by Andrew Post
“You should’ve mentioned that earlier.”
“I was afraid to.”
“Even if he killed the blackcoats for his own gain—and isn’t working with Lyle—I’m still gonna kill him.”
“I’m fine with that.”
“Take a peek,” she said.
Reluctantly, Erik leaned out around the carriage. Working as her eyes, Anoushka watched Erik peer.
“I was really hoping the snow would’ve made you guys turn back. I mean, I want you to get Eichelberger, absolutely, but when I saw how bad off this place was . . .” He glanced back at her, seeming almost embarrassed. “I dreaded seeing you show up here. But now that you are, it is good seeing you,” he said and smiled. He always had a nice smile. Toothy, broad. White teeth.
A shot sparked off the cobblestones near Erik’s feet. Taking him by the arm, Anoushka hauled him back behind the carriage with her.
Down the lane, the sounds of someone reloading echoed. A hoarse voice boomed in the smoky distance. “Unt chunnak hai. Unt channak hukki!”
Erik latched hands over his mouth, his nose whistling his panicked breaths.
Anoushka crept to the edge of the carriage, listening. The heavy, shuffling footfalls stopped. She had no idea how close they were.
Through the crackle of the burning blockade, she could barely hear an orc call to another. Still a ways off. The second was possibly questioning what the other had been shooting at. She knew only some of the orcs’ rough language.
They were probably twenty yards down the street, if she had to guess. One with a throaty cadence, the other more grating and shrill. “Channa hai,” the gruffer one barked. “Fuen channak, fuen channak hai, ka-kannek.”
Erik started to reach for Anoushka’s wrist but didn’t take hold. “We should go,” he said. “There’s never only two of them alone.”
They were never that organized before. Maybe Lyle was doing more than leading occupations but lending tactics to the orcs as well, his own Invitation to Civility Initiative.
“Fuen naught-CHANNAK,” the shrill one called.
The other raged, “Channak FUEN. Fuen hai!”
They continued berating each other. Anoushka no longer had to strain to hear their feet scrape along the street, approaching.
She noticed behind Erik was a window, without bars or shutters. Nothing inside the dark room beyond. Some firelight was throwing an orange square, cut by the window’s shape, onto a far wall.
The overturned carriage’s wheel lay at their feet, having fallen loose of its splintered axel. Holstering to use both hands, Anoushka hoisted it by its rim, swung back—and screaming to bolster the effort—launched it crashing through the window.
Behind, shouts and orcs’ charging footfalls. “Channak!”
She heard the blockade’s flames whoosh—once, twice—things fanning the blaze, jumping over, stirring them.
After pushing Erik into the apartment ahead of her, Anoushka crawled in. Glass remained in the frame, Erik hissing as he laid his palms on the shards to draw himself up. Anoushka cut herself the same, climbing in behind.
Glass exploded into the room as one orc leaped into the room ahead of her. Another came in from behind, the same window Erik and Anoushka had clambered in through. She turned, fired at the closer one. The second, charging toward Erik with his rifle stock craned back to pummel him, got his ankle caught in the spokes of the wagon wheel on the floor. She fired, the shot taking a piece of his ear. He seemed unbothered; on hands and knees, the orc raised his rifle—trained right at Anoushka.
Erik lunged, one hand out trying to smack the rifle away. His fingers curled the barrel, over its end. Stumbling over backward, the orc squeezed the trigger—and pieces of Erik’s hand were sent flying about the room.
Before the orc could free his ankle, Anoushka fired twice into its chest, dropping him.
“Oh gods,” Erik said, dropping to the carpet. He’d been left part of a thumb and his little finger. The rest of his hand was crescent-shaped, raw bone blackened by gunpowder. He sat, sweating and shivering, scrambling backward over the carpet as if trying to move away from the sight of his exploded hand would undo the damage.
Anoushka took off her belt, wound it about Erik’s wrist, and cinched it tight, knotting the leather band twice. A rag off the kitchen counter would have to serve as a temporary bandage. The blood slowed to a trickle but still sopped the washrag until it dripped. As Anoushka tried fashioning a sling for Erik, she noticed his blinks became slow. His drained face kept drooping forward, his head wobbling loose on his neck. She gave his shoulders a shake. Setting Erik in the apartment parlor’s wingback chair, she counted to five, then stuck her head out the broken window. There was shouting, a block or two away.
“We can’t stay here,” she said, withdrawing.
Something thumped. The orc still caught in the wagon wheel twitched in slowing pulses, overgrown toenails clicking against the nearest wall’s baseboard. Watching the greenie while she reloaded, Anoushka waited until the orc sighed its death rattle and went still. Kicking away the orc’s stolen Committee-issue rifle, she took aim at the back of its head—ready for Lyle to spring the orc back to standing. It’d undergone the scarification she’d seen many times on others—ropy trails around its eyes, sweeping up and over its scalp and down the neck. Leather armor, crude flaps of it strapped on with found rope and beach-washed twine.
It didn’t stir, didn’t rise. As unpleasant as it had been to see Lyle make a dead being hoist itself to standing, Anoushka wished for it at that moment. He’d hijacked nothing since they’d arrived on the island. Maybe he wasn’t here; fled with tail between his legs into Skivvit’s protection. Or maybe he was still in the city but had gone quiet, hiding.
Nothing. It remained dead. She holstered and helped Erik to his feet. He groaned and cursed.
The bathroom was the only other room on this side of the apartment with a window. Anoushka pushed it open—quietly—and leaned out. A narrow alley that made an L. They were at the elbow’s crook. Nothing either way. But after a moment, she could hear shouts coming from the street at the alley’s end, passing. Orcs’ guttural yells. They were coming around the front.
Anoushka dropped out, then helped Erik, shushing him as he awkwardly climbed out using only one hand. He left a small smear of red on the window frame. They needed something better for his wound.
They barely cleared the alleyway before Anoushka heard the front door of the apartment behind them get kicked in. Gunfire at once, a haphazard barrage the minute they were in. After they found nothing but their dead fellows, an aggrieved roar came.
* * *
Farther away in the industrial section of New Kambleburg, in Frank’s Diner—Anoushka had remembered they had pretty great waffles—the squad was squeezed into a booth at the back, eating the well-won breakfast Anoushka treated them to. They’d had a squabble with the packet boat driver’s union that’d turned ugly. They’d ended the dispute without ever making Joan bark at them. Russell, she recalled, kicking in the diner’s front door, had beat the greasy spoon’s previous record of seventeen waffles in one sitting. Sadness pricked her at that thought—but it rapidly grew enormous when she realized Zuther, Russell’s best friend, still didn’t know of the dwarf’s deceit or that he was now dead.
The place was as dark and quiet as a tomb now, every booth empty. After closing the door behind them—snuffing the string of bells on the door before they jangled too loudly—Anoushka drew the shutters, sat Erik in a booth, and took the seat across from him. Chopped moonlight came through the shutter slats, throwing bars of cold blue over Erik’s sweat-slicked face.
“You said those on the ships will get suspicious if no morning flare goes up.” She peeked out through the shutters, to the sky. “The suns are gonna be coming up soon.”
“I’m okay. You can go.” Erik kept swallowing and licking his lips. His head continued to move in slow seasick swivels, and he couldn’t keep his eyes focused on any one thing for lo
ng.
“We need to do something about your hand first,” she said.
“It’s bandaged.”
“It’s not enough.” If only Kylie-Nae was here. She’d know what to do.
“If you don’t mind, I’m not really in any kind of state to thank you for saving my life any other way than just saying it. Though, losing most of a hand might suffice.” Head loose on his neck, he gave a drunken smile. “Thank you, though. I mean it.”
“You’re getting loopy. You’ve lost too much blood.”
“Isn’t any too much?”
Anoushka went around behind the diner’s counter. There she found the proprietors—a husband-and-wife spatula-slinging duo, she recalled, often sang in a tolerable screechy duet as they cooked. They were huddled together, stained apron fronts touching. Both chefs were gray-faced. Gone.
Anoushka stepped over them, walked to the griddle, and clicked on the gas. The long-hardened grease began to crackle. She used a spatula to clear a clean spot on the long sheet of hot metal.
“Is this gonna hurt?” Erik asked as Anoushka walked him near. He came around behind the counter, blanched at the sight of Frank and his wife, and nearly collapsed. Anoushka was quick to catch him. She led him over to the griddle. A forsaken scrap of bacon danced around, sputtering.
“At least it smells good here,” Erik said. “Last place I’ve been that smells good was . . . Shit, I have no idea.”
“Please be quiet.” Anoushka undid the belt, and what remained of his hand immediately began to dribble blood. Before he could protest, she put herself behind Erik, took his wrist, and gave him a shove, bending him over. She was glad she’d put the bloody belt in his teeth. His screams would’ve drawn the orcs for sure. She held him there until each time she lifted his shattered hand away an inch, no blood dribbled out, turning to a puff of smoke.
His pained snarls died in his throat, and he became jelly in her arms. She eased him to the floor, shut off the burners, and tried to ignore the smell of her ex-boyfriend’s burning flesh as she dragged him from the kitchen. She took off his boots and put them behind his head.
She sat with Erik until he woke up.
“You remember that weekend in the Islands?”
“Yeah,” she said, giving him a glass of water. “I do. We both looked like tomatoes we got so sunsburned.”
“And the peeling afterward? Gods. I remember we got up the next morning at the hotel, and it looked as if someone had poured a whole sack of potato skins in the bedsheets.”
“You got this great golden tan,” she said. “And here I was, as pasty as . . . well, paste, and all I get is these.” She rolled up her jacket sleeve to show Erik the brown pinprick constellation on her forearm.
Surprising her, Erik reached out and traced a line between two of the darker spots. He connected two before withdrawing, as if he’d meant to only look and not touch.
She accidentally looked at his rebandaged hand, those capable and nimble fingers now gone.
“Why’d you sell the story?” Anoushka said without anger. “Because that really hurt. And what I said about my friends was between you and me. I guess I shouldn’t have said those things if I didn’t ever want them repeated, but it was still pretty low.”
“It was low. It was. I’d mouthed off to my boss and got my walking papers and ended up in Darvin . . . saw a bill saying this guy was paying for war stories. Went, asked if it was okay if the one I had wasn’t actually mine, and he said he’d still give me thirty julas for it.”
“Thirty julas.” Anoushka shook her head.
“I know.” Erik started to raise his hand to cradle his temple, a hand that wasn’t there anymore. She always thought when he did that, holding his head like that, it was like him putting a shield up over his face. Now he had nothing to hide behind.
“I was desperate. Not that that excuses it. I said I’m sorry. I’ll say it again and again if you want me to. As many times as I need to.”
“It’s fine,” Anoushka said.
“I can tell it’s not.” He reached for her.
“Really,” she said and took his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “It is.”
“How about after we get through with all this, we go rent room seven again, huh?” he said. “Sit out on the beach, have those drinks with the slices of fruit in them? But this time, we’ll sit in the shade.”
His hand in hers lost its grip, cold and heavy.
She let him pull away.
“I’m trying to think positive here,” he said “We can make it out of this. We find your squad, we get to the bottom of this thing with Mann, we find some way to get out of this town and—”
“I need to go find them,” Anoushka said, standing. “You’re staying here.”
“Anoushka,” Erik said. He tried pushing up off the floor with his ruined hand—and howled. He covered his mouth and lay back, biting his fingers. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scream like that, but fuck . . . oh gods. Fuck.”
Anoushka took her mammoth-killer and spun it around in her hand and extended the grip toward him. “If the bells ring on the front door out there”—she motioned through the swinging kitchen door—“and no one knocks three times, like this, shoot, assuming it’s not me.” She moved his hair out of his face, trailed a finger down his bristly cheek. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Anoushka, wait.”
The bells rang on the front door as she passed into the cold, dark street. She heard Erik shuffle around inside the diner, cursing as he tried to follow her. She could count on one hand how many times he actually listened to her. But she didn’t hear the bells jangle a second time.
Who Made Who?
Red boiled the horizon, Aurorin and Teanna starting their daily chase across the sky. Anoushka hastened her stride but not fast enough for her boots on the street to carry and echo. While normally unbothered by the cold, she’d been in it so long now, she’d lost feeling in her toes and her hands ached. She’d get warm once she found the others, she told herself and continued on.
Nearing a corner, she stopped to listen. Something was rummaging ahead. Anoushka stole a peek, seeing an overturned can with a set of hind legs and a tail sticking out.
“Teetee,” Anoushka whispered and tried to imitate Peter’s whistle.
The wolfhound withdrew from the trash can and turned until it caught Anoushka with his burning gold eyes. It was the only acknowledgment Teetee gave—no wagging tail, no springing close for a scratch behind the ears. Not that he ever had that kind of rapport with Anoushka. But something in the dog’s silvery, aged muzzle read differently. Less focused, exhausted. He turned to saunter away, limping his left hind leg. Anoushka noticed a long gash in the wolfhound’s side. She followed.
Teetee crossed an abandoned intersection where two empty roadsters faced each other. He wove between the dueling bumpers and down the next lane. Teetee seldom left Peter’s side for long unless it was to go nab a rabbit or mark a tree. Soon as he was finished, he’d always swiftly return to his master’s side. Hoping the dog would lead her to Peter, and maybe to Kylie-Nae and Zuther, Anoushka followed. She wouldn’t be as ignored as a wolfhound by the orcs and couldn’t meander. She began to lose Teetee in the refuse cluttering the next road, watching windows and jumping at benign shadows occupying doorways.
Snow began to fall again. The street gained a fresh white layer, covering the occasional orc body, the dead cars, the smashed beds hemorrhaging feathers that drifted and danced along with the snow, the gap-faced dressers with dumped drawers, black-and-white piano keys thrown about, its body hacked apart for the firewood or just because. For orcs without a direction or goal, boredom triggered aimless rage. It was said the best way to deal with orcs was to pen them together in a small room and give it a day. Getting them in there was the trouble.
Having stopped in the street, Teetee shifted his ears around—swinging back and forward again, angling about for the best catch of whatever he’d sniffed in the wind. Anous
hka followed.
At the next intersection, retracing her steps from the trek she’d made with Erik earlier in the night, she stopped and looked left—the square was that way, where Joan was. Alone, trying to both keep her tension engine wound and steer would be impossible. She pushed on, following shallow paw prints on the sidewalk three more blocks.
Ahead, Teetee had stopped at the entrance of Lenny’s Brewing Company. He nosed open the door and disappeared into the gloom within. Anoushka lit a match. Down a set of narrow staircases, the reek of soured ale and rotting hops grew stronger. Teetee turned a corner into a room with tall vats reaching two stories high. The light of a dropped torch burned on the brick floor, playing over the brass in dancing sweeps and crashes.
A pile of orcs lay in the passage between the vats, dead. Anoushka hissed as her match burned her fingers. She hadn’t noticed how low the stick was burning, staring slack-jawed at the stacks of ammunition crates tucked between the towering brass ale silos—and how the Committee wreath-of-locks had been branded dark into each pine box.
Teetee stopped behind Peter, who stood over one of the crates near the far back wall. Using his ax to pop one open, he cast aside the lid and drew a long snaking belt of unspent bullets and began feeding it to his crank gun. He didn’t turn around. Maybe he knew it was Anoushka by the sound of her boot heels on the brick floor.
“What is all this?” she said, her voice carrying in this cavernous space.
“Ammunition,” Peter said, working the wooden handle to pull the belt into the gun.
“I can see that, but why is it here?”
He turned. His breastplate had more shallow pocks to it since she’d seen him last. Raising the crank gun, he rested it on his shoulder, the dangling bullet belt jingling as it slithered over his blood-dotted armor. “They keep coming here, every few hours. Been using it as a blind, shooting them when they return for more.”
“Not very heroic,” Anoushka said.
Peter said nothing.
“Did the orcs bring these here? Did they find this? This is more than the city’s armory could’ve had.”