Sustenance
The man in the yellow sea stopped and looked back the way he’d come. The path between the crop rows was the same behind as it was ahead, narrow, and compressed, an unending tunnel disappearing into a haze beyond his sight. His head dropped and he scuffed at the fine dirt with his boot, watching tiny clouds of dust plume in time with the motion.
He couldn’t remember how long it had been, but it seemed that the world around him had somehow become fixed as if a moment had been trapped and caught in amber. After the first couple of days of walking, the monotony of the landscape had settled like a weight squatting across his shoulders. The limitless arch of sky over grey soil, the mustard yellow of crops on each side, the relentless drone of stalks moving in the wind. Each minute, each hour, the same, unchanging.
The vegetation surrounding him swayed a little in the breeze, its hiss rising with the gust. He coughed a little, the dry muscles of his throat rasping together, and straightened his back.
In the wake of the attack on the command node, he’d run as fast and as far as he could, terror carrying him into eventual exhaustion. After that, there was nothing but the walk and the hateful sibilation of the plants. He’d wondered how something so vast could feel so claustrophobic, and how long it would take for the isolation to drive him mad.
But there was no choice except to continue. The smoke that had clogged the horizon was long gone, dissolved into the atmosphere. The people he’d spent years with were likely all dead, and the fact that he’d run when the attack came caused him almost no guilt at all. They’d all done the same when the screams and explosions started. They came to mind now and again; Anton, Livisca,
Ke Tunan and the others, phantoms now, he supposed. His thoughts of them were detached as if his ravenous attention to his own survival had driven them to the back of his consciousness. He could not help them, nor they him.
Transience was part of the place’s disposition. The cyclic nature of their postings meant a constant turnover of personnel as they were rotated on and off-world with the Administratum’s bulk hauliers. Not that past duties were in any way more glamourous, nor future ones likely to be, but a stint on the system’s agriworld was considered essential for the limited advancement open to people such as he.
All that seemed to be part of a distant life. It was survival that pressed hardest now. His stomach was knotted, his throat a parched, constricted emptiness. And at the back of his head, lodged like a splinter, was one of many thoughts he sought to avoid. Whatever had destroyed command node 2-102-B1 might still be out there.
What if it was here now, watching, waiting?
He shook his head, massaging his temple with a calloused palm. “No, Mattius,” he said, grimacing. “Don’t think about it. Keep walking.”
But the truth of it, chittering away in the dark recesses of his mind, was that the crops sometimes moved when there was no wind. The noises in the night when he lay cold and shivering in the dirt wasn’t just his imagination. Whatever it was that had turned the command node crimson was still here. He just had to keep going, to put his constant fear to use in driving him on.
Another command node lay due east. Beyond that, there were others, pockmarking the prairie across the continent, bastions for crop crawlers, grain silos and aquila etched lander stations, all the intricate mechanics of Imperial food production. The one he was heading for had a designation, for all the use that was now, but the important thing was that it was the closest, and the only one he was likely to reach before starvation and thirst claimed him.
He was moving again, absently sloshing what remained of his water around in his canteen. His food had given out after a couple of days, something his stomach reminded him of constantly, but the water he’d taken from a broken supply pipe was, thankfully, lasting longer.
Mattius didn’t want to think about whether the water would last long enough. The single canteen he had would be empty by nightfall, and after that, he had nothing left.
He tried not to think at all, though his mind drifted constantly during the long hours of boredom to the screams he’d heard at his back when he ran. He wanted the ghosts to pass with the echo of those cries, but as much as he avoided them or pushed them away, the solitude and the grind of walking the featureless terrain always brought them back.
“Enough,” he said, his anger scraping along his vocal cords.
The afternoon passed, the sun beating down on the featureless plains from a vast, bleached sky. Mattius’s head throbbed from the heat. His feet ached, blistered past the point of feeling, and his legs hurt in places he hadn’t known existed before, yet one foot still dutifully followed the other. As the day wore on, he saw light glinting off something in the distance, and he forced his protesting legs to move more quickly. He couldn’t run much anymore, but he shuffled forward at an exaggerated pace, his eyes fixed skyward.
It was a dirigible, one of the fleets of airships sent out from the command nodes to maintain optimum conditions for crop growth in order to meet the punishing tithe quotas. Fertilizer drops, cloud seeding, storm prevention; the dirigibles were the instruments of weather control, fat, floating articulations of Imperial will guided by slaved servitors and directed from the command nodes. He stopped, staring open-mouthed at the sky. It was the first thing he’d seen in days that wasn’t dirt or crops, and he covered his face with his hands in sheer relief at seeing something different.
“The Emperor protects,” he said, something close to a smile cracking the flaking skin of his lips.
He limped along for the rest of the day, keeping one eye on the silver glint as it drifted slowly past until night fell and the temperature dropped. He drank the last of his water, thirst overriding any other thought, and lay down to rest.
The chill of the earth invaded his bones through the threadbare coat, keeping him shivering and miserable all night long. At some point, tiredness won out and he drifted into unconsciousness, though he slept fitfully, his exhaustion no protection against the plague of half-formed creatures that stalked his dreams, disjointed images coloured in scarlet and shadow. In every dream, he was armed, and yet each time, his limbs refused to obey his commands, hanging leaden while the manifestation of his fears drew closer.
He blinked awake with the first creep of dawn below the horizon, turning over in the dirt and moaning as stiff muscles cramped. Mumbling curses, he sat up and stared at the pair of water canteens at his feet.
Scrambling away, he looked around, eyes wide and searching. A cold chill made its way down his back, puckering his skin with goosebumps. He peered into the golden stalks; his senses heightened by sudden, rampant paranoia.
The crops gave no answer to his unspoken question. They swayed in that gentle, maddening way they always did, laconically unaware of their effect on him. There was no sound but their low, mocking hiss.
“Where are you?” he said, his voice cracking from lack of use. He coughed, dust tickling his throat. He cursed and began to shout. “Where are you? Face me, you bastards!”
He coughed again, and shouted more curses into the sky, filling the air with senseless obscenities. The wind picked them up and scattered them, dissipating them into nothingness.
He slumped, his rage exhausted, and stared at the water canteens. He prodded one with a worn boot, then the other. Both leant but didn’t fall. The tiny sound of sloshing liquid inside them sent his swollen tongue out of his mouth, running over split lips.
Before he could stop himself, he reached down and twisted the cap on one of the canteens, awkwardly fumbling at it and spilling the first few drops before he raised it to his mouth and poured the contents down his throat. The water was glorious; cleaner, and better tasting than what he was used to drinking from the command node main supply. He gagged and coughed as his stomach protested the sudden influx of liquid, and he stopped, willing himself not to vomit.
The sensation passed and he sipped at the water, nudging the second canteen with his foot. It was of the same type as his own, standard Administratum issue, nondescript metal slightly dented with a shallow aquila stamped on one side. Swopping one for the other, he twisted the second cap with more control than he had the first and sniffed at the contents. A taste confirmed that it, too, was full of water.
He stood and held a canteen in each hand. Whoever had filled them wished him to live, at least for a little while longer. The thought brought strangely little comfort.
Mattius thought on that as he resumed walking. Killing him in his sleep would have been as easy as squashing an insect, but whoever the water-bearer had been, they’d chosen not to. Whoever, or whatever, had brought the water had stood beside him as he slept, watching him, and had then left him to wake. It had been a subtle violation, a chilling exploitation of his vulnerability made worse by his inability to refuse the offering the intrusion had left. As with so much else, he shoved it from his mind and concentrated on the simple act of forcing his stiff muscles to move.
The day wore on, step by step through the bountiful wasteland. The sun warmed layers of cloud, making the afternoon heavy, and he sipped at the water throughout, quieting his grumbling stomach as he pushed himself past drainage ditches lined with stinking chemical residue and rusting ferocrete sides.
When he first saw the smoke, he dismissed it as an unusual cloud formation, but as he got closer, he saw multiple ribbons of soot trailing across the sky. Fear and anxiety blossomed in his chest.
The command node was still smouldering when he at last broke through the wall of crops and felt the solidity of Imperial artifice beneath his feet. The node itself was more akin to a small town than anything else, a settlement filled with muster yards, machine hangers, accommodation blocks, control stations, infirmaries and all the other paraphernalia humanity needed to survive. He went across the rockcrete apron ringing the command node, pressing into the jumble of buildings as the hope he’d entertained on the prairie leeched away. Nothing he passed was free of damage. Silence and shade lived in every corner. Walls were punctured, windows shattered, vehicles shredded. What might have been las burns and the destructive effects of melta weaponry scorched every other surface.
Mattius walked aimlessly around the ruin, hoping against hope that someone was alive. He passed a huge harvester machine and marvelled at a perfectly hemispherical bite that had taken the top off, along with most of the insides.
At the centre of the node, he found the first bodies, scattered like children’s toys. Some lay without a mark, their faces twisted into masks of agony and terror. Others had been caught in explosions and lay beneath crushed masonry. More still looked to have been shredded by a hundred blades, their remains pallid grey from blood loss. None looked to have died easily. Yet there were too few of them to have made up the entirety of the settlement.
A slump-shouldered ghost, he wandered through the command node as the final witness to the seemingly random acts of destruction. No one answered his calls, and even his voice seemed to be swallowed without echo until eventually, he stopped shouting.
He roamed in circles until he stumbled at last, his foot catching against a hole gored in the ferocrete, and he fell against the steel wall of a grain vat. He had no strength left to rise, and so stayed there, staring at nothing. Whatever reserves of energy he’d possessed were gone. He wanted to find his voice again, to scream his defiance and despair out into the world, but he had nothing left. He wouldn’t make it as far as the next command node, and what if he did? It was likely as ruined as his own had been, as this one was. Shadows filled his peripheral vision, crowding close, but he no longer cared. He was tired. So very tired.
He drank the last of his water, dully stretching his throat for the last few drops. He threw the canteen to the ground.
“You’ll need to fill this again,” he said, and laughed, creasing double when it became a coughing fit. “Come on, I’m thirsty.”
Nothing answered. The crops swayed in the distance, their susurration the low murmur he was used to. His eyes grew heavy, and for a while, he dozed in the afternoon heat.
It wasn’t sound that woke him, nor was it smell. A primal instinct, an old animal response to threat triggering consciousness through undefined and unquantifiable receptors. He blinked at the figure walking towards him, swaying black through the heat shimmer. Fear bloomed, dark and hard.
And then it was there before him, stygian and jagged, an elongated shadow that couldn’t possibly have covered the distance between them so fast.
“Emperor preserve us,” he croaked.
The figure regarded him, impassive. It was tall, thin, and clad in armour whose every plate and segment sprouted a hard spike or elegantly curved barb. Its sable, serrated helm was lit from within by jade lenses. The creature’s hands were empty, though a rifle with a long, notched barrel was fixed to its back, and a plethora of wickedly curved blades hung from its belt. Its form was less a colour than an absence of it, a void where substance should have been.
“He cannot help you.”
It spoke with the softness of a winters morning when the air was chilled and cut through to the skin, regardless of how many layers of clothing one wore. The gothic it used carried an accent as if the creature had learned the language on sufferance before dismissing the nuances of it as beneath its notice. But it was the calmness of the voice that made Mattius’s heart stutter because he knew this creature regarded him with all the empathy he might reserve for an insect.
“What are you?”
It was beside him then, squatting down spider quick. In fright, Mattius tried to back away, catching the smell of it as he pushed against the steel at his back; spoilt meat and the faint cloy of something sweet. As his head swam with nausea, it reached out a long, long finger and lifted his chin.
“How does it feel, to be the last one alive in all the world?” it said.
Mattius’s voice deserted him. All he could do was stare into the expressionless lenses, mesmerised.
The creature said nothing for a while, then stood. The suddenness of the movement made Mattius flinch again. It reached behind its back and he realised it was doing so in an exaggerated fashion, deliberately slowing its actions so he could take it in. A water canteen appeared in the creature’s hand; the same type of metal canister as those on the ground beside him. It jiggled the canteen, and liquid moved inside it.
It placed the canister at his feet and stood back, those same, consciously slow movements mocking his plight.
“There are plenty of these, scattered about in this dung heap you call civilization,” the creature said, indicating the water canteen at his feet. “Enough for you to live a little while longer. Will you seek them out, I wonder? What torments are you prepared to endure in the name of survival?”
“What do you want?” Mattius voice was a whispered croak.
“From you?” The creature seemed genuinely puzzled. “This is idle curiosity. Nothing more than that.”
“The water. Out there.” Mattius gestured at the crops. “It was you.”
The creature made a small movement that could have been a shrug of indifference. “You are a fleeting distraction. I have enjoyed feeding on your fear and drinking of your anguish, however bland the taste might be. It will last a little longer, I think. You mon’keigh are persistent if nothing else.”
It leant in again, its voice low now. “There is food aplenty, as much as your dull species can define it as such, and water enough until it rains. But nothing else, except your own company and a slow descent into the madness caused by isolation. You will think of rescue. It might even be possible. But with or without help, you have as long as you want. And all those moments to come, when the solitude threatens to become too much and your tiny thoughts run wild? I will feel them, and they will sustain me, from now until you meet your end. When your thread is finally cut, I will know. Even in the lightless depths, I’ll know how long you persevered.”
Mattius stared at it, unable to think, unable to process what it had said. He opened his mouth again but could only repeat his first question.
“What are you?”
It was before him then, quicker than he could think, its helmed head a hairs breath from his face, its eye lens’ a blaze of bilious green. The barbs on its armour drew thin slivers of blood from his skin.
“What I am? I am the drinker of nightmares, little one. Weep, so that I might taste your tears.”
Though he couldn’t see it, Mattius knew instinctively it smiled as it spoke. And then it was gone as if it had never been.
Mattius blinked, staring around at the new emptiness. This was how it would be until someone in the sub-sector command noticed the lack of communication from the planet, or more likely, the standard rotation pattern came around. Would they even search for survivors when they found the destroyed command nodes? By the time standard administratum channels were followed, enquiries made, resources petitioned for and received, years might have passed. The crops would be dead, the bodies decayed and pulled apart, and the vehicles held fast by rust. Would he be dead too, or would the ghost of what he once was still haunt the ruins, unkempt by isolation from civilization and maddened by solitude?
He sat with his back against the cold metal of the wall for as long as he could, until thirst drove him to his knees and his trembling fingers reached for the canteen. He held the metal canister close, hating his weakness, hating his need for water, but most of all, hating the creature for leaving him to this fate. He knew that the creature had spoken the truth; it would be with him every day he lived, suckling at his fear and his despair, until the end. Somewhere, somehow, the creature would know when he died. And when he did, it would simply turn away and do the same again.
He wept as he drank. A breeze blew across the desolate rockcrete, the stifling air pushed between grain vats, teasing through broken windows, and ruffling the clothing of the dead. Dust drifted in from the endless fields. Beyond that, there was nothing else.
Nothing at all.
== Other Stories ==
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Prime Helix:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/801724.page
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Cromlech:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/801259.page
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One Million Years of Solitude:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/800679.page
#
Aquila:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/794055.page
#
Acts of Defiance:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/792560.page
#
Afanc:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/790050.page
#
Changeling:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/786931.page
#
The Man Who Killed Rogal Dorn:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/783881.page
#
Duty:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/777469.page
#
Paper Heart:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/773175.page
#
The Things That Come After:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/751822.page
