Monster Planet(33)

Then she felt the energy draining out of her limbs, her muscles, her bones. She could barely keep her eyelids open. Any moment she would... she would collapse... she knew the... green phantom... had her...

'We like you,' Cicatrix said, bending over her, smiling down at her. Ayaan had fallen to the deck without realizing it. 'We think you're fun.'

Ayaan's vision closed down like a black shutter falling across Cicatrix's face.





Monster Planet





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.'