Ever Winter

by Hackshaw, Peter

  Henry had been certain he would die. He was done for, but was surprised it hadn’t happened already. The pain was so much that it brought only madness, and lucid thoughts were kept at bay. Yet he knew with certainty that death awaited him, lurking in his shadow, ready to usher him from the body that encased his soul. It frightened him more than he ever could have imagined. He wanted the pain to stop, but part of him did not want to let go.

  It was unjust. He was too young. He had not seen enough. The world was so big that Henry could not believe there wasn’t a pocket somewhere that held goodness, compassion and hope. He blacked out then and woke intermittently to realize he was being dragged roughly by his arms. The reprieve from consciousness was welcome, although the pain roused him continually and all he could see was the memory of his ruined eyeball being held before him.

  The snow covered his blood trails much quicker than his screams would be forgotten by all that heard him that day. The guards spoke as they carried him and Henry understood some of their words, but could not concentrate on them, or form his own to plead with them to help him ease his pain.

  Finally, they came to a stop and Henry was laid in the fresh snow, with the bloodied rag covering his terrible wound. He felt the slightest reprieve as the guards left him as the king had instructed. Alone to face the elements. A chance, no matter how small.

  But, even as delirious as Henry was, he sensed something was wrong as he heard the sounds of a pair of boots in the snow, returning toward him.

  Then Lanner spoke, close to his face, so he could feel the man’s breath on his skin and smell it.

  “The king might take a risk and leave you out here. But not me.”

  Still, Henry swam in and out of consciousness, with the pain and loss of blood seemingly having taken all of his energy. He couldn’t think of words.

  “You might not see this knife. But you’ll feel it. Just like your Mother did. And your Father. And your baby brother. I come to your homestead and you look at me like I’m nothing. Me! Who do you think you are? You think you’re special? Go, and join your family of ghosts. I’ll see the girls follow you, soon enough.”

  The snow fell upon Henry and the man knelt over him. Henry let go of that last hope he’d had, but his body and mind were already letting go and accepting it. Henry remembered the homestead, the smiling faces of his family. He pictured Mother holding the baby and Father embracing him after the Ritual. He pictured Martin sculpting the ice in his secret cavern beyond the wire. He thought of his sisters and how he had failed them.

  Henry didn’t fight it anymore. He welcomed it.

  Henry felt the blade on his chest. Another sharp pain. Then all went black. The last, final, long sleep.

  Thirteen

  Chore-up

  Boo’s thoughts were often jumbled, but in the moments where he could fuse them together perfectly, things became so clear, as if a picture had been drawn in his mind. When he saw Henry dragged through the lanes of the Favela, bleeding and wearing just his strange bodysuit, one of those pictures had been drawn for him. He didn’t know much, but he knew what was right and what was wrong. Henry had had a whale-load of wrong poured all over him and no one had tried to help him.

  No one had seen Boo slip away from Sissel and Florrie, cutting through the back-doubles and winding passages of the lanes, stopping only once at the salvagers’ digs to steal Skindred’s blanket. He knew that was kind of wrong, but it wasn’t bad-wrong, mostly because the blanket belonged to Skindred.

  A few bays over, a safe distance from the Favela, was the Bone Yard; a place where carcasses were piled after they had been butchered, allowing the very young or very old to scavenge along with the bird and roving predators for morsels. Boo waited there amongst the rotting cadavers for the adults who had taken Henry to return to the Favela. When they did, and he was sure it was safe to leave his hiding place, Boo headed in the direction they’d come from. A blizzard was sweeping in, but Boo wasn’t scared of blizzards. He was only scared of the adults, and of the dark.

  Boo kept going, holding the folded blanket as a shield to aid his visibility, which had little effect. His mind grew confused and he began to wonder why he had a blanket in his hands that didn’t belong to him and why he was alone in the blizzard. Then he fell upon a body, partially covered by the snow. On seeing Henry’s face, the clarity returned to him, but Henry looked dead already.

  “Henry?” No reply came.

  The snow was relentless and unwavering. The wind whirled about them and Boo lifted the bloodied rag from Henry’s face. He didn’t want to look at it, but had to check how bad it was. He didn’t know how to mend people, but he could at least try something.

  The wound was worse than he could have imagined. The absence of the eye, a void curtained off by a flap of eyelid, was grotesque. Boo thought of the things that lay in the Bone Yard and shuddered. Though the flow of blood from the eye socket had ceased, the void would allow frostbite to settle within and ruin Henry’s head from the inside out. This ground was Henry’s Bone Yard, with Henry the very first occupant.

  Boo replaced the rag and lay beside Henry, pulling the blanket about them, hoping his body heat would bring life back to the outsider he’d met just that same day. Henry had been angry when he’d first appeared on the bay, then had fallen into sadness. Henry was Martin’s brother, another outsider and newcomer to the salvagers. Boo had decided Martin would be his best friend in the whole of the Favela. Martin wasn’t like anyone else. He was quiet and gentle. He was kind and sincere. No one would let Boo help Martin, but they couldn’t stop him helping Henry. It was just a shame it was all too late.

  “Wake up, Henry,” Boo said hopelessly. “Come on, poo poo. Wakey up!”

  Henry didn’t respond and Boo lay with him for a while, until dusk began to fall and the threat of darkness lingered. Only then did Boo get to his feet, pulling the blanket over Henry’s face so he could rest in peace.

  “Na-night. Hallo be the name, Henry,” were his parting words. Words he knew to have meant something important, especially when people were no longer living, or were about to cop it.

  Boo ran as fast as he could, not looking back.

  Fourteen

  Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

  Leagues away was the stricken container vessel MV Greyhound. In one of the containers, stuck in ice and buried in snow, was a Red Cross consignment destined to support the Fighting 52nd Recce (Lowland Division) of a Great British Army that had been losing a war they would never get to finish. The cargo didn’t include drones, ballistic missiles, or Laser cannons (for they would have been on a defense vessel), but it did include surplus lifesaving equipment and apparel, much of which hadn’t been tested in the field.

  As Henry lay on the icescape beyond the Favela, the anteek battle-suit he was wearing beamed a distress signal as his life-signs began to dwindle and plummet with the temperature.

  Dormant for over a hundred years, a single electronic pulse announced the initiation sequence for Kraftwerk PanaSony Industries’ Nightingale Medical Droid, Hepburn 8, to synchronize and collect the data it needed to deploy.

  One of four medical droids assigned to a battalion, the Nightingale Hepburn 8 was a robust unit, built to withstand heavy gunfire whilst operating on any wounded combatants it had been assigned to in the unit.

  The remaining three Nightingales (Hepburn 9, Gable 5 and Lennon 2) remained in idle, cold silence as Hepburn 8 disengaged from the station on which it had been docked, then liberated itself from the container by blasting a hole in the side of it with its cannon. The speed in which it rocketed from the fissure in the container was beyond that of the Duesenberg that had been crashed nearby, mostly because Hepburn 8 was flying, but also because the technology used for war was more akin to that used in space exploration than that of the motor industry.

  The droid sped just six feet from the ground, horizontal, but rotating rapidly in a circular motion, as if it had been fired from a gun. It was shaped like a classic huma
noid, but had been designed not to appear too life-like; the intention being that soldiers would not risk their own lives to protect or retrieve it in battle, yet would still trust its ability to perform operations unaided upon human casualties. As such, its face was flat, with all features digitized on a pixelated screen to simulate basic expressions. Its armor was covered in the same angular splotches of green, tan and dark blue from the M90 Splinter temperate woodland camouflage that the regiment adopted in the warzone it was destined for. The Union flag was sprayed onto the droid’s shoulder and a red cross was emblazoned across its chest, as well as the name Hepburn 8 and unique I.D. code NGMD-HEP-8.1a. On the back-plate was a series of corporate sponsorship logos, with their usual colors changed to match the camouflage.

  Several miles ahead, a lone caribou ate lichens growing on satellite parts that had fallen from the sky a decade previous. The animal pricked its ears and ceased what it was doing. It raised its head, scanned the horizon, appearing confused, then seemed to shake the thought off and return its attention once more to its meager meal.

  A sonic boom made the creature leap into the air, hind legs first, as Hepburn 8 avoided a collision with the animal and the debris it took meal from. No sooner had the sound and the robot disappeared than the caribou went about its business once more.

  The robot reduced speed as it neared the location of Critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier and it performed a procedural running stop, until it was able to touch down precisely next to Henry’s body in a perfectly upright standing position.

  As the droid scanned the patient, one of the leg plates opened, revealing a coffer of medical paraphernalia. Hepburn 8 reached inside and took out a silver box made from Carbon Nanozil, which it twisted, then shook once above its head. The box itself opened then and shifted into a new shape, which he cast on the floor about them. The material seemed to come alive, as if it were made of a million digital insects. The insects multiplied and piled on top of each other continuously in a ring, until they had morphed themselves into a perfect tent structure. When it was over, the material hardened and all life went out of it. A hint of charcoal-like dust fell from it to the floor and both the droid and Henry were inside a domed shelter that would withstand any storm on the planet.

  All sound had disappeared once the dome closed around them. The air temperature moderated to a comfortable level, without risking the integrity of the ice underneath them.

  The droid lifted the patient carefully from the floor and out folded a gurney under Henry’s body. The droid was both the surgeon and the operating table at the same time.

  It did not speak, but its digital face held an expression of calm, as it injected a cocktail of vital Adrenacol, Morphine-X and basic nutrients into Henry’s bloodstream from syringes attached to transparent, snakelike cables emerging from the droid’s chest.

  When it had fully assessed the wounds to Critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier, it immediately began to operate on the abandoned and empty eye socket, using lasers to burn away the flesh that had been exposed to the cold for too long before pouring a squad of Nano-Surgeons into the void; minuscule bug-like creatures designed specifically to repair tendons and blood vessels whilst dispersing anti-bacterial agents, before harmlessly expiring within the patient host.

  From outside the tent, it looked as if someone had captured a lightning storm in a snow globe, as the lasers sparked and burned in neon brilliance and an inhuman shadow danced throughout.

  The droid clamped back the flapping skin of the eyelids and took out a cylindrical lens from its own spare parts attaché located in its thigh. One of the droid’s fingers opened at the tip and a metal thread extended into the eye-socket and fused the lens to what was left of the optical nerve. The lens was then inserted into Henry’s skull, where the Nano-Surgeons would finish the interior work. The eyelids were unclamped and bonded around the lens itself before more drugs were injected into the patient. Finally, an accelerated healing formula was sprayed around the skin now bonded to the lens, which was covered with gauze from the medical kit, not to protect the work carried out, but to stop the patient from panicking if he woke unexpectedly.

  The droid ran final diagnostics on Critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier, then focused on the icescape outside the dome, raising its faceplate skyward as if it was trying to overhear a conversation. In mere seconds, Hepburn 8 had ascertained that there were no hostile threats in their vicinity and moved into power-saving mode, monitoring the patient’s progress and the proximate terrain alone. It would be another twenty hours until Henry woke up. In that time, both the droid and human would be intertwined and motionless.

  To Henry, encased somewhere in his own mind, it felt like someone had removed him from Earth. The vacuum of the dome, absent the howling wind gave him a different tune to accompany him as he sprinted into the abyss of the light; the sound of unknown tools and technology performing an operation on him. The chemicals coursing through his veins took him on a journey like none he had been on before – a world of both brilliant colors and beauty, contrasted with a nightmarish place of black and white. Heaven and hell. Above the ice and below it. The past and the present.

  When Henry awoke, it was in darkness once more.

  The droid had seemingly sensed this and had already administered medicine to aid Henry’s return to consciousness in the calmest way under the circumstances. The gauze still covered Henry’s new eye. It had not bled and the droid was certain it would not only be fully functional, but would be an enhancement on the natural human optic design.

  “Am I a dead ‘un?” rasped Henry, bewildered, wondering if he was in the dream world, or one of the places he’d seen as he sprinted toward the light.

  The droid fed him treated water from a flask. Henry could not see it in the darkness. He tried to remember what had happened to him, but something in his mind wouldn’t allow it. He drank the water until the robot ceased pouring it.

  “You are alive. You are Non-critical Condition Patient #1; Unknown Soldier,” said the robot plainly.

  “Soul-ya?” Henry slurred. The last thing he remembered was emerging from the ice. He saw the memory three times: once, he was a seal, being hit on the head with a pick; the second, he emerged in a strange cavernous room; and the last, he was dragged by the hair. None of it made sense, but all of it was linked somehow.

  “I do not appear to have been configured to your specific data. I have no further information on your rank, origin or other medical records. With the injuries you have sustained, in line with both the Primary Values and Ethics and the Occupational Health codes of the Great British Army, I declare you unfit for battle. Rehabilitation is required.” The accent was outlandish and alien. Shades of it were familiar, but most of it was like speaking to a being from another world.

  Henry tried to sit up, but his ribs were bruised and his vision blurred, yet it was enough to get a glimpse of his carer; metallic and cold. Something about the face. He had heard of angels and demons. He’d read of the latter in the family’s book that was now lost. This thing was something else.

  “You may struggle with your breath for a while. The muscles surrounding your rib cartilage have been damaged from trauma. I believe this injury is synonymous with an attempt at stabbing. But the armament did not penetrate the industrial yarn material of your battle suit,” it said.

  Henry was perplexed. He didn’t understand much of what had been said to him, but he observed that his chest was tight as he spoke, even though he felt no pain in it at in that instant.

  “You. You’re not…not like me, are you? Who—no, what are you?” he asked the strange figure in the darkness.

  The droid responded in a particularly upbeat tone.

  “I am Kraftwerk PanaSony Industries’ Nightingale Medical Droid, Hepburn 8. I am one of fifty Nightingale droids allocated to the Red Cross under Global Service Agreement KWPSI-RC-1200. I was activated after your battle suit detected and reported a significant change to your vital
signs. I have changed your status from Critical to Non-Critical.”

  “I don’t fathom it,” muttered Henry, frustrated that his memory was still hiding important things that he could not bring forth. It irritated him that Hepburn 8 spoke to him in words that were confusing. “Would you come closer?”

  Hepburn 8 moved its head closer to the patient and the walls of the shelter illuminated with muted, soft light. Henry lay in shock, but found himself reaching a hand to touch the robot’s arm; cold and firm. Sleek and impressive like the smooth shape of the Duesenberg he’d crashed weeks before. He was mesmerized by the patterns on the droid’s armor and the writing, but most of all, he could not take his eyes from the flat, unearthly and pixelated face. He reached up to touch the faceplate, but withdrew at the last moment.

  “A true, talking relic. Do I dream?” he asked, feeling dizzy.

  Hepburn 8 blinked. Its expression signified puzzlement. “I do not understand.”

  Henry passed out once more, exhausted from the exchange. The robot waited patiently for its charge to wake once more.

  Henry dreamed he was standing alone with an axe in his hand, smashing it against the door hinges of a container stuck in the ice. A rainbow streaked the sky above and all around him were circles cut into the ice, for as far as he could see.

  Seals bobbed their heads from the sea to watch as Henry struck the container over and over, the clash and clank of it reverberating around them.

  Each of the seals looked like a child. An Orfin. One had a crooked fringe, one an unforgettable overbite. One had long eyelashes and cornrows; this one looked saddest of all.