by Tim Curran
“Why wouldn’t I? There’s nothing to worry about. He’s sorry for what he did. He wants to apologize.”
He lunged.
She pulled the trigger.
The sound was incredibly loud and she dropped the pistol after it bucked in her hands.
Latchkey knelt on the floor in the center of their quarters and blood spread out between his knees. He gasped once and fell over.
She sobbed, but went back to the cot and hastily began putting the last Splo-sieve together.
She heard footsteps in the hall.
She dropped the last one into her Scout bag and slid it under Latchkey’s cot.
The door opened, and Gordon and his guards stood there, machineguns pointed at her.
She raised her hands.
She wasn’t in the cell long before Plum Bob showed up, still in his Scout regalia, hand on the knife that had killed Uncle.
“Funny that the old man picked you after me,” he said. “Maybe Latchkey couldn’t live with what happened that day. Maybe he put your name in Uncle’s ear.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The year of Nougat. Funny that I spent much of the year of Nougat thinking of you. Missing you.”
He came close enough to the bars that she could see his bloodshot eyes.
“Why didn’t you die in the Hellabove?” she asked.
“You think the Hellabove kills the Scouts?” he grinned terribly. He shook his head. “Nope. None of the Scouts are dead. They’re all alive. Even Alberta. She keeps them, you see. Keeps them safe. Suckles on their memories, their emotions. And Baxter’s kept her fed all these years. Even long after he killed himself. I know. I saw it. I seen everything the Scouts have seen. You can’t help it. All our minds mixed like in a soup.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“All except me. ’Cause I told her she could have all the rest down here. All she had to do was let me go. That’s my payment. Greenbriar. All to myself. But I’m gonna need company.”
He leaned in closer, and slid his hands into his pockets.
“Do you remember how it was with me?” He closed his eyes and grinned.
She backed away against the wall in disgust as he moaned to himself, rising in pitch and vigor until he was finished and gasping.
“It’s going to be like that again. I’m going to leave you here, Nougat. And when I’ve brought the last of them up, then I’ll come back here for you.”
He put his hands on the bars again, and blew her a kiss.
“I love you,” he said.
Then he was gone.
When she heard the outer door close, and she was all alone, she stood and took the ring of keys from around her neck, where she’d hung it with Baxter’s talisman.
It only took five minutes to find the right key to open the cell, but considerably longer to find the one that opened the door out into the corridor.
She had never known Greenbriar to be so quiet and still. Her boots resounded on the floor of the empty corridors, all the way back to her quarters.
Latchkey’s blood was turning orange on the floor, and there were drag marks from where they pulled his body out.
Her pistol was gone, but they hadn’t found the bag or her belt with the knife. She took these, and a hooded sweater, and left for the Porch.
She was shocked at how few remained in the corridor, brightly chatting as if they were in line for Chef’s red onion soy burgers. There were maybe a hundred people.
There was only Gordon and one guard at the door.
When she began to move ahead of the line, eliciting protests, Gordon came over himself, smiling.
“Say there! Wait your turn! The Upper World isn’t going anywhere.”
There were some nervous chuckles.
Gordon didn’t see the knife coming. She stuck it under his chin to the hilt and he fell, spluttering blood. His machinegun nearly slipped from her bloody fingers, but she lifted it and killed the guard before he could react.
She took back her knife and waved it and the gun at the people in line. She fired off a couple more shots to get them running, and even then they kept looking back.
She went to the door, used Baxter’s talisman to open it, ready to kill Plum Bob and any guards inside.
A bullet whizzed past her face and she killed the shooter. He slumped against the controls to Elly Vader, a guard.
The Radmen started to rush her, but when she shot one they fell back in terror.
She ordered them out and locked the door behind them, shooting the door panel for good measure then dropping the empty gun.
She went to the controls. Elly Vader was only just beginning its descent.
She used the time to get out one of the Splo-Sieves. She realized with a panic that she didn’t know how to make the things work. She pressed a few buttons on one until the numbers blinked red and began to count backwards. She tried to stop the numbers again, but couldn’t figure out how.
It didn’t matter. The numbers were at eight and counting back to one the long way. She had time.
She went to stand before Elly Vader and prayed to Potus, if he existed at all, that Plum Bob or the other guards didn’t break the door in behind her.
Elly Vader clanged to a stop and the doors slid open.
Plum Bob, faceless in his mask and gloves, jumped out at her, startling her. They wrestled for a moment, and he flung her hard into the cylinder, but she pulled him along by his belt. The Splo-sieve tumbled between them.
The doors closed and with a lurch, Elly Vader began to rise again. The dead guard must have fallen on some switch that made it rise and descend automatically.
Nougat pulled the mask from Plum Bob and clawed at his face and he cursed and struck her hard. His hands went to her throat and squeezed.
She gasped, but he was pinching her airway shut. She couldn’t breathe, and her eyes bugged. His face loomed over her, rabid. Just like that day. The veins standing out alongside his temples, his bloodshot eyes wild, teeth gnashing, drooling.
“It doesn’t have to be you, I guess,” he said, leaning so close his breath was hot on her face. She knew it was rancid, but she sucked hungrily at it anyway, desperate to breathe.
He smiled as her eyes began to roll and blackness encroached from every side. Her hands scuttled down his face, his shoulders, to his waist.
He pressed his lips to hers, forcing them open with the tip of his salivating tongue.
Then the pressure was gone and he was trembling. She gulped air and kicked him off of her.
He rolled on his side. She had stuck him with his own knife and dragged it halfway up his torso until the blade lodged against his sternum and his guts sagged out of the ragged vertical cut.
She crawled the rest of the way out from under him, coughing over his own last breaths.
She scrabbled for the Splo-Sieve. The numbers were at three something and it was pinned under Plum Bob’s body and she couldn’t stop it.
The whole room shook and clanged and she realized with a jolt of terror she was at the top of the shaft. The doors would open and she would choke on the air of the Hellabove.
She found Plum Bob’s mask and pulled it on. It reeked of his breath and something else, some sweet something not the same as whatever had been in her own mask.
The doors slid open, to a world of ash and darkness.
She could see something beyond the threshold of Elly Vader, more than the electric eye, which she spied perched above the door, glass circle with a red light, could discern.
The Hellabove was not empty. It was filled to brimming with clouds of whirling black smoke. Two hundred and fifty-six years’ worth. It was like murky water, that air, but it was not hot. It was cold. Very cold.
And in those murky clouds, things moved and swam. She caught only glimpses of strange, writhing shapes, immense beyond reckoning and also crowds of scuttling things, tiny as fingernails. Other things glided through the thick air, and other things crawled along the grou
nd, inching through the mounds of ash like the earthworms the gardeners used. There were lights out there too, fading in and out.
It was not quiet.
Upon the opening of the doors, her ears had been assailed with a cacophony of yammering, wild cries and mad speech. There was music, or it was all together a kind of music, without rhythm or pattern. Just jabbering chaos and confusion. Chirps, wails, squeals, howls, and weird piping, as if in those impenetrable black depths an orchestra of madmen played upon the elicited shrieks of the harried damned, strumming exposed nerves with clawed fingers and beating upon living brains with bloated fists to play a blasphemous symphony of instruments human and inhuman.
The Splo-Sieve was at one, leering at her through Plum Bob’s blood.
She panicked, and leapt from Elly Vader as the doors began to close.
She fell on her hands and knees in the soft ash and moments after the doors closed there was a flat, heavy sound and a rumble beneath her and the doors crumpled outward. There was fire behind them, but they didn’t blow off.
Greenbriar was sealed.
It was safe.
Why had she done that? Why hadn’t she thrown out the Splo-sieve and retreated into Elly Vader and saved herself, used the other Splo-sieve to destroy the exit?
She looked, and through the lenses of the Scout mask she saw the tracks of all those that Plum Bob had already led up here. They disappeared into the black cloud.
Something had called her. She could feel it. A voice. No, two hundred and fifty-six voices. The same voices that had told her,
“Don’t let him in.”
Only now, they called:
“Mercy.”
She stood on unsteady legs, and waded out into the cloud, stepping in the tracks of those who had gone before.
She went toward the lights.
They swelled and contracted in a hurried but definite rhythm, as of a heartbeat. As she got closer, she saw whorls of moving bioluminescent tendrils, attendant to a series of faraway globules, as though they were caressing these nodes high atop some unknowable vast form, a mound of pulsing, living matter.
What was this thing? Did it have a name? She felt it must, and also that were she to learn it, she must not speak it. Yet this was just one among many horrors moving unseen in the ash that blanketed the world, she knew. The Paradise she had longed for in Baxter’s postcard was not here. Here there was only the Hellabove. Greenbriar had been Paradise. She just hadn’t known it.
This thing, this Old One, nested here atop Greenbriar like a great bloated parasite, a mandarin wastrel, imperious and stupefied in its gluttony, yet still malevolent, still cunning, and ever-voracious. Maybe Baxter had known its name. Maybe he had fed the Scouts to it over the years, made some bargain with it, or maybe it was just the thing’s luck to have drifted here on the burning winds.
As she stood wondering, something whipped out of the darkness, bathing her in that same sickly, pulsing light, probing her with it. Then it tightened around her. She was jerked into the air, and brought rapidly toward the top of the thing. Particles ticked against her mask, and it was difficult to see up here in the whirl of ash. She felt strangely at ease, even when she looked down and saw the glowing barbs piercing her torso wherever the tendril touched her.
Her brain flooded with euphoria, and she fancied that the veins of her wrist, just visible between the end of glove and sleeve, were glowing too.
But then that nagging multitude cried out again for mercy, and she saw the source.
Inside the globules.
Outspread human silhouettes, like paper dolls held against a fluorescent bulb.
None of the Scouts are dead. They’re all alive. Even Alberta. She keeps them, you see. Keeps them safe. All our minds mixed together like in a soup.
Mercy.
They had touched her somehow. Deep down in Greenbriar. They had pooled their dissipated consciousness into one and plunged desperately down to the home they had been tricked into vacating, and they had found her.
It was hard to care, but it was also hard to be afraid, so there was that. The cold was making her sleepy. Was it the cold?
She reached back into her pack and came out with something in each hand. Her fingers were growing numb. She fumbled at the blocky objects, nearly dropped them, and so hugged them close to her, as if she were keeping them warm.
As she was thrust toward a dome of pale, throbbing light, she smiled to see the red numbers pop to life in either hand. Maybe she couldn’t kill this thing. It had been born in fire, matured in hell, and it wallowed in ash and grew fat upon misery. But maybe she could cut off its food supply.
Two.
One.
And then the chorus.
Thank you, Nougat.
Light and warmth. All that she had hoped for from the Upper World, and left behind.
THE KEEPER OF MEMORY
Christine Morgan
“The gods, once, were kind.”
Laughter greeted this, but the old woman merely smiled.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They were different gods then. Kind gods. Our gods. The gods who made and loved us. We spoke to them in prayers and praises, and they heard, and answered.”
The laughter turned, for the most part, to smirks. We may be young, but we are not fools, their looks—again, for the most part—declared. Kind gods, indeed.
Still, they’d gathered eagerly enough around when invited. It was a change from the sameness of their chores, a reprieve from cutting reeds and dredging mud, gutting frogs and hauling water. Entertainment, novelty, and rest were rare. Already, these children knew that all too well.
Some of them might have never in their brief lives seen outsiders before. Let alone outsiders who traveled with hide-covered huts built on sledge-rafts, pulled by harnessed many-legged beasts. Outsiders who wore strange garments and stranger ornaments, who brought strange things from stranger places.
Who brought this old woman, with her wizened head and matted strings of pallid hair. A knobby hump of flesh rose above her bent neck; a loose skin-wattle drooped below it. From her fingertips curled long nails in thin and yellowish chitinous spirals.
“I am Mema,” the old woman said, “though you may call me Grandmother, if you like. I am the Keeper of Memory.”
She sat on an upended, water-worn stump put to use as a chair, its roots cradling her limbs. A canopy of broad-fronded leaves held up on bent poles provided some shelter from the steady dripping of the mist.
“This is Nemon, my granddaughter’s daughter, who will become Keeper after me.”
Nemon dipped her head as she poured mossbark cups of juice pressed from lilyberries. Just as they—she and Mema, their fellow travelers, their sledge-rafts and their tamed, harnessed beasts—were the objects of scrutiny, so too did she examine with interest the crude village and its inhabitants.
Irregular hills rose low from the morass, topped with clustered dwellings made from sticks and mud. The shape of them was like that of wader-birds’ nests overturned, or the lodgings of oil-furs moved to higher land. Meandering paths of stepping-stones crossed slow-coursing waterways. Fresh catches from fish- and frog-traps hung on lines, near bundles of harvested reeds with pulpy, fibrous tufts.
“In the time of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother,” Mema went on, “our people were numerous, and powerful, and strong. We held this world and ruled it, and our gods were kind.”
Again, her words were met—for the most part—with those smirking looks. Silly old woman and your fancies, your made-up tales of a never-was.
The children who did not sneer and smirk, however, Nemon watched with close attention, but discretion. The ones who listened to Mema with attentiveness, with curiosity … whose expressions showed something more … something other … those were the ones she made note of.
The ones who thought, and questioned. The ones in whose minds lived something other than necessity and survival.
“They granted wishes and gave us gifts,”
said Mema. “If we were hurt or ill, they healed us. They protected us. They provided us with bounties of food and clean, clear water.”
“What did they look like?” asked a little boy called Lut.
Yunnig, a larger boy, nudged him, nearly knocking him over. “Don’t be a hoot-head. Everyone knows the gods are indescribable.”
“That’s not true,” said Tesya, who wore her hair woven into several thin braids. “The Mindless in the Dark-Between has no head and no body.”
“You can’t describe something by saying what it hasn’t.” a girl named Anith said, then looked to Yunnig as if for his approval.
“My papa told me that the deep-folk by the ever-waters say their god is bigger than hills upon hills, with wriggling feelers like handfuls of worms where a mouth would be.” Paulph held a hand against his lips and wiggled his fingers to demonstrate.
Nemon, observing the boy’s wide-set bulging eyes, supposed that his papa might have come by that lore at first hand.
“And the Over-Seer of the Under-Seers is all shiny slime-bubbles and glow-bulbs,” Tesya said, persistent.
“Our gods were beautiful,” Mema told them. “They looked much like us, because they made us in their own shape and image.”
“This is gone-world never-was talk,” Yunnig said, scoffing. “You’ll be telling us about fire and fairies next.”
Tesya threw a mud-clod at him. “I want to hear.”
A few of the others voiced their agreement. More joined in when Chayg pointed out that it was better than going back to their chores. Shurg, his twin, asked if they could have more lilyberry juice as well, and that convinced the rest.
Meanwhile, over by the largest of the mud-and-stick dwellings, the usual trade negotiations were being helped along by the sharing of a foamy brew made from pounded yeast-roots soaked in stone troughs. The travelers had picked it up at one of their previous stops, and, judging by the jovial tone, its heady effect was already taking hold.
“Well, then,” said Mema, as they settled themselves on hummocks of damp grass. “Much of what I know has been passed down to me from my grandmother and her grandmother and her grandmother before that. It was a very different world, then. Before the new gods came, bringing the mists. When we knew night and day, real night and real day. When there were seasons other than warm-steam and cool-fog.”