Lazarus Rising

1.8 Jamek

Lying on her back, looking up at the whirling snow caught in the gentle updrafts of the wind Cheyenne felt as if she were in a child's snow dome, tipped upside down, with the ground falling into the sky. She rolled over. The Captain was lying a few feet away from her, eyes closed, body limply held in a blanket of shrouding snow. A large gash, struck in oxide red ran across his forehead over his pale, inert face.

With a supreme effort, ignoring the tearing pain in her ligaments she crawled over and knelt by his side. Gently lifting his head and cradling it in her arms she picked up a pile of frosted snow, crushed it in her hand and pushed in into the wound across his forehead. His eyes shot open as he flinched away from the cold compress.

"Hold still, I've got a medical kit in the aero," the frosted words spilled from her mouth in thick balls of white air that drifted away into the icy darkness.

He sat up coughing and pushed her away. "I'm OK. Give me a hand."

She hauled him to his feet and for a moment he looked around dazed, as if trying to recollect what had happened. Then gathering his thoughts he released her hand and moved away, motioning her to follow him. "Come with me, I've got something to show you"

As she looked down she could feel the snow falling on her neck like the cold whisper of death standing over her shoulder surveying it's most recent recruit. The headless body looked like a bleached squid expelled onto the soft grey sands of beach. Curdled blood had leached into the snow where the head and hands had been removed. Expelled from the stunted neck and hands it had pooled into the shape of a grinning winged demon in the snow. Cheyenne looked at the Captain to see if he showed any signs of having seen it but his face looked blank. As he caught her eye she quickly looked away.

"The chauffeur? Are you sure?" she asked.

"Earlier this evening one of my officers came in here for a... well you know. He found the body. It maybe against the law to bury anyone these days but a body in a graveyard is no surprise. Illegal, but it goes on more than you'd imagine. People still want burials in these old consecrated grounds, for their babies and children mostly." He gestured toward the pale lights coming from the far wall of the churchyard. "His clothes are over there, uniform and cap, so he knew who it probably was. My officer got out and called me. I was waiting until you came and then saw our man, come to bury the body. We've not found the head or the hands. In this snow they could be just by us and we'd never find them, we'll have to wait until it clears."

"Doesn't matter, we can still identify the body from G-tests. If he'd been buried here no one would have ever have known." Cheyenne heaved the body over and ran her hands over the bleached flesh, checking for bruises and wounds. "Whoever killed him did it here and did it quickly, then dismembered him."

"The man we just missed in all probability." Mused the Captain. "Came here to bury him and close down your prime suspect."

She looked at the stained faces of the statues standing around them on thin platforms of cracked stone graves. Lines of motionless stone seraphs staring at them through moss filled eyes, seemingly transfixed at the sight of the blood splattered corpse lying prostrate before before them, slowly being drawn into the ground by the tumbling snowflakes. "Whatever you may say Captain, Risers don't get buried in churchyards. Plenty of witnesses here saw it all, ask them." She tried to suppress the irony in her voice.

"No one's talking." His voice sounded hollow and tired, too tired to bounce back her gallows humour.

"Get Rovin over, he'll get them to say something." A long beam of light, shining through the tombstones, washed over the flickering, tumbling snowflakes, attracting her attention. She strode across the virgin surface to investigate. It was her torch, lying where it had been thrown. She picked it up and brushed it down. "So the drivers been killed, what are we to make of that? And what are we to make of the man that did it?"