Armwrestling the Dead Read online

ARMWRESTLING THE DEAD

  by Andrew McEwan

  *

  Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

  *

  Cover design by Jane Parker - https://www.janedesignedthis.com/

  *

  * * *

  first: protean world

  Golden bars of sun slipped between rocks on the far horizon like torchlight through fingers. He sensed their warmth before he felt it, a primitive awareness of fresh hope, renewed life and worldly splendour that inevitably made him think of breakfast. Below him on the sandy plain, its yellow dust concealing a million shadows, the crashed flyer hunched over its spilt guts like the petrified victim of an as yet unsated predator.

  There was nothing to do but sit; sit and breathe, talk with the wind, mouth open, eyes narrowed in Oriel’s weighty medium of survival. The atmosphere hung heavy with snow. It formed a blue-white lattice round the planet, one that cracked as the seasons roused, flexing muscles of capricious weather that ultimately fractured this icy grille, dumping tonnes of frozen material onto the world beneath its continually forming roof.

  Three metre flakes rose about the flyer like slowly melting bergs.

  The snow was alive, the Ologists said. Below ten thousand metres it blossomed, a pseudo-bacterial mash the metamorphic properties of which were not lost on the original survey team that had penetrated Oriel’s natural defences a decade past, losing a fifth of their number to the vagaries of the planet before mastering the encoded patterns of her boisterous climate. But still there were casualties. The flyer, on a routine transit from Base 1 in the north to Base Central at the foot of Candy Mountain (christened such by Ologists, whose private games and corporate dialogues baffled the majority Runners and Weekenders) had strayed into an area of flux, the storm-carried debris indenting the fragile craft like oversized hailstones the canvas wings and fuselage of a child’s toy glider...

  He’d sat on this moulded spur of rock the entire night, peering up at the few visible stars, mind cosseted in a balmy cloak of repair; while on the lightening plain shapes true and imagined climbed unsteadily, staggered and fell as injuries told.

  And now it was morning.

  one - snowmen

  Stepping carefully through the wreck, an itch at the base of his spine, Harry outlined the figure they’d located earlier. One of his legs had been splinted, yet it appeared he was the sole survivor.

  ‘How’s it feel?’

  The figure, whose name was Yan, tipped his eyes from the intruder’s glare.

  ‘Issac?’

  Harry, leaning over him, drew away. ‘Isn’t that stretcher here yet?’ he called back, dipping his shoulder, voice resonating inside the trashed cabin.

  Yan stared past him at the amorphous shapes moving beyond the flyer’s serrated edges, ragged gums hanging in the breeze like streamers.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Harry told him. ‘Everything’s fine. Don’t try to move.’

  ‘Issac?’ repeated Yan. ‘I can’t see your face.’ His head shook, eyes dancing as they slipped in and out of focus.

  ‘The name’s Schroeder. Harry Schroeder.’

  ‘Where’s Issac? Still up on the ridge?’

  ‘There’s no-one on the ridge,’ Schroeder told him, hunting for cigarettes, a reflex he recognized as nervousness.

  Yan refused the offered smoke.

  ‘Is that who fixed your leg?’ he asked, lighting up, trailing bluish clouds. ‘Was he on the flight?’

  ‘My leg,’ said Yan, as if clawing the memory back. ‘Issac fixed my leg, you say?’ His grin made an appearance, like he wasn’t convinced. ‘Well, that’s something.’

  Harry didn’t get the joke. He presumed there was one, pulling meditatively on his cigarette while he attempted to unravel the meaning behind the survivor’s waxy stare. ‘Tell me about this Issac,’ he prompted when sure of Yan’s attention. ‘In fact, tell me everything you remember of the last twelve hours, from before the crash.’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Right,’ said Harry, unfolding his notebook. ‘Start when you boarded the flyer.’

  i

  ‘Trauma,’ opined Ivan. ‘He’s crazy.’

  ‘I don’t think so. A lot of what he told me makes sense.’

  Ivan scratched his head. ‘The Ologists are going to have a ball with this one.’

  ‘Let them.’ Harry looked around at the vague stubs of bergs, then up to the sun-pierced vault with its waiting cargo, and shivered.

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘Uneasy. This planet gives me the creeps.’

  ‘So you’ve said.’ Ivan dragged the toe of one boot round in a circle. ‘I don’t know, I kind of like it,’ he added, dividing the circle into slices like a cake.

  ‘Did you get a call through to Central yet?’ questioned Harry, ignoring the discomfort of his bones. ‘The passenger list?’

  ‘On its way. He really has no idea what happened to them, or the crew?’

  ‘Yan? No. This Issac Waters, he was the only one he saw after the crash.’

  ‘Apart from snowmen...’ Ivan commented, admiring his artwork while pulling at an ear.

  Harry wandered toward the ridge, its brownish hue like worn leather, its convolute form that of an elongated saddle. He climbed slowly, pacing himself, the day’s warmth climbing alongside, swelling with the rock as the turgid air inflated the oddly quiescent sacks of his lungs. Turning once, he watched flickering shades gambol about the stricken flyer, spectral animals harvesting a corpse. Ivan stood by the truck, one cab door open. Talking over the radio, Harry presumed. The rescue party, diverted to the crash site from a routine pick-up two hundred kilometres west following a command from Central, milled like confused bees, unexpectedly redundant.

  He badly wanted to question the missing Weekender. The present scenario was difficult to interpret.

  The pick-up had involved Ivan and himself, airlifted to a survey station two days previous, charged with investigating the theft of personal belongings and scientific instruments, the latter a puzzle as the station’s sixteen personnel were all members of the survey and as such had a vested interest in its success. At first everything appeared normal; there was the usual non-co-operation, resentment and closing of ranks. Then, late yesterday evening, the project leader was discovered hanged from a stanchion. Harry had immediately requested the station’s closure, only to receive news of the crash to the east along with instructions to accompany the rescue party, whose truck cut a hastily arranged trail, slowing amid a plume of sparkling mica just long enough to haul the two detectives on board and drop two heavily-armed security operatives in their place. Routine was their driver’s description of the operation. It made Harry cringe to think about it, her quixotic smile.

  He reached the ridge and sat overlooking the plain, its yellow sands and clustered humanity. Unrolling his hat and pulling it down over his ears, he squinted at the hills on the far horizon, dozing like them beneath the struggling roof of the world. Puzzles formed an orderly queue in his skull.

  He wrestled one.

  Why had Yan been left behind? That presupposed the other passengers, dead and living, had, for whatever reason, decided to walk to safety rather than wait for safety to arrive. Harry didn’t like the walking theory; it was improbable. Only, the alternatives were outrageous.

  That there had been passengers was fact. There was blood. He'd taken particular note of that. And Yan hadn't fixed his own leg, so his talk of Waters would appear genuine. Which brought Harry to the snowmen and Yan's eerily convincing account of their nocturnal manoeuvres.

  two - yawbus

  ‘Hookler!’ Brouchard, leaning with the flats of his hands on the table. ‘A word...if you will.’

  He frown
ed, toying with a plastic counter, its white ridges forming concentric circles, matching reliefs. ‘What is it, doc?’

  ‘I think you’d better see for yourself,’ Brouchard told him, adding, ‘It’s important.'

  ‘It’s always important,’ Hookler replied, rising from his game of draughts, his opponent a green-eyed woman possessed of a whimsical smile. ‘Okay...’

  The doctor walked nervously, fidgeting with the belt of his lab coat, while the pilot (second-class) loped behind, a head shorter, silently amused, if somewhat perplexed by Brouchard’s agitation. They climbed a stair. Its well ran with coloured lights denoting deck and area. Stepping off, Hookler folded his heavy arms while Brouchard exchanged worried glances with a junior medic.

  ‘In here...’

  Hookler pushed open the storeroom door - inside a table, a toppled foam cup, a pool of brown liquid on the dull veneer surrounding a crumpled cigarette pack.

  ‘Doc?’

  Brouchard shoved his hands in his pockets.