Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  The layout of the walls and barriers, some raised up on berms of rich brown dirt, looked messy at first but upon closer inspection spoke of incredible attention to detail. The maze was an enormous funnel meant to break up clusters of approaching Pales by forcing them into ever more narrow passageways, the twists and turns requiring single-file approaches to the kill boxes. The whole thing was a spider web meant to catch predators and turn them into prey.

  Beck and Eshton were given places on a low wall the overseer called Interior Two, or I2. Twenty feet wide, it spanned the entirety of the closest courtyard in the maze to Canaan. The maze opened up in several places, allowing Pales who survived the killing floor stretching out before her to cluster together in this last open space. From what she had been told, it was uncommon to see more than a handful make it this far.

  Today was no exception. From the floor of the maze it was impossible to see the action spread across the rest of its length and breadth, but she could hear it. Grunts and shrieks, men shouting at one another for coverage or pointing out the direction of incoming enemies. The part of her that had ever been timid, a minority at best, had long since withered beneath training an experience. Her hands tightened on the haft of her spear, tight then soft in an unconscious rhythm, as the urge to fight grew.

  “Nervous?” asked Hale, the overseer for this section of the maze.

  Beck glanced at him. “Huh? Why would you think that?”

  Hale tilted his head toward her hands. “You’re grabbing that weapon like it’s the only thing keeping you standing.”

  Beck looked down at her grip on the spear and felt her face warm up slightly. “No. Not nervous, really. I mean, nerves are always a thing before a fight, but I’m not scared. Just hate hearing other people out there doing the fighting and having to stand here with my thumb up my ass.”

  Hale gave her an appraising look. “Guess this must be weird for you Deathwatch folks. Suppose you’re used to running out in your armor and being the hero.”

  Beside her, Eshton snorted. “No, we’re trained to be patient and think about our next move. She’s just kind of bad at it.”

  Beck stuck her tongue out at him, because she was an adult and she could.

  “Incoming!” shouted the I2 lookout, a small man who had climbed to the top of the tall barrier on the other side of the courtyard to keep watch. “We’ve got at least eight who made it through.”

  The lookout shifted his weight, obviously trying to keep his legs away from where the incoming Pales would be in a few moments. There were pegs set into the top of the wall for this purpose, and Beck felt surprising relief when the man settled in with both of his legs on the protected side. The wall gave the smallest wobble as he shifted his weight.

  She should have kept her eyes on the narrow corridor the enemy would approach through, Beck knew that. Yet their avenue for attack was locked in to just that space. It did her no good to focus all her attention on it. That would give her no new information.

  Instead she kept her eyes on the lookout, reading his reactions. It was a poor man’s surveillance system, true, but it was better than going cross-eyed staring at empty space.

  The lookout began counting down when the approaching Pales drew near, giving the defenders at I2, the last line of defense in the maze, fair warning about the approach. The system might be less technologically advanced than what Beck was used to, but it was no less thought out or logical. These people used what they had to the fullest extent. She found herself impressed.

  Pales began appearing, framed by the corridor as they maneuvered the last ninety-degree turn before spilling into the courtyard. The first few spread out but didn’t move forward, spotting Beck and the other defenders at once. Clever eyes narrowed as the rest of the group moved in to form a small cluster.

  Then one of them looked up and spotted the lookout. This was a particularly large specimen with the usual chalk-white skin but more than a few scars running across his stony flesh. Its eyes dropped to stare at the wall. Before Beck could formulate a theory on its interest, the large Pale let out a blood-curdling shout with unusually complicated glottal stops and cadence.

  In the instant between the scream and its attack, she had a single thought.

  That sounds like language.

  The Pale slammed into the wall. Everyone around Beck gasped in horror.

  The wall shimmied beneath the lookout, who was not at all prepared for such a bizarre turn of events. His balance swayed beneath the suddenly moving slab of stone, and when the wall rocked Beck could see why it was able to move in the first place.

  It was a single piece, whether quarried or manufactured she had no idea. The builders had tilted it up on its edge and piled dirt around it for support, trusting a yard of earth and its own ponderous mass to keep the thing vertical. It wasn’t a bad design choice considering the available options, but too many lookouts ascending the wall and causing minute shifts in its position had slowly worked a gap between its sides and the dirt surrounding it. Beck saw the empty space when the Pale struck, a band of darkness between stone and dirt less than two inches wide.

  The wall stayed standing—no mere body could have toppled it. The lookout was not so lucky. He wasn’t prepared for even the limited movement of his perch and over-corrected, falling over toward the Pales.

  “Fuck!” Beck said, and knew the man was dead.

  Except he wasn’t. The lookout somehow managed to spin his body at the last possible second just enough to hook one leg and arm on the top of the wall, while holding one of the pegs in his other hand. His position was terrible, unable to get enough leverage to raise himself back up.

  The Pales below watched with hungry eyes as their scarred brother put a shoulder into the wall again.

  “Steady,” Hale said. “He’ll get himself back to the top.”

  She could feel the tension radiating from Eshton like heat from a fire. He would be as painfully ready to act as she was—and indeed a few seconds later she heard the low, unconscious sound he made in his throat when he wanted to act but wasn’t allowed. During his months locked away with Parker, that agitated noise, which sounded like a labored breath, was almost constant.

  “They’re going to get him,” Beck said in that all-too-calm voice which was her version of brightly colored plumage birds sometimes wore to warn off enemies. It said that this creature was unafraid of being noticed, that it was dangerous enough to handle anything you wanted to throw its way.

  “He’ll make it,” Hale said in a voice lacking any shred of certainty.

  The lookout’s arm slipped a few inches from its death grip on the edge of the roof. Beck could see the chain of events unfold without effort. The weight of his body was all on one side of the wall. The tension in the arm and friction with the rough edges of the wall would eventually rob him of strength. If he was going to pull himself up, if he were able, the man would already be safe. It seemed so obvious that she had to wonder if the rest of the I2 team had something against the man.

  No. Clearly that wasn’t it. These people lived out here together under constant threat. Much like citizens of the Protectorate, they would put aside any petty squabbles or dislikes in the face of such an overwhelming and relentless enemy. Those who dared to use Pale attacks to hurt another person would be criminals to be dealt with.

  They were scared. Simple as that. They saw the things Pales could do to bodies and had a healthy respect for it. Beck could understand that. The logic going through the heads of her Remnant teammates was that it was better to hope the lookout managed on his own than break the line and put everyone at risk.

  Which also made sense. Beck could respect that, too.

  It just wasn’t her style.

  “Eshton?” she breathed.

  “Yep,” he said, and she could hear the grim smile in that single syllable.

  They moved in unison, launching themselves over the low wall with fluid grace and barely landing before taking off at a dead sprint.

&nb
sp; “What are you doing!” Hale shouted at them. “Get back here!”

  Beck didn’t look over her shoulder as she replied. “You all stay there! We’ll get their attention off the lookout and drive them toward you. Attack as a group.”

  She was certain there would be harsh words, maybe even exile, for disobeying. And depending on how petty Hale was there could be other punishments for daring to bark orders no matter how good they were.

  In the face of a human life she was equipped to save, Beck didn’t give half a wet shit about any of that.

  Eshton stayed to her right as they moved toward the now-fascinated group of Pales. The scarred one turned his attention to the approaching pair, and Beck silently rejoiced. Every second they could buy the lookout was crucial.

  The Pales moved as a group, trying to overwhelm Beck and Eshton before they could do as all the humans here did and set their spears. Letting the enemy drive itself onto your weapon was a solid tactic, and the way Pale eyes darted from spear tip to spear tip told her they were ready for it.

  “Break,” Beck said, and slid for several feet before reorienting and moving left at a right angle to her previous direction.

  The Pale that had nearly reached her stumbled as it tried to match her change in direction, and Beck took advantage of its momentary disorientation to spin the spear around in a tight arc, slamming the butt into the side of its eye socket. Tough bones and stony skin could prevent a lot of damage, but pure physics was on Beck’s side. She was already moving when the shattered remains of the Pale’s orbital bone began gushing blood.

  It would take a few seconds to adapt to the loss of an eye. Beck was fine letting it. She used those moments to find another target.

  17

  When she was fighting, Beck went against character and didn’t think about much. Her normally busy mind shut off the flow of incessant wondering and working and focused on the complex rhythms of the fight. This too was like a machine, but one whose moving parts were constantly changing.

  Statistically speaking, Beck wasn’t thinking about most things in existence when in combat. Just before? Sure. She had begun to sweat and wondered what the laundry situation in Canaan was like. Andres and the others were fairly clean, so some kind of system had to be in effect.

  She was a blur of spear and lashing limbs, though only a journeyman compared to Eshton. She had months of grueling daily practice, and while that level of dedication yielded significant results, he had years under his belt. For every Pale that reared back from her spear only to have its knee kicked in sideways a half second later, Eshton injured two. He was a ceaseless engine of destruction off to her right, funneling Pales toward the waiting wall of spears.

  The trick when fighting the infected without armor was not to try so hard for deathblows. It was human nature to want to end the threat as quickly as possible, but Deathwatch training beat that out of a person fairly quickly. It was a fighting system with few rules, yet a huge number of fundamental principles to guide it, letting the individual tailor their style to fit their strengths and cover their weaknesses.

  The first and ruling principle was to survive. And without layers of ceramic and Steel Six surrounding her body, staying alive meant staying in motion.

  Beck slapped the butt of her spear against the face of a female Pale and danced backward. The chalk-white woman hissed in fury, diving toward Beck’s midsection. She barely got out of the way, and not even that completely; stony fingers caught the front of Beck’s shirt and tore free a chunk the size of her fist.

  Fortunately, the move still worked as planned. Beck’s backpedaling brought them close to the wall where three defenders popped up with their own spears. The Pale woman, still stumbling forward after Beck sidestepped her, was unable to shift the considerable momentum of her unusually dense body in time to avoid the trio of points aimed at her upper body.

  Spears took her in the chest, neck, and cheek, though it was the shot to the neck that ended her. The chest wound was superficial, the dense sternum too tough for the relatively weak blow to pierce. The spear to her face gouged out a furrow of hard flesh but deflected off her cheekbone. The third spear slipped into the hollow of the Pale woman’s throat and hit square. No sliding, no deflecting, just a straight shot into the relatively soft tissue and into the throat.

  The thing to remember about Pales is that other than their bones, inside they’re just as soft as humans. Dense muscles are still muscles, and even toughened individual strands still have the same basic layout. A thin point will slide between them just fine.

  As demonstrated by the sudden spasm when the spear point traveled through the throat and buried itself in the Pale’s spine. She dropped instantly, a shot that had to have damaged if not severed her spinal cord.

  Beck was aware of this peripherally at best as she was already moving toward another enemy. This turned out to be the large, scarred Pale, who circled her warily with hands extended like an old-school wrestler. The thing kept the circle wide as if it didn’t actually want to engage, and someone without her training might have been taken in by the trick.

  “I don’t think so, asshole,” Beck said. “You may not be able to understand me, but I know what you’re up to. I see those friends of yours you’re trying to distract me into getting too close to. It’s not gonna work.”

  Perhaps it was her tone, but a look of clear annoyance crossed the thing’s face. Beck felt a shiver of discomfort try to rise through her spine. Seeing all-too-human expressions on those alien faces was creepy to a degree none of the fiction on the vids had ever been able to adequately get across.

  Seeing out of the corner of her eye that she was about to get too close for comfort to one of the Pales orbiting her like cannibal moons, Beck shifted her weight in preparation to leap back and move away on another vector.

  Unluckily, the big guy caught it. The scarred Pale lunged forward in that moment between readying herself to move and actually doing it.

  Beck did what months of training told her to: the unexpected.

  The Pale swept its long arms out to either side, clearly ready for Beck to move laterally as she had with the female. Instead she dropped to one knee and brought her spear down and forward at a low angle. The big guy rammed himself on it, not in an immediately fatal way, but being skewered through the belly had to hurt like a son of a bitch.

  Beck slipped beneath its grasping arms and came up next to—and slightly behind—the infected giant.

  While she was at it, she pulled the Deathwatch-issue knife from the top of her boot. The spear was lodged in the scarred Pale’s gut but hadn’t pierced the back of his torso. Conveniently for Beck, this meant she didn’t accidentally hurt herself on it when she threw herself on his back. With one arm locked tight around the giant man’s neck as he reared up with her spear waving around like a comically oversized phallus, Beck pulled in tight and aimed her knife well.

  Stabbing someone through the eye is a lot easier to do when you can take your time aiming and pull the point of the blade toward yourself.

  When the giant fell, she looked for another enemy. As it turned out, none remained able to stand. Only two dead, but every remaining Pale was crippled. Too slow to be a threat to anyone with a shred of common sense and caution.

  The cleanup only took a few minutes. Teams of three staked out the Pales with spears from a distance, one on each arm as a third piked the victim through the throat or eye. Pales needed to breathe just like anyone else.

  Beck meant to help—Eshton was—but Hale pulled her aside and physically moved her to a low stone outcropping the doubled as a bench. She complained about the treatment until he put a hand to her belly and brought it up for her to see.

  Bloody. Well. That was unexpected.

  “Sit still and let me take a look at this,” Hale ordered, and Beck obeyed. Now that the rest of the team was out of immediate danger, she was fine with doing as she was told.

  “How bad?” she asked, craning to get a look.

&n
bsp; Hale fixed her with a flat stare, then put a hand on her chin and gently pushed her head up and away. “Sit back so I can see. I promise I’ll let you look at your guts if they start to fall out.”

  Beck let him work. He rolled her shirt up and had her hold it in place, though after ten seconds of this she just tucked it under her bra for safe keeping. He might need her hands if any serious treatment was required.

  “Gonna need to close this up,” he said thoughtfully after pulling a small first aid kit from a pocket of his pants. “I can irrigate it and put a dressing on it for now, but we’ll need to take you back to Canaan for treatment.

  Beck snorted. “Might want to wait until they decide whether or not I’m getting kicked out. No need to waste medical supplies on someone who’ll be dead in a few days.”

  Hale looked up at her, his gray eyes sharp as scalpels. “What makes you think we’re going to do that?”

  Beck nodded toward the field littered with corpses. “I disobeyed orders. Ran out there despite being told not to go.”

  “Well, yeah,” Hale said. “But there’s disobeying orders and there’s disobeying orders. I told you not to go because I didn’t want you to get killed. Honestly I kind of thought you’d be shit in a fight without your gear.”

  Beck smiled. “Don’t know much about the Watch, do you?” She winced, realizing how that question might come across. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  Hale shrugged. “No, you’re right. We live in different worlds. Haven’t had a Watchman come through here in ages.”

  Relieved she hadn’t caused offense, Beck explained. “During our training, we learn to fight without suits. No shields between us and them. When we train after graduating, that’s how we do it. The computers in our heads make the suit work with our bodies, so we don’t have to train wearing them. My first instructor told us that if you can’t kill a Pale without the armor, you have no place putting it on.”