Gravewalkers: Dying Time

Gravewalkers

Book One

Dying Time

Richard T.
Schrader

Copyright © 2013 Richard T.
Schrader

Copyright © 2014 Smashwords
Edition

All rights
reserved.

Contents

Gladius and Toga

One Homecoming Too Many

Dying Time

Fat of the Land

Foragers’ Castle

Great Expectations

Sins of the Fathers

The Hawk, Scorpion, and
Frog

Soulless is the Tyrant

Leap of Faith

Behind the Unreasoning Mask

Where Eagles Call Home

Ascension

Chapter 1: Gladius and
Toga

Critias watched the hangar
doors chomp down behind his gunship like the Homer space station’s
mordacious jaws snapping at his ass. Though they never made a sound
in the vacuum of space, he always imagined the tremendous clang
that was missing. It would have been a militant metallic bang that
signaled the start of another one of his one-man races, first to
complete his assigned objective and then to return home safely. His
home was the luxuriously massive Orbital Platform Nine where seven
thousand inhabitants knew and loved their Homer. That technological
habitat along with the various other orbital space stations was the
only perfectly infection-free places left for what remained of
humanity. Not even the atomically sterilized islands or the oceanic
big-hulk horticulture carriers gave that same orbital seal of
preferred cleanliness.

For nearly three centuries,
an insentient army of contagiously diseased humans that numbered in
the billions had held undisputed sway over every earthly landmass.
Those ghouls were proverbially resilient creatures, entirely
vicious, notoriously carnivorous, and wholly lacking in any forms
of meekness that beings with the destiny to inherit the Earth were
reputedly going to possess.

Critias was on his way down
to land in what had once been a true capital among old mankind’s
greatest cities. The very word city was like a curt euphemism for
naming a gargantuan man-eating tumor that would be
indistinguishable from Hell, if only Hell were comprised of meat
instead of stone and rusting iron. In the time of Critias, a city
really meant a continuous citified-strand of metrorrhagia bayou
that chased you with its biohazardous teeth.

“
What a disaster waiting
to happen,” he vented the sum of his disgusted thoughts about the
mission aloud for the benefit of his servant who occupied the
sleeping cabin to his rear.

His feminine android
responded from the berth where he had recently left her, “What do
you imagine Colonel Walker would think about your watchers’
hypothesis? Would he be as acrimonious as the Council of Governors
was when they received your report on the containment failure in
Phoenix? Perhaps you should send them a letter of appreciation for
not taking you off duty for a psychological evaluation. If you
like, I could explain to you in detail what Dr. Frost meant when he
testified before the Governors that you ‘harbored a ridiculous
schoolboy’s superstition about magical bomber-wrecking goblins that
are maliciously derailing our reclamation efforts’. I think that
gremlins would be the appropriate synecdoche for that simile. You
were probably just thinking that he had used a metaphor; humans
frequently make that mistake.” She knew his controversial opinions
on intelligent leaders among the ghouls to be an exposed nerve;
that was why she picked at it whenever there was a plausibly
deniable opportunity.

Critias believed that
watcher cunning was the only possible explanation for a long list
of mysterious containment failures that had been the downfall of
reclamation outposts throughout the history of survivors, not that
he could prove it. He had testified on official record that he
believed that out among all the billions of ghouls there were a
special few that maintained their former human-like reasoning. It
wasn’t a new idea, more of a persistent legend that dated back to
the first survivors and it hadn’t helped that he had legitimized
the name of watchers to name them. He had co-opted that epithet
from the realm of their current popular fiction because those
comicbook tales mirrored his own observations of cunningly shy
creatures that lurked at safe distances to observe their
reclamation activities and then retreating from conflict. Watchers
seemed to hold some Pavlovian influence over their more
intellectually challenged brethren. They were somehow able to
wangle them into performing elaborate behaviors, patiently adhering
to unnatural strategies that were diabolical enough, that if he was
right, were undermining their best security precautions, waylaying
their expeditionary teams in the field, and infiltrating their
fortified installations to leave them smoldering inexplicable
necropoleis. Few people took his suspicions seriously, but even
fewer had as many hours as he had creeping around down on the dirt
among all the tempestuous meat. All his considerable experience had
mattered little to the Governors after the chief scientist of
infectious biology, the famed Dr. Frost, had counter testified that
Critias’ opinions were patently preposterous and bordered on
paranoid hallucination.

“
He doesn’t believe in
watchers in the slightest,” he confessed though uncertain about the
meaning of all her words, like acrimonious; Critias assumed it was
something berating since mordant jibes were Carmen’s staple in her
sardonic self–amusement, armed as she was with an overdeveloped
vocabulary. “He thinks that watchers are just boogieman legend from
the old days, like those destroyer-sized hunters no one has ever
seen. To Colonel Walker, all ghouls are just the same dumb animals,
but I’ve seen more than enough to know better. They’ll start
gathering in one place to begin feeding in search patterns, making
broad encirclements and ambushes; then you know something
voodoo-bullshit is going on down there. In a battle once, I saw a
whole tribe of runners just hanging back in the shadows, waiting
patiently as waves of crawlers soaked up our ammo. Everyone is
right to think it’s unnatural for ghouls to want to do anything but
lazily skulk in dark holes when not truffle-hogging filth searching
for edibles. Colonel Walker plopped himself down in the driver’s
seat of a cannibal clown car with a million rabid passengers. Grand
Marshal Wayne must be really pissed at me over something to send me
on this kind of inspection. The freaks will be friendlier and more
cooperative than anything we can expect from that foul-tempered
bastard.”

Colonel Walker had formerly
been in Critias’ selfsame Marshal Service; such was the source of
his rank. He had departed on resentful terms to follow his ambition
to build a supersized reclamation outpost in a God-forsaken
murder-hole metropolis that the wild dirt-footers who probably no
longer even existed used to call Chicago. Thermal satellite surveys
indicated the place was off the chart in ghoul population density.
From his report files, Critias even saw hints to the presence of
watcher nests as well.

Homer Station held the
official seat and offices of Grand Marshal Wayne and that one man
commanded absolute authority over every marshal in the service
planet-wide. He had taken a personal hand in raising Critias as
sort of a stepson and openly expressed his favoritism, which was
why Critias couldn’t figure out how he ended up with the dreadful
assignment to intrude on the privacy of the notoriously unfriendly
former marshal taken roost in Chicago. Wayne had always been a
generous mentor since Critias’ first days at the marshal’s
dormitory school, ‘the orphanage’, also known as the marshals’
ludus. As Critias grew to manhood, Wayne matured his own marshaling
career, rising from decorated service to Professor of Law and
Military History to attaining Dean of Ludus, and then finally to
being a King’s Right Hand, taking the seat of Grand Marshal
itself.

Wayne had always gotten
Critias the best teachers and trainers. He had the best gunship in
the fleet and the bio-chefs had stewed up for him a custom
titanium-armature mechsuit. The Grand Marshal had even pulled the
right strings so that Critias could be master of the newest Epsilon
series android, a kill-house combat prototype and personal
assistant, which while grandiose was hardly unreasonable
considering the hostile environments that Critias routinely
trafficked in.

Job necessity or not, the
android was surely the pinnacle height of privilege and luxury that
any man could hope to possess anywhere in civilization, for nothing
was more splendid than owning a combat-ready tailor-made indentured
concubine for a personal servant. He had named her Carmen only
three months prior when she had called him master as her first
delighted word upon opening her freshly activated eyes to see
Critias gazing back down on her in utterly delighted
stupefaction.

The bioengineers had
encoded Carmen to be a field operations model based on their newest
and most capable Epsilon series of scientist engineering technical
androids and like them she was a combination of bioengineered
neorganic tissues with implanted high-endurance technological
hardware. Carmen wasn’t as supremely intelligent as were her
light-duty Epsilon predecessors who worked as laboratory
assistants, yet she was still genius enough to have a rebelliously
grandiloquent manner unbefitting a proper servant. Critias had
never actually let her kill any ghouls since her first activation,
but he rightly assumed she would be plenty dangerous when riled, if
only judging by the rigorous product testing he put her through in
the bedroom.

Critias typed in his
security code to open the arms locker, causing the door to slide
away, revealing enough weapons and supplies for him to last for a
year if he ever crashed dirt-side in some accident.

By the time the autopilot
was on final approach to land the ship, Critias locked down the
visor on his helmet. His mechsuit was bullet resistant armor-fiber
integrated into an android’s neorganic musculature melded to a
titanium exoskeleton armature. It provided a fantastic boost to his
physical strength and agility, stabilized his hand-eye dexterity,
enhanced his perceptions with myriad sensors, and screened out
poisonous fumes or infectious agents for an inexhaustible supply of
breathable air. Locking himself inside his extremely valuable
mechsuit was the next best personal security to being safely home
in space. The suit was indispensable when it came to preventing the
infectious biters from wounding him and thus condemning him to
joining them as a cursed immortal.

Carmen asked, “If I guess
what you are thinking, will you take me with you this
time?”

Critias grabbed a teslaflux
rifle off a rack of them. “Do tell,” he challenged.

“
Infection always gets
in,” she guessed with special emphasis on always, just the way he
did. “Don’t lie if I’m right,” she added, “I’ll know if you do.”
Carmen did not mean to be rude, rather to give him fair warning of
an actionable fact.

She was right; he had been
thinking that as he always did when gearing up.

“
That’s what this is for,”
he punctuated his answer by slapping home the ammunition
clip.

Instruments beeped to tell
him that the gunship was about to touch down. The ship had the
automated piloting skill to land itself on an oceanic carrier
during a hurricane, so Critias wasn’t especially grateful. It was
never the flying down to Earth that he considered the risky part of
his occupation; getting out of the ship was another matter
entirely.

Carmen leaned her
violet-haired head out the cabin doorway wanting him to notice her
hints to take her along to do something exciting. The bioengineers
forced all their android creations to grow hair in exotic colors to
differentiate them from the real humans they so ideally simulated.
It wasn’t having the word slave tattooed across her forehead, but
the idea was entirely the same. She asked, “If you are just going
to talk to Colonel Walker, why do you need such a big
gun?”

Critias always wore his
marshal’s teslaflux pistol, but he took a full-out tactical rifle
too, along with four grenades on his belt, and ample ammunition
clips.