The Dead Queen and the Pelagic Court

He'd spotted it three days earlier while pacing the concrete shoreline of the plague pit that, in better days, was known as Emerald Grove Luxury Condos. It was a bog now, a mire of viscous, oily corruption that no light could pierce and where no life would ever again bloom, save for those preternatural horrors which stalked its depths, awaiting the scent of blood. The tremors had sunk the neighborhood into an asphalt canyon and the black water had bubbled up like a geyser, filling the crater at an impossible pace, drowning the bulk of the survivors. Those that yet lived fell prey to the things the water carried in. All that remained now to tell of the original inhabitants were sun bleached bones pitted with corrosion, and those few roofs which peeked above the surface, looming with the mournful dignity of old tombstones.

The scavenger had no business near Emerald Grove, no one except morons and madmen ever really did, but he had for days found himself drawn inexorably back. He gazed out over the tarry river, hating himself for wasting time with this fool's errand yet unable to put down his binoculars. And then he at last saw it.

It was a metallic glint, a single point of light hanging in the air like a guiding star. Had he a scrap of faith left he'd have called it divine providence that it should hang just off the coast of the dead forest surrounding the swamp. The house had shifted, and he was certain he could just barely reach it.

By the time he reached the withered mounds of petrified wood that could once have been called a forest, the sun had ducked back behind a blanket of slate-gray clouds, snuffing out the angelic beacon that lit his way. In the dull light of a coming storm, he saw her for the first time.

He was not immediately certain she was a woman, she suffered from the androgyny of desiccation, her sex only confirmed by the tattered remains of a sundress that, though once canary yellow, was now the color of wet sand. Her arms were wide open, held in place by thickly knotted ropes anchored to either side of the triangular rooftop with what appeared to be railroad spikes. The placement of the spikes allowed her body to sag down below her arms in a "Y" shape, with her head resting on her right shoulder. Humid air wafting from the vile river below had sloughed off much of her flesh, what remained was paper thin and darkened by rot, some had begun to tear away, exposing the skeleton beneath. The skin of her lipless mouth was pulled back in a rictus grin, as though she were pleased by the wretched sights over which she stood an eyeless vigil. Her feet and calves were stripped down to bones the color of ivory, without a scrap of blood or meat remaining. Her left foot was missing entirely, the femur ending in a jagged stump. With her outstretched arms and broken body, she looked every bit a morbid parody of The Passion.

It was not hard to spot what had caught the light, it was a pendant. It was a heart shaped affair, solid gold with inset diamonds framing the edges. It showed none of the telltale signs of fake jewelry, no rust or oxidization, it was real and it was within his grasp. Even in a dead world gold had value. The autocannons around the settlement had started letting monsters get close enough to pound on the walls, a bit of gold would get the targeting system up and running. The chief would sell his soul if it meant getting that necklace in the hands of the gunmaster.

He'd not risk trying to get the pendant that day, the waters were too turbulent, the things within were in a feeding frenzy, they'd smell his sweat if it dropped into the river and that would be the end of him. He made camp within the dead forest, far enough away that he could take off his rebreather without worrying about the toxic effluvium getting into his lungs. He still periodically took slugs of the brewmaster's homestyle vodka from a dented old hip flask to burn out any throat shrooms before they took root in his esophagus. He hadn't come this close just to die from his own carelessness.

For the next three days he milled about and killed time as best he could, returning to the edge of the shoreline every few hours to see if the water had calmed down, each time finding it still churning with unseen activity. He sharpened his knives, mended holes in his clothing, patched up any damage to the artificial lung that fed clean air to his rebreather mask through a flexible hose pipe. He leafed through weather-beaten novels he had gathered and locally written penny dreadfuls printed on strips of vellum and cloth-paper. On the second evening he went and sat cross-legged by the shore, looking out at the putrefied face of the woman who wore his future around her neck.

"Who are you, dear girl?" He asked louder than he meant to, his tone cordial, as though he genuinely anticipated an answer.

"You're a corpse now obviously, but what did you do before you took this job?" He chuckled humorlessly, the stilted laugh of a man feigning interest during an obligatory dinner party. He pulled his flask out from one of the inner pockets of his greatcoat, unscrewed the cap, took a pull from it, grimaced, and held it out in front of him as if to hand it to some invisible drinking partner.

"Care for a tipple?"

Pause

"Ah of course, you're on duty. Someone has to play watchman out here I suppose. Wouldn't want any unsavory types coming and robbing any of these fine people!" He gestured grandly to a crowd of no one, his exaggerated arm movements jostling his flask and spilling a drop onto the ground beside him.

"Shit! What a senseless waste of booze. Gotta be careful, the till is emptying fast and who knows when I'll be able to afford another bottle." A glower all of a sudden fell over his face and he stared angrily into the empty eye sockets of what had once been a woman.

"Yes, I suppose it's time you found out, I'm a guttersnipe myself, born and raised in the filth."

Another pause, his anger seemed to grow at the cadaver's silence.

"Oh I know, you're too good to speak with me. Yes I know the game, take what you want from whoever's beneath you and don't spare them a passing glance. You blue bloods are all the same, thinking you're so superior to us working stiffs. Well you certainly must taste better, they sure seem to think so!" he pointed down at the murky water, the moonless gloom turning the shadowy miasma into a fathomless void that dizzied him when he stared at it too long.

He fumbled for a moment in the dirt before grabbing a rock, swearing loudly, and throwing it towards the corpse with as much strength as he could muster in his inebriated state. The rock bounced off the pendant hanging from her neck and dropped into the sludge below with a squelch like boots in mud. The heart seemed to split in two, and for a horrible moment he was certain he had shattered it. The shock cleared his mind and he was able to parse that the two pieces were hinged together. It was a locket. Sighing, he awkwardly climbed to his feet, stumbled in the direction of his campfire, and collapsed onto his bedroll. "Tomorrow" he muttered as sleep claimed him.

He had been correct, the water had finally skinned up over night, a filmy membrane masking the liquid beneath and giving the lake the appearance of a massive rubber sheet. It had gone still, and it was time to collect his prize. A quick hop saw him on the roof of the house, and he stepped as lightly as he could over the creaking shingles until he found himself positioned just above the head of the dead woman. The chain of the locket was pinched between two exposed vertebrae, and he extracted it with the steady hand of a surgeon. He told himself it was to avoid dropping it, but in the back of his mind he wanted badly not to disturb the crucified lady. The first thing he noticed when it entered his hands was the picture. It was a woman, copper skinned with rosy cheeks and hair as dark as the waters over which she now dangled. Beside her, his arm draped over her shoulder was a swarthy looking man with his black hair slicked back and a jester's million dollar grin plastered over his face. On the inside of the locket was an engraving, "To my beloved Abby, from the man of her dreams". The scavenger sat there, staring at the picture for a good ten minutes before he heard the wet pop of something breaking surface tension.

He'd seen these things before, more times than he cared to remember, but something about the sheer wrongness of this one activated a sort of primal disgust buried in his subconscious mind. Its body was a stark, shiny gray beneath the sludge sliding from its streamlined physique. It appeared to be an enormous trout, though with almost humanoid legs which sprouted from just above where its body tapered into a tailfin. Two hugely muscled simian arms hung from either side of its body, looking too heavy for its comparably lithe form, yet which twitched and flexed in a manner which proved they were not. It's mouth hung constantly open, and from its throat projected a probing lamprey mouth crowded with rows of yellow daggers. The hideous protuberance moved about, clearly prehensile in spite of the basic laws of physiology, pulsing and sucking in air, sniffing for its next meal. It stood atop a chunk of cracked asphalt stuck to the side of the house, its proboscis scuttling over the lower extremities of the crucified woman. The scavenger suddenly had an inkling as to where her foot had gone. There was no way the idiot creature could possibly reach him if it could only get at the dangling corpse's feet. And yet...

Before he'd had a chance to think the flintlock was in his hand. It was a long barreled, repeating abomination of a gun sold to him at a discount by young gunsmiths. The first shot went wide, barely managing to scratch the beast's arm. It roared, a loud trilling sound like the howl of a drowning panther, clearly angrier than it was hurt. The next shot was better, lodging in the thing's arm. Its roar was strained this time, and before it could finish the scavenger had already pulled back the lever and had his finger over the trigger. His third shot slammed into the monster's left eye, bursting it in a shower of gore that splattered over the lingering film on the nearby water, staining it red. It howled with more ferocity than anything that had just lost an eye should have been able to muster and dove back down into the water, thrashing angrily as it rushed to safety.

His gun was back in its holster before the creature had fully vanished from sight, and his pocketknife quickly took its place. Grabbing a piece of driftwood, he sat down and carved furiously into it for fifteen straight minutes. At length he finally stood back up, brushed the sawdust from his hands, and fastened the wood around the dead woman's neck with a piece of the twine he'd used to set up his tent. Content, he set off for dry land, never so much as glancing backwards.

HERE RESTS ABBY. FOR WHATEVER IT'S WORTH, SHE WAS LOVED.