Cronix

by James Hider

“I know how bad it looks,” said Hencock, coughing into his hand. “But it's paradise compared to London.”

  The mere mention of the name elicited groans of horror from the people gathered around.

  “I heard about London being overrun,” Oriente said. “But what's happened here?”

  “We don’t know exactly.” The former DPP chief stroked his thick beard. The contrast between the well-manicured pianist’s hands that Oriente first noticed back at the Delpy, and these knotted leather mitts was a testimony to the years of hardship he had endured.

  “We lived in peace for a long time here, but then a couple years back the Cronix found us. First a few of them showed up, and somehow the news seemed to spread among them. Now the woods are crawling with them. We're prisoners inside our own walls, under total siege. We killed hundreds of them, but they managed to start a fire a month back that blew up our armory. Killed thirty people in the blast, and that wing is still smoldering. We’re mostly down to bows and spears now, though we keep a few high-powered rifles loaded just in case a Ranger shows up. That’s our biggest fear. It was old Walt who clipped you in the face as you ran in. Lucky for you his eyesight's not so good any more. He’s taken out a couple of dozen Rangers who got too close before.”

  A few of the onlookers cheered old Walt’s prowess, and their equal luck that he missed on this occasion. Hencock leaned closer in to Oriente, as though inspecting the bullet welt on his cheek. “I’m not sure how much longer we can last,” he whispered.

  Oriente did not know what to say. His arrival here had no doubt sparked some flickering hope, and no doubt he could bolster their defenses. But there were too many people in here, and too many Cronix out there, for him to make a real difference. Clearly, the subspecies would follow any large gathering of humans and hunt them down remorselessly. The best means of survival, he saw, would be for small groups of well-armed hunters to live far off in dense forests. There was no way, however, he could tell these poor people that. Most of them wouldn’t make it as far as the tree line.

  He was just contemplating that grim prospects when a small girl stepped out of the crowd.

  “Did you say your name was Urrantay?” she said, her voice barely audible.

  She was gaunt as the rest, but still quite beautiful. Six, maybe seven years old. She wore a rough-spun jerkin that came down to her knees.

  “Oriente,” he said, correcting the girls' pronunciation. “That's my name. What's yours?”

  She stared at him, as if beholding a ghost. “Pris. My mother spoke of you. She told me about you, in her bedtime stories.”

  Everyone looked at the girl, then peered back at Oriente as if he were the messenger of some inscrutable fate. But by now he had been struck by the resemblance, and was smiling at the girl. He held out his hand.

  “You mother’s name is Lola,” he said.

  She stared at him, and didn’t have to answer. The look was there: those big blue eyes and the curved, wide lips of the ancient Egyptian queen. Despite the dirt and hunger, the girl was a vision to behold.

  She nodded enthusiastically. “Have you come to save us?”

  He pulled the child to him. She was tiny, like a fragile bird.

  “Where's your mother, Pris?”

  “She’s sick,” the girl said. “But she’ll be alright now you’re here.”

  She took him by the hand and led him past the crowd, up a stone stairway and down a passage whose windows opened to the breeze. She led him through an arch, warning him to watch his head, and into small, airy room where a woman lay under a shawl.

  “Mum! Mum, look who’s come to visit us,” the girl squealed, voice full of childish glee. The woman pulled back the cover and opened her tired eyes. Even as Oriente recognized her face, haggard but still fine, Lola recoiled in horror. He had, for a second, quite forgotten the body he was inhabiting.

  “It’s okay, mum, it’s Urruntay. He’s come to rescue us!” the girl laughed, hugging her mother and trying to coax her out of her fear. Lola looked flushed, perhaps wondering if this was some delirious fever dream.

  Oriente knelt down in front of her. He smiled.

  “Hey Lola. It’s been a long time.”

  ***

  Lola showed no sign of recovering her strength. Oriente guessed it was nothing more than flu, but in their undernourished state, many of the refugees had already been carried off by it. He sat with Lola, feeding her thin broth and cradling her head as she slept.

  When not watching over Lola, Oriente tried to scrounge up as much food as he could. She needed to eat, but there was precious little to be had. To earn more rations, he took night shifts on the lowest, most dangerous, section of wall, from terrified watchmen who had seen comrades snatched by Cronix in the darkness. It was here that Hencock had suffered the terrible wound to his thigh, falling from the rampart while struggling with a marauding scold.

  From Old Walt, the man who had tried to blow his head off but who was now one of his comrades on the night watch, Oriente managed to procure a leather kilt, less out of modesty than a desire to distinguish himself from the naked predators outside the walls. He didn’t want any of the guards mistaking an actual Cronix for him and being taken by surprise. When he finished his watch, he would return to Lola’s side at dawn, feeding her when she woke up, drowsy and confused. It seemed somehow fitting that after all these years, it should be him who was nursing her back to health.

  He would curl up tight next to her to keep her warm, while her daughter pressed on the other side. It felt good, this family he had never had. Lying there, Oriente allowed himself to dream of the day when he could lead them out of this doomed place, to a world where there were no Cronix, where they could build a new life together.

  He listened for the voices in his head, the voices of the god he was supposed to serve, but there was nothing.

  When he left for his fourth night on the walls, Lola was sweating and half-delirious. Her breath smelled bad and Oriente worried that unless she ate properly, her condition would deteriorate. He told Pris to stay with her, holding a damp cloth to her forehead.

  The guards on the night watch tended to stick close to him for their own safety, whiling away tense hours by recounting the lore of the castle: the attacks they had withstood, the distinctive behavior of the Cronix, and advising him who to go to if you were looking to get medicinal herbs, moonshine or extra rations. They even told him which of the women sold sexual favors, though Oriente was amazed that any of these stragglers had the energy for fornication. As they were talking that night, one of the guards saw movement below.

  “Shhh,” he hissed, pointing to where a ripple in the thick grass. Oriente followed his finger and sure enough, he spotted the slow, deliberate shape of a body moving below.

  “Go to the gate,” he whispered to the surprised guards. “Be ready to open it at my command.” Then he slipped over the parapet like a cat.

  The tussle lasted only a minute. There were two Cronix lurking beneath the walls: Oriente took out the first with a knife to the breastbone. As the second leapt upon him, he grabbed it by the neck and slammed its face into the castle wall. He picked up the limp bodies and sprinted for the gate.

  The guards gaped as Oriente returned with his kills. He pulled his knife from the Cronix’s chest and started to gut and dress the corpse.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked one of the haggard men.

  “Meat,” said Oriente, relishing the butchery despite himself. “They’d eat us as soon as look at us. Why not return the favor? Start a fire and we’ll cook up some Cronix steak.”

  After three days of her new, protein-rich diet, Lola’s fever broke. Pris clapped her hands with glee.

  “I knew she’d get better once you got here,” she said, looking at the giant man.

  ***

  Like the other refugees from London, Hencock had almost no possessions. The few items he had managed to salvage were stored with meticulous care on a ledge in his quarters: a sewing kit i
n a clear plastic box, its pins kept in military order on a strip of cardboard and its cotton threads down to the last few centimeters, to be used only in the direst emergency; a shaving brush that had not been used in many a year; and a laminated picture of Hencock, his arm around a beautiful woman and a little boy pulling a silly face.

  Oriente reached out. “May I?”

  He studied the picture, which he assumed must be a family vacation back in one of the afterworlds. He smiled and put it back in its place. Hencock picked up and stared.

  “Not exactly forensic evidence of my previous life,” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a photograph of a memory,” the inspector said, still staring. “You used to be able to download and print them out in the old days. Memories, I mean. I’m not sure if we all actually looked that good that day, but that’s the way I remembered it. That’s the way I wanted to remember it, at least. It was always my favorite. Fading now, though.”

  Oriente did not ask where the image might have been drawn from, which afterworld forever beyond reach of the man sitting in front of him. He would die here one day, taking all his painful memories of Earth with him. But another Hencock would wake from its deep sleep on the Orbiter that same day, knowing nothing of the suffering of the other.

  “There’s one other thing which I don’t keep on the shelf,” said Hencock. He leaned over and rummaged under the straw pallet, pulling out a slim metal flask.

  “I barely touch the stuff, but I seem to recall you enjoyed a drop,” he said with a stiff smile.

  “Now, how did you know that?” said Oriente, passing the open flask under his nose and scenting a heady vapor of whiskey. “You weren’t spying on me, were you Inspector?”

  Even after all this time Hencock looked slightly put out, then realized he was being teased.

  “I read the reports,” he said. “We sometimes had a tail on you. Not all the time, but in the first few weeks. You were quite a mystery, and of course, things started to go wrong shortly after your arrival. I had to keep an eye on you. It was the least I could do.”

  “I know, I know,” said Oriente. “No hard feelings.” And he took a delicate sip of the liquor, savored the burn in his throat.

  “Have some more,” said Hencock. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, and I don’t think they get more special than this. Besides, a man your size needs a bigger shot.”

  Oriente obligingly raised the flask again in salute and drank. He passed the flask to Hencock, who took a tiny sip out of politeness more than desire. He winced.

  “Tell me,” began Oriente, feeling the pleasing buzz of alcohol. “When I came through the Cronix ranks, there was something strange. Lots of them looked…well, bizarrely familiar.”

  Hencock screwed the cap on the flask again. “It took us a while to work that one out too,” he said. “Back in the days of the Orbiters, each body was tailor-made for a specific client: perhaps a little original genepool, bluer eyes, firmer jaw, whatever you wanted. You’d go to a stylist and work out a look, then if you wanted something really special you’d find a carpet beater earthside to dig something up. If you wanted to have kids, it was important to get decent genepool so they could inherit good traits. If you just had a pretty faced sculpted for you, it was purely cosmetic and the kids might not inherit. So the first wave of subspecies that broke out of Brixton looked like the old Eternals, because they were designed for people who had already specified what they wanted. But the bodies in deep storage, in the reanimation tanks, hadn’t had faces grafted on yet. They were blank.”

  Hencock was fiddling with the cap of the flask. As if he hadn’t meant to re-open it again, he seemed surprised to find the top off again. He was clearly contemplating another swig.

  “There were a few weeks when they were coming out like that, essentially faceless,” he went on. “They were the most terrifying, their faces as blank as their souls. But then whatever psychopath had been reanimating them…” here he looked significantly at Oriente, as though he might know … “suddenly decided to give them faces. Only they weren’t individualized, custom-made faces. They were stock faces, taken from the movies, as though someone had gone through the archives and looked for models. That’s why they appear familiar, because they are old screen idols.”

  Hencock’s self-discipline seemed to waver and he took another slug of the liquor. He sighed, and offered it to Oriente, who politely declined: no doubt the stuff was impossible to come by.

  Hencock burped quietly and smiled.

  “Hell, in the past year alone I think I’ve shot three Marlon Brandos and two Brad Pitts. Bagged me a Marilyn a few weeks back, she was almost over the wall when I popped her.”

  They both laughed. “Who do I look like?” Oriente asked. “There’s not exactly a lot of mirrors in your bathrooms here.”

  Hencock squinted at him, the smile still lingering in the cracked corners of his mouth. “You? Do you remember an actor, I think he was Australian, called Hugh Jackman? Big guy, like you. Fitting, I guess.”

  The inspector’s hand was trembling and he took another brief swig then shook the flask, clearly worried he’d emptied it. He screwed the top on again and looked Oriente straight in the eyes, for all the world like an interrogating officer.

  “Now,” he said. “Your turn, Mr Oriente. You tell me.”

  Oriente shrugged. There was so much to tell. “Where to begin?”

  “Well, you can start off by telling me what in god’s name the Missing Link is doing back on Earth,” said Hencock. “Of all the people to suddenly pop up…”

  “Funny you should phrase it like that,” said Oriente, pulling a straw from the mattress and picking his teeth with it. And he told Hencock, told him the unbelievable truth, that his fellow Eternals had fused in the mood pools of nirvana into an uncertain, juvenile deity which was only slowly waking up to its own power, to the realms it controlled. As he spoke, Hencock’s mouth opened wider and wider until he suddenly snapped it shut, as though he had made a decision. Too bad you finished your hooch already, Oriente thought. You’re going to need it.

  “And you have no idea what this thing, this deity, wants?”

  Oriente shook his head. “Tilloch guessed that it wanted me here, as a liaison, or a prophet. Something that could perhaps understand it, given my background, but which was also essentially human. Since it let me come back, and since I am the first successful download in a decade and a half, I’m guessing Tilloch was probably right. But it’s a vague job description, second guessing a god that doesn’t even seem to know what it is.”

  Hencock was lost in thought, staring at the little collection from his previous life.

  “And do you think there’s a place in all this for us? For us humans, I mean?”

  Oriente was struck by the fact that they were all just humans now, no more Sapiens and Eternals. He'd heard from his comrades on the night watch that when the survivors in London had sought refuge in the Tower, fights had broken out between the two communities, with the Sapiens blaming the Immortals for what had happened: the latter would typically throw back a rejoinder, like “Well, you were going to die anyway. It's what you wanted.” Slowly, though, their predicament had drawn the two sides together.

  “That I don’t know, Inspector.” Oriente took a deep breath. “Look around you. I presume it was this self-styled deity that brought all these Cronix here, and it seems to have given them just enough smarts to organize themselves into a force that can hunt your people down. So,” he said, reluctant to finish. “I’m not sure it really wants you around, to be brutally honest.”

  The blunt assessment silenced Hencock. He squeezed his eyes shut, his fingertips digging into his hairy cheeks. Oriente could almost see the man’s mind working. Eventually he spoke.

  “Obviously, I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t repeat any of this to anyone outside of this room,” he said. The giant nodded, was about to offer some reassurances when the inspector started talking ag
ain.

  “Isn’t there something we can do? I mean, to endear ourselves to this god of yours, to…what was it people used to do…?”

  “Suck up to it?” suggested Oriente.

  “Worship it,” said Hencock. “Show it we’re on its side, that we are more worthy subjects than those soulless monsters out there? Could we...I don't know, build it a temple? Sacrifice something, a goat or something? I mean, what can it possibly get out of having them overrun us, kill us all?”

  Oriente shook his head. “You know, they used to say that god moves in mysterious ways. None more so than this one.”

  Suddenly Hencock lurched over and grabbed the giant by his broad shoulders. He tried to shake him but it was like shaking a boulder. “Tell me what to do, damn it! Aren’t you its prophet? It must have chosen you for some reason. Tell us what to do to appease it!”

  Oriente gently took Hencock’s puny arms, ropey with age and poor diet, in his massive hands, and returned them to the inspector’s sides.

  “I’m not sure there is anything you can do, inspector. You remember that vision in Ludgate, all those years ago? It wanted to separate the living from the dead. Why? Tilloch thought it was because every one of you who panicked and returned to the Orbiters is a potential addition to its mind, another cell in its massive brain. The rest of you who stayed here? You’re outside, you’re the other, a potential threat, something to be controlled. And maybe it’s enjoying watching the show from up there. Maybe it’s bored already. Maybe … maybe you are the sacrificial goat.”

  Oriente realized how much he sounded like Laura, the old Laura, not the diluted, deluded clones that inhabited the Zone. He remembered the message from the wolf all those years ago on Box Hill. Laura was right.

  The fight had gone out of the inspector now, and he sat there, deflated.

  “Just promise me this, Oriente,” he said. “That you’ll stay with us. Your presence here has given us new hope, new spirit, even if it is misplaced. We used to have to draw lots to find men willing to stand guard at night. Now they’re lining up to serve alongside you. You make us feel safe, even if you do look like our worst nightmare.”