CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MORE FERAL AUX

 

 

THEY WOULD BE faster outside than in the tunnels.

It was easier to leave the Zoo Pack fiefdom by one of the stations at the periphery, so the four Aux gathered during the night, careful not to coincide with the change of sentry duty.

The tracks were quiet, apart from the pinging water droplets that never seemed to stop.

Edward Leer had decided that Robert Browning was an asset. Dorothy Barker held sway over him, and, despite his loyalty to the Zoo Pack, had easily persuaded him that the mission back to Warschauer was worthwhile. He was a fierce scrapper and no challenge was beyond him. He was also a lieutenant with access to outside clothes and to arms. They needed him.

Evelyn War, Dorothy Barker, Robert Browning and Ben Gun came above ground at Deutsche Oper on track two. It added a few kilometres to their journey, but there were only four of them, a smaller group, so they could move faster.

“Us, we don’t move like a war band,” said Robert Browning as they came up into the station. The moon was high and visibility was good. “Us, we move fast, together.”

“Who put Robert Browning, him in charge?” asked Ben Gun.

Browning turned on the pup and glared at him, a deep furrow line appearing on his brow ridge.

“Only asking,” said Ben, shrugging. “Me, I thought Evelyn War, her idea, Evelyn War, her war band.”

“Robert Browning, him hold rank,” said Evelyn War.

And then, “What are you doing?” she asked after pausing to watch Ben take several lengths of rusted wire springs and begin to weave them into the treads of his boots.

“Here,” said Ben, handing a bundle of the springs to Evelyn. “You too.”

The constant pinging from outside was interrupted by a long low moan and a creak. Silence fell among the group.

“Us, we need to get moving,” said Robert Browning.

“Yes, us must go,” said Dorothy. “Us, we’ll be safer in the dark.”

“Will we?” asked Evelyn. And then, “Why are you doing that?”

“For the ice,” said Ben. “So us, we don’t fall on the ice.”

It took only a few minutes, and with all their boots modified, the four Aux left the station and headed east. They didn’t want to risk being seen, so they avoided the rat runs through the buildings that Browning was familiar with and stayed outside, keeping to the main streets where nobody ventured.

It was a risk. They felt exposed, but they could also move fast.

They stepped cautiously onto the ice, but the wire springs gave them a good grip on the slick surface. After a few tentative steps, they started to jog down the slippery streets.

The going was good, and the first two or three kilometres were uneventful. The four Aux set up a steady rhythm, slowing at corners to check and cover and to knock the accumulated ice from the springs in their boots. Then they moved on again at their steady jog.

Suddenly Ben Gun stopped and squatted low in the middle of the street. He gestured to the others as a deep rumble vibrated the air all around them.

Robert Browning pulled the crossbow off his back with one swift movement of his right arm and made a gesture with his left, lurching towards the shaded side of the street to take cover.

“No!” shouted Ben.

Too late.

The rumble was followed by a loud WHOMP.

Evelyn and Dorothy were thrown off their feet in a cloud of snow and ice.

Ben stood up almost immediately from his crouched position, and began to make his way through the cloud of ice debris and snowflakes towards where he had last seen Browning.

Behind him Dorothy groaned, and Evelyn coughed.

“What – What just happened?” asked Evelyn.

“Uhn... Are we under attack?” asked Dorothy.

“The ice,” said Ben over his shoulder, “it falls.”

Dorothy staggered to her feet and peered through the clearing mist.

“Robert?” she asked, still bewildered.

“Robert Browning, him under there,” said Ben Gun, pointing to a mound of ice and snow banked up against the side of the street, newly fallen from the roofs of the adjacent buildings.

“You, help,” said Dorothy striding towards Ben, shrugging off her confusion to come to her mate’s aid.

Evelyn was beside her in a moment, and the three of them started lifting slabs of ice off the heap, heaving them into the street.

“Robert,” said Dorothy, over and over, “Robert, you say something.”

“Wait,” said Ben, stopping abruptly and taking a step back from the rescue.

“You, keep digging,” said Dorothy.

“You, listen,” said Ben.

Evelyn put a hand on Dorothy’s arm to stop her scrabbling around in the wet, freezing detritus of the ice fall to prevent her making more noise.

They all heard another rumble. Ben was moving already, but Evelyn had to half-drag Dorothy back into the middle of the wide street to pull her out of danger. This time they were all low to the ground when another roof gave up its heavy load of ice and snow. All they felt was the scattering of ice shards as the spray from the impact hit their backs.

Dorothy called out, “Robert!” but the fall had happened two buildings over and the weight of debris at the site of Robert Browning’s accident had not been added to.

Dorothy Barker was the first on her feet, striding back to continue to dig for her mate.

“Aaargh!”

They all heard it: the pained, angry cry as Robert Browning punched and clawed his way out of his live burial.

As Dorothy reached him, he turned his head hard to the right, and clenched and unclenched his left fist. His neck made a cracking, crunching sound, and Browning let out a satisfied grunt. Then he looked at his left hand and squeezed it again, apparently satisfied that it had sustained no permanent injury.

“You, help me get out of here,” he said.

In a matter of moments, with all four working together, the big Aux’s legs were free of the avalanche. He was cold and wet, and he would have some bruising, but he appeared to be otherwise unharmed. He limped back into the middle of the street.

“Ben Gun, you, how do you know so much?” he asked. “You, how do you know about the outside? You knew about boots, and now you know about this.” He gestured at the piled ice.

“Me, sometimes I go outside,” said Ben. “Me, I like to see things, hear things. Me, I like to do things. The Pack, nobody cares about me. The Pack, nobody watches me. Me, I do what I like.”

“Good!” said Robert Browning. “You, keep doing that. Just you tell me everything.”

“We keep to the wide streets, and tracks, move fast, listen. Every sound, it means something. Me, I know sounds.”

“You, how much of the city do you know?” asked Dorothy Barker.

“Me, not much. Half an hour from Zoo. No outside clothes,” said Ben Gun, looking down at himself. He was wearing the outside clothes that Robert Browning was able to take from the stores without them being noticed, whatever was left.

Ben’s clothes were the smallest, generally assigned to the smaller dams, and had been adapted by them for their use. If he looked ridiculous, he didn’t care. He had been called. He was a scrapper. He was with a war band on a long Walk Around.

“Doesn’t matter where I know,” said Ben Gun. “Sounds matter. Me, I know sounds.”

Ben looked at Evelyn, who had been quiet for some time. They were in the area of Kreuzberg where the feral Aux had attacked on their last visit to Warschauer, and she was on her guard.

She liked to be underground among the tunnels. She didn’t like the light. She could feel her body reacting to the day, becoming more alert. Dawn would not be long. She reached between the rough toggles of her coat, drew out her eyeshades and put them on.

“South,” said Ben Gun, almost under his breath. “Us, we should travel south.”

The group slowed slightly as they approached another junction.

“There are no sounds,” said Robert Browning. “Us, why should we change direction? Warschauer is east.”

“The sun, him will rise soon,” said Ben. “Him bright. Better we should not walk into his face. Better we weave a path across him.”

He glanced at Evelyn War and was glad to see relief on her face. Robert Browning only nodded. They checked and covered at the next intersection, knocked the ice out of the springs in their boots, and took the road to the right, despite it being narrower.

They continued for three or four kilometres, as the sun began to rise, tacking back and forth across the sun’s face, finding a new route to Warschauer.

They encountered nothing but the ping, ping of dripping water as the sun continued to do its work on the ice of ages, and the changing hues of the world. The greys of the night gave way to the colours of the day, more colours than any Aux had ever seen as the shroud of ice, frost and snow continued to rise. What had lain beneath, unseen for lifetimes, little by little, emerged.

Evelyn had feared hearing the cries all the way across Kreuzberg, but she was not surprised when they came.

The howl reminded her vividly of the gushing of blood and the splash of viscera on Dorothy Barker’s coat. She spun sharply in Dorothy’s direction, and the two exchanged a nod. The feral Aux were still at a distance, probably a kilometre away.

“Ambush,” said Robert Browning. “The dogs, if them come our way, us, we should take them by surprise.”

“Us, we could take them in the open,” said Ben Gun. “Where we can see them. The dogs, them hunters. Them follow sounds, too.”

“How?” asked Evelyn.

“Slingshots,” said Ben, “Us, you and me.” He pointed to their right where the street gave way to a large piece of open ground with scrappy trees and a couple of derelict buildings.

Another howl came at them from the south and east, closer this time.

“Quickly,” said Ben.

“You and Evelyn, you set them up,” said Dorothy.

“Me and Dorothy, we pick them off,” said Robert Browning, drawing the crossbow from his back with a wince, his shoulder complaining.

They took up positions as the howls and grunts grew closer, louder.

Ben held up three fingers to indicate how many feral Aux he anticipated. Then he began to loose missiles from his position on top of a tall stone monument, about two metres above ground level.

He somehow managed to simulate the gait of some of the small, densely furred rodents that survived in Berlin. They scratched an existence out of the tough vegetation that managed to find its way through the frost, or lived off the bark and needles of the trees. He skittered stones off the trunks of the trees, too, making sounds like claws and teeth scratching at them.

Evelyn tried to do the same, but her first few stones fell too heavily or landed too hard on their targets. It didn’t take her long to adjust, however, and she had a good stock of missiles. She’d been astounded by the number of perfect stones of various sizes that Ben Gun had produced from the many places in his clothes where he’d managed to secrete them without them clicking and banging and tumbling together. She marvelled at how clever he was.

Evelyn War suddenly heard a long, low growl to her right and then the plink plink plink of small stones falling rhythmically on ice, sounding just like the swift footfalls of a fleeing rodent. As she turned her head to look at the feral Aux, it was lunging in the direction of its supposed prey.

The first crossbow bolt struck its leg, and the second went straight into the top of its lowered head. It slumped flat onto its belly on the ice.

More of Ben’s stones hit their targets. This time the bark of a tree thokked hollowly as another howl filled the air.

Evelyn remembered that she was supposed to be half of the set-up team and reloaded her slingshot, looking from left to right for her next target. She saw an Aux coming in from the left, skulking silently, bewildered by the corpse of its comrade lying flat out on the ice.

Another crossbow bolt whistled through the air, but Evelyn ignored it. She did not see it sink into the torso of a second beast. She whipped her slingshot fast and firmly. Her target wasn’t the ice, or the trunk of some sickly conifer, her target was the bright, hard eye of the feral Aux.

Letting loose, Evelyn watched her projectile dart through the air almost as fast as a crossbow bolt. The Aux didn’t move, and it didn’t seem to see its death coming.

Her aim was true, the impact explosive. The Aux’s eye was shot through into its skull, and the beast reeled. It clawed at its face, but its jaw had already slackened, and it could not even howl. Its legs buckled beneath it and it folded at the waist, even as it tried to pluck the stone out of its head.

Finally, the Aux dropped, heavily, onto its back, arms falling away to either side.

A final bolt from Dorothy’s crossbow finished off the second feral Aux, who did not see fit to die from one chest wound.

Ben Gun dropped down from his vantage point and Evelyn stepped out from cover behind her little building. Robert Browning had his crossbow raised above his head in triumph, despite his sore shoulder, and Dorothy Barker was baring her teeth in a grin that spread wide across her face.

Not one of them had suffered a single scratch or had even expended an ounce of energy in hand-to-hand combat. Not one had needed to unsheathe a blade. It had all been accomplished with a few stones and four crossbow bolts. They weren’t even breathing hard.

“Fine scrapping,” said Robert Browning, his expression grave. “What the tale-teller, him say. It is true.”

“The time, it is changing,” said Dorothy Barker equally seriously.

“Us, we must find Walter Sickert,” said Evelyn War. “We must find the Hearer and listen to all of the truth.”