Tankbread 02 Immortal (10 page)

Quint watched her go. That woman had a fire in her that he had not seen since his surfing days, and the way she walked the deck reminded him of someone he used to know. By the time Else had vanished among the stacked crates and piles of salvage scrap, he remembered who it was.

The ship had several decks and their layout confused Else as she went up the metal stairs and around piles of wood and plastic junk. There were burn marks on the metal deck where people had lit fires. The walls were marked with scrawled murals of graffiti, their details long lost to the scouring of the salt water. When whatever they painted with had been used up, the artists started scratching messages in the spreading rust. Words of hope and lost meaning—
Don’t believe the hype!
and
Happy Hour 7AM till Fuck nose when!
—were carved large into the corroded steel. The birds watched and scolded Else at every step. She kept an eye out for Hob or Eric, not wanting to be taken by surprise again. She worked her way upwards. The crew, the walking dead, the evols who ran this supposed sanctuary lived somewhere above. The doors she tried were locked or rusted shut. Peering in through salt-frosted windows showed only dusty rooms plundered long ago.

There was no sound other than the breeze and the cries of seabirds out here. Else moved faster, jogging up the stairwells that connected each deck, scattering birds in angry clouds as she burst out among them. Their noise morphed into the cries of children. She started yelling, “I’m here! I won’t leave without you! I’m coming for you, baby!” The setting sun blinded her as she ran along the highest deck. The wide deck was open, up to a wall of steel that ran from one side of the ship to the other. Twenty feet up, the top of the wall turned to glass. Massive windows reflected the view in three directions. Above the glass, spires of old antennae reached up to the first of the stars that smeared the twilight sky.

Else found another set of stairs and started climbing again. The doors on the highest deck were locked too. Seabirds had nested in every available space and she stepped around their heaped-up donuts of shit and dry seaweed. Solar panels erected along the high points of the deck were dull in the spreading gloom, their photoelectric cells waiting for dawn to start converting sunlight into electricity again and feed it down into racks of batteries stored somewhere inside the ship. Another way the crew held sway over the captive population.

“You shouldn’t be up here.” Sarah’s voice took Else by surprise. The girl moved like a ghost.

“And you should be?” she replied.

The blonde child narrowed her eyes. “I can go anywhere I want. No one can stop me.” She cocked her chin and stared up defiantly.

“Show me how to get in there.” Else pointed to the tower of steel and glass.

“That’s the bridge. Only the crew goes there. That’s where the Captain lives.”

“Show me,” Else repeated.

Sarah backed away a few steps and then bolted. Else gave chase. The smaller girl flew down the deck, leaping over bird’s nests and darting past sealed doorways in a way that made Else feel like a lumbering cow.

Reaching the back of the ship, Else stopped; Sarah had disappeared. She crouched down and examined the crusted deck. Small bare footprints, blurred by speed. Sarah had run through, turned right, and headed across the deck. She wouldn’t have time to reach the opposite rail. So where did she go?

Else walked forward slowly, looking up the high steel wall. No way the girl could have climbed that. The footprints led to a small hatch. Else squatted again and tugged at the steel doorway. It was locked from the inside. She could see a smaller handprint on it. Sarah had gone to ground. Rising to her feet, Else wondered what other openings might exist up here. She turned sharply at a zipping sound. A shadow dropped through the moonlight. Pressing back against the wall, Else prepared to fight.

Hanging in a harness at the end of a rope was a hairless woman painted black with grease from head to toe. She wore only a ragged pair of stained shorts and a pair of dark tinted goggles pushed up to her forehead. Brushes and screwdrivers jangled in the harness as she twisted at the end of the rope.

The girl regarded Else with a somber expression. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Else. Who the fuck are you?”

“Ratchet. They call me Rache. What are you doing up here?” Rache swung gently in her harness, her dark goggles giving her an alien expression, as if she had four eyes.

“I’m looking for a way inside. I need to get my son back. What are you doing up here?”

“Maintenance. Someone’s gotta clean the panels. Salt and bird shit don’t do much for them.”

“You’re an engineer?” Else asked and Rache’s chest puffed with pride.

“Yeah.”

“Why are you covered in that stuff?” Else asked. Rache’s expression soured.

“It’s grease. Grease comes from hard work. Hard work is what will save us. One day this ship will sail to a safe place.”

“The man who believes in God told me that this ship is an ark,” Else said.

“He’s crazy. There is no God. There’s only the engines. The engines are what we need to get us moving.”

“Why don’t you just start the engines and sail away?”

Rache glanced upwards, staring at the flaking paint and the rust patches on the white-painted steel. “The Captain is the only one who can set the ship free. We are ready. We keep the engines clean and maintained. All the ship’s systems are ready to go. We just need the Captain to give the order.” Rache sounded wistful and evangelic at the same time.

“You don’t need to wait for the Captain. Why not just start the engines and take over the ship?”

Rache reached up and pushed the goggles higher on her forehead. Her eyes were green, the same brilliant jade of the sea. “Are you kidding me? If the crew heard you talking like that they’d tear you apart and throw you over the side.”

“Why do you let them rule over you? Why do you let them take the newborns and give you nothing in return?”

“They give us a safe place. They give us hope,” Rache countered.

“They imprison you. All of you. You don’t need to stay here. You could take your boats and go anywhere you want. You could start a new life, raise children and rebuild society.”

“I dunno anything about that. I ain’t never had kids.” Rache’s eyes dipped to the deck. “Not for lack of trying, though.”

“They would take your baby away from you. Just like they did mine,” Else said. “But I’m going to get him back. I just need to find a way inside.”

“You can only get in from down below. All the deck hatches are sealed. You’d need to go the way the engineers do. Up through the maintenance ducts.”

“Show me.” Else stepped forward and grabbed hold of the rope suspending Rache off the deck.

“I’ll take you to the Foreman. But I ain’t promising nothing.” Rache grabbed a loop in the rope and heaved herself up with one hand until the line to the harness went slack. She unclipped it, dropping barefooted onto the deck.

“This way,” she said, slinging the harness over her shoulder.

They wound their way down to the lower decks, Else following the engineer as she opened a door and they descended deeper into the ship. This area was marked differently from the hold where Hob and his people lived. The walls here were covered with schematics and scientific formulae.

“The ones who remember teach those who haven’t yet learned. Then when they die, the ones who learned become those who remember,” Rache said.

“If you let the crew eat your children, there will soon be no one left to learn,” Else replied. They carried on down the stairs until they passed the waterline and entered the deepest area of the ship.

It was dark down here, darker than the night sky, always so full of stars. On the nights when clouds covered the moon, even the clouds seemed to glow with silver light. This was nothing like that. For a moment Else felt like she was descending once again into the depths of Woomera. She was plunged back to the place under the desert where the geeks hid from the evols and worked their genetic magic to make better weapons and zombie-killing Tankbread. So safe and perfectly contained—until the lights went out. Then the true darkness was suffocating. A darkness as complete and thick as velvet curtains stinking of burnt flowers pressed against her face.

“You okay?” Rache said in the dark.

“Dark,” Else managed.

“Well yeah, lights are limited.”

“Can’t . . . breathe.”

A scratching sound came from somewhere below, a steady winding grind. A few seconds passed, with Else feeling a cloying panic pressing the air out of her lungs. Then a flare of sodium-yellow light cast long shadows up Rache’s dark face and made her eyes shine.

“It’s okay,” she said calmly. “You’re safe down here.”

“Don’t like being trapped in the dark,” Else gasped.

Rache shrugged. “Follow me and the light will stay on.”

Else pushed on down the stairs, following the moving circle of light. Rache stopped in front of a door, which she rapped on with the knuckles of one hand. Else felt her heart thudding; the close darkness terrified her.

Claustrophobia is an irrational fear
, she reminded herself
. But it doesn’t make it any less real
, she mentally retorted.

The steel door ahead rang with the sudden strike of metal. Else growled a warning that Rache ignored. The door cracked open and then swung inwards. A warm glow emerged from the other side. Rache immediately pushed on it and stepped through the gap. “Almost home,” she said over her shoulder.

Else followed the light. Behind the door and to one side of the corridor stood a young man, painted in black oil against the shadows. The whites of his eyes vanished when he blinked, rendering him almost invisible. Else watched him warily and kept moving after Rache. The girl ahead ignored the doorman and he watched them go before pushing the door shut in their wake.

Rache walked with Else on her heels until they stepped onto a walkway that ran around a chamber as wide as the ship. Below them, pipes and domed machines were being crawled over by oil-stained figures as black as the shadows. The air hummed with the vibration of feet and the clang of tools striking metal.

“The engines are always ready,” Rache said with pride in her voice.

“Then why don’t you sail away?” Else asked again. Rache ignored her. A trio of blackened, tool-carrying mechanics came swaggering down the walkway. Like Rache, their heads were shaved and they did not smile as they approached the two women.

“Hey Giz, Prop, Bolt, this is Else.” Rache crossed her arms, the goggles on her forehead glinting in the light.

The three nodded. “She’s no black. What’s she doin’ down here?” Giz asked.

“She’s from ashore. Came here looking for her sprat.”

The three young men sneered. “Grabbit wants you on turbo stripping,” Giz said. “The landy can turn around and go back to the hold. Ain’t nothing for her here.”

“She’s walking with me, all the way to the Foreman,” Rache said, drawing herself up to her full height.

“Well you’d both better walk your arse to the turbocharger,” Giz said. The three boys pushed past.

“I can’t stay here,” Else said, looking for a way out.

“You can leave anytime you want. No skin off my knuckles.” Rache headed off down the catwalk. Else hesitated for a moment and then hurried after her.

The engineers lived in conditions similar to those of Hob’s people. Else saw no babies, just pregnant women with white eyes shining in their dark-stained faces and men with bodies sculpted into lean muscle from hard work. Two guards, armed with swords hammered from sheet metal, stood in front of a steel door.

“Got a landy. She needs to see the Foreman,” Rache said.

One of the guards pulled a lever and stepped through the door. Else caught a smell of cooked fish and sweat before the door closed again. The remaining guard moved in front of them and stared. The three of them stood in silence, unmoving until the door opened again.

“Come,” the first guard said. With Rache leading the way, Else ducked through the door into a room at the bottom of a set of metal stairs. Women lounged naked on ragged cushions and crumbling furniture. The guard climbed the stairs, Else and Rache following close behind. The room at the top contained more cushions and a bed of sorts, with more naked women. Else had only ever seen one fat person, the Greek near Woomera. The man on the bed looked like he had eaten the Greek and his pigs for lunch. The women massaged the sprawling folds of his abundant flesh. Else could smell the sour stink of his sweat and filth across the room.

“Foreman,” Rache said and went down on one knee. Else just stared.

“Who is this lovely creature you have brought us, child?” The Foreman’s voice was a breathless wheeze. His face seemed half-formed in a swollen ball of fat topped with thin black hair that hung over his shoulders in greasy strands.

“She’s come from ashore,” Rache said.

“Ashore . . .” The blob waved one of the girls stroking his arm away. “Come closer.”

Else stepped up to the edge of the bed. The smell was overpowering, a nostril-clogging stench like rotting vegetation.