine to bring them back.”
The boy paused, staring at the dead figures of his parents. Lily could see he was finally questioning his choices. Could he really return them to life? Would they be the same as he remembered if he did? Doubt filled his face.
“Don’t do it, Dane,” Lily called, her voice breaking with emotion.
“I can’t turn back now,” he said. “I have no choice. I have to get my parents back…”
He stepped past Miss Buckle and joined the four of them in the lead-lined observation booth, the only place safe from the electrical rays of the machine. Miss Buckle shut the heavy door and Dane turned a dial on a circuit board in front of him.
There was a crackle of energy and Lily heard a hum as the electrical current ran through the Ouroboros Engine. The lights in the room flickered ominously as more and more of the electrical current was diverted away from them into the machine.
“The circuit’s working, Master Milksop,” Miss Buckle said.
“I know,” Dane replied happily. He flicked a switch on the board and in the reanimation lab beyond the lead wall, Lily heard the Ouroboros Engine come to life, as the power from the turbine outside flooded through the base’s generator and into the circuits of the machine. Energy was pulsing through the device and it practically shivered on the table.
Dane pressed one last button on the control panel. Staring through the narrow glass observation window, Lily saw thin skeins of blue lightning flicker from the four lenses of the Ouroboros Engine and earth against the bodies of Dane’s parents. But it didn’t stop there. It spread to all the other bodies around the room, and back again to the machine. As the lightning crackled, the humming of the machine grew more violent, gathering strength.
“Cover your eyes,” Dane advised. “Don’t look directly at it. It’s about to complete the process.”
Lily, Robert and Caddy did as he’d commanded. Malkin was curled up at Lily’s feet.
Even with her hands pressed over her screwed-up face and her back to the narrow slit of the window, Lily still saw the explosion sizzle like a tangle of snakes. Jagged slices of ghostly blue light flooded the control cabin, illuminating everything. They flashed across her retinas and sparked inside her mind – the briefest flash of the brightest storm she’d ever seen.
Lily scrunched her eyes tighter and felt the electrical energy from the Ouroboros Engine melt away and dissipate in a wave through the ship. Afterwards, she could still hear it hissing in her ears, a horrible static sizzling, like when you reached the end of a long-playing wax cylinder on the phonograph and the only sound left for the needle to pick up was scratches and dust.
She opened her eyes, and found she could see nothing.
At first she thought the sudden flash of light had blinded her, then she understood.
She was in real darkness. The power had been sucked away from the rest of the base by the machine and the lights had blown for good in the explosion.
A soft moaning was coming from somewhere outside the lead door of the observation booth. And creaking. Something was alive out there.
Many things… And they were moving about.
The moaning became a clamour, and gradually that clamouring got louder and louder.
“What is it?” Robert’s voice whispered from a few feet away in the dark.
“I-I don’t know.” Lily felt about in her pocket for the Wonderlite Kid Wink had given her. Pulling it out, she opened the lid and flicked the flint. A flame sprang up at once, illuminating the booth. Lily saw the fear in the others’ faces, gathered around her.
Dane’s expression oscillated between trepidation and hope. “Do you think we did it?” he asked Miss Buckle, stroking Spook, who was squeaking worriedly in his hand.
“I’m not sure, Master Dane,” Miss Buckle answered.
“You mean, do we think you did it?” Malkin corrected.
“He didn’t,” Caddy said softly. She turned and appealed to Lily. “He didn’t do it, did he?”
“I-I’m not sure,” Lily said. She held the flame of the Wonderlite up to the porthole window and motioned to the others to look too. Together they peered through the thick safety glass into the pitch-black lab…
It didn’t seem as if anything was moving in there.
Lily held the Wonderlite up higher, pressing her nose right against the glass.
The others gathered closer, doing the same.
Vague shapes shifted in the blackness.
Something was moving…
“I can’t…” Lily said. “I don’t see—”
SMACK!
A bloated face smashed against the window, its mouth a gaping cavern. It gazed with wild fury through the glass.
Caddy shrieked in terror as more figures joined it, crowding in on the far side of the glass. The reanimated faces of the crew. Now revived.
“It w
orked!” Dane cried joyfully. “My parents must be in there too.” He scrambled towards the door.
“Wait! Don’t go out there!” Lily cried. “It might be dangerous.”
But Dane wasn’t listening. He pulled the door wide and raced into the lab. Cursing Dane’s idiocy, and holding the Wonderlite aloft, Lily and the others hurried after him.
A handful of the corpses that had been lying on the floor mere moments ago were standing upright, clustered by the window to the observation room, swaying from side to side. They twisted slowly towards Lily and Dane, and stared at the flame of the Wonderlite.
The rest of the bodies, which were still strewn about on the lab’s floor, now started to move too. Life rattled back into them, filling each body in turn, until one lifted a skin-and-bone arm…
The undead squirmed slowly, grasping at the floor as they clambered to their feet and joined their already upright friends.
Then, as one, the entire group began to shuffle towards the dancing flame of the Wonderlite.
Lily didn’t know if it was that which was drawing them, or if it was the flickering flame of life inside her and Dane.
Robert held his sister back as they watched the zombified corpses lurching about the laboratory. The submarine city had awoken. The slouching undead staggered about, knocking things off tables and bumping into walls. Their eyes were empty, and their mouths were open in hideous grimaces. Their hair was patched and moulting and their shrivelled skin clung to their bones, visible through the gaps in their torn and damp clothing.
Whatever they were, they were no longer human.
“The Ouroboros Engine’s brought them back!” Dane cried. He slipped quickly between the swaying figures. None of them had the look of the real people they’d once been, and none of them seemed able to recognize him. “Where are my folks?” he asked, his voice tight with despair as he searched for the spot where his parents had just been lying. “They were here.”
At last, he found them, or at least the zombies who used to be them. They were almost indistinct from the others now, no longer his parents, except in memory. He tried to approach them, tried to put his arms wide around them for a hug, but instead they smacked against him, bouncing away as if he was no different to the wall or the table or anything else in the rest of the room. “W-what’s the matter with them?” he asked, tearfully.
“They’re all wrong,” Robert muttered.
“They’re not there,” Lily whispered. “They haven’t come back to life properly.” She waved the Wonderlite at the zombie figures.
“They may have been woken from death,” Malkin growled. “But that doesn’t mean they’re truly alive. Their bodies – their brains and organs – will have been dormant for so long that they can’t possibly be the same as they were before. They haven’t the capacity to think like humans. Nor like mechanicals. They’re husks of their former selves…”
“I feared this,” Caddy whispered. “It’s what I was afraid of.”
“I’d better recover the Ouroboros Engine, Master Milksop.” Miss Buckle stepped over to the table at the centre of the lab and began fiddling with the engine, undoing the leads to turn it off.
Dane was still trying to get the two zombies who were his parents to recognize him. But there was no light behind their eyes. Finally he gave up, holding them by their shoulders, one then the other.
“Why can’t you see me?” he cried. “Why can’t you see I’m here?”
Lily noticed that his parents’ expressions were slowly changing, but not in the way Dane wanted. She could see a mindless agitation growing behind their eyes.
They raised their arms, their fingers twitching, but Lily pulled Dane away from them before they had a chance to grab him.
The rest of the zombie horde shuffled towards them, moaning angrily.
“What are they doing?” Robert cried.
“It’s like a primitive defence mechanism,” Malkin said.
“What have you done? You’ve made them angry!” Lily snapped at Dane.
The woken dead were lurching straight towards them.
“Back in the observation booth!” Caddy cried, and they all tumbled back inside, pushing the heavy door closed behind them.
Lily shielded the Wonderlite flame with her hand so only a dim glow slipped between her fingers, then they sat there, breathing heavily: Caddy tearfully hugging Robert, Lily clutching Malkin. Dane was holding Spook carefully in his shaking hand.
“Miss Buckle!” he cried suddenly. “We left her in the lab!”
Robert felt sick. He watched through the observation window. The reanimated zombies who had gathered just outside it stared at Miss Buckle, still going about her task unplugging the Ouroboros Engine and attempting to pack it away.
Something about her movement was slowly raising their ire. Lily held the Wonderlite to the window. In its flickering light, she and the others stared in horror as the tangled group of zombies approached the mechanical nursemaid, converging for the attack.
Miss Buckle stopped what she was doing and stood facing the horde. She was strong enough to throw the first few creatures off, but soon there were too many.
“Master Dane, help me, please!” Miss Buckle shouted in a strangled yell, turning this way and that, hitting out at them with her long arms. She could barely hold them off.
The zombies roared and raged, attacking her from all angles, showing no fear or care for the damage to her or themselves. The life in her seemed to fill them with embittered anger.
Lily and Dane and the others rushed to the heavy door, trying to pull it open again. To get out there. To help save her… But she was already engulfed in the angry swarm. Submerged beneath their enraged bodies and lost from sight, and before they could even get the door open, there came a monstrous, mechanical scream of distress.
Lily shuddered with horror. The Wonderlite shook in her hand. She gritted her teeth against the cries. To hear Miss Buckle howl like that was awful. The noise went on and on like the brakes on a steam-wagon, until Lily thought it might never end.
Suddenly, the yelling stopped, and when the zombified figures moved away, Miss Buckle was no more, reduced to a pile of broken machinery.
Lily’s eyes smarted with tears as she stared in shock at the mess. Even though she had fought against them, even though they had been adversaries up until only a few minutes ago, Miss Buckle had only been trying to do the right thing by Dane, just like Lily’s own mechanical friends did right by her. She didn’t deserve such an awful end.
Robert glared appalled through the window at the scattered pieces of the mechanical. It was a ghastly way to go, but by now they could do nothing to save her. He shuddered, gripping his fingers tight into two tense fists. Was that what would happen to them if they tried to sneak past the zombies? Would they end up like that too? How were they ever going to get out of here in one piece?
Dane slumped down in the corner, his shoulders hunched and his body wracked with sobs. “Miss Buckle’s dead,” he wailed. “Destroyed. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” He was pale, grinding his jaw, breathing hard. “But you, you pulled me to safety. You didn’t have to, after the trouble I caused.”
“It’s what anyone would do,” Lily muttered in shock. “What makes us human… What makes mechanicals too,” she added sadly, thinking of poor Miss Buckle. “And hybrids. Anything that feels the pain of others.” She wiped the sting from her eyes and stared out of the porthole at the wandering zombies.
They weren’t human. And they didn’t care. If she and her friends were to get out of here in one piece, they had to find a way to get past them.
“It was a mistake to come here,” Dane said, stroking Spook, who was clasped in his hand. “Foolish to imagine I could bring my folks back and they’d be like they were before.”
Robert felt a surge of anger. They’d told Dane that. Tried to stop him. Then he remembered his own da and how much he missed him. He would’ve given anything to see him one more time. His fingers found
the Moonlocket round his neck. “You can never return to the past,” he said. “Not really.”
“I thought I could,” Dane replied. “My aunt resurrected me and Spook and that makes us different.” He stared with a frown at the little mouse and then at Caddy, who was stroking Malkin in her lap. “But you, Caddy, you saw the truth of it. And Robert and Malkin, you believed. And you, Lily, you knew that truth in your heart.” He stared at her. “You came back from the dead too, didn’t you? We’re not like anyone else, you and I. Not like those creatures out there… Why are they that way? Why can’t they remember?”
“Perhaps,” Lily said, “forgetting is for the dead, and remembrance is for the living. Or perhaps the only reason we remember is because we were gone for such a short time. Perhaps it was the shock of coming back.” She thought about that. “One thing I do know, if I hadn’t seen my mama on the other side, if she hadn’t reminded me of who I was, and to keep fighting, I don’t think I would’ve returned to life. Your parents, Dane, if they could speak to you now, they’d say the same thing.”
“I dunno why I came back,” Dane said. “There’s nothing special about me. Truth is, I’ve barely slept since I did. I’m afraid my dreams’ll pull me into the afterlife. And, now that I see them, I’m afraid I’ll turn into one of those creatures too.” He brushed a hand across his face. “It must be horrible being half-alive, like that. Not quite gone. Craving the life you once had, but not being able to return to it.”
“Yes,” Lily agreed. “But whatever happened to us, it’s not the same as what happened to them. We’re alive and that’s a privilege. We owe it to ourselves to keep on fighting for that life.” She crouched beside Dane and took his hand, holding the Wonderlite up between them. “Hope is strong. And I…” She paused, and glanced at the others. “I mean, we…we’ve hope enough for you, and for everyone.”
Dane smiled at her then, for the first time in a long time, but, even as she said it, Lily wondered if that small glimmer of hope they carried together would be enough.