The Sea Hates a Coward (12 page)

In time, he found himself pulled to the edge of the fire-circle by One-Arm, the wiry corpse tugging urgently on his wrist and cajoling him into the light. “We’ll find out, won’t we, we’ll see?” chattered the strange little creature, and to Wrack’s astonishment, dead men and women all around the fire repeated “we’ll see!” and fell into raucous laughter. As their eyes watched him, twinkling in reflected flames, he twigged what was going on. This was the exorcism of life stories turned into a game—and cackling, cracked One-Arm had found its place as the host.

And so Wrack found himself talking about his life as if there was a real story to tell; as if he remembered more than a fragment of it. Still unsure whether he had been a Piper rebel caught at scheming, or just a librarian caught in the jaws of a militia with a quota of arrests to keep, he decided to play up his uncertainty for comic effect. He would veer wildly from prim statements about reorganising tactician’s manuals to stories of alleyway snitch-stabbings, waggling his hands alongside a theatrical sneer to indicate it was all—probably—total bollocks.

The dead laughed as he played the fool with his broken memory, but their faces hardened in solidarity as he reached the firmer, rawer memories. They cheered fiercely at the discovery of the pamphlets, they cheered at his branding, and at his father’s helpless tears. And they cheered when he died. They cheered hardest when he died; they cheered for him, and he cheered with them. For a moment, the cheers made him brave enough for it not to matter. But then his story was over, and the cheers faded, and still he had no heartbeat.

As if knowing he had no more to say, Mouana piped up with the name of some long-ago regimental victory, and the Blades in the hangar cheered again. One of them opened up with a fresh story, and Wrack felt the eyes of the circle slide from him. After a while he retreated from the firelight, and sat himself down at the edge of the crowd, against the cold metal of the hangar wall.

For a time he sat and listened to the voices of the chattering people, watching their shadows thrown against the broken warplanes in flickering orange relief, and allowed himself to forget that they were all dead, that a terrible sea lay beyond the mouth of their metal cave. But then he began to notice another sound under the human murmur: the slow, rhythmic scraping tick of a knifepoint on old bone.

He turned to his left, and a skull grinned up at him from the dark, yellow teeth mischievous in a wispy halo of beard. It was the skeletal man he had seen the previous night in the hangar, sat up to his hips in rot, still patiently whickering away at his exposed bone with his scrap of metal. While just a day ago the creature had seemed horrifying, a ghoulish remnant reminding him of his own decay, there was now nothing remotely threatening about it.

“Alright, mate,” said Wrack, and nodded at the skull.

The skull nodded back, prompting Wrack to bark a delighted laugh, and opened its jaws like a shoddy ghost train animatronic. The skull looked at him, mouth open and grinning like a bad comedian waiting for a reaction to an appalling one-liner, and emitted a barely audible wheeze.

“You keep doing what you’re doing,” said Wrack, then lay back in the filth and lost himself in the fire-cast shadows of the nostalgic dead. What came next was not sleep as he had once known it, but neither was it the turgid black dreaming that had ensnared him before he had woken in the flensing yard. Whatever it was, it was devoid of much thought, and that was good enough.

Morning came, and silence with it.

The fire had burned down, its embers blackening as the sky outside lightened, and the zombies were still. They had gathered back in their drift, slumped against each other but no longer moaning and twitching as they had done before. Their eyes watched the horizon, gleaming pale as they waited for the sun to undrown itself. Scraps of flesh dangled from the picked ribs of the beluga-things, fluttering in eddies of the dawn wind.

Wrack stood, stretching muscles turned to wood by rest and the weird processes of undeath. It felt dreadful to ease himself out of the muckpile and into thought, but it had to be done. If they lay here any longer, they were in danger of ending up right where they had started off, sunk beyond the responsibility of consciousness. They had to make a plan, and start waking the others. There was so much work to do: somebody had to start it.

Wrack stood by the embers of the story-fire and clapped his leaden hands, and the pile began to stir. He was just about to address them, when a familiar clattering came from the hangar’s mouth.

Not again, thought Wrack, rolling his eyes, and turned to the sound. This happened every time he was about to make a speech. The same overseer, the one with the grille for the face, was at the door, huffing with her wheelbarrow of offal, the thresher shark skittering at her heels. She foraged in the red mess, cursing to herself, not yet aware of what had changed.

“Come on, arseholes,” she barked tiredly, then looked up and froze, a gelid kidney in her hand. Eyes crunching into slits above her corroded muzzle, she took in the smoldering ashes of the fire, the stripped carcasses, and the mass of still, silent zombies staring right at her. Registering Wrack alone in the centre of the hangar, her head swung round and she dropped the kidney, brows leaping in shock.

A strangled noise blurted from her grille. She recognised him. Knew him as one of the zombies she had herded down the ship the previous day, as one of the dead sent miles out to sea on a disastrous hunt. Knew he should not be there, standing stock still with teeth bared in an animal grin.

“Morning,” said Wrack, and the dead erupted from their pile like a swarm of flies. There were near a hundred of them, loping across the hangar with arms outstretched and shrieks rising from their ruined throats. Wrack ran ahead of them, eyes fixed on the overseer’s blanched face, flooding with a terrible hunger.

The shark came at him, sliding on the deck in its haste to catch him between its jaws, and overshot Wrack by a good three feet. It wheeled round like a hound, raising sparks on the deck, and lunged for his leg. But the mob had grabbed it by the long lobe of its tail, and it was tugged back away from him.

The overseer, eyes still fixed in disbelief on Wrack, fumbled for her radio, but he was upon her. Despite a two-hundred-pound difference in weight, Wrack had the advantage of being a screeching monster in a room full of more screeching monsters, and easily clawed the device from her grip. He opened his mouth wide, screamed again, and the overseer turned to flee.

She made it nearly twenty feet. Wrack was the first, throwing his arms round the woman’s gore-streaked workboot. He barely registered as an anchor for her timber-stiff legs, but he was not alone. Soon two, three, seven more zombies were clinging to her, dragging back her limbs and slowing each step. Then the mob, finished with turning the shark into a smear of white gristle, caught up with her. The overseer threw punches hard enough to knock jaws off faces, but with a growing swarm of dead hanging from her limbs, she was tiring quickly. It took nearly a minute, but she went down.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
RACK CLAMBERED UP
her body through the throng of zombies pinning her, and crouched above her face, alongside Mouana. He could only imagine how they looked to the overseer; a ring of stinking, dripping rictuses, staring down and growling. It nearly ended there, quick and bloody as it had done for the ray. The overseer only lived through the first ten seconds because the others were waiting for Wrack to take the first bite. And although his belly was full of beluga meat, his mouth urged dreadfully to bite: to tear, and gnash, and take back every act of
Tavuto
’s sneering cruelty with his teeth.

But he couldn’t, because the overseer was terrified, and helpless, and—mad as the term was on this ship—human. Just like they were. “Please don’t eat me,” she whispered, like a little girl trapped inside a steel drum. “Please don’t eat me, please. Please.”

Yellow tears pooled in the corners of her eyes as she stared into Wrack’s face. “Please,” she whispered again.

He clenched his jaw, and understood there had to be a reason, and quickly, for this not to end in torn meat. If he didn’t want to preside over the dismemberment of another human being, no matter how callous they were, this had to become an opportunity. But so help me, thought Wrack as she babbled, she was going to have to work bloody hard with him to get things that way.

“Shut up,” he snarled, letting his voice siphon the hate swollen in his jaw. “Shut up, and breathe.” She breathed.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” spat Wrack, cocking his head. “Now, tell me why I shouldn’t eat what’s left of your face.” After all, he thought, there was absolutely no reason not to scare her shitless.

The overseer’s eyes bulged in her bloated face, edges pink, as she made a strangled sound in the mess of her larynx.

“You
can
talk,” she gargled.

“So can you,” snapped Wrack. “So talk.
Reason
with me.”

If this oaf really wanted to live, she would give him the speech of her life. Even beyond the thundering mess of his conscience, he hoped against hope that she would. Dead, she was just another bloody smear, another reason for his mob to be wiped out like bacteria when authority in sufficient numbers found them. Alive, she represented at worst the information they needed to make a plan, and at best an ally.

So far, she was not doing well. Choking, aborted words kept garbling from her grille, her eyes flicking wildly to the dead faces closing in on her.

Feeling a disturbance by his feet, Wrack looked back and saw the pub bruiser, attention span exhausted, gnawing at the overseer’s leg through her thick hide trousers. Wrack kicked him in the head, and growled at him to pack it in before looking back to their prisoner.

“We really are keen to eat you, you know,” he said, as if remarking on the weather. Suddenly, she found her words.

“Listen,” blurted the prone ogre. “I always knew you could think, could talk. You heard rumours, and they always got talked down, but I always th—”

“Oh,
fuck off!
” interjected Mouana, smashing a fist into the centre of her forehead.

“Yes,” Wrack interjected, in a hurry. “We’re not going to be friends, so don’t bother with all that. We hate you. But you might walk away from this if you can do something for us.”

The overseer’s face changed, very subtly. The panic etched in it ebbed as she found she was in a position to make a deal, and Wrack realised with a surge of disgust that at least some of her fear had been theatre, a desperate appeal to compassion that had drawn him in like the illicium of an anglerfish.

“Like what?” said the overseer, her voice steadier.

“You’re going to tell us what’s going on here. And you’re going to tell us how we stop it.”

“We’re criminals, the same as y—” started the woman, before retching as Mouana’s fist slammed into the folds of her throat.

“We already made it clear you’re not getting the pity vote,” spat the soldier. “So stop your sob story.”

“No,
listen
,” croaked the overseer, more in exasperation than pleading. “I’m
trying to tell you what’s going on
. I’m trying to explain. Nobody’s here by choice. We’re prisoners just like you are.”

“You’re not dead like we are,” said Mouana.

“We’re not far off. They fill us with chemicals, to keep us next to death. To keep us ill, sick, falling apart. For five years. Before we came to Ocean we needed surgery, steroids, implants; months of bulking up, just to have a hope of surviving it. Most don’t make it past three years. They take our medicine away if we can’t make quota.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Mouana exploded, fists smashing against the pallid face again and again, shreds of her forearms tearing away on blunt metal. “You expect me to pity THAT?” she screamed, jaws wide. “You expect me to care for a bastard
instant
that you’re sick? I will
show you
sick!” she screamed, and lunged for the overseer’s neck with grey teeth bared.

“Hold on!” shouted Wrack, throwing himself on Mouana, grabbing her head desperately, wincing as her teeth sliced into his forearm. “Why? Why do you have to be nearly dead?”

The overseer stared at Mouana, panting, eyes dulled with genuine terror, then flicked her oily gaze back to Wrack.

“Because Teuthis hates life,” she said, simply.

From the back of the crowd looking down on the prisoner, a voice piped up: “What the hell is Teuthis?”

“It’s a monster,” she answered, voice slithering in revulsion.

“So’s everything, here,” snapped Wrack, still straining to keep Mouana from lunging. “What kind of monster?”

“It’s different,” said the overseer. “Very old. Very clever. Came from the polar reach, up under the icecap. Horrible, armoured, squid thing. Got hunted years and years ago, and brought back here. Says it’s the last of its kind.”

“
Says?
” hissed Wrack.

“We can talk to it, in a way. But we have to be nearly dead; we need to be right on the edge before it’ll talk to us. It won’t work for the living. That’s why they bulk us up to take five years of poison; so it can’t tell the difference.”