Paolo Bacigalupi - The Drowned Cities

Heavy fighting, for sure. But none of their wounds looked like explosions or gunfire. One of the dead ones looked like he’d been nearly snapped in half. The other had his neck torn and snapped.

The conscious boy’s eyes followed her as Mahlia knelt beside him. She peeled away the bloody rags, guessing what she would see, and more afraid because of it.

Four massive, deep parallel gashes cleaved across his chest, tearing his clothes and shearing deep through brown flesh. The white cage of his ribs showed amid the red. Mahlia held her hand over the torn flesh, unwillingly measuring the size of the claw that had dealt the blow.

Mahlia felt sick. It all made sense.

She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, Mouse would surely die.

“OUR FRIENDS TELL US they encountered a wild boar,” Doctor Mahfouz said.

It was a stupid lie. No boar could do that. Only a monster. Only a half-man. And Mouse was trapped with that creature, and if Mahlia didn’t get him free, he was going to die, and if she didn’t get free of these soldiers and find some way to get the meds from Doctor Mahfouz—

“Mahlia!”

She startled from her mesmerized staring at the soldier’s wounds. Mahfouz repeated himself. “I have my tools boiling. If you’ll wash your hands, I’ll need you for the cleaning and stitching.”

Mahlia hurried to the boiling water, feeling numb. The soldiers were everywhere. She snuck glances at them, studying her enemies as she cleaned herself.

They were a raggedy bunch. The kind her father used to scoff at, all beat-up equipment and missing teeth and acid-burned faces, but their guns had bullets and their blades gleamed with razor edges, and they were everywhere. Walking the perimeter, pillaging the doctor’s squat, stalking out on patrol. They lit campfires and hauled ancient plastic jugs filled with water from the basement pool next door, and stacked looted piles of everything from rice to dead chickens on the dirty concrete. It looked like they were shaking down the entire village.

A tall black-skinned boy with piercing eyes directed a squad of three in gathering wood and starting a bonfire. Kill scars slashed his bicep, nine enemies ticked off, the way the doctor checked off his medicine inventory.

Mahlia started to count kill scars on the other soldiers but gave up. There were too many; they must have had more than two hundred kills. Even the youngest of them, the little licebiters who were only allowed to carry hydrochlor and machetes, had kills. And the oldest, like the lieutenant and the wounded soldier boy with his ribs opened up, had more than a dozen.

“What we want to do with this?” a soldier called out. Mahlia looked up at the slurred voice. A machete cut had cleaved the soldier’s jaw and scarred his face all the way up to the eye. But what drew Mahlia’s gaze was his prize, a goat he was leading into their midst.

With a start, Mahlia realized it was Gabby, the doctor’s goat. “You can’t—” Mahlia started to object, before she shut herself up.

Lieutenant Sayle had been conferring with his sergeants, but now he looked up, a pale cadaverous mantis turning attention to its prey.

“Looks like dinner.”

He returned to marking off quadrants on a moldy map, uninterested in what he had ordered, or whom it affected.

The soldier boy looped Gabby’s rope around her legs, trussed them, and abruptly shoved her over. It was a casual shove, almost bored. The goat fell with a thud and whuff of surprise, as powerless as a sack of dropped rice.

Lieutenant Sayle was back to talking with his sergeants, his words blending with the rest of the soldiers’ activities. “Flush it up against the coast, sweep south.” The details of their hunt. “A-6, push along this ridge; it’s still above tide line. This river cut might give it protection…”

Mahlia watched, powerless, as the soldier boy knelt beside Gabby, lifted his machete, and hacked into her neck. Gabby bleated once in panic and then the blade sank in and the goat lost her voice. The boy started sawing across. Blood spilled out. Mahlia looked away.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

Mahlia finished washing her hands in boiled water and rinsed in alcohol, fighting to ignore Gabby’s dismemberment.

It’s what they do , she reminded herself. Don’t fight things you can’t fight. She needed to think like Sun Tzu. Make her own plans for how to get the meds she needed and escape back to Mouse.

Mahlia focused on Sayle, listening to him plan. “B-6, Hi-Lo Platoon, Potomac…” None of the names meant anything to Mahlia except that soldiers were out there—lots of them—and they wanted that half-man, and Mouse’s life wasn’t worth rust. If they found the half-man before Mahlia could return, the monster would believe she had betrayed it, and Mouse would die, and she was stuck here, fixing up someone who would just as soon chop off her last hand.

Mahlia finished washing, grabbed boiled forceps and scalpels and needles from their battered cook pot, and shoved through the ring of watching soldiers to the last living victim, wishing there were some way to tell the doctor what was happening to Mouse.

“Ease back,” she ordered as she pushed through. The soldiers shifted a little but didn’t move away.

The doctor looked up. “Your comrade needs air and he needs your dirt away from his wounds. Either you listen to the girl, or your friend will not survive.”

“He dies, you die,” one of them muttered.

Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was Soa or one of the others, but the wounded boy reacted to the challenge. “You heard them,” he grunted. “Get back. Let the doctors do their thing.”

Mahlia knelt down and began swabbing out the wound, plucking bits of fabric from torn brown flesh, inspecting to see if his broken ribs looked as if they had damaged his internal organs.

The boy didn’t flinch as she probed. The only evidence of his pain was that sometimes his breath would hold as she dug deep. He stared straight ahead with a fixed expression of contempt. She squeezed blood out of her rag, swabbed the wounds again.

What a fool she had been. Of course the monster had been hunted. There’d been boot and dog prints all over that place. The creature hadn’t come from nowhere. It had come out of the Drowned Cities, and the soldiers had followed. In hindsight, it made perfect sense.

“Don’t look like a pig did this,” she said.

The wounded soldier boy’s gaze focused on her for the first time. Gold-flecked green eyes, glinting violence. A face sculpted by war. Hard. “If I say it was pig, it was pig.”

Mahlia dropped her eyes. It wasn’t worth fighting over. Boys like this had seen too much blood to care one way or the other if they spilled a little more. Antagonizing them was stupid.

“Problem, Sergeant Ocho?”

The voice was soft, but it made Mahlia’s skin scrawl. The lieutenant was looking at them. Pale skin, pale hair, gray empty eyes. She’d thought he looked like a corpse at first because he was so pale, and then like an insect, because of his long, thin body and limbs. But suddenly Mahlia knew what he was: coywolv. Pure blood and rust coywolv. A predator. Deadly and smart.

Sayle’s gray eyes lingered on her. “Anything I need to be aware of?”