Chapter Seventeen

Magna helped Sarah down the narrow ladder into the belly of the FNS Nordvind, the most advanced submarine in the Finnish Navy. There wasn’t much competition anymore. “He found me,” she told Sarah, talking about her husband. He had been a warrant officer onboard the Nordvind when the Epidemic began. “They put into port with the dead already coming over the fence. He deserted when he saw what was happening. Well, they all deserted. He came and found me—I was on the roof of the PX. He came and found me and he hasn’t spoken a word since. It was my idea to steal the submersible.”

The two women passed forward into the bridge of the submarine. Magna’s three children, none of them over ten, scrambled out of their way. The oldest, a girl wearing a captain’s hat with maroon bars, folded up the periscope handles and raised into into a locked position.

“They’re adorable,” Sarah said, watching the blonde children man the submarine’s instruments.

“They’re my angels.” Magna touched the springy yellow curls of the youngest who sat at the chart table with her feet dangling from the chair. She brought Sarah to a small room ahead of the bridge, a briefing room for the captain. Her husband Linus sat at a low table there, a plate of salted cod fish untouched next to him. His hair and beard were pure white and draped down over his shirt, clean and carefully brushed. He didn’t look up when Sarah entered. “Lover,” Magna called, but that elicited no response, either. “He’s like this all the time. He’ll eat, if I feed him. He’ll do just about anything if I talk him through it but he would just sit there forever if I let him.” Magna gave him a tiny smile, her face folding in on itself as she hugged her own arms. “Catatonic stupor, they call it. I don’t have the drugs to treat him but I can look up their names in my Physician’s Desk Reference.”

Something occurred to Sarah, something she didn’t want to consider too closely. If the man had been catatonic for twelve years, and his eldest daughter was only ten at the most... well. People got lonely. Sarah knew a little bit about manners, so she didn’t ask.

“Normally we stay surfaced for the fresh air and the sunlight. We only dive when someone comes by—I’ve kept us alive this long by cultivating my antisocial behaviors. I fish over the side most days, and some days I just lie in bed and conserve my energy,” Magna told her. “I have a little garden down here, under some ultraviolet lamps. The submariners used those when they went on polar missions, to avoid seasonal affective disorder. Sometimes I need them too.”

“You dive whenever anybody comes by?” Sarah asked. “Does that happen... often?”

Magna nodded absently. “There are a surprisingly large number of people like me. People who have surrendered dry land to the deaders. Most of them aren’t as well kitted out as I am. A lot of them are borderline personality types, do you understand? Pirates.”

“But you surfaced for us.”

Magna smiled, a smile so wry and complicated it looked like a frown. “Only because you happen to be the friend of a… well. It wasn’t the first time I netted a floating deader. I’ve never caught one who could talk, though. He told me things. Comforting things. These days I take my validation where I can get it. He said his name was Jack, and that a girl named Sarah would find me, that he needed to talk to her. Here, will you help me with this?” She handed Sarah a folding patio chair. “I’d let you to talk to him down here but the smell... I’m sure you understand. He must have been floating for weeks when I found him. I don’t know who he is when he’s at home but right now he’s terrifically whiffy.”

Together the women climbed back up to the deck where they set up the two patio chairs under a sun umbrella. Magna put out a pitcher of ice water (the submarine had its own desalinization plant, she explained proudly) and a single glass. Sarah’s guest wouldn’t need one. Then Magna untied and unwrapped the tarpaulin-covered mass at the back of the deck. Frowning and holding her face very tight she brought her burden over and dumped it unceremoniously in the second patio chair. “If you need me, shout,” Magna told Sarah. “I’ll be below watching series four of Prime Suspect on DVD. I’ve seen it so many times the perspex has worn right off the disk but I never get tired of Helen Mirren.”

There were words in that sentence Sarah had never heard before.

Magna finally put her pistol down next to the pitcher of ice water and left Sarah alone with Jack. What was left of his borrowed body, anyway. Fish had been at it leaving little that looked human. He had a torso and most of two arms. A head like a boiled chicken with some matted hair on the top. No eyes, nose or lips at all.

“You look like hell,” she said.

“In Finland they call hell Tuonela, at least they used to. It wasn’t supposed to be so bad. A city under the ground where you went to sleep forever. When you arrived you were still pretty active and there was a welcoming party, they gave you a big beer stein. It was full of frogs and worms but it made you groggy and when you were finished they found you a nice soft patch of ground to lie down on. Sounds better than how it actually worked out, hmm?”

“I suppose,” Sarah said. It was tough to look at him. She’d seen plenty of corpses in her day but this was bad. He stank of stale brine and sun-baked skin.

“I didn’t have much choice in bodies,” he explained, “and I needed to talk to you. It’s urgent, Sarah. There are things you need to know.”

She bit her lip and nodded. “I know that rescuing Ayaan isn’t going to be easy. I’m committed, though, and I’ve got Osman to go along with me. Ptolemy wants revenge, I can work with that—” She stopped. Something fragile and small opened inside of her, a flower of emotion. If she examined it too closely she knew it would collapse. “Ayaan is dead. That’s what you’re here to tell me,” she guessed, her breath very cold in her lungs. “I mean, you would know, somehow.”

“Yes,” Jack replied. He looked a little like he was melting. “They’re all… down in here with me. All the dead people. If she was dead I would be able to find her, and I can’t. She's still alive, for the moment at least.”

“Oh.” The feeling inside her liquefied and drained away. It was—it had been—a kind of relief, and now it was gone. She understood that when she had heard Jack wanted to talk her subconscious had assumed it was to tell her that she’d done all that she could, that she’d been very brave but now it was over. But it wasn’t over, it couldn’t be yet. She had actually, in some quiet, small way, hoped that Ayaan was dead.

The thought wasn't worth the energy it would take to rationalize it away. Sarah looked away from him and changed the subject. “So it’s true, all that religion stuff? There’s an afterlife?”

“You could say that. Like you could say that a book still goes on even after you’re done reading it and you’ve put it on the shelf. All the words are still there.”

“That’s… interesting,” she said.

“Fucking fascinating. Now shut up and listen to me. I don’t want to have to stay in this body any longer than I have to.”

He looked out over the waves, drew a deep breath. “The one consolation for being dead—the only possible consolation—is that you hear things. Dead people love to gossip, just like the living. If you’re selective with who you listen to you can actually learn something useful, sometimes. I happen to have met somebody who works for our enemy. The Tsarevich, I’m told, is planning something big. He’s been working on it for years—maybe since the beginning. It's going to be the culmination of his unlife. He’s been busy at it, collecting things he needs.”

“Things?” Sarah asked.

“People, mostly. People like Ayaan or all those mummies. There’s at least one more person he needs, somebody very special and he’ll stop at nothing to find her, or at least a reasonable facsimile. He’s been making liches at a furious rate, killing most of them because they didn’t have powers or they didn’t have the right powers. He’s been collecting old bits of machinery, too, and documents the Soviets left behind. He took five tons of documents out of a cave near Magnitogorsk last year, research materials, parascience stuff left by Stalin-era scientists looking to find a way to bring dead soldiers back to life on the battlefield. Whatever he found in those papers made him think he needed to kidnap a bunch of mummies. Now he’s moving. He’s moving west. Toward the Source. Do you understand where this is going?”

“I think so,” she tried, though she really didn’t.

“It means that once he has this last person that he needs, he’ll be ready to act. It means we have very little time left for dilly-dallying. You want to save Ayaan, fine, and if Ptolemy wants revenge well so be it. But you need to know the Russian bastard has his own agenda, and I can guarantee you it isn’t good. Ayaan plays into his hand somehow so he won’t give her up easily. You're going to have to fight, Sarah. You can't just run along after him for the rest of time, you're going to have to fight. I know that isn't your strong suit. You’re going to need help. Find yourself a couple of atom bombs, raise an army if you need to.”

“I don’t know how—”

“Then learn. I gave you your gift for a reason. Use it, now. You’ve got to find things out, you have to learn a lot between now and the end of this.”

“...Learn things?”

“Yeah. And some of them are going to make you cry. I’d go do it for you but, well. Since I’m just a disembodied consciousness cut loose in the void, I figure you’re going to have to do the heavy lifting. Understand?”

“Yeah.” This time she thought she did understand. She’d just grabbed the shitty end of the stick. Sarah poured herself a glass of water. Her mouth had gone very dry.

“Okay. So I’ll try to find out more, give you a better idea of what you’re up against as we get closer. For now I’m going to let this body go. Once I’m out you know what to do.”

Jack rocked back and forth a few times and let his torso crash forward onto the deck. Sarah looked down at the knobby back of its neck, the places where the skin of its back had been nibbled away. It turned its ruined face up toward her and its jaws clacked shut, looking more like a horribly wounded tortoise than a human being. Clearly Jack was gone. She picked up the pistol Magna had left for her and thumbed the safety. The gunshot passed right through Jack's deliquescent flesh and pranged off the submarine's hull, making it ring like a bell. And then Sarah was alone, completely alone on the rolling water.