Chapter 9.
The golden ship could not be made dirty. They threw pig shit on it, tied branches on it, flew it into a small swamp but ultimately Xolo’s space ship was too gleaming and visible to fly around in. So Gomez got his men to build a shelter over the top of it and then Xolo and the kids were mounted on horses with horns on their noses and they began the ride across the countryside. For hours it was nothing but a beautiful ride. Despite the failure of the space mission, the details of which were still being kept a secret from Xolo, it was obvious that the safe return of the royal children raised the morale of the twenty or so men and women who rode alongside Gomez.
“Gomez, look, this isn’t a book and we have long ride ahead of us. Can you please fill me in about what is going on here on Earth? Here is what I have figured out so far. There is an army of zombies that is trying to take over from the king and bring down hyperspace travel and the kids were trying to get some help from someone.”
“Yes. That’s about it.”
“Well, zombies. There has to be something there you can tell me more about.”
“Yeah, that’s a good one: the zombies. Okay.”
Gomez had a long think. Xolo waited. He was sensing no danger right now as they crossed the edge of a long valley under a shady line of trees. The valley rippled slowly, flattered at the movement of eyes along its otherwise rock-frozen contours.
“Well, as you may know after the great exodus, we had a lot of worthless kings and queens. A century of them. Some of them liked to eat dirt; others liked to wear a necklace of skulls. One ended up juggling on a sultan’s ship, but we don’t really like to talk about him.
“Our planet was an embarrassment and an inconvenience to the galactic settlement, like a demented parent. But our position as the root of the spaceways and the data farm supreme for their whole Extended Human Settlement Space meant that they had to look after us. We were the necessary soil for their ghastly plants. So they sent down medicines to let us survive the various plagues that we still suffer here. And they left us alone, off limits to all of the sultans, barons, etc.
“One day, surprising everyone, a great king arrived, Silvio X. Such a king! The full power of a human personified. Fists of steel, smile of gold. He unified the warring tribes and started us on the path of a diversified economy, where the peasants would be retrained in critical life skills and weaned off the menial brainwork of the Cruiser Class.
“Within twenty years, from his base in North Africa, he had a following of over one million free humans with unplugged eyes and ears. The Terrans were back. We built New Babylon…when this is done you must see New Babylon. Sustainable grandeur, my friend. That soil birthed all those starships and all those counterfeit planets that they swarm around.”
Xolo coughed. “We had mentioned…zombies?”
“Well, this is all leading up to the zombies, my man. You want me to just say ‘Oh ok so one day the zombies started pouring out of the earth all tied up in wire?”
“Is that true? About the wire?”
“So that is what you want me to say…I see. Yes, well things were going well when we heard reports from Old Somaliland of unkillable human-like creatures filled with carbon wires and friction motors. They were pouring out of mass graves of the bad times. They would surround a village, horrorize them for a week until their brains were full of PTSD hormones and then tear into town holding people down and jacking equipment into holes – holes they made or those nature gifted us with.
“Soon it was an army surrounding us. Blue gray people. People I say. Human faces, old faces. They had that look you see on people’s faces in the histories. The so-called WTF face.”
Xolo chewed on a piece of cactus jerky. “Can you define ‘unkillable’ for me quick?”
“Oh yeah. If you get one on its own you can kill it. This rail gun is perfect for that. The problem is they move as a swarm. In the middle is what we call the queen. The queen is a mesh of three or four humans and several tons of carbon and motors and blades. As you blast apart zombies the pieces are passed back to the queen, along with any new bits and pieces they take from our side. New zombies pop out of the queen’s…vagina…and the whole swarm continues.
“It’s a fucking bloodbath alright, boyo, but there’s no sport in it. The best we do is send them heading off somewhere boring and low population.
“If we had some air support we might have a chance. Otherwise, there’s not that many humans left anyway, after the harrowing. And the bulk is in New Bablyon, sheltering from harm. The best part of us is in the ground, déjà. So we sent Sunny off to space to try and find Grand Dame Meseret. Her family was the last off the planet and they play fewer games than the rest. They have poets and dancers and explorers still. They still run in the human race. We thought we could maybe trust her.”
“Yeah, Meseret is alright,” Xolo said in a voice from space. “She’s not quite the same since her husband got…killed, though. I don’t think she’ll send you the ship you need. The other grandees would think she was pulling a power play. No one will touch Earth.”
The valley was fading away. They could hear the human sound of a large camp: just a trace of it. Xolo’s heart flickered at the unmistakable presence of many people, living alongside each other. You could even smell it a little, the smell of rot and fermentation that reminded him of hugging.
Gomez was getting fired up. “Oh but they better. They will when we tell them what we know. Every zombie cluster we have found starts off at the roots of one of their Astral Autobahns! Someone is behind this and they want to pull the whole space tree down. That’ll royally roger their galactic bungholes, will it not? They don’t want that up ‘em!”
Xolo raised an eyebrow. “Do you have a map of the outbreaks I can look at?”
Gomez lowered both eyebrows. “Perhaps…but you seem more interested than I would expect a hired gun to be.”
Xolo shrugged coquettishly.