Flesh and Blood

by French, Jackie

  I wondered where they’d bought the books. Had they been lying in some dusty Outlands shed for generations? A box of them traded for honey or wax candles? Or had they been treasured, passed down from parent to child? I’d never know.

  The bodies lay on the bed. There were two of them, a man and a woman. Truenorm by the look of them and either young or well rejuved, which, given the poverty around them, wasn’t likely. They had evidently grown ill then died together. The bedclothes were pulled up over them; two beakers of water stood on the roughly built bedside table.

  I crossed over to them, and touched the woman’s forehead. There was just a chance … but no, she was dead, the skin cold, the body stiff.

  ‘They haven’t been dead long,’ said Neil.

  ‘No. I wish …’ I didn’t finish. I had been going to say, if we had only arrived earlier we could have helped them. But how? Death, it seemed, had come swiftly, too fast even to need nursing.

  ‘Should we bury them?’

  For a moment I thought Neil was going to say, why bury two bodies when there will be thousands more? But he just said, ‘There’s probably a spade in the shed near the garden.’

  I followed him out into the light and fresh air. The bees were bright yellow, like the flowers. I wondered if they were Engineered too, super-productive hardy bees. Once again, I couldn’t be bothered to Link up the data.

  The shed held a spade and a hoe, and bags that bulged with what looked like dried corn cobs and spare blue beehives. I assumed the other shed held the honey harvest that would eventually be traded for Basics and floater repairs. They must have used the console in the floater when they needed to Link to the world, I thought vaguely, as they didn’t have power for one indoors.

  Neil seized the spade. ‘The vegetable garden would be the best place to dig,’ he said. ‘The soil will be softer there.’

  ‘But …’ I stopped. No, it wasn’t likely that anyone would be troubled by eating vegetables from a graveyard. This poor isolated utopia would probably never be lived in again.

  I leant against a tree trunk while Neil dug. I was grateful there was only one spade, so I couldn’t offer to help. I was an unskilled digger and the late afternoon sun was hot. I was glad of the shade. The bees’ hum grew to a roar above me.

  Had the bees seen it first? I don’t know. But all at once hands grabbed me from behind, bore me down onto the stony ground. Cold hands, strangely soft, that fumbled clumsily around my throat.

  ‘Nei …’ My cry was cut off by the cold soft hands. I shoved upwards with all my strength, but the being above me didn’t even flinch.

  I shoved again. This time I managed to dislodge the hands. The person stumbled back.

  It was the woman from indoors. She wore a faded unitunic. Her hair was long and blond. She blinked at me with cold dead eyes, then charged again.

  This time I was ready for her. I darted forward, my fingers aiming for the eyes. I gouged, as the hands tried to bear me down again. I felt the eye give, pop out cold and wet into my hand. But again she didn’t seem to feel the pain.

  Of course not, said a small voice in my mind. She was dead, dead, dead.

  My skin contracted with horror. I could feel the prickle as the hairs on my arms, my head, my legs stood up in protest. This was wrong, the dead don’t walk.

  I could smell her now. She smelt of death. But there was no breath. The dead don’t breathe either.

  Someone shouted behind me. The spade suddenly crashed against the dead woman’s head. It stopped her only for a second, then she came at me again.

  Another blow. This time across the eyes or the remaining eye. But no blood flowed. The eye was pulp now, surely there should be blood.

  But, I thought, the dead don’t bleed.

  I staggered back. The dead woman blundered sightless after me. She lurched and faltered, walked another three steps towards the shed, away from me. And then she fell.

  ‘Neil. Neil what …’ I couldn’t finish.

  Neil held me. His hands were dirty. Over his back I could see another body, the man this time, lying among the crushed stalks of corn. His body lay to one side, his head to the other. I glanced down. The spade was red with blood. No, not red. A dark, almost brown colour. After all, the dead’s blood is stale, not fresh and flowing red.

  I broke from Neil’s arms, and vomited next to the tree trunk. Then Neil’s arm was round my shoulders. We staggered back to the floater together.

  chapter 32

  The floater rose. Neither of us had programmed it, so it hovered above the tussocks till Neil bent and pressed the button for forward.

  It wasn’t where we had meant to go. It didn’t matter. All I wanted to do was get away.

  ‘Neil, Neil, the Centaur, remember? We thought it was dead too, but it wasn’t …’

  ‘Those people down there were dead,’ said Neil grimly.

  ‘But they can’t have been!’

  ‘They were. Have you ever seen death before? Real death, not on Virtual?’

  I shook my head. Death was the great taboo in the City. I’d been shocked by the Outland custom of funerals when I was first banished. It seemed obscene to celebrate the dead, slightly disgusting to even mention them. Since the Declines the City dead were mechanically removed and incinerated as soon as they’d been autopsied. It was as though a City citizen had done something shameful by dying — not been meticulous with rejuves and regenerations, had been so disorganised that death was a possibility.

  ‘Well, I have seen dead bodies,’ said Neil grimly. ‘And those people were dead.’

  ‘But they attacked us!’

  ‘And they didn’t feel pain. Their blood didn’t flow. They were dead.’

  ‘Neil, that’s impossible!’

  ‘Is it? Have you ever seen a dead snake?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘When you kill a snake it can still move for hours. People have even been killed when they’ve tried to pick up a dead snake and it’s bitten them.’

  ‘But how?

  ‘Reflex. The nerves still send messages to the muscles even when the snake is dead.’

  ‘You think that’s what happened back there?’ I said slowly.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It’s possible. That would be why the Centaur attacked us too. Maybe there’s something about the plague that activates the nerves after death.’

  ‘But why attack us?’

  ‘Like the snake,’ said Neil. ‘It bites because that’s what it does when it’s startled. It attacks, bites. Humans are animals too, remember. We were the last thing the Centaur saw. The final reflex is fear and when humans are afraid they fight.’

  I smiled wanly. ‘You sounded very like Theo then. That’s the sort of thing he’d say.’

  ‘He brought me up,’ said Neil.

  I gazed down at the brown grasslands. ‘We should tell Michael about this,’ I said at last. ‘It might be important.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at Dunghill first,’ said Neil. ‘Then … Well, I think we should do what he asked. Go to the City straight away.’

  ‘But why?’ Two years ago I longed for the City. Now I just wanted to be home, even for a day or two, our home, the quiet stone house by the utopia.

  ‘Michael’s right. There are better medical facilities in the City. The survival rate has to be better than in the Outlands. There are better Networks there too. Maybe you can make some correlation the experts have missed, something that just doesn’t appear on OutlandNets. Besides …’ he stopped.

  ‘Neil, what is it?’

  ‘I just thought,’ he said slowly, ‘that if we’re infected, or if you’re infected and I’m not, then maybe … maybe they can clone the baby, after we’re dead. So there’ll still be something of both of us left in the world.’

  The brown grass blurred below us. ‘All right,’ I said at last.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Let’s go to Dunghill and then to the City. And yes to the cloning too.’

  cha
pter 33

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. A pretty plasticrete farmhouse, perhaps, like the Holsteins’, or the beekeepers’ poverty. Dunghill was different again.

  It was a dome, but massive, covering ten hectares or more. It was transparent too, a giant bubble that flashed red from the sinking sun. Below the dome I could see trees, dark green, and the brilliant flash of birds. It was like something out of a Virtual. But this was real.

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Wow.’

  There was a landing pad to one side of the dome, signalling its coordinates. The floater swung down automatically to land on it.

  I smelt it as soon as I opened the door. Bird shit. You could hear them too, a million tweets and caws and peepings, and over it all the grinding of machinery.

  Neil touched my arm and pointed. A conveyer belt slowly eased out from under the dome and over to a shed, laden with leaves and twigs and …

  ‘Dung,’ said Neil softly. ‘Bird dung. Dunghill. They must sell the bird dung as fertiliser.’

  ‘Eerk.’

  Neil gave a small smile. ‘It’s good stuff. We use the manure from our chooks in the orchards. It’s more cost effective than buying manure.’

  ‘Birds,’ I said. ‘The most common sources of zoonoses are birds living in close contact with humans.’

  Neil looked around. ‘First find your humans,’ he said dryly.

  We walked around the dome, peering inside as we went. There wasn’t much to see — more trees blocked our line of sight and bushes too, obviously Engineered. I doubted any fruit grew naturally as large and colourful as the specimens in Dunghill. Shadows flickered through the leaves from the birds above, but they were too high for us to get more than glimpses of their colours.

  The door was on the opposite side of the dome from the landing pad. It was opaque and the dome walls around it had been subtly coloured too, so that it was impossible to see in. There was no sign of a doorbell.

  Neil knocked. I still found doorknocking strange — in the City you just pulsed an image of yourself to the house comsig, so the occupier knew who was at the door and could make an informed decision on whether to admit you or let the default take a message. You didn’t first knock and wait.

  The door opened, evidently automatically, as there was no-one holding it.

  ‘It should have creaked,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The door. It needs to creak. Like in all the best horror vids. The creaking door, so you wonder what’s inside.’

  ‘Who needs creaks?’ said Neil. He stepped through the doorway. I followed him. The door shut behind us.

  ‘Shit,’ said Neil. ‘There’s no door handle.’

  I pictured the door in my mind then searched for its comsig. Nothing there.

  ‘No comsig either,’ I said. ‘We’re stuck here till whoever lets us out. Unless we can break down the door or tunnel out …’ I glanced down at the floor. It was plasticrete, as I suspected, with holes for the tree trunks. ‘If you know any way of tunnelling through plasticrete.’

  ‘Maybe there are controls further in,’ said Neil. ‘The whole system might be on automatic.’ He sniffed. ‘I don’t see why anyone would want to live in this muck.’

  I nodded. The smell was strong, half ammonia, half decaying leaves and overall a scent of something pungently sweet.

  It was a familiar smell.

  ‘Neil, I don’t like this.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re here though. Whatever it is, we have to go through with it.’

  There was a path through the trees. I’d expected it to be dung covered, but now I looked closer I could see small holes in the floor, with bits of debris shivering on their rims before they were sucked down — the dung and leaves must fall through to the conveyer belt below.

  The birds yelled above us. The path twisted through the tree trunks, swerved around bushes. Suddenly wings flapped close to us. I glanced up and bit back a scream.

  ‘Holy hell!’

  ‘I agree.’ I tried to make my voice sound normal. ‘That was a face. A human face on a bird’s body.’ My voice was still shaking, no matter how hard I tried to steady it. The creature had been small for a human, but so very large for a bird. And the expression on its face … ‘It looked … desperate,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s hurry,’ said Neil grimly.

  ‘Hurry where?’

  ‘Wherever this damn path leads us. To the control system I hope. There has to be one somewhere.’

  Yes, in the shed outside, I thought. But I didn’t say it aloud.

  More trees, more bushes. The fruit smelt over-ripe and sickly. Then suddenly the bushes cleared.

  We were in the centre of the dome now. The trees arched above us, their branches thick enough to hide the sky. A large container loomed in front of us. Container? Shed? You could call it either of those — it was room-sized and rectangular, with a flat roof with bird dung dripping from the edges.

  No windows, just flat dull walls and a door.

  ‘Are you going to knock again?’

  ‘Why bother?’ said Neil. ‘There’s a handle. Let’s hope there’s a handle both sides this time.’

  He turned it.

  The room seemed infinitely bigger than it looked from outside and it was filled with people too. Then I realised that the walls were mirrors and there was only one person, reflected over and over again.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  chapter 34

  My first thought was that he must never have had a rejuve or regeneration in his life. He didn’t look old so much as aged, the body crouched and bent, the skin on his face sagging. Then I realised that what had aged him wasn’t years, but horror.

  He smiled at us. It was a child’s smile, of innocent pleasure. ‘Hello, I’m Bill,’ he said. ‘I let you in. Now you have to lock the door again.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Neil gently.

  ‘So they can’t come in!’ The old–young face frowned. Fresh terror touched the eyes. ‘You mustn’t let them in.’

  Neil glanced at me. I nodded. Neil stepped back to the door. There were two old-fashioned chains there — a clumsy but effective way to keep people, or something else, out. He slid them into their latches.

  ‘There you are,’ said Neil.

  ‘Good,’ said Bill. He added conversationally, ‘They’re all dead, you know.’

  ‘Who’s dead?’ asked Neil quietly.

  ‘My brothers. They’re all dead. Then they came alive again, but they’re properly dead now.’ He giggled. ‘I can show you. Look.’ He reached over to a control panel on the wall and pressed something. Immediately one of the mirrors faded and became a window. We looked out onto the opposite side of the dome to the entrance.

  A bird lay on the floor. She was beautiful, with parrot colours but more subtly done, long tapering wings and soft feathers at the neck where the bird form slowly merged into human. Her face looked peaceful too.

  ‘She was Maurie’s,’ said Bill childishly.

  ‘Maurie’s bird?’

  ‘Maurie’s wife. One of his wives. We had lots and lots you know,’ he went on. ‘When they hatched we all agreed, one for Maurie and one for me and one for Jason and one for Sam.’

  ‘How did your brothers die?’ I tried to keep my voice gentle too.

  ‘They got sick. Like her.’ He pointed to the dead bird. ‘She got sick as well. They all got sick. I got sick too, but I didn’t die. Or maybe I am dead.’ He giggled again. ‘Maybe I died but I woke up again, like they did but I stayed awake. Do you think that’s what happened?’ He regarded us innocently. Only his eyes seemed mad.

  I couldn’t speak. I shook my head instead.

  ‘You know about the sickness, don’t you?’ He regarded us steadily. ‘That’s why you’re wearing suits.’

  I swallowed. ‘Yes. We know.’

  Bill smiled his too sweet smile. ‘I knew what would happen when they died, you know. Saw it happen to the birdies. They died
then they woke up. Then they attacked us. They attacked Sam. They bloodied his face.’ He frowned. ‘That’s when he got sick too.’

  ‘What happened to your brothers when they died?’ Neil’s voice was low.

  Bill grinned. There was a touch of triumph in his face and somewhere a world of sorrow too. ‘Put them outside. I opened the trapdoors and put them on the conveyor belt and it took them outside. When they woke up I wouldn’t let them in. They banged and they banged but I wouldn’t open the door. I couldn’t you see.’ Bill nodded out the window. ‘They’d do that to me.’

  The bird was waking up now. The sightless eyes seemed to focus, the wings moved. Suddenly it was flying again, crashing its wings over and over on the window, as though it knew there was life inside and wanted to kill it too.

  Bill giggled again. ‘It can’t get in,’ he said reassuringly. ‘None of the birdies can get in.’

  ‘How long …’ My voice broke. I tried again. ‘How long will it keep doing that?’

  Bill shrugged. ‘Half an hour maybe. Till it gets tired or breaks itself. Sometimes they do that you know. They break their wings. Then they can’t fly. They just lie there. But you can’t touch them. They’ll bite you if you touch them.’

  The bird–creature outside grimaced. The skin drew away from her teeth. The look was — what? Not mad. There was no insanity there. Hatred for life maybe? Or was it simply terror, all the terrors she had ever felt crammed into a final half-hour of reflex violence.

  A shadow hovered over the frantic bird. Another face appeared, almost bewilderingly beautiful. It glanced at the animated corpse, then at the window we looked out of. I wondered if she could see us. An expression of infinite pain crossed her features, then she flew back into the trees.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘please, shut it off.’

  Bill looked at me. A moment of clarity flickered across his face. He pressed the button again. The birdwoman faded and my white and frightened face took its place, peering out of the isolation suit.