These Lifeless Things Read online

  First published 2021 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-448-1

  Copyright © Premee Mohamed 2021

  Designed and typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights 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 copyright owners.

  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.

  For those who say:

  Let us remake the chain.

  April 28

  Today we dug up bones in the Botanical Garden.

  I was briefly, reflexively confused: How did these get here? But what a question. People just die wherever they die.

  V. stopped digging too, and we studied our findings: brown, glistening, not white and dry like in the movies—for a moment I thought my eyes had tricked me, and we had found a layer of mulch. Or wood, a sculpture carved by some macabre but competent art student. Bone fragments fell on the trays at my feet, the strawberry runners we scavenged from the wall yesterday.

  I just wanted something sweet. I haven’t had anything sweet for a long time.

  V. poked the skull with his boot and said: The grass in cemeteries, they say, stays green even in drought, because it drinks from the bodies of the dead.

  I said, Who says that? That’s disgusting.

  He laughed, and I put my hand on his warm back in the black shirt—he’s strong, there’s still muscle along with the bone—and I thought, We could make love right here! In the sun! Right here under the gaze of God! Who, in this dead city, would stop us?

  But, well.

  We planted the strawberries, and more beans, and weeded the potatoes. In the fussy, preciously-laid-out Mediterranean gardens we scraped aside the white gravel, laying bare the black fabric below, in another SOS sign. Very satisfying, that noise.

  No one’s coming, I said.

  Still, said V.

  The soil rumbled and churned under our boots, not with the vigour of spring seedlings, nor worms or springtails or mice. Faceted, iridescent eyes watched us. A tiny tentacle lunged up and tugged impishly at my laces; V. spun at once and killed it with a blow from the spade.

  I thought the soil at least had been spared, he said.

  We’ll see who spares who if they touch my strawberries, I said.

  A good day’s work. No sentinels seen. About half the remaining trees have turned, but watched us rather than attacking. We scrambled back to safety just before sundown, sweaty and thirsty as always, and joyously locked the doors and pulled the shutters behind us. Dark now. Something scrabbling on the street below.

  “EMERSON.”

  The botanical gardens. The botanical gardens. Quick, where is that on the map? Pull it up, check the drone photos...

  “Emerson?”

  I look up, dazed. “Wha?”

  “We’re just breaking for lunch, if you want to come.”

  I lower the book to my lap with trembling hands. I should be wearing gloves. No. Wait. The scanner can filter out my fingerprints. But that means I’ll have to wait until I—

  “Em!”

  Winnie stoops and taps my wrist briskly with her sharp, painted fingernail. The pain is bright and minute as a wasp sting, and brings me back to myself, back to the cool gloom, the ceaseless breeze. The patch of sunlight I have been sitting in all morning has become shadow, violet and even scarlet around the edges from the dust in the air.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I found... I think I found,” I correct myself professionally, “I think I may have found a... a primary source.”

  “Christ! Are you sure?”

  “No. I don’t know.” I’m cradling the book, I realize, in both hands, close to my torso, as if I’ve picked up a small animal. “There’s no date. The book itself was published fifty years pre-Setback. But it talks about the sentinels. About things in the dirt...”

  Winnie watches me for a minute, her face politely interested but dubious. She’s a forensic osteologist, or whatever her department is calling them now—the dropdown menu on the funding form didn’t have our real titles, but we had to put something in to get the money—and she deals with trace chemicals, microscopic fragments, strands of hair, things that can be measured and tested. Journals don’t fall under the purview of what she considers ‘real science.’ “Well, that’s great,” she says, her voice as sincere as she can make it. “We’re meeting back at the pod,” she says eventually. “In 14C. I’ll keep yours hot.”

  “Thanks.”

  When she’s gone, her microboard silent along the rubble-strewn street, I set the book down where I found it, and don the gloves in the back pocket of my cruise vest, and pick it up again. My heart is beating very fast.

  The rest of the team might not help me. But I’m already thinking: Beg Winnie to check the gardens for bone fragments. Ask Victor about the trees. What does ‘turned’ mean? It’s too early in the year to be referring to fall.

  This could be my whole degree. My whole life.

  May 1

  I’ve taken to carrying this book in an inner pocket, tucking the pencil inside it so I don’t lean over and puncture a lung (not that I can keep it that sharp, ha ha). What a funny thing to do, I keep thinking. I’ve made it a substitute for my phone. An object of both comfort and utility, like the plastic dollies that N. used to drag about when he was a little boy, the younger brother who never had a real baby to cuddle.

  Now, I cradle the analogous-but-not-quite flat rectangle in my hands at spare moments, softly lit through dirty windows, and I imagine I could cry out, receive a reply within seconds, hear how people are doing. Loved ones. Friends. The world.

  The world.

  If this is to be the gradual petering out of what I thought of as the world, then so be it. But I am fiercely and adamantly and unshakeably and secretly sure that it is not.

  I can’t tell my theory to V., he’ll laugh at me. But just as Hiroshima did not happen everywhere, just as the Shoah did not happen everywhere, just as the Great Hunger did not happen everywhere, I feel certain that there are places which were spared the Invasion.

  Certain that... humanity, progress, evolution, whatever we were doing at the time (whatever that was, even though it may have been failing), continues somewhere, and that they who go on elsewhere have been prevented from helping us due to external circumstances of perhaps politics or finances or logistics or weaponry limitations. That they are not waiting for the sieges to lift and then to come count the dead, but that they are making preparations to rescue us.

  Certain that one morning, we will awaken to find the rest of the world singing songs of gladness and coming over the horizon in huge, monster-proof helicopters...

  ...but They’re not really monsters, are They?

  They’re something else.

  At any rate, writing in here gives me something else to think about; and it lets me imagine that, once we’re rescued, my words could join the words of others like me.

  I don’t want to say remnants. I don’t want to say leftovers. I think I want to say ‘survivors,’ but... not if I don’t survive.

  Perhaps someone will read this and figure out what happened, because God knows I won’t, and can’t; I’m too bu
sy.

  We were trailed by sentinels today, who must have been watching us in the garden; their unevenly-scaled bodies were covered in white gravel from where they scrabbled in our sign. As night fell and we ran for cover, I wounded (I think) one statue, but did not kill it. One of the uglier ones, its twisted face scattered with spiraled teeth and eyes, shoulders humped with brass muscle. I would not have wanted to see that one begin to move.

  Hang on. Something outside, not on cobblestones but wall. Something is breaking apart the plaster. Bastards!

  More later.

  BY THE TIME I return to the research pod, the purple nanopolymer looming gaudy and self-conscious over the pale ruins, the others are almost done eating. Winnie hands me a bowl and gestures at the crumbling block of concrete next to Victor.

  “Where’s Fearless Leader?” I ask, tugging on the tiny foil strip of the heating nub.

  “18A, I think,” Victor says. “Near the river.”

  I’m almost too excited to eat, and I’m grateful for the two minutes my food takes to heat up. I feel like I’m a little kid again—or no, like the day my acceptance letter came. Sitting there with winter sun and icy air coming in through my window as sharp as a knife but not feeling it, instead something hot ballooning inside of me till it seemed to push into every corner of the room, reading it and re-reading it again and again. I am angry that my body needed to put the book down to eat.

  I force myself to mechanically spoon up the too-salty, reconstituted pasta while my mind races. What I hoped to find here was never anything as good as this. A first-hand account of the Setback! Of course everything before is valuable, of course everything afterwards is valuable. Of course it is. But we have so many of those, and we have so very few of those three years themselves. Particularly in blockade cities. Off the top of my head, based on the literature review I did last semester, we have a grand total of six verifiable documents.

  All four of us are studying different things, so it’s not fair to compare what I’ve found with what they’re going to find, but still. I could dance.

  After lunch, when the others are gone, I feed my paper bowl into the digester, and then much more carefully feed the book into the scanner, after three diagnostic checks. Overkill, I guess. But this book is so precious, I simply can’t risk it.

  This isn’t just my master’s degree. This is my obsession, it’s my life in a way; it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to know about. Why some cities and not others is the small question. But the large question is: What happened? Why does no one know? Why do even the people who lived through it not know? Why do my parents, my grandparents not know?

  And then this, this miracle book. Maybe it will not answer any of these questions. Maybe it will peter out in a splatter of blood. I’ve had my heart broken before.

  But the hope, the hope of it all, in this soft ancient paper, in the blockily tumbled edges of it, the smell of it. It’s not even a proper journal, it’s a poetry book, thick, one of those anthologies they give to first-year English students, with wide margins—probably why the writer picked it. I would have overlooked it if it hadn’t been meant for us to find, displayed with a sign, a scrawled note on the wall: BOOK. So many books were burned for fuel in these cities when people couldn’t get out to get wood or charcoal. The writing—smudged and tiny but impeccable—winds around and around each central poem in the wide margins. You can’t help but think of something circling the drain. No. Less morbid. They lived, after all—lived long enough to write dozens of pages after the Invasion.

  I thought it was encoded at first, but it’s just that the lines crisscross and meander as they circle. It’s not hidden. It was meant to be read. Maybe not by me. And of course, in my line of research, there’s always that little nagging thought—would they mind if I read it? If I touched it, scanned it, reproduced it, published it? I often get the impression that they would hate it. It seems so disrespectful to the dead.

  Maybe not in this case though; this writer, I feel certain, would be excited to know that we are studying it now. That the ‘world’ of which they spoke started over again, picking up what pieces still remained, building something clumsy and slow and new, but (we hope) good.

  I would tell them: I know. I know. It’s been fifty years and we haven’t yet figured out what happened. But we’re doing our best to answer the questions. Make sense of it all, write a story out of history, which is not in and of itself a story—which tells us it is, because one event causes another, but it isn’t. Not really. It’s a series of scary fairytales to tell children in the dark.

  Still shaking, I take out my own notebook, key to a fresh page, and begin to write.

  May 3

  A cool, clear day. Glad the everpresent clouds finally lifted; I see them on the horizon though, waiting to pounce. Do you think They affect the weather at all? I asked V.

  He shrugged. It does seem different now, he said at last. But I can’t quite put my finger on it.

  Nightmares were bad last night. Faces swimming from the darkness, angular and harsh; staring eyes, membranes, flickering things like wings. The problem is that nothing They possess can actually be thought of as analogous to anything that anything on Earth possesses, if that makes any sense. Even mouths, eyes, all wrong. I heard Their songs chanting and wailing, and woke up screaming. Then I realized I had not dreamt the hollow, echoing booms of something striking the cement in the canal outside the flat. I know that sound.

  This morning I found the expected: a dead man in the canal—a dead stranger, which should be impossible now, in this empty city. Still I studied his silvery, fallen-in face, hoping for recognition. He had drowned; I knew the bluish tone of the skin. A pearly sliver of eye white, no iris, showed under his upper lids.

  He must have fallen into the canal running from Them and couldn’t get back out. I suppose that’s a better death than the one They would have given him. And yet in Their rage They’d still mauled the poor body. The statues and the sentinels sometimes move like the bigger ones, that herky-jerky movement—so swiftly it seems to be in the seconds between seconds, or so slowly they seem perfectly still.

  I exhausted myself trying to haul him out. My back hurts now as I write. When V. came over we pulled him out together, then performed the necessary theatrics of death and stood around awkwardly for a while as if waiting for applause, or for someone to heckle us.

  We should say a few words, I said after a while. I did not say: Because it may be our fault that the sentinels came upon him; why else would he be here? I thought: Let’s give him a decent burial. Decent always means guilty.

  How strange that I do not know his face, V. said, and then folded his hands and quoted some poem I did not know. The unexpected piety of the young! He fixed his gaze upon the bright empty sky, then lost all his sense, as often happens now, and nearly fell into the canal himself. I dragged him back at the last minute. I heard nothing.

  I washed the dead man’s jacket after dinner. Before all this, I never would have worn such a thing; but now, now... I have so little, I carry everything I own on my back, I have made peace with it. The jacket will be temporary as we are all temporary. Like moving flats every couple of months and forgetting them at once. There is only now, there is no then. Must keep reminding myself of that. And keep this diary, to remember the now.

  I must try to make entries every day instead of just when I’m too exhausted to do anything else.

  Every day for years I’ve thought: I’ll only get more tired, not less. And every day it turns out to be true. I thought I would have passed some kind of... event horizon of exhaustion by this point, but still the body digs up its reserves of strength from somewhere, as if it were a vein of metal buried so deep that no human art could ever find it, let alone extract it.

  No mirror in this room. But I tried on the jacket a minute ago. Even damp, it is warm when it’s zipped up, and hangs almost to the middle of my thighs. The punctures in it are cruciform, X-shaped; they beg the question: What made
them? But there are so many potential answers.

  Jacket hung back up to dry. I’ll wear it tomorrow, when we go shopping.

  May 5

  Spent the day going door-to-door, industrious little bees, with our bucket and paintbrush, our axe and hockey stick. Just like those first days. People will become like animals, my husband said, and I agreed, and I wept with fear waiting for our door to be smashed in, for him to be killed and eaten in front of me, for myself to be raped in half while everything in my flat was stolen or broken. But it never happened; and if you knock, now, survivors invite you inside, and you put your axe in the umbrella stand. There are too few of us to fear the violence of the mob. There are too few of us, to be honest, to field a proper mob. We’re more of a club.

  Four big bags of questionable cans and canisters and packets, carted effortfully back to the flat. I’ll catalogue them tonight, start distributing them the day after tomorrow if I can. I need to rest. My breath rasps in my throat.

  A funny thing. On Shoemaker Street we discovered—in fact, almost walked into—a new crater, house-sized, so fresh the soil was still damp and steaming below. Something misfired, I said, and V. nodded. I’ve never seen one so small.

  In the house opposite, the only sign was a gleaming shard of metal embedded in the brick like a thorn. Perfectly clean, so smooth you could see your face in it. We walked over and did just that, and laughed and preened, far from the edge of the crater, listening to the soil shift.

  Perhaps he was thinking of the day we met. It feels like another lifetime, though it was right after the invasion, before the city was really dead. Back when we still thought what government that remained might return things to normal.