Cronix (46 page)

“Oh god, Luis,” she said through her tears. “Tell me how this is going to end.”

“Shhh, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay now. I’m here. I’m going to get you out of this.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” he said, though his pledge was a direct contradiction of the one he had given to Hencock. He knew which one he would keep. He held her until the trembling subsided. Wiping her nose, she looked up at him. “I’m okay now. Thanks…’

“To be honest, if it hadn’t been for Quin, I probably would have off-worlded in the first few weeks, after we’d chipped everyone at the clinic. There wouldn’t have been much point staying beyond that. But I couldn’t leave him. And now with Pris…There’s no way.”

Oriente looked down at her face, worn yet so determined, and wondered how the hell he was going to fulfill his promise to Hencock, when all he wanted to do was take this woman and her child far, far away from this accursed place.

***

Despite being born into the rump of civilization that was being slowly over-run by monsters, Pris had been blessed. The little girl had her mother’s looks and unselfconscious manner, but her father’s curiosity and intellect. In a world circumscribed by the castle’s walls, she was at ease in her environment. Danger and deprivation were all she had ever known, and were therefore normal. The refugees’ talk of a splendid city out there, somewhere beyond the forest, was mere legend, a dream land in the heads of old people. And she never quite believed those fairy tales about a paradise hovering somewhere in the night sky, full of fabulous worlds where no one ever died. Her mother never talked about such a place, so it couldn’t be true.

She was a bright and cheerful child. She knew everyone in the castle and everything that went on. She was constantly on the prowl, foraging for scraps, gathering whatever berries or herbs grew in the nooks and crannies of the walls that only a child could get to, mingling with the people as they hoed and planted or reinforced the walls with rocks, all the time picking up gossip, absorbing the pulse of the community. Her world was constrained, but big enough for a child. Oriente could tell from her constant questions that she was already starting to rub up against its limitations.

“Why don’t the Cronix eat each other?” she would ask as she skipped along beside him, trying to keep pace.

“They do,” he said.

“Where have you been living all this time? Is London still out there in the forest? Was mum really a queen of Egypt?”

Oriente was cautious about how much he should tell her. He could see a sharp little mind whirring away behind the big blue eyes, processing the judiciously parceled-out scraps that he gave her. And in any case, he was limited in what he could tell any of these people. Promising Hencock not to divulge the truth was one thing, but fending off endless queries from a desperate population was another. He quickly decided that the less they knew, the better they would be able to hold out: as Hencock knew, false hope was preferable to crushing despair.

When people asked him how he got back, he told them he did not know. He had been released after serving his sentence and expressed a wish to come back and try to save the woman he loved. By some inexplicable luck, the download had not only worked but had landed him in an optimal body for getting through the Cronix horde.

That was enough for most of them. They had lived in a world of mysteries for so long that accepting one more – especially one so freighted with hope of change – was no great difficulty. A few die-hard romantics put the miracle down to the power of love, others, more accurately, to an act of divine intervention. Only a very few turned away with a grunt and lingering suspicion in their eyes.

For her part, Pris latched on to this giant who had stepped out of her mother’s fairy stories and into her world, delighted that he was so much larger than even her mother’s tales had made him out to be. The hero of the hour was living with her, in love with her mother, and she basked in the reflected glory. She would get up early to greet him as he returned from the night watch, gazing at him as he exercised for hours every day, tormented by the endless energy that raged inside his huge frame. He often returned in the mornings with fresh meat from his hunting expeditions. Everyone knew where the meat came from, but like shipwreck survivors, no one asked. Except Pris.

“My friend Uxmith says you go outside and kill the Cronix and that’s what we’re eating,” she said cheerily. “Is that true?”

Oriente caught Lola’s eye, read the look of hunger and revulsion as he unwrapped the lean steaks wrapped in chestnut leaves.

“Not entirely,” he said, as he blew on the embers of last night’s fire, added kindling that Pris had collected. “I do go out hunting Cronix, but this meat is from a pig I caught in the woods. Why, would you eat a Cronix, Pris?”

The little girl wrinkled her nose. “Yuck, they’re monsters. What’s a pig? I’ve never seen one? Whatever they are, they taste good.”

***

First the Scolds, then the less intelligent Cronix, started to avoid the walls at night. They knew it was dangerous: too many had not come back, and they could scent the blood on the grass. That made it safer for the defenders, but also meant that Oriente had to push deeper into their territory to hunt. He was not afraid. In fact he relished his expeditions, crawling through the long grass at night, relying on his heightened senses and feeling the endorphins coursing his muscles as he eased himself up to some unsuspecting prey. Then the delicious frenzy of the kill, the knife striking home, vertebra cracking under his powerful fingers. Some nights he made it as far as the woods, where he slipped like a shadow, observing the creatures as they slept, fought or engaged in their vicious couplings. His preferred trick was to lie like a leopard on a branch overhanging one of their trails, and wait until a lone Cronix passed underneath, then lift it noiselessly by the chin on to his blade.

He rarely felt in danger, but there was one episode that seriously rattled him. It occurred one night when the full moon made hunting difficult, and the risk of detection greater. He was on already edge when he saw a female walk slowly across a glade, heading straight for the thicket where he was hiding.

A few feet behind it was another figure, shorter and slightly built for a Cronix. As the first passed by, he lunged out and sunk his knife into its thorax. She fell with a grunt to the ground and he prepared for the second, smaller one to attack. Instead, it bolted into the dark wood.

He turned back to the dying subspecian and was about to deliver the
coup de grace
to its carotid when, to his deep horror, it spoke in a soft voice.

“Oh no.” It was a woman’s voice. “No, no…”

He froze in horror. “Oh Jesus, Jesus I’m sorry,” he said. “Who are you? What are you doing out in the woods at night…”

The woman was already fading, mortally wounded. He cradled her head in one hand, pressing the other to the wound in the vain hope of stanching the blood that gushed faster than his whispered apologies. As he pulled her towards him, he noticed she was wearing ragged trousers. “Jesus, what were you doing here, don’t you know…” he was almost sobbing himself by now.

“No,” she wheezed again. “No no no…” It was then that he realized it was the only word she knew. She was a scold, after all. It was a relief, but the confusion and pain in her eyes was still ripping him apart. Perhaps she was some unusually compos mentis download, smart enough to almost qualify as human. She struggled in his arms, not to escape but to scan the darkened woods for her companion.

“Adum-brae,” she called weakly, mustering her fading strength. “Adum-brae,” she repeated it like an incantation.

And it struck him like a hammer blow to the chest. The hair, the face, even in the dark it came flooding back to him. It was the same scold he had picked up in Dorking, all those years ago, the one his dogs had taken to with such affection, and who had slept with him before the wolf had ripped his world apart. Adum-brae: that had been the safe place he had told her of.

Edinburgh.

He stared at her dying face. Her eyelids were flickering, her hands balling up as her muscles tightened into a death grip. He stroked the clotted hair out of her eyes and tried to provide some measure of comfort, but there was none to give. He felt her body go limp and pressed his blackened fingers to her throat. She was gone.

He laid the body in the thicket, warily looking for the other figure. There was a movement in the shadows, then a cry like a wounded animal. He started in the direction of the sound, but the creature had darted off in the dark woods.

And Oriente ran too, no longer caring what he ran into. Because it occurred to him that the slender second creature, so distraught amongst these heartless beasts, was just a youth and was probably her boy. It could have been his own son.

There was no sign of the creature. Oriente had to stop, gasping for breath, still sobbing in pain.

“Adum-brae,” he bellowed into the darkened woods. “North. Adum-brae.” Then he ran again, tears on his cheeks and unseen branches whipping at his face.

***

It was Old Walt, the crack-shot night watchman, who told him about the women. A handful of them supplemented their meager rations by selling themselves to the guards, who received extra food for their dangerous work.

“They’re a sorry lot,” said Walt, a Sapien who had once been a hunter in a village in the south. “But then, aren’t we all? And my missus was carried off by the 'flu last winter, so I occasionally go round. It’s only natural, really. A man’s got his needs. Life goes on, even in the middle of death.”

Oriente nodded: he knew all about a man’s needs. In fact, since he had been reborn inside this super-man’s body, he had struggled to keep a lid on the urges that constantly threatened to overwhelm the person he still believed himself to be. The almost physical need to fight and to kill he had just about managed to master, unleashing his baser instincts during the hunting trips. But he was also boiling with testosterone, and recalled how the Rangers of old had been terrible whoremongers, often engaging five or six women at a time to satisfy themselves on return from long patrols in the woods. Since arriving at Arundel, he and Lola had made love once or twice, but she was still frail and undernourished, while he permanently felt like a horny teenager watching his first porn flick.

The discrepancy between their sex drives had led him to seek counsel from Old Walt, to whom he bashfully explained his problem.

“To be quite frank, I’ve not really been feeling myself since I got back,” he said.

“You’re lucky,” said the grizzled backwoodsman. “I’ve been feeling myself for way too long. Wish I could be someone else for a change, like your lot.” He spat on the stone walkway. “I'm an old fool. Should have had myself chipped years back. Always thought there’d be more time.” He smiled. “Never trusted all that mumbo-jumbo about the natural way being the only way. But I always worried what the missus would say. And the neighbors. Though they probably got chipped on the sly and are up there now, cavorting with beautiful women and floating on unicorns through pink sunsets, while I'm down here waiting to get eaten by Charlton fucking Heston.”

Old Walt told him where he could slake his thirst. He also promised to stand his watch for him. Since the Cronix had largely retreated in the face of Oriente’s nightly onslaught, there was little chance he would be needed on the walls.

The courtyards and garden plots were deserted at this time of night. Oriente made his way to what had been, long ago, a chapel, its limestone doorway and window sills carved in tapering arches. There was no door – the wood in the castle had been used for fuel or to fill in gaps in the defenses -- and he slipped into the dark hall unannounced. At the far end, a guttering tallow candle threw a feeble light over a figure hunched by the wall. He saw the sack of rags move, and felt a mixture of revulsion and desire.

“Come on in,” said a woman’s harsh voice. “You got food?”

“I have meat,” said Oriente, walking towards the figure. “Cronix.”

There was a greedy, cannibal chuckle from the shadows. “That’ll do nicely. Come over here, dearie, and let’s see what we’ve got.”

As he stepped into the greasy circle of candle light, the ragged figure gasped and pulled back. He guessed it was his huge figure, so reminiscent of the enemy, that had shocked her. He started to reassure the woman. “It’s alright, I know I look like one of them, but I’m actually…”

“I know who you are,” barked the woman. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Oriente could barely make out her shriveled face in the dark. She obliged him by holding up the candle. Her question had utterly stumped him – it was quite obvious to both of them what he was doing here – but when the flickering light lit the woman’s face there was something oddly familiar about it. She was a bag of bones, her face hanging in sagging folds, waxen and old. Under her upraised arm, a wing of loose flesh dangled, as though evolution had intended her to glide between treetops, then changed its mind and condemned her to this earthbound existence.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

It was the voice – abrasive, both aggressive and defensive at the same time – that identified her.

“Nurse Shareen?” He couldn’t believe that she, of all people, was still alive. He remembered the scold he had killed in the forest: with so few people left on Earth, maybe it wasn’t so surprising he was running into old, almost familiar faces now.