Cronix (4 page)

“I was that good, huh?” he said. She ignored him.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. She spooned slop into her mouth, but did not look up. “Not even a name? Well, we’ll have to get you a name then. Let me think about it.”

After breakfast, they set off again. Occasionally the old man would shout out a possible moniker. “Cathy?” “Lorna?” Each time she would glance over her shoulder and walk on.

“Well listen, Miss No-Name, I don’t know what you were doing in Dorking, but when we are finished with this hunt, I’d advise you not to stay in the southern woods. Too many Rangers and hunters. Go north. They say there’s a place up there where scolds live in peace with mortals, and there’s no police. You could build yourself a life there.”

This time, she seemed to be listening. “North,” he repeated. “Follow the birds in spring. I hear it’s a place on a hill, name of Edinburgh.”

She frowned at the name, apparently trying to make sense of it. He repeated it. “Edinburgh.”

“Adum-brae?” she managed.

“Close.” He chopped the name up into palatable syllables. “Ed-in-burrow.”

“Ad-um-brae,” she said again. He shrugged, pleased at least she had expressed fleeting interest in something he had said. “That’ll probably do. Adum-brae it is.”

They saw the stone monument rising on the crest of the downs long before they spotted the multitude of figures that were ranged around its base. The hunter already knew what was there, and was ready for the inevitable shock, but the scold halted when she saw the throng of dead people positioned around the towering shrine, unmoving and devoid of any discernible human scent.

He waved her on as his mule caught up. “Nothing to be afraid of. They’re not alive.”

The scold stood stock still, and he trotted on through the thistles to where the first of the bodies stood rooted to the ground. Despite his reassurances, the place always instilled a sense of ill ease in him. The sloughed-off bodies of thousands of people who had gone air-side were perfectly preserved in a variety of poses around the vast marble statue. Some were running, some sitting cross-legged or kneeling in circles, others lying on the ground, wrapped in each other’s arms. Many just stood there, looking up at the skies to which their one-time occupants had ascended, leaving their skins – treated with chemicals against decay and the elements – here on Earth, a memorial to all those who lived and died before the promise of deliverance. Beneath them, Oriente knew, was a great burial pit, where the tens of thousands of bodies from London had been interred during the frenzied final years of the Exodus.

The chemical treatment had prevented the bodies from rotting, but not from being annexed by nature. Some were almost entirely entwined in ivy, while others had faces blackened by moss and mildew, birds’ nest peeking from mouths that gaped open in joy. A half-hearted caretaker, underpaid and dispatched every few months from London, had scythed back the weeds from the figures closest to the statue, and even scrubbed one of two back to their original polish. The overall impression was nevertheless of a horde of vegetal zombies shambling toward the giant stone figure rising in their midst. As the mule weaved its way through the frozen crowd, Oriente glanced over his shoulder. The scold was skirting around the edge of the display, unsure what to make of the macabre assembly.

He passed smiling, elderly grandparents now young and coltish in their off-world paradise: eternally sulking teenagers, happy families chasing a stuffed pet dog. There were at least three people mounted on embalmed horses. Some of the clothes had been improperly treated and had rotted, revealing glimpses of bare flesh beneath. In places, a figure had toppled and lay face-down in the long grass.

Oriente reined in his mule at the foot of the stone plinth. It was bracketed by two giant feet belonging to the figure that soared above him. He craned his head, squinting in the light reflected by the off-white marble. Far above, the craggy stone face stared into infinity.

“Hey Fitch,” Oriente said to the statue.

The plinth, rising twenty feet above him, was scored with writing in dozens of languages, all bearing the same message:

In memoriam

To those who died.

A less-than-heartfelt memorial from those already half-out of the door, but anyone reading it knew what they had died of, and why. They died simply because they had been born too early to be saved.

Beneath the moss-rimed engraving, a larger, less polished lettering had been chiseled by some later commentator, clearly not an Eternal: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are.”

In fact, on closer inspection the hunter saw the huge pedestal was covered in a fungus of graffiti left by countless visitors, people either on their way out or returning to Earth for whatever reason. Some of it was just names and dates – 
Philippe et Claudine 23/7/2377
, 
Drax Megalouki, March 2553
– while others had left misspelled messages of gratitude to the man whose statue now dominated the hilltop, just as his name dominated the history of human evolution.

Tusen tak Dug Fitsch, Agneta Arnborg, Uppsala.

One slogan, freshly painted on the plinth, caught the hunter’s eye.

And they shall know that they are dead.

He stared at the message a while, then tethered the mule to the wrist of a young woman making the V-for-Victory sign.

By the heel of the statue’s right foot, a metal door opened into the cool interior of structure. It was supposed to be locked, but the chain was rusted and broken. The place had a pleasantly dilapidated air, and Oriente trudged up endless flights of steps to emerge at a doorway half-open to the powder blue sky. Puffing slightly, he stepped out on to a platform atop the giant’s head.

He couldn’t help but smile. As far as he could see, England was covered by rolling woods broken only occasionally by a grassy glade. Birdsong drifted up and the high breeze cooled his moist forehead. Gazing down over the stone waves of the giant’s thick hair, speckled with the nests of swifts, he could make out the tip of the nose protruding out over the throng of celebratory corpses below.

“Ah Fitch,” he said, slapping the statue's head. “What the hell are you doing to me?”

The silence was tempered only by a whisper of a breeze and a wood pigeon cooing. Peering down, Oriente felt like a monarch of old addressing his people. Unnervingly, a number of them had been positioned to stare up at the man who saved them, and he could almost feel the blind stare of their eyes.

“C’mon, Doug, where are you?” He scanned the legions of the dead fanning out towards the edge of the forest, hoping for a glimpse of the hulking wolf. Nothing. For the hundredth time, he asked himself what the beast had meant with its cryptic message: 
Laura was right.

Right about what? He had spent so long trying to forget her, and Fitch, that now the memories only trickled back. Laura's obsessions, her many strange ideas. One thing sprang to mind, something she had always gnawed away at, could never quite let lie: her religious upbringing. As a scientist, she had tinkered with the fabric of life, always trying to lift the curtain and peek at the wizard behind. Even after the centuries of forgetting, Oriente suddenly recalled her badgering Fitch at the dinner table the old house, theorizing about the nature of God.
“Maybe there was deity once, who created all this, but then he died. Or got bored and left. Or maybe he’s on a break, and his lunch hour is like five thousand years of our time…”

Could that be what the wolf had meant?

Oriente shook his head. No, she couldn't be right about that. There was no deity. Science had long since stripped nature down to its barest essentials and found nothing, no feral god hiding behind the skirting boards of the universe. It had to be something else.

On the far edge of the crowd of stuffed humans, a figure was running, jumping around. He pulled his field glasses out of his back pack. It was the scold, waving her arms in the air. 
The wolf!
She must have spotted the wolf. The hunt was on.

He dashed down the winding steps. Outside, the sunlight dazzled him and he fumbled as he tried to unhitch the mule from the smiling girl's arm. As he grabbed the saddle, something caught the edge of his vision. He froze, slowly lowered his leg from the stirrup, and turned around.

He couldn’t tell exactly what had raised his hackles. His eyes scanned the silent figures.

And there it was. The hunter’s heart lurched, the breath leaked out of him. For there, standing absolutely motionless between a Sikh family in turbans and saris and a paunchy middle-aged man throwing a Frisbee, stood a powerfully built blond male, a good six feet four. Stock still and staring straight at him between the posed corpses. Not moving a muscle, not blinking.

Cronix.

“Oh shit,” he croaked.

The creature was naked except for a rope belt hung with two human heads, fixed in place by twine running through empty eye sockets. 
This
 was what the scold had been warning him about, not the wolf. She wasn’t about to tackle such a monster by herself.

As slowly as he could, the hunter reached the gun in the saddle sheath. The Cronix was a good fifteen feet away, but would move with terrible speed once he made his move. His head could be hanging from its belt in minutes.

His arm crept to the stock of the gun. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for never having had a chip implanted. What was now a moment of life-or-death hazard would then be no more than a minor, if briefly painful, inconvenience for an Eternal. Too late now. Too late for anything except that rapid grab for the shotgun, if he could make it.

He went for the draw. A movement behind the Cronix, shapes hurtling between the dead, registered in his peripheral vision. The Cronix spotted them too. Arthur and Jess, pelting at full speed to their master’s aid. In a split second, the creature weighed its options, then bolted.

Hablaw
, it screeched in its insane babble as it ran.

Oriente yanked the gun out and wheeled on the giant as it dashed off between the embalmed figures.

“Take that, motherfucker,” he screamed, blasting off a round. The arm flew off a Chinese woman. He fired again and the head of the Sikh pater familias exploded in a shower of chipped bone splinter and insulator foam. But the Cronix was gone. The hunter fell to his knees and heaved up his breakfast on the wet grass. Jess ran up and licked his sweating face. He clasped the dog and buried his face in her fur.

“Thank you, girl, thank you.”

The scold padded up noiselessly and stood staring he crouched on the ground.

“Thank you,” he said. “For releasing the dogs. You saved my life.”

She stared at him a second, then turned and led the way onwards, away from the statue and its unmoving entourage, on towards London.

Hours later, they glimpsed the city. To the east were the old Thames flood barriers, rusting hulks basking like washed-up whales on the tidal mudflats. The floodplains had long since receded when the ice caps were artificially re-frozen, leaving the dykes and dams rising like sentinels over swamps of genetically enhanced mangroves that had once helped limit the tides. In season, the Thames valley blossomed a startling tropical red and white.

To the south, directly below where they stood, the Great London Wood swept up to the heart of the city. The historic center lay in the shade of the endless forest, dominated by a gaunt stone edifice: the Temple of the Apex of Human Evolution. Vast stone pillars carved in the shape of trees burst through the temple’s sloping roof, a tribute to the restorative power of nature over civilizations that had brought humanity to the brink of catastrophe. Oriente had always dreamed of going inside, but fear kept him away: London had only a marginal police presence, but long experience made him mistrustful of any large gathering of human beings. He had heard from the few Dorkingites who visited the temple that inside was a large statue of Charles Darwin, surrounded by stone-carved ape-men.

“There it is,” the hunter said, half expecting the scold to share his wonder. But she was squatting on her haunches, chewing a stalk of grass. The fact that he couldn’t share this moment irked him for a second. He shook himself out of it: he was already losing the habit of being alone.

“London,” he said. “You came through here.”

She pointed lazily down the hill, to where the woods broke like surf on the swell of the hills. The trail of the wolf.

“Well, let’s go get him then.”

They descended the escarpment slowly, Oriente still gazing at the scaffold-crusted dome of Saint Paul's and rooftops of the much diminished city. Eventually, the great wood enveloped the travelers and the magical vision faded once more into narrow forest track. The scold stopped and looked back.

“I know,” he said. “We’re getting close to London. I don’t like it either.” He could understand her apprehension – she must have fled for her life through these same woods. How long ago? Weeks, maybe months. She had no desire to return.

“Watch out for Rangers,” he said. “They can come down on you in seconds.”

They walked on, slowly. The scold held Arthur and Jess on a tight leash, occasionally halting to inspect a broken fern or crushed grasses for signs. The wolf, or whatever it was, appeared to be heading north, skirting the city. They walked for hours, eyes fixed on the forest. They would be at the river soon: Oriente could almost smell the muddy water.