The Company of Death

by Elisa Hansen

Carlos sniffed sharply and squared his shoulders. “Sherice. Hey. I didn’t realize anyone was listening.” He shot Emily a glance, his cheeks splotchy.

  “I know what you saw.” Sherice let the doors fall closed behind her. “You weren’t hallucinating. That’s what happens.”

  “What?”

  “When you die.” She crossed the carpet to him. “It takes your soul. Like what you said, shadow and bone. Like smoke, right? But thick and, and, what you call it. Like ink in water, like melting. And the bones, they come out of it. The death hands, reaching. Nothing holding the bones together, but they’re solid, like there’s someone trapped inside the dark parts, needing flesh, stretching to get out. Like he’s only got to touch one more person, steal one more soul, and he’ll finally be free. But he never is.”

  Okay, was Sherice drunk? To talk that way to Carlos when he was so upset? But the conviction in her dark eyes made all words of protest go cold on Emily’s tongue.

  The color fled Carlos’s face, his mouth gaping. But then his expression crumbled, and he shook his head. “Sherice, you weren’t there.”

  “No, not then. That’s not when I saw it. When my moms and dad… When they…”

  Emily’s shock almost made her laugh. It was the first time she ever heard Sherice at a loss for words on the subject of her parents. She was usually the my-tragedy-is-worse-than-yours type.

  Emily had her own tragedies. They all did. She’d only told three people what happened to her dad and brother, and that story slipped out in what she regarded as her weakest moments on long, black, haunted nights, with whispered voices the only things masking the howls in the distance.

  Carlos grabbed Sherice’s arm. “Did you dream about him—it last night?”

  Sherice screwed her mouth into a frown, shook her stubbly head. “No, but I saw it. Back then. When I saw my parents die. Right before my eyes. Like you saw Alaric.”

  Carlos’s face pinched. “Just me, then.” He turned to Emily. “This is it. He’s coming for me.”

  “Alaric?” Emily couldn’t help herself. She should feel bad, but the two of them had gone beyond pitiable straight into ridiculous.

  “No! Him. It. The shadow.” Carlos sank to the step, his eyes on the floor, his fingertips brushing his chapped lips. “In a way, I’m glad. I’d rather he take me than get bitten. I’d rather die like Alaric.”

  Not like Michele. All ridiculousness aside, Emily didn’t disagree in the slightest. If she ever found herself between a four-story drop and certain bite, she would take that fall in a heartbeat. And if no roofs to leap from presented themselves, other ways abounded. Ways to keep them from using her body to increase their ranks.

  Sherice pushed past Emily to kneel beside Carlos. “Dreams have power.”

  Carlos shivered. Emily snorted.

  “What?” Sherice snapped at her.

  “I don’t think you’re helping.”

  “Oh yeah? And you know a lot about helping, Prissy Miss I-Can’t-Do-My-Job?”

  Emily’s mouth fell open, the words hitting like a fist to the sternum. Meanwhile, Carlos’s eyes darted around the room, looking everywhere but at Emily.

  So much she could say, but her breath withered under Sherice’s glare. She closed her mouth, her teeth clamping the insides of her cheeks.

  Fine. Whatever. A reality check obviously wasn’t what Carlos wanted right now.

  She pushed off the step and left the room. If Carlos ever answered Sherice, it was not meant for Emily to hear. She would clean herself up and come back later to sleep, after Sherice went out for scout shift. When the lantern would be off and Emily couldn’t see how anyone else might be looking at her.

  And then tomorrow… Tomorrow, she would do her damnedest to remember she needed to live each day like it could be her last.

  3

  Artificial Life

  Sleep was a friend who visited less and less. Emily awoke long before the scheduled end of her rest shift. She lay in the dark of the visitors’ center theater among her sleeping teammates, absently listening to distant moaning howls and trying, trying to drift off again. She gave up when her mushy brain eventually realized the sounds weren’t actually there. Phantom howls.

  Shaking the echoes from her mind, she rolled on her sleeping pad to fish her gun from under the wadded towel she used as a pillow. Her bunk was on the top tier of the room’s carpeted steps. The mildew stench was bad when they first moved in, then was quickly overtaken by the unwashed body smell of her team, but the human nose adjusted. The completely enclosed space offered a far more comforting place to sleep than their last camp, where wasteland winds rattled duct-taped windowpanes all through the night.

  Emily pressed the Glock’s cool metal against her cheek and willed away the lingering wisps of her troubled dreams. Usually, she dreamt of better times. Of electricity and running water and smiling old people and puppies and caffeine. Ironically, she preferred such happy thoughts be bitch-slapped away by wakeful reality. But this time, the dreams had been too real. Rosa taking her mission assignment. Rosa pretending to want the vampire’s bite, and then—in a terrible twist of dream logic—liking it. Swooning into it, giving up the cause, giving up everything. Emily cringed.

  Letting her arm fall over the step’s edge, she brushed at Rosa’s spot below. Empty. Couldn’t she sleep either? Emily still didn’t know what to say to her. Why, Rosy? Why did you do it? No matter the answer, Emily asking would just make them both feel worse.

  She pulled on her boots mechanically in the dark and wiggled her holster up her leg, snapped it into place. Toeing down the steps, she avoided tripping over the slumbering lumps of their three newest teammates. What were their names again? Rosa would remember.

  A chink of light under the doors guided Emily, and she slipped out silently. As she breathed in the vaguely less-musty hall air, she decided she didn’t mind losing precious sleep. No town duty today. That was a good start, at least. And she was exempt from regular drills due to scout shift, so no Daisy either. For a moment, Emily couldn’t decide which was better news. But as she recalled the day they cleaned the town’s grade school, she decided she would rather do a thousand burpees than town duty any day. She shivered at the memory of toppling the barricades of desks, ripping past the faded construction paper streamers into the classrooms; the milky eyes of those shambling six- to ten-year olds kept her up for long nights after she shut them for good. Thank hell the little town only had one grade school. Emily had joked about regretting not being on duty the day they swept the high school, as if teenagers would be easier to shoot, maybe even satisfying. Her teammates had chuckled. That was back when they liked her.

  It would probably be in her best interest to go out for scout shift early. She wasn’t due to relieve Sherice until later, but what else could she do with the extra time? Idle in the visitor’s center and contemplate the meaning of existence? No, she should look useful, dedicated.

  The daylight filtering into the gallery made a haze of the dusty air. Emily pushed through a door marked “Employees Only,” and then she was in the dark again. Running a hand along the wall, she made her way to the supply room to hunt down her morning ration bar.

  She halted inside what was once the museum staff break room. Rosa sat cross-legged on the floor. She was the only one there, not counting the two inert metal bodies sprawled across its central table.

  Rosa chicken-pecked at a keyboard projection emanating from an old-fashioned white pullscreen. It was dimmed low but lit the room enough for Emily to make out the bullet cartons and plastic bins on the counter. Either she didn’t hear Emily come in or chose to ignore her.

  One way to find out. “Hey…”

  “Hey.”

  Or she was mad. Or something worse. But what could Emily even say? She chewed on her lip, then moved around the table.

  The pullscreen’s glow cast deep shadows in the mechanical angles of the two android bodies. They were mostly intact, except one’s left arm was missing and the second lo
oked like it underwent some kind of sick C-section, with its wiry guts gone from its narrow stomach. Bald and naked, their metal parts had a brushed steel-style finish, but their male-featured silicone faces rested in imitation of human sleep. Like their eyes could snap open at any moment and catch Emily staring. They turned out to be completely drained of power when her team found them abandoned at the Dragon Mart last month. An attempt to charge them from the generators set some LEDs blinking, but neither would wake up. Yet.

  A half-laugh escaped Emily as she realized how she squeezed against the counter to keep as much distance from them as possible. She shook her head at herself. “I’ll never get used to those things.”

  “They’re just machines.” Rosa patted a metal boot-shaped foot dangling off the table by her head.

  “Or is that just what they want us to think?” She’d seen robots of all shapes and sizes, but these ones looked too human yet not human enough.

  Emily tried to think of them as dead bodies. She was used to dead bodies. But they weren’t really dead; programs in their brains could still think and remember. Personalities trapped inside their own minds. Not persons, per se, just AI thinking itself people, though the Robot Rights activists made the line blurry in the years before the Ecuador Explosion. Androids as advanced as these rarely interacted with the public sector, but they appeared in the media aplenty. Back when a media still existed.

  Emily’s only personal experience with anything more sophisticated than the drones crisscrossing her forever-artificially-green suburb was the shop helper at her father’s lot. Though she passed it wrenches as it tinkered with the lemons her dad sold as “collectible” vehicles, she never got hands-on with its machinery. She was a software girl, but its limited AI didn’t really warrant getting hands-on with either. Her dad named it Bob, so she tried to think of it as a him, but it never stuck. Bob wasn’t designed to resemble any particular gender, and it—he—didn’t have much of a personality except for a canned attempt at seriously pathetic jokes repeated from the gullible customers.

  She’d named the two bodies on the table Lefty and Yum. Sherice, of all people, called her morbid, but Emily was amused. Either the rest of the team was too, or they didn’t care enough to come up with names of their own.

  They were military-grade robots, LQ models or something. Despite their over-three-years-old serial dates, the laser gun mounts in their arms were definitely post-Explosion. Ramon hoped to harvest whatever possible off their hard drives. Cocky about her hacking skills, Emily tried every trick in her roster to break through their encryptions for him. But after long hours of failure, she turned the project over to Rosa. She gave up too, over a week ago. So what was she doing now?

  “Anything I can help with?” Emily hoped she sounded chill as she busied her hands with securing her hair into a knot on top of her head.

  Rosa shook her head and squinted at the black and blue code-carpeted screen.

  “Can I turn on a lantern for you?” Snapping her elastic in place, Emily leaned against the counter.

  “Nah.”

  A million things Emily could say, should say. Her insides felt shriveled. Empty. But she still wasn’t hungry. “You find something new?”

  “Not since I tried detaching the lasers,” Rosa answered without looking up. “But nothing I wire can channel enough power to make those work. They need the bodies.”

  Okay, at least Rosa was talking to her. And she didn’t sound mad, exactly.

  “That sucks.” Emily shrugged as casually as she could manage. “But it’s probably not worth it.” She’d heard awesome things about lasers against undead flesh, but apparently, even attached to fancy military LQs, the weapons were never good enough. “I mean, androids aren’t what LPI assembled to take down the communes, right?” Humans were. Humans with bullet guns.

  “You don’t know.” Rosa finally looked at her. “None of us do. Headquarters could be sending out all kinds of teams.”

  Emily nodded and glanced away. Her unit concentrated on missions near small towns so they could clean them while waiting for the communes to arrive. It would take a much larger force to clear out an actual city. All other LPI units Emily ever encountered stacked up pretty much the same as hers: fewer than forty humans and no androids. But communication from headquarters remained minimal as a rule, and impossible once they came out into the desert. Some of her teammates grumbled about conspiracies among the LPI heads in Manhattan, about task forces like theirs being puppets for mysterious goals. But they stayed on the team. They must, like Emily, realize it was better than the alternatives.

  The alternatives… like joining a commune. A sour tang defied gravity at the back of Emily’s throat. “Rosa? I…”

  “You’re on scout today, right?” Her eyes locked on the screen again.

  Emily shook her head even though the answer was yes. “About yesterday…”

  “What about it?”

  She watched Rosa’s fingers move over the virtual keys, catching the blue lines of light. “I just…” Emily couldn’t say thank you, could she? That wasn’t right. “I don’t want that for you any more than for myself.”

  “Yeah? Who do you want it for then?”

  Emily grimaced and rubbed her thumb between her eyes. She couldn’t say sorry, either. She wasn’t sorry for wanting out, and Rosa made her own choice.

  She just thought… Thought what? That Ramon would pick someone else, or decide two spies would be enough? No, she hadn’t let her brain go there. None of their previous missions required infiltrators. None were this big before.

  Turning off the keyboard projection, Rosa leaned back on her hands. “I never told you this.”

  Emily met her eyes. “What?”

  “I’ve been bitten before.”

  “What? When?”

  “You do what you gotta do.” She shrugged.

  “Was it before…” Emily swallowed. She couldn’t bring herself to mention the two little girls Rosa lost in New York.

  “But look at me,” Rosa said, unfazed. “I’m fine.”

  Fine? How could she not be permanently traumatized? Even if she had to do it for her daughters, she’d still been used.

  God.

  The dream image of Rosa swooning into vampire arms rushed back, making Emily’s skin crawl. She forced her mouth closed.

  “I get you.” Rosa sighed and stood, coming around the table. “You have your issues. We all have issues. We work hard; we get over them.”

  “They’re not issues.” Emily tried not to sound too defensive. If anyone could understand, it would be Rosa. “They’re standards.” A reason to live. “It’s not something you get over.”

  “Oh, so you don’t think I got standards?”

  “It’s not— I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not like high versus low. It’s…people are different, right? Take pride in different things?”

  “No.” She sighed again. “Emily. Mi amor. You got issues. This purity complex of yours or whatever—”

  “I don’t have a purity complex.”

  Rosa laughed. Actually laughed. “Your mom, she was Catholic, right?”

  What did that have to do with anything? Emily was no virgin; though sex had always meant nothing for her beyond a thing to make her partners happy. She shook her head. “She was Catholic as a kid. But she didn’t raise us religious.” Her mom stopped going to Mass the day after Grandma Gloria’s funeral, a month before Emily was born.

  “Yeah, mine too. But that stuff sticks, Emmers.”

  “No, you don’t get it.” Emily huffed out a breath. Why was this so hard to explain? Her gaze locked onto Yum’s sleeping face. What she would give for the ability to shut herself off and play dead until the hard parts passed. But she could feel Rosa’s eyes on her, waiting, expecting. Emily powered on. “I always thought, ‘once you’re bitten, you’re dead,’ you know? It’s pretty much my motto.”

  “But vampire bites don’t kill you.” Rosa’s tone fell somewhere between soothi
ng and you’re-an-idiot. “Unless they drink you dry, but they’re not stupid enough to let people go to waste like that now, and they’re definitely not making any more of their kind. And they never will, until there’s a cure for zombies. But trust me on this, it’s nothing like getting bit by a zombie.”

  “No, it’s worse!” That was the whole, entire, everything point. “When a—a zombie bites you, you’re gone. You’re just gone. But when a vampire bites you, you’re still you. You’re still aware. But you’re not all of you. Once they take from you, once you’ve given yourself to them, you’ve given in. You’ve given up your…your…”

  “Purity? Who gives a shit.”

  “I was going to say your, like, sense of self.”

  “You got a lot more to yourself than that, Em.”

  “But, no, that’s not— If I’m not all myself, then I’m not me.” Emily took a sharp breath. It all felt so simple and right in her heart. Why did trying to put it into words reduce her to an inarticulate mess? “If they use me, I’m not mine. I’m not—”

  “Says who?”

  The backs of Emily’s eyes burned. She fought to keep tears from forming with a frustrated snuff. “I’m sorry. I’m trying to explain.”

  “Issues.” Rosa nodded sagely, but then she gave a gentle smile and put a hand on Emily’s arm. Her hands were always so soft.

  “God.” Emily sighed. “You know, you sound like my ex.”

  “That Travis guy?”

  “Ha!” Emily pressed her eye with rough knuckles. “No. I meant Kayla.”

  “She must have been smart.”

  She was, but it had been a short romance. Like all in Emily’s past. In the end, Kayla was smart enough to cut Emily and her issues loose before either of their hearts could break too hard. Emily never imagined old relationship drama would apply to the undead apocalypse. Did nothing ever go away? “Issues.”

  “So it’ll take you a while,” Rosa said with a pat. “Not this time, but maybe next.”

  And there would always be a next time, wouldn’t there? The missions would keep getting bigger and bigger. Until the world ended or the LPI saved it. Emily squinched her eyes shut and took a long breath. The threat of tears faded, but now she felt queasy.