Dead Boys (21 page)

Mahmoud rose seismically to his feet, his hand extended in a gesture that still struck Leopold as obscene: the offer to shake hands.

“Now tell me, my friend,” said Mahmoud, “do we have a deal?”

Leopold, reduced to his last resort, closed his fist around his pouch, turned on his heel, and stalked away, as if he were about to sell the watches posthaste to Mahmoud’s most hated rival.

“All right, my friend, relent!” cried Mahmoud, waving his hand at the ground. “The sight of your back reminds me that a man must sometimes take a chance to reap a reward, isn’t it? And so I present you my final offer, which I hope you find agreeable: I can give three dozen blades per watch, with armor to match. This truly is a deal that only Mahmoud can make, for no other merchant has the stock!”

“We’ll need delivery, too,” said Leopold, offering his profile. “Our tent is along the Rim, past the Torn Curtain, about a mile before the Medic’s: do you know the place, or shall I draw you a map?”

“Delivery?” spat the merchant, investing those four syllables with such disbelief and outrage that he had to steady his head with his hands. “This is not a service we offer at Mahmoud’s! A man comes with his army and he takes his goods! He does not ask the merchant to take the risk of transport, and through this war zone, and for nothing!”

“I offer four watches,” said Leopold, undeterred. “One as downpayment. The other three you will receive at the camp. Meet me there, and you’ll be rich enough to buy several districts, which I, as ruler of Dead City, will let you keep. Who knows? There may even be a place for you in my administration.” Leopold dangled the pouch from his fingers, favoring the merchant with his ruined teeth. “So tell me, my friend: do we have a deal?”

“We have a deal,” muttered Mahmoud, his rancor dissolving into deep satisfaction as his customer turned his back. “Moron,” he said under his breath, “all the swords in Tutankhamen’s army are worth less than the gift you’ve given!”

The crow turned its tail on the merchant and took to the air, following closely behind the bobbling head of Leopold l’Eclair.

As Leopold threaded his way through stalls of imitation swords and makeshift clubs, he squeezed the pouch in his fist. “What audacity, l’Eclair!” he said to himself. “The very audacity that shall carry you like a guardian angel through these Plains, for if any quality is favored by the gods of this land, it is surely brazenness.”

He continued in this vein as he walked into the Shallow End, going so far as to recite his first speech before a united Land of the Dead. His mood was further improved when two recruits with sharpened sticks charged him, their river-moist bodies falling in slabs beneath the edge of his sword before their battle cries had been fully articulated.

“Tell those who kick pebbles into your eyes,” he said as they sank into torpor, “that the Last Man Standing has arrived!”

He grew less ebullient as he approached the hinged gates of his camp, where the sounds of argument soon spilled over the walls and onto the pitted surface of the earth. Enclosed within a tall fence constructed entirely of scavenged weaponry and patches of plastic and cloth was a wide swath of earth divided by barbed wire into a multitude of little pens keeping hundreds of quarrelsome body parts organized by size and type. The bickering company worked in a clearing between the pens, and their dispute concerned the plans drawn in the dirt before them, which had, as the weeks passed, grown so elaborate that the company couldn’t proceed without them. A miniature tent had been built to protect them from breezes, footfalls, and discarded tools—and this had seemed like protection enough until Etienne’s head was installed at the top of the framework of flesh that was shrouded in shadow by the camp’s high walls. Since then, his spasmodic attempts to control that errant body had crushed the tent, erasing the plans entirely.

“It was faulty wiring that did it,” he shouted from above the company. “Look to yourselves before blaming me!”

“Come on, E,” shouted Remington from the ground, where he was attempting to join a string of body parts with both hands and both feet, “what happens when the parts get joined to you is
your
problem! We’re working overtime down here, so why don’t you just kick back and wait for the grownups to tell you what to do?”

“Enough of this verbal spew!” screamed Jacob, tearing the little tent up by its roots. “Let everyone be quiet unless anyone has anything even partially relevant to say, at which point everyone will be amazed at anyone, since there’s been nothing but jabber for hours, if not days, of wasted time!”

Then Jacob shouted at Remington, flinging the tiny tent aside; Etienne hollered at Jacob while trying to gain control of his enormous limbs; and Remington hollered at Etienne while Adam and Eve tossed him up one side of the human scaffolding below Etienne’s neckline, where Remington strove to fix the connection between two lengths of spine in a grand hoop around the creature’s midsection.

“My friends!” cried Leopold, planting his sword in the earth and holding out his hands as if he were carrying a large platter of hors d’oeuvres. “Let us all take a well-deserved break and settle our differences without—dear lord, Remington, are you climbing that beast with my watches? Come down slowly, damn you, and give them here!”

Thus the argument intensified, and might well have led to violence, had Jacob not scrambled over to the ruined plans and begun scribbling over them with a ski pole. Etienne, noticing the diagram, pleaded with Remington to disconnect him from the bony clamp that held him in place above the creature, and with a last wheeze of psychic energy Remington obliged. Etienne, who had been unscrewed from his plaque, and whose few remaining vertebrae had been stripped of flesh for a cleaner connection, was passed down to Adam, and the company crowded around Jacob’s sketch.

In the sand, two human forms were depicted beside a harness made of limbs and ribs, parts whose cuneiform was instantly recognizable to all through a system of anatomical notation developed in the planning stages. “Of course,” muttered Jacob as he sketched, “of course! If bone is the engine, its mass is the horsepower. Of course!”

“What are you saying, man?” said Leopold. “Enunciate when you jabber.”

“Yeah, Jake, en
un
ciate,” said Remington.

“A living man doesn’t move the way we do,” said Jacob, pointing to the first drawing, the shape of a man with arrows descending from his head into his body. “When he moves his hand, the motion starts in his brain, runs through his nerves, then moves his muscles.” He tapped the grit below the second drawing, in which a human figure had arrows running through every part of his body, in both directions. “But a corpse goes through a total overhaul. When he’s translated from life to death, he learns a new way of moving.”

“Ooh! Ooh! That’s called quickening!”

“Yes, Remy, it is,” said Jacob, “now put your hand down. While quickening, the corpse recognizes that his brain and muscles are now powerless to move his hand, which must now move itself. The will to move is no longer centralized; it has spread throughout every bone in his body.” He drew his fingertip across the bellies of the two figures. “Thus, if you cut off a living man’s legs, they simply die, but cut a dead man in two, and you get two dead men: one who walks on his hands, and one who can no longer see.”

“Usually,” said Remington, looking up at Adam and Eve.

“Usually. But bring Remy into the picture and you can get different parts of different dead men to agree to function together.” Jacob joined arrows from the separated halves across the diagrams. “Get him to merge parts of different corpses, and you make a combination corpse. His will to move has separate origins that Remington unifies. So far, the mechanics are simple, because the parts still add up to one whole body.

“But this creature is more complicated: its body is made up of parts of hundreds of corpses. We want to unify those parts enough for a single operator to control them, and so we’ve been trying to plug Etienne in at the top.

“But we’ve been leaning on the model of a living human, expecting his head to control the body as if its brain were operational. Apologies, Etienne, but we’ve been overestimating the importance of your skull! Attaching it does allow the creature to see and hear, but for our purposes it’s only a specialized bone. This isn’t about mental dominance, it’s about extending the will to move throughout the creature’s framework, and where that’s concerned, bone mass matters.”

Behind them, the creature shifted its weight, dragging a massive appendage a few feet through the sand, alarming the company enough to halt the lecture for a time. When it settled, Jacob began sketching again, drawing a head with a short arrow extending from its neck and a body with long arrows extending from its digits and joints, each of which he connected to a corresponding point on his proposed harness.

“A skull on its own doesn’t have the mass to control our creature. To drive it, we’ll need to plug an entire body into the core, so that the impulses from every bone in its body can interface with the creature’s. What we need is a puppeteer.”

The company fell on the theory at once, dissecting it, debating it, and engaging in a heated analysis of the harness, which Jacob and the headless began assembling on the spot. Remington consented to join it to the framework of the creature, clambering back inside its cavity despite the frazzled state of his nerves, holding on while involuntary motions shook its bulk, but before he was through, Etienne, plugged into the creature and hanging above them all, began to protest.

“The plan makes sense, I’m not denying it. The thought that there wasn’t enough of me for the job passed through my mind, though I wasn’t thinking in terms of bone mass. But this isn’t just about mechanics. There’s the character of the operator to consider.

“I promise you, this creature is chaos. It’s a jumble of wills that wants to devour the man at its reins. To take control of it, a corpse would need to be so forceful and stubborn that he was almost insane; he’d have to be completely self-obsessed; he’d have to be monomaniacal; he’d—”

“He’d have to be Leopold,” said Jacob.

Leopold, of course, had already come to this conclusion.

“And why not?” he cried as he laid his hand on one of the creature’s myriad flanks. “The beast will be under my control after we reach the gate, so let us be joined now: the king and his people, sharing the body politic! How soon can we begin?”

“We’ll have to expose a lot of bones first,” said Jacob, “but we can get started immediately.”

Noting his ward’s exhaustion, he ordered Remington to go off and play with his friends until he was needed, and so it was that Remy, Adam, Eve, and the reconstructed crow had ample time to relax on the rocky ground outside the gates, staring into the Shallow End, watching a number of minor encounters between bit players in the drama of the Plains before spotting a rickety shape on the horizon. Mahmoud the merchant approached, each segment of his body shimmying independently with the strain of locomotion. On his shoulders were the straps of a backpack that rose above his head, containing all the city-goods for which he’d traded his stock, and behind him, twelve of his Guardsmen steered a pallet creaking with cargo.

The crow flew in a silent circle above the fence, and Remington trotted out to meet Mahmoud, flanked by the headless. “Oh, hiya! You must be the delivery guy.”

“Where’s Eclair?” said the merchant, bristling.

“You mean Leo?” said Remington. “He’s busy inside, but I’m on his team. I saw you coming, and I’m on my break, so.”

“Saw me coming?” Mahmoud peered at the fence. “Through what?”

“Through the crow,” said Remington, poking at the punctured bed-sheet on top of the pallet. “I see what he sees. He’s my buddy.”

Mahmoud grunted in skepticism. “Show me. Send him under the pallet and read me what is written on its wood.”

The crow squawked irritably at this suggestion, but complied, hopping between the guardsmen’s feet and under the wheeled conveyance. “That’s funny,” said Remington, giggling. “It says ‘Restrooms This Way.’”

Mahmoud straightened, his head bobbling. “My young friend,” he said, throwing an arm around Remington’s shoulders, “your talents are wasted with these schemers. I have decided to relocate my business, moving back into the city I left so long ago, with your friend Eclair’s watches as my passport. A man with a vision so limited as he would, of course, never be able to unload such finery, but I was once, let me say, well-placed in the economic structure of the city, and know just which wheels such items would grease. Soon, I will return to the position I held before my little misunderstanding with Caesar, and with a newfound and unstoppable momentum will I rise above it.

“In short,
yanni
, death is long, and we survive its passage only if we are willing to reinvent ourselves. I am going to places, do you understand?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Remington, nodding as the bird settled in his skull. “You have to go to places, right?”

“Precisely. So go to places
with
me, boy. Tell Mahmoud what they pay you and your bird buddy, and Mahmoud will quintuple the number.”

“Oh,
wow
! Quintuple is my favorite. But they don’t pay me anything.”

Mahmoud roared with laughter, clapping Remington on the back. “Easy to quintuple, then! Stick by me, boy, and you will be wealthier than you have ever imagined, all in the span of a single pay period.”

“Hey, thanks! You’re the most generous delivery guy ever. But I’m just going to take the stuff and stick with my friends. Here, let
me
pay
you
.” Remington reached into his skull, where the watches had been pasted down with clay beneath a piece of folded paper. Pulling the packet loose, he counted its contents into Mahmoud’s hand like giant coins. “One, two, and three,” he said, then set off for the fence. “I’ll open the gates, and you can wheel that stuff right in.”

“There must be something that can sway you,” called Mahmoud.

“Not really. See, I have to go to places, too. And they’re closer than ever.”