The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read online

  One look at those imperfect eyes was all it took for the sobs to come in shoulder racking bursts. If the other Frontists noticed his pain, they left him be, busied with the tasks of getting on in the trenches for another day.

  The Knitter brought out a gold plated oval locket and opened it. Inside, Delauchen looked back at her from the small heliotype image. He appeared startled, frightened, but it was the only time he had ever made eye contact with her, through the heliotype maker.

  The Knitter sighed. You never change, Delauchen.

  The soil beneath her heavy frame shifted and dumped the Limb Knitter down into the puddle next to Delauchen’s boot.

  Whoever threw something into the shell hole managed to do so in such a way that it splattered urine-fouled water all over Delauchen. A white haze fell over him when he saw his sketch of Yvette Mobori, preserved for two years since her death, was soaked with mud and feces. He threw the pad down and stood up, looking for the jackass that had thrown the rock into the puddle.

  “Who did it this time?” The telltale smirk always gave someone away, or at least a cluster of Frontists, but there were only pale, fearful faces instead. Delauchen’s peers skittered, cowered and backed away, staring at something behind him.

  Maybe I’ve finally beaten enough sense into them, he thought.

  Water sloshed around in the shell hole behind Delauchen. He turned to see.

  An overcoat patched in places with tar canvas and burlap rose from the muck, first to its knees, then one leg at a time, until it stood at a full two meters. It bent over to retrieve its slouch hat, floating on the surface, and replaced it upon its burlap-bag-covered head. Through two ragged holes, its yellow eyes watched Delauchen Severis with great care.

  “Look at this!” Delauchen pointed at his ruined pad and forgot that he was supposed to be afraid of the Limb Knitter. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  The Limb Knitter held its jointed, ceramic hands out, palms up, cowering ever so slightly.

  He retrieved the pad, stepped forward and held it up. When he did, he noticed a tarnished, gold-plated oval locket around the Knitter’s neck. It was still open and in it, he saw a heliotype of himself staring back.

  Delauchen knew who it belonged to and she was supposed to be dead.

  He pointed at the locket. “Where did you get that, you freak?”

  The Knitter took another step back. It stumbled on something in the hole, almost falling back into the muck. Its robe quivered and rippled along the torso, which made the patched fabric flap back and forth.

  He thrust the sketchpad at the Knitter. “You recognize her, don’t you? Where is she?”

  The Knitter’s shoulders heaved and shook. It made a high pitched scraping sound akin to nails being dragged down a slate board in a lecture hall. Other Frontists scrambled into their bomb-proofs, not sure what would come next when the Knitter fell to its knees, wringing its hands. The ceramic fingers tinkled like a china tea set, the scraping sound grew louder and began to warble.

  “Take a good look!” He threw his pad at the Knitter. It landed on the ground at the edge of the puddle. “Why don’t you answer me? Where is she?”

  “Step back from that thing!” Out of breath, Thalia took Delauchen by the shoulders and made eye contact with him. “Look at me. No, at me, Delauchen. Sit down over there and take a deep breath. Okay?”

  He nodded numbly, his anger spent, and did as he was told.

  Thalia murmured words to the effect that the Limb Knitter had best leave and rejoined Delauchen on her own ammo crate. A whining sound in the background made it hard to hear her. She dropped the ruined sketch pad at Delauchen’s muddy brogans and sighed.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think you made it cry.”

  Microturbines heralded the arrival of a pair of Invalid machines, their two-meter tall bodies slid down into the trenches, bringing one of the crucified Invader’s corpses down with them. Thalia and Delauchen watched the machines watch them before they turned and made their way down the trench to the West. Silver buzz saws on the whitewashed machine caught the sunlight with a flash before they rounded a turn in the trench and moved out of sight.

  Delauchen pulled Thalia’s hand, her Knitter hand, to his lips and kissed the albino skin. She squeezed back, but her right wasn’t as strong as her left. He tried to look into Thalia’s eyes. It was hard, not because one was red and the other was blue. It was hard to open himself up, to get his head up and look at her, really look at her.

  Once the whining turbines faded away, he let go of her hand.

  Thalia kicked Delauchen’s foot. “Two years we’ve been together and you still keep things from me.”

  “Sorry,” Delauchen said. He put the pad aside, out of Thalia’s sight. He hoped the sun would dry out the pages enough for him to salvage something.

  “Why? I’ve got a fairly thick skin. I think I can face her.”

  “She’s dead, Thalia.” He shrugged. Now that he had seen the locket, he wasn’t quite so sure. He remembered buying that locket at a sutler wagon for Yvette on their first visit to Kalentine Orchards on the northern slopes three years ago.

  “I know that,” Thalia said.

  “Then why worry about it?”

  Thalia fixed him with a stare. “Because you still love her.”

  He nudged a bit of mud next to his brogans; the heel was coming loose again. It was not an accusation, he realized, looking at his brogans. It was a fact.

  “Can’t you say that about your last battle spouse?” Delauchen asked. “Don’t you get angry that the Knitters didn’t save him? It would be far better than ending up in one of those machines.”

  She took him by the chin and held him up. “The Knitter saved me, Delauchen, not him. He was an ass anyway. Besides, one good thing came of it.”

  “What?” he asked, still looking away.

  “I met you.” She let go of him. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “We’re going to get hit soon,” he said, trying to change the subject.

  “Oh, come on. You don’t believe that crap, do you?” Thalia twisted the bottom of each ration can to start the heating process. “Imminent doom foreshadowed by the presence of a Knitter at Dawn and all that? Plenty of times I’ve seen them and nothing has happened.”

  Delauchen kept his mouth shut. It wouldn’t do any good to say anything else. He could feel it happening in him. That moment when you had to shut yourself off and go cold to the world because someone was too close, too important.

  He took a minute to consider Thalia, snapping a heliotype into his mind. Where the long-dead-and-gone Yvette Mobori had been olive in skin tone, Thalia Vetraslev was pale and red freckled. His lost lover had thick auburn curls where Thalia had short blonde hair, cropped close.

  She smiled at him.

  Smiles didn’t really mean anything; Delauchen had seen too many fake ones over the years. And when they started to mean something, as Thalia’s smile did at this instant, that was when he started to shove them away.

  She’s too close, he realized. He didn’t want to hurt her like he had Yvette.

  “You know, the Brigades Invalid might have—”

  “Don’t,” Delauchen said. “Just, don’t. Okay?” He shook his head.

  The Knitter’s locket bothered him.

  She probably threw it away after we broke up and the Knitter found it, he decided.

  Thalia looked away, unaware of what traipsed through Delauchen’s mind. She popped the top on a can of tea and handed it to her partner. “Here. Drink. You’re depressing me.”

  He reached for the steaming can of tea and in so doing, made himself try, just one more time, to look her in the eye. She watched him watching her, breathing deeply, looking down into her when their eyes finally met. He held himself there in her mismatched red-blue eyes, the fear and panic pulling at his guts.

  Don’t push her away, he told himself. Don’t quit just yet.

  She blushed. “You’re such a grump. You’re lu
cky I love you, you know that?”

  He nodded, hot can of tea in hand. He brought it up to his lips.

  There was a flash of light.

  “COVER!” someone shouted. “TAKE COV—!”

  Lightning seared his eyes as a hot thunderclap slapped them down into the mud. He struggled to pump air back into his lungs, as he slid down into the shell hole. Rats streamed past him, but one stopped to nibble at something, a bit of rag, muscle and fresh bone.

  Delauchen could see Thalia sprawled out not far from him, face down in the dirt. He tried to crawl toward her, but he couldn’t move.

  There was another burst of light and something busted him in the face.

  The darkness took him.

  Delauchen opened his eyes to a grey murk. Someone was screaming loud enough to pierce the remnant ringing in his ears. A high-pitched mechanical whine obscured their screams until metal bit into flesh and the whine dropped into a low moaning grind. It drove the screams into the inhuman range.

  Buzz saws, Delauchen realized. Invalid Harvesters.

  He blinked and turned his head. He could smell a metallic tang mingled with the stench of putrid rotten flesh close to his body. Sharp, burning jabs of pain pushed from his fingertips to his biceps in both arms before degrading into a duller incarnation that radiated through his shoulders and pushed deep into his neck before burrowing into his skull. Someone kneaded the flesh around his biceps as if it were bread dough.

  He coughed and tried to clear his dry throat. He was thirsty.

  “Hello?” he croaked.

  “Do you require a Limb Knitter or do you wish to be inducted into the Brigades Invalid?” a toneless voice asked.

  He coughed again. “What?”

  “Knitter or Harvester.” The voice was insistent.

  “Why...why can’t I see?”

  “Frontist, your wounds are treatable but I need a decision. Do you want a Knitter or not?”

  “Limb Knitter? But...” This was going too fast. “Wait, what about Thalia?”

  “Frontist, I can’t spend any more time on you. Either accept the Knitter or I’ll send for a Harvester.”

  Thalia would chose a Knitter, Delauchen told himself. She had done it once already.

  “I’ll get a Harvester, Frontist.”

  “No, no, a Knitter,” Delauchen shouted. “I’ll take the Limb Knitter.”

  He couldn’t hear a response in the growing scream of microturbines and metal-shod feet stomping closer. The Invalid Harvester was coming. He’d be chopped up and dumped into one of those drums, then hauled off to wherever it was that you went to become an Invalid Warrior. A two-meter cybernetic zombie, the living electric death.

  “I said I’ll take the Knitter!”

  The screaming turbines and footsteps faded away along with the buzz saws and screams. He heard a door slam shut muffling the sounds completely, leaving him with only the ringing in his ears. Delauchen thought he could hear heavy fabric falling to the floor but he wasn’t certain.

  “I’m here, Delauchen,” a voice said. He could hear a rapid, frantic clicking sound. Something hairy took him into its arms. The stench of rotten flesh was overpowering. “I have always been here.”

  Small points of cool, hard rods touched his ribs, wrapping themselves down and around to embrace his torso. Delauchen felt the rods tumbling him around; rolling him as hot, sticky glue-like string plopped onto his ankles. The substance began to wind itself around his shins, working up around his legs, pulling them tightly together. It sweated a blood-warm fluid that filled the dead spaces around his legs as the substance increased in speed, winding up to his torso. When it reached his lower ribs, the substance pulled itself taut. The fluid advanced behind the material, which caused Delauchen to break out into a cold, clammy sweat.

  The rolling came to a stop.

  Two of the coils, or rods, Delauchen wasn’t sure, touched his arms. They rubbed themselves back and forth, tugging at his skin.

  Something bit him.

  “Breathe, Delauchen,” the Knitter shouted over his screams. “Breathe.”

  He strained at the bindings in a futile attempt to inflate his lungs. “I can’t.”

  He felt the Limb Knitter’s hands grasp his head. Strands of filament oozed from its fingers, creeping their way across his skull. They pressed, shoved and rutted themselves into his ears, under his eyelids and down his nose. Delauchen tried to speak but found himself gagging on the advancing filaments that crawled through his sinuses and invaded his throat. The sharp-toothed coils in his stumps continued to rut, suck, pull and push into him.

  “I’ll breathe for both of us,” it said, and kissed him full on the mouth. He felt himself pulled upright inside a powerful pair of legs locked behind the small of his back. The thing mounted him when the mouth pulled away, causing him to vomit. A warm, wet cloth cleaned the bile from his face.

  “There will be a sharp pain, and then it will pass,” it said.

  He heard a crack at the base of his skull, followed by something grinding against bone, penetrating deep into his brain.

  The darkness came for Delauchen again.

  Silver tones and dark shade permeated the Kalentine Orchards, not far from the Canarus Redoubt’s Northern Gate. Delauchen didn’t recall the walk on this visit, but he had been here before with Yvette. Their last weekend together had been during the Fall Harvest and they’d spent it camping out in the open and making love under the star-splashed skies.

  His presence at the Orchards made him feel like an ass and it reminded him of why he hadn’t brought Thalia here, even though he was close to doing the same thing to her. Yvette had never suspected he was going to end it after that weekend.

  Where is Thalia? He wouldn’t have come alone. It was too depressing.

  Now in the springtime there were abundant blossoms on the oldest apple tree that swayed in the afternoon breeze. Two patched, careworn field blankets were spread out around the trunk of the tree, its bark rubbed bare from campers over the decades. Someone had sliced smoked cheddar, apples and some sausage on two tin mess plates. He remembered the galvanized bucket in his hands, heavy with iced-down bottles of hard cider. The sutler wagon down the trail sold them from the Orchard presses to a Frontist for a modest discount.

  He set the bucket down and took a slice of cheddar from the nearest tin plate. When he stood up Delauchen noticed a hapless Velaysian apple mite caught on a spider web. The spider moved swiftly, immobilizing the mite with a bite and winding it up for supper later.

  I don’t remember planning this trip. Delauchen figured it must have been the cider, too much of it during the trip up, which might explain the sludge in his head. He slid the slice of cheddar into his mouth and sucked on it thoughtfully. Yvette and Delauchen had gorged themselves on hard-to-get delicacies when they were here last time. The smoky, creamy texture pulled up a painfully sharp and clear memory of the first of the final kisses he shared with Yvette.

  He swallowed the bit of cheese. You’re a coward, Delauchen. You know that?

  “Beautiful, aren’t they? The blossoms that is,” a woman said from behind, her voice young, fruity, melodic in tone. Familiar. “I’m glad we’re here to see them together.”

  He froze.

  Fingertips traced their way around Delauchen’s shoulder, sending chills down his spine. He held his breath as the woman’s hand circled around until she was face to face. Her auburn curls spilled down over her shoulders, lush and thick. Sharp dimples flanked her close mouthed smile.

  Yvette? Delauchen started to breathe again, but didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “I’ve found you.” Her smile brightened. “Took you long enough to get the cider.”

  She drew Delauchen into her embrace. He found himself hugging her in return, his right hand located her shoulder blade, his left still holding the bucket. She nuzzled against his chest as his hand started to descend the solid, firm curve of her back. A hint of lavender in her curls caught his attention while his hands c
ame to a wandering stop around her hips.

  Fits like a glove, Delauchen thought, drawing her closer still.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  Yvette drew back from him and took a long look. He tried to meet her eyes but his own gaze darted off to rest on sandals. Her toenails were painted with gold.

  “Oh, I made you something. Sit down and fetch me a cider while I find it,” she said, turning to her Forces Velaysia issue canvas knapsack.

  “Sure,” Delauchen said, and did as he was told. On all fours, Yvette rooted around in her knapsack. His eyes wandered to her butt and he found himself fascinated with the fact that he could stare at her rear end all day but not look her in the eye. Thalia’s was wider, bigger, softer, not the hard leanness of Yvette. He always had to bend at the knees to hug or kiss Thalia. She never really felt right in a physical sense.

  He felt shallow and crass, embarrassed and repulsed at his thoughts.

  Yvette handed him the paper-wrapped parcel from her knapsack. She plopped down next to him, blew an errant curl from her face and took the offered bottle of cider.

  “Here it is,” she said, her face in full blush. “Knitted it myself.”

  Delauchen squeezed the package, hefted it, then shook it. It was soft, light and noiseless.

  “Open it, silly.”

  He pulled at the twine to unwrap the paper. There was a bundle of knitted red yarn, folded nicely and neatly inside.

  Delauchen smiled, turning the sweater back and forth to get a good look. “You made this?

  “That’s what I said. Try it on.”

  He rubbed his fingertips back and forth on the fabric. It wasn’t wool or cotton. It was sheer, warm, and he could swear it was throbbing.

  A nervous chuckle got away from him. “Not exactly sweater weather.”

  “Oh, humor me, babe.”

  “Okay.”

  He pulled the warm, sheer material over his head and shoved his arms out through the sleeves. The cuffs ended in the middle of Delauchen’s forearms. Waves of scalding hot pain washed back and forth across his hands and arms, sucking and pulling at his finger tips. He couldn’t move his arms at all. It hurt that badly.