Р. Смит - Land of the Beautiful Dead

The ferryman had six more fares in the back of his van and a long way yet to drive, so he didn’t stop at town. He just rolled up to the docking gate, opened up the hatch and told her to get out.

Lan got out, moving carefully along the van’s armored roof and trying not to look at the Eaters clambering below her. They hadn’t seen many on the drive, but there were always Eaters at the towns and this one was pretty big, as towns went these days.

There were kids up on the wall, taking shots at Eaters and smoking. They had bows and buckets of smouldering pitch beside them, but it had rained most of the morning and the dead were too wet to burn, so they were using guns instead, showing off the wealth of a town that could afford to waste bullets on Eaters. When they saw her, one of the kids dropped a ladder and steadied it for her while another jotted down the name painted on the side of the ferry beneath the picture of the red-haired siren with her sword raised high over a heap of decapitated corpses. The Boudicca , it said, which Lan only knew because the ferryman had bragged it up all the way from Morrow-up-Marsh where he’d taken her on.

“Bloody Irish,” said the kid, now turning to her, tapping his stub of a pencil so she’d notice him writing and be impressed. “Welcome to New Aylesbury. What do you want?”

“Just passing.”

“Well, first night’s free if it’s just you, but it’ll be a ‘slip a night for a longer stay, plus the cost of the bed. If you’re set on paying for a bed,” he added. He didn’t look at her when he said it, but she could feel the unspoken invitation hovering between them.

Lan said, “I’m just passing,” again and left it at that. She had no coin, but she had plenty of barter in her rucksack and in any case, he was too young for her. A girl on her own couldn’t afford many scruples, but Lan was not going to be some wall-rat’s first brag just for the price of a bed in some mudlump of a town.

If the kid was disappointed, it didn’t show. He just moved on to the next question. “Where from?”

“Norwood.”

He looked up from his book, smiling beneath puzzled eyes. “Where’s that?”

“Near Lancaster.” She shrugged. “Nearish.”

“And you?”

“Lan.”

The kid rolled his eyes and wrote it down. “Yeah, okay, Lan from Lan caster.”

“Lan,” said Lan in a soft, stony voice. Her mother’s voice. “From Norwood.”

“Whatever you say,” said the kid, not believing her and not caring if she knew it. He made a point of drawing a line through the letters in his book and writing new ones in. This done, he nodded to his friend, who in turn signaled the ferryman below. The kids pulled the ladder up as the ferry drove away, bumping over Eaters and leaving smears of old blood and rotting flesh in its wake. “So, Lan from Norwood,” said the kid, putting his book and pencil away. “What can we do for you?”

“I need another ferry. They come through regular?”

“Yeah, we got a few in, although they’re not leaving until morning. Hey, Jakes!” he called, leaning out from the docking tower. “Got a fare for ya!” He pointed Lan toward one of the kids looking curiously up from a corral of armored ferry-vans and went back to the wall, leaving her to climb down alone. The kids all had vans with pictures of scantily-clad ladies on the side, either posed to do in an Eater or just posed. The one with the kid called Jakes working on it had the stamps of a dozen towns or more painted on the side, underneath the naked lady hacking open Eaters with the machetes she carried in each dainty hand.

“This here’s Big Bertha,” the kid said proudly, wiping a greasy hand on his shirt so she could shake it. “Fastest, meanest bitch on four wheels. Where bound, luv?”

She told him.

He laughed. All the ferrymen laughed. “Not in my ferry. This may not be much of a world, but I’m not leaving it that way.”

“I pay good.”

“You could pay in clean cunny and pure meth, but you’ll still be paying someone else.”

She didn’t argue with him. There wouldn’t be any more ferries this late, so instead she asked him the way to the hostel.

Like all hostels these days, it did double duty as the prison and as the emergency shelter, should the town walls ever fall. Lan took her key and locked herself in the first available cell. A guard came by every so often with boiled water; everything else had a price (although the currency was negotiable, he said, reaching through the bars to stroke at her arm). She had food in her rucksack, but she didn’t want anyone in this strange town to know she had it. She could have used a bath, but knew she’d be watched while she took one. All Lan wanted was to sleep until the next ferryman came through, but she didn’t believe hers was the only key to this cell, so she sat on the lumpy mattress that was her bed and looked out the narrow window at the unnatural mess that was the only sky Lan had ever known. Although no one could seem to agree on exactly how long it had been since Azrael’s ascension, Lan had never known any world but this one. Her mother used to say she remembered, but she’d been a kid—six or seven or maybe only five—when Azrael came.

No one knew who Azrael was or even what. Demon was the popular theory. Azrael never denied it. Neither did he deny sorcerer, Satan, alien, or mutated man. But whatever else he was, Lan’s mother would say, he was Death. As the master of that domain, he had torn his first companions from their rightful rest and set them at his side under new names, without memory, without humanity. Perhaps he expected Mankind to meekly surrender their world to him, to accept his rule without question and worship him without resentment.

“We fought back,” Lan’s mother would always say, should this part of the story come around. ‘We,’ she said, and she said it with pride, she who had been that child of maybe seven, maybe only five. “He raised his so-called children and before the sun had set, we killed them again. Most of them.”

Lan knew how that had gone. Norwood’s sheriff had saved pictures, but even if she hadn’t, plenty of people still talked about it, whether or not they were old enough to remember. They were proud of it, proud of the troops who had broken down the doors of Azrael’s first home, slaughtering the newly-raised corpses where they stood unresisting, until Azrael fell on them. Before the sun had set, Lan’s mother would say, and before that same sun had risen again, Azrael and his three remaining Children had fled, but not far. He was back soon enough, bringing with him the fires and the poison rain and the skies that were still lit up with that sick color that had no earthly name. All of that, yes, and the Eaters.

There had been other names for them in the beginning, back when people thought they knew what the Eaters were, back when people thought they could be stopped with something as simple as a bullet to the brain. No. This was Azrael’s world and nothing died save by his word of release. You could break them, burn them, or just wait them out until they had rotted away to bones and could no longer come after you, but even then, whatever remained of them still retained some kind of horrible life. Lan could remember her mother pulling the teeth from a charred skull after a neighbor’s death and showing them to her, how the teeth had trembled in her mother’s hand, trying to come together and bite. There was no hope then, only the diminishing living, the growing ranks of the dead, and less and less unpoisoned land to share between them.