[TCD]: The Pounds of Flesh - 8
Tower Eight
Death was not designed as a fickle thing.
It was not made to be subverted.
An apocalypse had begun. The very nature of death itself was being warped by forces beyond their control, with no clear idea of how it was spread or contracted.
Biometric scanners seemed to be the only clue anyone had. Whatever contorted creature a dead man was, it didn’t register on the scanners, and neither did the infected.
In some respects, the woman who operated Tower Eight considered herself lucky. She lived alone in a small watchtower not far from Arsia, close to civilization and yet completely removed from the fear of infected strangers. Her biodome was small and relatively easy to maintain with the right supplies, and her proximity to Arsia made those supplies much easier to obtain than many of the more isolated Towers she’d passed messages with.
On the other hand, it left the mind open to speculation. She couldn’t count the number of hours she’d spent pacing with her thoughts, contemplating the nature of life and death now that the two were recursing back in on each other.
An apocalypse had begun. She knew it for a fact, and she understood it as such.
That news had been a lot of things. Concerning. Frightening, really. Annoying, in its own way. It was a gruesome, terrible fact, and it complicated the logistics of her operation more than anything.
Arsia had closed its doors. No one in or out. A handful of Towers kept in contact with the outside world, but they were unwilling to share much information about their own situation, or whether or not supplies would be on its way. She was required to send a transmission to them daily. They never responded directly.
The summer sandstorm had lasted a few months, but not long enough that Eight had run out of stockpiled food or water. She had enough to last her a few more months at the very least — maybe more if she rationed tighter than before. Even if it took Arsia several months to get a fresh batch of supplies to her, she should be fine. She’d even started her own little vegetable garden on the bottom layer of her tower. Arranged a trade with the Arsian Towers to get some fresh soil, seeds, and a basic hanging garden setup for the (relatively) low price of giving them priority with any transmissions she received.
It had been nice, planting her own garden. Growing something vibrant and green in a world so full of dull, rusted reds as far as the eye could see. She’d started the project a few weeks before the storm rolled in, and had lived by the light of her grow lamps for the months that it had passed over her and blotted out the sky.
It wasn’t for nothing, necessarily. But she had a feeling that it wouldn’t matter for much longer.
An apocalypse had begun. It was a fact as real and as rooted as anything growing in her makeshift garden.
But for a radio operator, alone in her Tower, what did that really change? The walls of her station remained the same, the blue glow of the biodome as ever-present as it had ever been. The few roaming dead she’d seen with her own eyes had been only through binoculars, tracing their aimless, yet determined shamble across the desert.
A few days ago, a lochsled graveyard had cropped up five hundred feet from the decon doors of her little outpost.
It had appeared overnight.
She’d greeted the sunrise that day to the sight of sunlight bleeding through the exposed wires and solar wings of a damaged hovercraft, twenty feet off the ground with its nose pointed towards the sand below.
Maybe that in itself wasn’t too unusual. The Red was well known for its anomalies. Hotspots like this one would appear and disappear as they pleased, and always had.
What was maybe more unusual was what had appeared the day after — a figure. A man wearing a green jumpsuit. A harrier. A sand-sailor, dead and walking.
She hadn’t realized what he was at first. The thought had occurred to her, sure, but he hadn’t been immediately, obviously… dead the way she was expecting.
He stood upright and tall, staring skyward at the floating machinery. From her angle, she couldn’t even see a breach in his suit or a helmet. Even after several attempts to hail him, she could believe that he didn’t have a radio, or that he’d turned it off for some reason if he did. Stranger things had happened.
She’d watched the stranger all morning as he stared, wondering what significance the craft held to him. Maybe it was his own, and he was trying to figure out a way to get it down. Maybe he was a thief, interested in the hovercore powering its flight.
Maybe his empty, stock-still stare was the look of a man whose sled had been wrecked, his dragons detached, and now could only watch as it floated above his grasp, stranding him helplessly in the desert. Perhaps it was the stare of a broken man.
It had taken about thirty minutes for enough blood to pool around the dead man’s feet that Eight was able to notice it and recognize his nature. Still, the creature did not move, only craned its neck back and stared into the sun. It was unnerving. Disgusting. The sight of him made her skin crawl.
Days and nights passed with no sign of movement from him.
But eventually his presence became routine. She would wake up, send her morning transmission to Arsia, and walk out on the windowed terrace of her Tower to stare out at the dead man and his sled.
After a while, she started hailing to him again, speaking quietly across the waves. She wasn’t sure if his radio was still working, but it didn’t really matter either way.
Bit by bit, she bore her thoughts to him. First, surface level boredoms and the mundane. But it wasn’t long before the dead man’s ears became the asylum for her restless thoughts, her anxieties, her deepest fears.
She painted a picture of what she thought he might have been like, what he might have done. In the slow, empty hours of the day, she speculated and questioned him about his first dog and how old he was when he took up harrying. What he was running from, and why it took him all the way out here.
On the more morbid nights, she asked him how it felt to die, and come back. Asked him if they would all be like him one day.
He never responded, of course. Still, that was about the same level of engagement she got from Arsia Tower, so there wasn’t much to be upset over. There was peace in the listening ears of the apocalypse. A confessional to the dead themselves.
One morning, she woke up to find it all gone.
The graveyard and its singular grave were nowhere to be found, and the grim company she’d kept had moved along with it.
The horizon was empty. No one responded to her transmissions.
She’d never been more aware of the vastness of the desert in that moment, stretching off endlessly into the distance.
An apocalypse had begun. She knew it for a fact. But even that knowledge had not prepared her for what it would feel like to wake every morning, to send her unanswered transmission to civilization, and to walk out onto the windowed terrace of Tower Eight and see… nothing.
That night, she laid in bed, staring at the ceiling.
And cried.
End
Hello and thank you for reading the eighth release in this anthology series based in the universe of The Cardinal Directive!
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”
Story 6 - “Risking the Dead”
Story 7 - “Lecture Questions”
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That was wonderful!