by Steven Welch
She stood on her one good leg and balanced against the slime of the wall.
I have a few minutes to deal with the wound before the lack of blood flow in my leg becomes a problem, she thought.
I will pass out and then I will die.
No gun. No knife. Mortal wound.
Shit.
The footsteps were closer now, to her left, coming down the side of the dark sewer tunnel. The echoes made the count difficult and Zuzu was light-headed but she reckoned there were three people coming to kill her by the sound of it.
She flattened against the wall as best she could. Zuzu was ample, and she wasn’t exactly able to become one with the moldy stone but she did her best and, in the gloom, that might be enough.
The first person was close, close enough to reach. Zuzu struck out with the meat of her palm just as the man turned the corner. Her blow was slightly up and drove the man’s nose back up into his face. It was normally a killing blow but in this case Zuzu was off balance and the man just dropped stone cold unconscious.
She heard voices, a rustling, a clattering of metal as the man collapsed.
Zuzu dropped and rolled, going for the source of the metallic sound, and came up with a SIG Sauer P226. The gun was warm. No telling how many rounds without taking time to check but time wasn’t on her side.
The voices in the darkness became curses. She fired once at the sounds. The noise and the flash blackened her senses, but she was confident she’d hit something, someone.
She fired again as there was something moving beyond, running away. Zuzu blinked rapidly, clearing the blossoms of light from her vision.
One figure was a still shadow on the ground. Dead or unconscious. Yes, there had been three. The one she struck was still out. The third was mewling like a wounded kitten and trying to crawl away.
What did I hit? A leg?
She fired again and finished the job.
Zuzu rifled their clothing. Guns and ammunition. Good.
Thigh was numb. Need to seal that wound.
Using the wall as a brace she hopped along into the darkness. After fifty yards there was another dock, another metal vessel. This was smaller, simpler than the Aquaboggin that Jack had stolen, but it would do. Zuzu managed her way inside the ship and secured the hatch.
If they found her they would pay hell trying to break in.
She went straight to a locker with a red cross painted in stencil on the dark gray exterior. Inside there were medical supplies.
Pain killer. Scalpel. A lunar caustic cauterizing stick. Liquid suture.
This would not be the first time she had cauterized and sealed a wound but it would be the first one in a long while. There was a good chance that something bad would happen when she released the nylon cord that stopped the flow of blood in her leg.
Zuzu was not one for prayer but she made an exception in this case.
Please don’t let me pass out.
A MATTER OF TRUST
The land had long since passed beneath him and turned to ocean as Jack flew east.
For ten years the Earth had been dry. There had been lakes, yes, and the springs and aquifers below ground, but those things were all connected to the sea and without it they slowly died. The sky had been the color of dried blood, thick with dust, and the winds had been harsh. As plants died, the air grew thin. The atmosphere too had been connected to the sea and all to the web that held life on Earth together.
But now the ocean below them was calm and vast and the sky was once again a clear and beautiful blue.
Jack did not need to fly the machine. Once the coordinates were input, the Aquaboggin would fly to its destination in short order, a flight from Paris to Cairo handled in a matter of hours. So, Jack reclined in the pilot’s seat and closed his eyes. The hum of the engines, the slight vibration of the ship, the cool air in the cabin, all of these things made him sleepy.
The ship flew well, even better than the ones he piloted when he was young.
“But you aren’t just a ship, are you?”
He smiled, his eyes closed. There was no answer. Something had happened to this ship, something strange, something horrible.
This had been the one that went to the other world and came back. This was the ship Jules Valiance flew at The Turn. Elise St. Jacques had been on this ship. He had heard many variations of the story, different beginnings, middles, and endings.
There had been a battle on another planet, a water planet. Some said there was a pirate ship made of glass, others said a legion of fish warriors joined with humanity to save the sea. Dimensional rifts became portals for stolen goods, kidnapped people, hijacked worlds.
Nonsense, all of it, whether true or not. Past is past and the future will be remade in a way that honors the dead.
“How did this happen to you?”
Was the story true? Had they destroyed this ship, then put her back together again, a Frankenstein’s monster of human technology and the living science of a distant world? Yes, the cables were there but now they were sinew and tissue, still doing the job but not just metal, wire, glass. Some panels of the ship were steel, others were some sort of dense coral, others looked for all the world like exposed bone.
Did it breathe?
Jack jumped. The sudden falling sensation got him, the one that strikes when you’re hovering between sleep and rest. His heart pounded.
“Should I trust you?”
There was only the low hum of the ship and a high sound, the wind rushing past the cockpit glass.
Blue sky. Hours to go.
“You saw what I did to the big woman in the sewer. She’s dead by now, you know. My men have finished her. Do you feel this?”
There was nothing.
“Are you like a dog or something, some kind of pet for the girl? Do you miss Elise? Am I going to regret this?”
He laughed to himself.
“I will kill Elise, you know. You good with that? Are we cool?”
Nothing.
Maybe the ship was alive but so is a chunk of coral, so is a butterfly, so is a slug.
“Yeah, I think we’re cool. Right as rain, you and me.”
Jack closed his eyes and sleep came quickly this time.
His dreams washed over him as they always did since The Turn, in great sweeping colors, like curtains or sheets, then with the sound of drums, of bones clattering.
He dreamt of strings coming apart in explosions of light. He felt joy, never fear, and in his dreams Jack knew his mission was pure.
THE FIFTEEN
Zuzu took down the first of the men with her hunting knife.
There were multiple hidden ways into L’Académie. There were portals in the floor disguised as Turkish carpets, there were aquariums that could swing open from concealed passages, there was even a tiny elevator that could lift one reasonably sized person from the sewer into the kitchen through what appeared to be an antique bread oven.
Most of these were not useable. The Truth had been hard at work and there was little in L’Académie that was not burned or hacked or smashed. The smoke in the place was thick, the flames licked here and there, and broken furniture or piles of burning books covered most of the hidden, secret, clever entrances. The Truth were calculated and cruel in their work. They were still busy in the desecration when Zuzu climbed out of a circular hole in the library’s corner and found the body of her dear friend Robert.
Robert was an old survivor of Paris before The Turn. He was cranky and wonderful and he was loved by his husband Renny and he was loved by Zuzu as well. He smoked too much and drank too much and imagined too much and he was a perfect Aquanaut despite his frailty and the fact he had never been to the sea.
Zuzu touched the cold pale face of her dead friend. She did not cry because that was not in her nature. The wounds were awful. They had done terrible things to Robert.
So it had been easy for her, the killing of the first of The Truth that she would take as she brought order back to the Academy of The
Aquanauts.
Silence was important but not essential for her work. The men of The Truth, because they were men, were loud as they did their damage. The halls of L’Académie echoed with the sound of wood being split, of laughter and shouts, of glass shattering.
Her eyes were good and she knew her way around the place as well as anyone. She moved easily through the shadows and smoke, the hidden generators were still functioning but most of the lights destroyed, and she picked off The Truth as she went.
They were not drunk on alcohol but they were drunk with power and hate and that would be enough to make her job easier.
Zuzu took her time identifying where everyone was before she opened fire. She knew once she brought the gun to play, she would be revealed and then it would be a true firefight. So she moved in the shadows and she listened as she went.
There were fifteen of them now in the Academy, spread out in groups.
Zuzu stood quietly in the darkness of a ruined bookshelf that was as tall as a street light. She checked her weapon and did some math in her head. She took several deep breaths, holding, then slowly exhaling. Her pulse was slow, and it was not because of blood loss. The pain killer was doing its work, so she felt nothing from her wounds. Her eyes burned from the sting of the smoke but she had retrieved a pair of functional night goggles from the debris and so the stinging would soon pass.
And now she could see in the gloom.
She could see through the night goggles well enough to do what she swore on the body of her dead friend Robert would be done.
THE PYRAMID OF BONE
Have you ever been to Cairo, Egypt?
Before The Turn, before the end of the world, did you ever have the opportunity to walk her streets?
What a glorious city, what a fine and chaotic and confused masterpiece, what a loss, what a triumph. Oh, there were civilizations before, rich cultures with technology and arts and beliefs lost in time, and there have been civilizations since, but on the shores of the great Nile the power of human imagination came on like a wildfire and it burned brightly for century after century until even that brilliance faded through atrophy and war.
The ring road split off and brought you into the impossible maze of villages and towns and rebar studded concrete blocks that spilled out and around the river. This jumble, this puzzle, this city of infinite layers confounded and confused and did not offer secrets lightly. This was true before The Turn and it was true in the years that followed.
The truck was a strong beast as Ahmet promised but she died with a dry cough just as Elise steered her past a large green sign post that read “Cairo” in Arabic and English. The wheel shuddered in her hands for a few moments, there was a loud bang as a piston shot through the sidewall, and the truck wheezed her last and bled out onto the road.
Elise gathered her things. The backpack, with the Octo-Thing inside, slipped over a shoulder. She carried the waterproof guitar case in her left hand and inside were nestled Van Gogh’s sunflowers as well as the other paintings she’d gathered along the way. Her black cowboy hat shaded her face while sunglasses shielded her eyes from the blaze of the sun.
She and Taariq stood in the center of the road and looked to the north. Buildings flanked them to the left and right, some tall pillars of stone and glass, others shacks of corrugated tin roofs and cinder block.
There were scars. A mile wide swath of the old city to the east was flat as if raked by a giant hoe. There were no structures there, only tangled brush and debris no higher than an ankle. The flattened remains of eastern Cairo, of the area known as Islamic Cairo and the almost endless tombs of The City of the Dead stretched on as far as Elise could see and the horizon was nothing but a haze in the distance, a blur of dust and filtered sunlight.
The City of the Dead was gone, though, along with everything in and around that mile wide gouge where the enormous machines, the black ships of the invasion had devoured so much of Earth. There was no sign of the graves, the warrens, the huts, the millions of people who had carved out homes and lives in the ancient cemetery that spilled out from the eastern ring of Cairo.
Taariq picked up a rock and threw it as far as he could.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked.
She lifted her arm and twisted a dial on Jules. The screen glowed green.
“Cairo. Map.”
A simple map of the city popped up on the screen.
She studied it for a moment.
“Confusing. Well, let’s go to the river. At least then we’ll have a landmark. Northwest.”
She walked and Taariq followed. They walked for an hour before they heard the chattering.
Elise motioned for them to stop and they did.
They stood still and listened.
Again, a chattering of voices.
It was like the laughter of small children.
There was nothing to be seen. There were old buildings caked with dust. There was rubble in the road and long abandoned cars and trucks and buses. There was a wooden cart that had once been pulled by a horse or a donkey and there was a mass of black in the cart’s bed that might once have been produce but was now dried rot.
The street was quiet again. They continued walking. Another few minutes passed and their skin was wet from the heat. They did not hear the chattering. The street was quiet until the sun passed over the tallest of the old rebar and cinderblock towers and Elise and Taariq walked in the shaded shadow, in the coolness, in the stillness.
Elise checked the map on her wrist.
“It should be just ahead. Off of Tahrir Square.”
The street led them to an intersection that was once a roundabout and there they came upon the wide expanse of historic Tahrir Square. There were military vehicles and tanks scattered about, some on their sides, all of them burned and damaged. There had been a battle here, and it had not gone well for us.
According to the map the Egyptian Museum was directly ahead of them but in its place there was a monstrous pyramid of blackened bones.
Elise gasped and Taariq stopped in his tracks.
The Pyramid of Bone was as tall as a five story building and skeletons spilled out onto the road in all directions, a black pillar like the hill of an ant colony and yet it was not made of sand or rock. The tower was of bones, stacked sometimes neatly and sometimes roughly on top of each other until it came to a peak and at the top of the peak Elise thought she could see a final, single, human skull. They were all manner of bones, long ones and short ones, clean burned bones and cracked bones, femurs and skulls and ribcages and feet.
The tower of skeletons had no windows but there, at the base before them, was a tall door of ebony wood and rusted metal that was twice the height of Elise.
Then came the chattering again, the laughing of the children or the cackle of the monkeys or whatever the noise was, and Elise felt her skin go cold.
She touched Taariq on the shoulder and motioned to an alley that ran off to their left and down into the darkness between old buildings.
They walked to the alley as quietly as they could and stood in its shadow and stared at the Pyramid of Bone.
The chattering went quiet, but the echoes were there, like ghosts of the sound.
“That is not where we’re going, right?” asked Taariq.
“Yes. According to Jules, according to the indicator on the map, that’s the place. There was a door.”
“I saw the door. Do you actually think we’re going in through that door? You’re out of your mind.”
A tentacle with the hand of a child lifted out of Elise’s backpack and rang a tiny bell. The Octo-Thing, you see, had been looking not at the tower of burned skeletons but into the darkness of the alley that trailed off behind Elise and Taariq, and he saw eyes in that darkness. Many golden, glowing, shimmering eyes.
The chattering came again, loudly this time.
Elise and Taariq turned and saw them coming, the tall black figures, naked and too thin, with fingers like the legs of sp
iders and tall skulls where there were many unblinking eyes.
Elise pulled her 9mm from the holster at her side and aimed it into the gloom as she ran backwards and away. There was no purpose, no point in screaming “run” so she saved her breath and fired.
There was the deafening sound of the gunfire then a splash and shrill screech as the bullet ripped into one of the Men of Many Eyes.
The other dark creatures were in pursuit.
Elise and Taariq dashed into the brightness of the mid-day sun.
The Pyramid of Bone was in front of them and the skeletal black creatures loped out of the alley in pursuit. One of the creatures pointed and smiled and when it smiled it was as if its head split in two. Teeth like the needles an old woman would use for knitting shined in the sun.
“More of them,” Taariq said and pointed up to the tower of bones.
There were the blackened ones, yes, but more, there were at least a dozen of the Men of Many Eyes skittering down the tumble of skeletons, coming for Elise and Taariq. They were emerging from the mountain like ants.
There was no point in wasting bullets. Elise and Taariq ran. They sprinted as hard and as fast as they could go down the street and away from the bone tower. Elise knew by the position of the sun they were running in the right direction, to the river.
There were stones and bits of rubble and bottles and old pieces of trash in the street and this made the running hard but fear fueled them.
Elise looked back over her shoulder.
The mob of ebony creatures was fast. They were a single black mouth and behind trailed a cloud of orange dust. They were coming for Elise and Taariq and they smiled and chittered as they came.
Elise ran. Her legs pistons and her mind raced. What was in her backpack that could help? What was in her vest? She had more of the gas grenades. Yes. She reached into the vest to pull out one of the metal cylinders but in so doing she lost concentration on her feet and caught a cinderblock with her toes.
Elise fell hard and tumbled. She tried to stay to her chest and side so that the Octo-Thing was not harmed but she couldn’t control her fall and she slammed down onto the backpack.