Army of the Damned

Self-awareness came and went like a weak radio signal. Stuttering, time-lapse moments of consciousness. It began in the main lobby. She was sipping Scotch. She hated Scotch ever since she vomited Macallan out of her nose during a college drinking game. She retched at the smell of it. A shot glass full of bile. But now she drank single malt like it was Coke. She couldn't taste it and it didn't make her drunk.

Three infected people in front of her. Two brass-buttoned waiters and an old lady welded to a walking frame.

Blackout.

Two naked old guys and a chef.

Blackout.

Two officers and a cleaner fused to a broom.

Rye smiled. It was like pulling the arm of a slot machine. Three different fruit, every time.

One moment Rye was sitting at the blackjack table, checking her cards, nudging chips with the rotted club that used to be her hand. Next moment she found herself standing in a deserted coffee bar staring out of a porthole at the stars. She wondered how much time had passed. The next instant she found herself standing in one of Hyperion's little gift shops cramming fistfuls of shortbread into her mouth then spitting the biscuits because they tasted dry as dust. Time passed in a series of jumpcuts, each lucid moment met with anger and frustration. Why was she, among all the shambling, leprous passengers, one of the few cursed with long moments of wakefulness in which she experienced the full horror of her condition?

Rye checked the diesel tanks. She descended a ladder. Her boots splashed, ankle-deep. The floor of the fuel room was wet with octane. A flare would be enough, or a struck match.

She patted her pockets, tried to find a lighter. Next moment she couldn't remember who she was or why she was standing in a strange, wide room. She stood staring into space for hours, fuel slowly rising round her legs.

She found herself pounding a door. Infected passengers jostled around her, scraping and clawing at the metal.

She backed away from the crowd.

The hatch separated the Rampart crew from a savage horde that wanted to tear them apart.

Rye tried to drive the passengers back. She grabbed collars and pulled them away, but they immediately returned to punch and kick at the door. She blasted the crowd with a carbon extinguisher. Foam jetted over faces and bodies. The infected passengers were oblivious. They dripped white. Rye battered heads with the spent extinguisher. They shrugged off the blows.

Blackout.

Rye found herself among the group once more, hammering and scratching the metal.

Rye snapped alert. She found herself standing in front of a steel hatch, hand gripped around the release handle. She was alone. A remote lower deck.

DÖRR 26

She backed off. She had learned the layout of the ship from multilingual you-are-here wall charts mounted in each corridor to help passengers navigate their way from one theme-bar to another. Hatch 26 would lead to a passageway beneath the officers' quarters.

She rested her forehead against the cold metal and fought the overwhelming meat-lust that wanted to put her beyond the door and heading for the Rampart crew. She was lonely. She wanted to see Jane and Ghost once more. But she couldn't trust herself. She would seize them. She would rip and tear.

You should turn round, she told herself. Turn around and head the other way.

Rye cranked the handle and pulled the door ajar. She hesitated. The Rampart crew would have sought out every entrance to the officers' quarters. They would not have left the door undefended. They would have taken steps to protect themselves.

Rye squinted through the crack. She could see a red canister taped to the back of the hatch at eye level. A grenade, trip-wire pulled taut.

Rye squeezed her arm through the gap and gripped the grenade, careful not to dislodge the pin. She ripped the grenade free, snapping the thread. She examined the case. AH-M14 thermite grenade.

She put her eye to the gap and studied the barricade beyond the door. She could see a jumble of furniture. Desks and office chairs. A couple of filing cabinets. She could also see a couple of fine nylon threads, like wisps of cobweb. More grenades rigged around the doorway. If she opened the door wide she would have three seconds' grace before blowtorch heat seared flesh from her bones.

Rye sealed the hatch.

She wandered through the ship. She followed a draught of Arctic wind until she reached the gash ripped in Hyperion's prow by the collision with the rig. An evacuation sign, a running man fleeing flames, pointed to where jagged, ice-dusted metal framed the night sky.

Rye stepped over buckled floor plates. She stood in the great wound and looked out at the stars, the sea, the lunar crags of the island.

There had been rumours. Months ago, Jane and Punch had returned to the rig from the island with crates. They had visited the site of a seismic research station and returned with some kind of munitions. The secret revealed: boxes of thermite grenades.

The grenades were not designed to explode and spit shrapnel like conventional anti-personnel ordnance. Once triggered, they burned at four thousand degrees for a full minute. The brief nova-heat could turn an engine block to a puddle of liquid metal in seconds. Arctic drill teams used them to melt quickly through permafrost.

Would it hurt if she lay down, pulled the pin and quickly wedged the grenade beneath her head like a pillow? Three, maybe four seconds of unimaginable pain as flesh crisped and flaked from her skull, then her brain would fizz and boil away. Her thoughts and memories would be vapour.

Do it, she told herself, for the sake of the Rampart crew. Do it for them.

The diesel tanks. A steady gush of fuel. Rye descended a ladder and waded knee-deep. She held the grenade. No more excuses. All she had to do was stand between the huge fuel tanks, wreathed in diesel vapour, and pull the pin. The blast would measure in megatons.

She hooked the grenade ring with her finger. What about the Rampart crew? She shook her head, tried to think straight. The guys were a couple of floors above her. If she detonated the grenade they would burn.

She looked down at the red cylinder in her hand. She was tired. She just wanted to sleep.

Rye woke. She lifted her head from a table. Green felt. House must stand on 17. She looked around. The casino. The blackjack table. The game.

'Welcome back,' said the dealer. He smiled with cracked and bloody lips. His face had begun to disintegrate. Skin hung in strips. 'I thought we'd lost you. Thought your lights were out for good. Well. Maybe tomorrow, if you're lucky. It surely won't be much longer.'

He skimmed a couple of playing cards across the table. Rye didn't bother reading her hand. She pushed a couple of chips towards the centre.

'Not going to check your cards?' he asked. 'Dancing to the music of chance?'

He drew seven. Bust.

Rye gestured to the empty seats around her.

'So the others all turned?'

'One by one. I'm glad for them, but I can't help asking, why not me? Why am I left behind?'

'The breaks.'

'Those fucking breaks. It's just you and me now. The living dead.'

'I feel like I've drawn the short straw all my life. Forgive the self-pity. I just want it to be done.'

'It'll happen, sister. Don't you worry.'

'I'm scared. I want to do something, take steps, if you know what I mean. But I have to admit, I'm scared.'

The dealer gestured to his legs. Rye craned to see beneath the table. Metal tendrils had burst from the dealer's shoes. They had punctured the carpet and fused with the deck plate beneath. It looked like he had taken root.

'Sadly, I'm not as mobile as I was. If I could get out of this chair I'd jump over the side.'

Rye took the grenade from her pocket and placed it on the table.

'I found this. I don't have the courage to use it.'

'Mind if I take it from you?'

'Be my guest.'

Rye slid the grenade across the table. The dealer examined it like a barstool drunk contemplating the bottom of his shot glass.

'Obliged to you.'

'Thank you for your company these past few days,' said Rye. 'It's been a comfort.'

'Good luck, Liz.'

Rye woke. She was sitting on a bed. Whose bed? She was in a third-class cabin. Cramped. Trashed by a previous occupant. Clothes and coins on the floor.

Blood on the bed sheets. Whose blood? Hers? The blood was black and old.

She stood up. A monster in the mirror. A face weeping metal. Eyes behind a mask of spines. She smashed the mirror with a grotesque club-hand.

Rye woke. Silver walls. She was standing in one of the walk-in freezers. A mouthful of rotten meat. A big slab of ribs, furred green, hung in front of her on a hook. Bite marks on the ribs. Rye spat half-chewed fat and splintered bone on to the floor. No substitute for fresh sinew, for sinking her teeth into warm flesh.

She turned to leave, but jerked to a stop. Her left hand was frozen to the wall. How long had she stood catatonic? Her clothes were stiff with ice. She tugged her hand away from the metal. Skin tore. No pain. A palm-print glued to the wall.

Rye woke. She found herself jostling with infected passengers. Stench and rot. A dozen monsters pounding at a door, scratching and hammering, trying to reach the meat. Hawaiian shirts and paper garlands. A night of limbo and pina coladas turned to hell.

Fingers raked the hatch metal. Broken nails and streaked blood. The hatch was giving way. It was wedged shut by a barricade the other side of the door. Rye heard furniture start to shift.

Bodies hurled against the door. Chairs and tables began to subside.

Rye kicked legs. She tripped the passengers. She wanted to slow them down. She wished she had her radio. She could warn the Rampart crew of impending attack. They were about to be swamped. Cornered. Killed in their beds.

The door gave way and swung open. A collapsing mountain of furniture. Rye stepped back, waiting for grenades to detonate and consume the crowd in brilliant white fire.

Nothing.

Jane and Ghost were waiting on the other side of the door, shotguns raised like a firing squad. Twin muzzle flash. Explosive roar. Scrambled brain matter.

Jane stood hazed in gunsmoke. She slotted fresh shells and racked the slide. Efficient shots, point-blank to the face like a stone-cold killer.

'Hey,' shouted Rye. 'Hey, Jane.'

Jane saw her. No recognition. She raised her shotgun. Rye dived sideways to avoid the blast.

Jane and Ghost re-sealed the door. Rye lay among smouldering, headless bodies and listened as they rebuilt the barricade.

Rye's last moments of full consciousness, the last time she was truly herself, occurred deep in the heart of the ship. She was stumbling down a stairwell. She was not alone. She found herself leading a crowd of passengers in fancy dress.

On her left was a man in a dinner suit and pig mask. Spikes pierced the pig snout. The man could never remove the mask. He would spend the rest of his short life squinting through rubber eye-holes.

On her right was a man in a bunny costume, fur matted with blood.

The stairs led down into dark water. One of the hull plates had popped a seam below the waterline when Hyperion collided with the refinery. The ship was still seaworthy but a couple of mid-section compartments were flooded.

At the bottom of the stairwell, beneath the icy water, was a door that would lead to rooms directly below the officers' quarters. The door wouldn't be wedged shut and it wouldn't be strung with grenades. A blind spot. The Rampart crew wouldn't anticipate anyone would rise out of seawater.

Rye reached the point where water lapped the stairs. She kept walking. Knee-deep, waist-deep, chest-deep, and finally submerged.

Smothering silence. Green, sub-aqueous murk. Rye walked slowly like an astronaut. The cold should have killed her but she could barely feel it. She was breathing water, but it didn't seem to matter.

The bottom of the stairwell. A submerged electric wall lamp, sealed in a glass bubble, still burned bright. A sculpin swam past Rye's face and darted into a floor vent.

She found the hatch. She turned the handles and pulled it open. There must have been a cupboard of bathroom supplies nearby because the water around her was filled by a blizzard of dissolved toilet paper.

Rye walked through the doorway. She looked over her shoulder. The grotesque animal forms of her companions kept pace behind her. A clown with one arm. A ballet dancer, tights lumped and stretched by tumorous growth.

More stairs. Rye climbed upward, water cascading from her clothes as she broke the surface. Her companions followed, shaking water from their animal heads, stumbling under the weight of their sodden costumes.

Her thoughts cleared for a moment and she realised the terrible carnage she was about to unleash. The refinery crew were two decks above them, eating dinner, convinced they were safe behind barricades.

Rye reached in her pocket for the grenade, then remembered she had given it away. Maybe she should trigger the sprinkler system and raise the alarm. But a moment later she could no longer remember who she was, and why she was standing in a stairwell jostled by monsters in tattered carnival costume. She joined the herd and shambled up the stairs alongside her nightmare companions towards the Rampart crew, ready to rip and tear.