The Last Hour of Gann (105 page)

“Please present—” the bot began, and then there was a
shunk
, a hot-smelling pop, and Meoraq kicking the husk out into the rain.

She opened her eyes and saw him with the storm howling at his back. H
e dropped her pack on the floor, then her spear (she couldn’t even remember losing them), and finally tossed her tunic—his tunic, really—down on top of them. He looked wet and muddy and pissed.

Things kind of greyed out for a moment, or perhaps she only thought they did because of the suddenly silencing effect when the door shut again.
Amber tried to get up and fell uselessly onto her face. Nothing seemed to be broken, but the run, the rain and her disastrously comical fall had taken all the breath out of her. She listened numbly to Meoraq’s footsteps striding swift and heavy toward her (he didn’t slip; life was full of unfairness) without moving.

“Light,” he said, picking her up and thumping her unceremoniously on her feet.

A light came on overhead. It did not happen quickly, as of someone flipping a switch, but slowly, sickly, accompanied by an insectile whine of effort that grew until, just before Amber clapped her hands over her ears, it died away entirely and left the lights brightly burning.

Meoraq
glared at her until her eyes started stinging and then he turned his back on her. She saw his hands draw into fists and slowly uncurl. He took six breaths and said, “I cry. We’ll stay here until the storm passes. Put your clothes on.”

She limped over to their packs and picked up his
tunic.

“Put
dry
clothes on,” he snapped.

She dressed.
Thunder rolled out in the plains, making the metal hum beneath Amber’s feet.

“Is there a basement?” she asked.
“Something below this? Something…safe?”

“
How is it safer to be buried under a fallen building than to simply be crushed by it?”

“Please, Meoraq!”

“There is no place safer than within the sight of Sheul, woman. It doesn’t matter how deep you burrow—”

“Can
’t I hide my atheistic ass just
once
without a sermon?”

Meoraq
hissed at her and stomped away, shoving at what little blockish furniture had survived the ages and slapping at the walls until he found a panel that opened into the next room. “Stay here,” he snarled when she started to limp after him, so she leaned carefully against the wall, rubbing at her aching hip, and waited for him.

The storm raged.
She’d heard the cliché used before, had even believed she’d heard storms raging in the past, but never knew it could be like this. The walls had to be at least half a meter thick, all metal and concrete—or whatever they used for concrete on this planet—and the wind still shook it. She was alone with that, alone with the muted thunder and howl of a tornado that might be even now passing directly overhead, alone without even Meoraq’s high-handed religious fervor to comfort her. The lights blurred; she looked up fearfully, thinking they were going out and she’d be trapped in the dark, then realized she was crying. And once she realized that, it was as though something broke inside her and suddenly she was sobbing so hard, she could barely breathe.

Something huge hit the wall with a deafening bang.
Amber screamed helplessly and sank down the wall, sobbing because she’d banged her hip at some point in her wild spin across the floor and now it hurt to stand and it hurt to kneel and it hurt worst of all to sit. She couldn’t remember the last time nothing had hurt; she didn’t think she was ever going to feel that way again. This was it. She was never going to feel better and she was going to die huddled in a corner and crying.

She didn’t know
Meoraq had come back until his hands slipped under her arms and pulled her back up onto her feet. He didn’t let go of her right away.

She kept her hands over her face, trying to shut her stupid self up and be the person she’d been all her stupid life without any effort at all, but the tears kept coming.
He didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to see him trying to think of something to say to this ridiculous, fretful, useless alien he’d been saddled with. She wanted to die.

Thunder savaged the walls.
Amber wailed and then Meoraq’s arms were closed fast around her, locking her against his broad, scaly chest. She wished she were the old Amber, the Amber who would have smacked him away and been tough and just fine, the Amber who wouldn’t have been crying at all. Instead, she clung to him, weeping blindly, and grateful for every cautious touch as he kneaded her back.

“Come,” he said after a moment.
“The storm will pass. We will wait below.”

She nodded, still weeping hard, painfully aware of tears and snot and even drool streaming down her damn face.
Humans were disgusting.

He took her with him, his arm close around her, through a series of doors to a wide stairwell.
He led her down several flights, leaving the sound of the storm behind them until all was silent except for her sniveling.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last.
Her voice, weak as it was, echoed.

Meoraq
stopped to muscle a door open. He must have done it before, because the lights were on in the hall beyond and he’d known to throw his weight at it from the start, but it still took a great deal of effort and his only answer was a grunt.

She
knew she should keep quiet, but no sooner had Meoraq finally managed to shove the door-panels apart than it came bleating out of her again: “Please don’t be mad at me.”

He
’d started to walk on through the doors, but just as suddenly stopped (she bumped hard into his back and had to stagger to catch herself). He stood there for a second or two, not moving, then swung around and hissed, “I am not S’kot, damn it! I won’t leave you!”

The words and the vehemence with which they were spoken might have each been sufficient on their own to take her aback. Together, they entirely overwhelmed her.

He resumed his prowling, pissed-off stride, leaving her there in the stairway to stay or to follow as she wanted.

She followed
, but slowly, not daring yet to speak. The hallway they entered was wide but not tall, with a rounded ceiling and featureless metal walls that made it seem a lot like walking through a pipe. Here and there, other corridors intersected, but there were few doors and Meoraq did not stop to test any of them.

“They left you,” he was saying. “They left you and I have tried and
tried
for your sake to be sorry, but I’m not. You say I don’t want to find them and you say truth. I would go so far as to say I
dread
finding them, but I will take them back if I do. For God, yes, and for you, because you think you need them and you think it would make you happy if they liked you, but they never will!”

She flinched, surprised by how much it hurt to hear that out loud, even though it was hardly something she hadn’t thought herself.
“I don’t care if they like me,” she mumbled. It used to be true.

“If they were right here in this room—” His fist lashed out and thumped a panel on the wall as he stormed by. The door beside it wheezed halfway open, showing her an empty room, small and stark as a prison cell, before groaning shut again. “—you would take them back. Not just your N’ki, but
all
of them! And you would be glad you found them, glad to take them in and let them piss on you all over again!”

“What do you want me to say?” she asked dully.

He stopped and swung on her again. The stripes were out on his throat and brilliantly yellow. “I want you to tell me why you want them back! I want you to tell me why I—” He smacked himself on the chest hard enough to make her jump. “—am not enough for you! I want you to tell me why you can’t just let S’kot go and be glad he’s gone!”

“Because everyone else is dead.”

He stared at her, breathing hard as the color on his neck faded. When it was almost gone, he looked away, then turned around and started walking again. She followed. Their footsteps echoed, making it seem like more than just the two of them, like Scott and all the others were walking invisibly right behind them.

“Say it,” Meoraq said abruptly, disgustedly.

“Say what?”

“What you always say when I act like this.”

She frowned, bewildered, and suddenly got it. “Scaly son of a bitch.”

“That’s it. I’m sorry,” he said, in the impatient manner of a man unused to making apologies. “I should not be so harsh with you. This place—and all places like it—just put poison in my mouth.”

“It’s all right.” Amber followed him around a corner, only to stop in her tracks almost immediately.

There was a
corpse in the hallway.

Meoraq
kept walking, talking back at her just as if he weren’t also stepping over the blackened, mummified arm of a lizardman as he went. “No, it isn’t. I don’t want to be here, but I know you only want to come in from the storm and look for your people, and you should not be ashamed to want either.”

“There’
s a dead body here,” said Amber.

Meoraq
looked at it, then at her. “Yes,” he said. He did not say, ‘And your point is…?’ but she heard it just the same.

“Is this place safe?”

Meoraq looked at the corpse again, a little longer this time, and at her, a little harder. “What exactly do you expect dead men to do to you?”

She had no ready answer for that, so she asked instead, “Do you know what this building used to be?”

Meoraq backed up into the room behind him and looked around at whatever there was in there to see. “It somewhat resembles a niyowah.” He glanced at her. “A place of display, such as one might exhibit trophies of battle or holy relics. Except that these were people,” he added as Amber moved past him to see.

A
niyowah, he’d called it, which she’d taken to mean a museum or something. But the word that leapt at once to her shocked mind was laboratory.

It was a great round room, the surfaces all neutral and utilitarian in appearance and architecture.
The door they had come through appeared to be the only exit. The rest of the outer wall was paneled in glass, or this world’s equivalent, and it would not surprise Amber to find it was one-way glass. On the other side were seven cells, each holding a small number of desiccated bodies gnarled together in a violent heap. At the center of these viewing chambers stood the room’s control center—a raised dais sporting a horseshoe-shaped console whose video screens were attempting to come on in spite of several cracked monitors. From that vantage, the scientists or guards assigned to watch the prisoners or patients could see into every cell. And as impossible as that seemed, they must have just stood there and watched as the inhabitants of those cells slaughtered each other.

Each chamber was its own vignette of horror and no one had died peacefully.
In the first, setting the tone for all of them, one mummy lay with its belly ripped open and another sprawling face-down in the cavity, as a third and fourth (stained black from chin to chest, as if they had been…feeding) remained where they had fallen, hands still locked around one another’s throats. Not all the violence was reserved for murder alone; the male mummies were easily identified by the dried cobs of their genitalia, fully extruded at the time of their terrible deaths, and several had expired either in the act or as the victim of violent sodomy.

She didn’t want to look at any of it, but was powerless to look away.
Amber moved slowly from cell to cell around the steadily rising walkway, oblivious to the rest of her surroundings until she stepped on something that crunched underfoot. She looked down, already knowing what she was going to see.

She’d stepped on someone’s toes, but of course, the someone was hundreds or even thousands
of years beyond caring. He lay face-up and snarling against the console, his arms and legs sprawled as awkwardly as those of a rag doll carelessly thrown, his withered penis laying crookedly across one thigh, stained to his belly with old blood. Beside him, perhaps six other bodies knotted together. The body at the bottom was that of a woman, still pinned in place by three cocks that Amber could count—one in her vagina, one in her mouth (her snouted jaws snapped wide open so that her throat could be speared), and the last stabbed in just under her right rib—although it appeared that she had been dead for some time before the rest of her attackers expired. They had killed each other without bothering to stop the rape. Two were being themselves sodomized as they fucked her. The corpse crowning the heap, the last survivor one might assume, was fucking a hole in the back of someone’s skull, nearly castrating himself in the process. It may have been what killed him.

“What…”
Amber’s whisper scraped across the dead air like a match. She tried to lick her lips, but had no moisture. “What happened here?”

“I don’t know.”
And didn’t care, his tone said.

Amber’s hip shook; she put out her hand to steady herself and caught the console.
As if drawing strength from her life-force, the monitor nearest her flashed an urgent yellow and played a few silent seconds of some lizardman’s face. His mouth opened and closed as if he were talking, but there was no sound, only a low hiss. It was perhaps even the same transmission she had first seen and heard in the ruins where Scott got the idea of a skyport, but the picture spat and died without ever quite coming into focus and she couldn’t be sure.