Chapter THIRTY-FIVE
It’s cold down by the shoreline, and there’s a storm coming in. Black flecks of fallout mingle with flurries of dirty snow, and the wind lifts splatters of spray off the rumpled sea. Reluctant waves dump themselves on sand turned muddy green beneath the glowering sky. I hunch my shoulders inside my jacket, hands jammed into pockets, face closed like a fist against the weather.
Further up the curve of the beach, a fire casts orange-red light at the sky. A solitary figure sits on the landward side of the flames, huddled in a blanket. Though I don’t want to, I start in that direction. Whatever else, the fire looks warm, and there’s nowhere else to go.
The gate is closed.
That sounds wrong, something I know, for some reason, isn’t true.
Still…
As I get closer, my disquiet grows. The huddled figure doesn’t move or acknowledge my approach. Before I was worried that it might be someone hostile, but now that misgiving shrivels up to make space for the fear that this is someone I know, and that they’re dead—
Like everyone else I know.
Behind the figure at the fire, I see there’s a structure rising from the sand, a huge skeletal cross with something bound loosely to it. The driving wind and the needle-thin sleet it carries won’t let me look up far enough to see clearly what the object is.
The wind is keening now, like something I once heard and was afraid of.
I reach the fire and feel the blast of warmth across my face. I take my hands from my pockets and hold them out.
The figure stirs. I try not to notice. I don’t want this.
“Ah—the penitent.”
Semetaire. The sardonic tone has gone; maybe he thinks he doesn’t need it any more. Instead there’s something approaching compassion. The magnanimous warmth of someone who’s won a game whose outcome they never had that much doubt about.
“I’m sorry?”
He laughs. “Very droll. Why don’t you kneel at the fire, it’s warmer that way.”
“I’m not that cold,” I say, shivering, and risk a look at his face. His eyes glitter in the firelight. He knows.
“It’s taken you a long time to get here, Wedge Wolf,” he says kindly. “We can wait a little longer.”
I stare through my splayed fingers at the flames. “What do you want from me, Semetaire?”
“Oh, come now. What do I want? You know what I want.” He shrugs off the blanket and rises gracefully to his feet. He is taller than I remember, elegantly menacing in his ragged black coat. He fits the top hat on his head at a rakish angle. “I want the same as all the others.”
“And what’s that?” I nod up at the thing crucified behind him.
“That?” For the first time, he seems off balance. A little embarrassed, maybe. “That’s, well. Let’s say that’s an alternative. An alternative for you, that is, but I really don’t think you want to—”
I look up at the looming structure, and suddenly it’s easier to see through the wind and sleet and fallout.
It’s me.
Pinned in place with swathes of netting, dead grey flesh pressing into the spaces between the cord, body sagging away from the rigid structure of the scaffold, head sunk forward on the neck. The gulls have been at my face. The eyesockets are empty and the cheeks tattered. Bone shows through in patches across my forehead.
It must, I think distantly, be cold up there.
“I did warn you.” A trace of the old mockery is creeping back into his voice. He’s getting impatient. “It’s an alternative, but I think you’ll agree it’s a lot more comfortable down here by the fire. And there is this.”
He opens one gnarled hand and shows me the cortical stack, fresh blood and tissue still clinging to it in specks. I slap a hand to the back of my neck and find a ragged hole there, a gaping space at the base of my skull into which my fingers slip with horrifying ease. Through on the other side of the damage, I can feel the slick, spongy weight of my own cerebral tissue.
“See,” he says, almost regretfully.
I pull my fingers loose again. “Where did you get that, Semetaire?”
“Oh, these are not hard to come by. Especially on Sanction IV.”
“You got Cruickshank’s?” I ask him, with a sudden surge of hope.
He hesitates fractionally. “But of course. They all come to me, sooner or later.” He nods to himself. “Sooner or later.”
The repetition sounds forced. Like he’s trying to convince. I feel the hope die down again, guttering out.
“Later then,” I tell him, holding my hands out to the fire one more time. The wind buffets at my back.
“What are you talking about?” The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there’s a strange comfort to the way it hurts.
“I’m going now. There’s nothing for me here.”
“Go?” His voice turns abruptly ugly. He holds up the stack between thumb and forefinger, red glinting in the firelight. “You’re not going anywhere, my wolf-pack puppy. You’re staying here with me. We’ve got some accounts to process.”
This time, I’m the one that laughs.
“Get the f*ck out of my head, Semetaire.”
“You. Will.” One hand reaching crooked across the fire for me. “Stay.”
And the Kalashnikov is in my hand, the gun heavy with a full clip of antipersonnel rounds. Well, wouldn’t you know it.
“Got to go,” I say. “I’ll tell Hand you said hello.”
He looms, grasping, eyes gleaming.
I level the gun.
“You were warned, Semetaire.”
I shoot into the space below the hatbrim. Three shots, tight-spaced.
It kicks him back, dropping him in the sand a full three metres beyond the fire. I wait for a moment to see if he’ll get up, but he’s gone. The flames dampen down visibly with his departure.
I look up and see that the cruciform structure is empty, whatever that means. I remember the dead face it held up before and squat by the fire, warming myself until it gutters down to embers.
In the glowing ash, I spot the cortical stack, burnt clean and metallic shiny amidst the last charred fragments of wood, I reach in amongst the ashes and lift it out between finger and thumb, holding it the way Semetaire did.
It scorches a little, but that’s OK.
I stow it and the Kalashnikov, thrust my rapidly chilling hands back into the pockets of my jacket and straighten up, looking around.
It’s cold, but somewhere there’s got to be a way off this f*cking beach.