Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “Nyx!”

  She turned. Yah Tayyib was upright. Blood streamed from his face.

  “Tayyib? I need to find Rhys!”

  Yah Tayyib started climbing toward her. Other passengers began to move and moan. Nyx pushed past a few as they staggered around looking for belongings. A high, keening cry cut the air. Then another and another as the survivors picked through the corpses.

  “What of Suha and Eshe?” Yah Tayyib asked as he came up next to her. She climbed on top of the shattered hull of the overturned first class cabin and started pressing her face to all the opaqued windows.

  “They’re at the back. They’ll find us,” she said. “No damage back there.”

  The porters were calling people together to comb the wreckage.

  Nyx crawled across broken windows and twisted metal. Bug swarms were gathering above them.

  “We need to move soon,” Yah Tayyib said, staring at the swarms.

  “Where?” Nyx said. “Into the jungle?”

  “We’re only a few kilometers from Beh Ayin. It’s dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as staying here.”

  “Nyx?”

  Rhys’s voice.

  She looked down the pitch of the tracks. He stood straight in his tattered coat. He was missing a boot, and she saw his hands were scratched and bloody.

  She crawled down from the wreckage and walked toward him.

  “Yah Tayyib’s right,” Rhys said. “We need to move. The bugs are going to pick this place clean.”

  They found Suha and Eshe bruised and shaken, but alive. It took another half hour to recover their bags and get Rhys some new boots off a corpse. By then, the swarms had darkened the sky.

  “Come, come,” Yah Tayyib said.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” one of the porters called. The porter had gathered a few dozen survivors in the ruins of the train. More were climbing along the rear of the train, pulling people from the cars.

  Nyx didn’t even look back at him. She handed Eshe a jar of unguent. “You slather yourself in that. It’s a long hike. Won’t be pleasant.”

  Yah Tayyib looked back up at the sky as they pushed into the jungle.

  “They’re dead, ain’t they?” Suha said.

  “Without a half-dozen magicians?” Yah Tayyib said. “Yes.” He led the way deeper into the contaminated wilderness.

  37.

  Within an hour, cysts had appeared in the warm, moist crevices of Rhys’s armpits, the kink of his elbow, the soft flesh behind his ear. He could convince some of them to burst and expire through will alone, but the rest he cut out. It always hurt worse if you let the little ticks and midges grow and split open on their own.

  Yah Tayyib kept away the worst of the bugs—the hulking, skittering shapes that paced them as they walked along the tracks. They had moved back onto the train tracks after they cleared the wreck. They moved steadily east now in the faltering daylight. Getting caught out in the jungle overnight wasn’t… promising. The bugs out here were far too big and far too wild for Rhys to control. He felt them, yes, though not as keenly as Yah Tayyib felt them. Every few minutes, he was able to call in a dragonfly swarm to eat the lesser biting bugs that plagued them—the ones Yah Tayyib did not have the stamina to bother with.

  Rhys brought up the rear of their little processional. Suha walked ahead of him, hands moving to her pistols every time something in the undergrowth shuddered and hissed. He didn’t bother telling her that the bugs would be too fast and too well-armored to kill with regular bullets. They had few enough bullets as it was to go bouncing them off mutant scarabs and horned beetles that likely weighed a hundred kilos.

  Ahead, Yah Tayyib paused. Rhys saw a large, dark shape moving along the tracks ahead.

  “You want me to shoot it?” Eshe asked.

  “Low on ammo,” Suha said. “Save it for when we need it.”

  When. Not if. Rhys appreciated her sense of the inevitable.

  Nyx pushed up next to Yah Tayyib. Rhys moved next to her to get a better look.

  “What the fuck is that?” Nyx said.

  It was a centipede, six meters long, gnawing on some dead creature run over by the last train that had come through. The centipede’s head was as big as Rhys’s—the torso about matched Eshe’s in breadth.

  As Rhys watched, it lifted its giant head from its meal and turned its antennae toward them.

  “Please tell me I can shoot it,” Eshe said.

  “Save the bullets,” Nyx said. “Tayyib?”

  Yah Tayyib shook his head. “It’s not responding. They’re very wild out here. Very contaminated. Not everything responds.”

  Nyx looked back at Rhys. She had fished a hijab out of the wreckage, and wore it pulled forward to get some relief from the sun pounding down on her uncovered face.

  “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “Eshe has a good one,” Rhys said. “It’s not as well-armored as the beetles. But then, the bullets might just antagonize it.”

  “If it’s angry, it will charge,” Yah Tayyib said. “Are you keen on wrestling with a giant centipede?”

  “It would be a first,” Nyx said.

  Rhys snorted. He didn’t think it was a laugh until it came out that way. Nyx looked surprised, raised a brow.

  “You want to help?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “You’re on your own.”

  “Maybe we can just wait,” Eshe said. “Or go around?”

  “Fuck that,” Suha said. She pulled her pistols. “Fine. Let’s do it.”

  Nyx raised her scattergun, and the two of them stepped up in front of Yah Tayyib. Rhys shook his head and stepped up with them.

  “You game, gravy?” Nyx said.

  “Somebody here actually needs to hit something,” he said.

  “Might be I’m a better shot these days with all that good bug juice Tayyib gave me.”

  “Then I’ll know for sure it’s the End Times,” he said.

  Rhys pulled his pistols. They felt strange in his new hands. Not quite alien, but… different. Somebody else wielding all that death.

  They started forward together.

  The centipede’s head bobbed back and forth. Its legs rippled. The first three meters reared up at them. Rhys realized what a massive reach the thing would have.

  He fired first.

  The centipede’s head jerked back. Rhys saw a satisfying spray of blackish blood. Then it hissed. The massive jaws worked, and then it was coming straight at them.

  Six meters of centipede was a lot of bug.

  They opened fire.

  It kept coming.

  Rhys stepped back. Nyx started reloading her scattergun. Suha swore.

  Rhys aimed again at the head. The centipede reared up again and lashed out with its broken, oozing head.

  Nyx swung her scattergun, caught the thing in the jaw.

  Rhys fired three more times, point blank. The head dropped—right onto his shoulder. He went down under the smooth, bloody carapace.

  “Fuck!” Rhys yelled. Blood and bug offal splattered his face. He tried to push the bug off him. The long, velvety legs—long as his hands—twitched.

  Nyx was making some kind of sound. Rhys tried wriggling out from under the centipede. He managed to clear his head.

  Nyx was laughing.

  “For God’s sake!” Rhys said.

  Nyx laughed. She, too, was covered in blood. She bent over and helped him up. Her shoulders still shook.

  “Oh God, you should see your face,” she said. “You should see it.”

  Rhys tried to wipe some of the blood and offal from his coat.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Yah Tayyib said. He came forward and patted Rhys on the shoulder. “Very nice shooting.”

  “That’s about all we got, though,” Suha said, unloading her clip. He watched her count the remaining bullets. Three still in the clip. Rhys had two left in each pistol. He wasn’t sure about Nyx.

  “Let me kill it next time,” Eshe said as he stepped o
ver the twitching ruin of the centipede. “Knives don’t run out.”

  “I’d love to see you wrangle the next one,” Rhys said.

  “Wanna fight me for it?” Eshe said, slyly.

  As they walked, the bugs got bolder.

  Suha started throwing stones at some of the shiny scarab beetles—tall as Rhys’s knee—that poked their heads up out of the underbrush.

  These were easier for Yah Tayyib to turn away, but it meant the midges and markflies and mosquitoes and other biting insects got worse.

  They stopped three times to slather on more bug unguent. Rhys’s thick hands were already littered with bites. When he handed Nyx the bottle of unguent, he saw a bruise on the side of her face big as a thumbnail, and a long smear of some dead bug that had tried sucking her face off.

  In truth, he was more worried about the scarabs.

  “Think I could get anything for the shells?” Eshe asked as they walked. Nyx was passing around the last of their water. “Real pretty.”

  “You get close enough to take a shell, it’ll take your arm off,” Rhys said.

  “Yours, maybe,” Eshe said.

  “They’re carrion eaters. Those jaws are designed to strip flesh from bone.”

  “It can try,” Eshe said. His knife appeared in his hands. A slim blade about as long as his arm from wrist to elbow.

  “Careful you don’t cut your arm off with that,” Rhys said.

  “I know which end’s the pointy one,” Eshe said. He glanced at Rhys’s hands. Rhys waited for a follow up about clumsy fingers. It didn’t come. Maybe the boy was smarter than he pretended. He’d have to be, to survive this long with Nyx.

  They trailed the others.

  “How’d you end up with her?” Rhys asked.

  Eshe eyed him sideways. “How did you?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “It was like that,” Eshe said, and nodded. He sheathed his blade.

  Rhys slapped at a mosquito—big as his thumb—that had settled on his left wrist. He sent out another call for a dragonfly swarm. There were none nearby. He tried again, a stronger message this time. Something tickled back in response. Some errant swarm. He told them to find others like them and bring them to him.

  “So,” Eshe said, nodding toward Nyx where she walked ahead of them with Yah Tayyib, just out of earshot, “you two ever… you know?”

  “Why does everyone ask that?”

  “Just seems like a normal thing to do,” Eshe said.

  “Maybe in Nasheen. I’m Chenjan. The world doesn’t work that way. We have morals.”

  “I have morals,” Eshe said. “I’ve prayed three times today. I haven’t seen you pray once.”

  Rhys frowned. His chest tightened. Guilt? Anger? He wasn’t sure. Something he didn’t feel comfortable naming, not yet. “It takes concentration to keep the swarms from overtaking us,” he said.

  The boy looked dubious.

  Rhys watched Nyx walking ahead of him. She was an intimidating figure, even now, twenty kilos lighter than when he’d last seen her. Broad in the shoulders, the hips. When she sparred—

  He shook his head and looked away, back out into the brush. He missed his lemon trees. Elahyiah. The girls playing with ladybugs in the yard. It was just… How long ago, now? The pistols at his hips felt heavy. He missed the gauzy bisht, the…

  Another biting bug attacked his neck. He smacked at it. The dragonfly swarm finally arrived. They began to swim and dart above him. Eshe breathed a sigh of relief.

  Rhys was covered in dried blood and crushed beetle carapace. His hands were heavy. His fingers were slightly numb at the tips. He hadn’t prayed since the morning before, and he hadn’t missed it. It was not the Kitab he brought with him to Beh Ayin, but a book of poetry called The Caged Unbeliever. Chenjan poetry—old—from before the war. Like most works written before the war, it was in the prayer language, which was why he could make any sense of it at all.

  Why had he brought that instead of the Kitab?

  “We got movement!” Suha yelled.

  Rhys turned. The day was moving into dusk. He saw a low purple haze along the western edge of the horizon. As he watched, a dozen giant scarabs burst from the undergrowth and charged up the cleared bank of the train tracks toward them.

  Rhys fired. It took two shots just to stop one of them. Two more shots for a second, and he was out. Suha’s guns clicked immediately after his. Nyx’s scattergun didn’t faze the incoming wave of insects. She stopped to reload as the first wave broke.

  Eshe pulled his knife. Rhys drew a dagger from his boot.

  Yah Tayyib turned toward the bugs and drew his hands up and across his body.

  A massive black swarm of locusts rose from the scrub brush along the tracks and created a wall between them and the scarabs.

  “Move, move!” Nyx yelled at Rhys and Eshe.

  Rhys didn’t need a second prompt. He ran after her and Suha up the tracks. Yah Tayyib followed after them. Rhys glanced over his shoulder. The locust swarm was holding, but the scarabs were simply chewing their way through.

  “The fuck longer is it?” Suha yelled.

  Rhys shook his head. His breath came hard and fast. Yah Tayyib wasn’t as fit, and lagged behind. Rhys eased up his pace, held out a hand.

  “Come on!” he said.

  Yah Tayyib took his hand.

  They brought up the rear of the group as the train tracks wound around a low rise. As they rounded it, Rhys was blinded by the setting suns. The big orange demon hung bloody red in the dusky sky. Above it, the bigger blue sun still raged, just visible now that the light from its companion had begun to wane. The whole world went lavender.

  Rhys caught his breath, and choked on a giant mosquito. He coughed and spat.

  Ahead of them—not a kilometer distant—the sheered, broken hilltop of Beh Ayin gleamed in the dusky sky.

  “That’s it!” Rhys said. “That’s it!”

  Nyx and Suha and Eshe paused ahead of him. Nyx followed the line of his arm and grinned.

  “Fuck me,” Nyx said.

  A dark shape blackened the sky. It came in so fast Rhys blinked and Nyx was suddenly gone, sprawled on the other side of the tracks.

  Rhys scrambled after her, but Eshe was quicker.

  The black shape circled once, then rushed back at Nyx with a high-pitched buzzing that hurt Rhys’s ears. It was a massive hornet, big as a dog, like nothing Rhys had ever seen.

  As it dove, Rhys watched Eshe draw his dagger and leap at it from the height of the tracks.

  The hornet dropped like a stone.

  Nyx was scrambling back up the hill.

  Rhys ran down. They met over the body of the hornet. Eshe’s big knife spouted from the insect’s armored head. Eshe still had both hands on the hilt.

  “The fuck is that?” Suha called.

  “Are there more of those?” Nyx said, rubbing her shoulder.

  “I very nearly had it,” Yah Tayyib said. He placed a slender hand on the hornet’s abdomen. “I nearly controlled it.” Rhys heard something like awe. Tried to imagine the kind of damage Yah Tayyib could do with a hornet that size.

  The stinger on the hornet’s abdomen was as long as Eshe’s knife. Eshe pulled the knife free of the head and pointed it at Rhys.

  “That’s the pointy end,” Eshe said.

  38.

  Nyx soaked in a tub of aloe and bug balm from the local hedge witch—they called them mendicants, here—and wished she was back in the desert.

  It was a lot safer.

  “Hey, hurry up in there!” Suha yelled.

  Nyx hosed herself off in the tiled shower. Rhys had found them a hotel at the lower end of the city, right up against the filter. When she sat out on the balcony, she could hear the bugs outside hissing and chittering. She wasn’t sure how many of them were going to sleep tonight with all that racket going on. Not her.

  She opened the door for Suha and finished dressing while Suha disrobed.

  “How you
holding up?” Nyx asked. She had washed out her hair. It hung clean and ropy across her shoulders. She started braiding it, using the bronzed mirror over the stone sink as a guide.

  “Weird question,” Suha said from the tub.

  “Guess so,” Nyx said.

  “Nyx?” Eshe’s voice.

  “What?” Nyx yelled back at the door.

  “Inaya’s here!”

  “Who?”

  “Inaya! That white woman!”

  “You’re kidding me,” Suha muttered.

  Nyx pulled her hair back into a tail and opened the door. Eshe had already cleaned up. His hair was damp and shaggy around his ears. She was starting to get used to it.

  “Where is she?” Nyx asked.

  “Downstairs. They wouldn’t give her the room number. I came down.”

  “She alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say why she’s here?”

  “No. Just wants to talk to you.”

  Nyx padded barefoot down the smooth steps. For all its proximity to the filter, the hotel was clean enough, and nobody asked her to cover her hair. It was something.

  Inaya waited in the latticed archway separating the reception counter from the waiting area. She was dressed like a good Tirhani matron, and carried a large carpet bag in both hands.

  Nyx hesitated along the stair, looking for some sign of Khos. Nothing.

  “What you doing here?” Nyx asked as she came into the foyer.

  Inaya looked oddly relieved to see her. “You’re alive,” she said. “I heard about the train.”

  “Terrorist bomb, they’re saying. Didn’t know you Ras Tiegans had that big a grudge with Tirhan, still.”

  Inaya’s face twisted. “They murdered thirty thousand people when they claimed this region. Whole towns. I do not begrudge the people here. They are colonized.”

  “Careful where you say that,” Nyx said. There was no one at the front desk, and Beh Ayin seemed like a laid-back frontier town, but Nyx didn’t trust Tirhanis much more than Chenjans.

  “It’s not about that anyhow,” Inaya said. “Or, it is, but not in the way you think. Can we speak privately?”

  “Come up.” Nyx brought her upstairs to the room she shared with Eshe and Suha. They’d split up the rooms for privacy and sanity. Rhys and Yah Tayyib slept next door.