Paolo Bacigalupi - The Drowned Cities

He waved her over. On the ground before him, another track marked the mud, from another kind of predator. A boot print. A good heavy boot, with a solid waffle tread.

Thick soles might make you noisy, but it also meant you could run over anything. Run over broken glass and rusty wire in the Drowned Cities without slowing down, for instance.

“Soldiers,” Mouse said. “Boots like that, it’s got to be.”

“So we got rich soldiers and their dogs?” She felt a chill of fear. Soldiers. Here in the jungle. Close to town. “UPF, you think?”

“Can’t say. But they got boots. If they’re that rich, they probably got guns, too. Not just some wannabe warboys with acid and machetes.”

“But there’s nothing out here. No scavenge. No enemy.”

“Maybe they’re recruiting.”

If that was true, they all needed to run. Everyone in the village. If the soldier boys wanted you, they took you, and Mahlia had never heard of anyone coming back after they got recruited.

“So what’s that thing out there?” Mouse asked.

Mahlia followed his gaze to the huge alien mass, floating in the swamp. “Hell if I know. Looks like a gator.”

“Not with fur.”

Mahlia didn’t want to stick around anymore. The jungle was making her skin crawl. “We got to get back to the doc, tell him about the soldiers. Let people know there’s military around.”

“In a minute.”

“Mouse…”

But the licebiter was already wading in, headstrong and crazy.

“Mouse!” Mahlia whispered. “Get back here!”

Mouse ignored her, wading deeper, pushing aside cattails. He prodded the floating mass with the machete. Flies lifted off the dead thing, buzzing and humming. Matted hair and grime, clots of blackened blood, leathery hard skin.

In the light of day, crawdads were in it, and beetles feeding on ragged putrid wounds. Mahlia saw a centipede-like thing come out of a gash and drop into the water, slither-swimming through the water like a cottonmouth.

Mouse leaned against the thing with his blade.

“Damn,” he grunted. “It’s big.”

Huge, more like. Meters and meters of meat, fur, and rough armored skin. It rocked sullenly, so big that it barely moved, even when Mouse leaned hard. Green mossy scum water rippled around it. Rafts of tiny lilies bobbed up and down. Water skippers fled.

“I do believe we’ve found dinner,” Mouse announced.

“Don’t be gross.”

“It ain’t spoiled. And there’s enough here for us to smoke. Better than scraping for crawdads and trying to snare lizards and rabbits. Plenty to give to Amaya and her new baby.”

“No way the doctor will eat something like that.”

“Just because he don’t eat pig, don’t mean he won’t eat this.” Mouse spat into the water, irritated. “Anyway, we don’t have to tell him what it is.”

“ We don’t know what it is.”

“So we just feed it to him. We can call it goat, or something. Or make up some of his Latin talk for it. Deadus pondus , right? Mahfouz’d eat that right up. He loves those big words.”

Mahlia laughed. “You try that, he’ll definitely know you’re up to something.”

“Come on, Mahlia. If we don’t carve it up, coywolv will.”

Something about the dead thing made her uneasy. She scanned the swampy pools, the jungle all around. Nothing but trees, green leaves, and kudzu draping over everything. Deep mossy pools. And then in the middle of it, this bloody leaking thing.

Mouse was smirking at her.

Grind it. She couldn’t be paranoid forever. Mahlia waded in, feeling stupid for her fear. The warm waters of the swamp eased up around her thighs, hot as blood.

“You’ll eat anything,” she said.

“It’s why I’m still alive.”

Mosquitoes buzzed around her as she waded through cattails and algae slime. Together, they grabbed the floating mass. Clouds of flies rose up again, a choking tornado.

Mouse caught Mahlia’s eye. “On three, right?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

“One. Two. Three! ”

They hauled, straining and grunting, dragging with all their strength. The thing moved sluggishly.

“Come on !”

Mahlia set her feet and pulled. Her feet scrabbled in the mud, heaving, pulling—

The thing ripped apart.

Unbalanced, Mahlia and Mouse toppled back into the water. Mahlia came up sputtering, expecting to find herself in a sea of guts and blood. Instead, one half of the dead thing had rolled up, revealing a face, scarred and terrible.

“Kali-Mary Mother of God!” Mahlia gave a startled yelp and scrambled back.

“Damn!” Mouse crowed. “I should’ve seen it before! Should’ve known!”

It wasn’t one creature, but two. Monsters intertwined. A big king of an alligator, and another creature—a thing that Mahlia hadn’t seen since the cease-fire died and the last of the peacekeepers cleared out, all of them running for the docks as the Drowned Cities returned to war.

A half-man. A war creature that only the richest corporations, the Chinese peacekeepers, and the armies in the North could afford to grow and use.

“A dog-face!” Mouse was practically hooting with excitement. “Must’ve been epic ring!” He splashed over for a closer look. “Must’ve killed each other! Dog-face killed the gator, gator killed the dog-face.”

He shook his head with admiration as he ran a hand down the monster’s flank. “Check out those teeth marks. Gator practically tore its shoulder off. Had to be epic ring.”

“Mouse…”

“What?” He looked up from his inspection of the battle wounds. “Ain’t gonna bite. We’ll take the gator. Good eating, for sure. Even old Mahfouz likes gator.”

Mouse was right. The monsters were dead. She was being stupid.

After the initial shock of the half-man’s face, Mahlia could think through her reaction. It had just seemed too human, that was all. One minute it had been a beast; the next, a person.

“You coming?” Mouse asked. He was looking at her like she was some kind of baby war maggot who’d never rolled a dead body.

“You didn’t see its face,” she said.

It was submerged again, but it had been terrifying—beast and human welded together in an unholy mix. Her skin crawled at the memory of that visage.

“If you got no spine…”

“Go grind, Mouse. I ain’t afraid of the dead.”

Still, Mahlia avoided the floating half-man and went straight for the alligator, ignoring the boy’s smirk. Together, they grabbed hold of the massive reptile and started hauling it toward shore.

They paused to rest. Mouse leaned his elbows on the floating corpse. Wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Must’ve been epic fighting,” he said. “They got ring fights in the Drowned Cities. Use their deserters and the other warlord soldiers. Panthers. Coywolv. Anything that’ll fight. Bet that old monster would’ve done good in the ring.”

“Sure, Mouse. Let’s carve up the lizard and get gone.”

“Fight like this one, people’d pay Red Chinese cash to see it. Soldier boys would’ve loved it. Battle to the death. Epic ring.”

“Soldier boys do all kinds of dumb stuff.”

They started hauling on the gator again, but suddenly the going got slow. Mahlia leaned into the weight, annoyed. Mouse liked to bait her into doing the work and then slack off. Typical.

“Grind it, Mouse! Quit lazing off.” She glanced back. “Hey! What you doing?”

Mouse wasn’t even helping. He’d pulled out his knife and was wading back toward the floating half-man.

“Got an idea,” he said.

“Come on, Mouse! I don’t want to be out here in the dark with raw meat. Last time that happened, we ended up sleeping in the trees with a bunch of coywolv down below. Let’s get gone.”