Path of the Horseman

by Amy Braun

  Home sweet home.

  Well, as close as I would get anyway. The pit had been home since time began, but it was a cold place with nothing to do but learn about the world above us. I’d been about ready to lose my mind, when the seal was broken, and we were free...

  Light seeped through the pinnacles over our heads, dousing us in its warm glow. I breathed deeply, savoring the taste of fresh air for the first time. It was cool and soft, a gentle lover’s caress to my lungs.

  I stood up, and welcomed it.

  The four circles of light swelled and grew, until they conjoined into one glorious, gold sphere. I wanted to close my eyes and bask in it, but I feared that doing so would make the light disappear and cast me back into darkness.

  My brothers converged to my side, each one of them trembling with anticipation. We continued to stare as a single, beautiful voice descended through the light and melted into our ears.

  It is time.

  The sharp smell of petrol fumes took me out of the memory, but didn’t change my mood. It was safe to say I was more pissed off now, given how hard I shoved the gas pump back into its holder.

  I yanked open the driver side door and threw myself in, angrily restarting the SUV.

  The Cherokee finally coughed to life, my saving grace to get the hell out of this dead city.

  After six months here, I knew the streets well. I was able to find a route and squeeze through the literally lifeless traffic and drive out to the highway. Or the sandway, as I called it these days.

  I hoped the long, quiet drive would calm me down, but it only reminded me that I was the reason for the silence.

  I was asked to create a virus that would wipe out every living soul on the planet. With the amount of knowledge force fed into my brain, deciding on the Plague was almost too easy. Humans have feared the undead since the dawn of time. And why wouldn’t they? What could be worse than shooting at an enemy that feels no pain, no exertion, that travels in packs, and that multiples faster than jackrabbits on ecstasy and speed? I thought it would be funny to watch the humans, who had spent years thinking they were prepared to handle an undead apocalypse thanks to media, paranoia, and Hollywood, see just how unprepared they really were.

  For the first few days, it was amusing. The government tried to cover it up and get everyone to stock up on survival kits and stay in their homes. They would handle the situation, and it would all be over soon. That’s when Simon started doing his part. He snuck into grocery stores with my help and turned the food inedible. Even dried goods became scarce. He went out into the wilderness and starved the animals and evaporated all the water in the lakes. Simon turned forests into nothing but dehydrated trees and sand.

  The humans began to lose their minds. Lack of food was making them insane. They had to get outside and find food, salvation, anything. Then it was Kade’s turn.

  He’d already been running around on his own, setting everything and everyone he could see on fire, starting mutinies in the armies, and aggravating packs of Plagued so they would find their way into heavily populated areas. It was too easy for him to turn man against man. He was right in the middle of it all, laughing and smiling and covered in blood.

  Logan didn’t do as much as people might think he did. Sure, he did his job and killed everyone he touched, but there was always a heavy sadness around him when he did it. The Plagued didn’t have souls after my virus killed them, but since they were walking corpses, he focused on those who were still living and breathing. He would appear out of nowhere, cloaked from human eyes, and watch people die until it was time for him to make their deaths permanent. Logan was the most powerful of us, able to extend his skills across the world so he wouldn’t skip anyone. Logan hated his job, but he was really fucking good at it.

  It took two months for the human population to be cut in half. I figured the angels would be showing up, ready to establish a new game plan for us. Soon enough, there would be no humans left, and something would have to replace them for the Second Coming.

  We never heard a fucking thing.

  I waited and watched, staring at the sky and thinking someone would tell me why this was happening. It was becoming too much. All those memories of humans had showed me more than wars and destruction. Humans could be selfish and stupid, yes, but their history hadn’t been a complete disaster. They laughed and loved and fought for nobility. Firefighters risked their lives to save strangers in burning buildings. Soldiers took bullets for one another. People with barely enough income to feed themselves volunteered to help others who lived on the streets. Big brothers put Band-Aids on the skinned knees of their little sisters.

  At five months, I realized I had made a huge mistake. Heaven wasn’t coming to earth. My virus had killed off all but ten percent of the population. Anything Simon hadn’t atrophied was burned down by Kade. Logan was everywhere.

  When it was over, all that was left standing was us and the dead. That was when I knew we were going to have to live with the mess we made.

  ***

  The road I took to Henderson was devoid of Plagued and Soulless, so I thought I would be safe. Never assume.

  I’d been so damn busy moping over what I’d done with my brothers that I never saw the road-spikes on the middle of the sandway until it was too late for me to stop.

  They flipped up and I reacted like an idiot. Instead of stopping, I swerved.

  With nothing but vacant cars and tipped big rigs and RV’s strewn on the sandway, speed was irrelevant. It wasn’t like there were any cops around to give me a scolding and a ticket. I had been doing close to one-fifty against the grit, so when I snapped the wheel to the left, I took the whole SUV with me. The back tires still skidded against the sharp edges of the road-spikes, popping them with a sound that rivaled a shotgun blast. The horizon pitched as the Cherokee flipped onto its side, bouncing once before rolling onto its ceiling. Before the tumble, the airbag exploded with a loud crack, smashing me in the face and nearly blinding me with the damn powder. There was sharp pain in my nose, and then the SUV rolled onto its side. I fell out of the seat and landed in the passenger seat in an awkward crunch with my rucksack digging into my back.

  Next time I speed on the sandway, I’m wearing a seatbelt.

  The problem with being in a human body is that I feel pain. Unless I’m using my powers, I’ll feel every cut of broken glass, every sharp twist in my neck, every bruise as I’m tossed inside a metal box like the world’s most hated rag doll. When the SUV finally stopped rolling, I was already blacking out.

  Their voices woke me up. I could hear them shouting happily from outside the vehicle. They couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away.

  I blinked my eyes open, feeling something hot and sticky sliding down my forehead. I quickly glanced at my body. It was bruised and scratched from the broken glass, but it was in one piece and there were no bones sticking out at the wrong angles.

  I knew I had to get moving, but everything I saw was blurry and I felt sluggish. When I turned onto my front, it was more like an awkward belly flop. I lay down on the top of the car, feeling the shards of glass and rough carpet of the roof scraping my stomach. The front of the car had been crushed sometime in the roll, making it hard to see through the thin crack of the windshield.

  But I saw enough. Four Soulless sauntering toward me, and someone else. Someone that wasn’t undead, but wasn’t human either. Which could only mean…

  Shit.

  There wasn’t a lot that could kill me. But one of those things could.

  I pushed myself up, barely even feeling the glass digging into my palms. I wasn’t a huge guy, but I wasn’t small, either. I couldn’t squeeze out of the side windows and there was no way I was getting out of the front. I twisted around and clambered to the end of the SUV. Their shouts were louder now.

  I stumbled when I made it past the seats, landing on my ass in the trunk. The back window was cracked from the crash, so it spider-webbed when I kicked it.

  Soon a
s the back window popped from its casing, I pushed it out. I shoved the glass until I could crawl underneath it onto the road. The glass scraping my back pretty much guaranteed my shirt would look like it went through a shredder.

  Now freed from the Cherokee, I stood up and swayed on my feet. The pain in my head was an angry throb, and it only got worse when someone rushed my side and punched me in the head. I twisted with the hit, watching the world spin again. But I didn’t hit the ground. Instead, I ended up in the claws of a Soulless, who wasted no time in sinking his fangs into my throat.

  I cursed as his teeth clamped onto my neck, tightening his grip until my skin broke and my blood poured into his mouth. It hurt like a motherfucker, but his teeth hadn’t punctured any vitals yet. I shoved his shoulders but he didn’t let go.

  But the moment my blood touched his tongue, he got a heavy taste of suicide.

  The Soulless jerked back, yanking his fangs out of my throat. I pressed my hand to my neck. The blood flow was sluggish, not enough to kill me. Still felt like I’d been stabbed in the neck with jagged rocks.

  Meanwhile, the Soulless’ black clawed hands went to his throat, tearing at it as he tried to get the poison out of his system. He gagged and choked, his bloodshot eyes going wide as his jet-black pupils dilated. The prominent blue veins under his paper white skin began to turn black. He looked at his friends for help, but they were too stunned to do anything but stare.

  I stood there and smiled, watching the monster turn the color of a slug. The Soulless took one more heavy gasp, then bent double and vomited up all of his internal fluids.

  His chest bulged as his stomach heaved up a disgusting rainbow of slimy red, piss yellow, shit brown, and my personal inky poison. He didn’t stop to breathe, because he couldn’t. The body fluids splattered into a pool in front of him as his skin turned a solid grey. As soon as he was done puking his life out, he collapsed into the puddle of disease, deader than a doornail.

  Killing the Soulless wasn’t easy, but I was a walking weapon.

  I turned my head ever so slightly to the other three Soulless that were staring at their finally dead friend, horrified and confused about what had happened to him. When they heard me take the machete from its leather scabbard on my back and a combat knife from my belt, they looked at me. I was bleeding and struggling to keep myself upright, but that didn’t stop me from smiling.

  “Still hungry, tics? I dare you to take another bite.”

  The Soulless hesitated. The three of them, a middle aged man in blue jeans, a dark-skinned man in a grey suit, and a ‘roided up jock still wearing the jacket of his college football team, gawked at me like I was the tiger whose tail had been pulled one too many times.

  Soulless weren’t mentally challenged like the walking Plagued out there. They still had a functioning brain. They could speak, understand, and feel physical pain. They were also extremely fast and had heightened senses. Definitely the more dangerous of the two, but not half as dangerous as the other monster lurking out there. I didn’t want to look away from the Soulless, but I needed to find him. He could actually kill me, whereas the Soulless would be hunting for my pain.

  Some sort of switch must have flicked in their heads, because they charged me at the same time. Jock was the quickest, darting forward to throw a harsh punch. I moved at the last second, spinning around his side and planting a hard kick into his stomach. He doubled over at the perfect angle for my knife to slide into his throat. Cold, dead blood stuck to my hands as I yanked out the knife and shoved Jock away. He wasn’t dead-dead, but I’d come back to him.

  Jeans was rushing my left, but I stopped him with a powerful kick to the chest. As he stumbled back, I swept out my right arm and slashed at Suit with the machete. He was a little bit quicker, skidding to a halt before the blade could cut his throat. I kept turning, stabbing the knife in my left hand into the side of his head, right into the sweet spot behind his ear. Suit jerked once then went still, his dead body simply reacting to the knife lodged in his brain. I twisted that knife, and watched his bloodshot eyes roll into the back of his head for the last time.

  A huge impact slammed into my back, knocking me away from Suit and pushing me onto the sand covered road. It must have been Jeans who was pinning me, because I couldn’t smell sulfur, and Jock was only just beginning to recover. The stab wound I’d given him hadn’t damaged his brain or his spine, so he was capable or healing. And being severely pissed off.

  Damn.

  I twisted and tried to throw Jeans off my back, but he wasn’t letting me go anywhere. He grabbed my shoulders with his claws and pushed my chest back into the dirt, careful not to dig his nails into my skin. He was worried my blood would poison him, too. The guy forgot that poison only worked when it was ingested, but points to him for being cautious.

  When he’d tackled me, I’d lost my grip on the machete, and the knife was still in Suit’s head. I still had one knife on my belt, but I decided he deserved a flesh-eating disease. I reached back and touched Jeans’ skin where the cuffs of his pants had ridden up. His skin was freezing, but I kept my grip and let the disease slip through my fingers.

  Jeans screamed, a terrible, hoarse, shriek that freaked even me out. He was up and off my back so fast I was sure he broke some kind of record.

  While he was screaming, Jock was back in my face. He raised his foot and stomped down, aiming for my head. I was quicker. I pushed back and let his shoe pound the sand. I leaned back on my haunches, grabbed my second knife from my belt, and stabbed it into his shin. Jock howled, distracted by the pain. I pushed myself onto one knee, punching him hard in the ribs. I yanked the knife out, continuing to rise and take revenge.

  I drove my knee into Jock’s kidney, then punched him hard in the cheek. His head pivoted to the right, his eyeball going directly into my waiting knife. I gave the blade a sharp twist, and killed the Soulless Jock.

  Pulling my knife free, I spun around. Jeans was running all over the place, his claws tearing apart his flesh as the bacteria began infecting his skin. He was decaying, the skin that he hadn’t torn turning a sickly purple red before blackening. The man looked like a burn victim without the crispiness.

  Jeans’ face was twisted in a horrible mask of pain, his screams utterly agonizing. I flinched, remembering those sounds. The terrible wails of women who’d lost their children to the Plague, husbands who were defenseless when their undead wives returned to devour them. Crying children with hollow bodies, weeping out of hunger and fear. Pain-filled cries for mercy before Kade brought down his hammer. A quick, short scream before Logan officially ended someone’s life.

  I flipped my knife and hurled it into Jeans’s head. He twitched when the blade thunked home, then dropped like a bag of rocks, silence replacing his screams.

  Behind me, hands clapped. I whirled around, balling my fists at my side and waiting for the next attack.

  But the son of a bitch wasn’t going to attack me. He sat there, on the undercarriage of my flipped SUV, his long legs dangling over the side. He looked like the main character from the Western fantasy of a goth kid. He had a thick black duster draped over his shoulders, covering sleek black pants and a black dress shirt. He even wore black cowboy boots, leather gloves, and a wide-brimmed hat that hid his short black dreadlocks. His smile was blindingly white against his flawless, tanned skin.

  Like me, though, it was his eyes that gave him away. The total blackness from lid to lid would have been creepy enough, but his irises were rings of fire. A mixture of red, orange and yellow that burned brighter the more excited he was. Right now, he was goddamn giddy.

  “Avery,” he drawled. “Good to see ya. It’s been too long.”

  I glared. “I dunno, Vance. I could’ve gone eternity without seeing your ugly mug again.”

  “Ouch,” complained Vance. “That hurts me right here,” he tapped his chest slowly. “Well, it would if there was something behind this sweet outfit.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You know the old West
died a few hundred years ago, right?”