Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  “Women,” Fat Jack slapped Critias on the back. “In your time the infected are gone?”

  “They’re still around. It’s just what you see out there now only with everything rotted away by time. To be honest, you probably have more to teach me than I have to teach you. Only days before I left for here, an army of infected took out our latest base the scavenger bosses put in Chicago. We really got our asses handed to us.”

  Fat Jack decreed, “I hereby make you and Carmen official members of the Forager community then. If I’m the first Grand Marshal as you say, and this paper says you’re a marshal, that means you two belong with us.”

  “It would be an honor,” Critias thanked him. “I told you all this because I want your help in keeping Carmen safe from any mistreatment.”

  “You did the right thing,” Fat Jack told him. “You came here to help us, not seeking our help. I’ll make sure that any rumors about her unusual gifts die quickly. As a member of my teams, you can be sure that the rest of my people will be on her side and everyone else will know to show her proper respect.”

  “If you can’t assemble that man,” George wondered, “who can?”

  “I leave those kinds of things for Carmen to deal with. She may not be a science model, but she is still much smarter than me.”

  They returned to the dinner table in time to eat and Carmen joined them in a cheerful mood since she enjoyed the whole experience immensely. The geese did not go far as portions among so many, but it was a delicious treat all the same. The cook also served soup and cornbread with some hard candy for dessert. Carmen ate a little mostly for appearances because of the extreme efficiency of her metabolic processes, but also because her neorganic systems did at times need to make use of it, especially for self-repair.

  At the end of the meal, Fat Jack and other officers passed a smoldering cigar and drank fine bourbon that George had gotten from a mansion he had plundered. When Fat Jack was at the peak of his contentment, he called out a toast, “Here is to King Louie and his Foragers!” In response, everyone cheered and raised their cups to the King.

  As the evening ended, George showed Critias a room where he and Carmen could spend the night. “We’ll be leaving for the city in the morning,” he told them before he departed.

  Once they were alone, Critias locked the door as he prepared for bed. After he thought about it for a moment, he disclosed to Carmen, “I told Fat Jack and George who we really are, just so you know.”

  As she peeled off her body suit, she asked, “Why did you do that? Are you angry with me because of what I said in the shower? I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but that is the correct meaning of the word, as I understand it. I know it’s supposed to be a bad thing for you to force yourself upon a real person like that, but I’m not a real person and I learned to enjoy being intimately close to you. Being under you makes me feel like I’m something very special. You are the greatest person I have ever known. Being special to you is the greatest feeling there could ever be.”

  Even though she tried to be helpful, her words were painful for him to hear. Critias spoke gently, “I actually am the only person you have ever known. You are very special to me and you always were. My telling them has absolutely nothing to do with what you said in the shower. The real meaning of the word rape generally implies an act of savage cruelty and hateful violence, where as I only wanted to make love to you, never to hurt you. I didn’t understand that your reactions were not your own. You’re someone of great value to me, Carmen, not something. If I had known the truth at the time, I would never have done anything to you without first having your genuine permission.”

  Carmen listened to him closely; she understood violence and hostile aggression very well, but her designers had purposefully left her ignorant of the moral implication of being slaved to a human master. Her final understanding was that so long as he greatly enjoyed himself sexually it was an expression of love. For rape to be an improper act, he would have been intent on inflicting pain and emotional injury on her without actually taking sexual pleasure at all from a simulated act of intercourse. With that out of the way, she asked, “Then what did I do wrong? Is it when I played the bouncing ball game with the others?” That thought disenchanted her happy memory of the fun she had. “I tried not to display too much of my abilities.”

  “It has nothing to do with anything you have done,” he reassured her patiently.

  Carmen considered that then challenged, “I don’t believe you. If it wasn’t the game then it has to do with what Penny said about me, that I was suspiciously unnatural. She thought I might even be a ghoul, if I read her correctly.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “that’s partly why they were curious about you, but no more so than they were about our weapons or my mechsuit. King Louie will find out anyway when he sees the new android, right? Fat Jack and George are just a couple steps under him, so King Louie would probably have told them anyway, Jack for certain.”

  “Then why did you tell them now? I don’t want them to think of me as a piece of your equipment. I want to be your lover, not your technology.”

  He tried to explain, “That’s why I told them the truth. Fat Jack can tell the others to back off if any of them get any stupid ideas. Without Jack’s help, I would have to kill some of them for mistreating you and then where would we be? No one, not even King Louie is going to treat you as anything less than what you are.”

  She frowned, “An expensive android?”

  He valued her far more than that, “You’re the most important thing in my life and in this whole ghoul-infested world so I told them for my sake. I want you to have the freedom to be yourself without anyone putting me in a position that I have to blow their head off.”

  She found his words romantic, “You would do that for me?”

  “Not just for you,” he disagreed with the way she phrased it. “I did it for me too, to avoid me having to shoot someone. They’ll respect you for being as smart, strong, and beautiful as you are or they can just get the hell out of our way. You’re no damn infected and you’re nothing like one, so they need to get that into their heads here and now so that it never comes up again.”

  Their room had four single beds. Critias took two sets of bedding from a chifforobe. He put one on a bed for Carmen as he told her, “When you recharge yourself, I’d prefer you didn’t do it sitting on the floor. It would make me ashamed to see you sitting down there like a pet.”

  The thoughtful sentiment pleased her, “Do you want to charge your mechsuit too? It’s still in the front room. I could go get it for you.”

  “No, that won’t be necessary,” he said as he climbed into bed. “It gets plenty of charge rubbing against me when I wear it.”

  Carmen could read his subtle mannerisms even when Critias thought he concealed them from her. She could tell he wanted her to comfort him so that he could feel they had made up over a division that was only in his imagination. Her foolish choice of words had deeply wounded his prideful sense of honor and made him unwilling to ask for her companionship so she crawled into his bed to be with him anyway.

  Critias had honestly not expected her company, “Aren’t you going to recharge yourself?”

  She planted small kisses on his chest, “Your mechsuit is made of the same materials as my body. I want to get plenty of charge rubbing against you as you wear me.”

  Chapter 6: Great Expectations

  The morning activity at Foragers’ Castle was strict on discipline and rigorous in effort as Fat Jack commanded all the crews for the departure back to the King’s residential quarter. They loaded all the cargo from their foraging venture into the tractor-trailer truck at the south-end of the train tunnel garage. Their organized haste wasn’t military because the participants were proudly willing, like a tribe, like family, a gemeinschaft.

  The rail tunnel’s southern gate had complex mechanized movement that allowed it to close itself after the giant truck went out onto the streets beyond the defensive
barriers. The portal had an apparatus of pumps and fuel tanks for powering an array of flamethrowers. The fire drove infected away from the gateway so that the Foragers could open the door in relative safety.

  Thousands of man-hours and great care had gone into perfecting their largest transport truck. Its front ram, armor, and maintenance were a shining example of Forager ingenuity and perfectionism. The front plow could remove cars, snow, or infected bodies with equal proficiency; its hydraulics adjusted the height and angle for any purpose at hand. Their vehicle sported its own flamethrowers to force the ghouls away from any side or even off the top. Numerous gun ports allowed riflemen to shoot from the safety of the armored container should they have the need. The Foragers had named their truck Big Joe in conversation, but the name they had painted on the sides was the ‘HMS Conrad’ as if it was some sort of ocean-going ship.

  Fat Jack had Critias and Carmen stay with him as he supervised everything. He wanted them to have the best possible platform for understanding all the crews that he required and to see what it was those diligent teams were responsible for accomplishing.

  Carmen admired Big Joe and it made her thoughtful. “I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast,” she quoted, “the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of the victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night.”

  Her quotation of the novelist they had named Big Joe after impressed Fat Jack. “Heart of Darkness,” he knew it himself, “but I do believe it first came about as a tribute to our Lord Jim; that’s King Louie’s given name. At the time, none of us had read the book, so we didn’t realize the title carried some questionable baggage.” That thought made him chuckle, “I suspect most no one has read it since either. Now that I have listened to you, I know we made the right choice. I like yours better.” Fat Jack inhaled deeply as he remembered his collective experiences that involved the legions of victorious damned that controlled the city, a city that men only traveled through as a matter of daring taken at their own peril.

  Critias asked Jack, “What did you do before all this?”

  “I ran my own construction company, a wealthy man living the good life,” he patted his diminished belly. “In college I was going to be an electrical engineer, but when my father died, I dropped out to run the family business.” Jack questioned Carmen on her knowledge, “How many books do you know?”

  She replied, “If I take some liberty with your meaning of books, I have only about thirty million written documents in my non-neorganic parallel memory core. They are from four-hundred and seventy languages, but the master resource previously translated them all into prevalent living languages, so I don’t actually read or speak all of those.”

  Jack considered that, “So what makes the other man you have to assemble so smart compared to you?”

  Carmen thought about a simple answer, “Aside from the additional four-hundred-million documents, he is far superior to me in applying that knowledge in ways you would find beneficial, especially when that means inventing things that never existed before. My ingenuity is limited to terminating hostiles and being charming.” She gave Critias a wink in reference to their escapades when he recharged her electrocells while she made love to him the night before.

  “Alright you two,” Fat Jack doused their amour. “Mount up. We’re going home.”

  A hanging counterweight of cement controlled the flamethrowers and operated the gate all according to a preset timing. After all the crews were in the back of the truck, Fat Jack pulled a lever to remove the safety locks on the gate then he took his place in the passenger seat of the truck’s cab. He pressed the button on a handheld device he carried to start the exit procedure.

  Jets of flame would have enveloped any infected loitering in the exit passage and set them to flight. No ghouls were present on the occasion, but they burned the exit passage anyway as a matter of procedure since they were unwilling to risk the consequences of any overlooked trespasser.

  The gate swung upward and then George’s driver Andy who was at the wheel expertly drove them out backwards with his plow blade set down low to mangle any ghouls that might manage to get underneath the truck and between the crushing wheels. Andy could drive backwards better than most people could going forward. He used both his side mirrors and some rearview cameras to watch for any infected to either side and should he see one, he would maneuver to intercept the creature with his front blade, sometimes scraping the wall to make certain that none of the ghouls got past him and into the Castle before its gate closed.

  As soon as the truck fully cleared the gateway, the heavy door fell back into place with an audible bang of spring-loaded locks. The clockwork machine finally rehoisted the counterweight back to its high position to await a signal from Jack’s wireless garage-door-opener that would let them back in when they returned.

  The railway valley outside the gate was identical to the honeysuckle-encased Vineyard section of rail north of the garage except that southern valley didn’t have any protective cage and was open to the sky. Instead of a welded barrier, dense woods flanked the sides of the southern valley. The undergrowth was a thickly entangled thorny bramble that the Foragers had specifically nurtured to form an African-style bulma against the passage of infected.

  Andy continued in reverse to pass out of that valley. Its southern end was another hundred-meter stretch of underground tunnel that exited off the wooded park grounds out into the urban city environment. The track left the property on an elevated trestle just as it did on the northern edge. The truck would have toppled down to crash on the street below, but Andy turned their course just before they left the cover of the woods there. He followed a narrow lane they had blasted through the retaining wall on the west side in a fashion similar to the Vineyard driveway. A moment later, they exited the park’s trees onto a city street. Andy performed a practiced jackknife reversing turn and then accelerated dramatically forward to the west while he triggered onboard flamethrowers to scorch the infected foolish enough to use that roadway as feeding territory. Flamer burns could not fully disable infected, but it frequently left them blind for many days and always inflicted terrible agony on them. As stupid as infected were, they liked to return to places with good food and avoided places that got them roasted instead.

  From a gun port, Critias watched flaming infected dash about as they inadvertently oxygenated their fires and screamed in their underserved suffering. Every one of the ghouls without exception had once been a human being. Plague victims or not, they had become predatory, infectious, and far too dangerous to pity. The regeneration every ghoul possessed insured that their nerve endings were ideally suited to feel their flesh crisp and blister from the heat of the flames. They felt pain exceptionally well and disliked it as much as any creature.

  The road to their destination was wide and clear of obstructing vehicles. Andy drove fast as he knew the limits of their truck and used them all. Their destination was so close and their rate of progress so swift that all the excitement of the journey made the trip seem quite brief.

  The capital of King Louie’s power had once been a courthouse building of the civil authority and it remained an imposing magisterial fortress of limestone. The hundred meter tall tower stood in a direct-line through the legs of the monument at only a kilometer distance. The top-most quarter of the building appeared as though an Ionian Greek temple with a pyramid roof had landed atop a city skyscraper. The entry to the building had a facade reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe with two additional columns in the center. That frontage supported a Forager-made rigid barrier of welded steel that covered and enclosed a courtyard like a circus tent of birdcage that protected an exterior safe-area the ghouls couldn’t enter.

  From his gun port, Critias saw that all the windows of the fortress featured steel angle-iron bars that shielded the interior from any hunters audacious enough to climb the outside.

  By monitoring the camera views taken by his helmet, Carmen could tell what Critias studied. She
commented, “It is ironic that springy steel bed-frame rails became a pivotal resource for ensuring the security and continued survival for the whole human race.”

  The King’s Tower had its own highly proficient work teams that waited in hiding to receive Big Joe into the barrier cage. When the truck arrived, they rushed out to operate flamethrowers that repelled infected while other laborers prepared to open a giant gate that would let the truck get inside. Riflemen stood stern and ready to immobilize any ghouls clever enough to present a threat. Permanently killing the infected was not their duty since the unwanted bodies would collect in the area. They knew how to inflict disabling wounds that would last only long enough to suit purpose, knowing the freaks would later regenerate to wander off on their natural way. Those crews had rehearsed bringing in Big Joe with safe expediency and performed that duty once again with polished efficiency.

  Andy turned Big Joe wide to the left then came back with a hard right to enter a chute of welded rails that were just wide enough to allow the vehicle between them. Any ghouls inside that restricted lane suffered the wrath of Big Joe’s plow. Any infected that chased up from behind had no space to get around the truck as it nosed into the gateway.

  The crews opened the gate high at the last instant so the truck passed through. They loosed flamethrowers and fired a few suppressed rifles to discourage the tag-along ghouls enough for them to close the gateway afterward.

  Andy pulled the truck in through the waiting doors of a huge sheet-metal shed that completely hid the truck and everyone else from sight. The crews raced in after the truck so that once they closed the doors with no one remaining outside, the howling ghouls would soon lose interest in snarling at what they couldn’t see.

  A team of workers used a fire hose to blast the exterior of the truck to remove any bits of infected that might be clinging to it and wash that down into the sewer. Only after they finished that cursory decontamination did they bang on the rear door to alert the occupants that they could come out.