The Morgen Towers: The Misrule, #5

By Andy Graham

Lust and wrath. Vengeance and love. Hope.

A collection of short stories that tumble through a whirlwind of human emotions.

A bullied man is pushed over the edge with disastrous consequences.

A woman stands up to a lecherous professor who has been preying on 'his girls'.

Benn Tate wakes up in a hospital of nightmares.

Then there are the tales of unsung heroism, sacrifice and dark magic. Stories of humanity amongst cruelty, and of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Graham
• Release date: Dec 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781393997375

Book preview

THE MORGEN TOWERS

THE MORGEN TOWERS

THE MISRULE: BOOK FIVE/ SHORT STORIES

ANDY GRAHAM

CONTENTS

Stay up to date

The Morgen Towers

Trustless

Henn's (Pen is) Pink

Hell Sky

Switch

Shark Teeth

Sticks & Stones & Scalpels

Droidal

Lynn's Projects

Copyright and Disclaimer

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THE MORGEN TOWERS

A key clattered across my desk.

Simm’s dead. Corporal Terez’s face had a green tinge to it.

What do you mean dead?

Dead as in we need to call his father dead.

Are you sure?

A muscle flickered on Terez’s jaw.

Scratch that. Dumb thing to ask. Of course you’re sure. But dead? I needed to ask again, for my own sake. How could something as final as death arrive so suddenly? Even after a long career in the military, I still couldn’t get my head around it. Neither, it seemed, could Terez. She stood parade-ground still. The sun streaming through the porthole windows didn’t touch the blackness around her eyes.

The leather of my chair — a captain’s chair, appropriately — creaked as I twisted to follow the glare of light. Right now, I wanted heat, even looking at something warm would do, anything to fight off the chill Terez’s news had brought.

The early morning sun was breaking through the clouds. It flashed off the sea, sparkling and dancing between the Morgen Towers. The seven military towers located off the coast of the mainland had been my home for the last six months. I was sick of the sight of them and the bloody birds that shat all over the steel structures.

The fisher gulls were hunting early this morning, swooping shadows that carved lines through the sky. Cawing. Raucous and ugly. One broke away from the circling flock above Tower Two. It plunged towards something I couldn’t see. The grace of the gull’s dive was lost in a looming sense of dread. As ranking officer on these life-forsaken towers, I was going to have to deal with the emotional fall out of Simm’s death. Then there would be the enemy that no amount of training could prepare you for: paperwork. Death wasn’t the only thing that was endless.

Terez coughed, discrete but insistent.

OK, Corporal, let’s do this. How did Simm die? Boozing in one of his hidey-holes? Or did he fall into the sea again? The last time we’d had to fish the drunken sot out, it had spawned even more bad jokes at Simm’s expense than usual.

No, sir. You need to see this for yourself. He’s in the map room. I locked the door. It’s not a routine death. Corporal Terez was an army medic who made most hard-nosed veterans look like button-nosed newbies. Now, she looked to be on the verge of throwing up.

What do you mean by ‘not a routine’ death?

That was on the floor outside the map room. Terez pointed. The key she’d thrown onto the desk had come to rest next to the diary my wife had bought me. The metal had a long scratch gouged into one side. It was clogged up with something thick and dark and crimson.

Not a routine death? The closer I got to my retirement, the less I liked the sound of sentences like that. My desk diary stared up at me, and in my wife’s voice seemed to say: "Only three days left before the end of this assignment. Only three weeks before you retire to the country to keep chickens. Only three days before you see me again."

Sir?

I grabbed the key. Let’s do it, Corporal.

The clang of my office door closing rattled down the corridors. The echoes followed us as we wound our way towards Private Simm and his not-a-routine death. Red-hot wires hissed and crackled in the old filament bulbs above us. We passed through shadows that swayed as the wind and waves buffeted the supports of our tower: Tower One, framed in the heart of the other six Morgen Towers.

Terez turned left, her breathing shallow. She was spooked and that had brought me up in a rash of gooseflesh. I wasn’t a wimp, a teardrop, a beta, or whatever was the current insult-of-the-day. I’d seen active service as recently as the Great Trade Conflict, where I’d first met Terez. I’d witnessed my fair share of death and guts in a forty-year career. I was still waiting to see the glory, though. I didn’t consider soldiers dying particularly glamorous, especially when those soldiers were boys still boasting about how often they shaved.

The kids I’d commanded should have been fumbling their way through their first date, not sobbing and wide eyed as they pieced together the fleshy jigsaw of their dead friends. But, and this had always been the harsh truth of life, whatever your enemy was prepared to sacrifice, you had to sacrifice more, or you lost more.

Terez turned left again — How is it that these sea towers have more left turns than right? Isn’t that impossible? — and again, coming to a halt outside the map room.

I pulled the key out of my pocket. It was clammy and greasy, almost as if it had been sweating, not me.

That’s evidence, sir.

It’s the only key we have, Terez. Opening the door takes priority. My gaze slid from the key to the lock. Back again. For many people, the more horror they see, the more they become inured to it. It had the opposite effect on me. You’ve seen bodies before, I whispered to myself. You’ll be fine.

Terez’s eyes were fixed on the door. She’s seen bodies before, too. She’s a medic. She’s seen worse than I have. Terez was more scared than I was.

Snapping my jacket straight, I slid the key into the lock. It click click clicked as the tumblers engaged.

The first thing that hit me was the stench. People say that blood smells coppery or metallic. This was neither. It smelt of drains and decay. The second thing I noticed was the thump of my pulse in my ears. The third was private Simm. It was hard not to. He was everywhere. The only bit of him that was recognisable was his scalp. Simm had being going bald since his early teens and his solution had been to tattoo a vicious widow’s peak in blue-black ink on his head. The rest of Simm had been...

At this point, parts of my brain started shutting down. Rather than filling the silence with redundant questions, like Are you sure he’s dead?, my mind shut off its emotional centres and focused on what I could see and what I would have to do next. I didn’t like violence or death, but I was still a professional. I took a shuddering breath in and concentrated on what lay in front of me.

A globe of our planet spun from the ceiling like a geographical mirror ball. Coloured glass, winking in the light, marked capitals and continents. Our capital city, Effrea-Tye, was a deep vibrant red. The same colour as the twisting strands of intestines that dangled from the mirror ball. A drop of blood beaded at the end of the guts, swelled, and splattered onto the table. Another fell, then another. They traced a dotted line around the mess that had been Simm’s tattooed head. It had been decapitated and sat in a spreading puddle. For Simm’s sake, I hoped his face had been battered into a pulp after he’d been murdered. As for the wall opposite... The part of my brain that was fully aware of what it was looking at and trying not to puke sent shivers down to my toes.

The Morgen Towers, anti-aircraft, -submarine, and -boat towers, had been built during the recent Great Trade Conflict. Located off the coast of the mainland, they were high-spec, semi-automated and had been designed for one thing: killing people. And when the crew weren’t killing people, there wasn’t much to do other than wait to kill people, train to kill people, chat about killing people, watch videos about killing people, and repeat. Apart from one bullet-ridden flash of action, my soldiers’ lives on the Morgen Towers had been terminally dull. To make matters worse, the Military High Command expressly forbade any form of initiative; my wife claimed it was a fear of free thinking. Any tasks the crew wanted to undertake were passed up the chain of command. Occasionally, an order was passed back down that chain. But there was very, very little to do. And after a six-month tour — my final tour before retirement and fresh eggs! — it was harder to maintain the discipline we needed. That meant we had found ways of amusing ourselves.

I read and looked at photos of my kids and grandkids. I had a great-grandkid on the way, too, but wasn’t supposed to know that.

Terez studied.

Naylor beasted himself in the gym. He called it training; I called it early-onset arthritis.

Levskow slept. She said the more she slept, the better looking everyone else got.

Jonnes played jokes on everyone. He’d glued all the zips closed on Simm’s uniform the last time the budding artist had got blind drunk.

Simm sulked and glowered. When he wasn’t doing that, he created. He saw art in everything, from the flicker of starlight on the waves to the arrangement of food on his plate. And even I, with the artistic inclinations of a slug, could see that what he created was magnificent. This room, the map room, had been Simm’s masterpiece.

He’d sculpted one wall into a detailed relief map of the coast of the mainland and its neighbours on the other side of the South Sea. Filigree letters and numbers swirled in lines around the edges. A huge nautical compass was designed around a grinning skull, one eye of which had a plastic gem set in it. The colour matched the hue of the capital city on the globe. The skull rested on crossed pistols with roses in the handles. Ornate symbols had been stamped into the sea close to the coast: a trident, a fish, a horse, a bull and a whirlpool.

Only now, a lot of that map was smeared with blood that was drying black. Simm’s headless, eyeless, gutless corpse stood in one corner of the room. It seemed bigger than it should be, as if it was daring me to look at it. One arm had been nailed to the wall, pointing. Across the top of the map, sprawled a sentence painted in fresh red streaks.

By all the gods that never lived. Terez’s voice scratched its way into my head. The writing. Those words. Your name... they weren’t here when I locked the door. I gave you the only key.

There was the dull thud of Terez’s knees hitting the floor. As her retching became dry-heaving, I mumbled the words dripping down the walls, You’re next, Captain Namoor.

I pulled Terez to her feet and half-pushed, half-pulled her out of the map room. There was a slow noise behind me, squelching and slurping and sliming, as Simm’s corpse slid to the ground. It left a dark red arc on the wall. A time-lapse image of a sunset. It took three attempts before I could get the key in the lock. Who else knows about this?

No one. Terez gripped the doorjamb. Jonnes is on Dust Watch. (The name we had given the comms equipment.) He bet Simm a week’s wages yesterday that he’d get a call from HQ during the night.

Naylor and Levskow?

The first is probably in the gym.

Makes sense, he likes to be ‘heaving iron’ by zero six hundred.

"The