Land of the Beautiful Dead Read online

  Also by R. LEE SMITH:

  Heat

  The Lords of Arcadia Series:

  The Care and Feeding of Griffins

  The Wizard in the Woods

  The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

  The Army of Mab

  Olivia

  The Scholomance

  Cottonwood

  The Last Hour of Gann

  Coming Soon!

  Pool

  LAND

  OF THE

  BEAUTIFUL DEAD

  R. Lee Smith

  This one is for Aaron.

  Copyright © 2015 by R. Lee Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The ferryman had six more fares in the back of his van and a long way yet to drive, so he didn’t stop at town. He just rolled up to the docking gate, opened up the hatch and told her to get out.

  Lan got out, moving carefully along the van’s armored roof and trying not to look at the Eaters clambering below her. They hadn’t seen many on the drive, but there were always Eaters at the towns and this one was pretty big, as towns went these days.

  There were kids up on the wall, taking shots at Eaters and smoking. They had bows and buckets of smouldering pitch beside them, but it had rained most of the morning and the dead were too wet to burn, so they were using guns instead, showing off the wealth of a town that could afford to waste bullets on Eaters. When they saw her, one of the kids dropped a ladder and steadied it for her while another jotted down the name painted on the side of the ferry beneath the picture of the red-haired siren with her sword raised high over a heap of decapitated corpses. The Boudicca, it said, which Lan only knew because the ferryman had bragged it up all the way from Morrow-up-Marsh where he’d taken her on.

  “Bloody Irish,” said the kid, now turning to her, tapping his stub of a pencil so she’d notice him writing and be impressed. “Welcome to New Aylesbury. What do you want?”

  “Just passing.”

  “Well, first night’s free if it’s just you, but it’ll be a ‘slip a night for a longer stay, plus the cost of the bed. If you’re set on paying for a bed,” he added. He didn’t look at her when he said it, but she could feel the unspoken invitation hovering between them.

  Lan said, “I’m just passing,” again and left it at that. She had no coin, but she had plenty of barter in her rucksack and in any case, he was too young for her. A girl on her own couldn’t afford many scruples, but Lan was not going to be some wall-rat’s first brag just for the price of a bed in some mudlump of a town.

  If the kid was disappointed, it didn’t show. He just moved on to the next question. “Where from?”

  “Norwood.”

  He looked up from his book, smiling beneath puzzled eyes. “Where’s that?”

  “Near Lancaster.” She shrugged. “Nearish.”

  “And you?”

  “Lan.”

  The kid rolled his eyes and wrote it down. “Yeah, okay, Lan from Lancaster.”

  “Lan,” said Lan in a soft, stony voice. Her mother’s voice. “From Norwood.”

  “Whatever you say,” said the kid, not believing her and not caring if she knew it. He made a point of drawing a line through the letters in his book and writing new ones in. This done, he nodded to his friend, who in turn signaled the ferryman below. The kids pulled the ladder up as the ferry drove away, bumping over Eaters and leaving smears of old blood and rotting flesh in its wake. “So, Lan from Norwood,” said the kid, putting his book and pencil away. “What can we do for you?”

  “I need another ferry. They come through regular?”

  “Yeah, we got a few in, although they’re not leaving until morning. Hey, Jakes!” he called, leaning out from the docking tower. “Got a fare for ya!” He pointed Lan toward one of the kids looking curiously up from a corral of armored ferry-vans and went back to the wall, leaving her to climb down alone. The kids all had vans with pictures of scantily-clad ladies on the side, either posed to do in an Eater or just posed. The one with the kid called Jakes working on it had the stamps of a dozen towns or more painted on the side, underneath the naked lady hacking open Eaters with the machetes she carried in each dainty hand.

  “This here’s Big Bertha,” the kid said proudly, wiping a greasy hand on his shirt so she could shake it. “Fastest, meanest bitch on four wheels. Where bound, luv?”

  She told him.

  He laughed. All the ferrymen laughed. “Not in my ferry. This may not be much of a world, but I’m not leaving it that way.”

  “I pay good.”

  “You could pay in clean cunny and pure meth, but you’ll still be paying someone else.”

  She didn’t argue with him. There wouldn’t be any more ferries this late, so instead she asked him the way to the hostel.

  Like all hostels these days, it did double duty as the prison and as the emergency shelter, should the town walls ever fall. Lan took her key and locked herself in the first available cell. A guard came by every so often with boiled water; everything else had a price (although the currency was negotiable, he said, reaching through the bars to stroke at her arm). She had food in her rucksack, but she didn’t want anyone in this strange town to know she had it. She could have used a bath, but knew she’d be watched while she took one. All Lan wanted was to sleep until the next ferryman came through, but she didn’t believe hers was the only key to this cell, so she sat on the lumpy mattress that was her bed and looked out the narrow window at the unnatural mess that was the only sky Lan had ever known. Although no one could seem to agree on exactly how long it had been since Azrael’s ascension, Lan had never known any world but this one. Her mother used to say she remembered, but she’d been a kid—six or seven or maybe only five—when Azrael came.

  No one knew who Azrael was or even what. Demon was the popular theory. Azrael never denied it. Neither did he deny sorcerer, Satan, alien, or mutated man. But whatever else he was, Lan’s mother would say, he was Death. As the master of that domain, he had torn his first companions from their rightful rest and set them at his side under new names, without memory, without humanity. Perhaps he expected Mankind to meekly surrender their world to him, to accept his rule without question and worship him without resentment.

  “We fought back,” Lan’s mother would always say, should this part of the story come around. ‘We,’ she said, and she said it with pride, she who had been that child of maybe seven, maybe only five. “He raised his so-called children and before the sun had set, we killed them again. Most of them.”

  Lan knew how that had gone. Norwood’s sheriff had saved pictures, but even if she hadn’t, plenty of people still talked about it, whether or not they were old enough to remember. They were proud of it, proud of the troops who had broken down the doors of Azrael’s first home, slaughtering the newly-raised corpses where they stood unresisting, until Azrael fell on them. Before the sun had set, Lan’s mother would say, and before that same sun had risen again, Azrael and his three remaining Children had fled, but not far. He was back soon enough, bringing with him the fires and the poison rain and the skies that were still lit up with that sick color that had no earthly name. All of that, yes, and the Eaters.

  There had been other names for them in the beginning, back
when people thought they knew what the Eaters were, back when people thought they could be stopped with something as simple as a bullet to the brain. No. This was Azrael’s world and nothing died save by his word of release. You could break them, burn them, or just wait them out until they had rotted away to bones and could no longer come after you, but even then, whatever remained of them still retained some kind of horrible life. Lan could remember her mother pulling the teeth from a charred skull after a neighbor’s death and showing them to her, how the teeth had trembled in her mother’s hand, trying to come together and bite. There was no hope then, only the diminishing living, the growing ranks of the dead, and less and less unpoisoned land to share between them.

  Surrender was inevitable, no matter how bitterly Lan’s mother spoke of it now, but surrender had not ended the war. Azrael had accepted the leaders of that broken world for his unending retribution, but he did not forgive the people who gave them up. In the years since his ascension, Azrael had harrowed his great army to a whisper of its former magnitude, but even a handful of Revenants was enough to wipe out whole villages when all they had to do was break down one wall, let the Eaters in, and wait. Everything else they did—the burning, the dismemberments, the impaling poles—served purely as a warning of the fate that awaited all those who took such unwise pride in defiance.

  And really, what did Azrael have to fear from them? The world which had once groaned under Man’s weight was quiet now. Cities made to harbor millions had been empty for decades, fallen in and grown over. The last dams had long since burst, the last bridges collapsed. Deer grazed on the old roads, Revenants patrolled the new ones, and folk mostly stayed home these days. So long as they did, Azrael seemed content to tolerate the living even here, provided they stayed well away from his city, his Haven, the land of the beautiful dead.

  She was close now, so close. This fool’s journey, begun when Lan walked away from her mother’s smoky pyre two months ago, was now only a day from over, if only she could find someone to finish it for her.

  Lan dragged her eyes open without any conscious memory of closing them. She was falling asleep and sleep was never safe in a strange town. She got up and dragged her mattress over to the cell door, propping it against the sliding panel so that she could not help but be jostled awake should someone try to come in with her in the night. Then she lay down, pillowing her head on her lumpy, uncomfortable rucksack, and went to sleep.

  * * *

  Sometime in the middle of that dark, dreamless night, a hand slipped through the bars of Lan’s cell to grip her foot. It was lifted, tersely shaken, dropped. Lan bolted upright, snatching her knife from its concealed holster on her back, but did not slash. She could see only a shadow among shadows in the moonlit cell, but the shadow wasn’t attacking. It appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat and there were glints here and there that might be a metal buckle, an ammo belt, a gun.

  “You Lan?” the shadow said. The voice was a man’s, much older than she’d expected. Ferrying was a kid’s game, and a reckless, nihilistic kid at that. Everyone who’d ferried her this far had been her own age or younger. Here was a man who maybe used to live in a city, the way the cities used to be, all lit up and full of people. Maybe he’d had a job. Maybe he’d had a family.

  “I’m Lan,” she said warily. “Did they tell you where I want to go?”

  “They said you could pay.”

  She unzipped her rucksack and showed him two quart-bottles of peaches. “This year’s,” she told him. “From Norwood.”

  He took one and tested the seal, but even though she couldn’t make out his eyes, she had the feeling he was still looking at her. “What else?”

  “That’s what you get to take me there.” Lan took the peaches back and zipped them up. “But you can have this and everything in it if you get me over the wall.”

  She expected an argument, a laugh at the very least. Instead, as if he didn’t care at all, he said, “As soon as you’re ready, we can go.”

  Lan blinked. “Really?”

  The shadow turned around and started walking away. “Van’s charged up. Light don’t bother them and the dark don’t bother me. Let’s go.”

  Lan scrambled up, struggling to find the door before remembering she’d pushed the mattress against it. She followed the ferryman in the dark, running after him even though he never seemed to walk any faster, catching up only when he reached his plain, unpainted van. The other ferrymen, sleeping in their vans, watched them go. Lan could see Jakes shaking his head, laughing at her as he put himself back to bed.

  Once they were on the road, she got her first good look at him. Unnerving, was her first impression. Too handsome. Not as old as she’d thought in the hostel. Her mother’s age, maybe a little older, but he mostly wore it in his eyes. His skin was smooth, unlined. He had no beard, not even the shadow of one. His one flaw was a slash across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek. He’d cleaned it and sewn it shut (he’d cleaned it very well; it wasn’t even a little bit red or swollen. In the dim light, it was more like a painted line than a real wound), but it hadn’t yet begun to heal.

  The ferryman caught her staring. He pointed at a book of CDs and gruffly invited her to pick one. Lan thumbed through the plastic pages and chose one at random. She didn’t like the music that played out through the ferry’s speakers. It was too strange, too full of complicated notes made by instruments no one could make anymore. On impulse, she asked him what the world was like before Azrael.

  “I don’t remember,” he told her and after that, he did not speak.

  They drove through the remains of the night and most of the next day, stopping a few hours before dusk at a waystation so close to her final destination that the clouds on the horizon were actually orange, reflecting the electric lights that lit its streets. Eaters milled stupidly around the fence, tearing themselves on razor wire and occasionally chewing at one another’s wounds if they were fresh enough. There were a couple of teenaged boys by the gate, smoking and shooting flares at the dry ones, and after the ferryman finished running over the Eaters to clear the gate, they let them in.

  There was only one other van parked at the station, so there were plenty of charging ports open. There was also a greasy-looking diner that promised beds and hot food. Just what they might be serving, Lan didn’t know. Most waystations were built around small orchards or pens of goats or pigs. There was nothing here, nothing but the scorched black rubble of the wastes.

  The boys seemed to know the ferryman, although they didn’t call him by name. Lan waited, watching the Eaters pick themselves up if they could and writhe around if they couldn’t while the ferryman got out and plugged the van’s batteries into a charger. When he came back, he asked her if she wanted something to eat. She said she did and he climbed into the back of the van onto the threadbare mattress there and looked at her.

  “I’m not clean,” she lied, joining him. A girl alone learned a lot of lies.

  He told her it didn’t matter, to do what she could, and then in a wistful tone at odds with his expressionless face, he told her to get naked when she did it. He wanted to look at her, he said. And that was fine. Lan undressed and used her hand while the ferryman felt up whatever he wanted to feel. He was cool in her palm, slow to respond. Too slow. Too cool. Curious, she put her mouth on him.

  He didn’t taste dead, she thought uncertainly. Not that she’d know what death tasted like. Rotten meat, she’d assume. But he didn’t taste alive, that was for sure. He didn’t taste like sweat or musk or piss or man. He tasted…like licking leather. Old leather, too smooth for its age. So now she guessed she knew what a dead man tasted like.

  She worked at it for a long time, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. The ferryman stared at the roof of his van and rested his hand on her hair and didn’t speak. His penis warmed up gradually, but never got hard. After a while, he said, “That’s enough,” and moved her gently back. He zipped himself up and watched her get dressed. “Could you tell?�
�� he asked at last.

  “Not until I touched you,” she answered honestly.

  He nodded and opened up the van’s rear doors. “I guess you could say something if you wanted to,” he said as she climbed out.

  “I’d rather get something to eat.”

  He nodded again and shut the door behind her.

  They went into the diner, past another group of kids, younger ones, racings rats in a crudely-constructed arena. The kids were all shouting, cheering, shaking their guns in the air, apparently oblivious to Lan and the ferryman. Lan would be very surprised if she didn’t find their grubby little handprints on the inside of the van when they came back to it, but if the ferryman was concerned about robbery, he didn’t show it.

  There were only three patrons inside the diner—another ferryman, a young one, and his fares, either sisters or mother and daughter, sitting close together. The younger was whisper-arguing at the older one; the older one stayed quiet, but looked like she’d been crying. Their ferryman sized Lan up with an intent interest she did not trust.

  “Tell me to touch you, okay?” she murmured as they sat down at a sagging table.

  He didn’t answer, but took her wrist and put it firmly over his crotch. She made a point of looking unhappy about it, resigned but a little fearful, as if he were dangerous. Of course he was dangerous. He was one of them—not an Eater maybe, but still one of the dead. And this was more his world now than hers.

  Soon, a girl came to their table. Not far into her adolescence, her body was taut and agreeably displayed, but her eyes were already old and tired. “We got coffee, whiskey, applejack and water. Goldslip only. No barter and none of that paper play-money.”

  “Clean water?” the ferryman pressed. You had to ask. They didn’t always tell the truth, but if you didn’t at least ask, they’d screw you over any way they could.