The Sea Hates a Coward (5 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

H
E HAD BEEN
out for some time following his blackout beneath the rotting skirt of the stingray—the rain had died down to a light drizzle, and dawn was on its way, grey like the skin of something drowned, without a hint of where the sun might rise.

They had left the
Tavuto
’s bridge tower some way behind them, its brooding bulk lost in the same mists that swallowed the deck ahead of them. And they were virtually alone—unlike the city-ship’s forward decks, which had teemed with the industry of the dead and their shepherds, this area seemed empty.

To their left, the superstructure of the ship rose in a mountain range of machinery, windowless gunmetal cliffs and vertical jungles of scaffolding. The sprawl of engineering crowded nearly to the edge of the ship, leaving only a strip of deck a hundred yards or less across, a grey road for them to walk.

Here and there, they came across lone zombies, staggering aimlessly like drunks returning bloodless from all-night revels. Once, they encountered a line of house-sized, chalk-white spider crabs, limbs bound with cable, mouthparts still weakly flickering. As they passed, the cat-sized isopods that seemed to serve as ship’s vermin clicked and squeaked at them from the shadows beneath the limbs of their vast cousins.

But for the most part, their only company as they hobbled down the side of the
Tavuto
’s spine were the occasional grey-headed seabirds, dipping from the mist to croak weary cries, or to roost in the foul, shit-crusted nest piles built up in the interstices of scaffolding and pipework. Schneider wondered idly, as they walked beneath one of the birds’ eyries, whether their hooked beaks were open to the taste of abhuman flesh, but was quick to put the thought out of his head. Being devoured by a bird was hardly the worst thing he could imagine right now.

Eventually, as the sky grew noticeably brighter in the distance, they came to the stern of the ship. The gargantuan central structure ended in a stark abutment of cooling towers and aerial masts, against which blocky sheds and storehouses leaned like foothills, their mouths yawning onto the deck. At its edge was a railing, dark in the predawn mist, and then nothing but the expanse of Ocean. Schneider and his friend said nothing, just walked on towards the edge; while they were still walking, he figured, they wouldn’t have to work out what to do next.

When they reached the rail, rusted and intermittently caked with guano, the sun was just beginning to climb into the sky, a sliver of steel nestled in a rare gap in the clouds. All was silent in its cold, sideward glare, a billion wavelets shivering over fathomless depths. None of this water, thought Schneider, would ever touch a shore.

If anything, the obfuscation of night had been a comfort. Being able to see the sheer, grey emptiness of what surrounded the
Tavuto
made even the incalculable mass of the slave ship seem tiny, fragile. Were he still alive, Schneider would barely have been able to look beyond the deck of the ship, let alone stand on its edge.

It was then that his attention was drawn by a noise out on the water, distant yet rising above the rough fizzing of waves against the hull far below. A few hundred yards out, a whale was being eaten.

The animal was white, eyeless, something like an elongate sperm whale with gills and a lower jaw trailing thick barbels. A benthocetus; Schneider recognised it from the logo on countless tins of Hedstrom & Sons fish. One of the most commonly fished creatures in Ocean, they swam in lonely pods in the blackness a mile or so down, following the currents in search of squid, balloon crabs, and anything else soft and pelagic.

When they died, their teeming gut flora, running wild in the dark, began to digest their host, filling their bellies with gas and sending them rising slowly to the surface far above. It was said that pods would follow the bodies of their dead as far as they could, until the decrease in water pressure threatened to burst their heads. Eventually the corpses would breach the waves alone, ruptured and wrecked, rolling sightless beneath a sky their distant ancestors had left behind.

This body looked like it had just risen, and already the sharks were upon it. Great whites and sleepers swarmed its belly, the slick wedges of their heads breaking the waves as they scrambled for purchase against thick blubber. More were arriving, visible briefly as grey ovals above the waves as they cruised for a place at the feast. Fins thrashed, raising spray.

“So that’s it,” said Schneider’s friend, their voice a quiet rasp on the breeze. “We can’t walk any further.” The time had come for that difficult conversation. Schneider grunted in acknowledgement, eyes still fixed on the dead whale.

“Where were we going again?” he asked, hoping desperately that a plan had been agreed in that groggy, half-remembered time following their investigation by the awful stingray.

“I don’t know,” whispered the other corpse, as if surprised by the fact.

“You were leading the way,” said Schneider, without the energy to phrase it as anything more than a statement of fact. Speech came more clearly now, but it was utterly exhausting—nuance was beyond him.

The corpse sighed, wistful in a way that suggested they might have had a plan earlier.

“Maybe, I forgot. Maybe we never had a plan. But it’s quiet here, we can talk. We can make a plan.”

The carcass rolled in the water, disturbed from below by something very large, and tails smacked at the water as the sharks were dislodged.

“Talking,” said Schneider, fighting to stay focused. “We need to talk to other, to other... to the other...”

“Zombies?” offered his companion. Schneider looked over at them and they shared a rustling laugh, his companion’s chest wound foaming mirthfully.

“Yes, the zombies,” he agreed. “Ridiculous, isn’t it? But there we are. We need to talk to them, to wake them up, like us.”

“What then?” said Schneider’s friend, as the water around the benthocetus slopped and churned with red-gummed mouths. The carcass dipped in the water again.

“I don’t know,” said Schneider. “Let’s see if they’ve got any ideas. At least it’s quiet here. We’ve got a place to think, and to talk, and work out what we’re going to do.”

The water exploded in a surge of spray. Schneider had seen it coming a second before it breached, huge and pale and rippling through the water as it rushed up. Then it was there, a great blunt head, grey cathedral jaws distending to clamp round the whale’s girth.

It shook from side to side and the sixty-ton carcass moved with it, raising walls of white water. The crepuscular titan glowed a weak yellow in the dawn, and the clusters of copepod parasites trailing from its eyes glistened. At last a good quarter of the whale’s body came free in its mouth, and the head disappeared.

For a second one of the great scavenger’s fintips breached and hung in the air as it turned. Then it was gone, taking its meal with it and retreating into the depths for the day. What was left of the whale sank from view, less than a minute later, gone back to join its fellows in the deep.

“I’d like to find somewhere to shelter,” said Schneider, at exactly the same time his fellow said, “I’m hungry.”

When he came to think of it, Schneider was very hungry too—he had been for as long as he had been conscious, although he hadn’t recognised the sensation for what it was. After watching the scene off the stern of the
Tavuto
, there was little in the world he wanted to do less than actually eat, but apparently his companion was made of sterner stuff.

More pressingly, as the sun rose, the stern deck felt extremely exposed. If another one of the rays—or worse yet, an overseer—came round this end of the ship on patrol, there would be nowhere to hide. For that matter, there was no guarantee they were not already being watched from any of the darkened windows that festooned the ship’s aft decks.

Looking round at the
Tavuto
’s rear (and feeling a rush of relief to be looking away from the sea), the darkened entrances of its lower warehouses suddenly seemed hugely inviting. There was no sign of any movement.

“Let’s go in there,” urged Schneider, gently turning his companion away from the endless water and pointing. “Maybe they have food stored there. And it’s safe. Maybe.”

Shrugging with wasted, bony shoulders, the other zombie stepped away from the rail and loped for the ship’s interior.

He was so tired; the short walk to the nearest entrance felt as long as the night’s march up the flank of the ship. They collapsed just inside the mouth of the metal cave, Schneider feeling as though his limbs were little more than salt-soaked driftwood, his feet sodden lumps. He didn’t dare think about their condition inside their gore-stained wrappings.

There was no doubt, he was growing weaker. While he had no idea when—or what—he had eaten before becoming conscious, whatever metabolism he had was screaming for fuel. It had not escaped his notice that he had not shat yet, either—so far as he knew. But that was another thing he just did not want to think about. It was best to focus on what went in. This was a ship that existed to gather meat; whether he liked the idea of putting any in his mouth or not, there had to be some nearby.

The warehouse was dim, as the sun had not yet hauled itself high enough to shine over the parapet of the stern, but looked dispiritingly empty. What he hoped at first to be the angular bodies of sharks revealed themselves, as his weak eyes adjusted to the dark, to be the corroded bones of aircraft, half-dismantled and surrounded by littered parts. The warehouse was actually a hangar, and—judging by the look of it—one that had not been used in an extremely long time.

There was no food here, no company, no answers. Just him and his companion; two knackered corpses slumped in a derelict building. Schneider closed his eyes, and was positively urging the ever-present interior night to swallow him, when the gurgling of his companion’s chest wound, which always preceded their voice, caught his ear.

“Look: meat,” they breathed, and he craned forward with open eyes to see it for himself. Sure enough, as the sun’s light began to filter into the rusty cavern, the back wall was coming into view; and against it lay a six-foot drift of flesh. He thought to plead for a moment’s rest before they went to investigate, but his friend had already risen shakily to their feet and was scampering past the shattered jets to the prospect of food.

Schneider rose to follow, and was halfway across the hangar before the first wash of sunlight spilled onto the pile against the back wall, revealing what it was made of.

Bodies.

CHAPTER SIX

“T
HEY’RE PEOPLE
!”
SHOUTED
Schneider, surprised by the volume of his voice. “They’re people!”

To his immense relief, his companion slowed—he had briefly thought they would continue on with jaws open and eyes dulled by hunger, but with the sun shining on the pile, there was no doubting the provenance of the meat.

At first, he wondered if it was a heap of the truly dead, but then he saw movement. Just a fingertip at first, twitching weakly on the end of a scab-crusted arm, but once he knew what he was looking for, he saw more. Here a bandaged foot scrabbled mindlessly at the deck, there an arm waved slowly in the air as if signalling for help, there a shattered jaw opened and closed, sickeningly mechanical below unmoving eyes. For a queasy second, the image of the bloated fish in Exhibition Plaza returned to Schneider’s mind: it was horrible that seeing corpses move didn’t seem unusual anymore.

They were stacked on top of one another, slumped against each other like sozzled friends, as he and his companion had been when they first walked into the hangar. Schneider wondered: had they come here consciously, or had they sleepwalked here unaware, driven by the vague instinct to get away from the horror of the foredeck, without any real plan? More to the point, in either case, were they any different to him?

Towards the bottom of the mound, the zombies looked markedly more decrepit, and less motile. Under the sprawled forms of the more recent arrivals, there was a midden of muck-encrusted forms, either lacking in limbs or so thin and drawn they seemed incapable of movement.

At the edge of the drift, separated from his fellows by a few feet and lying in a mound of wet black detritus, was the most harrowing of all of them.

He was little more than a skeleton, clothed in nothing but a ragged grey beard, his limbs worked down in places to grey-red bone and black tendons. Yet he still moved. Despite being reduced to a wet, filthy parody of a human form, he still moved, scratching absently at his right humerus with a fragment of metal like a caged parrot gone mad.   

Schneider wondered, looking down at the emaciated figure, whether this was what he had to look forward to. A gradual erosion of function, followed by an interminable slump against a wall somewhere as he waited for his bones to fall apart.

He was just plotting out his excruciating demise in some reeking corner, when it occurred to him he had not heard from his companion in all the time he had been inspecting the writhing people-pile. Looking over to his right, he saw them hunched over the form of a prone zombie, arms outstretched, and a cold shot ran down his spine. His friend was eating another human.