Private James Anthem shoots up as thunder hammers the sky.
His vision sharpens as soldiers zip themselves out of their netted sleeping bags. He squirms out of his own, straps his vesicle tank on, and joins the men, pressing tight to get through the hallway.
A blast roars. The Twin Pales beat. A gout of black smoke erupts from the cannon emplacements on the RLZ’s outer walls. Another pound, not thunder at all anymore, but louder than drums echoing in the caverns of the Hells.
In the market square, standard bearers flutter yellow pinions next to their sergeants. Beneath one of them is Nedland, men gathering around him in a loose circle. “1st and 4th are already engaged. Fletcher wants us in reserve in case the formation breaks.” He takes in their confused faces. “Maligned!”
Anthem takes a whiff of his vesicle, and the other men follow, not out of necessity but in anticipation of what’s to come. These breaths could be among their last.
Crunches crack the sky like the prattling of a god’s fingers. The 3rd squadron runs to meet the 1st and 4th, already forming a line outside the northern entrance to the grounds of the RLZ. The new arrivals take the far right side just as another volley discharges. The men of the 3rd load their rifles in time to join the next volley on the back of Fletcher’s throated screams.
At least fifty of the things lumber in front of the line like flotsam caught in a slow whirlpool, looking confused and directionless, but in reality, anything but. That the maligned are here at all suggests their Minds direct them.
The things are pear-shaped, bipedal, heavy around the shoulders, and slim at the waist. They have no necks, but three heads bulge in the middle of their upper bodies, each a different soldier’s head caught in shock the moment the maligned turned them.
The maligned, willed by the Mind controlling them, simultaneously turn to the formation and charge forward. The next volley sends the things under, but it’s not enough. The 5th and 6th squads join the battle, widening the line and firing volleys alongside the other squads. Still, the maligned pour out of the forest, forcing the men back until the things are almost at their bayonets.
Fletcher holds up an arm like a cannon and points toward the sky, and the men obey. Ox and Ape-infused pikemen in heavy shell armor hoisting seven-foot polearms step out in front of the lines with the muskets of the other men trained behind them. Unlike Anthem’s earlier prison, their outfits are airtight and thick enough to withstand several volleys. With the maligned occupied by the pikemen, the riflemen have enough time to reload. Fletcher calls the next volley, ignoring the pikemen engaged, and the musket balls tear into the things and ricochet off the heavy shells. One ball clips a man in the shoulder, and the one beside drags him away.
The maligned keep pushing, driving the pikemen and the riflemen back until they are only a few meters away from the wall. Fletcher orders the men to fix bayonets, knowing that every man may have to meet the next wave in the melee.
More maligned approach from out of the woodwork surrounding the RLZ, dragging giant feelers along the dirt, thick enough to break Anthem’s limbs if they encircle. With the men cowering and unsteady beside him, he finds that after more than seven months, he hasn’t anticipated this first battle so much as avoiding it. He has run it over in his head daily and imagined himself in this firing line during every training exercise and shooting range volley. Yet, all he can envision now are escape routes, excuses he can make to run back to Cliff House and cower behind the shelter of the cannon wall. The others can manage without him, as they had before.
The maligned trickle forth from the forest. One runs headlong at the line, absorbing an entire volley before the pikemen drive it down. Even when the melee gets close, it bangs its chest and jumps like a monkey. It grabs one of the pikemen and throws him further away from the line, and he does not stand up.
These things are more grotesque than whatever Anthem’s seen in a lab, diverging so far from their original hosts to be indistinguishable. The Ox demands its own head in each host, Anthem surmises, hoping to calm himself. So, one part Ox for each head. Three total. Pear-shaped. Pear-shaped means there’s an Ape in the mix. As they trickle towards the line, he observes their swaying gaits, measures the distance they cross, and notices how their too-long arms flap. Two Apes each. Three parts Ox and two Apes. Three Ox, two Apes.
Fletcher raises a pistol and a red signal pinion denoting orders. He stabs the air, indicating they meet the maligned head-on to gain ground. The order is just in time, as from the forest emerges a longer line of the things, perhaps two hundred across, more than double Fletcher’s platoon. The Mind has seen the other maligned falling and is not impressed. The men respond to the orders through autonomous movements born from months of training, and Anthem, too, finds he is part of this dance.
As the human line walks forward, a cannon volley wrenches from the wall, slamming into the emerging maligned and pinwheeling them like flower petals caught in an updraft. Black gore sprays, wafts of it wrenching against Anthem’s hair. Fletcher yells for the men to press on, and they do, their bayonets fixed, the maligned line almost half of what it just was. The things regard the approaching men, collecting, assembling in a massive clump. Then it disperses, forms its own line, and runs straight at the men, three heads per body with tongues lolling and haphazard footsteps. They’re too close to loose a volley.
The pikemen step out and run to engage, but the things quickly overrun the men. More spring from the woodwork, grabbing the pikemen and dragging them all about. One of the men has four of the maligned, pulling him in different directions, and his spinning head is enough to convey the confusion he feels, but it’s too late. Two pull his gloved hands free, and he falls to the ground as three more pile on top of him.
Anthem and the whole line of men converge to join the pikemen. They stab into the things, run them down, pushing them off the armored figures and lending their numbers to each, three men jabbing the screaming and shrill forms like each is a seamstress’s pincushion. A maligned tries to rise from its pile of dead, but Unwin runs it through. Another private loses his rifle in one of the things, unsheathes his machete, and hacks into a head like jungle foliage. Four men join him, jabbing and hacking.
The melee dissolves into an uncoordinated mess. Anthem can’t hear Fletcher’s next order above the clouds of dust and dirt, the waft of maligned gore. A burner has set fire to one corpse, and it catches on a man and a maligned that turned him. The burning duo crashes into two other things, spreading the flames to more until it seems the entirety of the grounds outside RLZ 1 is a fire pit, and Anthem is in the middle of it.
A volley cracks. Another squad must have joined them, which is a sign that they’re being overrun. Just after it, a cannon erupts, and a ball slams the dirt a few meters away. The emplacements on the wall must have deemed the formation doomed and have begun shooting into it anyway. If Fletcher is barking orders now, Anthem can’t hear them.
He points his rifle towards a maligned, but before it reaches him, a pikeman skewers two of its heads with one thrust. Before the man can look over and regard his surroundings two more maligned pull him away, kicking and flailing as he disappears into the upturned dust.
Anthem pauses, stares off somewhere, and it takes a moment for every man’s grip to falter on their muskets as they see a swarm of maligned approaching. The wave is five times thicker than theirs, emerging from the forest straight towards them. Four hundred of the things must be pressed tight enough that their flesh could all meld.
Fletcher is still alive, and his call rises over the tumult. “To the wall!” He yells. “Retreat!”
Everyone repeats the order. Anthem sees that feature of familiar gray stone lined with emplacements that have stopped shooting but may start up again anytime. He runs towards it faster than anything in his existence, darting out in front of the men and not sure which section of wall Fletcher told them to gather, only trying to put at least men some behind him. A cannon roars. Anthem’s skull pounds to the point of caving in. The ball whizzes above his head. The ground blasts where the platoon was running seconds earlier. A maligned tumbles in the air and skids on the ground next to Anthem, tripping another soldier, his screams shrill and piercing and joining the things.
Anthem slams his back against the wall next to the other men. Together, they make for the entrance beneath a six-pounder cannon that hounds like a guard dog. More maligned run out of the forest towards the wall, crossing the killing field only with the artillery to contest them. They’ll reach it in less than a minute, a line seemingly as long as the RLZ is wide.
Anthem looks up from his place on the wall, right beneath the barrel of a cannon. One of the men above the parapet holds a rope ladder, hesitant to drop it. “Hey!” Anthem shouts. “Help!”
The man above sees him, gets a hold of himself, and throws the rope ladder down. Anthem’s the first to grab it, almost shoving another man aside and climbing. He crunches the man’s fingers beneath him as he climbs desperately. Once above, he runs from the wall, forgetting to help the others, and pants between two cannon emplacements that choose that moment to fire, deafening him in both ears.
The other men, still on the ground, have joined Fletcher at the entrance. Anthem runs along the parapet but then stops and looks around. The men who joined him on the wall move ahead. He doesn’t see anyone from the 3rd squad on the wall or near the entrance. And they can’t see me.
He is safer up here, and the cannon teams could use him. They, too, do not regard him as they fit the balls into their massive guns, sponge them in, light and fire.
Anthem grips his bayoneted rifle tight, scanning the rooftops of the RLZ’s outer buildings, checking corners for any maligned that may have snuck around. He’s doing his part, isn’t he? A volley cracks, but he’s not there to join it, and he shouldn’t be. The things could be skittering up the walls, so he steps away, ready to push them down.
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Three Ox, Two Ape.
He looks at his hands, cowardly and useless things that should never have held a rifle nor opened those jars in the lecture. A volley looses from the formation near the entrance. When Anthem looks over the parapet, he sees Nedland gesturing, Unwin wielding his pike, Devitt and Hamill with their bayonets and fixed and ready to stab into an approaching line. The others in the 3rd could be around as well, but it’s enough to tell him he’s a deserter, and if anyone sees him now, they’ll agree. He tries to join them but can’t stomach the thought of being back in the fray again, dying, and never returning home.
He grips his thigh, exaggerates a limp, and walks towards the entrance. No one who sees him will say he didn’t try. They all know he was held in that heavy shell prison during the target practice, so they’d understand.
A maligned rolls into the formation’s edge, now a crescent moon shape. Unwin skewers it, then anchors himself to keep it down. Two men break off, kick the maligned off the spear, and hack at one of its three heads. It squirms, spraying black like a hissing vesicle. Anthem inhales his own, perhaps the only man in his squad to have done so since leaving Cliff House. More men wave orders, crunch their blades into maligned flesh, carry the creatures away, hurl buckets of sap onto the things, and set them ablaze. The horrors writhe, screaming, and Anthem limps over while men rush to join the formation. He is safer up here. Up here is home.
The cannon emplacement to his right has been discharging a shot every minute or so, but twice that time has passed in silence. The crew’s red pinion flaps while one of the cannoneers looks down from just near the barrel of the six-pounder. His back is arched, and when it finally corrects, a tentacle emerges from below the parapet and wraps around his neck.
Someone pushes Anthem aside, nearly throwing him over the wall. He looks over to see Frine running up to the emplacement. The man stares at him and scowls, likely wanting to hack into Anthem with his machete. Anthem backs away, and Frine comes to his senses and cuts into a maligned just beneath him, black blood splashing across his face. He wipes it from his eyes and breathes in his vesicle.
Another maligned leaps onto the emplacement, latching onto one of Frine’s squadmates and pulling him off the wall into an inner courtyard near Cliff House’s square. His vesicle’s respirator catches on the parapet, and the lifeline severs. Men run past Anthem, pushing him aside. His hand still clutches his thigh, but it’s a pathetic gesture, always has been, and it might be shame or obligation that forces him onwards, but he goes, thinking to help even Frine’s men, to redeem himself, to show even he can make a minor difference.
As Anthem goes, he catches sight of a soldier on the other side of the inner wall atop a roof. They stand with no musket on their back, holding a machete with a thicker blade than any he’s seen. He does not strain under the weight of such a weapon, swinging it in a useless flourish. Yet through the man’s long and wavy hair, Anthem can see hard eyes gaging him.
A V shape joins the entrance formation from the western side of the wall, likely the 8th or 9th squads fleeing. The V drags two wounded pikemen back to the larger contingent holding at the entrance. Before they can reach the flurry of men, one of the dragged starts to convulse as if having a seizure. He grasps for the sky with two arms, and a third sprouts from his chest. The men see this and bring the bayonets down upon him. A burner sprinkles sap and throws a match, and the man goes up.
Footsteps pound to Anthem’s right, inhuman in rhythms of three. A maligned climbs up and over the inner wall and charges towards him. He steps back just before two from Frine’s squad impale it. The creature seizes one of the men by both arms and tears them off, flings the bloody limbs aside, and leans over its prey. Two more men fire at the maligned, the shots sinking into the pear-shaped body like butter but never once stopping the thing. It stands over the body of its disarmed target, bends over, and straddles him. Its whole body sinks, enveloping the man entirely.
The twisted curiosity necessary for every medical zoologist keeps Anthem glued to the scene. It is the same as the process he observed at labs in Galt Alese, dialed to its highest intensity. Back then, he held the life of those maligned, and they knew it, but the one before him is fearless.
The soldier on the rooftop still stands there, a gust of wind lifting his hair. He is skinny, lithe, and seems careless about the battle, standing proud as if he knows something everyone else doesn’t. He doesn’t appear to be an officer either, waving no pinions and not gesturing. Anthem blinks only to see the man is still there.
Then, as if goaded by Anthem’s thoughts, the soldier leaps from the roof, lands on the inner wall, and rolls. A maligned runs towards him, but the soldier is faster and hacks into one of its heads. He pulls the machete back and chops into the second head, on and on, until he’s out the other side. Another maligned has torn a private’s left leg off and is beginning to feed, but the soldier sees this, grabs the creature’s side, chops into it, and throws it off the wall.
Someone climbs over the parapet and crawls along the wall while a maligned engulfs the soldier’s waist and everything underneath. Anthem runs over, aiming for the thing’s head, but drives his bayonet into a layer of soft, gelatinous flesh. The soldier writhes as the maligned turns him. Anthem can do nothing but pull his bayonet free and step back.
With Sergeant Hallisey nowhere in sight, Frine signals an order, and two of his squadmates stab pikes into the maligned beneath Anthem, aiming for the three heads. They hit home and push the maligned away from the fallen private, but nothing is left below the man’s knees.
While this happens, the soldier from the rooftop moves across the wall, slicing down maligned before they notice he’s there. He even walks up to one, looking it straight in its gaping mouth, eye to eye with three heads, absent of any fear or indecision, before skewering each one and throwing the thing over the wall. He reaches the maligned that straddled and engorged the first soldier. The creature does not move when this new arrival stands above it, only watching as the soldier hacks his machete at the back of one of the thing’s heads, black blood spraying geysers. The creature slumps and deflates, its victim fused to the underside of it, dying when it does.
With everyone preoccupied, Anthem isn’t going to get a better chance.
He runs, not towards the entrance formation where he should be but to Cliff House, to the tent of wounded that Paulson tends to. The medic will understand that Anthem cannot fight after such a wound. No one else will notice he’s gone.
Someone steps down from the cannon emplacement and looks Anthem’s way. He waves and runs towards him. There’s only one person who would care that Anthem is fleeing from the battle.
Frine grabs him by the shoulder and turns him around. The meathead snarls, looking straight into Anthem’s eyes and spraying spittle as he utters. “Zoo man!”
Out of instinct, Anthem steps back and then wishes he hadn’t. Frine senses the cowardice in the retreat and pulls Anthem towards the 2nd squad, the men who had held him in that heavy shell prison. They have just thrown another maligned over the wall, watching it squirm and die from above. Across from them, the long-haired soldier hacks one maligned down and another, none seeming to trouble him. Frine and his men ignore the man across and walk together, leading Anthem to the inner courtyard near Cliff House. Below, at least a dozen maligned writhe and screech. Some are dead, but most aren’t.
Frine kicks Anthem down the stairs. He falls, rolling down the steps until he smacks into the cobbles below. Just ahead of him, a maligned has lost a few of its feelers, pulling itself up on three arms and looking Anthem’s way. It crawls towards him, its pear-shaped body sliding on the ground and pulsating.
Frine takes Anthem by the arm and throws him towards the maligned. Anthem pulls himself up. He’s lost his gun, but he unsheathes his machete, trying not to show his quivering hands or his legs that seem not to support his weight anymore. He smells the thing a meter away, its silvery aroma mixed with earth and rot. It perks its upper body towards him, staring with its only remaining head.
Frine’s squadmates hold their bayonets at the ready as if Anthem is maligned and they are the righteous defenders. A crowd gathers above the wall, curious heads poking down, cannons pounding. The rooftop soldier joins the onlookers, watching, silent, their long hair resting at waist level, no vesicle hanging from their back.
With what seems like the RLZ’s eyes on him, Anthem has no choice but to step closer to the maligned. His machete feels weak, an extension of his bony arms. The maligned is slow, though. It should be easy.
He raises his machete.
A feeler shoots out from the maligned as fast as a whip and encircles his leg. He falls, squirms away, and tries to stand, but Frine trips him, pulling him by his feet towards the thing. Frine’s screaming something incoherent, fanaticism overtaking, the Ape-infused throwing away all inhibition. Anthem can’t make out the words but can see Frine’s head vibrating like he’s straining under a great weight. He drags Anthem on the ground in a circle around the maligned as the thing watches.
Frine’s eyes blaze lunacy, a rage almost unwarranted, exaggerated. He pulls Anthem up just because he can and clutches his jaw with two hands as if to pry it open. His dirty fingers try to reach into Anthem’s mouth, but Anthem bites and Frine cries out a guttural wailing sound as if his entire throat is full of saliva. “Zoo man! Zoo man!” Frine screams in hysteria. “Zoo man!”
Above, the soldiers continue to watch, no one intervening or cheering, just silent as a murder of predatory birds.
The maligned grabs Anthem’s ankle. It’s right next to him now, its tentacle wrapping around his foot, another one slithering out from the thing’s center, a bulbous shape at its end, with teeth as sharp as needles and tiny eyes set on Anthem’s leg.
Anthem tries to kick, but Frine shakes him and throws him down. His head swirls. He wants to fall over and die and thinks that would be a better outcome than being tossed around by this meathead.
Then, he feels pressure in his tunic’s pocket and almost forgets it has been there since last night. He withdraws the syringe, the same one he had pocketed from Paulson. In its chamber is the fluid he had concocted while thinking how sweet things could be. Seeing it now, he can’t pass it up.
Anthem grabs Frine’s wrist and stabs the syringe into the soft spot underneath his armpit. Anthem presses hard, judging his progress by the wincing in Frine’s eyes, the screams of confusion. The neutralizer takes the Ape-infused muscles immediately, shriveling them. Frine tries to throw Anthem aside but is barely strong enough to hold his body weight. He slumps, falls at Anthem’s feet, and reaches for his armpit, his back, trying to undo the straps that hold his rifle on his back, which must now feel as heavy as a boulder, for all the Ape’s strength is rushing away in an instant. He claws at the ground like the maligned had, coughs, spitting up orange gouts of phlegmy ooze, the same secreting from his armpit.
The maligned sees the downed target, the one closer to it, and releases its hold on Anthem. It grabs Frine’s tunic, feels underneath, searches, and then presses into the skin, forcing itself in. Frine screams, gripping the appendage, convulsing, trying to pull it away, but the tentacle is too strong; its hold inside him is too deep as it anchors onto bone.
The maligned lifts Frine up, and three smaller feelers sprout forth from its body, each grabbing Frine and pulling him closer. They bulge as they drink Frine’s bodily fluids and the neutralizer.
Suddenly, the tentacles bend, lose all their strength, and drop Frine right onto itself. The maligned thrashes, pounds the cobbles with its feelers, grips for anything. Anthem runs away as the thing shakes and tries to rid itself of Frine, but the man is one with him, their flesh melded, their screams one.
Frine and the maligned start peeling away, bits of skin melting and decaying. Frine’s body inside his tunic shrivels as moisture leaks from every orifice, oozing through the rips in his tunic.
Moments later, the maligned lies still, its shriveled husk a fifth of what it was, the once-Frine plastered against it as if dying under the weight of its trophy. In Anthem’s hand is the used syringe, and he throws it away to be rid of it, but there’s no use; everyone has seen what he did.
Standing above the maligned is the long-haired soldier. He wipes his blade clean on his pant leg, scratches his head, and plays with the tangles of his unkempt hair. Anthem notices now that his lithe figure bulges out at his chest, feminine, in a sense—in every sense.
Among the silent stares and absence of cannon fire, Anthem’s questions are answered when he hears her voice.
“Well?” the Thurmgeist asks the crowd. “Clean this up!”