Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol I Read online

  I heard the glass face of Jackson's second-favourite clock shattering beneath a heavy fist, and I allowed myself a few seconds to consider the merits of cowardice. It was tempting; I am ill-equipped for stealth, what with my steel-shod limp and the endless tick-tock tick-tock eliminating the possibility of approaching unannounced. Investigation meant a confrontation, facing the intruder down, and I was coward enough that the thought gave me pause.

  I picked up Jackson's poker, a cast-iron antique he'd acquired at an auction. I'd scoffed at him when he bought it, claiming it was useless, but it felt comforting to have a weapon in hand. The poker felt solid, weighted for a quick swing should I need to bludgeon a potential thief, and I held it before me as I limped down the stairs and switched on the workshop lights.

  There was a Corvidae in the workshop, languid and ready for my approach. He was an angry snarl of a boy, just like the rest of them, black-feather hair, fingers like raptor talons, eyes as smooth and dark as marbles. He stank of carrion, thick and overripe. I raised the poker, holding it like a sword, ready to cave in the boy's skull with its iron head. The Corvidae sneered. "Ya bully dreaming, Tick-Tock. Me-and-I pluck your vitreous; squish-squish, sweet'n'juicy, yum-yum-ha." He cawed then, cackling. He had a crow's laugh, a harsh croak. "Where da patch?"

  I charged him, swinging the poker, a futile gesture fuelled by anger and fear. He moved fast, a dash of shadow against the sulphurous yellow light. It didn't take long, no more than three ticks of my heart, and it was over. I saw him move, felt the poker rip free of my hand, then he crashed backwards with his hollow weight bearing me to the floor. I looked up into a wicked grin, grubby talons hovering over my eyes.

  "Where da patch?" he croaked. He kept his voice low, all secret whispers. I shook my head. "Gone," I said. "Jackson's gone. He isn't here."

  His talons wove an eager pattern in the air as a narrow, black tongue licked pointed Corvidae teeth. "Where da girl den, Tick-Tock? You hide our pretty-pretty, our little birdy-bird? We want her back, Tick-Tock. Gotta finish what we started."

  "She's not hiding." My treacherous voice quavered, just a little, giving away my fear. "She's not here, she ran away."

  The Corvidae gave me a harlequin's smile, leaning forwards to run his long tongue across the tender flesh of my good eye. "Tell da patch I came, Tick-Tock. Tell him Rook3 wants 'is dolly back, no matter what." And I nodded, stiff-necked, my eye following the pointed claw dancing a hair's breadth from my pupil. Rook3 laughed, drunk on my fear. He floated to his feet in a flurry of limbs, dancing and spinning his way to the gaping maw of our broken doorway. "Me-and-I be seeing you, Tick-Tock," he said, and then he was gone, nothing more than a caw of laughter on the wind.

  * * * *

  I lay on the floor for a long time.

  Jackson had shown me his blueprints for my arm and chest, the detailed plans and notes he'd compiled explaining how and why they work. I know that there are three-hundred and fifty-seven cogs and gears in my arm alone. I lay on the ground and listened to my heart, the steady tick-tock that never felt the surge of adrenaline, never sped up when danger loomed. When I flexed my fingers, pondering their movement, I knew that another hundred and twenty cogs came to life. I tried to console myself with this knowledge, telling myself that clocks are works of precision and delicacy, that they do not lend themselves to strength, or violence.

  It didn't help.

  Jackson unlocked the bedroom door; his feet padded down the stairs. My good arm trembled. Jackson stood next to me, staring at the broken door. "They came," he said.

  "Just one." I stood up, busying myself clearing a bench, moving the junk onto the surrounding piles. When I was done I tipped it on its side, pushing it against the doorframe to replace the door. I leant my weight against it, holding it secure. "He's fast and he's angry. I'm sure he'll collect the rest of them."

  Jackson clucked his tongue and forced me to sit, fussing with my arm. He checked mechanisms and servos, double-checking to be sure. He always worried when I fell, always wanted to make sure that I hadn't damaged the intricate parts of his creation. "They want her back, Jackson," I told him. "They want us to hand her over, or they'll kill us both. Kill us and eat our eyes."

  Jackson bowed his head and kept his attention on the arm. His face pinched, locked into a frown of concentration. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We'll keep her safe, somehow."

  "We need to run. Tonight."

  Jackson shook his head, closed the casing on my arm. "If they found us, it's too late. They're expecting us to run and she still needs rest, another day or two at least. We need to stay, keep them out somehow. Give her time to heal, then use the tunnel to sneak away."

  I looked at the upright bench, thinner and weaker than our stout wooden door. "How?"

  "Somehow," Jackson said. He rapped my arm with a sharp knuckle, the soft echo filling the room. "We haven't got a choice here, Randal. We must do the best we can."

  * * * *

  I went back to Pelican the next morning. I bought the best security system our money could afford. "Lethal or non-lethal," Pelican asked me.

  "Whichever you've got," I told him. "As long as I can walk away with it today and have it installed by nightfall." He gave me a queer look and a price, and I gave him the money. It took the better part of a day to get the workshop straightened out and the new locks installed, repairing the door and barricading the windows with steel bars and old workbenches I bolted into place. I spent the afternoon installing Pelican's toys: taser banks and motion detectors; thick Kevlar sheets that sat over the doorjamb, securing it against gunfire and battering shoulders; voltage packs that would pass a charge through anything metal that was tampered with on the exterior of the workshop, leaving a claw blackened and the man behind it stunned. Jackson was upstairs while I toiled below; he checked his work on Rose's prosthetic tongue.

  I finished the security job after sunset, just in time for the first Corvidae's croaky laughter to echo at the end of our alleyway. Jackson came down as I was making dinner, flinching at the distant laughter outside. "Done," he said, wiping his hands on a rag. His blue, worn overalls stained with patches of rust. "She can talk."

  "Can she eat?" I ladled soup into a bowl and pushed it toward him, then filled a second when Jackson nodded. I started limping toward the stairs, bowl on a plastic tray.

  "She's probably sleeping," Jackson said. "And she'll be groggy, even if she's not. Make sure she doesn't choke, Randal---she'll need some practice before she's used to swallowing with the prosthetic."

  The whole gang arrived while I was climbing the stairs, loud caws and laughter shrill in the alleyway. I ignored them and kept climbing, opened the door to Rose's room. She wasn't sleeping, but her eyes were glassy from Jackson's painkillers. She was insulated by the drugs, able to look into my face without flinching. She seemed numb to the point where even the noise outside was absent. I sat down next to her and she smiled at me, wincing. "Randal," she said. Her new tongue stumbled around the name, blunting the n, but I could recognise the word through the awkwardness. "Your name is Randal."

  "I brought you food," I said. "Something soft. Soup. Jackson wants you to practice swallowing."

  "I can hear birds," she said. Her face turned toward the window, toward the aftermath of sunset lingering behind the skyline. The song of the Corvidae filled the air.

  "Nothing to worry about." I tried to look her in the eye. "You should eat."

  I held a spoon before her face, the soup steaming and thick. I watched the patchwork plastic and Kevlar move when she opened her mouth, the faint flicker at the base of her throat as Jackson's prosthetic worked with the torn scraps of her real tongue. Jackson was right---it was ugly work, but Rose remained beautiful. I fed her a spoon at a time, using my good hand to guide the spoon. The crow calls grew louder, cutting through the groggy haze. She stopped eating and turned to the window, shuddering.

  "It's them." She said. "They...hated me. They told me to leave. Why are they here?"

 
; "No one likes to lose," I said.

  She blinked back tears, remembering. "Why am I here? Why aren't I dead?"

  I thought of Jackson, sitting downstairs, working his way through a bowl of soup. "Jackson likes old stories," I told her, and she frowned. "Fairytales and stuff. You needed help and he helped you." I clenched my fist, listening to the gears creak. "He does that, sometimes."

  The painkillers kicked in, responding to her stress. She drifted off, unable to fight Jackson's drugs, and I went downstairs to listen to the bird calls. Jackson was by the stove again, hidden in the corner of the workshop. He cradled a half-full bowl of soup in his lap. The Corvidae were right outside now. I turned the lights off, one by one, relying on the shadows to give us some cover.

  "She's scared," I said, settling into the stool next to him.

  "She's a smart girl," Jackson answered. He lowered his head and stared into the murkiness of the soup, wispy hair falling in front of his face. Something thumped hard against the front door and the charge went off, filling the air with ozone. We listened to something young and birdlike squeal in pain, then the sound of a limping body retreating into the distance. "We should have closed-circuit," Jackson said. "I don't like hearing them without seeing what they're up to." The second thump was more solid, prepared for the shock that followed. The sound echoed across the workshop as the taser's hiss cut through the darkness.

  "Pelican didn't have any cameras," I said. "It'd take at least a week to get some in."

  * * * *

  Jackson slept in his chair, fitful, flinching with every measured assault against our doorway. I stayed awake, keeping vigil, the poker gripped in the clockwork hand. My slow hand, the hated hand, but it was strong enough to shatter bone if I could land a solid blow. Jackson used to tell me stories about a broken boy who was put back together by kindly elves with a talent for magic and clockwork. He would tell me the boy's arm was magical, that his heart was a wonder in a world where hearts rarely beat, where all too often hearts were lost for no reason. Love was a powerful thing in Jackson's stories. It could conquer armies and rewrite time. It could make the broken whole again.

  I passed the time by counting the thumps of Corvidae against the door, the rattle-rattle-buzz of claws against the window bars, the electrified charge sending bodies reeling back with scorched hands and strangled cries. They paced themselves, syncopated the assaults, used the silence as a weapon to keep us on edge. I counted the thumps, one after the other; one bird, two birds, three birds burned. Four birds, five birds, six birds harmed. Occasionally I stood by the doorway, listening to the quiet scuffle of clawed boots against the concrete. Sometimes they were swift and raucous, using the echoes of the alley to their advantage. They filled the air with birdcalls, making it impossible to be sure of their numbers. Other times they were silent, murmurs in the darkness. I figured there were twenty three of them out there, including those who'd been shocked by the taser bank on the door, birds shocked by enough voltage to leave them twitching and stunned until morning. Sometimes I pressed my weight against the door, keeping it steady against the assault.

  Around 2 a.m. it all went quiet. I listened to the steps of someone loping up to the doorway, leaning in without touching it. "We know you're in there, Tick-Tock," Rook3 whispered. "Me-and-I hear your heart; tick-tick-tick."

  "No-one here but us chickens," I told him, voice cracking. I picked a spot by the door, raising the poker high, just in case. "Bars on the windows and steel plates on the doors. Go bother someone else, little bird."

  Rook3 knocked, three sharp raps that echoed on the steel. The air filled with a whiff of ozone and Rook3 screamed, then cawed and cackled as his screams turned to laughter. "Nothing save you from me-and-I, Tick-Tock," he said. "You come out, sun or no-sun, and Rook3 be waiting."

  There was no more knocking after that, no more electrical discharge or rattled windows to break the silence. Later, as the sun rose, I peeked through a crack on a second-floor window and watched the Corvidae perched on the fire-escape next door, waiting and watching like an army of twisted shadows. I woke Jackson and pointed. "We're locked in," I said. "It appears they're laying siege."

  Cops are an expensive proposition in Downside, but Jackson tried calling them anyway. His first attempt got him a busy signal, the second just the hazy buzz of a scrambler attached to the line. The third call was answered by Rook3's croaking laughter. "Nobody going to help you, Patch. You goin' to die if you don't give me-and-I back da girl." Jackson hung up. His knuckles were pale and his hands trembled, but he drew himself straight as he glared at the door. Defiant, angry, but that wouldn't last. I could see the fear there, lurking behind his eyes.

  "We should go," I told him. "Use the tunnel, get out while we can." Jackson didn't answer. He went back to his chair and rocked, his face pinched so tight I could barely see his eyes beneath the press of wrinkles. Small, gentle Jackson, determined to do what was right. "So many of them," he said. "I wasn't expecting there to be so many."

  I left him there, huddled against the darkness, and checked on Rose myself.

  * * * *

  "I couldn't sleep," Rose told me, fighting against the painkillers. "All the noise, it was like being back there. Like living with them." She was still weak, barely able to lift her head off the pillow, but there was life in her cheeks. She winced with every s she used, a sting of pain from the sutures as the tongue touched her teeth. It gave her voice an old lilt, at odds with the face full of bruises and patchwork stitches. So many grafts, so many repairs.

  "No one slept," I said. "Don't worry, they can't hurt you here. We've locked the place up tight, and we've held off worse than this."

  Rose pursed her lips and frowned at me, the patchwork tongue bulging against her cheeks. It was a little too large for her mouth, the mechanism heavy against her jaw. She would never look right with her mouth closed, but at least she could speak.

  "How..." She shook her head, trying to dislodge the question, but her hand reached out anyway. The dark nails and fingers withered into claws, hovering over the steel, preparing to stroke it. I pulled away, the cogs grinding.

  "Jackson found me when I was a kid," I said. "Beaten, cut up, almost dead. He put me back together, the same as you. Replaced the parts as I grew older so I didn't get lopsided." I raised the arm and looked at it, flexed my fingers and took her withered claw in mine. "He's a good man. Foolish, really, and stubborn, but a good man nonetheless."

  Outside there was a loud caw, the fizzing snap of a rock thrown against the windows. Rose flinched. "You never...there are other options," she said. "You could get it replaced."

  I shook my head. "Jackson calls it his finest work," I told her. "The arm, the heart, the knee. Replacing them would break his heart."

  I stood there until Rose gave in to the painkillers, drifting off into sleep with a frown across her face. I held her hand, studied her scars, wondered how far she could make it. Jackson was wrong; we could move her if we had too. Slowly, using a gurney, with enough drugs to keep her sedated and free of pain. We could run if we had to, but we might not get away. The tunnel could get us out, but they would have someone watching. Just in case we had allies, on the off chance someone heard the noise and could be bothered to investigate. If we were spotted as we left, if they saw us sneaking out...

  I went downstairs. Jackson was huddled in his chair, shaking. "They won't stop," Jackson said. "They'll never leave us alone, Randal. They just won't stop."

  "Then we run," I told him, and I laid out the plan. Jackson listened, eyes flat, and nodded when I reached the end. I sent him upstairs to get things ready. When I was alone in the workshop I let myself shake, skin crawling against the prosthetics. I tightened my grip on the poker, steel grinding against steel. My heart tick-tocked, slow and steady, heedless of my fear.

  The Corvidae left us alone during the day, disappearing into the shadows or lingering in knots of two or three, hanging on the fire escapes like birds on a wire. I spent the afternoon taking practi
ce swings with the poker, trying to get comfortable with its leverage and its weight. Violence is easy to practice: swing, parry, thrust; make use of my longer reach. Don't let them get close enough to use speed against me, try to take them down before they rip me apart with their claws. Jackson watched me, lips drawn, trying not to state the obvious.

  "You'll need food," he said. "Sooner or later, you'll run out of food."

  "I won't run out of food," I said. "And you'll need it more than I do." I smiled at him, awkward and lopsided. Jackson hugged me and patted my arm.

  "It'll be dark soon," I said. "You should get ready."

  "Sit," Jackson said, and he waited until I did. He told me a story. "It's easier," he said, in the silence at the end. The shadows inside the workshop were growing longer and darker. "In the stories, it's always easier."

  "We should get her ready to move," I said. "You'll need help with the gurney, for the first part at least.

  * * * *

  This time the bird calls started right on sunset, a whole murder of Corvidae starting their mockery at once. I sent Jackson upstairs with two bowls of soup and a pair of spoons, keeping up appearances in case their spies had an angle to see into the house. He pretended he was weary, stomping as he climbed the stairs. He snuck back down quietly, taking each stair with a graceful limp. The wood didn't squeak beneath him, and perhaps the ruse was pointless at this late hour; the plan would work or it wouldn't, whether we maintained the ruse or not. He nodded at me, eyes shining. We turned out the lights.

  "Tick-Tock," Rook3 said, calling through the door. "Hey, Tick-Tock? We-and-I getting bored. We be cracking your cage tonight." I heard the regular chk-chk-chk of the taser discharge, the sharp squeal of nails against the metal bars over the window. "Insulated, Tick-Tock," Rook3 taunted. "Me-and-I saw your little friend, saw the fat little Pelican. Got me what I need to break down your little toys." He knocked on the door again; rap-rap-rap. This time it wasn't followed by a scream.

  I heard the door to the tunnel slide shut, the quiet click of a lock settling in place. "Me-and-I eat your eyes tonight, Tick-Tock. Eat your eyes and taste the sweet-meat upstairs, after we gut da patch. He shouldn'a saved her, Tick-Tock." Chk-chk-chk as the taser spluttered, useless, against the claws sliding over the door. Nails on the metal, sharp squeal like a knife to the gut. The sound drew goosebumps from what flesh I still possessed.