The Sea Hates a Coward (2 page)

Blackness rose. As his vision began to fade, he became aware of a larger groan underscoring the din of the dead. One that grew and grew until it shook the floor and emerged, piercing, on the salt wind. The flesh around him shook with the noise, and Schneider’s waning vision was drawn to its source, some sixty feet down along the great grey body.

There, above a mass of figures straining with ropes, blades and hooks, a toothy jaw gaped in silhouette against a weak sun, and gave its death scream. Black blood geysered from the giant mouth as it thrashed once, then twisted and fell lifeless. The last thing Schneider saw before he blacked out was a rush of thin bodies, scrambling onto the head of the monster with knives drawn, to begin flensing it.

CHAPTER TWO

A
LIGHT BLAZED
against darkness, an angry stain orbited by sparks, swelling into a fierce nimbus as sense came back to him. With the return of light came sound: the creaking of chains, the rasp of a great mass dragged across rough surface.

Heat licked Schneider’s face, and a cable cut into his shoulder. As the glow ahead grew more intense, it pooled around shadows; human figures stooped, trudging forwards under burdens. He willed the dark from his eyes, strained like a drowning man to breach full consciousness again.

He broke surface, and awareness came all at once—he was deep in a crowd of the shuffling dead, yoked to ropes and moving forward across rain-puddled metal, with an enormous weight at their backs. He turned; behind them was a truck-sized slab of sinew and grey fat, moving on a slick of grease and gore, away from a pandemonium of butchery.

At the end of the snail-trail behind the lump was the carcass of the monster. Night had fallen, and the thing had been stripped down to a raw red hill, stickled with spars of bone and swarmed over by the clambering, restless dead. Banks of floodlights turned the night around them to ink, cast long shadows across a plain of black metal where other teams of wretches struggled forward with their hillocks of flesh.

The heat grew more intense. Turning back ahead, Schneider saw he was approaching a tall archway, its searing glow resolving into a glimpse of further industry. Inside the bright space, dark figures stirred and prodded at huge vats, their sides licked by flames. Crucibles ascended on clinking chainwork, poured bubbling torrents down chutes and into barrels, while yet more harnessed cadavers dragged bars to skim the slag from the molten grease.

Looking into that Hadal throng, Schneider felt his body grow heavy with terror. This was not a nightmare, or a trick, an illusion or a hallucination. He was dead, and he was in Hell. Sick anxiety longed to anchor itself to a leaden heartbeat, but the inside of his chest was still.

What had he done? He strained to remember, but nothing came: his name was all he knew. How had he deserved to be stuck here, his body slowly disintegrating, surrounded by blood and fire, monsters and the moaning damned? Would he rot away? And when he finally collapsed to a soggy stack of bones, would he be brought back to do it all again? Maybe this would last forever.

It was somewhere then, in the depths of his spiralling panic, that he heard the radio. He was no theologian, but to the best of his knowledge there were no radios in Hell.

“
Kōhua team one, this is DV, come in. You need to pick up the pace; we’ve got two fresh benthos an hour away, and nowhere to land ’em. Get that zeug cleared up now or it’s getting swept, over.
”

Schneider felt an absurd surge of hope: there were definitely no radios in Hell, and even if there were, devils did not bicker with each other over scheduling. Before he could begin to know what to make of the crackling, disembodied message, it was answered.

“Receiving you clear, Dakuvanga. Yes, you will have area 6-Tohorā clear in time to load—just two left to haul and then we’ll call in skeletal for the bonepicking. Get off our backs and let us finish the job, out.”

The connection cut with a burst of static, followed by a volley of unmistakably human cursing, before a bulky figure strode abruptly out of the dark.

“Alright, fuckers,” it growled, “pick up the pace.”

The speaker was nearing seven feet tall, a great fat man swathed in layers of canvas and waxed leather. Just his head protruded from a turret-like collar, a lurking bulge like an egg boiled in dirty water. His mouth was a bloodless slit, his eyes red and inflamed in the waxen immensity of his face.

In his hand, a taut leash held back what Schneider took at first to be a huge dog, but which upon closer examination prompted him to reassess his ‘not in Hell’ hypothesis.

It was, or had been, a shark. Its front end was a great fat wedge of jaw, lipless and set with serrated enamel shards, while its body and tail heaved in a cage of wires, tubes and churning hydraulics. Sweeping out from its belly, a fan of hooked iron spider-legs scrabbled and clanged against the ground as it strained to reach the haulage gang.

Grunting, the pallid, egg-headed ogre let out another ten feet of lead for the awful thing, and it scuttled, cockroach-like, to clamp its jaws around the hip of a struggling ghoul.

The victim shrieked as it was dragged to the ground, but did not even look in the direction of the thing savaging its leg, merely stared forward with an expression of abject defeat. None of the other dead even looked round—they just leaned into the ropes and ploughed forward, agitated like spooked cattle. Aware of danger, but clueless to avoid it.

Schneider couldn’t stand to watch. Shouting what he thought was a protest, but which came out as a stuttering gurgle, he lurched free of the rope and shouldered aside sodden teamsters in an attempt to reach the fallen creature before the shark-thing could fall on it again.

Suddenly, the red eyes of the giant and the glassy pits of the shark were both fixed on him.

“Ha! Who the shit are
you?
” roared the overseer, and Schneider realised what a horrendously stupid thing he was doing. He tried to freeze, to sway like the other corpses did, but it was far too late.

With no hope of avoiding attention, Schneider ran, turning his back and scrambling back through the milling dead in the hope of blending in again. But the skittering of steel on steel was too close behind him. He weaved through the hunched, emaciated bodies, but he could hear it drawing nearer—that dreadful blunt head shunting aside bodies as it pursued him.

Schneider ducked ropes and hopped lumps of meat as he shoved through the toiling throng, but it was like running in a nightmare: his legs seemed to move at a fraction of the speed he willed them to, while the scuttling horror behind him gained with the tireless speed of a machine.

He could hear the hiss of its hydraulics, could almost feel its teeth kiss the backs of his flailing heels, when an almighty crash and squeal of shearing metal sounded from the direction of the skeletonised monster behind him; from the place where Schneider had woken up.

A distant voice called out “Shut it off! Shut it down!” and a wail rose from the dead working the bones of the sea-giant. The overseer cursed, and Schneider heard the hiss of sparking steel all too close as the shark-thing reached the end of its leash. Then the radio again:

“
Kōhua, this is DV again. Winch team just screwed up bad—there’s a lot of meat caught up in the gears. You just got yourself an even bigger mess to clear up.
”

Schneider risked a glance behind; the shark was still fixed on him, red gums bared as it strained on its lead, but its handler’s attention was elsewhere, face scornful as he held a battered radio to his craggy sneer.

“Yeah, copy,” growled the overseer. “I told you more haste means less speed, DV. We’re on it. Just hold your damned tongue while we get the real work done down here, out.”

The grey-headed giant spat in disgust and yanked on his monster’s leash, stalking off towards the source of the racket without a second glance towards the haulage team. Following the overseer’s gaze, Schneider saw with a sick lurch what had called a halt to proceedings.

Smoke was pouring from the drive unit of a towering gantry crane, paused midway through tearing the skull from the body of the monster, while a crowd of dead clustered in aimless distress around its base. As the knots of wandering bodies merged and split, Schneider saw through them to a sight that made his throat close up.

Arms and legs twitched weakly in the rusted jaws of a gear assembly, half-crushed heads gaping in weak anguish: a whole team of haulers, in the overseers’ rush to clear the flensing site, had veered off-course and, lacking any supervision, wandered into the grinding cogs of a crane rig.

Schneider stared, until a more urgent thought bubbled to the base of his skull. With his team’s overseer—and his horrifying charge—heading rapidly towards the accident, there was nobody watching him. This was his chance to run.

Without another glance at the overseer, or at the looming glow of the rendering plant, he loped into the dark as quickly as his trembling legs would allow. Not a single head turned to watch him leave—every sad, opalescent eye was fixed on the fire ahead.

The roar of the furnaces, the monotonous shuffle of dead feet on metal, the slow rasping of the fat-slab, all faded beneath the slapping of his bare feet, the rumble of the ever-present thunder, and—louder every moment—the quiet, vast crash of waves.

He had no idea where he was running to, but anywhere had to be better than the vision of Hell that awaited the haulage team. He willed himself onwards and out of the light, before an overseer could turn and see him making a break for it.

Then he remembered; the fallen corpse. The poor wretch that had been dragged down by the scissoring jaws of the shark-thing, that had not even looked back as its leg was savaged. Crouching against a flaking iron wall, Schneider looked back to see if it had gotten back to its feet.

It had not. Alone on the darkened ground, the dead thing sat on its haunches as the haulers passed it by, arm extended as if for assistance, head swinging as if looking for something.

Its eyes met Schneider’s; its head stopped moving. For a long moment it stared, as the rain fell in light sheets around it. Could it see him, out at the edge of the furnace lights? If it could, did it have any conception of him as another being? Was it just a broken rack of meat, or was it every bit as conscious as him?

The possibility was overwhelming. With the image of those bodies broken against the wheels of the crane still fresh in his mind, the hopeless, withered faces of the flensing mob, there was no way he could leave it there, maimed and lonely. Bitingly aware that anything could be looking his way, Schneider ran back out into the glare of the floodlights, towards the huddled body.

The rain fell heavier as he knelt beside the cadaver, sinking on shaking legs until his eyes were level with its own.

“Can you hear me?” he whispered, straining to speak with lips like salted slugs. The dead thing’s mouth hung open, wordless, arm still extended as if it was reaching to pluck its own words from an indistinct cloud.

Schneider repeated the question, the words coming more firmly with practice, and was answered with a low bubbling sound—the thing’s chest was punctured just left of centre, a bruised black slot that gurgled as its mouth gaped for an answer.

The jaw closed with a slow hiss that might have been frustration, and the dull grey eyes slid shut in a slow blink. When they opened again, there was no illusion of contact—they were looking through him, to somewhere beyond the dark.

Off to the side, with a stuttering roar, Schneider heard the gears of the gantry crane come to life, presumably free of its abhuman blockage. The triumphant bass yell of an overseer answered it, a guttural prayer of thanks to industry renewed, and the familiar clatter and hiss of the flensing work resumed.

The giant and his monster would be returning any moment, and he was right out in the gaze of the floodlights. There was no more time to wait for a response from the wretched thing: he had to get back to the darkness. No matter how hard he wanted it to be otherwise, Schneider thought as he struggled to his feet, it seemed he was the only one here with a mind of his own.

Turning to face the dark, he made it one step before a cold hand clamped around his calf. He jerked away on impulse, panic surging down his spine like frozen slush forced down a hosepipe, and twisted to find the face of the dead thing staring up into his, teeth grey and clenched.

“Help me,” it hissed.