Dead Boys (15 page)

“What oath wouldst thou have?”

“If I reunite you with the missing head of our Otho,” said Elspeth, “you’ll call me sir from that moment on.”

“But find him, and I’ll call thee goddess!”

“Sir will do.”

“Then I oath it, but find him quickly, dear Elspeth!”

“And Ox,” she said, “another oath: if I find folk who swear to bring Otho’s bits to the stitchery, you’ll leave off yowling and follow where I lead.”

“But Elspeth, there’s nobody here but thee and me and Otho-bits.”

“Then you lose nothing by the promise, do you?”

“Truish!” said Oxnard. “I oath it.”

“But hark!” cried Elspeth. “Is that the mewling of Otho I hear? It is!”

“It is!” cried Oxnard, spotting the dusty head past her outstretched finger, as silent as the rock it resembled.

“But soft!” said Elspeth, restraining Oxnard’s bulk with one withered arm. “Who’s that, behind the boulder? Why, a band of fearful recruits, eager to do our bidding or be minced!”

Staggering around the boulder, Elspeth and Oxnard confronted Jacob’s little band, holding their weapons at head-level.

While Remington and the headless threw their hands to the sky, Leopold and Jacob exchanged a curious glance, for the sword-shaped implements wielded by their assailants were cut from aluminum siding, their hilts wrapped in electrical tape.

“You overheard our negotiations,” said Elspeth.

“We did,” said Jacob.

“Then you agree to carry Otho to the stitchery?”

“In exchange for armaments from your wagon,” said Leopold, “and the cart to carry them in.”

“In exchange for your unsevered spines!” said Elspeth. “Resist, and Oxnard will mash you to Plains-paste.”

“Leopold,” said Jacob slowly, “don’t you wonder what would happen if, on the way to the stitchery, we were attacked by a second band as fearsome as this one?”

“Dear me!” cried Leopold. “Then Otho would be scattered to the winds for sport!”

“And we could hardly defend him with our arms full of his constituent parts.”

“I dare say we might lose a chunk or two.”

“Poor Otho,” said Remington, his hands still in the air.

“O, do as they demark, Elspeth, sir!” said Oxnard. “O, thou must give them mashers and the wheely-gig, for to protect our dear Otho-man!”

“Very well,” said Elspeth, irritated at this unexpected deviation. “Leave Otho in the cart, and bring them three bashing-sticks from the chariot, Oxnard.”

“But there are five of us,” said Remington, at which Elspeth laughed uproariously.

“Oxnard, hark!” she cried, pointing at the headless. “These feeble-minded recruits would have us arm their meat-shields!”

“Oh, ho!” said Oxnard, bringing a pool cue, a ski pole, and a slat from a picket fence, all worse for the wear, and tossing them at Leopold’s feet.

“A free lesson in tactics before we depart,” said Elspeth, picking up the severed head of Otho and heaving it into the shopping cart. “This is the bit that does the seeing on a corpse. Lose yours, and you’ll have a hard time swinging those bashers!”

As Oxnard rolled the cart before them, Elspeth drew up to her full height and shook her imitation sword at Jacob. “Swear on your posts in the Ultimate Army that you will bring Otho safely to the stitchery three miles hence, along the curve of the Rim.”

“I swear it,” said Jacob.

“So be it. Oxnard, hie! We make for the Armory before the choicest blades are sold!”

“Fare thee well, brave Otho-bits!” said Oxnard. “Mayst thou tower and glower again, and be the last to fall beneath my vorpal blade!” He lumbered off behind his new general, pulling their little wagon behind him.

“If this is the caliber of corpse we have to contend with,” said Leopold, “we’ll do more than arrive safely at the other end of the Plains: we’ll be its conquerors.”

“The individual warriors aren’t the problem,” said Etienne, “it’s their numbers. You can outwit a warrior, even a platoon, but what the Plainsmen call the scrimmage defies strategy.”

“There’s hope, in any case,” said Jacob. “Now let’s honor our agreement. I confess, I’m curious to inspect this stitchery.”

Though Elspeth had claimed the establishment was three miles away, the company trudged ahead with no idea how much ground they’d covered. If distance had lost much of its meaning, the passage of time was so effaced that Jacob found himself missing Dead City’s bells. Time and space seemed to be slipping away from him, and he found himself wondering, childishly, if they’d ever arrive.

Despite the gusts of dusty wind that overtook the Rim from time to time, the air slowly cleared, and in time a ragged construction appeared in the distance. Two long, flexible poles had been bent over each other and buried in the ground, forming a large tent enclosed by an unraveling tarpaulin, its sides marked by fat-limbed crosses daubed in flaking mud. A ring of crates surrounded the tent, stuffed with wire and scrap metal, encircled by a defensive perimeter of sharpened poles and barbed wire fencing that was currently being deconstructed by two spectacularly damaged corpses. The pair turned toward the rattle of Otho’s cart, a length of barbed wire suspended between them as they considered the newcomers.

He was a lean, naked man with a striking, two-toned corpse. His back, sides, and limbs were a rich mahogany color that indicated a natural Plains preservation, while the entire core of his body was a bombed-out black, as if he’d died by throwing himself onto a live grenade. The destruction stretched from his empty pelvis, through his charred ribs, and into the upper reaches of his face, where his jaws, teeth, and nose had been blown clean off, leaving two piercing brown eyes and a pair of bushy brows below a curly head of hair.

His eyes, once they’d determined the newcomers to be customers, returned to his gloved hands, which swiftly drew a loop of barbed wire from the long line his assistant was feeding him from beneath.

The woman, who stood a full three feet shorter, never took her eyes off the company and could be heard muttering her appraisal of their worth in an unfamiliar dialect, slapping the ground with one of her sturdy work gloves for emphasis. She was so low to the ground that this gesture required no amendment to her posture, for she had been chopped in two just below her breast and rested now on the stump of her torso, leaving her hands free to work.

Once she’d fed the last loop of barbed wire to her employer, she rose onto her palms and padded to the front of the encampment on her hands. Behind her, the two-toned man stowed the wire in an open barrel and withdrew into the tent. As the company approached, the half-woman barked out greetings in a number of languages until she found one that stuck.

“All right, fellas,” she said as they drew closer, inspecting them through a ferrety face that was, like the rest of her, riddled with evidence of post-mortem battles. “I’m the RN, and that there’s the Medic. Alls we need to know is if you got trade.” Her dusty hair was close-cropped to deny grasping hands any purchase, and her flesh clung tightly to what remained of her skeleton. “If you got trade, we can talk about your buddy in the bucket seat. No trade, you got to turn it around. No offense, but we’re running a business here.”

She plopped herself onto her stump before the shopping cart and stopped it with her hands, climbing onto its wire basket and peering down at unlucky Otho. “Your buddy’s a real jigsaw job, too, and I can tell you right off that he’s got pieces missing, which costs extra, on account of the replacements.”

“You use parts from other corpses?” said Remington.

The RN squinted at him. “How would that work? No offense, kid. But how’s somebody else’s leg going to know which way you’re walking? We use prostheses: metal, wood, plastic, rubber. So, you got trade, right?”

“To be perfectly honest,” said Jacob, “we don’t even know this man.”

“Huh. So what did you bring him in for?”

“We traded the favor for these weapons, such as they are.”

The RN slapped the side of the shopping cart. “Okay, so whose is the shopping cart, yours or the jigsaw’s?”

“They were a package deal.”

“Good enough. You give us the bucket, the doc fixes up your buddy, everybody wins.” She loped on her palms toward the front of the tent. “Roll him in!”

While the Medic’s tent, on the face of it, had nothing in common with Jacob’s flat, its layout, arranged around the professional necessities of the Medic’s trade, felt instantly familiar to him. The tools, laid out on barrels and rough wooden shelves, illustrated the ingenious solutions that the Medic had found to those problems of reconstruction particular to the Plains of War, necessitating an approach to preservation unknown in Dead City. As a fellow tradesman, Jacob felt such excitement that he could hardly keep still.

In the midst of the cramped tent was an improvised table made of a barn door and two sawhorses, beside which stood the Medic. His hands, now gloveless, were so perfectly skeletal that it was clear their bones had been intentionally excavated by the Medic himself. With these brilliant appendages, he motioned for the shopping cart to be drawn up beside the table, then withdrew its contents one segment at a time.

Whether mute out of preference or because of his injuries, the Medic made himself understood solely through gestures. The RN occasionally interpreted them for Jacob’s benefit, for it was clear that this newcomer had a genuine fascination with their work.

Leopold and Remington inspected the rest of the tent, regarding with curiosity a large metal trunk at the back, whose open lid revealed that its latch only locked from within. “Is this a refuge from the Plainsmen?” said Leopold.

The RN, elevated on a metal step-stool, looked over at the trunk and nodded. “That’s our last resort,” she said. “The scrimmage usually sticks to the middle of the Plains, but every once in a while it hits the Rim. The fence keeps them from pushing in here by accident, but if they want to loot, they’re going to find a way inside. Most of them leave us alone—I mean, you never know when you’re going to need us, right? But we have to have somewhere to go. Handy, since I can’t fight and move at the same time, and the boss doesn’t have the stomach for violence.”

The Medic clacked his fingers to draw her attention, then made a knocking motion with his hand, at which the RN climbed off the stool and pulled a rubber mallet from a shelf. She held it in her teeth while she crossed the floor, then tossed it into his hands with a swing of her neck.

He gripped the tool and lifted Otho’s head with one hand, striking it sharply in the forehead with the mallet. The blow produced a sound like a coconut hitting concrete, and a startling side effect: every segment of Otho’s brick-colored body twitched at once, as if the Medic had struck the table-top instead of his patient’s skull. The Medic then passed the mallet back, crossed his arms, and stared down at the table with a chess-master’s intensity.

“Why’d he hit him?” said Remington.

“Checking for separation of consciousness,” said the RN.

“Separation of consciousness,” murmured Jacob as the Medic began fitting the parts of Otho’s human jigsaw together with startling speed.

“Sure,” said the RN. “You get diced up, you go into shock. It’s like quickening all over again. For a while you’re completely blacked out, and we can stitch you up no problem. But after that window closes, all the hacked-up parts give up. They can’t reconnect, so they stop trying and start moving for themselves. Nothing we can do to put them back together again after that.”

“Like those piles of parts outside,” said Remington. “They all think they’re different people.”

“And the mallet?” said Jacob.

“A quickened corpse has one reflex: not in the nerves, but in the senses. You can hamstring a guy on the Plains without him noticing, if you’re quick enough, but hit him in the shinbone, and he twitches. The vibration makes him jump, even if he’s in hack-shock. So if your left leg is cut off, and it doesn’t jump when the rest of you does, then we know it’s too far gone. Might as well be a stranger’s leg then.”

“But all of Otho’s pieces jumped, so he’s going to be all right,” said Remington.

“Well,” said the RN.

The Medic jabbed a white finger at the problem areas of Otho’s puzzle: though the cart was empty, his left bicep and right shin were missing.

“We’ve got some work to do.”

While the RN dug through crates and barrels to find an appropriate substitute for Otho’s lower right leg (whose foot she tossed unceremoniously through the front flap of the tent), the Medic assembled his tools: the home-made, double-barbed hooks that were inserted around the bone, anchoring flesh to flesh; the thick fabric sewn into either side of a severance like a grafted bandage; and an assortment of rock-sharpened, improvised blades and picks.

The RN offered up her prosthesis, a rusty length of pipe jammed into a flat rubber rectangle, and hustled everyone out of the tent while the Medic operated, leaving Jacob and Etienne behind after a sharp nod from her employer.

Jacob, humbled by the gesture, opened his knapsack, withdrew his canister of needles and proffered one to his host. The Medic pinched the needle between the white tips of his thumb and forefinger, his eyes showing wonder.

He touched his own chest, cocking his head to one side.

Jacob bowed his head.

The Medic nodded, emitting a long, hushed rattle of thanks. With a series of precise, eloquent gestures, he invited Jacob to lay out the rest of his tools on the table, assuring him of their safety.

Jacob, who had not until that moment noticed that he had missed his practice, accepted the needle, now threaded with fishing line, and laid down his first stitch.

When Otho at last awoke, it was Etienne’s grizzled head he saw first, hanging from Jacob’s chest a few inches away. “Don’t look down,” said Etienne, a warning the warrior promptly ignored.

“Yeargh!” cried Otho as he surveyed the ruin of his once-mighty body, which, though its basic integrity was assured, was still being stitched up by the hands of his two surgeons. “Yeargh!” he shouted at his left arm, which now proceeded directly from shoulder to elbow, resulting in an ineffectual limb that would never again swing a warhammer (though it did prove useful in knocking half of Jacob’s tools to the ground, causing the preservationist to curse him in a language he didn’t speak); he shouted it again at his right leg, which was nothing more than a length of pipe jammed into the stump below his knee, so snug against the bone that it would never come off without a hacksaw.