The Wild Dead (The Bannerless Saga 2)

Chapter One • The estuary

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The Precarious House

Most regions Enid visited, she could find something to love about them, some enticing and beautiful detail about the landscape, the people, the mood of the place. A reason folk would want to stay and scrape out a living in less-than-ideal situations when a dozen other settlements had more resources and less disease, and would gladly welcome extra hands. Even the rainless, baking salt flats at the southernmost end of the Coast Road had isolation to recommend them, for those who wanted to be left alone. And just to show that every place had a reason for existing, the people of Desolata household there exported the salt they collected from the flats on their own trade route.

But here in the Estuary, Enid had to consider for a while what exactly the appeal was. Over the damp marsh where the San Joe River drained, clouds of bugs rose up through a sticky haze, shimmering with heat. Squealing gulls gathered, circling on slender wings, drawn by some rotting treasure. There were no orchards here, no pastures, no rippling fields of grain. Instead, a dozen scraggly goats, stuttering their calls to one another, picked at brush along the last trailing edge of the Coast Road. Presumably, there were fish in the river to eat, along with shellfish and the like this close to the ocean. In checking the settlement’s records, Enid had learned that it rarely exceeded quotas—because there wasn’t enough to start with. The folk rarely earned banners, either, and had few children. Why would anyone stay in such a place? Perhaps because in the end it was home . . . and sometimes that was enough.

The sunlight here had a bronze cast that she had never seen anywhere else, and the light made the water seem molten, flashing with ripples to the horizon, broken up with stands of marsh grass and the sticks of old dead trees. If you’d lived here forever, the light might seem warm, the air like a favorite blanket on the skin.

That was what she told herself, to try to understand the people here a little better. Because at the moment, her patience was waning.

“Would you look at that,” her new partner, Teeg, murmured, clearly amazed. A short, sturdy kid, he shaded his eyes with one hand and gripped a staff with the other. Had a manic way of moving, like he’d rather be running ahead than slowing down enough to be methodical. His shining black hair was tied in a short, sloppy braid at the back of his neck, and his lips always seemed to be pursed, like he was thinking hard. When he wasn’t talking. This was his first official case as an investigator. “They said it needed repairs. I thought they meant a new roof, maybe it had holes in the walls. Does it even count as a house anymore when it looks like this?”

Erik, head of the Semperfi household, looked at the young investigator with dismay.

Erik’s request for a mediation had brought Enid and Teeg to the Estuary. Semperfi household had a building that needed repairs, Erik’s request had stated. The community refused to help with those repairs, despite all the support Semperfi had provided to other households over the years. Records supported this assertion—Semperfi had been the first household in the region, and was an anchor. Normally, a town’s committee would mediate this kind of disagreement, but the Estuary didn’t have a committee. Didn’t need one, the people claimed. They didn’t consider themselves a town, but a loose collection of households whose members preferred to rely on themselves and one another. The regional committee at Morada set quotas and awarded banners, and medics came through a couple of times a year to check birth-control implants and general well-being. Place like this didn’t need a committee until it did, and so Erik’s household had to send for investigators to settle the dispute. Now that Enid and Teeg were here, it became clear to them that the building in question was far past anything resembling salvageable.

The structure, a sprawling, single-story block of a house, was old, a pre-Fall construction. Wood and brick walls sat on a crumbling concrete slab, covered with some kind of plastic siding that was cracked and disintegrating. What strips of it remained were held up with nails, twine, and hope. It might have been blue once, but it had long ago faded to a sickly gray. The siding survived only on the lee side of the house; the windward was built up with wood slats and leather hides—layers and layers of them—evidently replaced as the next bout of wind tore them off. Likewise, the slanted roof might once have had purpose-made shingles, slate tile or plywood, but the decades hadn’t been kind and the surface was now patched with reeds and hides. What was left of the structure still dripped from last week’s bad storm.

All that was bad enough, but the land under the house was falling away. Years of storms had eaten at the ground, mudslide after mudslide eroding it until half the house now stood over nothing but air. This last storm had made the problem critical. Huge slabs of concrete lay at the bottom of the slippery hill, the house’s foundation lying in crooked, broken pieces, sliding inevitably toward the river. Tree trunks, two-by-fours, scavenged steel rebar, and rusted scaffolding precariously held up what was left. A house partway on stilts—not like the sturdy pylons of the other structures in the area, but thin and haphazard. A breeze would knock it down. Somehow it was all still standing. Clearly, the structure was at a literal tipping point. If it lost any more ground, the whole thing would fall. No amount of stopgap framework supports could possibly keep it stable. And yet, the folk of Semperfi were clearly trying.

Even the overly emotional testimonies of folk from Bonavista and Pine Grove, the first two households on the path up here, couldn’t possibly have prepared Enid for how bad the wr

eck really was. The folk had complained about how awful the house was, that it was a waste of resources—about the worst insult possible. It never should have required investigators to decide this.

“It’s a lovely view, anyway,” Enid murmured, looking out over the sluggish river and golden, shimmering marshes of the Estuary. A century ago, there’d probably been an entire neighborhood, an entire city, of nice houses just like this one—or just like this one must have been, once upon a time—a grid of streets, sturdy street lamps lighting it all up bright as day at all hours of the night. Signs of that old world littered the marsh, all the way to the horizon. Canted blocks of concrete, broken frames of steel, whole berms of debris washed up on the tide. Some of the households here made their living by scavenging. Lots of that to be had, constantly turned over by waves and storms.

Before the Fall, this neighborhood would have been miles from the ocean. Back then, flooding may not have even come close. But then it had, and the other houses fell away. Semperfi had saved this tiny little scrap of that ancient neighborhood, and there was something poignant about that. They might have had folk living in it, parent to child, ever since the Fall. But there came a point when no amount of effort could save a thing, and surely this structure wouldn’t last another storm.

Erik pleaded the house’s case desperately, speaking quickly, as if speed would give his argument more weight. He knew what Enid and Teeg must be thinking. “Yes, it’s in poor shape, but . . . there’s nothing else like it. It’s lasted this long, it’d be a shame to let it go to ruin now. Wouldn’t it?” He kept his voice steady, but his eyes shone with anxiety.

He was younger than Enid had expected. The head of a household wasn’t necessarily the oldest member, but had typically been around some time, maybe even earned a banner and raised a kid. He didn’t seem much older than Enid’s own thirty years. Lanky, angular, he had skin the shade of teak and close-shaved brown hair. His face was gaunt, like he never quite got enough to eat, but he kept his hands on his hips in a confident stance.

He’d been watching for them and came to meet them as they followed the path up the hill. Ready to intercept them before they saw the house. Not giving them a chance to make any judgment on their own. Moving up the path with them, he gestured toward the house, guiding them over uneven, scrubby ground. A rangy, tawny dog named Bear had accompanied him. Now, after sniffing at the investigators’ hands, it sat politely at Erik’s feet. Looking up at them, it gave the uncanny impression of following the conversation.

“I know it’s not easy, I never thought it would be easy. But it’s still worth doing. This is important,” he said.

Enid tried to see the place through his eyes. An artifact from the world before the Fall, evidence of what used to be. Like the collection in the archives at Haven, carefully stored bits and pieces, the plastic bricks of computers and radios and things that weren’t any use now, but that people saved because, well, they’d always been saved.

But this was a whole house.

“How long have your people been keeping the place up?” Teeg asked. He made the question sound curious, rather than accusing. Just a casual conversation.

“Since the start. My great-granddad grew up in it. They stayed, all the way through the Fall, even when everyone else was gone. Scavenged the neighborhood, made repairs when everything else washed away. We’ve got pictures, real photos of what it all used to look like. I can show you, I can show that it’s worth saving. My dad”—here he paused, swallowed back grief—“I was seventeen when my dad died, and I promised him I’d look after the place. Seventeen and keeping up the whole household, plus the house . . . I can’t let him down, don’t you see? I promised.” Erik said this with the determination of a man going into battle.

He continued the tour with a parent’s pride. “There used to be a concrete walk right there.” He pointed to the path leading down the hill, back to the other households. A dip in the earth, a stretch where the scrub grew in a little paler, was in fact visible. Scanning over the hillside with fresh eyes, Enid could see all kinds of evidence of a previous vast settlement: divots in the earth where sewer and drain pipes had collapsed, mounds where ruins had fallen decades ago and been buried or scavenged, leaving only shadows behind. An unnatural straight line where shrubs had grown over a fallen lamppost. She had just been thinking of how hostile this place seemed, but this had been a city before the sea crawled inland and storms washed it away.

“That’s impressive,” Enid admitted.

“So you see why we want to keep it standing. We’ve got to!”

Enid wasn’t an engineer and didn’t have much mechanical inclination, but she had a thought: they could get a team of horses—a big team, six? eight?—and put the whole structure on rollers to move what was left of the concrete slab and everything on top of it to more solid ground. Even fifty yards would put it on bedrock rather than the disintegrating muddy cliff it was on now. If Sam were here, he’d have a better idea of what was possible and what was ridiculous. The undertaking would be massive, a huge and excessive use of resources, so Enid couldn’t help but think it would be so much easier and more efficient to build something new and let the old rot away. Better for everyone.

Except Erik had an attachment to the old house. Enid just about understood the impulse—she loved the archives in the cellar under Haven’s clinic, with its stacks of dead things from an irrelevant world. Including photographs, much like the ones Erik bragged about. Memories had their uses, and this house clearly meant something to its people.

But what could possibly justify using the immense resources that would be necessary to save such a wreck?

The look on Enid’s face must have been pained, because Erik kept going.

“The household name, Semperfi—it was a motto my great-granddad had. He was something like an enforcer—like you,” he said, gesturing at Teeg’s staff. “He had this phrase written on badges and things. It means never give up. That’s how he got through the Fall, that’s how he started all this. We can’t give up now.”

Enid wasn’t sure that explanation of the name was exactly right—based on her reading, it had been a pretty common saying before the Fall. And she suspected that Erik’s ancestor would prefer that his great-grandson put his energy to better use, into making something new that would help his household. But there was that promise. Four generations of promise.

Erik led them on eagerly. “Come inside, here—”

Teeg looked at Enid in wide-eyed horror. No assumptions, she wanted to remind him. No preconceived notions. But it was hard to stay neutral, looking at that house. House wasn’t even the right word. That artifact. And like an artifact it likely held its own bit of history—precious, full of information. The photos Erik spoke of ought to be kept in an archive, where they could be protected.

Teeg held back. “You don’t actually go inside there, do you?”

Erik said, “It’ll be fine. Unless there’s an earthquake or a storm coming up, it’s fine.” He started for the front door, urging them forward as if he could pull them by force of will. Fortunately, the wood-grain door was in a part of the house that was still on solid ground. The metal knob and deadbolt might have been original, judging from their scuffs and scratches, the patina of hard wear. Still intact, still functional.

Enid took off her hat, rubbed a hand through her short brown hair, which had become matted with sweat. She was game to enter the rickety building and grinned back at Teeg. “Maybe you should wait here and get help in case the whole thing tips over.”

“That’s not actually funny,” he replied, following her.