The Sea Hates a Coward

by Nate Crowley

  Schneider stared, until a more urgent thought bubbled to the base of his skull. With his team’s overseer—and his horrifying charge—heading rapidly towards the accident, there was nobody watching him. This was his chance to run.

  Without another glance at the overseer, or at the looming glow of the rendering plant, he loped into the dark as quickly as his trembling legs would allow. Not a single head turned to watch him leave—every sad, opalescent eye was fixed on the fire ahead.

  The roar of the furnaces, the monotonous shuffle of dead feet on metal, the slow rasping of the fat-slab, all faded beneath the slapping of his bare feet, the rumble of the ever-present thunder, and—louder every moment—the quiet, vast crash of waves.

  He had no idea where he was running to, but anywhere had to be better than the vision of Hell that awaited the haulage team. He willed himself onwards and out of the light, before an overseer could turn and see him making a break for it.

  Then he remembered; the fallen corpse. The poor wretch that had been dragged down by the scissoring jaws of the shark-thing, that had not even looked back as its leg was savaged. Crouching against a flaking iron wall, Schneider looked back to see if it had gotten back to its feet.

  It had not. Alone on the darkened ground, the dead thing sat on its haunches as the haulers passed it by, arm extended as if for assistance, head swinging as if looking for something.

  Its eyes met Schneider’s; its head stopped moving. For a long moment it stared, as the rain fell in light sheets around it. Could it see him, out at the edge of the furnace lights? If it could, did it have any conception of him as another being? Was it just a broken rack of meat, or was it every bit as conscious as him?

  The possibility was overwhelming. With the image of those bodies broken against the wheels of the crane still fresh in his mind, the hopeless, withered faces of the flensing mob, there was no way he could leave it there, maimed and lonely. Bitingly aware that anything could be looking his way, Schneider ran back out into the glare of the floodlights, towards the huddled body.

  The rain fell heavier as he knelt beside the cadaver, sinking on shaking legs until his eyes were level with its own.

  “Can you hear me?” he whispered, straining to speak with lips like salted slugs. The dead thing’s mouth hung open, wordless, arm still extended as if it was reaching to pluck its own words from an indistinct cloud.

  Schneider repeated the question, the words coming more firmly with practice, and was answered with a low bubbling sound—the thing’s chest was punctured just left of centre, a bruised black slot that gurgled as its mouth gaped for an answer.

  The jaw closed with a slow hiss that might have been frustration, and the dull grey eyes slid shut in a slow blink. When they opened again, there was no illusion of contact—they were looking through him, to somewhere beyond the dark.

  Off to the side, with a stuttering roar, Schneider heard the gears of the gantry crane come to life, presumably free of its abhuman blockage. The triumphant bass yell of an overseer answered it, a guttural prayer of thanks to industry renewed, and the familiar clatter and hiss of the flensing work resumed.

  The giant and his monster would be returning any moment, and he was right out in the gaze of the floodlights. There was no more time to wait for a response from the wretched thing: he had to get back to the darkness. No matter how hard he wanted it to be otherwise, Schneider thought as he struggled to his feet, it seemed he was the only one here with a mind of his own.

  Turning to face the dark, he made it one step before a cold hand clamped around his calf. He jerked away on impulse, panic surging down his spine like frozen slush forced down a hosepipe, and twisted to find the face of the dead thing staring up into his, teeth grey and clenched.

  “Help me,” it hissed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BEFORE HE COULD fully understand what he was doing, Schneider was stooping again and sweeping up the rain-slicked corpse in his arms. The urge to vomit rocked his gorge as he pulled its arm round his shoulders, felt its ruined chest slide against his, but what was the point in revulsion? He was every bit as vile as it was, and anything would be better than hearing its moans receding behind him.

  Spider legs clattered in the distance.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he murmured, only reflecting briefly what a ludicrous thing it was for one corpse to say to another, before hobbling briskly out of the cone of floodlit steel. He hoped desperately it had been shock rather than damage that had kept the body slumped on the floor; there was no way he could carry the thing if it collapsed. But after a few exhausting paces, it seemed to match his pace, leaning heavily on him but moving in a way that suggested its bones were still roughly in the right place.

  As he lurched past the base of a floodlight tower, Schneider was struck by a vision that made him think he was dreaming—and then he remembered what a memory was. Even with the constant slashing rain and the stink of salt, and the fact he was dead, he could have closed his eyes and been back in the library gardens, propping up the paralytic junior archivist who had just pissed all over the statue of the founders.

  He had joked at the time that it had been like trying to smuggle a corpse away from a crime scene; he was struck by the irony of his current situation. Of course, he couldn’t remember the archivist’s name, or what celebration or tragedy had gotten him so pissed, but the sanity of the recollection made the present somehow more bearable.

  Despite everything, Schneider found himself laughing as he stumbled through the dark, a weird, panting sound that would have been utterly chilling had it not come from his own neck.

  It dried out soon enough as he noticed pale faces in the dark, turning in sleepwalker confusion toward the unfamiliar noise. They were everywhere around him, swaying in the rain, loping in slow circles and bumping against each other like floating debris. The corpses, the cadavers, the...

  “Zombies,” he blurted at his lurching companion in something like a real voice, unable to suppress a small gasp like somebody revealing the twist of a ghost story to a group of children. The dead face just stared back at him with a hint of a baffled frown and he laughed again, drawing the gaze of yet more uncomprehending eyes. Let them come, thought Schneider. It felt good to laugh.

  His helpless wheezing brought the zombies shambling towards him, but naming them seemed to have robbed them of something of their horror. Even their smell—his smell, he reminded himself—had become familiar to his nostrils. Despite their watery eyes and their loose, peeling skin, they were utterly harmless. And in any case, he was one of them. The only real danger here seemed to be the brutish overseers and their attack creatures. Them, and the inevitability of bodily collapse—though that was less of an immediate threat to his life.

  The word ‘life’ caught in his mind like a sharp stone, and drained the weak humour from the situation. He was, after all, dead.

  But there was no time to reflect—hearing a burst of radio static some way behind him, he remembered there were still terrible things that could happen to him. And to the reeling creature leaning against his left side.

  They had to keep moving, but the safety in numbers that the aimless crowd offered was surely enough to buy him a minute to work out where he was and—hopefully—where to go next.

  The initial plan of ‘into the dark’ seemed suddenly inadequate as his eyes adjusted. The space beyond the floodlights was anything but dark. Specks of brightness twinkled far out in the distance to either side, while ahead of him stood a mountain, outlined in bright points of electric light, rising through banks of mist.

  As his head tilted back to take in the looming immensity, he saw there were lights above him too. To his left, immense cranes rose into the sky on gridwork lattices, illuminated here and there by encrustations of steel cabins. Blazing floodlights picked out the shapes of hulking pulleys and house-sized mechanical saws, suspended by creaking booms.

  The structures receded into the fog like a rank of grim steel herons, steel beaks
dipped in repose; they faded from sight and an even larger structure towered out of the murk. Set in front of the great hill of lights, it rose hundreds of feet into the air, a mighty steel mast festooned with gantries, antennae, searchlights, and clusters of dishes like lifeless barnacles.

  Jutting from the dizzying trunk were colossal crossbeams, themselves hung with winches, cables, hooks and buckets, reaching out over the darkness.

  Wherever he went next, thought Schneider, it had to be well clear of that thing.

  To the right of the edifice, opposite the ranks of cranes, was relative emptiness—the lights there were smaller and lower, and some of them were slowly moving. There must be a road, thought Schneider, some way to escape this steel hell of a place, and whatever cruel coast had spawned the monster whose guts he had been reborn in.

  Slipping quietly through the crowd of disinterested zombies, doing everything he could to mimic their purposeless blundering, Schneider began to make his way towards the moving lights. The head slumped against his left shoulder began to moan softly.

  Soon, perhaps a hundred yards on, they had to shrink into the horde as a behemoth truck came growling from the dark behind them, an overseer’s bearded face glowering in its red-lit cabin. On its back were bales of heaped, dripping flesh, a gruesome mess of purple fibres, sallow fat and rubbery, scarred skin. Once the grumbling vehicle had passed, they began to move again, following its tail lights at a safe distance. Soon, they came upon a hill of meat.

  It swarmed with zombies. At its crest, a knot of corpses laboured with hatchets to dismember a pale, fanged worm, while dozens more loitered on its slopes, unloading armfuls of dripping meat from the truck. The hill’s perimeter was ringed by overseers in cruor-slicked leathers, their beasts dashing to and fro to discourage flocks of grey, bald-headed birds from darting in for scraps.

  Schneider was loath to approach the charnel-mound, but it stood directly in between him and the moving lights, and had to be passed if they were to escape. Worse yet, to its left stood the base of the enormous mast, barely a hundred yards away and lit bright as day by floodlights. ‘A rock and a hard place,’ murmured some stray neuron within him. ‘Scylla and what’s-her-name,’ offered another.

  In the blood-drenched alley between the pile and the tower, a mass of zombies eddied like the sluggish backwaters of a river. They would have to meander through the gap, blending in with the other dead without being siphoned off to work on the meat pile, or to something worse. And they couldn’t do that while leaning on each other—it wasn’t the sort of thing that happened around here. The dead thing had to walk by itself.

  Gently, Schneider lifted the zombie’s clenched arm from around his neck, and grabbed it by the shoulders. It hissed in what could well have been dismay, but he turned it towards him and did his best to make contact with its swimming eyes.

  “Listen. Listen,” he implored it. “You have to walk with me now. I can’t help you.”

  The creature barely seemed to register his words, reaching instead to grab his body and resume its slump, and he had to physically put its arms back in place.

  “No,” he insisted, stunned by how easily the words were coming from his leathery throat. “We’ll be hurt if you do that. You have to walk on your own for a bit.”

  Again it groaned and reached out for him, and Schneider lost his patience. Without heed for how wise a move it was to headbutt a zombie, he smashed his forehead into the other corpse’s and grabbed it by the ears, scared for a second they might come off.

  “Listen. Mate. I hate to hurt you, I do. But you have to hear me. We can’t get any further unless you do this with me, and I really need you to. If I lose you, I’m just running to save my own skin, and I’m going to lose my mind if that happens. Looking after you gives me a reason not to go mental, so please don’t screw this up for us. I need you.”

  Schneider wondered how he had managed to pronounce several sentences in a row without his tongue falling out of his mouth, and almost missed the other zombie staring right at him and nodding. Its arms fell away from his and it stood, favouring one hip, yet upright, waiting to move.

  They moved. Moaning a little for good measure, giving it a rest when he worried it might look unconvincing, Schneider led his clueless charge into the press, and did his best to look utterly hopeless. He bumped and blundered, arms spasming as he piled slowly into other corpses, head lolling without any seeming concern for where he was going.

  All the while, he could feel the gaze of the overseers on him. More than once, he imagined one wading towards him with a predatory sneer, felt empty pores dilate to release sweat that wasn’t there. Each time, it got harder not to flinch, or to turn his head to see if he was being watched.

  Worse yet, as he began slowly to make his way round the bulk of the flesh-mound, it occurred to him there was no way to check whether his hobbling companion was still following. What if they had slipped back into the uneasy rest of unconsciousness, had genuinely lost themselves in the slow chaos of bodies?

  Any attempt to circle back to check would surely only make the situation worse. There was nothing to do but press through and hope that the other body’s sojourn into sapience was persisting. “Don’t look back,” he told himself, as he walked through Hell. “Don’t look back.”

  As Schneider was considering a sly half-turn to check, he walked, eyes unfocused, into the broad back of an overseer. He almost screamed. Remaining limp and slack-jawed as the ashen-faced brute—a woman whose nose was half-consumed by a livid sore—turned and scowled at him, was a feat enough to make Schneider wonder if he had somehow forgotten a lifetime on the stage. It was good enough: with a disgusted huff, the rot-faced giantess grabbed the back of his shirt in her Kevlar gauntlet and barrelled him on through the crowd.

  As he gradually slowed his stagger to his previous slouch, Schneider noticed the crowd was thinning. The lower slopes of the fleshpile were petering out to his right, while the immensity of the crane tower was some way behind on his left. Making his way through the rapidly clearing press of zombies and relishing the slow dimming of the light as he moved away from the tower, he looked out to see what the hill had hidden.

  Some way to his right, a cliff edge dropped away to a broad, dark valley, where a swarm of bright lights drifted back and forth. Only... it wasn’t a valley. Looking closer at the surface below, Schneider saw brief, flickering reflections as the ground rose and fell in massive, heavy undulations. The sea. And the lights were boats.

  Boats. Of course. He was on a boat. A ship. A floating city so large it had docks built onto its side, and its own pitted iron geography. He had seen one side of it, back in the flensing yards on the other side of that leviathan hull, and now he was seeing the other, who knew how many hundreds of yards up and across its deck.

  There was no way to walk away from this place. Looking down off its mountainous hull, any thought that the little lights puttering to and fro could offer any escape was swiftly crushed. The sprawling grid of piers and jetties that made up the dock below were separated from him by a plunging wall of metal, without a staircase, ladder or rope in sight.

  And even from here he could see the docks were overrun with overseers, and free of wandering corpses. Bulky forms patrolled the loading platforms, keeping a watchful eye as conveyors and rails freighted crate after crate, barrel upon barrel, into the waiting holds of the boats.

  The industry of the docks was mesmerising; coming in fast, the smaller vessels were caught in docking cradles, then filled at incredible speed by hydraulic loading arms, before being ejected in reverse just minutes after arrival. As they turned to join the stream of lights, their wakes glowing white in the lamps of the great ship, the next boats were already pulling in.

  The river of cargo, visible as a bright, winding stripe like glowing ants, threaded across the black emptiness of the water, until coalescing into a solid thread somewhere near the horizon.

  Far, far out, where the lights of the boats were lost to distance, t
here was something else. Right on the horizon; a glow, like the edge of a dawn that would never come. Deep violet, a stain on the underside of the clouds that swelled in convulsions of distant, amethyst lightning.

  Schneider strained to make out more of that distant glow, until he realised it was not the limits of his vision he was straining against, but of his memory. This endless stream of boats, this bastion of metal in black water, that distant lightning. He knew it. He had seen it all before. He remembered.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SUDDENLY, BUT ALMOST casually, as a low belch of thunder rolled in from the purple spark on the horizon, Schneider came to understand where he was.

  Realisation had been building for a while, as in a dream. The endless crashing of waves, the constant grumbling of the low sky, the dreadful industry of the ship, was all the formless stuff of nightmares—until he saw that swarm of boats.

  He had seen that procession, beetling back and forth under stacks of meat and palls of diesel smoke, before. Hundreds of times, in fact—seen it from another dock, where it meant food and safety and civic health; a never-ending stream of goods that kept home alive.

  Home. That immense walled city—its name escaped his death-muddled brain—buttressed by coastal cliffs against the permanent siege on its landward side. Unchallenged by sea, provisioned by its fleets, adoring of its fishermen.

  He would watch the boats go out, sounding their foghorns in farewell, off to bring food for ten million souls from a distant place. From hundreds of miles away; from a black stone gate, it was said, whose arch stood a mile clear of the waves and whose apex drew purple lightning from a perpetual storm.

  And through the gate? A world of infinite water, bottomless, and teeming with monsters: Ocean.

  Memories pooled around the word like blood swelling from a pinprick.