Ever Winter

by Hackshaw, Peter

  Henry waited still. He could hear the noises the strangers brought into the ship with them. Tripping over things they would not have known were there. Using hands to guide them along where even the faint glow of old safety strips had failed in time, or been covered by dust and webs. He heard them cursing to themselves and he heard them call out to each other, their fear starting to creep in and get the better of them.

  He took the first one in a corridor in utter silence; placing a hand over the man’s mouth, cutting him precisely and holding him until his life had gone, before letting him slip to the floor in a puddle of his own making.

  A while had passed. Twenty minutes, or more. The body of the man had not been discovered by anyone, for no one had shouted in anger, or threatened for all to hear. The ship stirred, as if it knew those inside it didn’t belong.

  A second intruder wandered into the engine room. A walkway stretched around the vast auxiliary and main engines, high above a floor of solid ice where spider crabs dwelt in the pit having found a way into the ship through one of the rusted fissures and breaches at some point in time. Below them, shadows moved where the saltwater sea had found a way into the bottom of the ship, eroding the hull beneath the ice from within. They were predators, stalking, perhaps sensing the humans above them. Meat is meat. Or perhaps that part of the underbelly had simply become their home.

  A body lay on the walkway clutching a clipboard, a pen dangling from it on the end of a piece of string. A draught caught the pen and swung it lightly like a pendulum, as a shard of glass once turned in an igloo home.

  The intruder looked ahead at the walkway beyond the corpse. The darkness there was impenetrable. There, Henry could have been hiding, but the intruder made a decision then not to go further, scared that the darkness could swallow him and anxious that something else, something more terrible than a human, might dwell beyond the walkway in front of him. The man, if asked by Erasmus, would lie and pretend that he’d looked everywhere he’d been.

  He went to turn back to the stairwell then and noticed another body in the pit below, being eaten by the spider crabs that scuttled and abided there. They feasted upon it with such frenzy that it felt strange to the man; there was something odd about it that he couldn’t place at first, to do with their fervor. A new dish? A recent addition to their menu.

  He looked back to the body on the walkway, but it was no longer clutching the clipboard and it was instead animated, already striking him with a blade, once, then twice, then a third and final time before he was launched over the handrails into the pit below to make the feast a banquet.

  The weight of his body cracked the ice and stirred the predators below it so they also smacked it hard with their powerful fins and heads. The noise escaped the engine room and traveled up the stairwell, but Henry was already gone and was on his way to another part of the stricken relic.

  Only the clipboard remained on the walkway in the engine room. Henry had written his name upon it, in large, uneven letters, claiming ownership of his latest work.

  A body had been discovered. Henry didn’t know if it was the man in the engine room or the one he’d cut in the corridor, but he’d heard a shout of frustration, which trailed off before the silent hunt had resumed.

  More time passed. Henry had sensed another intruder moving toward the galley. In there, where the dead chief cook still lay upon the hob rings he’d cooked his meals on, Henry hid amongst the racks of dry and tinned food and gave a signal for Panthera to leap onto a third man, the short man with the stubbed nose, sending him tumbling over the seats where a crew would have once eaten dinner. The intruder dropped his weapon in the tumble and had no chance to defend himself. This time, the man’s screams were heard throughout the ship and they were sustained as the animal bit chunks out of him.

  As the mauling continued, Henry listened at the galley door for approaching footsteps and tried to envisage where they were in the ship, knowing that the short man’s tormented screams would have great effect on Erasmus, who remained alone somewhere in the vessel.

  Henry signaled for Panthera to stop and the creature did. The man, bleeding heavily from his neck, was still breathing, although no medic, not even Hepburn, would have been able to save him. The man with the flat face knew he was done for, no longer trying to stem the blood from his wounds with his hands, but staring at Henry with accusation. Henry thought back to the first body he’d ever encountered; the frozen man he’d found with Father. He remembered the death stare of the corpse and how it had affected him, even later when he’d lain awake next to his brother Martin. After all that had happened since that day out with Father, looking into the eyes of a dying man no longer had any effect on him.

  Henry took hold of the hood on the man’s coat and dragged him across the space to the jagged breach in the side of the wall, which looked like a shark’s mouth from the outside. A rubicund trail ruined the snow-covered carpet of the chamber that had been exposed to the elements. Henry hoisted the man to his feet at the edge, where the floor came to an abrupt stop, and cast him through the void, out and onto the ice below, leaving only the blood to tell the man’s story.

  Skindred had waited for what felt like an hour as a vulture circled in the sky high above him. He’d heard the terrible screams from within the ship, then seen the body of one of his companions, plummet from the jagged hole in the side of the superstructure. He didn’t look over the side of the deck, because the sound of the body hitting the icescape, bones snapping on impact, told him that another adult from the Favela was dead.

  He looked in the distance and saw the pack dogs, still tethered where they’d left them. He thought about what Erasmus had said; if Henry came out alone, Skindred should end him, or face his own death at her hands. Though the screams from within the ship had stopped, they still rang in Skindred’s ears.

  He didn’t want to face Henry. Henry was reformed and there was something dangerous about him that was not there before. It came down to the odds of his own survival and who he feared the most in that very moment. Skindred looked one last time at the open door-hatch through which his companions had headed. He descended the funnel ramp from the deck of the vessel to the maze of rectangular prism containers. Then he ran for his life.

  Twenty-Seven

  Ungodly

  There had been no thunder of drums in the deep on the volcano. No hidden army under the mountainous rock, nor undead beings and creatures waiting in the fissures and tunnels, embracing the dark.

  No sacrifice on that first day, or any since. No danger, although she expected to witness it upon her mortal body that rarely moved or shifted where it sat in the pit.

  In the volcano, time had confused both Mary and her mortal husk. The absence of daylight and any routine fleeced her of when in the day – or night – it was. Here, there were no guards patrolling the deck of a prison, opening the door to place a meal tray upon the bed. No noise from brawling men and women, or crying children. No shouted orders from the king himself. No stinking, wretched pack dogs.

  The darkness enveloped the two Marys and the husk decided she would stay, for a while at least. For she was curious. Her god was no Odin. Although he had looked wretched when she had laid eyes upon him, to her, his voice was soft.

  As her eyes adjusted to her surroundings, she sensed the things that slithered and crawled on the surfaces around her. She heard the scrape and scuff of unseen insect creatures and something small and beetle-like dropped from the ceiling onto her lap before scuttling off. In another life, Mary would have cried out and been scared. But here, the two Marys felt a distinct calm in the otherwise silence and became one again for brief, fleeting moments.

  The god brought her food, warmed from the deeper chambers where the very air became steam from the boiling lava rivers below. That food was, most likely, the things that slithered and scuttled in abundance. Yet she ate it and found herself savoring the taste, finding the texture similar to that of raw fish.

  The voice, though it spoke
of all sorts of things, offered no threat to Mary. Subconsciously, Mary pinched her index finger and thumb together. She felt them peeling back those invisible layers of reality to find her way back to the real world; to return to her mortal carrion and reclaim it.

  She started to tune in to the pitch and tone of the god’s voice and she decided he was an un-god. She listened as he spoke of the old Great-Greats and the old world, like her Father and Mother had. Once, he brushed her arm with his hand and she could feel the ruin of his skin; so rough and uneven. Leather, older than the volcano itself. The un-god apologized.

  For the first time, listening to the soft voice of the un-god, she was able to dare remember what her life had been like before.

  She pictured a girl that was her. Younger. Fair hair, blue eyes and a nose tipped up slightly at the end, just like Mother’s. Smiling back from the surface of an ice hole. Her reflection rippling gently in the saltwater. Her skin had been unblemished by the sun. Never struck by a violent hand. Kissed by pursed lips if ever she had fallen, or grazed it.

  She pictured a slingshot. Hers. She imagined a voice telling her to aim for a bird in the sky and remembered how she felt on doing it the first time.

  Faces assembled in her mind and she was now able to cling on to those images, where for so long they had only withered in her mind into gray and bent corpses, or caused such pain that she could not dare to summon them. They lingered, as did she. She wondered if they were the apparition, or if it was she, Mary, who was the ghost, having hovered in and out of her shell for so long.

  Feelings accompanied all these things, yet the pain was dull. Barely there. For how long had the velvet voice of the un-god spoken to her?

  For the first time, her father appeared to her. His beard was as thick as his hair was long. His frame was huge, equaled only by his vast, warming smile that preluded the formation of creased lines around his eyes. Then the family was all there. It was so many, many nights before, when Father had for the first time in her life praised her in front of them all at once, when he spoke of her and Henry’s Ritual; finding the great ship in the ice and surviving a brush with the snow leopards.

  “What they did last night, what they discovered…well, I think they’ve completed their Rituals. Any test now would only mug them,” Father had said. He’d said so many things. Some more poignant. Yet this was what came to her first, after so long.

  In the utter dark of the volcano, where things slithered and crawled, where an un-god spoke in the gentlest of voices, Mary, for the first time in over a year, just in secret, smiled.

  Twenty-Eight

  A Ripped Black Flag

  Henry walked the incline to the bow of the ship, accompanied by Panthera and Hepburn, who had stayed well out of sight during the battle but had been monitoring Henry’s activities and vitals throughout. The midday sun shone bright, though nothing melted.

  “He’s getting away,” the android announced, motioning toward Skindred, who was running as fast as he could from the ship toward the pack dogs.

  A pinging noise came from the Duesenberg below them, where the passenger door was wide open.

  “Must’ve tried to steal the car. What a cunk.” Henry shook his head, then called out to Skindred across the ice that separated them. “Coward!” The word carried with the wind. “You got a head start, Skindred. But I’m coming for you.”

  Skindred stopped mid-stride at the sound of Henry’s voice, but he never turned around. Instead, he quickened his pace and closed the distance between himself and the pack dogs.

  A clang heralded the arrival of Erasmus as she appeared in the doorway and hit the steel hull with her claw hammer. She could obviously see Skindred retreating in the distance and a vinegar look appeared on her face.

  Henry faced her and signaled for Panthera to sit. The animal relaxed by the bow, licking blood from its own fur. Henry reached for his weapon; the war lance he’d wrought with a mélange of blades. Slowly, he made his way toward his opponent.

  Erasmus nodded appreciatively. One warrior to another. Yet her hatred for him was clear.

  “To your ruin, boy,” she spoke, moving closer to him.

  Henry said nothing.

  The Duesenberg pinged to remind everyone that the passenger door remained open.

  They met in the middle of the deck. Seconds passed and the silence remained. Momentarily, the vast wings of the black vulture obscured the wavering sun and it became the signal for all that was to follow.

  “Parabens! You killed my lot, like a thief creeping up in the dark. A little devil child. But out here, I’ll double-dead you mine self, boy,” Erasmus threatened, no longer twirling the claw hammer in her hands but brandishing it like she meant business. “If only you knew what’s become of your sisters! They’re damned. Each and every one.” They are damned. They are. Henry clasped onto Erasmus’ choice of words, which meant the present. His sisters were still alive. Finally, he knew something of them.

  Henry and Erasmus. One versus another. Henry smiled, thinking about the odds, unfazed by his opponent’s words. They circled each other. Henry, so confident in his new abilities, was sure of the outcome. If only he’d gone to the Favela so well-prepared before!

  Henry’s weapon was superior. He had forged it and designed it. Its reach was far greater than Erasmus with the hammer. But he knew the murderess was strong. One hit with her weapon would end him and so he had to keep his advantage over her.

  Now just the two of them, when she had arrived no more than an hour before, with her greater numbers, Henry saw the odds were fifty/fifty. Him or her.

  They circled each other and Henry felt strangely confident in his new abilities. He was still unsure of the outcome as he studied his opponent, yet there was no going back.

  Before he spoke, he realized that Erasmus too must have been thinking about the same odds. How she’d expected a quick slaughter of him, and how she’d already been so wrong.

  “It’s you what’s damned. Whether I let that black vulture come down and pick at you, once my beast over there has had his belly full. Or whether I strip your flesh with a whalebone and cook it up with a flame. You saw what I did in there. Thief? Maybe I am. Or maybe I am a devil. Maybe I have been dead afore. It doesn’t matter, cause this next bit just has you lying on the crust, bleeding out into the snow. This is not a fair match. It never was. I know that now.”

  Henry was the first to swing his weapon, but Erasmus reacted and took her moment to dodge the assault and charge before it could be wielded at her again. She was close to Henry now, but once more, her coat became a black flag that signaled her intent as she moved. She swung the hammer toward him and Henry stepped aside with ease. She aimed a second swing at him, but Erasmus was so off-balance that Henry barely had to brush her arm to send her slipping onto the ice ungracefully.

  “You think you’ll go back there with that freak face of yours and get your sisters back?” she taunted, catching her breath.

  “I know now that they’re alive. After I’m done with you, when you’re a carcass, I will go to the foot of the hill of the Favela and I will cut down every cunk that stands in my way. This time, I’m all for it. I have the teachings of the Great-Greats in me, and it’s yours who are done for. Not I.”

  Erasmus, the murderess, swung the hammer twice more. Henry avoided the first swing and blocked the second, but wasn’t ready for the headbutt that sent him sprawling backward. Henry’s vision swirled as his enhanced optics tried to correct the vision from his human eye and moved in and out of focus.

  Henry dodged another swing of the hammer. He kept moving, keeping a distance between him and Erasmus’ hammer whilst his vision adjusted. He appreciated how training with projected images or with Hepburn himself was different to fighting a real person, especially one as unpredictable as Erasmus and she pronounced it, by taunting him with, “That shut you, boy.”

  She moved toward him, screaming like a wild creature, but Henry’s vision had restored and his blade caught her should
er, making an epaulet in her coat from a flap of torn leather. Erasmus cursed and her face registered pain. Henry didn’t wait for her to recuperate and smashed the blunt shaft of his weapon on the bridge of her nose, which split on impact and spouted blood. Erasmus lurched backward, gasping for breath, clearly growing exhausted. The liquid from her nose and shoulder made a red slush in the frozen gratings.

  “I’m ready to talk again,” Henry provoked.

  The woman took out a knife from under her black overcoat, now wielding a weapon in each of her hands. The weapons were mismatched and of different size. Henry knew this gave her no advantage; she looked awkward and off-balance. She had no fear, but he saw a desperation about her. Erasmus swung the hammer at him as she had many times, then followed with a knife lunge. Henry blocked each of these with ease and countered them with kicks to the legs, causing Erasmus to stumble as her knee gave way.

  Henry gave the center of his war lance a twist and it separated at the middle into two shorter weapons. He changed his stance and crossed the weapons over each other so they formed an X.

  They both knew Erasmus had been bettered. She was done for. Still she came at him, off-balance and barely able to stand, making it easy for Henry to parry her feeble lunges.

  A swish of one of Henry’s blades sent three of Erasmus’ fingertips flying free of her hand. Her hammer dropped to the deck along with her fingertips. She regarded them, confounded. Then the rage returned to her face.

  With a final thunderous scream, the warrior threw herself at Henry, her knife blade flashing in the sun. But it was already over. Henry tossed one of his weapons toward her chest, and before it had even connected, he raised his other armament high above his head in a two-handed grip and brought it down on top of Erasmus’ skull. The momentum and power took her to her knees as the executioner’s blade stuck fast where her neck met her breastplate.