CHAPTER FIVE

DEATH

 

 

WARD CLEAVER PACED.

He was edgy. He wasn’t usually given to nerves. He’d been around. He wasn’t the beta dog he’d been in his youth, but he’d scrapped with the best of them. He’d become a leader, pulled his weight, commanded Aux as well as any lieutenant in the Zoo Pack. He wasn’t that much older than Ezra Pound, whelped only a couple of seasons before, but he was past his prime.

He was nervous, but it was his job and he was doing it.

The young and the old got the worst jobs, took the flanking positions in the war bands, were assigned the most far-flung sentry posts, the coldest and loneliest. He was old.

Ward Cleaver paced. He didn’t like it. He was nervous.

He was twitchy.

His blade felt heavy in his hand, he’d been holding it for so long. He didn’t dare sheath it. He didn’t trust himself to be fast enough to draw it any more. The other fella might beat him to the draw, might get his blade in first.

“Tougher and tough,” he said to himself.

He wasn’t convinced.

The tunnel forked off in two directions. He didn’t like it.

He couldn’t see down the left hand fork if he walked the right, or vice versa, so he stayed on the main line. He couldn’t stand still. He had to pace. He was filled with cold dread every time he turned his back on one of the forks. He turned often, so as not to have his back to either of the tunnels for too long at a time.

He moved awkwardly; an old injury had shortened his left leg, and the arthritis in his knee made it worse.

His ears were as good as ever though, and his eyes were keen. He could still swing a blade, too. Tougher and tough. He was still a good sentry.

He reminded himself that he could still do his job.

He’d heard about the noises. They’d all heard about the noises. Rumours were rife. It was the pinging he feared. He hadn’t heard it himself, but it was like the tap of a sharp claw on hollow stone, they said. He could imagine it.

Other Aux had described the noise, and the description frightened him. If Ward heard the tiktiktik they described, he’d recognise it.

The pack didn’t know what it was. The pack didn’t know what it meant, but they knew it meant something. There was talk. There was talk of a tiktiktik and of another sound, a whistling sound. It was the ticking he was afraid of.

He shuddered. He turned his back on the forking tunnels for the final time, and walked back along the main track. He could see for hundreds of metres along Track Two ahead of him as it cut a straight line back to Old Zoo. Wade longed to be back on the platform in the warm fug of the pack with its cloud of breath hanging in the air around it. He wanted to be a pup again, sitting on the platform, listening to the tales of Gene the Hackman.

He looked down at the blade in his hand. He clenched his fist around it for reassurance. He glanced back into the deep below-ground darkness. He could see the great arching curves of the tunnel walls, fading into the distance into two black holes. He could see the pale tracks diverging as they swept away deep into the holes. And he could see many shades of grey in the thousands of stones that lay between him and the tunnel mouths, before they became a single, seamless carpet of another kind of grey.

The cold dread that filled him every time he turned his back on either fork was followed by a moment of reassurance as he looked back along Track Two and walked those two or three dozen steps towards home.

The ping brought him up short.

It made his heart stop, his foot in mid-air, unable to finish the step he was about to take. The sound. The sound the pack had been talking about.

Then he breathed out. Just water, dripping. He wasn’t used to the water. It seemed to drip everywhere lately, from everything.

Four more steps, five... six. He was only two or three of his lopsided paces from the place where he should turn, marked by a long sooty streak down the tunnel wall to his left.

The whistle came from a distance, shrill and breathy, unlike anything Ward Cleaver had ever heard. His hand tightened on his blade, and the sinewy muscles of his biceps bunched as his fist closed. His hand came up level with his chest, blade ready.

Sweat gathered on his brow, despite the cold dread that had been filling him every minute for three long hours. The dread had suddenly grown sharply colder. His blood seemed to freeze in his arteries.

The whistle echoed down the tunnels behind him and he turned, slowly.

The tunnels.

The sound was coming from more than one place.

Ward Cleaver was sure that the sound was coming from both forks, from both tunnels.

It died away. He could hear the sigh of it long after the shrill tones had dissipated. The thing that had made the sounds was breathing.

It wasn’t Aux. He knew no living Aux had ever made a sound like that, nor any that he had ever heard dying.

Ward Cleaver remembered his duty. He was Zoo Pack, and he was a chosen sentry. He had to protect the perimeter. He had to stand his ground.

Ward Cleaver took two tentative steps back towards the fork in the tunnel, his eyes unblinking, his blade raised.

It was the same. There was no shift in the grey patterns before him. The uneven surface of the old walls was the same, the shingle beneath his feet was the same, the diverging lines of the tracks were the same.

The only sounds were the crunch of Ward Cleaver’s footfalls and the rasp of his breathing. He felt his fingers clenching and unclenching around the haft of his weapon. Stones shifted beneath his feet.

He thought he heard something right at the edge of his senses.

He stopped again, only a few metres from the fork, so close that his visibility down both of the tunnels was compromised. One of the larger stones shifted under his uneven stance and slid out from under his left foot. It grated against its neighbours, clattering impossibly loudly in the silence.

He was sure he would have heard something, but for that damned stone.

Ward Cleaver held his breath. The terrible sound came again.

tiktiktik tiktik tiktik tik tiktiktik tiktiktik

It was the sound, the sound he had heard the other packers talking about, the sound he had known he would recognise, should he ever hear it. He had not thought that it would be relentless.

tiktiktik tik tiktik tiktiktik tiktiktik tik

Ward Cleaver wanted to step back. He wanted a clearer view of both tunnels. He wanted to concentrate. He didn’t know, not for sure, where the sound was coming from.

He only knew that it was getting louder... closer.

tiktik tik tiktiktik tik tiktiktik

Ward Cleaver had been holding his blade in his hand for more than three hours because he didn’t dare sheath it. Ezra Pound, pack sire, always said that the other fella might be faster to draw his weapon, so Wade Cleaver was afraid. Something was changing.

Though his blade was already drawn, the other fella was still faster than him.

It came from the left. Ward Cleaver thought it was a shadow, but there was no light source to throw a shadow. Why was it so tall? So narrow? Why was its shape so wrong? It was full of wrong.

tiktiktik tiktiktik tik tiktik tiktiktik tik

Ward Cleaver took a lunging step and thrust with his weapon at shoulder height into the thing.

His blade made contact with something hard, more like bone than metal, and his left shoulder was pierced through. He pulled away, instinctively, feeling barbs tear through his muscle, disabling his arm.

He felt something in his side, but tried to ignore it. He jabbed his blade at full stretch, the second blow even less effective than the first, skittering off the bony surface.

Then he felt a burning sensation in his hip, and then another in his belly.

Ward Cleaver tried to defend himself. His sweating right hand tightened around the haft of his weapon. He swung it frantically back and forth, trying to connect with flesh, any flesh, trying to inflict a wound.

He felt the hot blood cooling on his clothes. He heard it pattering onto the stones at his feet, the thick liquid making a subtly different sound from the dripping water.

It was oddly reassuring. It was the first sound he had recognised since the whistling. Even his own footfalls had sounded wrong, too tentative, too fearful.

Ward Cleaver wouldn’t look down.

He was dead and he knew it. Aux knew when they were beaten, though it didn’t stop them fighting.

Ward Cleaver looked up.

He looked at the thing that was thrusting another barbed blade into him, forming a pattern of wounds down his left side and across his gut.

He could not find flesh to cut, because the creature had no flesh. It was a monster made of bone, of glossy chitin. Its blades were not weapons, but long, tapering, barbed limbs in matched pairs growing out of its barrel-shaped thorax, high above its abdomen.

The words of Edward Leer’s tales tumbled through Ward Cleaver’s mind.

He had heard them a hundred-hundred times. He had heard the legends of Gene the Hackman, of how he had used his blades. He had learned to fight with his own weapons by listening to them and by remembering them.

Wasn’t that why they had a tale-teller? To teach them to be scrappers in Gene the Hackman’s image? Weren’t the legends a scrapper’s manual?

Ward Cleaver looked up at the creature that was killing him. He heard his blade chink against the hard shell of its leg before his wrist gave way and his weapon fell from his hand.

He knew what it was.

He wanted to tell the Zoo Pack. He wanted to warn them all. He opened his mouth and, as loudly as he could, he said a single word.

“Them.”