[TCD]: The Pounds of Flesh - 6
Risking the Dead
“So, to recap—”
—With his sled thoroughly wedged in the tight pass between two large rock formations and a cadre of restless dragons milling about, a harrier named Oliver Corbyn found himself in the unfortunate position of having to take stock of their situation. He paced, speaking aloud, but mostly to himself.
“We’re down one harrier, two sleds, and missing roughly… twelve dragons?”
To say yesterday had been hell would be putting it lightly. He was lucky at least that he barely knew Xantha, the third member of their team — not that watching her helmet get caved in with a rock was any easier for it. The three of them had only met a few days ago, and they didn’t seem too pleased with his company anyway. If Tower hadn’t assigned them to go together, he doubted the other two would’ve been interested in a fairly fresh offworlder being on their roster.
Oliver’s ship had landed only a week before the storm had hit, shutting down the larger Martian society for months until it began letting up. By that time, he was already sick of the city and ready to try his luck somewhere that didn’t remind him so much of his former home back in England. If there had been a train or even a damn plane, he might’ve taken those, but it seemed the best way to get to the next big city was just to sign on with the harriers and team-hop until he found a place he actually liked. He was happy to report that he was picking up on things quickly.
Admittedly, though, this had not all gone according to plan.
His (remaining) companion was a younger man who called himself Tan. It wasn’t entirely clear if this was a nickname or his real name, or his even real-er “Martian name” — Martians had their fair share of oddities when it came to that sort of thing, and in his experience, harriers were even worse about it.
It could’ve meant Tanner, or Tangent, maybe tan like the color, or just a nickname for an obscure Martian landmark he’d never heard of. There was really no telling.
From his demeanor following the incident, it didn’t seem Tan knew Xantha any better than he did. Or maybe he did, and this was just another tidbit of harrier weirdness. Probably considered her a sacrifice to the desert or something of the sort.
“Our only remaining sled has gotten wedged between two rocks in this blasted pass, destroying the solar wings in the process — not that they were going to help us for much longer, considering it’s almost dusk. The rocks are also blocking our radio signals, so we can’t contact any Towers in the area to let them know what happened.”
He eyed the damage to the front of the hull.
“…and the dragons nearly ripped the harness line out. Perfect.”
Tan, a climbing pick in one hand, eyed the rocks and the gouge lines on the hull. “And zombies.”
“Right, yes.” If Oliver could reach to pinch the skin between his eyes, he would. Unfortunately, his fingers only hit the glass of his helmet. He’d call it rotten luck that they’d run into the dead harriers, their suits stained with blood and a few with body parts missing or hanging on by sinew alone, but the phrase seemed a bit of an insensitive pun, considering. “Somehow, the living dead are amongst the least of our concerns at the moment. Assuming they haven’t followed us, of course.”
“They seemed more interested in Xantha. Once we got far enough away, at least. With any luck they’ll have stuck around her. Or have gotten lost when they finally came looking.”
“You at least seem to have your wits about you regarding our situation. That’ll be quite helpful to keeping us alive, I’m sure.”
Tan just shrugged. “Far from the first time I’ve seen a dead body.”
“…Ah.”
Harriers did lead… charming lives, it seemed.
With a heavy sigh, he looked around.
There was still a bit of red dust in the air from the storm. Gusts of it were still blowing overhead and sifting through this narrow passage, and he knew they blew freely over the open ground outside of it. Visibility was getting better daily, but it would take some time for it to all settle. Apparently, if the Tower hadn’t gotten a distress call from a small town in need of supplies, they wouldn’t be out running missions this early in the first place.
He understood why. Their solar panels had been barely functional enough to keep the sled afloat with all the dust in the air, and navigating in these conditions had to be against some kind of protocol.
That, of course, was assuming Martians had protocols. He wasn’t convinced.
Regardless, he turned his eyes to his immediate surroundings. Most of the rocks around them weren’t as sheer or narrow as the area they’d gotten stuck in — they were a bit steep, but certainly not an incline he couldn’t handle on foot.
Tan had gotten to work on chiseling the stone around the sled, trying to free it. The sound echoed off the rock walls.
With the light above them dying, Oliver retrieved his radio. “There might be a signal further up. I’ll let you know if I get into contact with anyone.”
Tan muttered an agreement, and Oliver set off.
The hike was short, maybe five to ten minutes of routing his way up the sand and dust-covered rocks until his head finally popped above the formation. He hefted himself up into a seated position on top of the rocks and pulled out his radio.
He spoke into it impatiently. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
Static. There was a disturbance in it, though, like a voice he couldn’t quite make out. The dust had been doing no favors to their signal since they’d left, and it seemed that had not changed. He tried again.
“If anyone can hear me, things have gone a bit pear-shaped for us out here. You might want to consider sending a rescue team to our location?”
He pressed a button on the side of his radio, transmitting his coordinates along with his message. With any luck, maybe the coordinates might be picked up better than his own voice.
More static. This time, though, he could finally make out a single word: “Standby.”
“Standby?” He asked aloud before speaking into the radio once again. “We’re in the middle of bloody nowhere, how long do you expect us to stand by?!”
To this, he received no answer.
Oliver huffed, turning his eyes to the dust-strewn landscape. They weren’t far from the exit of the rock formations, where it sloped downward into a small valley. What little was visible of the sun’s light refracting through the dust had already faded from most of this lower area, shadows drawing themselves long and tall by this hour.
Still, he was able to make out… something. It took a few seconds of staring to be certain, but the more he looked, the more sure he was. Movement. Some sort of large animal?
Looking down into the pass, he could still see Tan below him, working away at the rock. The dragons had grown more restless, shaking their heads and stomping their claws against the hard-packed ground.
“Tan!” He called down. “Did we manage to salvage any binoculars?”
By some miracle, the other man seemed to have heard him. He climbed into what was left of the sled, pulling out a bag and holding it up. Oliver waved him towards his position (he certainly wasn’t climbing back down for the blasted things), and Tan begrudgingly began the trek up.
For some minutes, Oliver watched the figure moving in the dust. Its route seemed opposite to theirs, approaching the rocks at a slow but steady pace. It was bipedal, definitely not a dragon, but the rest of its proportions didn’t exactly place it squarely in the human category either. From this distance, and in these abhorrent lighting conditions, he could only make out a large mass at its back.
At last, Tan made it up to the ridge, holding out one set of binoculars and keeping the other for himself. “You see something?”
Oliver pointed out the creature. “Something on the approach. Can’t tell from here what it is.”
“If it’s on foot and isn’t a dragon, chances are we’re dealing with another one of those… things,” Tan said, and he had a point. The strange creature bore a pace that belied either undeath or deathly determination.
The two men put the binoculars up to their helmets, locating the hulking figure.
A humanoid, by the looks of it. A harrier, even, though with this increased clarity there was little doubt in Oliver’s mind that this wasn’t any sort of harrier he’d seen before.
It did seem to be wearing a suit, albeit with heavy augmentations. It was mechanized, reinforced with a latticework of dull-colored metal and God knows what else, making its silhouette larger and bulkier than that of a mere man.
The large mass at its back deformed its silhouette like a great shell. Some sort of backpack?
As it trekked closer, it passed briefly through an area without shadow, light glinting off something it wore atop the large mass. Solar panels, Oliver realized, hungrily turned towards the faint bits of sunlight that remained.
It carried in its hands a weapon with a shoulder strap, but not quite like the CO2 rifles he’d seen rangers carry. This one had a wooden stock and a magazine — long and curved.
“Doesn’t look dead,” Oliver mused. “Should we signal them?”
Beside him, Tan had gone quite pale.
Before Oliver could even get a word out, Tan had yanked Oliver’s head down below the ridgeline, turned, and begun skidding haphazardly back down the rocks towards the remaining sled.
Oliver called after him with no response or acknowledgement.
Chalking this up to more harrier strangeness, Oliver peeked back over the ridgeline, locating the figure once again. This time, rather disconcertingly, he found the figure staring back, the helmet glass glinting black in this light.
A troubled feeling stirring in his chest, Oliver followed shortly after Tan, making it down to the bottom a few seconds behind him. “Tan, what on Earth—”
The harrier was wild-eyed, gathering what he could from the sled.
“…This is a lot of fuss to throw over a harrier on foot, you know.”
“That isn’t a harrier,” Tan snapped, tossing a pack full of things in his direction that Oliver only just managed to catch.
“Hey— I don’t see why—”
Tan glared at him, chest heaving. His eyes searched Oliver’s, and whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it. “Damn offworlder,” he hissed, shaking his head and using the sharp curve of his pick to snap the harness line. The dragons, relieved of the sled’s burden, danced anxiously, looking to the two men for their next directive.
“What are you—”
“That isn’t a harrier!” Tan repeated, slinging a pack over his shoulder and dashing past Oliver to unclip each dragon from the harness line. He held onto two of them, but the rest he shouted at until they turned, stumbling over each other to leap over the sled and back the way they’d come.
Tan shoved the reins of one dragon into Oliver’s hands as he stood there, dumbfounded.
“That,” he rasped between clenched teeth, “is a scarab.”
Oliver blinked at him.
Harriers had all manner of stories, strange things they’d seen in their travels, anomalies they’d encountered en-route between various cities and towns, and a variety of boogeymen to haunt children’s bedtime stories. While it was fascinating from an outside perspective, Oliver had never had much reason to believe in sand-sailor superstitions.
Scarabs were amongst these. Whispered rumors of men beset across the desert… though the stories varied as to why, or how corporeal they might be. Husks, some said. Sunken-faced ghosts. Cursed to cross the desert endlessly by whatever godless force commanded them.
Smugglers, others said. Murderers. Forces of death in the desert. Men who scratched tallies of their kills into their weapons.
Headhunters that targeted harriers indiscriminately and left them to rot where they lay, only for the wreckage to vanish days later.
Part of him entertained the idea that he hadn’t seen what he had. The visibility was horrid, after all. Maybe his eyes and the sand were just playing tricks on him. Still, the empty, black-helmet stare the stranger had given him…
He did not consider himself a superstitious man. In this case, however, it might be better to be safe than sorry.
Oliver had never ridden a dragon before. Considering the circumstances, he was willing to try. “Fine — but I will point out that THAT way leads back into zombie territory,” Oliver called as he scrambled onto the dragon’s back, but Tan had already begun urging his dragon over the remains of the sled.
“I’d rather risk the dead,” Tan called back, his voice sharp and grim.
“Somehow the least of our worries yet again…”
As the heavy mechanical footsteps of the creature had just begun echoing through the pass, the two mounted harriers slipped back amongst the rocks, fleeing in the direction they had come and surrendering anything they could not carry to the desert specter.
This release happens to be very special because I’m dedicating it to my wonderful brother, Jonathan, who is responsible for the creation of Scarabs in Cardinal’s universe. It’s his birthday tomorrow, and this felt like a great time to officially canonize them. So, Jonathan, Happy Early Birthday, and I hope I did your idea justice!
For everyone else — Hello and thank you for reading the sixth release in this anthology series based in the universe of The Cardinal Directive! Thank you all for understanding about the movement of Monday releases, it’s been a great help for my creative process.
The wider universe can be found [HERE] if you want to know the main storyline! Otherwise, check out the other installments of the anthology!
Story 1 - “Ole Girl”
Story 2 - “A City to Die For”
Story 3 - “A Dragon’s Choice”
Story 4 - “The Price of Research”
Story 5 - “The Last Letter”
Remember to toss a like if you liked it, leave a comment, share, and subscribe if you want to see more!
I absolutely loved it. Unreal to see a Scarab in writing