David Gunn - Day of the Damned

‘What?’

His gaze slides from mine.

Flicking my bike to life, I feel its gyro settle.

Anton rides behind me, Leona slots into place behind that and our newest recruit rides tail. As we move out, I see his gaze skim the windows to see if anyone other than Mary watches us go. He double-checks for snipers on the roof.

This man’s good.

Too good to need our company.

Makes me wonder again what he’s getting out of this.

We’re all used to the cold, which is interesting. Leona and Toro have done time in sub-zero combat zones. So they say when we stop to sit out the next day in the shade of a sandstone butte. In an hour, the road surface goes from ice-flecked and frozen to hot enough to fry an egg.

Even in the shadows it’s so hot it hurts to breathe.

‘Never thought I’d miss the cold,’ says Anton, and ends up telling Sergeant Toro that he’s just back from an ice planet. He leaves out the bit about it being a prison planet. And so I tell them about the siege of Ilseville, which I sat out in a ruined house, with snow banked against our ruined walls.

All that was left of most of the city.

Of course, I was drunk.

But that doesn’t change how cold it was.

Ilseville was where I met Neen, who became my sergeant. His sister Shil. A girl called Franc, who slept with her knives, loved cooking and could make rat taste like chicken. The other was a boy called Haze, who turned out to be a baby metalhead, complete with braids growing straight from his skull.

Always wonder whether I should have let him live.

They formed the core of the Aux. Short for Death’s Head auxiliaries. A name I gave them to keep the Aux alive when some of the regular Death’s Head were showing too great an interest in them.

Even the Death’s Head think twice before killing their own.

There was another, but he died quickly and I can’t remember his name. We picked up Rachel, our redheaded sniper, after Ilseville fell.

Franc died on Hekati.

That was later, half a spiral arm away. We won. OK, Hekati was destroyed, along with almost everyone we met. But it was a victory. Almost as glorious as Ilseville.

And we left that in rubble.

‘Sir,’ Sergeant Leona says, ‘you’re grinding your teeth.’

She takes one look at my face and apologizes. Excusing herself, she heads out of sight to take a piss or something. It takes her longer than it should. So I guess she’s sitting out my anger.

Firing up my laser sabre, I strip a thorn bush to twigs and a twisted trunk, then cut the trunk into equal lengths. The dry twigs catch quickly and within minutes I’m feeding the fire bits of trunk.

‘What’s that for?’ Anton asks.

‘Breakfast.’

Pulling a dagger from my belt, I check its point.

Not sure why I’m bothering. It’s as sharp as it was when I put it away. And I’ve honed the edge so sharp that flesh cuts like paper. I know that from the trickle of blood on my wrist when I draw the blade across my thumb.

‘Keep the fire burning,’ I tell Leona.

She nods, still buckling her belt. ‘Sir . . .?’

I turn back.

‘You want company?’

‘Work best alone.’

She grins. ‘Right you are, sir.’

‘Leona. You know how to cook?’

‘Yes, sir . . . I think so.’

‘How about using a knife? Any good at that?’

When she nods, I throw her my blade which she catches cleanly, and tell her to kill something edible and cook it. Then I go take a piss of my own.

That night sees us descend to the low plains, beginning a run that will take us to the slopes of Farlight. We pass villages and small towns, goats eating rubbish on dumps beside the road, and small children who wave.

The older ones spit.

Sergeant Toro asks if I’ve seen the city before and seems surprised when I say yes. He’d be even more surprised if he knew the story behind my arrival.

Farlight is a sprawl of a city trapped in the bowl of a long-dead volcano. To enter by road you take a track that snakes up the volcano and drops into its crater. Slums cling to the highest slopes of the inside edge. The air there is fresh, but water’s rare and so are jobs. The rich bits of Farlight huddle on the floor. The really expensive bits circle Zabo Square and the cathedral.

A virus hit that area years back.

Imagine blowtorching a toy city until the biggest buildings start to melt, then letting them set again. That’s what the boulevards around Zabo Square look like. Debro has a mansion there. Aptitude’s ex-husband had one also.

Until I burnt it down.

‘Ready?’ I ask.

Everyone nods.

We fire up our bikes.

The blacktop gets better the closer we get to the city. But the road still twists and turns viciously. And we waste hours running parallel to our old path, only heading in the opposite direction and fifty paces higher. With the next stage of our route switched round again and fifty paces above that. Our pegs grinding sparks as we navigate hairpin bends.

Any army that tried to take Farlight using this road would be hacked to pieces before they reached a third of the way up. In all of this, our lights only show the narrowest sliver of blacktop.

As one hairpin leads into another, it occurs to me we’re going to hit a bigger problem and hit it soon.

‘What?’ Anton demands when I pull us over.

‘We’re going off-road.’

He wants to protest that on-road is dangerous enough.

Sergeant Toro is watching. As we wait, his eyes flick to the corner ahead, the strip of road beyond that and the road above. He keeps his opinions to himself and his engine running.

A man after my own heart.

‘Want to tell him why?’

‘Roadblocks,’ the sergeant says.

‘We can talk our way through,’ Anton insists.

‘And if it goes wrong? You happy for me to cut their throats? We might as well send a message saying we’ve arrived.’

Sergeant Leona goes still.

Maybe she’s not used to people openly discussing the slaughter of Farlight’s finest.

‘So,’ I say. ‘Since we can’t kill them . . .’

Anton nods reluctantly.

The city spreads out below us. So vast it froths up from the volcano floor right to the crater’s edge. A tiny speck in the middle is the cathedral. The gap in front is Zabo Square. You can parade an army there. OctoV has done it.

Just not in my lifetime.

Beyond the square lies an area of big houses, then the river. This is not a river at all. It’s a closed-system ribbon lake that cuts the city in two. Although the two pieces are not equal in size and it’s years since the river has flowed.

We stand on the eastern rim.

Around here, the caldera rises too steeply for anything but shacks on stilts to be built and scabs of bare rock show where some of those have toppled onto shacks below, sending them crashing onto the buildings below that.

Leona is looking around with a smile on her face.

‘Never knew it was so beautiful.’

That’s one way of putting it.

In a small square below, barrio dwellers are putting up stalls and unloading three-wheel tuktuks. A woman I know has a stall there.

Supplier of used weapons.

Cheapest price on the planet, guaranteed.

Beyond the little market is a row of rotting houses, built from stonefoam and fibreboard. I own one of the largest. Golden Memories. My bar and brothel . . .

Paper Osamu, U Free ambassador to this edge of the Spiral, told me they were designed to last less than fifty years. Seven hundred years later they’re still going. She knows stuff like that. The U Free like to study primitive peoples.

In my case, their ambassador liked to fuck them also.

That flat patch of dirt beyond is the Emsworth landing fields. A rotting square of concrete and scrub, edged with crumbling warehouses.