Nocturnal Emissions (22 page)

“The symbol of our deity. The Pod.” Citrin replaced his hat. “Onward, my friends.”

Ahead, they heard echoy voices and saw faint lights tremble across the walls of the brick canyon. One might have thought it was ghosts, but it turned out to be a small team of men with rolled up sleeves, covered in grease, but with their masks still hiding their faces. They were working on the pumps, sweating and swearing in their effort.

“How goes it, men?” Citrin inquired in an encouraging, cheerful tone.

“Poorly,” said the team leader, approaching them. Did his eyes flick rue-fy at the newcomers? “Too corroded. We can’t replace the parts we need.

The iron forgers from the factory-city will all be long dead by now.”

“We must try to substitute parts, then, or make due with fewer parts—cut corners,” Citrin said. “We must improvise.”

“We are trying just that, my lord. But I am not at all optimistic.”

“Can we have a look?” asked Golding.

“By all means,” the foreman said, with a sarcastically exaggerated sweep of his arm.

Advancing with his lantern, Golding murmured to Kubin and Morrow,

“Primitive. Impressive, but primitive.”

“Do you think we can do something, then?” Morrow asked.

He stopped to face her, smiling ironically. “I didn’t say that.”

While the new citizens lay their new hands on the rusted gears, tanks, nests of pipes that composed the heart of this circulatory system, its ovens cool and its bellows silent, another team of men emerged from deeper down the tunnel. Several had shirts stained with gore. They carried casks of wine, jars of pickled fruits or vegetable. The team leader reported to Citrin, “We lost two men to some terrible debased beings. These creatures have been sub-sisting on our provisions, as well.”

“Damn them, poor blighted beasts,” Citrin muttered, wagging his head.

“We’ll starve before we rot,” grumbled the repair team’s foreman. “All because of these blundering fools, who awakened us before our time.”

“Help was never going to come for you!” Kubin snapped. “Who do you think was going to clean up this world, or invent a way for you to survive in it? Those mutations?”

Golding turned to Citrin with a bitter smile. “I don’t think there’s much we can do for you here, sir.” He clapped the rust from his palms. “Your man is right. This pump is a ruin.”

Morrow stepped forward. “You don’t think there’s anything salvageable from our suits we could adapt? The circulatory plumbing? The motors?”

“Not to integrate into this mess. Not to pump that volume of water.”

Golding shook his head. “They’d best continue to filter and drink the water in small quantities. Maybe we can use our plumbing to help them with that. It’s the best we can do.”

“It won’t be enough,” said the repair team’s foreman. “I’ll watch you bas-tards rot along with me.”

“Enough,” Citrin commanded. He took Golding’s elbow. “We might as well return. In the end, the Pod will decide what is best.”

- Eight: Entropy -

In the kitchen area, where the servants prepared meals for the rest of the manor-city’s inhabitants, Golding, Morrow and Kubin had designated an area in which to create a new filtering system that might screen the pollution from water brought in manually from outside. They were combining parts from all three of their disabled suits, and a few of the best repairmen in the building were also lending their aid…though the team leader with whom Kubin had clashed refused to participate, saying that the strangers could not know how much of the sea water’s properties to filter out, and how much of its preservative powers to leave intact. But those repairmen who did consent to help in the project, whose input on the degree and manner of filtration was invaluable, seemed to think the strangers were doing an admirable job. Still, even they were of the opinion that the inevitable could not be held long at bay…

One morning (though the sky outside never deviated from its slate gray gloom), Kubin was walking alone toward the kitchen compartments to join his partners when he heard a rustling sound advancing very quickly behind him.

He turned somewhat defensively, and found himself looking down at a woman whose upper lip had turned black, dried out to a leathery twist, and curled up to expose her front teeth. The point of her chin, likewise, had blackened and looked gangrenous. Her breath, when she spoke, was septic…but her eyes shone intently.

“Venefice,” she said intensely.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you not know me, Venefice?” She seized onto his arm in both hands.

She had on white gloves up to her elbows, and a red stain was soaking through the wrist of one of them. “I know how I must look to you…but do you not recognize your wife?”

“Madam…I’m sorry…I…”

“Venefice!” Within her mask, he saw her eyes shimmer with tears. “I heard you were dead…I heard you were dead, my love! But here you are!

Here you are!”

The woman buried her rotting face against his chest, quaking with sobs, Kubin’s hands hovering ineffectually above her back.

Two servant women, also on their way to the kitchen, realized the situation and quickened their pace, helped pry the sobbing woman off of him. One of the servants whispered to Kubin, “I know her, sir. Your body…it was the body of her husband.”

“I’m sorry,” Kubin said to her, inadequately. Guiltily.

He watched as the pair of servants, on either side of the woman, walked her back down the hallway. The woman wrenched her neck around at a mad angle and screamed once more the name that Kubin didn’t know, but which nonetheless sounded uneasily familiar to him.

Kubin thought of his own wife then. Fancifully, he pictured her clinging with both hands to the arm of his corpse-like naked body, shaking him, calling his name…but unable to see his face beneath the mask of equipment that covered it.

In the kitchen now, he crouched down beside Morrow, who was already at work threading tubing from one of their suits into the filtering system. She had a stick of writing charcoal tucked into her wig, which made him smile. He asked her softly, “How is that mark on your cheek?”

Facing him, she hesitated a moment, then raised her mask up enough for him to peek. One of the repairmen, embarrassed by this intimate display, looked away sharply. Another looked on avidly. The bruise had darkened, spread a little, but was not much worse. Remembering the woman who had accosted him, Kubin was relieved.

“I would have thought Golding would be here already,” Kubin said.

“He was here a few minutes, but he told me he wasn’t feeling well. He returned to his room for some more sleep.”

Kubin nodded. His alien body wasn’t feeling well rested itself. “We’re all under a lot of stress.”

What they judged to be several hours later (both of them still unable to interpret the complicated time pieces of the Masque people, which had three faces arranged in a triangle—the symbol of their deity), Morrow and Kubin decided to take a break and walk, each with a dry and crumbling chunk of cheese in hand. They found themselves climbing several staircases, up into higher levels within the seemingly infinite wall-city, where most of the dwelling compartments appeared to be clustered. The corridor they traveled down was lined with ladders and very narrow staircases leading up to a series of these apartments, above their heads. The relatively low ceiling of this section was comforting to them, compared to the abyss that loomed in other areas.

Kubin had begun to tell Morrow about the woman who had recognized him—even in his mask — as her husband, when his words were cut short by a woman’s scream, ahead of them. For a moment, because of their conversation, he thought it might be his body’s former mate, having once again sought him out. But Morrow darted forward, her unwieldy skirts swishing, and then he too realized that the cry had been one of pain and fear.

A second cry caused Morrow to scramble to a stop beneath one of the ladders lining the hall. She hauled herself up it, and pushed at the wooden hatch above her. It was unlocked, and slammed open. She continued her ascent, with Kubin clambering up after her.

It was the apartment of a young woman, with a single narrow bed to indicate her unmarried status. Nevertheless, a man was hunched over her, one hand clamping itself over her mouth, the other pressed flat against her chest to pin her to the bed.

Morrow swept up a cut glass perfume bottle from the woman’s vanity, raised it over her shoulder. The man’s head turned to look back at her with something like an animal’s snarl, and for several shocked beats she hesitated.

Due to his disfigurement, the man’s age was difficult to judge. He had lost his hat whilst overpowering the woman, and his wig was askew. Her nails had raked down a forehead all purple and black, plowing deep grooves there which wept a greenish pus. One of the man’s eyes was a milky cataract, the other a vacant skull socket. His nose had been eaten into a crater. A bloated bluish tongue had swollen so much that it had forced his jaws apart.

Then, with a cry herself, Morrow brought the heavy perfume bottle down on the man’s skull. The stopper flew off, and Kubin’s jacket was sprinkled with a flowery fragrance that did not mask the odor of decomposition. The man slumped upon the woman with a phlegmy grunt. Kubin rushed past Morrow to roll the man off his victim, while Morrow helped the sobbing young woman to her feet. When the groaning man tried to rise from the bed, Kubin stomped his boot on his rear.

“Who is he? Was he trying to rape you?” Morrow asked the woman, her arm around her protectively.

“Rape me? No.” The woman sneered at the man, trembling violently.

“Look at him. He hasn’t long to go. Some go faster than others. He was trying to steal my body. He was trying to crowd me out, so he could have my body instead.”

“Christ,” Kubin breathed, looking down again at the moaning, ruined figure.

“You must be careful,” the woman said, regaining her composure, and recognizing them as the newcomers. “There will be more of this. Where your bodies are newly occupied, newly resurrected, I think you will last longer than most. Though I can not promise you. But others might try to steal your bodies, as desperation grows. As more people find themselves less understanding for your having released us from sleep.” With the back of her hand, the woman wiped her mouth, making an expression of disgust. She could no doubt taste her attacker’s decay on her lips. “Please, will you come with me? Will you take this man, with me, to Captain Breton? And tell him what you witnessed?”

“Yes, of course,” said Morrow…though both she and Kubin disliked the Captain. He was the man garbed in black who had been so hostile toward them upon the resurrection of these unintentionally commandeered bodies.

Morrow and Kubin managed to support the slumped, still groaning man between them, but they did not relish the stench of him…or their nearness to him, given what he had attempted with the young woman. Kubin even found himself glancing at Morrow several times, to make sure he still recognized her there in her new eyes.

At last, they found Breton in the dining hall where they had been reborn.

There appeared to be a meeting in progress, with all others seated but the Captain himself. Today he had a rapier on his hip. He was also dabbing a raw lesion on the side of his neck with an embroidered handkerchief.

By the time they found Breton, however, their prisoner had escaped all punishment. His head hung to his chest, his legs dragged on the floor. In his dying moments, his throat had rattled, his decomposing guts had gurgled, and he had passed gas in a not in the least bit humorous manner. They eased the carcass down onto an empty chair, in unison wiped their gloves on their legs.

Meanwhile, the young woman described what had happened, so as to exonerate the newcomers for the man’s death.

“He isn’t the only one to die this day,” the Captain said, spinning on his heels to face Kubin. “I’m afraid your tinkering in the kitchen comes too late, sir. I’ve seen a dozen corpses like this today. And one of them, in case you haven’t yet heard, is the Master of the Manor.”

“Citrin?” Morrow gasped in dismay.

“Yes. Your very gracious host. Your very forgiving host. Far more forgiving than I, I might add.”

“And who, might I ask, is the new Master?” Kubin said.

“That was what we were in the process of determining, sir. Though the matter is as yet unresolved, I will give you one piece of friendly advice.”

Captain Breton stepped closer to Kubin, one hand on the hilt of his sword.