A World of Ash: The Territory 3 (20 page)

Once again Lynn looked at Hank with a confusing mix of admiration and hostility. Despite being responsible for orchestrating the vengeful destruction of the Wall around Alice, the only thing that might have afforded them all safety against the horde, she couldn’t deny that his ability to bring together the people of the slums was an incredible thing to behold. Even Knox, who had been even more convinced than Lynn that the slums were just a lawless collection of people without any sort of organization, had said he thought the government of the Central Territory could learn a thing or two from Hank Barton.

“What you should do,” Lynn had said to the elderly Chief Minister, “is make him part of the government. The people out here should have someone representing them, don’t you think?”

Knox had opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, but in the end he had simply nodded. “That might be a wise idea, Lynnette. If there’s anything left to govern.”

Through two days and nights the people of the slums worked to tear down their homes and businesses. Over time more and more people became involved until even four-year-olds were passing thin planks of wood to their older siblings who would carry them to the new wall.

The men and women there worked in long shifts to put the freshly liberated wood and metal together in the strongest way they could. Lynn wished Squid was overseeing this because she knew nothing about building a strong structure. Squid seemed to have an intuitive understanding of that sort of thing. The best Lynn could do was tell them to make it high and make it strong. Luckily there were builders of varying sorts in the slums and they took the lead, directing the workers to erect a long triangular frame of wood to support the vertical section of fence, which was built up from layer upon layer of wood and plastic and corrugated iron and anything else people could stack against it. With the limited time they had they focused on the front of the fence, preparing the long section of the barrier that faced out into the open desert and would take the brunt of the attack by the snarling, screeching, moaning creatures. Lynn ensured they built the sides of the fence all the way back to the Wall in at least a cursory attempt to enclose themselves. The last thing she wanted was to face the same fate as the Diggers and be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the ghouls.

Lynn slept in short bursts, as everyone did over those two days, aware that with every passing minute the army of monsters drew nearer. She watched as the buildings of the slums were torn down and their component pieces carried to the fence. Under the guidance of Hank the people of the slums moved inside their haphazard fence as the last sheets of iron and random materials were fixed against the last open space in the wooden frame.

“I have to admit,” Hank said as they stood watching the final stages of construction, “I feel a little like we’ve just sealed ourselves inside our own coffin.”

Lynn knew what he meant. She too felt like they were animals sealed in a pen. She wouldn’t admit it though.

“You’re the only one here who’s fought the horde before,” Hank said, motioning to their fence. “Will it hold against them?”

Lynn looked at the fence. “It won’t hold for long,” she admitted. “We just need to hope it holds long enough.”

And on the morning of the third day the ghouls arrived.

Lynn stood with Knox Soilwork on one of the rickety wooden towers that had been built just inside the fence, tall enough that they could see over. She looked across at the other towers. Men and women Hank had selected were standing watch as well, observing the approaching horde. Even from here Lynn could see the whites of their eyeballs as their eyes grew wide. One of the watchers, a tall man, leaned over the side of the tower and vomited.

Lynn turned back to face the horde. She could see them stumbling forward, stuttering as they came, clambering over or shuffling around the remnants of the slums. The scattered debris would slow them down, but they would be here soon enough. A number of small dirigibles, those of the boundary riders, floated in the air. The whole thing looked larger than she remembered, but maybe she’d just forgotten how many there really were.

“Hello again,” she whispered, fear flaring deep inside her, but she managed to keep it contained. Knox looked at her but said nothing. He had been quiet as they watched the ghouls approach. Lynn didn’t know whether his silence was from fear or something else.

The horde drew ceaselessly and inevitably closer. When they were maybe half a mile away the ghouls’ speed began to increase. Their heads began flicking from side to side, faster and faster. Their legs jerked back and forward in an ever-increasing stagger. They had caught the scent of moisture, so much moisture, more than they ever would have sensed before, and it appeared to have driven them into a maddened loping motion.

Shouts went up from those in the towers, calling out for the people of the slums to prepare themselves. They stood a short distance back from the fence, milling around in loose rank and file and gripping whatever weapons they had. They held chipped swords, long kitchen knives, machetes for cutting plants, rusty hatchets and axes, clubs wrapped in barbed wire, even pieces of their dismantled homes. They had discarded their rifles. Lynn had explained that they would be useless in the close-quarters fighting that would come when the ghouls inevitably breached the fence. Lynn had told them to aim for the neck. They had no fire, no artillery, no burning pitch they could drop from above. They would need to take off the heads.

The men and women who were the best fighters, or at least those most willing to fight, stood near the front. The rest of the slum-dwellers and those who had come in from the outer Territory stood behind them, an army stretching back, thousands of them, babies held swaddled in their mothers’ arms, the children even holding pocket knives or shards of metal in their small hands. There was no one who wouldn’t be a fighter today. It gave Lynn pause to think that some of those children were only a few years younger than herself. She had almost forgotten that.

As the ghouls charged in their clockwork way, Lynn caught sight of a large dirigible emerging from the cluster of smaller boundary rider airships that hovered over the horde. The airship was too distant to make out any details but Lynn felt her insides flutter and her heart begin to race. Could it be? She knew there were no other transport dirigibles flying to and from Alice, especially not now that the horde was bearing down on them. Who else would be flying in just as the city was about to be besieged by tens of thousands of dry and dusty ghouls? It could only be Squid and Nim. It had to be them.

The large dirigible was still much further away than the horde. They would need to survive against the ghouls for at least an hour, maybe more. She hoped the fence would hold for most of that time but she had no idea whether it actually would or whether it would collapse immediately under the crushing press of the approaching monsters.

The armed residents of the slums shuffled in nervous anticipation below. Unlike those in the towers they couldn’t see how far away the ghouls were, or rather, how close. They approached like the dust storm that Lynn, Squid, Nim, Mr. Stix, and Mr. Stownes had been caught in, a roiling mass of husks, red dust from the ground and gray dust from their bodies filling the air behind them. Some were collapsing as if exhausted, though Lynn knew that wasn’t the case; they never tired. After so long in the desert many of the creatures were withered and dry, their skin stretched taut over their brittle bones. Perhaps those that collapsed had just become so parched that their bones had finally given out under their increased pace. What did it matter if a few fell, though? Others immediately took their place. Nothing would stop the storm of ghouls, nothing.

Just as some stumbled and fell other ghouls were breaking free of the others, the faster ones, perhaps the most recently fed, or the most recently human. They came stuttering through the immense pack, bursting into open space like runners trying to reach the line first.

“Here we go!” Lynn cried out. “Get ready!”

Shouts came down from the lookouts in the towers. The tension evaporating off the slums was almost palpable. Lynn took a deep breath, trying to remain as calm as she could, trying to slow the crazed racing of her heart.

“Please hold,” she whispered. “Please hold.”

The first of the ghouls hit the fence with thumps and the rattle of metal. They screeched like swooping hawks. They moaned like creaking timber. They howled like injured dogs. Lynn could hear their jagged fingernails dragging down the pitted surface of old corrugated iron, and it caused her to flinch reflexively. All ghouls seemed to have long fingernails, mostly broken and damaged, as if whenever people turned into ghouls everything stopped growing except their fingernails. Children never grew any taller. Hair never grew any longer. But fingernails continued to slide out in gnarled points.

They scratched and clawed and pulled and tried to climb, and the fence held. But the main body of the horde was still shambling toward them, and it was only moments before they hit. These ghouls, dry and desiccated by the heat of the desert, didn’t strike the fence with the force of those who were fresh, but as always it was the sheer mass of numbers that was terrifying. Even in their decayed state they came down on the fence like the slow-motion cresting of a wave with all the power of an ocean behind it, a wave of open maws, scratching nails, and jerking, reaching limbs climbing over one another in a tumultuous attack. Lynn looked down at the slum-dwellers. She saw them watching the fence, recoiling at the sudden crunches and scrapes, stiffening with the fear and adrenaline that had gripped them all.

The ghouls collapsed mindlessly against the structure. Each one tried to tear through or scale the fence with no thought for the thousands of other twitching dead around them. However, despite being driven by their individual thirst, the consequence was a cooperative push. They stacked against the fence, those ghouls in front crushed against it as those behind them pressed in and began to climb over them. The barrier began to bow inward beneath the press of walking corpses. The wood of the frame groaned. Lynn tore her eyes away from the crush at the fence and looked toward the dirigible in the distance. It was flying fast. How far away was it now? Another fifteen minutes? With a sinking heart Lynn realized the fence wouldn’t hold until it reached them.

In fact it lasted only moments longer. In fairness, the fence had withstood much more than she’d thought it would. Even as the ghouls stumbled over each other and more and more had weighed against it, the fence had stood. The ghouls had begun to spread around the sides of the fence in the last few minutes, but still it had stood. It had held up long enough for the airship to grow larger in the sky, long enough to give them a chance. The people of the slums had done an amazing job. Squid would be impressed. But, in the end, the collapse had always been inevitable.

The rupture occurred around the area where the ghouls had first struck, a short distance to Lynn’s left. The wooden frame gave way with a splintering crack. Once its support was gone the metal and wood of the main fence soon folded over and buckled, leaving a section of fence all but flattened against the red dirt. The ghouls poured in like liquid through a hole. They rolled over each other in a jerking spill, splaying out across the ground. As more of those that were pushing in from behind came clambering over the fallen fence their weight pushed more of the fence over until, like a line of dominos spreading in both directions, the entire fence fell flat. Lynn felt a sense of connection to the fence, a pride, thankful that it had held as long as it could to protect them.

Lynn watched as the ghouls came stuttering toward the slum-dweller army. At their first sight of the horde some of the people at the front turned and tried to flee, but there were so many people behind them they didn’t get far. In the end, those who’d tried to run paid for their mistake. As the ghouls hit the front line, they were among the first to fall, grabbed from behind and dragged to the ground. At least those who’d stood and bravely faced down the coming monsters could swing whatever weapons they held and take some ghouls down before they themselves were overcome.

As the horde pushed forward they passed around the base of the tower on which Lynn and Knox stood. Lynn could feel the jolts in the small structure as ghouls bumped into its wooden legs; some even began trying to climb. Like the fence, the towers had been hastily erected and were not meant for long-term use, and as Lynn watched, she realized they would not be able to withstand the force of the ghouls for long.

It was only a matter of moments. She heard the fracture of one of the wooden legs a bare second before the platform beneath their feet collapsed, and Lynn and Knox fell among a tumble of wood and rubble into the screeching, howling horde below.

Squid and Nim, still standing toward the bow of the airship, watched in horror as the ghouls breached the fence the slum-dwellers had built around themselves. As soon as the first section of fence collapsed Squid knew the rest would be pulled down with it. They should have built it in sections, he thought, so that if one section collapsed the ghouls would have bottle-necked themselves trying to get through and maybe the rest of the fence would have stood a little while longer. But the fence was down now and there was no going back. So, Squid thought, all this had started with a fence falling down and now it looked like it might just end the same way.

The slums were almost unrecognizable. The place had been stripped bare of most of the cluttered collection of buildings that had once filled it, and the people who lived there stood now as an army facing the ghouls. Even from here Squid could see they were nothing like the Diggers had been. They had no armor, no horses, no training for this. Plus, they were the ones being charged upon this time rather than the other way around. It was purely an instinctive fight: this was a battle for survival, not some well-planned military campaign.

Despite seeing it fall Squid knew the fence had been a good idea. It was certainly what he would have done to protect the people outside Alice. It looked like it had been hastily constructed, though, and he knew the design could have been better. He could tell that it would never have lasted long against the ghouls, but then again, with the force of those thousands and thousands of monsters pushing against it nothing built from the scraps of the slums would have held for long. Still, it had bought the slum-dwellers some time. Now they just had to reach them as quickly as they could and release the silver birds they had stored in the hold. They would drop the vaccine down on the crowd like rain, just like the Storm Man in Nim’s stories.

Squid wondered anxiously where Lynn was. He had to hope the High Priestess hadn’t already had her executed. That just couldn’t have happened. After everything they’d been through Squid needed to see his best friend again. He needed to believe they would make it through this and be reunited at the end. As he watched the ghouls stumble over the collapsed metal and wood of the fence he was thankful that if she was a prisoner of the High Priestess then at least she would be locked up somewhere inside the city, and right now the prisons beneath the Supreme Court or the cells in the depths of the cathedral were probably the safest places to be, much safer than the slums, at any rate. No matter how well they fought or how brave they were Squid had no doubt that some of the slum-dwellers, probably many of them, would fall to the tearing, sucking, biting mouths of the ghouls before they arrived with the vaccine. It was inevitable. He felt a desperate impatience. He wished he could save them all, but he just wasn’t going to make it in time.

“There’s a hole in the Wall,” Nim said, pointing ahead at the city. “That’s not supposed to be there, is it?”

“What do you mean?” Squid looked up. He had been so fixated on the slums and the fight that had just begun that he’d missed it. Nim was right: an enormous gouge had been taken out of the Wall. Judging by the scattered stone and blackened crater in the ground it looked like the result of an explosion, not something the ghouls could do. What was going on?

“No,” he said. “That’s not supposed to be like that.”

Unable to make sense of it, Squid turned his gaze back to the battle and noticed something he’d missed before. The ghouls’ impossible motion seemed to be more intense than he’d ever seen it. Even the ghouls they had faced in the Battle of Dust hadn’t seemed this driven, but then, he supposed, the horde could now sense the moisture in not only the people of the slums but all those people in the city of Alice too. This was the beacon that had drawn them across the desert from wherever they had originated. But even if they managed to suck the liquids from every living person left in the Territory, all that they would do was turn the population into more ghouls, more creatures to compete with to find fresh, living bodies to drink from. The ghouls were creatures that would eventually make themselves extinct, but only after destroying every human being first.

Soon the line between the people of the slums and the attacking ghouls had blurred into non-existence. There were still plenty of people standing behind the front lines not yet involved in the fight, and of course the ghouls stretched all but endlessly back out into the desert, but the point at which they’d first met just inside the fence was a mess of fighting and packs of ghouls piling on those that had fallen. There were roars of anger, and battle cries like those unleashed by the Diggers, but Squid could hear screams of pain and panic too. Many of those who hadn’t yet joined the fight were fleeing, or at least trying to flee. Those who stood their ground and fought were swinging their makeshift weapons in wild arcs at the heads of the ghouls. At least they knew to do that.

Then he noticed what was happening to the watchtowers. Several of the flimsy structures had begun to fall, collapsing as the ghouls swarmed around the wooden legs that held them upright. The wooden platforms of the towers, and whoever was standing on them, dropped down into the swarm.

“Come on,” Squid began. “Let’s get ready.”

“Time for the Storm Man to make it rain?” said Nim.

“Exactly.”

Squid and Nim moved back along the deck to where Ernest stood at the wheel.

“We’re almost there,” Squid said. “The ghouls have already reached the slums, though, broken through the fence they built. Can your men help us get the birds ready?”

Ernest nodded. “Aye, lad.” He turned to one of the men of the Reach Border Patrol standing nearby. “Sydney, take over the controls. Keep us going as fast as you can.” The man nodded. “You five,” Ernest shouted across the deck to a group of men watching the battle over the side, “bring the bags of vaccine up from the hold.”

Soon the men of the Border Patrol had lugged the heavy bags of vaccine up the stairs from the hull and onto the main deck, and Squid saw Constance come up after them.

“I’ll help in any way I can,” she said, and Squid felt a rush of love for her. They all began unloading the gleaming silver birds, which shone like hope in the hot Territory sun.

“Group them along the sides,” Squid said. “Each of you take a group and get ready to release them.”

Squid moved along the deck as he spoke, giving everyone instructions and ensuring they were ready. When he was sure they were prepared Squid looked forward, grabbing onto a rope and putting his front foot on the bowsprit as if he were captain of this ship and about to lead it into battle. He supposed, in some ways, he was.

They were almost over the slums now, and Squid could see at a glance that the humans desperately fighting for survival were losing. The front line was being pushed inexorably back as the sheer number of ghouls began to overwhelm the untrained fighters, who simply could not kill enough of the monsters before they inevitably fell.

Squid picked up one of the mechanical birds on top of the nearest pile. Pressing the button on the bottom of its body he heard it whir to life, the wings snapped out, and the head moved from side to side at the neck joint, scanning around it, searching for the people it would spray with its precious contents.

“As soon as we get over the slums I’ll give the order to start dropping the birds,” Squid called out to the others. He looked to Sydney, the man who had taken control of the dirigible. “Once we pass over the slums, keep us going over the rest of the city.”

“You’re going to use the vaccine on them too?” Ernest asked, but he didn’t seem angry, just surprised.

“There’re innocent people in there as well, Ernest. We have to help them too.”

“Aye, lad,” Ernest said, “but I’m thinking more about those who aren’t innocent. That church in there, those terrorists, do you think they deserve the vaccine after everything they’ve done to the world? Everything they’ve done to you and your friends?”

“Dealing judgment and deciding who lives and who dies, who gets the vaccine and who doesn’t, that’s what the Church does. That’s not what I do.”

Ernest paused, but then nodded slowly. “I hope you’re making the right choice.”

“Sometimes I feel like I can’t trust anyone in the world,” Squid said. “But I don’t think that’s the right way to be. I think trusting people is a strength, not a weakness. I trust that there are more innocent people in that city than guilty ones. They will do the right thing in the end.”

“Aye, lad,” Ernest said gravely. “Right you are, then.”

Squid turned back. He bounced his hand, feeling the weight of the mechanical bird. As they finally passed the beginning of the battlefield below, he cocked his arm back and threw. The bird dropped for a brief moment before catching the air with its wings and flying toward the mass of people.

“Now!” he shouted.