The Drowned Cities (21 page)

“Got to figure the castoff headed north with the half-man.” He spat. “I would’ve.”

“Yeah.” The lieutenant stared down at their prisoner. “That how it went? She just left you to die, huh? Headed north and ditched your maggot ass?”

The kid looked like he was about to cry again. Ocho wished the LT would just hurry up and do the job. He stared out at the jungle.

“It’s going to be hell trying to pick up their trail,” Ocho said. “All those civvies out there, running around, trampling things down?” He shook his head. “Lot of jungle to search.”

“Missed our chance, you think?”

Ocho glanced over at Sayle, trying to tell if he wanted an honest answer or if he was trying to trick Ocho into showing weakness. Showing he wasn’t all in for the cause. But the lieutenant was just staring out at the jungle, too.

Finally Ocho said, “I don’t see how we’re going to pick up its trail. If that girl did a doctor job on the dog-face, that means it’s mobile now. It was just dumb luck that we even got close to it before, and it ripped us up.” Ocho touched his ribs. “Did four of us, and that was when it was down and out.”

“It’s still wounded,” the LT said. “It isn’t made of magic.”

“Yeah, but it sounds like it’s doing a hell of a lot better than the last time we tangled with it.”

Lieutenant Sayle snorted. “You may be right, Sergeant.” He turned and headed into the village, waved back at Ocho. “Get rid of the maggot.”

Ocho looked down at the kid. He had snot all over his face from crying and his eyes were red.

“Sorry, maggot.” He waved for his boys. Tweek and Gutty grabbed the maggot and scooped up a machete. Good soldiers. They knew better than to waste a bullet.

“Put his neck over some wood,” Tweek was saying. “I don’t wanna dent the blade.”

Gutty got the kid laid over a log, and then the maggot seemed to snap to awareness. Like he finally realized what was up. He started struggling and screaming, while Tweek and Gutty tried to control him. For a skinny bastard, he sure fought.

And then, all of sudden, the boy stopped fighting. His chest heaved and he was covered with sweat, but his fight was gone. He looked up at Ocho, as Gutty and Tweek knelt on his back. Ocho had the unnerving feeling the licebiter was putting some kind of Deepwater hex on him, but the kid didn’t say anything.

Ocho turned away and headed into the burning town.

Sorry, maggot. Wrong place, right time.

It was the same problem all the time. Sometimes you got lucky, ended up recruited instead of dead. Got a machete and a bottle of acid, and you ran around trying to show everyone
how you were worth keeping. Putting as much blood on you as you could, so that Sayle wouldn’t dump your body in a ditch. Sometimes you just got your head chopped off.

Behind him, he could hear the kid start struggling again.

“Dammit! Would you hold him, Gutty?”

“I am! Licebiter’s strong.”

Ocho turned back. He limped over to the licebiter and squatted down in front of him. Waved his boys to leave off trying to chop him.

“You want to live?” he asked.

The kid didn’t know how to answer. The way he’d been pushed over the log, his face was all red and puffy with tears and fear. Ocho waited, then prodded him.

“Speak up, maggot. You want to live?”

The kid nodded hesitantly.

“You think you got some soldier in you? Wanna fight for the UPF? Sign on? Fight the patriotic fight?”

The kid sort of grunted, still held down by Tweek and Gutty.

Ocho grinned and slapped the kid on the back of the head. “Sure you do.” He glanced over at Tweek. “Go get me some hot metal.”

“You gonna brand him?”

“Sure. Born out of fire, right?” He stared into the war maggot’s eyes. “It’s how we all are.”

A minute later, Tweek came back with a hunk of rebar, glowing and smoking from a burned building. He held it in one hand, by smoking cloth.

Ocho took the metal bar. Even with a cloth wrapping, it was hot in his hand. He squatted down by the small shivering boy. It was hot. Good and hot.

“What’s your name?”

“Mouse.”

Ocho shook his head. “Not anymore. We got to give you a new name. You ain’t Mouse, anymore.” He studied the village and destruction, hunting for a soldier name.

The place reminded him of his own town, a long time ago. He was surprised this place had lasted as long as it had. You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually. His own family had always been sure that war was going to stay down in the Drowned Cities, where all the fools were, but war was like the sea. It just kept rising, until one day the tide rolled in and you were up to your neck in it.

The wind shifted and smoke poured over them. Was that this boy’s name? Smoke?

Ocho scanned the blackened place, considering. The trees guttered with flame, some of them half-burned, twisted into spooky shapes by the fires. Stones sizzled with heat. Ocho thought he smelled meat burning. Pig or human. One or the other.

He considered names as he studied the kid.
You were dead
, Ocho thought.
And now you’re not.

Raised up from the dead. Got a mission, still. Yeah. That was all right.

Ocho smacked the kid on the back of the head again. “Your name’s Ghost.”

He crouched down with the brand. “This is gonna hurt, little buddy. You better not cry. You cry, Tweek here will chop your head off. UPF’s tough, right? We don’t flinch, we never surrender. You’re Ghost. And you’re UPF, forever, warboy. Forever.”

He stared into the face of the sniveling war maggot, all pale and sooty with his wide scared eyes. “You ain’t going to thank me, maggot. But it’s better than dead.” And then he pressed the brand into the little war maggot’s face, three horizontal lines.

The cooking smell of pig curled up from the brand. The boy shook and fought, but he held on and rode through the pain, just like they all had.

When Ocho straightened, the warboy was gasping, but he hadn’t cried and he hadn’t begged.

He slapped the kid on the back. “Good job, soldier.” He waved at Tweek and Gutty. “Go get our brother drunk.”

“You going soft on me, Sergeant?”

Ocho stiffened. The lieutenant’s voice was soft, but there was a warning there. Like the movement of a cottonmouth in the swamp, coming at you, and then you were bit and poisoned and dying.

Ocho turned. The boys had found a bunch of antique furniture that they’d hacked up and piled into a bonfire,
and everyone who wasn’t standing patrol against civvies coming back and looking for revenge was drunk off their asses. One of the soldiers had put the head of an old civvy lady on a stick and was running around saying, “But I don’t even like castoffs!” while everybody laughed.

And now Sayle was standing beside him. “You going soft?”

Ocho drank from his bottle. It was some bottle that had used to hold… what? He studied the label. Some kind of cleaning fluid, if the bleached-out picture on the plastic was right. Showed a Chinese lady with a floor that was sparkling bright as the sun. Ocho drank again.

Van had found the liquor store in the back of the old lady’s sundries shop, hidden. She’d tucked all the booze away as soon as UPF showed up, but Van had that nose for liquor. Ocho drank while he considered his answer.

“Soft?” he asked, and handed the bottle up to the man who controlled his world.

Sayle snorted. “
Soft?
” he mimicked. “You know what I’m talking about.” He waved the bottle over at the company. “You recruited that war maggot?”

Ocho followed the man’s gesture to the bonfire, where the new recruit stood surrounded by soldier boys. At their command, Ghost was taking drinks from a bottle that they were passing around the fire. He was scared. Eyes like a rabbit, looking for a way out. The half-bars Ocho had laid on his cheek stood out, red and blistered.

“He’s tough,” Ocho said. “And he’s loyal.”

“How you figure?”

“Followed the doctor into hell.”

“That’s not loyal. That’s just stupid.”

“There’s a difference?” Ocho deadpanned, making Sayle snort his alcohol. “I figure if he’s fool enough to follow that crazy doctor, he might be smart enough to follow someone who saves his maggot ass.”

He took another swig of burning liquor. It was trash. Nowhere near as good as the stuff that got smuggled in on Lawson & Carlson ships when the recycling went out, but that was what you got with the homegrown stuff. Probably make him blind if he drank enough of it. His old man used to say you could drink homemade hooch and go blind.

“What you going to do when that little pup turns and tries to bite you?” Sayle asked. “Maybe puts a bullet in the back of your head?”

Ocho shook his head. “He won’t.”

“Big bet, Sergeant.”

“Nah. I’d put a million Red Chinese on that boy.” Ocho studied the recruit. “We’re all he’s got.”

When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.

COWARD.

C
OWARD
.
Coward coward cowardcowardcoward…

The word kept running through Mahlia’s head, and with every step away from the village, the accusation echoed louder.

I tried to tell them. I tried to save their dumb asses. They would have been fine, if they’d just listened to me.

Doctor Mahfouz was always talking about places where kids grew up without worrying about bolt holes and what to do if soldier boys came. Places where you lived past twenty. Mouse should have been born there. He just didn’t have the Drowned Cities instinct. He was too nice for his own damn good. Just a sad-sack farm kid who didn’t know how to stay alive.

Yeah. He was so dumb, he saved
you,
right?

Mahlia hated the thought, but couldn’t keep it from surfacing. Mouse had charged, when he should have run in the opposite direction. He threw rocks and drew gunfire, even though it was the dumbest thing in the world.

Why didn’t you do the same for him? You owe him. If it had been you in that village, he would have done something.

And that was why he’d gone back for the doctor, and all the townspeople, and how he’d gotten himself killed.

Coward.

The word kept running through her head as she stumbled through the jungle, accompanied by the silent, shambling half-man.

Coward.

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.

She was a coward.

Yellow dawn light filtered through the jungle, highlighting misty humidity. Mahlia looked around at the greenery, feeling sick, knowing she would feel this way until she died. She would never escape it. She’d run away instead of helping the only family she had left.

She was just like her father.

When the peacekeepers finally gave up on their fifteen-year attempt to civilize the Drowned Cities, the man hadn’t
even looked back. He’d just run for his troop transport with the rest of his soldiers as the warlords flooded back into the city.

Mahlia remembered the gunfire and explosions. Remembered how she and her mother had run frantically for the docks, sure that the peacekeepers had saved berths for them. She remembered people leaping into Potomac Harbor as the last peacekeeping troop transports and corporate trading ships set sail without them. Remembered those huge white sails unfurling, clipper ships rising on hydrofoils as winds caught canvas.

Mahlia and her mother had stood on the docks and waved and waved, begging for the ships to come back, begging for her father to care, and then they’d been shoved forward into the ocean by the desperate press of others behind, all of them begging for the same thing.

Her father had abandoned her, and now she’d done the same. Mouse and the doctor had risked everything for her, and she’d just walked away. Saving her own skin, because it was easier than risking everything in return.

That’s how people get killed. If you did like them, you would’ve been dead a hundred times over.

She’d seen it often enough as she tried to escape the Drowned Cities, after the collapse of the peacekeepers. She’d seen people stand up, determined to hold on to principles. People who thought there was right and wrong. People who tried to save others. People like her mother who had died so horribly that even now Mahlia’s mind shied
from the jagged memory. Only Mahlia had survived. While all the other castoffs were getting cut down by Army of God and UPF and Freedom Militia, Mahlia had taken Sun Tzu’s principles to heart, and survived.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders. As she stood in the cool jungle dawn, it felt like they were all there with her. School friends. Teachers. Shop owners. Old ladies. Families. Her mother. And now, Doctor Mahfouz and Mouse.