Tim Lebbon: Echo city

Their equipment lay around them where it had fallen. Bags, water skins, weapons, clothing, an occasional sled or wheeled vehicle, all had been heated by the relentless sun and cooled by the fearsome desert nights, and successive heatings and coolings had destroyed much. There was nothing here to aid the creature in its progress, and after a while it no longer paid heed to the strewn remnants of desperation and hope. It focused on the hills it would never reach, sucked water from the bone straw, and felt the thing inside it rolling and gnawing, making itself strong for the time to come.

It could feel itself weakening, but purpose drove it on. Flesh sloughed from its exposed limbs, and blood speckled the sand beneath it. Its large feet had spread since shedding the shoes, and had it looked back it would have seen the trail of bloody footprints. Sand worked its way into wounds, and the creature felt pain despite the way it had been made, and taught, and given life. It howled, but there was no one to hear.

Eventually it came to a stop among the bones and rocks and hot sands, sinking slowly onto its side and then its back, turning its head so that it could look across the desert at the low hills. They had drawn much closer, it thought, especially in the past few hours when it had been walking with the sun sinking to its right. It felt a sense of accomplishment and hoped its maker was pleased.

Its movements ceased, its eyes grew pale and dry, and its limited awareness of surroundings and purpose drifted away like dust on the breeze. Its only thought as things grew dark was that it had done its very best.

Hearing was the last to go, and the sound that accompanied it down into death was something tearing, and something wet.

The thing emerged from the giant corpse. It had been made with hooked claws and toes with which to rip, and it tore its way out through the weakened flesh. It had also been formed with a sharp ridge running down its forehead to the bridge of its nose, and it used this to saw and snap at the thick ribs that encircled its host's upper half. As it emerged, a bloody violent birth, it also ate and drank. The meat was warm and the blood thick, and strength coursed through its body.

Free of its confines, it remained there for a while as it grew accustomed to its surroundings. It had filled itself with its mother's flesh and blood, but already it could feel this desert's rot.

Its maker had warned it of this. Time was passing, the desert was exerting its poisonous influence, and it knew it had far to go.

Standing naked beneath the sinking sun, it looked to the sky and felt a sense of release that it could not accurately identify or understand. It had little to do with being away from the body now lying beneath and around it, because it thought of that only as meat. It had nothing to do with being able to stretch its arms and flex its clawed fingers at the glittering points of light. Looking back across the desert, marking the bloody prints stretching off into the dusk, it saw a smudge of light low on the horizon. Freedom, release… it thought it had something to do with leaving whatever that light represented.

Yet it knew that its destination lay in the opposite direction. It gathered folds of leather around its naked body, filled rough pockets with handfuls of meat from the thing that had birthed it, and started walking.

Daylight came, and night once more, and when it saw the sunrise for the second time it realized that there were no longer bones. The last set of remains it had passed had been wrapped in several layers of thick leather, a chain-mail body shell, and something that resembled the chitinous outer layers of a beetle. The mummified corpse had been lying with its right hand stretched out and finger pointing southward, as if indicating the place it wanted to be. Its mouth had been wide, and it had carried three obsidian teeth. On the corpse's skin, the creature had made out the dark smears of strange markings, and it wondered what that meant.

It had memories of something called Echo City, but they were very old, and they belonged somewhere else. It did not consider the strangeness of carrying such old memories when it had been born for only two days. It had a maker, and that maker's voice was the sole loud, clear thing in its fresh mind. Walk, that voice said, avoid dangers, look south, and travel as far as you can. It spoke in suggestions rather than words. The creature obeyed.

Though nothing lived in the desert, there were dangers. Around noon of that third day, it entered an area where great holes breathed dark fumes of gas and nightmare. Drawing in these fumes for the first time, the thing fell to its knees as its immature brain was racked with onslaughts of images dredged from some past it did not know. It saw faces and death, madness and war, and the release of an appalling disease that made it open its eyes again to look down upon its own body. It could not see its face to make out whether it resembled those in its nightmare, but its body was the same-and the abuse it suffered clothed it in the same sadness. Skin was weakening, flesh was rotting, and its insides churned as something sought release.

Farther, its maker's voice said, hardly audible through the nightmares. The creature stood and ran, ignoring the staggering pain that pummeled up from its legs as weakening bones crumbled. When they finally snapped, it crawled instead, hauling itself out of that region of holes and ventings, giving it the chance to breathe air that seemed clearer. Its mind settled, leaving it with the idea of its maker.

By dusk on that third day it could crawl no farther. Its fingers had worn away, and whatever ills the desert carried had turned its eyes to mush, its flesh to rotten stuff. It lay still as it birthed the thing it had been made to carry, and the maker had created it so that the pain was only slight.

As darkness came, it tried to imagine the maker saying, Good.

The smaller creature crawled from the remains of its mother. It had four legs and a hugely distended stomach, but the legs were long enough to lift it from contact with the sands and strong enough to carry it across the desert at startling speed.

It passed over a low range of hills, negotiating a dry ravine on the other side and continuing into the desert that lay beyond. Nothing lived here but it, though it did not find that strange. It carried vague and distant memories of life and plenty, but it did not suffer loneliness, because the maker was always there. It listened to the maker's songs, poems, and words of wisdom and humor, and though it could not respond, it knew that the maker was pleased. It ran fast and far, avoiding patches of lighter-colored sand, which would have sucked it down to unknown depths, and places where flames twisted across the landscape in defiance of the breeze.

At last night came, and in the deceptive shadows of dusk the thing tripped over a rock and broke one of its legs.

It lay quietly as death approached, feeling the desert's deadly influences now that it was down. It listened to the maker in memories, and even as its rounded stomach split and gushed forth innards, it did not feel the pain.

The thing that rose from the gore and steam walked on.

A day later, as noon scorched the sands and something slumped to the ground to die, the journey came to an end.

As the creature edged toward death, its legs fell apart and revealed the moist heart of itself. It growled as it obeyed what the maker had instructed it to do, defying the sun and the desert, the heat and the air, the dust and the winds. It felt its flesh withered and diseased, but it pushed harder as it birthed its son and willed itself to die, comforted that it was not the desert that had taken it in the end.

The child mewled as it squirmed in the sand. It poked strong fingers through the translucent film that enveloped it and blinked wet, intelligent eyes at the heat and sunlight that rushed in to bathe its soft skin. It tried to stand, but its legs were still shaky. It looked around, seeing only endless sand and sky.