apes with drawn gums and shaking claws. Wrack laughed; this clearly wasn’t stopping until someone made it stop.
This was an insurrection. They were in trouble, and they were going to be in trouble until they were put down or caused a lot more trouble. It felt good. Better enjoy himself while it lasted, he thought, as one of the zombies leading the mob started screaming its own name.
Wrack was amazed when they made it to the aft hangar where they had first been rounded up for the ET hunt. The dregs were still there, the drift of ruined dead still stacked against the wall, moaning, their arms outstretched. Their salt-sodden band of survivors rushed over, hollering their triumph over the ray, and began to chatter with the dead. The conversations grew from the shaking of shoulders to the exchange of names, through the agony of remembrance, and into companionable rage. The hangar filled with human speech.
Some time during the night, zombies went out for food. They came back, dragging something like beluga whales. Fires were lit. Who had matches? Fuel? Wrack had no idea; it was bewildering to be out of control, but wonderful. No longer being the one who worked out what to do next, at least for a while, made his rotten shoulders feel lighter. More zombies came to them, either dragged there by search parties or blundering, lost, as he and Mouana had done before. It was a strange sort of party.
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
This was an insurrection. They were in trouble, and they were going to be in trouble until they were put down or caused a lot more trouble. It felt good. Better enjoy himself while it lasted, he thought, as one of the zombies leading the mob started screaming its own name.
Wrack was amazed when they made it to the aft hangar where they had first been rounded up for the ET hunt. The dregs were still there, the drift of ruined dead still stacked against the wall, moaning, their arms outstretched. Their salt-sodden band of survivors rushed over, hollering their triumph over the ray, and began to chatter with the dead. The conversations grew from the shaking of shoulders to the exchange of names, through the agony of remembrance, and into companionable rage. The hangar filled with human speech.
Some time during the night, zombies went out for food. They came back, dragging something like beluga whales. Fires were lit. Who had matches? Fuel? Wrack had no idea; it was bewildering to be out of control, but wonderful. No longer being the one who worked out what to do next, at least for a while, made his rotten shoulders feel lighter. More zombies came to them, either dragged there by search parties or blundering, lost, as he and Mouana had done before. It was a strange sort of party.
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
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