The Sea Hates a Coward Read online

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2015 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Commissioning Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Oz Osborne

  Map: Nate Crowley

  Internal Art: Joy Taney

  Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne

  Marketing and PR: Rob Power

  Publishing Manager: Ben Smith

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-977-1

  Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to Daniel Barker.

  Happy Birthday, mate.

  Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  Alone on a wide wide sea!

  And never a saint took pity on

  My soul in agony.

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.

  I looked upon the rotting sea,

  And drew my eyes away;

  I looked upon the rotting deck,

  And there the dead men lay.

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  The boy stood on the burning deck

  His lips were all a-quiver

  He gave a cough, his leg fell off

  And floated down the river.

  Eric Morecambe

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHERE WAS THAT bloody book? One of the high shelves, surely, where the old volumes were kept. The ones about history, or at least the really good legends. He was going to need the pole to get it.

  The sun poured through the bay windows of the old library: even with his eyes shut, it blazed sepia through the lids. All around him was the sound of paper, dusty pages shuffling as the thumbs of the old fellows fumbled through them. It was louder than usual.

  He searched for the hooked pole, the one for reaching the top shelves—and found it already in his hands. That was good. But he had forgotten the name of the book he was looking for.

  Never mind. He knew it was on the top shelf, up there with the siegecraft and the politics and... the other ones. The ones with all the fish in them. He knew he didn’t want to look inside those ones very much. He would avoid those books.

  His eyes were still shut, but that didn’t matter—he knew the row by feel. He just had to lift the pole high enough, run it along the spines of the old volumes and... there. That was the one. The leather was soft and the book was heavy, lent resistance by the pressure of old words around it, but it came loose from its row with a solid tug.

  He held it in his hands, good and thick, maybe a little damp. That didn’t matter—it was the right one. Even with his eyes closed, he could read the title: Schneider Wrack. That was odd though, thought Schneider—the book had his name. And he’d forgotten it. That didn’t usually happen in dreams, did it?

  The rustling of old thumbs on ancient pages grew louder all around him, almost aggressively so. Some of the readers had started murmuring as well; it was distracting. The flicker of pages started to make his own thumbs itch to open the book, and his arms began itching too. He wasn’t sure why, and it made him feel uneasy. It didn’t matter though: he had the book he needed.

  But once he had prised open the cover, sticky against the frontispiece, he found he couldn’t read the words inside. They were there, rich and black and swarming, but they wouldn’t come into focus.

  Of course! He had to open his eyes. But they’d been shut so long; he’d been asleep for so long. Schneider knew if he opened his eyes, he’d have to stop dreaming. That was alright, wasn’t it? If it meant being able to read what was inside the book, waking up would be worth it.

  He struggled to ungum his lids, and the groaning of the old fellows grew louder around him. Like pulling a dressing from an old wound, he felt his eyelids begin to peel open. But then he realised, far too late, that the book had changed.

  It wasn’t the book he was looking for. It was the book about the fish. The one he didn’t want to see inside. There were horrible things in there, blank-eyed and wounded and long-toothed. A dictionary of demons. He tried to cover the pages with his hands before his eyes could open fully, but it was no good. His arms moved slowly, and they itched so badly. The moaning around him grew into a howl; he felt cold spray against his scalp.

  His eyes opened.

  Schneider Wrack stood, knee deep in grey offal, before the hill-high carcass of a dying monster. In his hands, a twelve-foot length of gore-streaked wood; at its tip, a pitted blade hooked on a sagging strip of blubber.

  Pebble-hard, briny rain smacked against the back of his scalp, his shoulders. A hissing wind snatched the reek of blood from his nostrils, then whipped back, loaded with decay so thick it seemed liquid.

  Lightning smashed the image of a titanic rib against his retina, shrouded in strands of white flesh; something grey and chitinous scuttled, convulsing, across his left foot.

  He wanted to scream, but he was already screaming—or trying to. His lungs pulled thick and wet against a closed throat, struggling against oneiric resistance, the paralysis of a dreaming body. But this was real, and he was awake.

  At last the liquid loosened: his chest heaved in half a gallon of rotten air and roared it weakly free, the ghost of a shout: a foul, rotten hiss, the exhalation of a used body.

  Shuddering like a new thing, Schneider rocked on his heels and stared at the soup of blood and grey fragments washing around his ankles. He screamed again.

  This time, it came easier. A low moan, crude and primal against the base of his tongue. Salty liquid trickled from his lips, like the prelude to a drunken spew, yet no feeling came from his innards, just a long, frightened wail from the base of his chest.

  As the noise trembled against the walls of the wound in which he stood, Schneider heard it echo back from his left. And then from behind, all too close. Even as he jerked away in terror, a fresh wail came from the right, and his head snapped round to see its source.

  Schneider looked straight into the withered, wrinkled, old-fruit features of a corpse.

  It was stooped, ruined. Drenched in black fluid, its eyes watery above a ragged mouth, while its hair hung slick like the pelts of storm-drain vermin. In its hands, a billhook like Schneider’s; on its back a shirt that was hard to distinguish from the skin sloughing from its torso.

  Gasping, Schneider recoiled from the salty apparition, straight into the sodden arms of another. He thrashed to disentangle himself. Grey teeth gnashed and clattered inches from his neck, and he rammed the butt of his billhook backwards hard.

  Scurrying back into the tattered cave of meat with his blade shaking in front of him, Schneider quailed before a sea of twisted faces, a crowd of ghouls that seemed to look straight through him with their cloudy eyes.

&nb
sp; An echo of his waking howl rose black and dreadful from their throats, and the ring of faces began to close in. A blast of lightning revealed a thicket of arms, ablaze with crawling, actinic light, reaching out to pull him in towards the gaping mouths.

  Schneider stumbled, his foot slipping on a fat-shrouded vein, fell on his arse and scrabbled back into the dark, away from the stretching claws. His billhook caught on something and fell from his grip, and he cowered from the monsters with his arms shielding his face.

  But they weren’t after him; they were after the meat. Stepping over him as if he were so much offal, they waded into the carcass and began tearing flesh from the wound with their billhooks, with rusted knives, with their own hands.

  Their hands.

  Crouched into a ball as the ghouls surged over him, Schneider blinked hard to chase the rain from his eyes, and looked for the first time at his own hands.

  While he already knew what he was looking at—the waterlogged grey prunes of his fingertips, the bloodless white gashes that streaked his forearms—it was a long time of shivering and staring before he could face up to what it meant. He was a dead man.

  Schneider screamed once more; a wail of despair that rejoined the rolling chorus his first cry had triggered, that drowned in the sound of the thunder and the crash of waves. No longer conscious of his own voice as a discrete part of the cacophony, he threw back his head and moaned to let the horror out. But more only flooded in.

  Blackness rose. As his vision began to fade, he became aware of a larger groan underscoring the din of the dead. One that grew and grew until it shook the floor and emerged, piercing, on the salt wind. The flesh around him shook with the noise, and Schneider’s waning vision was drawn to its source, some sixty feet down along the great grey body.

  There, above a mass of figures straining with ropes, blades and hooks, a toothy jaw gaped in silhouette against a weak sun, and gave its death scream. Black blood geysered from the giant mouth as it thrashed once, then twisted and fell lifeless. The last thing Schneider saw before he blacked out was a rush of thin bodies, scrambling onto the head of the monster with knives drawn, to begin flensing it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A LIGHT BLAZED against darkness, an angry stain orbited by sparks, swelling into a fierce nimbus as sense came back to him. With the return of light came sound: the creaking of chains, the rasp of a great mass dragged across rough surface.

  Heat licked Schneider’s face, and a cable cut into his shoulder. As the glow ahead grew more intense, it pooled around shadows; human figures stooped, trudging forwards under burdens. He willed the dark from his eyes, strained like a drowning man to breach full consciousness again.

  He broke surface, and awareness came all at once—he was deep in a crowd of the shuffling dead, yoked to ropes and moving forward across rain-puddled metal, with an enormous weight at their backs. He turned; behind them was a truck-sized slab of sinew and grey fat, moving on a slick of grease and gore, away from a pandemonium of butchery.

  At the end of the snail-trail behind the lump was the carcass of the monster. Night had fallen, and the thing had been stripped down to a raw red hill, stickled with spars of bone and swarmed over by the clambering, restless dead. Banks of floodlights turned the night around them to ink, cast long shadows across a plain of black metal where other teams of wretches struggled forward with their hillocks of flesh.

  The heat grew more intense. Turning back ahead, Schneider saw he was approaching a tall archway, its searing glow resolving into a glimpse of further industry. Inside the bright space, dark figures stirred and prodded at huge vats, their sides licked by flames. Crucibles ascended on clinking chainwork, poured bubbling torrents down chutes and into barrels, while yet more harnessed cadavers dragged bars to skim the slag from the molten grease.

  Looking into that Hadal throng, Schneider felt his body grow heavy with terror. This was not a nightmare, or a trick, an illusion or a hallucination. He was dead, and he was in Hell. Sick anxiety longed to anchor itself to a leaden heartbeat, but the inside of his chest was still.

  What had he done? He strained to remember, but nothing came: his name was all he knew. How had he deserved to be stuck here, his body slowly disintegrating, surrounded by blood and fire, monsters and the moaning damned? Would he rot away? And when he finally collapsed to a soggy stack of bones, would he be brought back to do it all again? Maybe this would last forever.

  It was somewhere then, in the depths of his spiralling panic, that he heard the radio. He was no theologian, but to the best of his knowledge there were no radios in Hell.

  “Kōhua team one, this is DV, come in. You need to pick up the pace; we’ve got two fresh benthos an hour away, and nowhere to land ’em. Get that zeug cleared up now or it’s getting swept, over.”

  Schneider felt an absurd surge of hope: there were definitely no radios in Hell, and even if there were, devils did not bicker with each other over scheduling. Before he could begin to know what to make of the crackling, disembodied message, it was answered.

  “Receiving you clear, Dakuvanga. Yes, you will have area 6-Tohorā clear in time to load—just two left to haul and then we’ll call in skeletal for the bonepicking. Get off our backs and let us finish the job, out.”

  The connection cut with a burst of static, followed by a volley of unmistakably human cursing, before a bulky figure strode abruptly out of the dark.

  “Alright, fuckers,” it growled, “pick up the pace.”

  The speaker was nearing seven feet tall, a great fat man swathed in layers of canvas and waxed leather. Just his head protruded from a turret-like collar, a lurking bulge like an egg boiled in dirty water. His mouth was a bloodless slit, his eyes red and inflamed in the waxen immensity of his face.

  In his hand, a taut leash held back what Schneider took at first to be a huge dog, but which upon closer examination prompted him to reassess his ‘not in Hell’ hypothesis.

  It was, or had been, a shark. Its front end was a great fat wedge of jaw, lipless and set with serrated enamel shards, while its body and tail heaved in a cage of wires, tubes and churning hydraulics. Sweeping out from its belly, a fan of hooked iron spider-legs scrabbled and clanged against the ground as it strained to reach the haulage gang.

  Grunting, the pallid, egg-headed ogre let out another ten feet of lead for the awful thing, and it scuttled, cockroach-like, to clamp its jaws around the hip of a struggling ghoul.

  The victim shrieked as it was dragged to the ground, but did not even look in the direction of the thing savaging its leg, merely stared forward with an expression of abject defeat. None of the other dead even looked round—they just leaned into the ropes and ploughed forward, agitated like spooked cattle. Aware of danger, but clueless to avoid it.

  Schneider couldn’t stand to watch. Shouting what he thought was a protest, but which came out as a stuttering gurgle, he lurched free of the rope and shouldered aside sodden teamsters in an attempt to reach the fallen creature before the shark-thing could fall on it again.

  Suddenly, the red eyes of the giant and the glassy pits of the shark were both fixed on him.

  “Ha! Who the shit are you?” roared the overseer, and Schneider realised what a horrendously stupid thing he was doing. He tried to freeze, to sway like the other corpses did, but it was far too late.

  With no hope of avoiding attention, Schneider ran, turning his back and scrambling back through the milling dead in the hope of blending in again. But the skittering of steel on steel was too close behind him. He weaved through the hunched, emaciated bodies, but he could hear it drawing nearer—that dreadful blunt head shunting aside bodies as it pursued him.

  Schneider ducked ropes and hopped lumps of meat as he shoved through the toiling throng, but it was like running in a nightmare: his legs seemed to move at a fraction of the speed he willed them to, while the scuttling horror behind him gained with the tireless speed of a machine.

  He could hear the hiss of its hydraulics, could almost feel its t
eeth kiss the backs of his flailing heels, when an almighty crash and squeal of shearing metal sounded from the direction of the skeletonised monster behind him; from the place where Schneider had woken up.

  A distant voice called out “Shut it off! Shut it down!” and a wail rose from the dead working the bones of the sea-giant. The overseer cursed, and Schneider heard the hiss of sparking steel all too close as the shark-thing reached the end of its leash. Then the radio again:

  “Kōhua, this is DV again. Winch team just screwed up bad—there’s a lot of meat caught up in the gears. You just got yourself an even bigger mess to clear up.”

  Schneider risked a glance behind; the shark was still fixed on him, red gums bared as it strained on its lead, but its handler’s attention was elsewhere, face scornful as he held a battered radio to his craggy sneer.

  “Yeah, copy,” growled the overseer. “I told you more haste means less speed, DV. We’re on it. Just hold your damned tongue while we get the real work done down here, out.”

  The grey-headed giant spat in disgust and yanked on his monster’s leash, stalking off towards the source of the racket without a second glance towards the haulage team. Following the overseer’s gaze, Schneider saw with a sick lurch what had called a halt to proceedings.

  Smoke was pouring from the drive unit of a towering gantry crane, paused midway through tearing the skull from the body of the monster, while a crowd of dead clustered in aimless distress around its base. As the knots of wandering bodies merged and split, Schneider saw through them to a sight that made his throat close up.

  Arms and legs twitched weakly in the rusted jaws of a gear assembly, half-crushed heads gaping in weak anguish: a whole team of haulers, in the overseers’ rush to clear the flensing site, had veered off-course and, lacking any supervision, wandered into the grinding cogs of a crane rig.