* Author : Dustin Steinacker
* Narrator : Tatiana Grey
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published by Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
death, animated corpses, violence against children
Rated R.
[Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part novelette. Visit our previous post to read Part 1.]
Reading Dead Lips — Part 2
By Dustin Steinacker
They must have razed the entire village, Alex said carefully, rather than admit that ordinary people had killed the officers living here. Better for the city to appear a battle casualty.
“Why does it matter?” she managed. “Whether it was military or rebels?”
“Czir military all captured or killed. Nobody there left, but still guerrillas fighting. No need to inspire them.”
“But you know it was rebels.”
“Everybody knows. Propaganda.”
“Then why?” she pled. For understanding, for any way to put order to this. Questions of politics seemed so distant and sanitary to this charnel town before her. “Why the coverup?”
“We pretend not to. Same thing. Propaganda still works.”
These streets of death brought names back to her memory. Her friend, little Tibor, he of the harelip scar. The Valentins, who both shouted and struck their children and made Noe glad for her gentle mother. Petr Mátyás, an oddly well-to-do peddler who’d had the misfortune of settling in Óste just before the end. A nice man with a hard-to-place accent who loved a foolish pun.
All dead or enslaved or worse. This was a graveyard, as much as any she’d visited coming here.
Snap.
Nouelle didn’t remember fishing the elastic from her pocket, but there again was that comforting sting against her wrist.
There were two likely directions for the bodies. Westerly, past the half-standing livestock fence, between the village and the capital. Or along Óste’s lower perimeter–it surprised her, how easily a martial word like perimeter came to mind when talking about home — flanking the river. She doubted they’d have taken corpses over water or dug up the rockier untilled land on the other side of the road. If they had, she’d expand her search.
It was late, she told herself, though the sun was only just beginning to glare as it set. Better to go spirit-hunting in the morning.
Mercifully, Alex had held back as she toured her blighted hometown and, also mercifully, had returned Lynn. That night they left the buggy behind a standing wooden corner of wall, hidden from the road.
More vehicles passed in the dark. She looked out to see open-topped jeeps housing five soldiers each.
“Is this unusual?” she asked, keeping her voice even.
Alex smiled gently. “These men are for you, you mean? No worrying. Separate thing, something else wrong.”
“But if they thought I was a scout of some sort? Maybe they recognized the buggy or the checkpoint guard said something–”
“Shh…” he took her hand and she could feel his good arm, steady.
“You have a gun?” Alex asked in the low light of the next morning. Why he hadn’t asked that until this moment, she didn’t know.
“I did, before, for the settlements. But not here.”
