‘Yeah. Save your own ass. After all, everyone has a talent.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Nikki. ‘What’s your name?’
No reply.
‘Alan? Is that you?’
Nikki kicked at the door. Four blows then the lock splintered. The cubicle was empty.
‘Have I gone insane?’ asked Nikki, interrogating her reflection. ‘Is that the deal?’
‘Let’s just say,’ said her dead boyfriend’s voice,’ that your perceptions have undergone a radical adaptation.’
Nikki enjoyed VIP luxury. She sat in a club seat. A porthole gave her a view of open sea. She wrapped herself in airline blankets and reclined. She clamped in-flight headphones to warm her ears.
‘This place is a welcome piece of luck,’ she murmured as she snuggled down to sleep.
‘Yeah,’ said Alan. ‘ God crashed this plane just for you.’
She pulled a TV from a slot in the arm of the chair. A little screen on an armature. She jacked her headphones and selected Brief Encounter from the menu. She dozed as the movie played.
‘You realise that screen is completely blank,’ said Alan. ‘The plane is dead. Nothing works’
‘But I like the movie.’
‘Jesus. It’s like that joke. My wife thinks she’s a chicken. I’d take her to the doctor, but we need the eggs’
‘That’s fucking ironic. My dead boyfriend posing as the voice of sanity.’
‘You think you left me behind? You’re stuck with me as long as you live. Bonnie and Clyde. Sonny and Cher. I’ll look after you, until the end of your days’
‘Could you get me back to Rampart?’ asked Nikki. ‘Could you master the boat? The ropes, the sail? If I wanted to get back, could you show me the way?’
‘I can take you anywhere you need to go, Nikki.’
She sat cross-legged on the wing of the jet and ate crackers.
She saw a red glow on the skyline, a fine aurora. It was the wrong time of day, the wrong point of the compass for sunset.
They must have nuked the cities. Ahead of her, beyond the southern horizon, Europe was burning.
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. 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.
