They got to Blood Keep by sundown, which was, as the rumours went, the only time that you could approach the barbed wire fencing without being shot at by the guards hiding grimly along the perimeter.
Even then, people were sometimes turned away at the door for reasons only the Keepers knew. They had developed a method of selection that appeared to work, for there hadn’t been conflict at the outpost since it was first built, which was some fifteen years past, by Amber’s count.
She had watched men drag bits of plank and coils of iron across the desert from her bunker’s nest, thinking they would last all of a week before scavengers came for the scrap, or else for the tempting flesh made lush by hard work and superior rations. It had happened before, to other groups with far more men than this particular faction, even those with military skills.
But the Keepers held out, overseen by their leader, a one-eyed Dane, who had stood, arms crossed, to observe their progress, his tattered robes rattling like a hanged man’s trousers in the red winds that chafed them all raw as they worked.
Mortensen was the reason the Red Keep had survived, everyone that passed through the desert said so. Even the most savage of the roving cannibals were fearful of him, and told stories in which the Dane walked at night in the shape of a great black monitor lizard, that he had two wives— twin sisters —each of whom, like their husband, were missing an eye, able to observe the future through those dark sockets.
Amber herself believed that Mortensen was only a man, a clever one who saw the use of the tales that surrounded him and had, thus, built his reputation upon them. She had admired him, as a girl, but as she drove up to the Keep under the cut muscle of sunset Amber owned that she, too, was afraid of the Dane, and what it meant to be of his clan.
In the passenger seat of Amber’s truck, the young one, Blue, twitched and wrestled in their seat as though they itched to crawl out through the open window towards the inevitable dusk. Amber had first found them lingering around the bunker one long ago night, a rangy teenager, scab-mouthed and blue-eyed, tattoos marking their face and the backs of their hands with symbols and words in a language they could not repeat.
Like most in the desert, the child was starving, their ribs and cheekbones like tent poles under their skin. Amber had taken a wary pity upon them, and had set out a tray of bone soup at the mouth of the bunker in the hopes of the youth moving on afterwards, taking their need and the pale glass of their eyes with them.
But the child would not go, not even after she’d yelled and thrown rocks at them in the hopes of warding them back across the sands.
“Jesus, kid,” Amber had seethed, hoarse and weary from shouting. “I know damn well you can hear me. What’s wrong with you? Get out of here!”
She strode across the sand and took the youth by the shoulders, staring into their hard, solemn face with a harshness she would later remember on quiet nights, and lie sleepless from the shame of it. With the patience of one having been confronted in such a manner many times, Blue had opened their mouth and turned to the light so that Amber could see within.
Someone had cut their tongue and most of their teeth in cruel, ritual patterns, and there was a scar across their throat that told Amber whoever had kept the kid before had wanted them quiet. The child could not speak a word, and being too thin to fight off any outlaw in the desert alone had surely found themselves defenceless.
Amber felt shock pass through her in a sour wave.
“Alright,” she’d said, dully. “You better stay.”
In time Blue taught Amber a form of rough sign, and through this she learned their past in halting parts. After this she was glad to have kept them, for the youth had remained with Amber as their mother ever since, though from their looks it was doubtful that there were more than eleven years between them.
Blue proved to be as clinging as a hand-fed pup and as stubborn as a jackal, turning their cheek to any word or sign that they did not want to obey.
Yet there was love between them, that which Amber had not thought she would know again.
The first time she could remember being truly afraid of anything as an adult was watching Blue sleep in the early hours of a morning, curled at the end of Amber’s bed with a bald inch of skin showing between their shirt and slacks from having grown out of the clothes they’d arrived in.
That little bare oblong of gooseflesh and its plait of old scarring had seemed so inviting of a thousand faceless modes of imagined violence that Amber couldn’t settle for the march of them through her thoughts.
Now as she looked at Blue—shorn-haired, thin and jumping as a cricket in their seat—Amber knew that she would have hidden the child in the bunker till the endnotes of both their lives were written had the hunger not driven them out.
It wounded her that a young life could be so broken, carried within them like bones in the sheathe of a dead snake.
“Listen,” said Amber, softly. “When we get out of the truck you better stand behind me, and if I make the sign, you run. I hear they don’t hurt children here, but you’re getting big now, and they might shoot you like you’re grown if this goes bad.”
Blue stared, wordless as always, their eyes reflecting the jasper depths of the dying sun and the sand beyond the vehicle.
“They might want you as a woman,” Amber went on, “and if that turns out to be then I’ll offer myself, in your place. That’s likely not what they’ll ask me for, but whatever it is, you’re not to kick up a stink when they take it from me.”
The nail-bitten wings of Blue’s hands opened in the air.
“WHAT WILL THEY ASK FOR?”
“Never mind,” snapped Amber, and made a sullen gesture of apology as the child’s shoulders shot up to their earlobes. “I mean, it’ll be nothing much, I’m sure. Their rangers have seen me around; they know we don’t have much to spare. They’ll get what they’re given, is all.”
Opening the doors of the truck, she stepped out into the sand, not glancing up at the Keep ahead until she saw the child was at her back as promised, their left fist clutched over a little knife they kept in their pocket.
“You remember what I said,” Amber muttered. “You be polite to these people, too. Don’t bite, but don’t get too cosy with them, neither. They’re not our friends yet. Might never be.”
The child snapped their carved teeth and kicked at a pebble in the sand, watching it skip a few feet away with the taut attention of a cat to a favoured toy.
Glancing up, Amber took in the sprawling iron majesty of the Blood Keep. Its appearance was something like a cathedral built by a lunatic junkman in worship to a dying God; spires jutted up in a vicious underbite beyond the railings, and between the slats of that wicked fencing a hundred soldiers stood, all in black, some flanked by baying wolf-dogs.
All of them carried guns.
Red banners tacked to the battlements lashed the low clouds, each baring the painted sigil of a skull with one eye. Human bones had been roped to the fortress here and there, a piteous waste of worthy sustenance. The newest among them was likely a woman’s, thin and dainty.
She had approached the Keep at the wrong time, or else had faced its justice.
Humorous that this harsh place held such a staunch reputation, a king amidst the filth of men.
Swallowing her disgust, Amber raised her arms in greeting and watched as the great doors of the Keep squealed open, revealing three figures stood waiting behind it.
She recognised the one-eyed Dane at once, having seen him at a distance many times before. Hollow-cheeked and as handsome as a Biblical martyr, the man called Mortensen hunched low in his black cloak, a strip of similar cloth bound where his right eye would have been.
The remaining orb, which was of some murky, unnameable colour, passed from Amber to Blue with measured interest.
Guarding the Dane on either side were two women, so similar that they could only be sisters, and as heavily armed as the guards. They, too, sported sashes across one eye, and their builds were broad, strong, with as much hardened muscle as scarcity would allow.
These were not wives, but generals, and though they said nothing Amber felt their displeasure as though they had spoken aloud.
“Mr Mortensen,” said Amber, softly. “My child and I have come to beg sanctuary from the Blood Keep. Our food stores are done, and we too can’t hunt far alone. It’s not safe. State of things is getting worse.”
The Dane stepped forward, gesturing for his generals to fall back to the fortress with one corded arm. He had the dark and sombre presence of a war lord, yet there was a sensitive intelligence in the remaining eye that suggested he was not entirely cruel.
“That is not your child,” he said, in a voice that was stone and velvet all at once.
Blue made no sound or movement, though they might have hissed, had Amber allowed it.
“Their parents were eaten alive by cannibals,” said Amber, plainly. “While they watched, and couldn’t do a thing to stop it. The cannibals raised them as their own for a while. They were lacking in numbers. Needed new blood to make hunters out of, I expect. After a time, some other gang came by and killed all of them except Blue. They hid under a car till they went away.
“After that, they moved around with some kids in a nearby city, till that went sour. There was more fighting, and they were driven off back out into the desert. Now they live with me.”
The one-eyed Dane nodded, folding his fists into his sleeves as though he were cold, though the temperature in the desert had not yet fallen.
“It is good you brought them here,” he said. “Up in Howl Mountain children are a delicacy. You would be expected to take first bite, as a newcomer.”
Amber’s jaw tightened irritably.
“You don’t eat kids here, they tell me.”
“That is correct,” said Mortensen, with a sort of humour in his voice Amber didn’t like. “We protect our young. They are all that lies ahead of us. We must care for them as jewels.”
Out of the corner of her eye Amber glimpsed Blue’s hands rising, but with her back half turned to them she could not see what they said.
The one-eyed Dane watched the child with a dry curiosity.
“The tattoos,” he said. “Do you know what they mean?”
Amber gave a short shrug.
“Kid stuff, I figured. Maybe the street gang they were running with gave them to ‘em. Used to be popular, before the wars, right?”
The wind picked up, carrying flecks of grit with it, and Mortensen pulled the hood of his robes tighter about his face with a grimace.
“Those markings are words in one of the cannibal clan’s dialects,” he said. “I have seen them before. Your child would have been a priest, in their religion.”
Glancing back at Blue in guarded surprise, Amber said, “Yeah, well. They wouldn’t have been much good at it. We don’t hold with all that folklore stuff.”
The Dane raised one sparse brow.
“Is that so? Have you never asked the child what they believe?”
“Same as I do.”
“And that is?”
Amber raked an eye across the Blood Keep, her gaze meeting those of the many weathered faces behind the fence. They watched her bleakly in return, as apathetic to her presence as the mountains to men.
“We believe that you should be decent to the people you meet,” said Amber. “Eat only when you have to. Do no more harm than you have to. Mind your business, and let others do the same. They’re simple rules, but they get us by. No time for Gods, they way we live.”
The Dane’s thin lips curled, expressing a wry amusement.
“Is that what sets you aside from the wandering clans? Theology?”
“Seeing as they make a religion out of eating, I’d say so,” said Amber. “Blue and me, we just wanna live. Not much ceremony about it.”
Blue tugged at Amber’s shoulder, their angular face pensive.
With a nervy quickness, they signed, “ASK THE MAN IF THERE ARE ANY GODS HERE.”
Gritting her teeth, Amber smoothed a rough hand over their shoulder, patting down a crease in their tunic.
“Never mind about that,” she said. “If there are, they’re nothing to do with you and me. You got that?”
The child nodded, worrying at their lip with the edge of one sharpened tooth
Mortensen, who had been watching the exchange in polite silence, cleared his throat. The sun had set to such a point that his gaunt features were painted with stripes of shadow, ghoulish and beautiful.
There was a dangerous hunger there, a coyote’s slavering want of more than he had right to claim.
“The toll for entering,” said Amber, briskly. “I’ve heard the stories as to what you ask for. Are they true?”
The Dane smiled again. His teeth were white, and stronger than they should have been when paste was such precious contraband.
“Depends on the stories,” he said. “What have you heard?”
Amber half-closed her eyes, marshalling her patience.
“Whatever the kid owes, I’ll pay,” she said, after a time. “We’ll give you the truck, and anything of worth left in the bunker. Your guys know where it is; we’ve traded goods a few times. And I— I’m strong, and I’m only twenty-eight years old. I’m good for a lot of things you probably need a hand with out here. Plus I don’t shy from blood, or what needs to be done.”
“What needs to be done,” Mortensen repeated.
His tone was thick with cynicism, a cutting wheel of words.
Amber turned and squinted towards the west, where she knew from many hours’ observation from the bunker a group of cannibals were moving in across the desert. Without the protection of Blood Keep and its inhabitants Amber doubted that she and Blue would have seen the week out alive.
“IS HE GOING TO LET US IN?” asked the kid, scuffing their boots in the sand.
“You gonna let us in?” said Amber, to the one-eyed Dane.
Mortensen angled his head, seeming to consider.
“You do not know what the toll is.”
“Reckon I do,” said Amber, tersely. “I’ll pay it, I said, though it beats me how you think you’re much better than the other clans.”
She tensed as Mortensen took a step towards her, his stooped, lean figure like a cave drawing of the devil, all vicious lines.
“You believe we are better,” he said. “Or you would not be here.”
“Right,” muttered Amber, gesturing back over her shoulder. “The alternative being going out there, to them.”
There was an unpleasant silence before Mortensen spoke again.
“What we ask is a gesture of small sacrifice. All of us here have participated, or will, when they are of age. It is the first and last time you will be expected to endure it.”
At this Amber relaxed slightly, though not by much.
“Appreciate it,” she said. “Now can we come in?”
“Questions for both of you before I let you through the gates. What weapons do you carry? My guards will take them.”
“Handgun in my belt,” said Amber, at once. “Blade strapped to my left thigh. Blue has a knife in their pocket. Their teeth potentially count, but they’ll have to keep ‘em.”
The Dane laughed, a sound more like a cough than a gesture of mirth.
“I will make an exception for this. Now, another question. When did you first consume human flesh?”
This asked so casually that, for a moment, Amber wondered if she’d misheard him.
“Is that relevant?” she asked, warily.
The Dane nodded.
“It is a defining moment. If I know this, I may learn to trust. And if I trust you, there is a place for you here. So. Tell me. When did you first eat human flesh?”
The penalty for waiving an answer was Amber’s only motivation to concede, yet one she dared not incur.
“It was my father,” she said, quietly. “He taught me to hunt and dress a kill long before the wars got bad. Guess he had some idea of how things’d turn out. When he died—heart attack; he wasn’t so old, but he couldn’t find his medication much on raids—he left me a note telling me what he wanted done with the remains. So I did it. I was only thirteen years old. After that, I was grown.”
Blue stepped out from Amber’s shadow, and she put out her arm, seeing the many guards adjust their weapons.
“You tell them not to point their shit down here,” said Amber, to the one-eyed Dane. “The kid has something to say.”
Mortensen gestured to his men, all of whom shifted reluctantly behind the fencing like fox hounds called back from a kill.
The youth stood with a sort of neurotic dignity, tucking and untucking their hands from their pockets until the scene had settled.
Only when the Dane lifted his chin did they begin to speak.
“A WOMAN, THE FIRST. SHE WAS ALREADY DEAD. DON’T KNOW WHAT KILLED HER. ATE HER RAW BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. PARENTS WOULDN’T TOUCH HER. I WAS STARVING. I WAS TWELVE.”
Amber translated, her voice low and strained with a weary despair. She had never drawn this particular tale from Blue before; its stark, cruel simplicity seemed to drink the very heat from the desert.
Mortensen gazed at the youth until they looked away, folding their long arms about their middle.
“How old is the child now?” asked the Dane.
Both the child and the young woman shrugged, each an unconscious mirror of the other.
“That language,” said Mortensen. “They speak with their hands, but it is not American Sign.”
“Sir, look around you,” Amber retorted. “What’s even left of America now?”
Ignoring her, Mortensen turned back to the youth, who seemed ever on the verge of lunging in attack or fright, tethered down only by the woman at their side.
“The Keep must learn to speak this nameless Sign,” said the Dane. “Everyone in the compound has their voice heard. You as well. Will you teach us?”
Perhaps he had hoped to move the child with this speech; as it was, they only stared through him and gave an irritable jerk of the hand.
“YES.”
“Guess so,” said Amber.
The three looked at each other, then up at the sky, from which darkness came down like algae on a red sea.
“Good,” said Mortensen, at last. “You can come in. I will find you work, rooms to sleep. You will not want for many things.”
Amber bit the inside of her lips to prevent herself from smiling.
“Thank you,” she said, and took Blue by the skinny shoulders, propelling them ahead of her through the open ribcage of the front gates and into the fortress beyond.
Despite the rumours, Amber had not known what to expect on the inside. A prison of ravenous survivors tormented into grateful rapture, perhaps, a sty in which the fertile were bid to breed for swill like sows, still preferable to an existence of boiling up boot tongues and rationing the entrails of scavengers on the outside.
She was rather surprised that the main building opened into a what resembled a massive community space with many doors leading to inner chambers on either side of it.
The walls and ceiling were forged from reclaimed metal, creating a tinny acoustic in the room.
A vast stained window solely in shades of topaz and apricot cast stripes of tawny light across the iron grated flooring. Groups of adults stood around talking or drinking from pitchers on steel table tops, and somewhere in a far corner a speaker emitted a strange, gritty voiced jazz.
A television on one wall played scenes from an old film Amber did not know; she had not seen a working electronic since she was seven years old.
“You’ve got a generator,” she said, aloud.
Mortensen narrowed his eye.
“All of the original settlers I gathered here were scientists, doctors, engineers. As the Keep grows we will share the knowledge and technology we have here with those that will receive it, and share in our customs. Look around, if you would like.”
A middle-aged woman with the appearance and mannerisms of a wet crow approached Mortensen, muttering something too low for Amber to hear. Like the others in the room the woman wore dark robes, their distressed layers making a mystery of her form. Only her face give her away, as beautiful and taut as that of an ageing ballet dancer Amber had seen in a book once, long ago.
“Yes,” said Mortensen, to the woman, his hand touching the small of her back. “That is a good idea, I think.”
Turning to Amber, he added, “Myla will take your charge to meet the other children, if it is agreeable to you.”
He was polite, but with a firmness that defied refusal and suggested, also, the desire to commune with Amber alone.
She clapped her hand to Blue’s cheek, tracing the white scar that stood out like a fish hook on their dark skin.
“Go on,” she said. “Don’t get up to any dumb shit while I’m gone.”
Blue wrinkled their nose.
“I’LL TRY.”
“Madam.”
Amber glanced at Mortensen, who had turned expectantly, waiting for her to follow him again. She pulled Blue into a brief embrace and watched them skulk away at Myla’s heels, their head twitching about in all directions to take in the building around them.
“Madam,” said the Dane, again, and this time Amber followed, keeping a sizable distance between them.
The man had a slow, strange gait, not quite limping, but with the same favouring of one leg that came with an ancient injury. Amber wondered how old Mortensen was; she would have guessed mid-forties to early fifties, but she couldn’t be sure when the desert aged people far beyond the years that they had lived.
Mortensen led her through corridor after corridor, his boots ringing against the iron flooring. He stopped abruptly outside a door isolated on what Amber estimated to be an outer wing of the fortress and unlocked it with a bunch of keys from some pocket of his robes.
“Let us talk here,” he said. “It is private enough.”
“Here?” echoed Amber, taking an uncertain step into the room.
Unlike the rest of the fortress it was all black, smooth wood, panelled walls and polished floorboards, furniture that appeared to have been liberated from one of the defunct luxury hotels in Nevada. The chamber might have been taken for an old-fashioned gentleman’s smoking room had it not been for the surgical chair off to one side and the distinct smell of disinfectant in the air.
Amber felt a certain coldness fall across her, shuddering as though it were not warm enough in the room to wring her of all the moisture in her veins.
The one-eyed Dane leant against one wall, watching her closely.
“You know what I am going to do to you,” he said.
The clinical absence of feeling in his voice did not seem genuine, a formality that trapped the scuttling darkness beneath.
“I know, alright,” said Amber, unsteadily. “You’re gonna cut off a part of my body to be eaten by the people here. That’s your fucking toll.”
Mortensen lowered his head, accepting the spite in her words like a penance.
“Yes.”
Amber let out a breath made staccato with adrenaline.
“Can I ask how you choose what part you serve up?”
“No.”
The simple word left Amber as cold as sand by night.
“Why not?” she asked, and Mortensen shrugged.
“There would be dispute as to the fairness.”
“They’d have a point,” Amber retorted. “It’s not fair. We should be allowed to pick what we lose.”
“Many would choose small,” said Mortenson. “An ear, or finger perhaps. Convenient for you, but not the community. We create a culture here that values giving selflessly for the future.”
As he spoke the Dane opened a glass cabinet and began laying out a series of steel instruments onto a nearby desk. There was no villainous theatre to the act, no sneering cruelty, only the calm, methodical rhythm of motion performed a thousand times before.
See that this must be done, it seemed to say, as though the mutilation was a necessary hurt, like inoculation, or the carving out of cancer. Perhaps it even was necessary, if only to a clan half-mad from hunger.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the future,” said Amber, sinking down into a nearby chair. “Will there even be one of those?”
“I believe so,” said Mortensen. “If our culture is embraced by all, it is certain.”
There was such a concentration of belief in his rugged, wind-beaten face that Amber let out a nervous laugh.
“I don’t think that’ll be popular. You’ve seen how people are living out there. They won’t accept your way.”
Mortensen turned from the tools—a saw, a scalpel, a flat-sided file—and wiped his hands delicately together as though the metal had soiled him, somehow.
“Then they will not be saved,” he said, simply. “Not everyone can be.”
Clutching either side of her chair, Amber realised from the squeak of skin on leather that her hands were sweating.
“So why did you save me?” she breathed.
“Because you wanted to be,” said Mortensen, and he crossed the room until he was standing over her, so close that she could smell how clean he was, and the pepper of some rare cologne. “You knew what would be expected. Still you came.”
Amber was suddenly aware of how small she was in comparison to this men, and to most people; five foot three, and a lean one hundred pounds, more bone than muscle, made delicate by want of meat. She wondered queasily if it would benefit her that she was pretty, freckled and sun-browned, her loose hair like kicked-up sand, or if the Dane cared no more for that than the prettiness of a ewe put to slaughter.
“What are you going to take?” she asked, rather breathlessly.
Mortensen looked into her face, and in that sole eye Amber saw a glint of male cunning, that which she’d known would come.
“If you had come alone, I would have removed your leg only from the knee,” said the Dane. “Cut here, just like this.”
To demonstrate he crouched beside Amber, rolling her trouser leg up with hands so sudden and business-like in their attendance that she did not prevent him. He traced a dotted line across the joint, the warmth of his fingertip almost pleasant.
“But I must take a piece for the child, also,” said Mortensen. “So I will cut from here, instead, and have your thigh as well.”
Here he held back the dense roll of denim fabric as far as he could and touched Amber’s hip with such tenderness she jumped.
“You’ll cut?” she echoed, weakly. “Why does it have to be you?”
“I was a surgeon, many years ago,” said Mortensen. “Famous, in fact. Not that this matters, now. It will be a clean operation. I am skilled in what once made my name.”
His hand remained on Amber’s hip, but she was too rigid with fear either to dislodge it or complain.
“What good will I be to the Keep with one leg newly off?” she barked. “I’ll be damned useless, for a while, anyway.”
Mortensen tutted dismissively.
“We have developed prosthetics here of such intelligence that you will walk again the moment you are healed. Such advances are our currency. You underestimate us, I think. The keys we hold to rebuild the world.”
Clenching her clammy fists over the edges of her seat, Amber said, “I don’t believe you. What about your eye? How come that didn’t get rebuilt?”
The Dane smiled.
“It did. I cover it by choice. For effect, you see. Mystery lures people, and yet it holds them at bay, also.”
With his free hand he unwound the strap of fabric covering his bad eye and revealed it, blinking gently, as thought it were affected by the light. A sphere of black glass filled his socket, without detail or dimension of any kind, like a tunnel to the underworld.
Even without a pupil to signify a path of vision Amber realised, with a hollow awe, that it could see.
“I think you understand now why there is such peace at the Keep,” said the Dane. “First, there is trust, a bond between us all we forge in giving up our own flesh for the good of the tribe.”
Leaning down, Mortensen ran his thumb along the socket of Amber’s hip into the shallow where sweat gathered between her loins and her thigh. His hands had clearly known women and meat with the same precision, with little separation in between.
“Second, there is fear,” said Mortenson, and his voice then was almost gentle. “I will take, this time, with consent. But if you go against the Keep at any time I will not ask for that again.”
Amber sucked in a trembling breath, thinking of the hopeless, undreaming desert, of the taste of men, and of the Dane’s hands on her. Of his blades.
“Take the fucking leg,” she rasped. “But… feed it to my kid. That’s all I ask. If I have to lose it, make it food on their plate.”
Mortensen glanced up into Amber’s eyes, and his lined face worked with some emotion that did not quite surface, lurking like an ancient fish in subterranean shadow.
“So you have found ritual in this, also,” said the Dane. “Perhaps one of the oldest there is: the giving of a parent to a child all they have.”
The Morgue 