Gravewalkers: Dying Time (15 page)

Fat Jack decreed, “I hereby
make you and Carmen official members of the Forager community then.
If I’m the first Grand Marshal as you say, and this paper says
you’re a marshal, that means you two belong with us.”

“
It would be an honor,”
Critias thanked him. “I told you all this because I want your help
in keeping Carmen safe from any mistreatment.”

“
You did the right thing,”
Fat Jack told him. “You came here to help us, not seeking our help.
I’ll make sure that any rumors about her unusual gifts die quickly.
As a member of my teams, you can be sure that the rest of my people
will be on her side and everyone else will know to show her proper
respect.”

“
If you can’t assemble
that man,” George wondered, “who can?”

“
I leave those kinds of
things for Carmen to deal with. She may not be a science model, but
she is still much smarter than me.”

They returned to the dinner
table in time to eat and Carmen joined them in a cheerful mood
since she enjoyed the whole experience immensely. The geese did not
go far as portions among so many, but it was a delicious treat all
the same. The cook also served soup and cornbread with some hard
candy for dessert. Carmen ate a little mostly for appearances
because of the extreme efficiency of her metabolic processes, but
also because her neorganic systems did at times need to make use of
it, especially for self-repair.

At the end of the meal, Fat
Jack and other officers passed a smoldering cigar and drank fine
bourbon that George had gotten from a mansion he had plundered.
When Fat Jack was at the peak of his contentment, he called out a
toast, “Here is to King Louie and his Foragers!” In response,
everyone cheered and raised their cups to the King.

As the evening ended,
George showed Critias a room where he and Carmen could spend the
night. “We’ll be leaving for the city in the morning,” he told them
before he departed.

Once they were alone,
Critias locked the door as he prepared for bed. After he thought
about it for a moment, he disclosed to Carmen, “I told Fat Jack and
George who we really are, just so you know.”

As she peeled off her body
suit, she asked, “Why did you do that? Are you angry with me
because of what I said in the shower? I didn’t mean to hurt your
feelings, but that is the correct meaning of the word, as I
understand it. I know it’s supposed to be a bad thing for you to
force yourself upon a real person like that, but I’m not a real
person and I learned to enjoy being intimately close to you. Being
under you makes me feel like I’m something very special. You are
the greatest person I have ever known. Being special to you is the
greatest feeling there could ever be.”

Even though she tried to be
helpful, her words were painful for him to hear. Critias spoke
gently, “I actually am the only person you have ever known. You are
very special to me and you always were. My telling them has
absolutely nothing to do with what you said in the shower. The real
meaning of the word rape generally implies an act of savage cruelty
and hateful violence, where as I only wanted to make love to you,
never to hurt you. I didn’t understand that your reactions were not
your own. You’re someone of great value to me, Carmen, not
something. If I had known the truth at the time, I would never have
done anything to you without first having your genuine
permission.”

Carmen listened to him
closely; she understood violence and hostile aggression very well,
but her designers had purposefully left her ignorant of the moral
implication of being slaved to a human master. Her final
understanding was that so long as he greatly enjoyed himself
sexually it was an expression of love. For rape to be an improper
act, he would have been intent on inflicting pain and emotional
injury on her without actually taking sexual pleasure at all from a
simulated act of intercourse. With that out of the way, she asked,
“Then what did I do wrong? Is it when I played the bouncing ball
game with the others?” That thought disenchanted her happy memory
of the fun she had. “I tried not to display too much of my
abilities.”

“
It has nothing to do with
anything you have done,” he reassured her patiently.

Carmen considered that then
challenged, “I don’t believe you. If it wasn’t the game then it has
to do with what Penny said about me, that I was suspiciously
unnatural. She thought I might even be a ghoul, if I read her
correctly.”

“
Yes,” he admitted,
“that’s partly why they were curious about you, but no more so than
they were about our weapons or my mechsuit. King Louie will find
out anyway when he sees the new android, right? Fat Jack and George
are just a couple steps under him, so King Louie would probably
have told them anyway, Jack for certain.”

“
Then why did you tell
them now? I don’t want them to think of me as a piece of your
equipment. I want to be your lover, not your
technology.”

He tried to explain,
“That’s why I told them the truth. Fat Jack can tell the others to
back off if any of them get any stupid ideas. Without Jack’s help,
I would have to kill some of them for mistreating you and then
where would we be? No one, not even King Louie is going to treat
you as anything less than what you are.”

She frowned, “An expensive
android?”

He valued her far more than
that, “You’re the most important thing in my life and in this whole
ghoul-infested world so I told them for my sake. I want you to have
the freedom to be yourself without anyone putting me in a position
that I have to blow their head off.”

She found his words
romantic, “You would do that for me?”

“
Not just for you,” he
disagreed with the way she phrased it. “I did it for me too, to
avoid me having to shoot someone. They’ll respect you for being as
smart, strong, and beautiful as you are or they can just get the
hell out of our way. You’re no damn infected and you’re nothing
like one, so they need to get that into their heads here and now so
that it never comes up again.”

Their room had four single
beds. Critias took two sets of bedding from a chifforobe. He put
one on a bed for Carmen as he told her, “When you recharge
yourself, I’d prefer you didn’t do it sitting on the floor. It
would make me ashamed to see you sitting down there like a
pet.”

The thoughtful sentiment
pleased her, “Do you want to charge your mechsuit too? It’s still
in the front room. I could go get it for you.”

“
No, that won’t be
necessary,” he said as he climbed into bed. “It gets plenty of
charge rubbing against me when I wear it.”

Carmen could read his
subtle mannerisms even when Critias thought he concealed them from
her. She could tell he wanted her to comfort him so that he could
feel they had made up over a division that was only in his
imagination. Her foolish choice of words had deeply wounded his
prideful sense of honor and made him unwilling to ask for her
companionship so she crawled into his bed to be with him
anyway.

Critias had honestly not
expected her company, “Aren’t you going to recharge
yourself?”

She planted small kisses on
his chest, “Your mechsuit is made of the same materials as my body.
I want to get plenty of charge rubbing against you as you wear
me.”

Chapter 6: Great
Expectations

The morning activity at
Foragers’ Castle was strict on discipline and rigorous in effort as
Fat Jack commanded all the crews for the departure back to the
King’s residential quarter. They loaded all the cargo from their
foraging venture into the tractor-trailer truck at the south-end of
the train tunnel garage. Their organized haste wasn’t military
because the participants were proudly willing, like a tribe, like
family, a gemeinschaft.

The rail tunnel’s southern
gate had complex mechanized movement that allowed it to close
itself after the giant truck went out onto the streets beyond the
defensive barriers. The portal had an apparatus of pumps and fuel
tanks for powering an array of flamethrowers. The fire drove
infected away from the gateway so that the Foragers could open the
door in relative safety.

Thousands of man-hours and
great care had gone into perfecting their largest transport truck.
Its front ram, armor, and maintenance were a shining example of
Forager ingenuity and perfectionism. The front plow could remove
cars, snow, or infected bodies with equal proficiency; its
hydraulics adjusted the height and angle for any purpose at hand.
Their vehicle sported its own flamethrowers to force the ghouls
away from any side or even off the top. Numerous gun ports allowed
riflemen to shoot from the safety of the armored container should
they have the need. The Foragers had named their truck Big Joe in
conversation, but the name they had painted on the sides was the
‘HMS Conrad’ as if it was some sort of ocean-going ship.

Fat Jack had Critias and
Carmen stay with him as he supervised everything. He wanted them to
have the best possible platform for understanding all the crews
that he required and to see what it was those diligent teams were
responsible for accomplishing.

Carmen admired Big Joe and
it made her thoughtful. “I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my
breast,” she quoted, “the smell of the damp earth, the unseen
presence of the victorious corruption, the darkness of an
impenetrable night.”

Her quotation of the
novelist they had named Big Joe after impressed Fat Jack. “Heart of
Darkness,” he knew it himself, “but I do believe it first came
about as a tribute to our Lord Jim; that’s King Louie’s given name.
At the time, none of us had read the book, so we didn’t realize the
title carried some questionable baggage.” That thought made him
chuckle, “I suspect most no one has read it since either. Now that
I have listened to you, I know we made the right choice. I like
yours better.” Fat Jack inhaled deeply as he remembered his
collective experiences that involved the legions of victorious
damned that controlled the city, a city that men only traveled
through as a matter of daring taken at their own peril.

Critias asked Jack, “What
did you do before all this?”

“
I ran my own construction
company, a wealthy man living the good life,” he patted his
diminished belly. “In college I was going to be an electrical
engineer, but when my father died, I dropped out to run the family
business.” Jack questioned Carmen on her knowledge, “How many books
do you know?”

She replied, “If I take
some liberty with your meaning of books, I have only about thirty
million written documents in my non-neorganic parallel memory core.
They are from four-hundred and seventy languages, but the master
resource previously translated them all into prevalent living
languages, so I don’t actually read or speak all of
those.”

Jack considered that, “So
what makes the other man you have to assemble so smart compared to
you?”

Carmen thought about a
simple answer, “Aside from the additional four-hundred-million
documents, he is far superior to me in applying that knowledge in
ways you would find beneficial, especially when that means
inventing things that never existed before. My ingenuity is limited
to terminating hostiles and being charming.” She gave Critias a
wink in reference to their escapades when he recharged her
electrocells while she made love to him the night
before.

“
Alright you two,” Fat
Jack doused their amour. “Mount up. We’re going home.”

A hanging counterweight of
cement controlled the flamethrowers and operated the gate all
according to a preset timing. After all the crews were in the back
of the truck, Fat Jack pulled a lever to remove the safety locks on
the gate then he took his place in the passenger seat of the
truck’s cab. He pressed the button on a handheld device he carried
to start the exit procedure.

Jets of flame would have
enveloped any infected loitering in the exit passage and set them
to flight. No ghouls were present on the occasion, but they burned
the exit passage anyway as a matter of procedure since they were
unwilling to risk the consequences of any overlooked
trespasser.

The gate swung upward and
then George’s driver Andy who was at the wheel expertly drove them
out backwards with his plow blade set down low to mangle any ghouls
that might manage to get underneath the truck and between the
crushing wheels. Andy could drive backwards better than most people
could going forward. He used both his side mirrors and some
rearview cameras to watch for any infected to either side and
should he see one, he would maneuver to intercept the creature with
his front blade, sometimes scraping the wall to make certain that
none of the ghouls got past him and into the Castle before its gate
closed.

As soon as the truck fully
cleared the gateway, the heavy door fell back into place with an
audible bang of spring-loaded locks. The clockwork machine finally
rehoisted the counterweight back to its high position to await a
signal from Jack’s wireless garage-door-opener that would let them
back in when they returned.

The railway valley outside
the gate was identical to the honeysuckle-encased Vineyard section
of rail north of the garage except that southern valley didn’t have
any protective cage and was open to the sky. Instead of a welded
barrier, dense woods flanked the sides of the southern valley. The
undergrowth was a thickly entangled thorny bramble that the
Foragers had specifically nurtured to form an African-style bulma
against the passage of infected.