本文系用户投稿，不代表机核网观点
⚠️ 未经作者授权 禁止转载
4 Scrap and Grave
4 Scrap and Grave
The sun hung like a loose balloon, trembling as it peeked over the dam.
Clem clung to a utility pole, scrambling up with both hands and feet. She grabbed a cable, swung forward, and landed firmly on a sheet of faded metal plating. Sunlight barely pierced the layers of smoke and cloud, landing on the ground just in front of her. She lifted her gaze. The terrain of the quarantine zone was uneven, with Scrapspire laying its foundation on the sloped hills. From here, she could see nearly the whole settlement sprawled below: ramshackle tin shacks, precariously stacked like the discarded bones of some ancient machine. The stench of rusted steel mingled with thick humidity and rode the warm breeze straight onto her. Sheets of oxidized red metal clustered tightly, forming a sluggish river of rust that bled downhill into the distant lowlands.
She hopped forward, boots pounded rooftop after rooftop—thump, thump—echoing through the streets. A chorus of curses rose from the shacks below.
“Which little brat is it this time?”
“Just wait till I—” A fit of coughing drowned out the rest.
Clem didn’t bother replying. She vaulted over a makeshift chimney, leaped across more rooftops, and dove into a wide garbage chute. The tube was slick with some kind of synthetic polish—one of the few luxuries in the quarantine zone that could pass for fun. It was the closest thing they had to a playground slide. Clem crossed her arms over her chest, imagining herself as a contestant in one of those survival games hosted in outer orbit, launching from a high-pressure chamber into the arena below.
She tried to land on one knee like the contestants, but the chute’s acceleration had other plans. She tumbled through the air and crashed into a heap of black garbage bags, rolling with a thud and a grunt. Shaking her head, bits of trash clinging to her hair, and stood, brushing herself off. A group of kids had been scavenging nearby. They froze, startled by her sudden entrance, eyes wide and cautious, studying her from the shadows like alley cats.
Then she remembered the satchel.
Heart racing, she flipped it open and checked the inner lining. The book was still there, nestled inside the patched-up cloth. She exhaled deeply. The crimson cover was untouched, its title glinting faintly in etched gold: The Bamberg Revelation.
She rounded a corner—and the volume of the world doubled.
She is in Scrapspire’s central street now, where the alley was already too narrow, and now choked by food carts and junk stalls that clawed into every inch of open space. Two hulking Alpothecary guards wedged onto tiny orange stools beside a fritter stand. One had a slender green cybernetic limb branching from his back, twitching as it dumped an obscene amount of chili powder onto his fried kelp pancake. The other was devouring catfish sushi, synthetic soy sauce splashed across the plastic tray and half the table.
Though the street was jam-packed, people instinctively kept their distance, giving the two guards a wide berth. In a town this crowded, the sight was bizarre—a pocket of vacuum carved into the crowd, as if the very air around them had been cauterized.
Clem didn’t linger. She ran downhill along the narrow street, passing several more food stalls that all looked roughly the same. No Apothecary guards here—the crowd thickened, people gathering in tight clusters around greasy folding tables. The aroma in the air made her stomach growl. She shook her head, only three chips left in her pocket.
They were fragments of pre-plague storage devices—once part of an immense, highly classified databank. To protect its contents, the administrators had split the data across tens of thousands of tiny drives, most of them empty decoys. After The Plague, the database was lost. Only the Apothecary had the equipment to decrypt them, which made these shards valuable. In the quarantine zone, people used them as currency. You could trade them for food, meds, batteries—whatever kept you alive. And if you were desperate, you brought them to the Guild and gambled on a miracle. If your chip happened to hold even a sliver of the old world’s data, they'd pay out. Big.
A decade ago, there was a whole wave of chip gamblers—people who bet everything they had. Not one of them hit. Most starved to death below the dam. Some weren’t so lucky, and ended up as part of the Corpse Pasture.
That fever had cooled. These days, chips are just money.
Turning another corner, Clem entered a slightly wider section of the district. Vines crept across the right-hand wall, thick as cables. She realized they weren’t wild—someone had planted them on purpose, winding them around the metal struts to reinforce the flimsy structure. On the left, a storefront had three oversized fish tanks outside, each one murky with overgrown algae and eel waste. Inside, spirulina drifted in sluggish spirals. The shopkeeper sat slumped on a plastic stool, smoking in silence. His face was gaunt, gray beneath the flicker of the overhead neon. The ground around his feet was covered in crushed cigarette butts. Behind him, in the shadows of the stall, a heavyset woman—his mother, maybe—sat in a nest of plastic tubing, wheezing audibly. The tubes ran from her body to a machine humming in the back room.
Her face, half-sunk in shadow, wore an expresCyon Clem knew too well. She’d seen it on her grandfather’s face. In the quarantine zone, disease was more common than clean air or water.
The street dipped suddenly, just like the weather often did—without warning. The buildings thinned out. The road became a slope, stretching downhill toward the edge of Scrapspire. And there, at the bottom, the black silhouette of the Necropolis stood on barren soil like a tumor that refused to be cut out.
And it had always been that way, for as long as Clem could remember.
While other children—at least in her imagination—grew up with grass and fountains, her childhood unfolded in the shadows of the Necropolis’ tungsten towers, beneath Scrapspire’s patchwork skyline, beside the fluorescent riverbed below the dam. Her memories were stitched together with sickness and injury, with industrial runoff, night-long chants, and mountains of body bags. Faces that smiled at her yesterday were covered with white cloth today, loaded into refrigerated hearses by The Crows. One by one, the hearses moved like a school of steel fish, migrating to the graveyard.
Still, Clem considered herself lucky.
Her parents had died early—so early she didn’t even have their faces in her mind. Just scattered home videos, unsent gifts, old clothes sealed in plastic. And maybe that was a blessing. She had never known the pain of watching someone she loved fade in front of her.
She had seen Aunt Marsha go. One minute the woman was beaming on the balcony, stirring salted fish paste, the next she was twitching on the floor. Clem remembered the drool at the corner of her mouth forming a little puddle. In it, her dilated pupils stared back in shrinking rings of terror. Once the virus bloomed, you could count the rest of your life in seconds.
She’d seen Lynch’s parents die too.
She used to envy Lynch—growing up with both parents under the same roof. That was rare in the quarantine zone. Most kids didn’t have that luxury. One parent was usually gone before they were even born. Often the mother. The local medical tech could only ever save one. And the fathers? They ran at the news, or were taken by the virus just like everyone else.
There weren’t many kids in the zone to begin with. Even with Blightshire’s pro-birth subsidies, few dared to think of a future in a place where you weren’t sure you’d survive the week.
Lynch was twelve when both his parents got sick. Clem had just turned nine.
His dad worked some odd jobs for the Apothecary—hauling reactors and shielding coils around the Necropolis. Then, one day, an Apothecary sent him into the Data Depths to retrieve a “relic”—one of those mysterious artifacts left by the "Old Man" before the plague. No one knew what they did. Only the Apothecary had the answers.
Everyone knew the Data Depths was cursed. They said the Plague started there. The heart of infection. Lynch’s father didn’t want to go. But when you had a full family—three mouths to feed—there was always a price. After some coaxing, he went down in a barely functional hazsuit.
And the rest played out like every other tragedy in the zone.
He came home dizzy. Feverish. Sick. Then the mother got it too.
They wouldn't let Lynch near them. He moved into Clem’s place. The last glimpse he had of his parents was from a distance—watching their bodies, covered in white cloth, being hauled into the hearse. Dust kicked up around the tires as the sun dipped below the edge of the dam.
After that, Clem stopped envying him.
Clem crossed another intersection, and just like that, Scrapspire came to an end.
The ever-present claustrophobia—the tangled maze of bodies, stalls, and structures—was finally overtaken by open, empty ground. Only the skeletal frames of abandoned construction projects remained, left to rot before they were ever completed. This was where the terminal cases were exiled—those whose minds had already been chewed through by the virus. They moved in a daze, building the same structures again and again under Apothecary orders, only to forget it all the next day and start anew. A looping ritual of oblivion.
Forgetting. The word chilled Clem. It had already carved out a nest in her grandfather’s skull. He'd gone from total recall to forgetting what he'd just seen, and now he was slipping further—losing even short-term memory. But at least the past remained intact. He could still tell stories. She could still feel that the part of him that remembered history—their history—was still alive.
The gate to the Necropolis stared at her, silent and imposing.
It was made of black steel, overlaid with a nickel-phosphorus alloy that shimmered with a dark, oily sheen. The gate sat lower than the ground around it, like an overdesigned parking garage entrance for a place no one ever returned from. Beyond it, the Necropolis stretched out in a sprawl of needle-thin towers and squat data vaults—structures that reminded Clem of those old POV forest walk videos she used to watch online.
A speaker crackled above her. “What do you want?”
She looked up at the camera lens pointed directly at her.
“I’m here for Uncle Cyon. The pharmacist. Cyon?”
“Where the hell’s this brat from…” muffled voices muttered over the comm.
“She says she’s here to see Cyon.”
“Cyon again?”
“That old weirdo’s always hanging around with kids. Can’t imagine wh—”
“Will you shut the mic first—”
The voice cut out mid-sentence. The speaker went silent. Clem stood motionless. Overhead, clouds thickened. Sunlight faded from the sand like a tide going out.
Eventually, with a groan of metal on metal, the gate slowly opened.
Clem stepped through.
She still remembered the first time she entered the Necropolis. She had been seven. Lynch had brought her. Grown-ups always warned them to stay away from the Apothecaries—said they were paranoid freaks, surgically mutilated beyond reason, caught between obscure rituals and illegal experiments on the dying. Her first visit did little to change that perception.
Dark corridors carved with esoteric engravings. Research equipment that had no names. Mazes of towering fluid tanks hummed like something alive. The guards were hulking brutes, patrolling in silence, their arms twitching with swollen, worm-like muscle implants where electrodes pulsed with blue light. Inside the discusCyon halls, you could hear the Apothecaries ranting—broken sentences filtered through modulated voice boxes, glitching out with bursts of static. Maybe it was the augmentations, maybe just madness, but the Apothecaries had little interest in the “meatfolk,” as they called the people of the quarantine zone. Most never left their labs. Only a few were ever seen in the open.
But Cyon was different.
He liked to talk. Sometimes, he even posted notices to invite kids from the zone to see his work. That was how Lynch met him. After a few visits, he brought Clem along. But after his parents died, Lynch stopped coming. Clem had continued on her own. She didn’t mind. The Necropolis, for all its weirdness, felt more alive than the broken shell of Scrapspire. And she liked Cyon’s projects.
Cyon’s lab was tucked into a far corner of the Necropolis. She passed through a greenhouse—her favorite place in the whole zone. There, unlike the endless trays of spirulina, she saw plants she’d only ever seen online. Artemisia. Mint. Even blackberries. All cultivated by Cyon. He’d cut open old sewage pipes, filled them with soil, and rigged them into sky-bound rows. The plants thrived, vines poking out of every crevice. Clem brushed them aside as she walked through, letting the violet grow lamps cast lines of light across her fingers. She once again thought of those POV forest walk videos—the way the camera floated beneath tangled leaves, dappled in fading sunset.
When she entered the lab, Cyon was hunched over, sawing a chunk of white styrofoam into blocks with a sickle, shoving them into a narrow recycling chute.
He hadn’t changed since she first met him. But then, he already looked ancient. His spine was bent like a broken bridge, his body a patchwork of biomech—only his left arm was still flesh. The right one extended deep into his torso, making that side of him heavy, and lopsided, like a building supported by only one pillar. Years ago, he’d lost his lower jaw in an accident. From his upper mouth down to his throat was just a raw black cavity, rigged to a voice module embedded near his windpipe, his tongue hanging from the depth os his jaw.
“Uncle Cyon!” Clem called.
Cyon twisted his head over the foam pile. His hair had retreated from his scalp, clinging to the sides like troops in retreat. His implanted eyes glowed faint yellow in the gloom.
“Cl… Clem. You’re… here again,” he rasped through static. The voice module made him sound like a stuttering child.
“Sure am.” Clem pulled the book from her bag and waved it in the air.
Cyon’s eyes widened.
“You… you actually got it.” He stood shakily. “A… amazing, kid.”
He shuffled over, nearly tripping, and took the book from her hands like it was made of glass. His breath came out like a high-pitched screech—Clem had learned that meant laughter. At first, it had scared her. With no jaw, it was hard to read him. But over time, she’d picked up the signs. When he laughed, his left eye crinkled like wrinkled paper. Just like now.
“You weren’t lying, then? This book… it can really cure Grandpa?”
“Not just him,” Cyon said, voice sparking with static. “It can cure all of us.” He was trembling with excitement. “Tea? I just… boiled some.”
He tossed the book onto the table and poured tea from an aluminum kettle into two cracked cups.
“Grew it… myself. From the garden.”
“I hope you mean the first garden,” Clem said as she accepted the cup.
Cyon shrieked again in laughter. “Of… course. Though the other one… is coming along too. Come see.”
He stepped over the foam debris and opened a plastic door at the back of the room. Clem followed. Outside, the air reeked of rot—but the warm morning wind had faded, and now a colder breeze carried the smell, softening it slightly.
They stepped into a plot the size of half a football field, surrounded by double-layered metal mesh. Only the far end was left open—where the land fell away into a bottomless cliff. On the black soil, shapes moved, slowly, aimlessly, with twisted, broken postures.
Clem knew they weren’t human.
Electro-husks—that was the Apothecary’s name for them. Cyon simply called them “flowers.” Corpses, or close enough. Brain-dead, heavily modified, animated only by the leftover twitching of their implants. They existed in a state with no name. Not dead. Not alive.
This was Cyon’s duty in the Apothecary: the Corpse Pasture.
“Watch,” he said.
He clapped his hands once, then made a gesture toward one of the husks. It stopped, slowly turning its limp head toward her. One remaining eye stared wide and blank, yellowed with rot. The other—a red mechanical orb—blinked to life, glowing as it focused directly on Clem’s face.
For some reason, that eye and the empty expression reminded her of fish.
She sipped her tea.
“There’s… more,” Cyon said. He clapped twice, then drew a cross in the air with both hands.
Instantly, every husk on the field froze, then turned their heads in unison toward her.
She lowered the teacup.
The wind stopped suddenly. The rotting stench thickened in silence. Dozens of empty eyes starring at her.
A Sea. A swarm of fish.
评论区
共 1 条评论热门最新