by Nate Crowley
When their oddest charge had scampered over to the dreg pile to engage the listless dead in enigmatic winks and thumbs-ups, Wrack and Mouana found themselves the only speaking people left in the hangar.
“Which way do we go?” asked Wrack, shrugging in the dawn.
“You’re taking the starboard side, where the Bahamut is. I’m taking port, where the bridge is. I’m going to get them worked up, right in the shadow of this bloody squid thing.” Wrack opened his mouth to argue, but Mouana was already thrusting the stolen radio into the inside of his shirt.
“You said to the fat bloke: we need talkers. And you’re a talker, Wrack. Just make sure you talk to those boiled bastards with the weapons, if there’s more of them left. Talk, and listen. Keep one ear on the radio,” she said, repeating the frequency she had told the others. “See who else calls in, keep them on plan, and let’s talk when we’ve got some work done.”
“But you’re the soldier,” protested Wrack. “Why give me the radio? How are you going to get—”
“Exactly, I’m the soldier,” snapped Mouana. “I’ll get my hands on a new one quicker than you will. And then we can talk.” She began walking towards the open deck, even as Wrack opened his arms to reason with her.
“Surely we should stick together until we’ve got two?” whined Wrack, earning only a half-turn from his comrade as she stalked away.
“We’ve already stuck together long enough,” stated Mouana, then softened a little when she saw the look on his face. “Look, we can’t give them just one head to lop off, Wrack. And there’s no point in holding hands like lovers; we’re both far too rotted in the funbits to care about that. We’re assets, and we need to keep our distance so they can’t get both of us at once. At least until it’s time to act.”
“Fine,” said Wrack, deciding he owed his friend at least the semblance of military pragmatism. “But when’s that?”
“I don’t fucking know!” cackled Mouana, a joyful snarl on her face. “That stuff about the signal was your bit of bullshit to make real! Just choose your moment, get the word out, and hope for the best. Good luck, chief.”
And then, with a half-mocking, affectionate salute, she left. Wrack stood on the spot for a while, making feeble arguments to himself about whether it would be worth having one more trawl through the dreg pile for volunteers. Then he admitted to himself that he was wasting time, and walked out onto the stern of the Tavuto.
He roamed along the side of the ship, feeling as though he had a huge red arrow hovering over him. As he moved into the busier stretches of the deck and began to pass overseers on their rounds, he was sure that at any moment he would be identified and bundled to the floor. After spending his every waking moment trying to force the lethargy of death out of his limbs, he now did everything he could to shamble, lurch and stumble. It was like being young and drunk and trying to pass for sober while bowling past bouncers, shunted into sickening reverse.
It soon became clear there was no need for theatrics, however. Whatever had happened after Whina had fled, she had not raised the alarm straight away, and nobody but the scattered dead they had sent ahead knew he had started a rebellion. There was nothing conspicuous about him; nothing to mark him apart from the endless stream of bodies being herded along the deck towards their various labours. For now, at least, he was safe. He just needed to let himself be dead. The red arrow faded in his mind, and Wrack lost himself in the flow of meat.
He lost too much of himself.
When the radio eventually crackled into life, all was blackness around him. The world came into vile focus all at once, to every sense but sight. Slime enveloped him; he could barely move. Cadaverous vapours seared the hollows of his congealed sinuses. Had a Sniffer Ray caught him? Worse, had he fallen in the water, been swallowed up by something?
Reason surged against panic: the radio wouldn’t work in water, and whatever it was that pressed around him didn’t press back against his thrashing. He had merely fallen out of his own head, into the swamp that had always been waiting to catch him when thought failed, and had been caught up in some awful toil. But he was back now, and he was sure he had something important to do. He had to concentrate, and listen to the voices burbling on his radio—they were important, somehow.
“We’e going to go for it,” gurgled a wet voice, unfamiliar, buzzing with distortion. “There’s loads of us. Hundreds. We’re going to take the docks.” A cheer of many throats rose up from the tinny speaker.
That’s alright then, Wrack thought sleepily, as the dark wobbled up from the sump of his skull to blend with the black in front of his eyes. They were going to take the docks. That was good news.
Then he remembered the plan. This was not good at all. Whoever they were, those voices on the other side of the radio, they weren’t meant to be rushing the most heavily guarded part of the ship. They were going to get mown down, and give the game away.
Worse yet, he remembered, he was meant to be in charge of the plan; he was meant to have been listening out for this sort of thing, and stopping it getting out of hand. But he had been asleep at the bloody wheel. The guilt rammed itself down his spine like a cold metal spike, bringing him fully to awareness. How much time had he lost? Had he missed his chance? What if Mouana had been cut down while he was sleepwalking? Panicking, Wrack raised the radio to his mouth.
But it wasn’t the radio. Whatever was in his hand was inert and wooden, and offered nothing as he scrabbled frantically for a broadcast switch. It was a flensing knife. Wrack screwed his face up in fury at his own sluggishness: of course, the radio was still in his shirt, where Mouana had put it to conceal it from view.
Whatever he was constricted by gave him some freedom of movement, but was meat-heavy—he wriggled his free arm down the front of his shirt, but it was like wrestling against piles of soaked, coarsely bristled cushions.
Hand quaking with urgency, Wrack grabbed the slime-smeared radio and rammed it against his face.
“Don’t! No!” he hollered. “Wrack! It’s Wrack!”
“Wrack?” barked the other voice, like a bartender being asked for an imaginary drink.
“Yes, Wrack. You know...” said Wrack, wincing as the words became inevitable, “the leader.”
There was a lot of barking and confusion on the end of the line; he heard his name repeated several times, questioning at first, then becoming exclamatory as someone in the unseen rabble remembered who he was. Then the voice was back, rough and raw as salt-scrubbed iron.
“Right, Wrack. Well, we’re going for it! We’re taking the docks!”
“No!” shrieked Wrack, sounding less like a leader even than he had as a librarian. “You can’t, you’ll all die. Well, be destr—look, you’ll ruin everything if you act now. Wait for my signal.”
“What’s the signal?” growled the voice in the close, foetid darkness. “When will it be?”
“You’ll know,” snapped Wrack, hoping the distortion of the radio, amplified by whatever cache he had as a faceless mastermind, would disguise the fact he had no idea himself. “I can’t say, they could be listening. You just need to know: not now. Talk to more, spread the message. Wait for the signal.”
He heard his words repeated on the other end of the radio, and was about to cement his instructions with some grand words of encouragement when a slit of dim light appeared above him, opened by the wedge of a blade. The blade withdrew and thrust in again, carving a yawning hole in the blackness. Then the side of the world fell away with a great, soggy tearing sound.
Wrack lost his footing as the meat he was leaning against collapsed, and tumbled to the deck in a rubbery tangle of grey offal, ending up on his back. The sky was indigo with deep twilight. An overseer stood towering over him with a rusted falchion in their hand, looking down with eyes blazing in furious shock. A radio was already being raised to their cracked yellow lips.
Before he even remembered he was holding it, Wrack plunged the flensing knife into the back of the overseer’s knee
. Gasping, the giant dropped their radio and fell to the ground, clutching the wound. Wrack threw himself onto the body, spiderlike hands scrambling on wet leather. His mind went blank, save for the urge to cause as much damage as he could, as quickly as possible.
Clambering over the prone titan, Wrack hugged their back as if clinging to a lover, and began chomping frantically at the back of its neck. Greasy filth and layers of dead skin skidded off his teeth, and a huge arm reached back awkwardly to flap at him as the screams began. Then something yielding caught between his premolars and sheared through, with a feeling that made Wrack’s skin tingle.
Red flooded across grey skin in front of his eyes, and he ripped his head back, tearing meat free with it. He lunged again, hooking incisors into the wound and yanking back once more with meat clamped between his jaws. He bit and bit again, teeth cracking more than once, then jammed his fingers into the wound and tore at it. The screams of the overseer grew wet, choking, and still he scrambled at the bloody hole, jabbing and scratching and tearing. Then, with his crimson hand forcing the overseer’s face against the deck, he thrust his head in again and locked his teeth around a huge clump of tissue. Blood swelled in his mouth, acrid and tangy as the preservative he had downed on the skiff with Mouana, and he clenched his jaw against human meat.
Then, shoulders rigid as he braced, he tore the mouthful away. The screaming stopped.
Wrack rose to his feet, shaking, and looked down at the splayed nightmare of the overseer’s neck.
“FUCK!” he roared, the blood-drenched chunk flying out of his mouth with the force of the expletive, then doubled over and vomited everything inside him. As he straightened and wiped his ruin of a mouth, a chorus of voices rose from the dark around him.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”
Turning in a slow circle, Wrack found himself looking into the eyes of two dozen zombies, all frozen in the middle of their work to watch the fight. They were in a cove of meat, a chunk of the Bahamut’s insides hauled up on deck for dismantling, and their drawn faces peered out at him from a thicket of grey guts.
Wrack was shuddering, searching for words, when he heard the tick of metal on metal. He thrashed around, eyes jerking, ready for the skittering that would precede the arrival of one of the awful shark things, but there was nothing. Just his foot, bumping against his fallen blade on the blood-slick deck.
There were no other overseers in sight; Dakuvanga’s sprawling sub-limbs reached across the gathering night above, but the bulk of the dissected Bahamut had shielded them from the eyes of its command crew. Nobody had seen. In the throbbing mess of Wrack’s mind, the realisation he was a murderer crunched under the glowing weight of the realisation that he had gotten away with murder.
“Fuuuuuuuck!” growled the zombies around him, beginning to close in on the foetally-crouched corpse. Then the overseer’s radio, fallen to the deck, buzzed into life.
“Wetewete 3, come in, this is Dakuvanga,” squawked the gore-soaked box, a note of caution souring each word. “What’s the situation with the comms noise you heard?”
“Fuck,” hissed Wrack again, then winced as his new congregation repeated him. Pantomiming silence with massively exaggerated gestures, Wrack bent to the radio and raised it to his lips while pleading with his eyes for none of the dead to make a sound. Screwing his eyes shut, he clamped his bloody thumb on the broadcast switch and did his best impression of an overseer’s voice.
“Negative, DV,” he growled, feeling like a kid pretending to be a dad. “Overheard another team; nothing to report. Just getting jumpy.” There was a grinding silence, then Dakuvanga replied.
“Copy, We-We-3. But cut that shit. We’ve got restless assets in three, twelve, fifteen and twenty—we don’t need any false positives. Get the job done and change shift in eight, out.”
Wrack sank into a half-crouch, clutched his knees, and took in a massive, useless breath. “Fuck,” he whispered, still in shock, and opened his eyes. A crowd of the dead, silently gathered at arm’s reach, shouted the word back at him with relish. He had gotten away with it. At least for eight hours, until the poor sod he had just chewed the neck off failed to show up for shift change. Beyond that he had no idea what would happen, but given the way things had escalated in the last few minutes, he imagined he’d have other things to worry about by then. Things were accelerating towards the brink of chaos.
As if to punctuate the thought, moans sounded like distant thunder from far down-deck, rising in a wave, before the rattle of automatic gunfire cut into them.
Evidently, thought Wrack, he had been out of the action for some while. It could have been more than a day. The word had clearly spread while he had been under, and clearly not everyone was bothering to radio in before taking action. Looking down at the bloody wreck of the overseer, fading to grey with the advance of night, Wrack realised his own revolution had overtaken him. He had to catch up with the plan, before it all fell apart.
Stuffing the overseer’s radio into the stained horror of his shirt alongside the one they had stolen from Whina, Wrack spat blood from his mouth and looked over at the lagoon from which their chunk of the Bahamut had been drawn. Nearby were the ramps leading down into the bowels of the ship, where they kept the steam-boiled war-corpses, with their harpoons and pincers and cannons. Wrack could only assume they were well guarded, but he couldn’t leave the milky-eyed juggernauts in the overseers’ hands.
He was going to need a mob on his side to get down there. And though the swamp of blood around his cracked teeth spoke otherwise, Mouana had been right—he was a talker. And there was more talking to come if he wanted to stay ahead of the chaos he had kicked off.
“Right,” said Wrack, clapping his hands onto the shoulders of the nearest zombie. “What’s your name, then, mate?”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
HALFWAY THROUGH THE night, they rushed into the dim warrens of the underdecks like the winter sea. There were more than a hundred of them by the time Wrack finally decided it was less risky to launch a blind assault with the numbers he had than wait any longer.
The nearest ramp had been sparsely guarded; only one overseer had been posted there, and went down like a tower of matchsticks when the pack of zombies rushed from the Bahamut’s guts. Either Dakuvanga didn’t expect the ship’s ‘restless assets’ to have any capacity for strategic thinking, or the overseers were simply needed elsewhere, and stretched desperately thin.
Even presuming the near-dead supervisors of the Tavuto were aware they had a growing insurrection on their hands, thought Wrack, it was not as if they could divert all their resources to defence just yet. As Whina had said, the living crew of the ship depended on reaching quota in order to receive their shipments of medicine: it would take a full revolt for them to risk putting the ship on lockdown and shutting down production. What choice did they have, especially with the fresh disaster of the failed ET hunt on their hands, but to keep supervising the work crews, and hope that things didn’t get too out of hand? Clearly things were getting dangerously close to that point, with open rebellion simmering across the ship, and so any chance of success hinged on bringing on board as many dead as they could—including the fearsome war-built in their deep dungeon—before the overseers put Tavuto on lockdown.
And so they streamed into the underbelly of the ship without further resistance, although Wrack had no idea where they were going. As he directed the mob through the winding steel corridors and grated staircases, he avoided awkwardness by referring to himself in the third person. “Wrack wants us down here,” he would shout. “Wrack needs this corridor checked out.”
Were there anyone else listening, it would have seemed absurdly narcissistic. But he told himself it was a matter of pragmatism—the dead seemed much happier following instructions from an unseen third party, and became baffled and disquieted if he issued orders in the first person. And besides, distancing himself from the person giving the instructions also made him feel very slightly less respons
ible when he commanded the tide to tear apart living people.
Once they got deep into the hull, there was plenty of tearing apart. Not long after they burst below decks, the main block of his rabble encountered a control room staffed by four overseers. By the time the men and women within had worked out that the dead coming down the corridor were not being shepherded by their colleagues, there were already hands clawing at their throats. Fingers grabbed at them, bodies piled over them until they sank to the floor, and then the wet noises began. Within a minute, it was all over.
Zombies stood back up with purple-black, stringy flesh hanging from their jaws. Those with the presence of mind to look haunted, Wrack gave the freshly acquired radios. As they took the units gingerly in their hands, he sent them out of the corridors and away, telling them to find other dead to organise into groups, and to avoid provoking all-out war.
Meanwhile, Wrack’s mob moved through the corridors belowdecks, and found more of their miserable tribe. Zombies working on making ammunition, repairing weapons craft, working canneries and deep freezers. There were whole substegarian industries down there; thousands of workers, toiling by the dim light of sodium lamps. Just as it had been in the control room, their supervisors were unwarned, unready, when the tsunami of rotten mouths broke over them.
Wrack kept moving from chamber to chamber, trying to make sense of the maps on the walls, leaving his most cogent followers to begin the process of rabble-rousing as he sought the war-built. There was no time to linger and engage in the baffled chat of the newly undead. Besides, many of the dead down here were chained in place, ankles worn to bone by crude steel manacles. Even when freed with boltcutters, many just shuffled in circles or remained at their stations, faces twisted in confusion.
As he led the growing pack through the orange metal gloaming, Wrack kept one radio tuned to the rebel frequency, which he had taken to calling ‘Dead Air,’ while he cycled the other through Dakuvanga’s various broadcast frequencies, listening for any idea of what was going on on the wider ship, and—hopefully—advance warning if he was about to be run down by a death squad.