Cronix (44 page)

The defenders gawped, disbelief pierced now by some dim hope, a faint glimmer of salvation.

“That’s not possible,” grunted one man, his long hair matted with dirt. He was wearing a buckskin shirt and a breech clout which revealed a huge, gnarled scar on his withered thigh: he leaned on a walking stick whose upper half, Oriente realized, was fashioned from a human-thigh bone, the ball joint providing the hand-grip. The others were similarly ragged, like shipwrecked sailors washed on some barren shore with no hope of rescue.

“No one’s come down in more than a decade,” the man with the walking stick said.

Oriente shook his head. “I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true. There are still a few reanimation centers working. We’ve been trying for years to send someone down. This time, for some reason, it worked. Think about it. I’m here talking to you, in a Ranger’s body. What else could I be?”

“He could be one of the Halflings!” shouted a scrawny old man, his toothless mouth a black hole in a nebula of white beard. He brandished his spear closer to Oriente’s chest, though it was clear from his eyes that he was too terrified to make an actual jab. Oriente resisted the urge to snap the spear and ram it down the man’s throat.
Time to control that psychotic urge
.

“I don’t know what Halflings are,” he said. “But whatever they are, I’m not one of them. Now, you can listen to me, and have some hope of getting out of here, or you can try to stab me and all die here soon enough. I don’t care, I’ll wake up safe and sound on the Orbiter and lose two days of memories from this miserable dirtball that I’d be quite happy to erase anyway. Maybe that will happen to some of you too. But most of you don't have an avatar waiting up there, airside. Your kids certainly don't. Do you want them to die at the hands of those monsters out there?”

He was starting to get through to them, but still they stood with weapons raised, frozen by fear and indecision. The awkward silence was broken when the lame man with the thigh-bone walking stick stepped forward.

“Did you say your name was Oriente?” He was staring up at the gruesome Ranger. Oriente nodded.

The man’s face was half obscured by a thick beard. He appeared at a loss for words, then shook his head.

“The Missing Link,” he said. “Stumbling out of the woods again.”

Oriente stared at his face, trying to picture it fuller, without the woodsman’s beard. The piercing blue eyes were the only thing that stood out among features almost erased by hardship and weather.

“Hencock?”

The former DPP inspector nodded and warily extended a hand. “Seems I can’t get shot of you, Mr Oriente.” He tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled noise.

“My god. Hencock.” The words were out before Oriente had a chance to think about them. But Hencock barely seemed to register the shock on the giant’s face. Perhaps he knew just how he looked, a scarecrow among the skeletal, starving survivors of a lost civilization. Oriente tried to cover up with a joke.

“You going to arrest me again, commissioner?” Hencock gave that same strangled noise again. He was still clinging like a child to the giant's hand.

“It was inspector,” he said. “You always got my rank wrong.” Oriente wrapped him in his arms and a ragged cheer rose from the crowd, a cry of relief and joy that here, finally, was good news, that there was still someone human out there, aside from the glass-eyed monsters whose only desire was to butcher and eat them.

Hencock pulled himself free and ordered the guards to return to the ramparts.

“Come with me,” he told Oriente. Leaning heavily on his macabre cane, he led him into the castle.

It was a pathetic community. Peasants teased wilted vegetables out of the parched earth. There was no livestock to be seen, except a small wicker cage which contained several birds. As they passed, Oriente saw they were crows.

“It's hard life here,” Hencock said, following Oriente's gaze to the ramparts adorned with trophies of this war of attrition – severed human heads, some still with skin and hair, others picked clean of flesh.

They entered a shady hall whose roof had partially caved in. A cook was preparing a stew made of wizened root vegetables that looked more mud than food. Haggard wretches were propped against the walls, the more animated among them scraping hides or sewing crude clothing.

Cries of horror went up as Oriente entered the hall. Shrunken figures scurried for the nearest exit, but Hencock hobbled forward to reassure them that the enemy had not breached the walls. The scarecrows nervously returned, gathering around to observe this miracle for themselves. Bony hands reached out to touch his skin.

Hencock offered Oriente a bowl of the thin broth: out of politeness he took a few sips, though he was not hungry after feasting on the dead Cronix. It tasted like mildew. A gaunt boy crept up and dared to touch his arm, and Oriente offered him the foul broth. The boy devoured it as though it were lobster bisque, and the crowd seemed to sense, at last, that this really was no monster sitting before them.

“I know how bad it looks,” said Hencock, coughing into his hand. “But it's paradise compared to London.”

The mere mention of the name elicited groans of horror from the people gathered around.

“I heard about London being overrun,” Oriente said. “But what's happened here?”

“We don’t know exactly.” The former DPP chief stroked his thick beard. The contrast between the well-manicured pianist’s hands that Oriente first noticed back at the Delpy, and these knotted leather mitts was a testimony to the years of hardship he had endured.

“We lived in peace for a long time here, but then a couple years back the Cronix found us. First a few of them showed up, and somehow the news seemed to spread among them. Now the woods are crawling with them. We're prisoners inside our own walls, under total siege. We killed hundreds of them, but they managed to start a fire a month back that blew up our armory. Killed thirty people in the blast, and that wing is still smoldering. We’re mostly down to bows and spears now, though we keep a few high-powered rifles loaded just in case a Ranger shows up. That’s our biggest fear. It was old Walt who clipped you in the face as you ran in. Lucky for you his eyesight's not so good any more. He’s taken out a couple of dozen Rangers who got too close before.”

A few of the onlookers cheered old Walt’s prowess, and their equal luck that he missed on this occasion. Hencock leaned closer in to Oriente, as though inspecting the bullet welt on his cheek. “I’m not sure how much longer we can last,” he whispered.

Oriente did not know what to say. His arrival here had no doubt sparked some flickering hope, and no doubt he could bolster their defenses. But there were too many people in here, and too many Cronix out there, for him to make a real difference. Clearly, the subspecies would follow any large gathering of humans and hunt them down remorselessly. The best means of survival, he saw, would be for small groups of well-armed hunters to live far off in dense forests. There was no way, however, he could tell these poor people that. Most of them wouldn’t make it as far as the tree line.

He was just contemplating that grim prospects when a small girl stepped out of the crowd.

“Did you say your name was Urrantay?” she said, her voice barely audible.

She was gaunt as the rest, but still quite beautiful. Six, maybe seven years old. She wore a rough-spun jerkin that came down to her knees.

“Oriente,” he said, correcting the girls' pronunciation. “That's my name. What's yours?”

She stared at him, as if beholding a ghost. “Pris. My mother spoke of you. She told me about you, in her bedtime stories.”

Everyone looked at the girl, then peered back at Oriente as if he were the messenger of some inscrutable fate. But by now he had been struck by the resemblance, and was smiling at the girl. He held out his hand.

“You mother’s name is Lola,” he said.

She stared at him, and didn’t have to answer. The look was there: those big blue eyes and the curved, wide lips of the ancient Egyptian queen. Despite the dirt and hunger, the girl was a vision to behold.

She nodded enthusiastically. “Have you come to save us?”

He pulled the child to him. She was tiny, like a fragile bird.

“Where's your mother, Pris?”

“She’s sick,” the girl said. “But she’ll be alright now you’re here.”

She took him by the hand and led him past the crowd, up a stone stairway and down a passage whose windows opened to the breeze. She led him through an arch, warning him to watch his head, and into small, airy room where a woman lay under a shawl.

“Mum! Mum, look who’s come to visit us,” the girl squealed, voice full of childish glee. The woman pulled back the cover and opened her tired eyes. Even as Oriente recognized her face, haggard but still fine, Lola recoiled in horror. He had, for a second, quite forgotten the body he was inhabiting.

“It’s okay, mum, it’s Urruntay. He’s come to rescue us!” the girl laughed, hugging her mother and trying to coax her out of her fear. Lola looked flushed, perhaps wondering if this was some delirious fever dream.

Oriente knelt down in front of her. He smiled.

“Hey Lola. It’s been a long time.”

***

Lola showed no sign of recovering her strength. Oriente guessed it was nothing more than flu, but in their undernourished state, many of the refugees had already been carried off by it. He sat with Lola, feeding her thin broth and cradling her head as she slept.

When not watching over Lola, Oriente tried to scrounge up as much food as he could. She needed to eat, but there was precious little to be had. To earn more rations, he took night shifts on the lowest, most dangerous, section of wall, from terrified watchmen who had seen comrades snatched by Cronix in the darkness. It was here that Hencock had suffered the terrible wound to his thigh, falling from the rampart while struggling with a marauding scold.

From Old Walt, the man who had tried to blow his head off but who was now one of his comrades on the night watch, Oriente managed to procure a leather kilt, less out of modesty than a desire to distinguish himself from the naked predators outside the walls. He didn’t want any of the guards mistaking an actual Cronix for him and being taken by surprise. When he finished his watch, he would return to Lola’s side at dawn, feeding her when she woke up, drowsy and confused. It seemed somehow fitting that after all these years, it should be him who was nursing her back to health.

He would curl up tight next to her to keep her warm, while her daughter pressed on the other side. It felt good, this family he had never had. Lying there, Oriente allowed himself to dream of the day when he could lead them out of this doomed place, to a world where there were no Cronix, where they could build a new life together.

He listened for the voices in his head, the voices of the god he was supposed to serve, but there was nothing.

When he left for his fourth night on the walls, Lola was sweating and half-delirious. Her breath smelled bad and Oriente worried that unless she ate properly, her condition would deteriorate. He told Pris to stay with her, holding a damp cloth to her forehead.

The guards on the night watch tended to stick close to him for their own safety, whiling away tense hours by recounting the lore of the castle: the attacks they had withstood, the distinctive behavior of the Cronix, and advising him who to go to if you were looking to get medicinal herbs, moonshine or extra rations. They even told him which of the women sold sexual favors, though Oriente was amazed that any of these stragglers had the energy for fornication. As they were talking that night, one of the guards saw movement below.

“Shhh,” he hissed, pointing to where a ripple in the thick grass. Oriente followed his finger and sure enough, he spotted the slow, deliberate shape of a body moving below.

“Go to the gate,” he whispered to the surprised guards. “Be ready to open it at my command.” Then he slipped over the parapet like a cat.

The tussle lasted only a minute. There were two Cronix lurking beneath the walls: Oriente took out the first with a knife to the breastbone. As the second leapt upon him, he grabbed it by the neck and slammed its face into the castle wall. He picked up the limp bodies and sprinted for the gate.

The guards gaped as Oriente returned with his kills. He pulled his knife from the Cronix’s chest and started to gut and dress the corpse.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked one of the haggard men.

“Meat,” said Oriente, relishing the butchery despite himself. “They’d eat us as soon as look at us. Why not return the favor? Start a fire and we’ll cook up some Cronix steak.”

After three days of her new, protein-rich diet, Lola’s fever broke. Pris clapped her hands with glee.

“I knew she’d get better once you got here,” she said, looking at the giant man.

***

Like the other refugees from London, Hencock had almost no possessions. The few items he had managed to salvage were stored with meticulous care on a ledge in his quarters: a sewing kit in a clear plastic box, its pins kept in military order on a strip of cardboard and its cotton threads down to the last few centimeters, to be used only in the direst emergency; a shaving brush that had not been used in many a year; and a laminated picture of Hencock, his arm around a beautiful woman and a little boy pulling a silly face.