The Sea Hates a Coward Read Free Page B

bright points of electric light, rising through banks of mist.
    As his head tilted back to take in the looming immensity, he saw there were lights above him too. To his left, immense cranes rose into the sky on gridwork lattices, illuminated here and there by encrustations of steel cabins. Blazing floodlights picked out the shapes of hulking pulleys and house-sized mechanical saws, suspended by creaking booms.
    The structures receded into the fog like a rank of grim steel herons, steel beaks dipped in repose; they faded from sight and an even larger structure towered out of the murk. Set in front of the great hill of lights, it rose hundreds of feet into the air, a mighty steel mast festooned with gantries, antennae, searchlights, and clusters of dishes like lifeless barnacles.
    Jutting from the dizzying trunk were colossal crossbeams, themselves hung with winches, cables, hooks and buckets, reaching out over the darkness.
    Wherever he went next, thought Schneider, it had to be well clear of that thing.
    To the right of the edifice, opposite the ranks of cranes, was relative emptiness—the lights there were smaller and lower, and some of them were slowly moving. There must be a road, thought Schneider, some way to escape this steel hell of a place, and whatever cruel coast had spawned the monster whose guts he had been reborn in.
    Slipping quietly through the crowd of disinterested zombies, doing everything he could to mimic their purposeless blundering, Schneider began to make his way towards the moving lights. The head slumped against his left shoulder began to moan softly.
    Soon, perhaps a hundred yards on, they had to shrink into the horde as a behemoth truck came growling from the dark behind them, an overseer’s bearded face glowering in its red-lit cabin. On its back were bales of heaped, dripping flesh, a gruesome mess of purple fibres, sallow fat and rubbery, scarred skin. Once the grumbling vehicle had passed, they began to move again, following its tail lights at a safe distance. Soon, they came upon a hill of meat.
    It swarmed with zombies. At its crest, a knot of corpses laboured with hatchets to dismember a pale, fanged worm, while dozens more loitered on its slopes, unloading armfuls of dripping meat from the truck. The hill’s perimeter was ringed by overseers in cruor-slicked leathers, their beasts dashing to and fro to discourage flocks of grey, bald-headed birds from darting in for scraps.
    Schneider was loath to approach the charnel-mound, but it stood directly in between him and the moving lights, and had to be passed if they were to escape. Worse yet, to its left stood the base of the enormous mast, barely a hundred yards away and lit bright as day by floodlights. ‘A rock and a hard place,’ murmured some stray neuron within him. ‘Scylla and what’s-her-name,’ offered another.
    In the blood-drenched alley between the pile and the tower, a mass of zombies eddied like the sluggish backwaters of a river. They would have to meander through the gap, blending in with the other dead without being siphoned off to work on the meat pile, or to something worse. And they couldn’t do that while leaning on each other—it wasn’t the sort of thing that happened around here. The dead thing had to walk by itself.
    Gently, Schneider lifted the zombie’s clenched arm from around his neck, and grabbed it by the shoulders. It hissed in what could well have been dismay, but he turned it towards him and did his best to make contact with its swimming eyes.
    “Listen. Listen,” he implored it. “You have to walk with me now. I can’t help you.”
    The creature barely seemed to register his words, reaching instead to grab his body and resume its slump, and he had to physically put its arms back in place.
    “No,” he insisted, stunned by how easily the words were coming from his leathery throat. “We’ll be hurt if you do that. You have to walk on your own for a bit.”
    Again it groaned and reached out for