by R. Lee Smith
When the whole crowd of them stopped at an empty intersection so that Scott could ‘get his bearings,’ the remnants of some ancient public address system fired up and blatted out noise. What little she could make out through all the audial corrosion were mostly unknown words, peppered with odd, random-seeming numbers or verbs. The longer she had to stand there and listen to its tortured, droning gibberish, the easier it became to imagine how the blanks could be filled: system pressure rising warning warning severe storm watch in effect until nine hours and three error trafficeye six reports all lanes open on Cinoq Bridge please drive safely error trafficeye seven reports error error error no lanes visible on Jaavi Bridge please drive with caution the current time is three hours and sixteen contagion risk seven percent error error threat level high but stable tune to error error error for news and updates—
“This way,” Scott decided, and set off.
Amber lingered as the group moved on, reaching out to touch the cracked, dead window of a kiosk on the curb. It flickered and came on, spilling writing and static across its face until the whole window was filled and then going black again after voicing the grim message, “No response. No arrival,” in a dead, metallic voice. She shivered and moved around to the next window, reaching.
Meoraq caught her wrist. “Don’t.”
“What happened to this place?” she asked as they went together after Scott and the others.
He shrugged his spines, but they snapped pretty flat when he was done. He looked okay and he sounded okay, but he was still pissed, clearly.
“Do you even know where we are?”
“It was a city once, is that what you need to hear? No longer. The Ancients fell and all of their works fell with them. There is nothing to find here.”
“That smell is getting worse!” Maria called, trying to cover her face in her sleeve. “Can’t we just leave?”
“We are leaving!” Scott said irritably. “We’re just…taking a shortcut!”
“How can this be a shortcut when you don’t know where we’re going?”
“I know it’s shorter to go through something than to go around.” Scott gave Eric something of a dirty look and turned up another street, seemingly at random. It took them to the bottom of a long hill lined on both sides with clean, burned-out buildings.
“Oh my God, really? Uphill?”
Eric put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. “Ease up, baby. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”
“You’ve been saying that forever. God, what is that smell?!”
Amber tried to exchange glances with Meoraq, but he was looking down another street. “We’re not going to see a huge pile of bodies over that hill, are we?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”
“But is that what a huge pile of bodies smells like?”
“It would depend on what they died of,” he said, sounding distracted and a little annoyed with her, but not particularly bothered by the idea.
“You don’t believe in ghosts on this planet, do you?” said Amber, only half-kidding. At his puzzled glance, she added, “Dead people…walking around after they’ve died? Ghosts?”
“Ah.” He glanced down another side-street. “Yes, we do.”
“You do?”
He grunted.
They walked.
“Do you think this place is haunted?” Amber asked, just as a soft, cool hand slipped into hers.
She didn’t scream, but what she did was bad enough: grabbing at Meoraq’s arm, who already had a sword in his other hand and aimed over her shoulder at what turned out to be just Nicci.
His head cocked. His sword did not immediately lower.
“You scared the ever-loving Christ out of me!” Amber snapped.
“I was just…I only…” Tears, the big, slow kind, dribbled down her baby sister’s pale cheeks one at a time and dropped off her chin. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered. “Can’t I please come walk with you?”
Amber took her hand at once, pulling her into an awkward hug as Meoraq slowly let his sword-arm drop. “Yeah, of course you can, you know you can.”
“You’re always yelling at me!” Nicci wept.
Meoraq flared his mouth open at Nicci’s shaking back and exhaled soundlessly through his teeth.
“I don’t mean it,” said Amber, glaring at him. “You know I don’t mean it. We’re sisters, Nicci. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”
Thunder clapped and rolled, not on top of them yet, but close enough to echo in the empty streets. Nicci jumped in her arms and wailed even louder.
“And now it’s going to rain,” groaned Maria, somewhere at the head of the crowd. “Perfect.”
“Baby, please. You know I love you, but please.”
At the top of the hill, Scott suddenly stopped walking.
Maria threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m shutting up!”
Scott didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around right away and when he did, he looked greyish. He looked at his people, and then he looked past all of them at Meoraq. He didn’t say anything.
“Stay here,” Meoraq said and ran, jostling people roughly aside and reaching the top in maybe half a minute. He saw what there was on the other side. His spines came forward. He slowed to a walk, sheathing his sword.
So it couldn’t be that bad. Amber gave Nicci a squeeze and let go of her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
By the time she got to the top of the hill, a crowd had formed, thick enough to shield whatever they were looking at from view, but loose enough that she could slip through it without pushing too many people. She heard Scott (who sounded just as grey as he’d looked) asking if this was bad, if they were in trouble. Then she saw it for herself.
It wasn’t a pile of bodies after all.
It was a pit of them.
It looked like it was miles across, although it probably wasn’t. It was just the shock of seeing something so big thrown down in the middle of the city which had followed such neat, orderly lines. It was perfectly round in shape, with a raised lip of broken pavement all the way around it. The sides appeared smooth but uneven, melted. It had partially-filled with water—if it could be assumed that black foulness had started out as water—and although that might smell bad enough on its own, there could not have been less than a hundred bloated corpses mushed together along the sloping sides.
Somehow worse than what was in the pit was what was around it: small triangular flags had been set around the lip, outlining the whole thing in a hundred shades of fluttering yellow. Whatever had caused this crater had happened long ago and the animals might be falling in on their own, but someone had planted those flags.
Staring at them, trying to estimate how many hundreds or even thousands of flags she might be looking at, it dawned on Amber that the only reason she was able to see the pit at all was because virtually everything between it and the top of this hill had been flattened. There were no more buildings down there, no kiosks, no lamps—only the grey crazyquilt of their foundations and the nice, clean streets that ran between them. It was not perfectly flat; the ground buckled at regular intervals, forming concentric rings around the pit, almost like ripples in a pond after someone has dropped a rock in it.
‘Or a bomb,’ thought Amber, creeping forward in sick fascination.
Meoraq pulled her back, started to push her toward the crowd, then yanked her around and gaped at her, all his spines up and quivering for a split-second before they slapped loudly flat. “I told you to stay where you were!”
“I, uh, thought you were talking to Nicci.”
He thrust a finger in her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath against her skin. “That is a lie and it had better be the only one you ever tell me!”
Amber looked back over her shoulder at the pit…the crater…and felt Meoraq blow a fuming snort against her throat. “What killed them?” she asked, eyeing the bodies. From here, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought they w
ere all animals. She just didn’t know yet if that made her feel better or not. “Did they…Did they just fall in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t we go check it out?”
A flash of far-off lightning made his red eyes spark. “Why?”
“I want to make sure the animals fell in and then died instead of, you know, the other way around.” She gave the pit another backwards glance, as if to make sure it wasn’t creeping any closer. “And I want to make sure they’re all animals. And not people. Especially if it was the other way around.”
“I’ll go with her,” said Crandall, stepping forward.
Meoraq immediately swung her around and behind him, as if Crandall had been offering to cut her throat instead of walk with her down to the crater, but when the thunder caught up to the lightning, he seemed to shake out of it some. He didn’t let go of her, but he grunted and raised his other hand to rub at the yellow patches on his throat. “No one is going anywhere.”
“Meoraq—” she began.
“Insufferable human, I said no! Mark me, if there are men who feed that place of death, they are men to stay well away from. If it is a trap of Gann’s making, so too should you stay clear. And if it still holds the poison made at the time of the Fall, we are too damned close already!”
“Okay! Jesus, okay! Now will you please let go of me?”
“No!” he shouted.
Thunder groaned.
“Okay,” said Scott. He still looked a little grey, but he sounded more like himself. He turned around, raising his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, I’ve made my decision—”
Meoraq hissed, then clapped his free hand to his throat and started rubbing again. Amber could hear him muttering under his breath as Scott listed all the reasons why everyone was still perfectly safe but they should all get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. Meoraq muttering at himself was hardly a new phenomenon, but he didn’t seem to be praying this time. He was counting.
“Are you okay?” Amber whispered.
He looked at her and for a second—a very long second—there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes. Then there was, but it wasn’t a better moment. His head tipped slightly; his spines flicked forward; his hand stayed knotted in her shirt and even clenched a little tighter.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked, trying to laugh.
He didn’t smile.
“You look like you’re going to bite me.”
His gaze shifted to her shoulder, lingered, and came slowly back to her face.
Another flashpop of lightning distracted him before Amber could make the leap from concerned to nervous. He looked up as the thunder rolled, a whole lot closer than it had been, and closed his eyes while the wind blew over him. He took a deep breath. He took another one. He let her go.
The urge to run was extremely strong in those first few seconds.
“All right.” Having consoled the masses, Scott was back and at his most in-charge. “I think we should go around this, um…new development and keep our distance as much as we can.”
Meoraq grunted. His eyes were still shut.
“So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn around and go that way for a bit, see if we can’t find a building that’s more or less intact and hole up for the night.”
“What, here?” asked Amber.
Meoraq began to count again, very softly.
“Do you see that storm blowing this way, Miss Bierce?”
She looked. Lightning obediently forked.
“That’s going to catch us before we’re out of this place. No one’s going to want to walk in that.”
“Want to…” Meoraq murmured. He took a very deep breath, held it, let it out, and began to count again.
“So we need to find some shelter, preferably before it starts dumping directly on our heads. All I want from you, Meoraq, is a little help finding our way out of here without accidentally getting any closer to that, um…thing.”
The yellow patches on Meoraq’s throat brightened fast and slowly faded. “Accidentally…” he breathed.
“Why can’t we just go back the way we came?” Amber asked. “There were lots of buildings back there that were still standing.”
“Because I don’t want to lose ground, Miss Bierce, and I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. All I want right now is for the liz…Meoraq here to do his job.”
Amber cast a cautious glance up at Meoraq to see how he was taking the news that he was now in Scott’s employment. Meoraq did not appear to have reacted in any way. He breathed, counted slowly to six and started over again. The yellow stripes on his throat fluxed, but seemed to be dimming overall.
Scott waited, growing first an impatient frown and then a puzzled one and finally the worried one that Amber had been working on for some time. “Is he okay?” he asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know.”
The storm crawled steadily closer. The smell of the crater stayed pretty much the same. The people watching them began to whisper at each other.
“Okay,” said Scott at last. “You stay here with him and I’ll take the others—”
Meoraq tipped his head forward and opened his eyes. He looked at Scott with a solemn, vaguely curious expression as the rain came down harder and the lightning worked its way closer. He said, “I really don’t like you,” in the way of a man who has suspected this for some time but only recently found it to be true and perhaps worthy of some response.
Scott took a step back. So did Amber.
Meoraq started walking back down the hill. He didn’t tell them to follow, didn’t look to see if they needed to be told. He showed no sign that he even saw the humans shuffling out of his path, just marched himself through them and onward.
“What’s his problem?” Scott demanded, but he made sure to ask it well out of earshot.
“We are,” said Amber, her heart sinking.
“Can’t you talk to him?”
“And tell him what?” she asked. “That he’s not doing his job?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Besides, you pissed him off before I even opened my mouth.”
“Yeah. I know.”
They started walking together, well behind all the rest of them, side by side and silent. The rain came—fat, infrequent drops that became a pouring downfall in seconds, plastering her hair to her skull and her clothes to her body—and the thunder got louder and longer. Lightning came in spears and sheets and sometimes just going off in crazed sky-broad flashes deep behind the clouds. It was going to be a bad one, all right, and she guessed it was silly to camp in it when there were all these empty buildings lying around.
“Truce,” Scott said, angrily enough to make the offer a lie at its inception. “Truce, okay? Look, Bierce, I have got to know…Is this guy safe to have around?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“It doesn’t do a whole lot of good to ask when you don’t trust me.”
“Why should I? I know you and I know what the two of you are doing,” he added in a petulant sneer. “I don’t know why I thought that you might actually put the safety of your own kind—”
“What the hell do you mean, you know what we’re doing?”
“Don’t even try to deny it, Bierce. He doesn’t. The only thing that matters is whether we can trust him to look out for us or not, because the last few days, all I’ve seen is an armed, dangerous alien getting increasingly hostile and unbalanced.”
‘You mean he’s not putting up with your bullshit,’ Amber thought, but didn’t say it. She also thought, ‘And while we’re on the subject of people becoming increasingly unbalanced,’ but didn’t say that either. What she did say, as mildly as possible, was, “I trust him. I don’t think he’s crazy. He’s just not a people-person.”
“People-lizard,” Scott muttered. “Look, just tell me how I’m supposed to get through to him. How do I make him listen to me?”
“I’m serious, damn it! I can’t afford to have all this…confusion! People need to see him respecting me!”
“Yeah, well, I think marching us off into the middle of Plaguesville today has pretty much shot that dream to shit, but maybe the next time he tries to ‘do his job’ and guide us safely around a place like this, you ought to let him.”
Scott didn’t answer, just walked and fumed and glared at Meoraq’s back as the city receded. The wind picked up as streets narrowed and the buildings shrank, although everything was still clean and well-maintained. The rain fell harder, throwing sheets of water up from the pavement directly in their faces. The first of the really big clouds reached them, bringing on the dark too early and making up for it with near-constant waves of high, flickering lightning, like a visual metaphor for Scott’s bad mood.
The street ended at a neat square of disturbingly well-manicured greenery. On the other side of this little park were more buildings—great, grey cubes with smaller blocks butting up against them, all of them connected by second-floor corridors, fanning outward from the only building that made any effort to look nice. Warehouses, then, or some sort of shipping company. It seemed they’d come out of the downtown area into the industrial district. Here, Meoraq stopped and looked back, counting heads as they all came out of the street to stand in the grass. He saw her alone with Scott, away from everyone else, and even at this distance, she saw his spines go flat.
But Scott didn’t notice. He was looking at the buildings beyond the little park. One of the cube-shaped warehouses had a hugely gaping wound in one wall where a tree had fallen. Scott jogged away through the rain to get Eric and investigate, leaving Amber to trudge over to Nicci under Meoraq’s baleful stare.
“You okay?” she asked, and was distantly dismayed to realize she didn’t care how Nicci answered.