Timeshare
by jonny Lupsha
All content in this file © jonny Lupsha and A
Carrier of Fire, 2015 and 2016.
Preamble: 100 Words about Walter Atherton
His elbows resting atop the balustrade, Walter Atherton took
one final bite of the apple and casually tossed it over the edge. When he was a boy he’d watch the apples fall,
bouncing repeatedly against the steep, nearly vertical walls, but by now he’d
lost interest. He could imagine it falling
as he walked away though, down the hide of the great beast atop which they’d
built their city. Eventually it would
slip into the red-orange haze that covered the surfaces of the Earth and come
to rest on her barren soil. We should be somewhere near Chicago, he
thought.
Chapter One: Moscow in the Summer
Sean awoke in lurches from a deep sleep, a sleep
brought on by his share of alcohol – and then some. He was in his cot. The daylight loomed bright outside, but the
bright orange tent that he’d called home these last few weeks on Proteus was so
thick that it was much darker inside. A
sliver of blinding light tore a paper cut gash down the tent flap. The potted plant hanging from one of the tent
poles swayed gently with each of Proteus’s footsteps below him. At its stillest, the plant rested at a slight
angle to the left from where Sean lay. His
head dumbly ached as though the head of a spoon were rubbing somewhere against
the middle of his brain. His mouth was
dry and his tongue a bit swollen; his skin felt sensitive and thin. Gentle pangs of nausea probed at his abdomen
and he was warm to the point of discomfort and slight dizziness.
He had to regroup, to take stock of what he knew
in the moment. Sean knew this feeling
well enough to know he should’ve stopped drinking before he did last
night. He also knew that if he got up
and left his tent, the man who lived next to this rented space would let Sean
help himself to as much water as he could carry from the man’s home
supply. What was his name again? John something? Something Johnson? For the life of him he couldn’t remember the
man’s name, although they’d become acquainted since Sean’s arrival, since Sean
had a silver tongue – he was skilled at making friendly conversation with
people and making them like him.
Finally, he knew he needed more time before dressing himself and making
his way to his temporary neighbor’s house to quench his thirst.
Last night he’d gone out for drinks with some
locals, including the mayor, to celebrate picking up the tourists today. Proteus would shamble into Moscow late in the
morning, close to midday, to make his customary visit to the Moscow
International Business Center. Once
there, he’d stop for exactly one hour
and admire the skyscrapers, which were some of the only man-made structures
tall enough to still be visible over the fog.
Shit, the
homecoming, Sean thought. He
scrambled out of his cot and leaned his head out of the unzipped tent flap,
looking to his right to check the time.
The sunlight in the east blinded him for a moment and he remembered his
hangover just as the throbbing came to his temples. After a moment, his irises adjusted and he
saw that the sun was low enough in the sky that he wasn’t late, but high enough
that he should get moving.
His anxiety vanished. The relief he felt rippled throughout his
body, affecting his hangover in various ways.
The tremendous cessation of pressure in his body gave his skin a nice
chill but caused his shoulders to ache, joining his head in their throbbing. Sean crawled back inside and collapsed onto
his cot for one more moment. He laughed
a bit despite himself.
After dressing, Sean checked his face in the shard
of mirror hanging from the wall of his tent.
He was a little worse for wear but his dirty blonde hair and thin face
were still admirable. He had a few days’
worth of stubble on his cheeks and under his nose and chin, but his high
cheekbones, slender nose and pale blue eyes offset the more ragged elements of his
appearance. He’d turned 30 the day he
arrived on Proteus.
Sean talked his neighbor – whose name was Jeffrey
Johns, as it turned out – into feeding him before he went to the
reception. Sean figured it was enough of
a price to pay to act sober and decent to his unwaveringly pleasant
neighbor. Perhaps he had an easy time of
it because Sean and Jeffrey were cut from the same cloth in regards to their
amiability. Jeffrey wasn’t much to look
at – a plump, middle-aged man with a wide nose and round chin and skin that
shined from a hint of oiliness – but even when he interrupted someone or if he spoke
while eating, Sean found himself looking forward to hearing what the man had to
say. Sean, meanwhile, had always
fascinated people with his anecdotes and jovial nature. He was the type of person you just wanted to
be around.
Sean’s headache had returned with a vengeance from
the seemingly Herculean efforts of dressing himself and walking to Johns’s
house, but now with some vegetables and clean water in his belly, he was
starting to crawl out from under the rock of dehydration. He was better able to take in his
surroundings now than when he had first entered. Johns’s house was the same quaint size and
offered the practicality of all the houses he’d seen on the titans. There was a small kitchen and eating area on
the right when you entered, and past those there was a bedroom on the left and
a living room on the right. The kitchen
was open to the living room and, all in all, the house was less than 1,000
square feet. The walls were white and
the carpet in the living room had seen better days.
While they ate, Sean spoke matter-of-factly about
his uneventful journey to Proteus – leaving his assistant the responsibility of
dropping the tourists off at OKO South Tower several weeks ago while Sean
himself migrated from one walking city to the other to receive them on Proteus
today. The mention of Proteus sparked a
thought in Jeffrey’s mind.
“Are your ankles killing you yet?”
“How’s that?”
“The slope!”
The gears in Sean’s brain were still getting up to speed; it took him a
moment to realize what Jeffrey was talking about despite Jeffrey using his
knife to gesture a diagonal line several times.
Sean watched the knife flick back and forth with bits of food stuck to
it, then it clicked – he was asking Sean if he’d acclimated to the peculiar
angle at which the city sat on Proteus’s back.
Proteus wasn’t quite as tall as Triton, on whom Sean’s hometown was
built, but his front two legs were much longer than the back two. He walked on all fours, so his back sloped
downward from his head to his hindquarters.
When The Founders built the city on Proteus nearly 85 years prior, they
constructed low stilts on which the houses would sit in order to compensate for
the slant. To anyone unaccustomed to
life on Proteus, walking up and down steep hills all day was murder on the
ankles. This disorientation was
furthered by some of the dwellings that were built since mankind moved onto
these beasts. Either laziness or some
sense of pride had overcome the residents and they put together much of the
newer living space flat across Proteus’s back without correctional foundations. Some of the newer buildings were constructed
respective to Proteus’s sloping back instead of to gravity like the older
ones. This led to a hodgepodge of a city
in which some new buildings – Sean’s tent included – sat with one side higher
than the other, their roofs pointing perpendicular to Proteus’s hide. Whenever someone poured a drink in a new
building like this, the liquid tilted towards one edge of the glass more than
the other. Plants hung at angles that
weren’t quite 90 degrees to the floor.
Towards Proteus’s head, the problem got so severe that homeowners had gone
to such measures as sawing off half the length of two table legs and installing
belt buckles in their beds so as not to fall out.
“Oh! Yes,
that was an adjustment. Truth be told,
no offense to your fair city but I’ll be much more comfortable getting back
home to life on a flat plane. I don’t
know that I ever got my ‘sea legs’ out here.”
Sean finished his food and set his fork down on
his plate. Johns swallowed a bite of his
own breakfast and pointed his fork at Sean, wagging it up and down. “You know that reminds me of a story Granddad
used to tell.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.
About The Founders.”
Sean tried to hide his excitement. He never missed an opportunity to hear about
life in the old days, nor about the events surrounding mankind leaving the
surface.
“If you need to leave, though, I don’t mean to
keep you.”
Sean snuck a quick peek outside. It still looked like mid-morning; he had
probably an hour before he had to be at the docks. “I’ve got time.”
Jeffrey continued to eat as he spoke. “I’m sure you’ve heard about how crazy things
were when people first moved up here.
Nobody knew what to do with themselves.
How would we maintain a global government if we had no idea when we’d
meet? Why bother upholding our unique
cultural identities when we only stood over our native homelands for a few
hours at a time, and so rarely during the year?
Sure, back on the surface immigrants from all over the world had brought
their own cultures with them to new lands, but back then there were whole
neighborhoods where one nationality lived.
Some American cities had several square blocks that were called ‘China
Town’ and ‘Little Italy.’ Since we moved
up to the theriopolises, we’ve all been kinda one on top of the other. Anyway, soon enough, these ‘discussions’
about culture and law and order turned into quarrels.”
Sean nodded impatiently. He’d heard all this before from his own
parents and was starting to worry there wouldn’t be anything new in this
tale. But he let Jeffrey continue.
“Now, even besides the grade of the hill, do you
know why it feels funny walking down our streets compared to yours?”
Sean didn’t.
He shook his head no, only realizing then that he’d been meaning to ask
someone about getting his sea legs while he was here. It was something besides the slope, as Johns
had just said. He wished he’d thought of
something to say about it before admitting his ignorance.
“It’s because your body is used to the rhythm of
your own leviathan, Triton, walking in his own way. With those big wide tortoise legs of his, the
motion of your city is different from ours.”
Jeffrey made a spider-like shape with his hands by putting his wrists
together and crooking his fingers out like claws. He then rocked his fingers back and forth, side
to side, mimicking how Triton walked. “Like
this, yeah? Here, Proteus’s large
forelegs also make him walk more on a two-leg rhythm instead of four.” Jeffrey abandoned his Triton imitation and
instead put his first two fingertips on the table and made them walk like a
human. “See? It’s a very different pattern than what
you’re used to. His hind legs don’t
affect his back movement as squarely as Triton’s since they’re shorter and
smaller than his forelegs.
“So keep in mind that back down there, the surface
is completely motionless. The ground is
always flat, and immobile, like when Proteus stops to look at a
skyscraper. And they were used to that
being the norm. When we ascended, it
took some of The Founders weeks before they got used to the ground under their
feet moving. So granddad tells me they
had a town meeting once, at the beginning, and these two officials were arguing
with each other over this or that. Those
boys kept on raising their voices and shouting, and so help me they were
clinging onto tables and benches for dear life while they’re screaming at each
other!” Both men chuckled.
“And what makes it worse,” Johns continued, “eventually
this fight came to blows. These two
old-timers were trying to duke it out, both suffering vertigo and seasickness,
and they’re leaning on furniture to fight!”
Jeffrey laughed harder and harder as he continued. “Finally one of them put his weight into it,
cocked his fist back and leaned into this punch with everything he has.”
“So did he knock the other guy out?”
“He missed him by more than a foot! He lost his balance and fell on the
ground. He ended up throwing up all
night. See, your inner ear has a bit of
fluid in it that’s sensitive to any movement.
Since you were in your mama’s belly, your brain’s gotten used to the
swaying of Triton’s step. So when you
set foot in our city, your inner ear lost its rhythm.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.”
Jeffrey batted his eyebrows up and down once to emphasize his point and
took a sip of his water. Sean kept those
men in his mind, hiding their unease with loud words and bravado even as they
held onto support. It sounded like it
would’ve looked very dramatic. He
finally snapped back to his conversation and realized he had to go. He excused himself, thanked his host for
breakfast, shook his hand and made his way to the docks.
Sean stopped just once while he walked to the
docks. All along Proteus’s back, there
were small man-made outcroppings with balustrades on either side of the city
and he made his way to one of them. He
looked out over the horizon and saw a comfortably familiar sight. It was the same view he’d seen every day of
his life: the horizon split into halves,
with the blue daylight offset by the reddish earth. It was partly cloudy today, but the clouds
were spread out enough that the sun shined brightly despite them. Below the sky, the rust-colored red orange
fog sat mostly still. 82 years prior,
that poisonous fog had driven mankind from living on the surface to living on
the backs of the 13 colossi that emerged along with it from the depths of the
sea. In his youth, Sean had heard hushed
stories about what happened to the humans who didn’t live in a theriopolis like
he did. There were plenty of urban
legends about whole tribes of people living on the dirt. They were child warriors with a life
expectancy of less than 30 years, living in villages inside skyscrapers just
below the 1,000-foot fog ceiling. His
older relatives also talked about other people who lived in underground fallout
shelters, and others still who had tried to develop floating sky cities. There were as many rumors as there were
relatives, it seemed. Since there was no
way to separate the truth from the fiction, these stories were often as
frustrating as they were fascinating.
And although Sean always denied believing in such fairy tales, whenever
he found himself enjoying the view near a city he’d always lean forward a bit
and squint, keeping an eye out along the top of the haze for feral adolescents
carrying babies of their own. He’d never
admit it, but the old stories stuck in his mind. I’m
just looking because I know I won’t see
any people like the ones in the stories, he thought. It’s so
stupid. Sometimes he almost believed
himself.
Sean rejoined the bustling life of Proteus. He passed the septic manager, who stopped at
every house on the way to Proteus’s tail end asking people to add their waste
to his wheelbarrow. When it filled, Sean
knew the man would drive the barrow to the back of the city and heave it over,
then start again from where he’d left off.
You couldn’t pay me enough to be
the shit bucket guy, he thought. Walking
further towards Proteus’s head, he heard the humming of the people who had
already gathered at the harbor. Some of
Proteus’s clever residents had moved their shops there for the day and were already
haggling with customers over trade prices.
A weathered old woman missing several teeth shouted in Thai over the
din, attempting to barter away a piece of curved glass to an Australian man with
a backpack in exchange for some plant seeds.
“ที่จะเริ่มต้นไฟ!” she said. “ที่จะเริ่มต้นไฟ!”
“Yes,
yes, I got it! Thī̀ ca reìm t̂n fị! Missy, I know what the bloody glass is for;
these here are the only goddamn Rockingham cucumber seeds you’re bound to see
in this lifetime – or any other, for that matter. You understand? The last seeds above the surface! If you want them, I’ll need three from
you.” He held up three of his
fingers. “See? Three.”
“ห้า?”
“Yes. S̄ām. Three.”
She held up two fingers.
“No, no, not two,” the Aussie said. “Three.
S̄ām.”
She paused, cursed in Thai and handed over the
pieces of glass. He in turn gave her the
small plastic baggie of seeds and pulled out a pre-rolled cigarette from his
backpack. He stowed two of the curved
glass pieces and held the third up as if inspecting it. The Australian man then looked back at the
cigarette he held in his hand and gently turned the glass until it shined on
one end of the cigarette. Immediately,
the refracted glint of light from the glass began to burn the paper. The man took a drag from the cigarette before
stuffing the third glass into his pocket.
He walked away smoking and the Thai woman shook her head.
“Cheap son of a bitch.”
Other
merchants with an eclectic range of goods lined the street. One family had wooden toys and doll furniture
with a sign out front that said “REAL WOOD BROUGHT FROM SURFACE, HUNG FIVE
YEARS TO DRY OUT FOG.” An entirely
uninteresting-looking man had water filtration systems available. Teens sold pouches of custom-blended herb
cigarettes. Two middle-aged women had
fresh vegetables and pornographic magazines.
Those with customers bartered shrewdly.
Those without eyed passersby hungrily.
Sean moved past all of them and rounded the dusty corner where he
finally arrived at the docks.
It
looked like half the city was at the pier, waiting anxiously to welcome back
the two dozen or so wealthy vacationers.
Sean Bellamy pushed his way through the crowd, trying not to draw
attention to himself while looking for Proteus’s mayor, Bill Pulaski. Finally they spotted each other. Sean made his way to the far back corner of
the crowd where Pulaski stood on a small makeshift stage with his wife. The couple proudly beckoned Sean up to them. Now, standing on a stage with the mayor,
receiving more attention and applause than he’d hoped for, Sean Bellamy
remembered what it took to get to where he was.
Self-sufficiency
had been a central part of titan society since before Sean was born. Most people didn’t mind thinning their own
soup once in a while to help their neighbor if his crops didn’t come in, but
too much dependence on others was taboo as soon as word got out – and with most
people living 80 years in communities with a population as little as 1,000,
word always got out. Like every other
boy and girl growing up, Sean was raised learning to farm crops from hanging
indoor gardens. He could salvage compost
and soil substitute from his family’s garbage and he could run the simple water
filtration system that caught rain from the rooftop and drained to the barrel
on the side of their house. Beyond that,
however, most children showed talents in some trade and worked towards
apprenticeship. Sean didn’t. His natural charm let him slide by for some
time, but eventually it wore out its welcome with his neighbors back on Triton. His father’s disappointment in him weighed on
Sean more heavily as the years passed. Sean’s
mother always said “Something will come along,” but the confidence in her voice
started to fade. Sean took odd jobs to
bring in food and supplies, but his father’s words were never far from his
mind: “You go out and make something of
yourself. Become the best at something –
make yourself indispensable. Not this petty
bullshit you been doing.” He decided the
best way to earn a name for himself would be to solve a problem the community
faced and he wanted to be known as the one who solved it. If it were a big enough problem, god willing
he could use it as the foundation for his career.
Every
few years, in at least one theriopolis, people started to get bored and
restless living in such a confined space.
Sean had read of something similar once: the Hawaiians called it “Island
Fever.” Up on these towns they took to
calling it the Wandering City Blues.
People could walk around town and visit friends, but eventually it
became so much of the same damn thing that people got fed up. On the theriopolis, it led to unrest. The crime rate spiked. There were even suicides, which were shocking
– the culture of the value of human life had shifted dramatically since
Ascension. When Sean was a child, his
father’s father told him that there were once billions of people roaming the surface. Of course, when Sean questioned his mother,
she gently reminded him how prone to exaggeration his grandfather was. Now with the human species down to five
digits, every death weighed solemnly.
However,
despite how important each life seemed – and no matter how much of the world
people saw as their titans roamed its surface – so much of the Earth was
swallowed up under the cover of fog that it often looked the same, mirroring
their lives. Like Alexander of
Macedonia, the human race seemed horrified that there were no more lands to
conquer. So there were sometimes
self-induced fatalities. The fog was so
uniform that many people would visit their local cartographer just to ask where
they were. The cartographer’s office was
a schizophrenic’s dream, full of maps and globes and colored pushpins detailing
the routes of the titans – or, at least, the titans who had steady migration paths. When people got too restless and the city officials noticed, they would
try to arrange a party, event or cultural festival to spice up the quiet lives
of those living on the beast-cities. It’s
why they’d started the street hockey league and the exchange student programs
for the kids and the boxing tournaments for the adults. Then one day a year ago, Sean had an
epiphany.
If people want off of the leviathan so
damn badly, why not let them?
He spent
plenty of time in the cartographer’s office that spring, working with the old
man and his maps. Triton walked 48,057
miles on his unending circuit around the planet, stopping at 50 of the world’s
surface cities that had the highest populations pre-ascension. It took Triton over four months to circle the
Earth.
“So
if we keep a steady course, we’ll pass Moscow once on March 2nd of
next year, then again on July…15th.
Is that right?”
The
old man licked his lips. “Sure, but why
Moscow?”
“Proteus
stops in Moscow. That knuckle-walker loves
skyscrapers and there’s that huge cluster of them downtown at the uh, what’s it
called, Moscow Business Complex?”
“Moscow
International Business Center, sonny.”
“Right! And if you’re really as good as you say you
are at keeping track of the leviathans – “
“Hey,
now; don’t doubt my work for a
second, smartass…”
“…Then
Proteus will stop in Moscow a few weeks behind us. In fact, Proteus will get to Moscow on…” Numbers flew through Sean’s head as he
calculated Proteus’s schedule. Proteus gets home to Dubai on March 31st,
plus 68 days around the world and another 57 to Russia makes “August 3rd
of next year!”
They
double-checked their math, then triple-checked it. Dusting off his childhood sales skills, Sean
drew up a three-week vacation plan and approached the city with it in the
ominous town hall. “It would be like a…”
Sean checked his notes and his next two words came out awkwardly, despite
echoing throughout the room. “…’cruise
ship.’ Have you ever heard of one of
those? Surface-dwellers would get bored
of their own towns and book passage on a boat that would take them around the
oceans just to get away from it all.
Only instead of a motionless city and a trip around the ocean, we’d have
an immobile getaway from a moving city.”
He knew Triton’s mayor had a copy of his notes in front of him – in fact
he’d had his nose buried in them since Sean entered city hall. Sean had learned from school that people tend
to embed information in their brains better if they’re reading and hearing at
the same time, so he maintained his calm and consciously took his time
presenting the idea so as not to skip ahead of the mayor’s busy eyes.
Triton’s
deputy mayor piped up. “’Just to get
away from it all?’ It does have a nice
ring to it.”
The
mayor, Will Staps, nodded in agreement.
“We could really sell this ‘getaway’ idea. People are always excited about new things,
and if it works right we could start booking them regularly. Travel would be a bitch but I think our
citizens would pay for the chance.
“At
the same time, we don’t want to lose any of our population permanently. What with the missing colossi and those
lawless lunatics on Sao, we can’t even put an accurate figure on how many human
beings are left on the theriopolises.
10,000? 20,000? I can promise you it’s not more than that and
we’d hate for Triton to suffer 10 or 20 family bloodlines Mr. Bellamy.”
At
the mention of his name, Sean perked up.
“That’s not a problem sir; they wouldn’t be able to carry enough
resources to develop long-term settlements atop the skyscraper.”
Mayor
Staps thought. “Bellamy, have you worked
out all the kinks in this? Since it’s
your name – and your cut of the profits – at stake here, I’m assuming you have.”
Sean
hadn’t, but this was his only chance.
“Absolutely. I just need to take
one final quick look at OKO South Tower next time we stop in Moscow.”
Silence
hung in the air. It was deafening. Staps finally looked up from Sean’s papers.
“Okay. Let’s give it a try. We have them sign liability waivers in case
of any injuries and we book a vacation.”
Word
escaped Triton’s city hall and buzz generated quickly. In a few months, half of the theriopolises
and all their posh socialites had heard of the idea and were throwing riches at
Triton and Proteus for the chance to be the first vacationers since the
ascension. Amazingly, the faint-hearted
gentlemen and dainty young ladies who won the bids for the trip underwent all the
travel without a hitch. Over the next
several months, these travelers spent considerable time working their way from
the other leviathans – including Proteus, Galatea and Naiad – to Triton, where
Sean had hired an assistant to provide them with their packs. Each pack held three weeks’ food, several
gallons of water and a sleeping bag scavenged from the surface years
before.
And
today was the big day – August 3rd. Sean Bellamy waited shoulder-to-shoulder with
Mayor Pulaski of Proteus to welcome the first post-ascension vacationers back
from their trip. Sean figured there was
more glory waiting for him in the pickup than the drop-off, so he trusted his
assistant, a young Triton resident by the name of Alan Vaughn, to get the
vacationers onto Moscow’s skyscraper by himself while Sean left for Proteus
well in advance. Now, waiting at the
docks for Proteus to lumber up to the Moscow International Business Center just
20 days after the tourists landed, Sean was brimming with excitement and pride
in his work. He’d had a brilliant idea
that not only helped save the theriopolises from another bout of Island Fever
but could incorporate a whole new branch of peoples’ lifestyles.
From
the lookout tower behind them, they heard a young boy shout “Moscow dead
ahead!” The excitement grew to a fever
pitch. Musicians banged on drums that
sounded throughout the late morning sky.
Children chased each other in games of Tag through the crowd. The cigarette vendors announced they were
offering free pouches of herbs to the travelers upon their return. Mayor Pulaski laughed and patted Sean on the
shoulder. It was a veritable
quarter-mile-high parade, a celebration of mankind once again overcoming
adversity.
My God I’m going to be rich, Sean thought.
The
dock workers readied a 15-foot ballista to fire to the tower. They’d done it a hundred times before. Two workers cranked the handle near the seat
at the back of the ballista, bringing the string back until the limb itself
bowed backwards and clicked into its set position at the latch. A third man, already seated and waiting, was
handed a long, arrow-shaped grappling hook trailing nearly a quarter-mile of
rope behind it. He placed it under and
between his legs, into the flight groove on top of the long barrel. The poorly-named “string” that ran from one
end of the limb to the other – and would project the hook on its path to OKO
South – was more of a thick belt of rope than it was a string, but the name had
always stuck. All that remained, as they
knew from experience, was to await the order.
When the hook fired and caught on the tower, they simply reeled it in on
the spool and let the travelers strap onto the ropeway and climb back across.
As
they neared the cluster of towers, OKO South came closer and closer. A minute before the harbormaster was ready to
give the order to fire the ballista, something in the crowd changed. The onlookers at the front, who had
surrounded and cramped the dock workers eagerly, got quieter. Their raised hands lowered and their faces
fell. Each row of people stopped
jumping, stopped shouting, stopped cheering one after another. The drummers stopped their music, stood and
stared at the tower. Sean and Mayor
Pulaski were the last to realize something was wrong. One drummer dropped his fat drumstick and it
rolled noisily downhill, clanging and clattering towards the stage. An eerie silence enveloped the crowd, but
eerier still was the sight that awaited their approach atop OKO South Tower.
Birds
cawed and crowed. Why are there so many birds? Sean thought. The mayor charged up through the crowd,
pushing people aside until he reached the balcony, its low railing chipped with
dozens of marks from previous grappling hook attachments. He borrowed a pair of binoculars from a
nearby gawker and glassed the rooftop.
27 bodies
lay on the roof. They were slathered in
a grotesque soup of blood, vomit and bird feces. Many of them were being eaten by the
birds. The birds had been working on
some of them for a while, picking through their fancy clothes and moving their
jewelry aside to get at the carrion beneath.
“They’re
all dead.” Pulaski didn’t mean to let
the words escape his lips, but they did, and though he spoke quietly, everyone
heard it. He lowered the binoculars from
his eyes and pushed them against someone else’s chest. He thought it was their owner but he couldn’t
be sure. But he had no more use for
them; he’d seen enough.
As he
sauntered back to Sean Bellamy, his knees weak with the horror of the corpses
he’d seen, the crowd’s eyes followed.
Sean could barely see the rooftop from where he stood but he knew
something horrible had happened. The
roof was a macabre light grey with trickles of red dripping down its sides and
an abnormally large flock of birds perched on (or circling) it. There were no birds on any of the other
skyscrapers nearby. The pieces of the
puzzle started falling into place just as Sean looked down and saw Proteus’s
mayor within 10 feet of him, shambling slowly.
“What
did I do?” Sean asked earnestly. His
mouth was dry and the words barely croaked out of his throat. His thoughts slowly turned away from whatever
happened to his tourists and towards the unfathomable amount of shit he’d
gotten himself into. He cleared his
throat and asked the mayor again – in a monotone voice, with tears welling up
in his eyes – for the news. In a sense he
was asking for the fate of the rest of his life.
“What
did I do.”
* * *
The
harbormaster called to fire the shot as soon as Proteus stopped to look at the
skyscraper, just like clockwork; the dock worker in the gunner seat didn’t
hesitate. The hook reached the top of
the building and splashed in a puddle of fecal matter and blood. The other dock workers reeled the line in,
leaving a bit of slack to ease their journey.
Then they fastened their climbing harnesses onto the ropeway and zip
lined over to the rooftop on OKO South to retrieve the first body. Without the distant sound of Proteus’s
footsteps pounding against the earth, the hushed crowd seemed even
quieter. When they got to the nearest
corpse, one of the dock workers reeled and found himself retching over the edge
of the building. This sent a wave of
gasps and murmurs through the crowd. The
few family members of the deceased who were in attendance were shocked back to
coherence for the first time since seeing their relatives blanketed by
excrement and entrails. They began to
sob.
Pulaski’s
mood had turned from horror to anger. In
his rage he knew the only proper course of action was to keep a cool head for
the sake of the city, the dead and their families. Even still, he could only partly mask his
tone and when he spoke it was through gritted teeth.
“Get
the doctor.”
It
took the deputy mayor a minute for the words to reach his ears. He dumbly looked at Mayor Pulaski, who returned
his gaze with a fire in his eyes. The
deputy mayor blinked several times and ran to retrieve the town physician while
the dock workers resumed their unsavory task.
They
wiped the body off as best they could and batted two Eurasian Sparrowhawks off
the corpse with the backs of their hands.
The birds cawed with displeasure but flew off to peck at another
body. The dock workers unfurled a tarp,
which they usually carried for transporting supplies between colossi, and
folded it into a makeshift body bag and put the body on it. They tied up either end of the tarp so it
resembled a canoe, then they each fastened one end to their own climbing
harnesses, near the men’s spines, and began the long climb to transport it back
to Proteus. The men talked while they
worked their way back across the rope, the foot ascenders which were strapped
to their boots preventing them from sliding back to the building.
“Is
she slipping?”
“No. She’s staying up on my end so far.”
“What
the Hell happened here?”
“Like
I know? Just don’t say anything unless
someone asks you for info.”
“Copy
that.”
“Of
course you could’ve seen more if you hadn’t blown chunks over the side there…”
“Man,
fuck you. Those birds were picking her
damn guts – “
“Okay,
just shut up right there. Stop it. We’re getting close to the docks and if her
family is there and they heard you goin’ on like that?”
“Alright,
alright. Jesus. Let’s just get there. How far we got?”
“I’d
say another 200 feet.”
“How
are we gonna make 25 more trips?”
“26.”
“My
point is we’ve got less than an hour and we probably took close to 10 minutes
getting to this one and bringing her home.”
“Like
I said, keep your head down and follow orders.
Let the boss and Mayor Pulaski figure out this nightmare.”
“Fine.”
“And
try to keep your breakfast down next
time.”
They
arrived in silence, unhooked their cargo and set it down gently. Mayor Pulaski had returned to the front of
the area with a reluctant Sean Bellamy.
Pulaski offered his handkerchief to the dock worker who’d thrown up,
shooting him a dirty look. “Clean
yourself up for Christ’s sake; some of the people on that tower were your
neighbors and friends.”
Just
as the dock worker sought to defend himself, the deputy mayor arrived at the
harbor with the doctor, who carried his medical bag. The doctor scurried up to the body and untied
the tarp. With a full and close-up view
of the deceased, the crowd backed away several steps in a hurry. A young man howled in agony and shoved through
the crowd, kneeling in front of the dead woman and gently stroking her sullied
hair. He wasn’t too proud to cry for his
loss.
Her boyfriend, Bellamy thought. For a half a moment he was proud of himself
for his simple deduction but the overpowering odor emanating from the victim
brought his attention back to the scene at hand. Reality sank in again and Sean Bellamy
realized that for his negligence he’d likely be thrown off Proteus, every bone
in his body breaking on impact with the barren surface after a quarter-mile
fall from the city, liability waivers be damned. The only thing he had to wonder was if he’d
die of a heart attack on the way down before he hit the ground.
Continued in Chapter Two, "Ghettobelly," right here.
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