Armwrestling the Dead

by Andrew McEwan

top righthand corner of the display a menu will appear.’

  Ivan raised his eyebrows. He followed the instruction. The menu offered analysis over a wide spectrum. He chose X-rays. The image paled, the foliage, the sky blending into a single mass of tissue. Few shapes were recognizable. Darker shades represented trees. The ferns were visible only as a shifting, oddly translucent configuration. The impression was of something alive, interrelated, its surface peeled away to reveal...what? Organs? That was too distant an analogy. The picture, thought Ivan, was out of focus, a collection of blurred garden implements against a monochrome sun. As if an unknown medium interpolated; the atmosphere viscid. ‘The reception’s poor,’ he said, just as a form, acute and stygian, flew across the screen.

  He flinched.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Smith. ‘What did you see?’

  He turned to face the questioner. His memory of the Base 1 commander, gleaned from Stewart, hardly prepared him for the reality. At over two metres tall the bestial outline of Smith cut a jagged swathe against the winter backdrop. The man’s skull had been stretched into a bony corona of blunt horns and ridges, the nose hollowed and upturned, the eyes gouged, swimming greenly at the bottom of deep wells. The chin was elongated and the brow fierce with projections, decorated by hardened wafers of cracked skin, scales that spiralled into a conic growth at the rear of his head. From the shoulders down his body was more recognizably human, although warped, unfinished, hips and thighs bulging with new muscle, feet crimped, skin a deep rust red, hanging in folds about his loins, stretched tight over massive ribs, encrusted and sloughing.

  ‘Pretty, eh?’ Smith laughed, exhibiting teeth surprisingly mundane. He wiped his nose on his arm like a schoolboy. ‘Well, Ivan Evangela, what is it you spied in the mirror?’

  ‘A bird,’ he lied, feeling outnumbered. Wind slapped at his uniform. ‘A raven.’

  Smith nodded, rubbed his jaw. ‘An omen.’

  Ivan switched off the portable and turned once more to face the sea. Real birds dotted his vision. What had flashed across the screen, that he had identified immediately, was a witch, riding a broomstick.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he pitched, staring down the escarpment while flexing his grip on the rail. ‘Is war really necessary?’

  Himself speaking or Stewart?

  It was several seconds before Smith answered, in which time Ivan mentally perfected his fall.

  ‘War is a means of succession, of speeding up events. Like dropping hot coals into the waters of evolution. Boiling the swamp, as it were. It is always necessary, in one form or another. Here it will be fought by organic machines.’

  People, thought Ivan, and jumped, half running, half tumbling. The slope was steep yet grassy, a drop of a forty or fifty metres, the distance twice that by means of the lessening gradient. Bunched dunes ranged like low hillocks, too soft to build on, leaving only the high voltage and razorwire to negotiate.

  Staggering to his feet, Ivan rested a moment, ignoring his bruises, emptying himself of nausea and dizziness. The screen was safely housed in a pouch in his jacket. He looked around for signs of pursuit. The guards or whoever patrolled this side of the wire were either held back or late in arriving. He peered up the incline, but could see only the polished railing. He jogged the hundred metres to the fence, a four metre cheese-grate he had somehow to clamber over.

  There were shouts and people running toward him.

  Ivan sagged to his knees, too weak to fight, realizing this was one escape too many.

  Four men, ordinary in character, approached at a sprint, slipping in the loose sand. Each was beaming, frantic, bright with energy as they neared. The tallest grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him clear of the beach while the others scratched their sides and chins and babbled, speaking so fast Ivan failed to comprehend their meaning. The quartet gathered round him, jovial, clapping, hyperactive, leaping two, three metres from the shallow dunes, blissfully excited. Ivan pushed his fingers at them, gesturing for them to slow down, but succeeded only in enlivening the men further. The stockiest took hold of him, wrapping him in the crook of one arm while making swanlike shapes in the air with his free hand. Suddenly Ivan understood what they intended. He joined the humorous chorus, gorging on the bristling energy and mirth of the foursome, as he prepared to be catapulted by this Orielean circus act into either sparks or deliverance.

  Shot from a cannon, he thought, no helmet for the cannonball, the safety-net a veneer of powdered crystals beneath whose gently rasping surface might lurk stakes or anti-personnel mines. He wondered, as many muscles tautened, was this the first time such a mode of flight had been attempted?

  iii

  They stand in line, grimacing behind glass, waiting for the bullets to miss. The trucks spin tyres over corpses, powering streams of blood from wounds squeezed like ketchup bottles. Fires rush the upper floors, joining buildings in a handshake of flames across the street, the broad avenue, the trees broken in two and charred like used matchsticks. Windows explode, bursting into faces as if laughing with mouthfuls of coloured beads. Screams merge with sirens. Machineguns issue orders and tap-dance on the roofs of armoured vehicles, their routines studded with embarrassing pauses to reload - smiles dismantled and scattered, hot hollow teeth.

  A small boy runs down a corridor sprayed red, blotched and torn wallpaper peeling like burnt skin, plaster flesh decaying rapidly. Tears cartwheel from his eyes, trajectories symmetrical as they arc to the dust-breathing floorboards, splashing amid beetles, the floors vibrating heat an echo of the rooms below, the rooms where rape and torture, death and mutilation scald the air. Knives are sharpened. Bulbs pop, inviting swathes of dark, wrapping the child in his own fear, suffocating him with his own retreating senses, panic drying his throat and wetting his thighs, laces tripping him at the top of the stairs.

  The soldiers pound asphalt bearing the scars of tracked carriers, their metal safety helmets buckled and unbuckled, buckles fastened tight or swinging jauntily. Crushed belongings stain the stained pavement. The drains are blocked with refuse. The city is a single entity, joined to itself as it writhes, its people governed by the same impulses, the same thoughts, the same agonies and miscomprehensions. The city has achieved consciousness, become self-aware, cognizant of its every appendage, the workings of guts and tongues. The city had awakened, is alive that it might die, killed by a rival being, a city far away.

  Car horns sing a dirge and sound the death-rattle of blasted pneumonics, the deflated symphony of lives.

  The city of Moss expels a breath...

  They are fighting, the Orieleans.

  sixteen - pilgrim

  In six months of solitary travelling Johnson had considered many things, not least the self-combustion of Hubert Schilling, a fact she had yet to come to terms with. What occupied her mind at present though, was her name. The only Roman in Roman Johnson was her nose. Pounding the endless savannah at the heart of Oriel’s southern continent, it vexed her, what she might be called, how she might introduce herself to others, the manner after which they might address her. Johnson was Pilot Johnson to Knox and Soapy, the protomen she’d discovered inside a square-hewn cave, a cellar or dungeon, its roof part collapsed and overgrown, five metres outside the toppled castle walls on the promontory far to the north. A sleeping bunch of rags, they had come awake (alive?) in the tight beam of her torch. Johnson wondered how they were faring, hurt by their absence, their disappearance a mystery. She and Hubert were similarly divorced, separated, Johnson alone in a landscape void of homes.

  No-one lived here. This land was empty of all but scrub and animal bones. The dress she wore hung tattered about her knees, the material creased and torn. She walked barefoot under a large black umbrella, a canteen, a pair of gloves, a radio, a gun, a hunting knife riding along with Schilling’s backgammon set and the tiger’s eye in the string-pull bag over her shoulder. Clothes and luxuries were discarded, littering her path from the mountains, a trail of underwear and eme
rgency rations. She was happy to wander south in the face of logic and explanations that made no sense to her anyway. The sun was hot and the day interminable, the answers she’d received from the Base 2 refugees no less perplexing than the questions posed.

  So what? It had embarrassed her to try the dress on. Yet, it seemed, to shake all her masculine inhibitions. It had been easy with Schilling to forget everything and relax. It was hard to admit the degree to which she missed him, and the driving urge to venture south on a journey without end into a continent not so much dark as obfuscated. But south was his direction. Johnson lacked a direction of her own. South then she walked, her pool of shade bobbling, the hunting knife a present from Lloyd, Ula’s lanky husband, the dress once fitting Ula’s frame, since outgrown, Johnson twirling the flower-print skirt as she got used to the idea of urinating while squatting, menstruation and the strange intuitive bursts of acumen that confirmed her status as woman. Truly a sharp peculiarity, this newfound ability to conquer all opposition.

  The dress was part of her now, blessedly incongruous as she froze the night in its thinness and floated by day like the sole survivor of a tribal insurrection, the dazed and dreamy missionary’s daughter lost and