The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(22)

“Good.” He let her go and turned to the rest of his troops. “What are you all staring at?” he bellowed. “Get back on perimeter! Gomez, up above! Pinky, you too! Alil, Paulie, Snipe, Boots… patrol. Van. Santos. Roo. Gutty. Yep. Timmons. Stork. Reggie. Scout the town. See if we got any more castoffs. Maybe we got a whole nest of China rats we don’t know about.”

The troops saluted and scattered, rattling weapons and ammo, boots stamping across the grasses, acid bottles bouncing, machetes gleaming as they were drawn. Doctor Mahfouz swept an arm around Mahlia’s shoulders, drawing her through the activity.

“I’ll need your hand and eyes.” He waved ahead. “It’s not impossible, but there is work.”

He led her into his open surgery, and Mahlia gasped. Blood ran all across the cracked concrete of the building’s open lower floor.

No wonder the soldier boys were crazy. Four bodies lay before her and blood ran from them in a river. Two looked already dead for sure; another had a leg ripped open, tourniqueted, but he looked so pale she doubted he would last long, even if he wasn’t actually dead already.

Only one young man remained. His chest was covered with crimson sopping rags, but he was conscious.

Heavy fighting, for sure. But none of their wounds looked like explosions or gunfire. One of the dead ones looked like he’d been nearly snapped in half. The other had his neck torn and snapped.

The conscious boy’s eyes followed her as Mahlia knelt beside him. She peeled away the bloody rags, guessing what she would see, and more afraid because of it.

Four massive, deep parallel gashes cleaved across his chest, tearing his clothes and shearing deep through brown flesh. The white cage of his ribs showed amid the red. Mahlia held her hand over the torn flesh, unwillingly measuring the size of the claw that had dealt the blow.

Mahlia felt sick. It all made sense.

She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, Mouse would surely die.

8

“OUR FRIENDS TELL US they encountered a wild boar,” Doctor Mahfouz said.

It was a stupid lie. No boar could do that. Only a monster. Only a half-man. And Mouse was trapped with that creature, and if Mahlia didn’t get him free, he was going to die, and if she didn’t get free of these soldiers and find some way to get the meds from Doctor Mahfouz—

“Mahlia!”

She startled from her mesmerized staring at the soldier’s wounds. Mahfouz repeated himself. “I have my tools boiling. If you’ll wash your hands, I’ll need you for the cleaning and stitching.”

Mahlia hurried to the boiling water, feeling numb. The soldiers were everywhere. She snuck glances at them, studying her enemies as she cleaned herself.

They were a raggedy bunch. The kind her father used to scoff at, all beat-up equipment and missing teeth and acid-burned faces, but their guns had bullets and their blades gleamed with razor edges, and they were everywhere. Walking the perimeter, pillaging the doctor’s squat, stalking out on patrol. They lit campfires and hauled ancient plastic jugs filled with water from the basement pool next door, and stacked looted piles of everything from rice to dead chickens on the dirty concrete. It looked like they were shaking down the entire village.

A tall black-skinned boy with piercing eyes directed a squad of three in gathering wood and starting a bonfire. Kill scars slashed his bicep, nine enemies ticked off, the way the doctor checked off his medicine inventory.

Mahlia started to count kill scars on the other soldiers but gave up. There were too many; they must have had more than two hundred kills. Even the youngest of them, the little licebiters who were only allowed to carry hydrochlor and machetes, had kills. And the oldest, like the lieutenant and the wounded soldier boy with his ribs opened up, had more than a dozen.

“What we want to do with this?” a soldier called out. Mahlia looked up at the slurred voice. A machete cut had cleaved the soldier’s jaw and scarred his face all the way up to the eye. But what drew Mahlia’s gaze was his prize, a goat he was leading into their midst.

With a start, Mahlia realized it was Gabby, the doctor’s goat. “You can’t—” Mahlia started to object, before she shut herself up.

Lieutenant Sayle had been conferring with his sergeants, but now he looked up, a pale cadaverous mantis turning attention to its prey.

“Looks like dinner.”

He returned to marking off quadrants on a moldy map, uninterested in what he had ordered, or whom it affected.

The soldier boy looped Gabby’s rope around her legs, trussed them, and abruptly shoved her over. It was a casual shove, almost bored. The goat fell with a thud and whuff of surprise, as powerless as a sack of dropped rice.

Lieutenant Sayle was back to talking with his sergeants, his words blending with the rest of the soldiers’ activities. “Flush it up against the coast, sweep south.” The details of their hunt. “A-6, push along this ridge; it’s still above tide line. This river cut might give it protection…”

Mahlia watched, powerless, as the soldier boy knelt beside Gabby, lifted his machete, and hacked into her neck. Gabby bleated once in panic and then the blade sank in and the goat lost her voice. The boy started sawing across. Blood spilled out. Mahlia looked away.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.