by Nate Crowley
Wrack stopped in his tracks, poleaxed by the train of his own thoughts, and his pack steamed on into the next chamber without him. Somewhere in the journey between the ramp and the deep warrens, he had stopped thinking like an embarrassed librarian, and taken on the aspect of a violent revolutionary who spoke in the third person, and who thought about the mass annihilation of human consciousness purely in terms of its tactical benefit. It occurred to Wrack that his chin was caked black with human blood, and there were bits of somebody’s neck stuck between his teeth.
Once again, he considered that he had perilously little knowledge of his life before the day he had been dragged, protesting his innocence, from the wreckage of his library. Had he really been the scapegoat for someone else’s plot, or had he been the ringleader all along? It was, after all, beginning to feel horribly natural to lead a guerrilla army.
And then he clocked what was in the next chamber, and decided this would be a truly dreadful moment to talk himself out of becoming a monster. For he had just found the real monsters.
There were a dozen of them, wired into pedestals of chuntering machinery, in a room lit cold and blue by neon light. They were big to begin with, then made huge by the amount of metal, plastic, wood and rubber bolted onto their ruined bodies. They stood with heads bowed even as the hooting swarm invaded their prison-sanctum, chained into place with yards of black iron. But when Wrack entered the room, their heads snapped up to regard him. There was no sleep of death here.
At their heart was a colossus. There was no mistaking him, the weapon-laden horror he had beheld just before he had been sent to sea for the ET hunt. Wrack was looking straight into the blind eyes of another survivor of the Akhlut. Cracked lenses whirred on the rack of instruments bolted to the giant’s skull as Wrack approached, and scalded lips drew out into a blasted, carnivorous smile.
“Before you ask the obvious,” said the boiled hulk, “my name is Osedax: Bone-Eater.”
Once again, Wrack felt very much like a flustered librarian. Even without a half ton of weaponry fixed to his torso, menace and hate poured from the man like meltwater from a glacier. Wrack only hoped he could find something the puckered titan hated more than him. There was no point trying the soft approach here.
“You sank with the Akhlut,” stated Wrack, trying to sound as needlessly confrontational as he could.
“I did,” agreed Osedax, nodding. “But they build us with flotation machines, so they can always bring us back. They raised me up, towed me back, put me back together. Me and Riftia and Kuphus and Eunice. Isn’t that right, girls?” Three of the other monsters hissed in assent, chains clanking as they leaned forwards.
“You’re worth a lot of money to them, then?” asked Wrack, as the other dead in the room jostled in the shadows.
“Oh, no, it’s not just that,” replied Osedax, carcass grin still bared wide. “It’s the punishment. We’re killers, little man. We’ve been very bad. I’ve killed dogs, I’ve killed little kids. Just because I wanted to. Just for the sport of it.”
“You were killers, you mean,” corrected Wrack, faltering a little.
“No, boy. I was a bad man, and I still am a very bad man. So this is my sentence. I killed, and I kill, and I will kill. And they keep me conscious, and they keep me fixed up. So I can keep killing, and can’t forget.” Osedax shivered, chains clanking in their sockets as his huge chest shuddered, then his voice dropped to the whisper of graveyard mist. “Cute, though, that you’ve come to make me feel better, to... wake me up, to talk me into your little support group.”
Wrack felt anger surge through him. He thought of Once-Fat Man, roaring in dismay at the back of the boat, of Mouana whimpering in the rain, of Aroha’s pitiful eyes as he sank into the jaws of a devil. None had been so pathetic as this swollen mess of self-hatred.
“Well done,” said Wrack softly, as he bent for a wrench on the blood-smeared deck. “Well done!” he screamed, smashing the length of iron against Osedax’s thorax and leaving a spongy dent. “You’re terrifying!” he barked, half meaning it, and half spitting the word in scorn.
“I don’t know how long you’ve saved up this speech, but it’s useless. It’s shit. For a start, I’m not remotely afraid of you killing me, because I’m dead. And my pain receptors are buggered too, so torture wouldn’t be much of a laugh for you either.” Wrack shook the wrench. “Beyond primate dominance displays, your grinning and your flexing, you’ve got nothing to scare me with. Nothing.”
The silence could have melted through the floor. Wrack wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, but it felt amazing, and he continued.
“You’re the worst self-pitier I’ve met, Osedax, and I know myself all too well. So you got pulled back from Akhlut? Well done, you dicking great puppet. Me too. I pulled myself back from Ocean, me and everyone who’s causing trouble right now. We extended our own bloody ‘punishment,’ without any of those grey gits having to lay a finger on us.”
Osedax’s blind eyes widened in surprise—his mouth worked, but Wrack jumped back in before words could form. Talk, Mouana had said.
He gestured to the radio, and launched into a fresh tirade. “And why did we stick it out? Not because we’re spooky bloody psychopaths like you, but because this, all of this, is dreadful, and we’re willing to throw ourselves away to make it stop.”
Wrack hefted the wrench again, and shook it an inch from Osedax’s lumpen brow.
“Call yourself a killer? You’ve had damned harpoon guns welded on and off of your chest for who knows how long, and you’ve just gone along with it without lifting a finger towards the bosses. Sounds like you reckon you deserve what you’ve got.”
Silence thundered for a long moment, before the giant answered in a low grumble.
“Maybe I do,” he said.
“Maybe you do, Bone-Eater,” agreed Wrack, before tossing the wrench to the ground. “The question is, are you willing to do more killing? Because it’s already obvious the answer is ‘yes.’ Or do you want me to leave you chained up and piss off, then come back and have another chat when it’s all done?”
There was no answer.
“I thought so,” grinned Wrack. “Now don’t be sad, you big daft sod. This’ll cheer you up—I’m about to get all your weapons out, and have this lot bolt them onto you and all your scary mates.” Wrack made patronising movements with his hands at the word scary, then slapped a hand on Osedax’s restrained shoulder.
“And guess what I want you to do in exchange for freeing you?”
More silence, and a growl. Then the radio, the one tuned into Dead Air, burst into life, and Wrack’s eyes went wide. It was Mouana, at exactly the wrong moment.
“Hold on,” said Wrack, jabbing a finger into Osedax’s chest, “I have to take this.”
When he turned away, Wrack found he was shaking in terror. He was thankful he had emptied his stomach earlier, or he’d have voided it there and then. Bullying a musclebound cyborg murderer was not something he would have considered himself capable of even at the best of times.
“Yep,” he croaked into the radio. “Wrack here.”
Mouana’s voice was hard-edged, with no room for affection, as it was when she’d first left the hangar. “Pretty sure it’s time, Wrack. She’s up on the bridge, right now. We’re waiting for things to kick off. Really hope you’ve figured a signal.”
“Glad you’re doing well too,” muttered Wrack, rolling his eyes, then thumbed the switch.
“Yes,” he continued, “as it happens, I’ve just worked it out. Oh, and I’ve got the boiled bastards on side. I think.”
“Well done,” said Mouana, and Wrack wasn’t quite sure what to make of her tone. He was about to sign off, but hesitated. Whether it was because he was unsure of his chances of leaving the next conversation in one piece or not, he felt the need to be candid.
“Mouana,” he blurted. “I’m really glad you’re still alive. Or in one piece. You know what I mean. I’m so glad. Anyway, I’ll be there as soon as
I can—I just need to clear things up here.”
“OK,” said Mouana, as if she was ordering sandwiches, and the channel went dead.
“Bye,” whispered Wrack, before forcing his face into an overconfident grin and turning round, desperately hoping the tremor in his legs wasn’t visible.
“That’s our cue!” he shouted convivially, waiting for a moment before pantomiming sudden remembrance. “Sorry!” he cried, after no reply came, “and there was I thinking you were a talker. Never mind.” He cleared his mucus-gummed throat. “I was going to tell you what you could do in exchange for your freedom, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” snarled Osedax from his pump-station of a chest, his shoulders slumped.
“What I want you to do, Bone-Eater, is carve me right up,” said Wrack, as he ripped off his shirt. “You’ll love it—I’ll explain as we go along. And while you’re doing it, we’ll get your team here tooled up.”
Osedax gaped in confusion, but Wrack gave him no time to think. “Come on, then!” he yelled to his pack of cadavers. “Let’s get some boltcutters over here, look sharp! And when you’re done with that, there’s some huge weapons lying around the sides of the room that I think would look better bolted to these arseholes. Chop-chop!”
Wrack pulled a flensing knife from his belt and pushed it into Osedax’s palm, even as one of his pack shuffled up and cut the big man’s chains free. Ignoring the insanity of what he had just done, Wrack leaned in to the side of the giant’s head and whispered as if he was sharing a naughty joke.
“Alright, then, you big bastard. Here’s what I’m thinking...”
As he spoke, Wrack’s army bustled around the chamber, carrying nailguns, launchers and harpoon mounts over to the ruined prisoners. When he finished explaining, he was amazed to see Osedax looking at him with a grin like a dog given freedom to leap into a stream.
“Sounds good?” said Wrack, and the giant nodded.
“Yeah,” said Osedax, and the tension melted like ice shards on hot sand.
“Come on, then,” said Wrack, “you’re a man after my own heart.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEY CAME SLOWLY up the ramps and out of the underdeck, more than a thousand strong. Not in the wild dash of apes on the hunt, but at a measured stalking pace, ready to wade into bullets if need be.
Wrack led the vanguard, comprising the dozen war-built and a hundred or so of the most together of his pack. They came up a slipway used to send craft like the Akhlut belowdecks from their mounts on the ship’s central ridge, treading over wooden sleepers as they emerged.
As they trudged up into the light, Wrack half expected one of the mammoth whaleboats to come sliding down the metal rails and over them, turning his march into paste with one rumbling stroke. But nothing came. In fact, not a single overseer awaited them as they emerged.
The sky above them was white, choked with vapour as the sun approached Ocean’s slow noon. Wrack looked to either side: from ramps and slipways and hatches for hundreds of yards to each side, zombies were walking, shambling, crawling into the daylight, all silent. No work gangs stood in their way; all was empty deck, for as far as the eye could make out until fog stole the distance.
They were almost exactly amidships, on the Tavuto’s starboard flank. To their right sat the steel lagoon and the disassembled Bahamut at its side; the flensing yards and their row of cranes sprawled beyond, hazy behind walls of smoke from the trying vats. Ahead and immediately to their left, looming like a cliff, was the stark iron mount of Dakuvanga, rising hundreds of yards into thick cloud.
Straight across the deck from them, perhaps three hundred yards away and shadowed by the gaze of the god-crane, was the meat hill that Mouana and he had passed on their first night; a wobbling mound of offcuts piled to be hacked apart before being ferried down to the docks. From memory, it was overlooked by the saturnine carbuncle of the Tavuto’s bridge, where Mouana had told him their silent collaborator was ready and waiting. So that was where they needed to go.
He fixed his eyes on the top of the meat pile and began walking, looking neither to right nor left, expecting every second for bullets to begin sleeting down from the cranes above. But nothing came.
The ship’s vile, bald-headed birds screamed and wheeled in the fog overhead. Overseers watched in the distant mist, silent, holding rifles.
Wrack twiddled with his radios. While Dead Air crackled with murmured, potentially accidental broadcasts, the main channels were silent. The whole ship, dead and alive, was waiting for something to happen. Well, he thought, there was no point in subtlety now. Grabbing the shoulders of zombies from his pack as he walked, he hissed at them to run as far as they could and tell any other dead people they saw that now was the time. Then he got on the radio.
“Hello Tavuto, this is Wrack. Looks like this is happening.”
Immediately after he let go of the broadcast switch, a volley of wordless roars came back in response on Dead Air. Still the main channel was silent. But still the bullets didn’t come, and so he walked on, Osedax’s war-built clanking and hissing behind him.
As they approached the meat hill he saw it was surrounded by the dead, working listlessly. They carried on hacking and sawing, but almost every head turned towards him as he approached. Fifty yards out, he clocked Mouana in their midst, but did nothing to acknowledge her presence beyond the briefest flicker of a smile. If a sniper’s bullet was headed for him it would all be on her to work things out, so there was no worth in pointing her out as a target.
Ploughing through the mob of bowed, salt-stained cadavers around the mound, he saw one of them had picked up a loudhailer, and plucked it from their unprotesting hand. Surely now there was no mistaking him—and he was in full view of the bridge tower. As the outer scraps of the meatpile began to squelch under his feet, Wrack imagined a dozen crosshairs floating over his scalp, and lost his nerve.
He sprinted up the meat pile. Today it was skinned sharks, embryos taken from the birth canal of some pelagic matriarch, their teeth glinting like nubs of sharpened pearl in a slick of pink bodies. They caught on the bandages wrapping his feet as he climbed; his heels sank into the raw gashes in their gutted bellies. They slipped down, tore at his shins, made five steps achieve the distance of one, but he pounded to the top. When he arrived, he was not out of breath.
With the loudhailer raised halfway to his lips, Wrack stood and took it all in. Around him, a ring of the dead, thousands strong, watched him with a fire in their cataracted eyes. Mouana, surrounded by a mob of Blades, looked on with her arms folded. Osedax and his posse remained motionless, a monstrous wedge standing some way back from the crowd.
And there above him, like an emperor’s box in the arena, the ship’s bridge glowered. At its glassless windows stood a row of overseers, backlit by green even in daylight, their faces passionless as they stared down at him.
Only one of them moved. Sat in an ornate steel chair at the centre of the bridge, skull plugged with wires and grimacing as if through a migraine: the pilot of Teuthis. And to their side, just a foot away, stood Whina. His eyes slid across hers, and she gave a barely perceptible nod.
A bird honked dismally, far above. Wrack raised the loudhailer and opened his mouth.
“Tavuto,” he began, then fell silent.
Thousands of eyes were staring at him, but he hadn’t the faintest idea what words to use. What could he say that wasn’t stating the obvious? It wasn’t as if the overseers were expecting him to thank them for their hospitality on behalf of the ship’s workforce. And if the watching dead still needed talking round to the thought of violence, there was no hope for them anyway. And in any case, every time he opened his mouth to give an inspiring speech, he was interrupted—it had happened twice in the hangar, and once on the radio in the Bahamut’s guts. Holding forth now would just be tempting a bullet.
So Wrack decided to let his actions speak for him.
He threw down the loudhailer, letting it bounce down the pile of skinless sh
arks, and reached down to the ghastly hole Osedax had carved below his sternum. Gritting his teeth, he reached in with his right hand, nuzzling beneath the cartilage of his sternum, and rummaged between the hanging dead weights of his lungs.
He had rehearsed this motion in the dark of the killer’s cell, but it became much harder with the ship’s overseers and countless potential rioters watching him. He fumbled, fingertips slipping against surfaces only a surgeon should touch, thumb pushing aside rotten membranes as rib-tips grated against his wrist.
Then he gripped it. It was smooth, hard in his hand, like a wax pouch. His thumb traced over the fatty sheath built up by a lifetime of fried food, and his fingers curled round, hooking over the stiff tubes of major veins. Then, looking Whina right in the face, he yanked.
IT WAS THEN, as he felt arterial tissue stretch and snap at the centre of chest, that he silently thanked himself for having Osedax cut halfway through his aorta during the rehearsal. The human body really was a robust thing; it was really stuck in there. Gurning as he felt something rip horribly out of place, Wrack gave a mighty tug, and tore out his own heart.
Screaming wordlessly, Wrack held the bruised organ out in front of him, presenting it to the overseers as if in tribute. Then he turned to face his crowd and squeezed, wringing black juice from the long-dead ventricles and into the hill of city-bound sharkmeat.
At that point, everything went completely mental. A wall of crashing human rage rose from the masses surrounding the pile, and the crowd erupted into motion. Zombies reached into their own chests where there were wounds, or drove whatever blades they could find into their neighbours to open them up.
Within the first few seconds, a forest of arms rose into the air, hearts in hands, and more followed. Wrack caught sight of Mouana grinning madly, a flensing blade rammed into her solar plexus by her own hand, and he shook his heart at her, dark clots raining through the air.