The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1) (4 page)

The road lengthened behind her as she ran, falling to all
fours where it was steepest. Mulligraws twinkled on their vines in the flat
hollow where her fields bordered the path. She had intended to stop there, to
run through the beanstalks and hide away until she calmed down, shielded from
view in her secret place. But where that section of road ended, there was
another that stretched far beyond. It was so tempting. Just to run past her
mulligraw fields and never stop. The ceiling of the subterranean den crested at
a height almost further up than she could see, then dove down toward the far
end of Tanley, where the road shot under a covered passageway she had never
taken before.

Once the thought hit her, Lizneth didn’t hesitate. Hesitation
would’ve been the end of it. She darted down the path and entered the tunnel to
begin the hours-long trek. The sudden release of some long-fought suppression
swept her up and carried her along. She found herself unsure of her actual
intent, but too flushed with excitement and anticipation to stop. Abandoning
her family was not her aim; she knew what would happen to them if she ever left
for good. She only longed for something to break her away from the monotony of
her life, if only for a short while. Just then, she wasn’t clear-headed enough
to have a plan; she only knew where she was headed: the basin, a labyrinth of
roads that joined the nearby metropolis of Bolck-Azock to its border towns.

The metropolis’s distant bedlam swelled as Lizneth drew near.
She arrived at the foot of the basin after two hours of jogging, her fur filthy
and her tail heated. Above her, layer upon layer of ramps, walkways, and staircases
wound through streets and platforms cloven into shelves of rock and dirt and
clay. Bolck-Azock was the center of culture and trade for the
ikzhehn
in
this part of the world, a place bustling and awake at all hours with the sweet
haick
of possibility. Thousands of Lizneth’s kin scurried among the spires; dealers
and shopkeeps, beggars and bandits, treading the city’s latticework with the
effortless equilibrium afforded them by instinct. Lizneth had even heard tell that
the
calaihn
, the strange spindly-legged creatures who lived in the blind-world,
sometimes came here to trade.

Independence. If there were a place in which to gain that
most liberating of conditions, it was here, in the metropolis of Bolck-Azock.
Lizneth took her first step into the city proper, past the rotting sign that
signaled her arrival. The euphoria of freedom washed over her.

CHAPTER 4

Detail

The whole city stank to high Infernal, but the
strongest scent on the breeze today was the sharp tang of death. Merrick’s
stomach turned when he considered that his comrade’s body was causing the smell,
but there was no escaping it; his shift didn’t end for another hour. So he sat
in his rusted metal folding chair with the heavy rifle laid across his lap,
looking out the ragged fourth-story corner window-hole and down the street they
called Bucket Row.

He could see all the way to the eastern edge of Belmond from
here, between the dilapidated buildings and down the pulverized road that ran
the length of the city from east to west. At the outskirts, the asphalt sank
into the sand, and the endless desert beyond swallowed the road like a predator.
Merrick didn’t know where the name ‘Bucket Row’ came from, but this was where
most people who tried to get into the city north without permission kicked the
bucket, so that seemed as good a rationale as any.

The muties had left Praul on the street below, naked and
holding an armful of his own innards. It would be a long time before anyone
ventured into the street to retrieve the body. More than likely, it would wind
up a meal for the birds, maggot-ridden and shriveled in the heat—if something
else didn’t drag it off during the night. There hadn’t been a trade caravan for
months, and the southers were getting hungry.

Pilot Wax had ordered the muties chained by the ankles and
strung up from the Hull Tower roof to serve as a warning to any others who
would dare attack the Scarred. Sometimes the Commissar’s ‘warnings’ hung there
for days before they died, drawing hundreds of carrion birds to perch nearby
and drench the surrounding streets with their droppings.

Merrick spotted a shadow on the pavement two blocks down,
where a shape was moving behind a tall pile of rubble. When he raised his
rifle’s spyglass, a second shadow joined the first.
More muties
, he told
himself.
Muties, or humans with boiled pink skin and bad posture
. Whatever
they were, they were from the city south, and that made them unwelcome. One of
their heads swayed into view. A chunk of concrete erupted in a puff of dust,
and both shadows vanished. The sound of the shot came to Merrick a second
later, complements of one of his fellow Sentries further down the Row. Merrick
waited a few minutes, but the shadows did not return.
‘Fernal muties. Better
not come down the Row my way, or my first shot won’t be a miss.

The chair squealed in protest as Merrick stretched his legs
and slouched in his seat. He set his rifle on the floor beside him and stared
up into the building’s eviscerated interior. The missing floors above gave him
an unobstructed view to the crystal chandelier hanging from the seventh story
ceiling. He wondered how well it was bolted in.
If it comes loose and falls,
I’ll have to interrupt my moment of relaxation in favor of my good looks
.

He checked the street again. Still no sign of the muties. The
gaping hole in the wall in front of him had been a picture window once. He was
sitting in what would’ve been the dining area, he guessed, noting the splinters
of dark hardwood around the room’s edges. The faded billboard mounted on the
apartment building across the street urged him to visit Providence Hills, a new
luxury active adult community in northeast Belmond, just off Route 292 before
the overpass. There was a picture of a gray-haired couple in a hammock, gazing
at each other like star-crossed teenagers. The tagline at the bottom of the
billboard was burnt away, so Merrick had made up a few taglines of his own.
Providence
Hills—where the wealthy go to die
, was his favorite.

Merrick rested his hands on his belly. It was depressing to
note how much of the soft doughy flesh he could pinch between his fingers.
I’m
getting fat.
It had been easier to keep the weight off before he’d become a
glorified security guard. Ever since his job description had changed from ‘roam
the city and kill things’ to ‘sit on a rusty chair and do nothing,’ he’d been
packing on the pounds. He was surprised it was even possible to gain weight
with all the sweating he did out here.

The rattle in his lungs had gotten worse, too. The air in the
city was as bad as any in the wastes, but lately the four-story climb to his
post constituted the bulk of his physical activity. Sometimes he was out of
breath by the time he’d made it to the second floor.
Forbid it that an alarm
gets raised and I have to hit the street in a hurry. I’ll pass out before I get
down the stairs
, he mused.

The alarm never went up, though. Most of the locals knew
better than to provoke the Scarred Comrades. Neither the Mouthers nor the Gray
Revenants had sufficient numbers to pose a threat, and the souther gangs and
mutie communes were too small to threaten anything but the occasional mischief,
so the only action the Row ever saw these days was the occasional brief skirmish.

During most of his shifts, Merrick passed the hours by
creating hypothetical scenarios about these types of attacks and playing them
out in his head, throwing in whatever imaginative twists he could think of. It
was hard not to get bored, but bored was better than dead, and either was
better than getting banished.

That was what Wax did to the comrades who disobeyed his
orders, or proved themselves unfit for service; he banished them. The mark
carved into the flesh between Merrick’s right thumb and forefinger depicted
three claws, each shorter than the last, with a curved line through the base
like a set of knuckles. Every man who accepted the mark of the Scarred Comrades
knew that to do so was to bring the hatred and jealousy of thousands of southers
upon himself. That made banishment a fate worse than death.

Nobody had been able to unite the city north the way Wax did
when he brought the comrades together. He’d established a territory where
people had real jobs and homes and food for the first time since the Heat.
Granted, they were dead-end jobs and half-ruined tenement homes and more of the
food tasted like it was grown in a vat than in the ground or on legs, but it
was a more prosperous place than most in the Aionach.

Merrick considered himself lucky to have been relegated to
the Sentries instead of being banished. He hadn’t done anything
wrong
,
per se. He hadn’t gone against orders. He’d just made a bad decision. He’d seen
comrades banished before; bound about the ankles, ridden out into the desert,
and left to fend for themselves against whoever, or whatever, happened to be
roaming the sands at the time. And if by some cruel chance you were picked up
by nomads with the mark on you, you’d survive only long enough to wish you
hadn’t.

His breathing slowed as he rested his head on the back of the
chair, letting himself slip into a daydream. He remembered the night they
brought him before Wax. Until a month ago, he’d only seen the Commissar up
close a handful of times. It had been the longest, hottest part of the year. Merrick
would’ve savored the cool of the evening if he hadn’t been so nervous. The
thick ropes had been eating at his wrists, turning his hands purple, and the
guards at the jailhouse hadn’t let him take a piss all afternoon.

Wax had spent half a minute looking Merrick over before he
spoke. Merrick had wanted to be brave, but he’d had to settle for trying to
hide the signs of his fear.

“I hear you did something dumb,” Wax had said. He’d vaulted
down from the loading dock to stand in front of Merrick, resting his clasped
hands over his groin. He was tall and scruffy, with hair the color of oatmeal
and sunken green-gray eyes that became pools of shadow in the torchlight. Grimy
black stains tarnished his denim, and there were smudges of grease across his
face and fingers, the type of smudges familiar to a man who worked with his
hands. His hood-scarf was draped about muscular shoulders, his arms and chest
rippling beneath a loose-fitting tunic. Usually Wax would’ve been in the Hull
Tower, his headquarters. But tonight he’d ventured to his personal warehouse to
work on some mechanical project of his, which was the way people said he liked
to spend his leisure time. That didn’t sound too leisurely to Merrick, but every
man has his own way of blowing off steam.

“I did what I was told,” Merrick said in earnest. Saliva
caught in his throat and he tried not to gulp.

It should have been a simple task, clearing out a bunch of
zoom junkies from inside an empty cistern. Merrick hated zoomers even more than
he hated muties, so he’d been looking forward to the assignment. The
underground tank was just south of the Row, and Wax wanted to fortify it and
turn it into a supply depot from which he could stage his operations in the
city south.

Merrick’s commanding officer, Captain Malvid Curran, had been
friendly and informal when he briefed him that day. “Enter the structure and
clear out everything you find there.”

So when Merrick had arrived at the end of the tunnel after a
painstaking, hours-long creep through the network of pipeline, he had done what
he’d been ordered to do. The air had been dusky with the token stench of zoom;
acrid, bitter, and stinging to breathe. The only light in the cistern came from the
two pindrops beaming down through the tank’s filling holes. Most of the
zoomheads were sleeping or too wasted out of their minds to move. They had at
least exercised the courtesy of designating a place a few hundred feet down the
pipeline as their lavatory, but Merrick had already walked through that.

The muzzle of his rifle began to wake up the darkness,
presenting the zoomheads as a series of brief snapshots. The light strobed, and
their garments sprouted crimson flowers. A din rose, bullets puncturing the
metal skin of the tank and clattering around them, while those least impaired
gave cries of pain and surprise. Merrick swiveled at the waist, every bright
burst illuminating a new splash of red. Wherever a figure moved in the shadows,
he took aim, and didn’t stop until the last of the lethargic forms had succumbed.

A month’s worth of good deeds done in thirty seconds
,
Merrick had commended himself.
Belmond is cleaner by a tankful
. He had
propped his weapon between his legs and lit a torch. He’d nearly dropped it when
a desperate, high-pitched scream echoed through the cistern. The sound was so
foreign to him, he hadn’t realized what he was hearing at first. He’d picked up
his rifle, raising the torch high with his other hand.

The form of a woman was slouched against a rounded corner of
the cistern, leaning back in lifeless tranquility. Swaddled against the breast,
a tiny contour wriggled inside a red-stained cloth. A few steps closer were all
it took for Merrick to make out the screeching pink face of an infant, its still-toothless
jaw rent aside.

Concussive waves of awe and horror struck him in tandem.
How
did a bunch of zoom-riddled vagrants get a child?
Commissar Wax had been
vocal about his desire for a healthy child, born or unborn. As promiscuous as
the Commissar was, it seemed he wasn’t having much luck on his own. Not many
people were, anymore.

Merrick’s breath began to run ragged as the anguished, tortured
screams continued. The gunsmoke and zoom vapor were making his eyes and nose burn.
His legs went soft, and he kneeled, letting both his rifle and the torch slip
from his grasp. When he shut his eyes and put his face in his hands, he was
shaking all over.

He had stayed there, dazed and unable to rise, for a long
time. When he had finally scrounged up the will to take action, sweat was
running down his face, and his clothes were soaking wet. The torch was almost
out. In its dying light, and the light cast by the two pinholes above, Merrick
dropped his rifle’s empty magazine and jammed another into place. He hoisted
the weapon to his shoulder and sighted in, settling on the tiny shape that
squirmed on the dead woman’s chest. The child had grown lethargic, its screams
reduced to delicate whimpers.

“Children are our most valuable commodity,” Pilot Wax had said
later, as Merrick stood bound in front of him.

There had been so little feeling left in Merrick’s hands, he
was sure they’d have had to amputate if they didn’t free him soon.

“We can grow food, forge weapons and tools, and make
ammunition, all because this city provides us with the resources we need to do
so,” Wax had said. “The underground spring that flows into our territory from
the northeast is the only good source of water for horizons around, and it
requires minimal filtration to make drinkable. We have storehouses, and guards
to protect them. Cloth and leather enough to clothe us all, and roofs over our
heads to keep us sheltered from Infernal’s heat. This city is the greatest gift
our forebears could’ve left us. But we will
end
if there are no children
to carry on after we die. You. Your name is…”

“Merrick. Uh, Corporal Merrick Bouchard.”

“Bouchard. You killed three of them, Bouchard. An infant and
two older children.”

It was true. The comrades who had come to clean up the mess
later had discovered two girls between ages three and five among the dead.
Merrick had left the cistern too quickly to inspect the rest of his victims.

“Yes, I killed them,” Merrick admitted. The words came out
feeble, apologetic.

“You did. You admit it. You’re reckless. When dealing with
transients and misfits, we always take stock of what we’ve got before we proceed
with the task at hand. You learned this in your ingress training, didn’t you?”

“I did.” Merrick shifted, trying to find a comfortable
position for his hands.

“A severe transgression begets a severe punishment,” Wax
said.

Merrick knew he deserved to be punished, but he didn’t feel
the least bit ready to die. Those children probably hadn’t either. His whole
body was pounding, the dread of his inevitable banishment gripping him like a
cold hand. There was no wind, as if the air itself were listening for what came
next.