The Last Hour of Gann (61 page)

It wasn’t quite
silent. Passing too close to the dark shops made the windows sputter and light up, playing out the corroded remains of advertisements for whatever products had once been on display, but few of those recordings played for more than a few seconds before dying out and one of the windows shattered from the effort. On another street, the remains of what had obviously been a restaurant groaned out some of the daily specials and wheezed its door open at them, showing anyone who looked in the desiccated carcass of a saoq who had apparently wandered in and been unable to get out. Several furry heads poked curiously out of the nest that had been built in its dried belly.

When the whole crowd of them stopped at an empty intersection so that
Scott could ‘get his bearings,’ the remnants of some ancient public address system fired up and blatted out noise. What little she could make out through all the audial corrosion were mostly unknown words, peppered with odd, random-seeming numbers or verbs. The longer she had to stand there and listen to its tortured, droning gibberish, the easier it became to imagine how the blanks could be filled:
system pressure rising
warning warning
severe storm watch in effect until nine hours and three
error
trafficeye six reports all lanes open on Cinoq Bridge please drive safely
error
trafficeye seven reports
error error error
no lanes visible on Jaavi Bridge please drive with caution the current time is three hours and sixteen contagion risk seven percent
error error
threat level high but stable tune to
error error error
for news and updates
—

“This way,”
Scott decided, and set off.

Amber lingered as the group moved on, reaching
out to touch the cracked, dead window of a kiosk on the curb. It flickered and came on, spilling writing and static across its face until the whole window was filled and then going black again after voicing the grim message, “No response. No arrival,” in a dead, metallic voice. She shivered and moved around to the next window, reaching.

Meoraq caught her wrist.
“Don’t.”

“
What happened to this place?” she asked as they went together after Scott and the others.

He shrugged his spines, but they snapped pretty flat when he was done. He looked okay and he sounded okay, but he was still pissed, clearly
.

“Do you even know where we are?”

“It was a city once, is that what you need to hear? No longer. The Ancients fell and all of their works fell with them. There is nothing to find here.”

“That smell is getting worse!” Maria called, trying to cover her face in her sleeve. “Can’t we just leave?”

“We are leaving!” Scott said irritably. “We’re just…taking a shortcut!”

“How can this be a shortcut when you don’t know where we’re going?”

“I know it’s shorter to go through something than to go around.” Scott gave Eric something of a dirty look and turned up another street, seemingly at random. It took them to the bottom of a long hill lined on both sides with clean, burned-out buildings.

“Oh my God, really? Uphill?”

Eric put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. “Ease up, baby. We’ll be out of here in just a sec.”

“You’ve been saying that forever. God, what
is
that
smell
?!”

Amber tried to exchange glances with Meoraq, but he was looking down another street. “We’re not going to see a huge pile of bodies
over that hill, are we?”

“I
don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

“But is that what a huge pile of bodies smells like?”

“It would depend on what they died of,” he said, sounding distracted and a little annoyed with her, but not particularly bothered by the idea.

“You don’t believe in ghosts on this planet, do you?” said Amber, only half-kidding. At his puzzled glance, she added, “Dead people…walking around after they’ve died? Ghosts?”

“Ah.” He glanced down another side-street. “Yes, we do.”

“You do?”

He grunted.

They walked.

“Do you think this place is haunted?” Amber asked, just as a soft, cool hand slipped into hers.

She didn’t scream, but what she did was bad enough:
grabbing at Meoraq’s arm, who already had a sword in his other hand and aimed over her shoulder at what turned out to be just Nicci.

His
head cocked. His sword did not immediately lower.

“You scared the ever-loving
Christ
out of me!” Amber snapped.

“I was just…I only…” Tears, the big, slow kind, dribbled down her baby sister’s pale cheeks one at a time and dropped off her chin. “I don’t like this place,” she whispered. “Can’t I please come walk with you?”

Amber took her hand at once, pulling her into an awkward hug as Meoraq slowly let his sword-arm drop. “Yeah, of course you can, you know you can.”

“You’re always yelling at me!” Nicci wept.

Meoraq flared his mouth open at Nicci’s shaking back and exhaled soundlessly through his teeth.

“I don’t mean it,” said Amber, glaring at him.
“You know I don’t mean it. We’re sisters, Nicci. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”

Thunder clapped and rolled, not on top of them yet, but close enough to echo in the empty streets
. Nicci jumped in her arms and wailed even louder.

“And now it’s going to rain,” groaned Maria
, somewhere at the head of the crowd. “Perfect.”

“Baby, please. You know I love you, but please.”

At the top of the hill, Scott suddenly stopped walking.

Maria threw up her hands. “Fine, I’m shutting up!”

Scott didn’t answer. He didn’t even turn around right away and when he did, he looked greyish. He looked at his people, and then he looked past all of them at Meoraq. He didn’t say anything.

“Stay here,”
Meoraq said and ran, jostling people roughly aside and reaching the top in maybe half a minute. He saw what there was on the other side. His spines came forward. He slowed to a walk, sheathing his sword.

So it couldn’t be that
bad. Amber gave Nicci a squeeze and let go of her. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

By the time she got to the top of the hill, a crowd had formed, thick enough to shield whatever they were looking at from view, but loose enough that she could slip through it without pushing too many people. She heard
Scott (who sounded just as grey as he’d looked) asking if this was bad, if they were in trouble. Then she saw it for herself.

It wasn’t a pile of bodies
after all.

It was a pit
of them.

It looked like it was miles across, although it probably wasn’t. It was just the shock of seeing something so big thrown down in the middle of the city which had followed such neat, orderly lines. I
t was perfectly round in shape, with a raised lip of broken pavement all the way around it. The sides appeared smooth but uneven, melted. It had partially-filled with water—if it could be assumed that black foulness had started out as water—and although that might smell bad enough on its own, there could not have been less than a hundred bloated corpses mushed together along the sloping sides.

Somehow worse than what was in the pit was what was around it: s
mall triangular flags had been set around the lip, outlining the whole thing in a hundred shades of fluttering yellow. Whatever had caused this crater had happened long ago and the animals might be falling in on their own, but someone had planted those flags.

Staring at them, trying to estimate how many hundreds or even thousands of flags she might be looking at, it dawned on Amber that the only reason she was a
ble to see the pit at all was because virtually everything between it and the top of this hill had been flattened. There were no more buildings down there, no kiosks, no lamps—only the grey crazyquilt of their foundations and the nice, clean streets that ran between them. It was not perfectly flat; the ground buckled at regular intervals, forming concentric rings around the pit, almost like ripples in a pond after someone has dropped a rock in it.

‘Or a bomb,’ thought Amber, creeping forward in sick fascination.

Meoraq pulled her back, started to push her toward the crowd, then yanked her around and gaped at her, all his spines up and quivering for a split-second before they slapped loudly flat. “I told you to stay where you were!”

“I, uh,
thought you were talking to Nicci.”

He
thrust a finger in her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath against her skin. “That is a lie and it had better be the only one you ever tell me!”

Amber looked back over her shoulder at the pit…the crater…and felt Meoraq blow a fuming snort against her throat. “What killed them?” she asked,
eyeing the bodies. From here, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought they were all animals. She just didn’t know yet if that made her feel better or not. “Did they…Did they just fall in?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t we go check it out?”

A flash of far-off lightning made his red eyes spark. “Why?”

“I want to make sure the animals fell in and then died instead of, you know, the other way around.” She gave the pit another backwards glance, as if to make sure it wasn’t creeping any closer. “And I want to make sure they’re all animals. And not people. Especially if it was the other way around.”

“I’ll go with her,” said Crandall, stepping forward.

Meoraq immediately swung her around and behind him, as if Crandall had been offering to cut her throat instead of walk with her down to the crater, but when the thunder caught up to the lightning, he seemed to shake out of it some. He didn’t let go of her, but he grunted and raised his other hand to rub at the yellow patches on his throat. “No one is going anywhere.”

“Meoraq—”
she began.

“Insufferable hu
man, I said no! Mark me, if there are men who feed that place of death, they are men to stay well away from. If it is a trap of Gann’s making, so too should you stay clear. And if it still holds the poison made at the time of the Fall, we are too damned close already!”

“Okay! Jesus, okay! Now will you please let go of me?”

“No!” he shouted.

Thunder groaned.

“Okay,” said Scott. He still looked a little grey, but he sounded more like himself. He turned around, raising his hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay, I’ve made my decision—”

Meoraq hissed, then clapped his free hand to his throat and started rubbing again. Amber could hear him muttering under his breath as
Scott listed all the reasons why everyone was still perfectly safe but they should all get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. Meoraq muttering at himself was hardly a new phenomenon, but he didn’t seem to be praying this time. He was counting.

“Are you okay?” Amber whispered.

He looked at her and for a second—a very long second—there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes. Then there was, but it wasn’t a better moment. His head tipped slightly; his spines flicked forward; his hand stayed knotted in her shirt and even clenched a little tighter.

“
Am I in trouble?” she asked, trying to laugh.

He didn’t smile.

“You look like you’re going to bite me.”

His gaze shifted to her shoulder, lingered, and came slowly back to her face.

Another flashpop of lightning distracted him before Amber could make the leap from concerned to nervous. He looked up as the thunder rolled, a whole lot closer than it had been, and closed his eyes while the wind blew over him. He took a deep breath. He took another one. He let her go.

The urge to run was extremely strong in those first few seconds.

“All right.” Having consoled the masses, Scott was back and at his most in-charge. “I think we should go around this, um…new development and keep our distance as much as we can.”

Meoraq grunted. His eyes were still shut.

“So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to turn around and go that way for a bit, see if we can’t find a building that’s more or less intact and hole up for the night.”

“What, here?” asked Amber.

Meoraq began to count again, very softly.

“Do you see that storm blowing this way, Miss Bierce?”

She looked. Lightning obediently forked.

“That’s going to catch us before we’re out of this place. No one’s going to want to walk in that.”

“Want to…” Meoraq murmured. He took a very deep breath, held it, let it out, and began to count again.

“So we need to find some shelter, preferably before it starts dumping directly on our heads. All I want from you, Meoraq, is a little help finding our way out of here without accidentally getting any closer to that, um…thing.”