The Beautiful Dead

by Banner, Daryl

  “From what?” I bother asking, but at the sight of seeing everyone bolt in one direction without asking questions, I find myself running with them, no idea whatsoever what, exactly, we’re running from.

  I keep stealing a look over my shoulder, but I see nothing pursuing us. We keep running, the Judge ahead of me, Helena and Grimsky just behind, and Marigold trying desperately to keep up with the two bony men at her side, her eyes panicked. “What’s going on??” I cry out to her, but she doesn’t respond, focused only on the ground before her, I assume to keep from tripping.

  Then I feel something like a bee-sting on my arm. I wince and examine the sudden pinch, still running. I see a red spot on my skin that burns and itches instantly. Squinting at it, confused, I’m just about to ask what’s happening when another sharp needle pokes the back of my neck, surprising me. I grab my neck, puzzled by the sensation, but keep moving my feet.

  Then I start to feel the needles all over.

  “Run, run, run!” hollers the Judge with force.

  All over the back of my neck, my arms, even down on my legs I feel the tiny jabs of needles, the almost annoying pinches of pain from a source I can neither see nor hear. My eyes are desperately searching for something, but I don’t know whether to look for a swarm of insects, or some sort of poisonous gas, or—

  “Right ahead,” the Judge calls, “there’s cover!”

  “Cover from what??” I yell, but my voice is drowned out by the sudden crack of lightning that, for one blinding moment, lights up the entire muddy field.

  That’s when I realize what’s pelting me … Rain.

  Ahead of us there is the gnarled stump of a very, very large tree trunk whose roots hang down like jagged teeth. It’s under that trunk where the seven of us pile, protected by earth’s umbrella from the rain.

  Six of us.

  “Drecklor!” the Judge shouts. “Drecklor! Keep on it!”

  Under the tree, I look back and see one of the bony men—Drecklor by name—flat against the ground and crawling sluggishly toward us … but he’s still a long way to go and the killer rain is unrelenting.

  “Pull harder! Pull, pull, pull!” hollers the Judge in an impressively level voice, like a coach. “Pull, Dreck!”

  He claws the ground in front of him once last time, then collapses, unmoving, dead.

  “Get up! Dreck!” she cries. “Get up, you fool!”

  The bony henchman doesn’t so much as flinch.

  “Fool!” the Judge cries out. Then, to my surprise, she boldly dashes back out into the storm. With the fell rain pummeling her body, she manages to grab hold of Dreck’s arms and, with impressive might, jerks him under the partial cover of our little earthen inlet.

  “Quick, quick, Marigold,” she urges with a snap of her gaunt fingers. “Your kit.”

  Marigold dutifully whips out her wooden case, flicking open its locks and producing tools I can’t even begin to identify.

  “His back and the top of his head, quickly.”

  “Yes, Judge,” says Marigold, hauling the lifeless body up closer to her—blocking him from my view now—and she begins to work … doing whatever it is she does.

  Steam rising from the bony man’s exposed back and head, I lean closer to Grimsky and ask, “What the heck kind of rain was that …?”

  “The normal kind,” the Judge barks, irritably pulling her disheveled hair up into a tight bun while watching Marigold do her work.

  I gape, staring outside our covering of tree trunk and twisted roots as the rain assaults the soil with its blameless bullets for raindrops. “Rain?” I say, uncomprehending. “Just normal rain is harmful to the Undead?” Helena rolls her eyes, then winces at a drop that lands on her hand from a root above. “Why wasn’t I told this?” I ask, looking at Grimsky for an answer, then at Helena, beseeching her. “And what’s going to happen to him?—to Drecklor?”

  “Nothing, if I can help it,” Marigold answers in a soothing voice. “Dreck, dearie, can you keep still? Your back is falling off your back.”

  “It doesn’t rain in Trenton,” Grimsky explains to me. Helena masks an irritated sigh, turning away and glaring outside our trunk of a cave. “Wherever the Undead live, no one can explain, but it never rains. In fact, anything living is, more or less, repelled by our inhabitance.”

  “But we have water in Trenton,” I say, still not following. “Doesn’t that come from rain, in part? How is that not poisonous to us?” Helena tries hiding another petulant sigh. I face her. “What’s your problem?”

  “Same problem as it’s ever been,” she says flatly. “The problem I’ve had ever since the day I harvested you.”

  “How interesting,” I bite back, “that my problem seems to be so similar to yours … The fact that no matter what I do, no matter what I say or ask, I have the love and respect of my Reaper, Helena Prim, to comfort me. How very lucky I am.”

  “Helena Trim,” she corrects me scathingly.

  “Helena Prim-And-Proper.”

  “SWORD!” the Judge cries out. “NOW!”

  All of us turn, startled. The Judge reaches out urgently toward Grimsky. “Quick. Hand me my blade.” Grim peers down at the sword that rests by his foot, uncertain. “Quickly!” the Judge shouts.

  I look to Grim, concerned. “What’s wrong, Grimsky?”

  After another indecisive moment in which he just stares at the thing, the other bony henchman grabs the blade instead and tosses it to the Judge, who steps to the front boldly brandishing it.

  It’s then that I look up to see what threat has moved the Judge to take such action. To my surprise, the rain has abated entirely, and from the misty distance marches forth a wide row of figures. Figures that look less like people and more like …

  Like skeletons.

  “Stay back,” Grimsky commands, his usually-even tone shaking with fear. “Keep behind me. Don’t move.”

  I hide behind him as instructed, eyeing Helena who no longer appears smug, but wide-eyed and panicked.

  Maybe when I was alive, I knitted scarves all day.

  Marigold has taken pause to her mending methods, anxiously watching the oncoming row of—somethings—that march with conviction toward us. The Judge remains in front like a shield, her steel sword in hand, ready for something that’s about to happen, of which I know not. Grimsky is so tensed up, I feel the muscles in his slender back turn to stone, like a gargoyle.

  “We have no business with you!” the Judge calls out all dramatic, her voice—even in these circumstances—remarkably composed and self-assured. “I behold a blade of pure steel. If you wish your lives spared, walk no further!”

  The marching army of skeletons persist, on and on, unaffected by her apparently weightless threats.

  “Walk no further!” she calls out again.

  And then she collapses, like a puppet clipped of its strings. After all that showing of bravery, has she just fainted?—Seriously? A little delayed in reaction, Marigold gasps with horror, placing a tentative hand on the Judge’s arm, then looking up at the approaching army. She steps up to the mouth of the cave and calls out, “Please! We mean you no harm! Please!—We are only—”

  Then Marigold, too, drops dead to the ground.

  “What’s happening??” I cry out to the three still-standing companions of mine, grabbing hold of the back of Grimsky’s shirt much tighter now.

  “Keep back,” he breathes, trembling all over.

  The remaining bony henchman wrests the sword from the hand of the fallen Judge, stands gallantly before us, only to drop to his knees before getting one word out, then in seeming slow-motion slumping face-first into the wetted soil, the sword fumbling out of his grip.

  The army has nearly reached us. Mere meters separate our little hollow from the looming advance of skeletal terrors.

  “To hell with this,” I mutter, annoyed by the absurdity of this whole thing. Before Helena can stop me, before Grim realizes what I’m even doing, I’ve risen, pulled the sword from the henchman�
�s bony hand and am marching wildly out of the root-laden grotto to confront the army myself.

  Yes, Grimsky cries out in protest for me to return.

  Yes, even Helena hollers out, “What are you doing??”

  The onslaught of deathly nightmares are far more gruesome upclose. The lot of them look freshly heaved from the foulest, grimiest, oldest of tombs. Some of the figures are still partly adorned in fettered flesh, giving them unbalanced, offputting exteriors. Only a few have eyes—or the semblance of them—and they wear frayed, threadbare clothes, mere suggestions of clothes perhaps, hanging off their mangled, rigid forms.

  These are what one imagines zombies to look like.

  “Deathless,” I call out, assuming so from the way in which the Judge threatened them with this steel blade, the apparent weakness of said horrors. “Stand down, or I’ll cut down every last one of—”

  And then something quite unexpected happens.

  The army stops advancing, the front line of the easily-over-thirty-or-forty zombies looking quite surprised in doing so. Their expressions—if one could even read their expressions—seem collectively, all of them, startled by my demand. It is like only a moment ago they had blood in their eyes, murder in their gait … and now they all simply stand still, loitering in a mass stupor.

  Then, without seemingly being instructed to do so, without explanation or cause, they do something else unexpected: They slowly lower to one knee, bowing their heads. First the front row, then the second row, then all of them. Every last one of them, now bowed before me.

  My sword of steel wielded, I slowly bring it down to my side, astonished, watching this dead army kneel in front of me. It’s like I’ve suddenly been elected to be their commander by some force unseen. Was it the sword? Was it my words? A magic spell? My fabulous hair?

  Still stunned by this display, I don’t notice Grimsky and Helena coming up to my sides, also watching in joint amazement the spectacle before us.

  “What,” Grim breathes in my ear, “did you … do??”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” I whisper back. “You’re the one who seems to know and not know anything.”

  For the longest moment, we just stare, the three of us. Staring at the rows and rows and rows of kneeled skeletons. Or half-people. Or zombies—I’m still not sure what to call them—Loyal subjects of mine?

  There is a shout from behind the sea of half-people-zombies. A few words: “Up, up!—On your feet, up! Idiots!” And the skeletons, confused and disarrayed, rise to their feet once again. They part right down the middle to make way for yet another odd figure to draw near: a short, stumpy male. His right leg is a contortion of metal plates and knobs, causing him to hobble. It is an effort with each step for him to lift it, every footfall walloping the ground. As he comes closer, I notice one of his eyes looks like a green, glinting jewel … an emerald, maybe.

  “You,” he shouts, and I’m surprised by the high pitch of his voice. “You with the sword.”

  I frown. “Me … What about me?”

  “You will come forth.”

  “Like hell I will.”

  Grimsky steps in front, shielding my body with his arms. “She won’t be going anywhere. Neither her nor any of my friends have done you or your Deathless harm.”

  “You,” he speaks stiffly, pointing now at a very dazed Helena. “You are her Reaper … You will come too.”

  Helena’s eyes flare and she takes a step back, wordless.

  “No one’s going anywhere,” Grim declares, struggling to sound bolder than he looks. “No one at all.”

  “You three, then, all,” the little man decides with a patient wave of his hand, “will come with me. You, you, and you, to the Necropolis.”

  “We will not go to your city of death!” Grim goes on, glaring at the metal-legged man. “We refuse to bow to your will! You cannot take us by force!”

  The short man neither speaks nor makes a gesture, and at once Grimsky collapses lifeless to the ground like a doll, just as the Judge, Marigold, and the other did.

  I kneel by Grim’s side, panicked. “What did you do to him??” I demand angrily to know, examining Grimsky like a nurse, as if searching for a sign of life on an Undead person were possible. “What did you do to all of them?”

  “You,” he murmurs, patient as ever. “Will you come willingly?—Or resist?”

  “Resist, you metal-legged freak!” I spit back.

  And that’s the last thing I remember.

  C H A P T E R – N I N E

  N E C R O P O L I S

  For the second time in my life, I wake to the sound of screaming.

  This time, it is not my own. I’m not even certain my eyes were closed, but the world seems to materialize into place all around me, then go away several times. Maybe I’m blinking, or maybe the world’s blinking in and out. The last thing I saw that made sense was the emerald-eyed metal-legged thing patiently ordering me to go with him, and me saying hell no. I wonder now if the stumpy metal-legged man has cast me to hell.

  “Winter.”

  They’re dragging me someplace. Blurry as my vision is, I think I see people standing like X’s against the walls, which confuses me until I realize they’re bound by chains. What could have been some kind of underwater opera, I realize now, is the sound of their agonized screams.

  The. Only. One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

  “Winter.”

  Black out. I open my eyes again, still being dragged somewhere, I catch sight of a young man with red hair fastened to an iron block—and I watch dreamily as his arms and his legs are unceremoniously removed, one by one. The volume of his screams is startling, to fathom the depth of sound one person can make.

  “Winter, wake up.”

  I’m in hell, because when I open my eyes again, people are burning. If I squint, I see two young boys in tiny iron cages that hang above sweltering coal pits … Men bound in chain being dragged as I am, lugged away to wherever, I couldn’t guess … Women being hung by their hair, arms flailing, their voices hoarse from hours of crying out desperately to be saved, to be spared.

  YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

  What I at first think to be a macabre painting on a wall is, in actuality, a bookcase of heads freed of their bodies.

  “If you don’t wake up now …”

  A violent, torrential wind assaults me from all directions. Anywhere my eyes try to focus, I see white wisps of my own hair like ghosts encircling me.

  My hair. Winter. That was my name, wasn’t it.

  Maybe a great storm is raking over the land, ridding it of all us horrible, earth-poisoning Undead. Just as the rain tried. Just as the grass pulls away from our feet. Just as life itself recoils at the very sight of us.

  “Winter, look at me. Over here. Look.”

  I regret very much waking that first day of my Final Life, coming toward the accented voice of the woman that would come to hate me, the woman I call Helena. Coming toward her voice in the same way a drowned soul surfaces from the depths of a murky pool. The world getting clearer, clearer, clearer as I ascend …

  “Winter, wake up.”

  Speak of the devil. It’s Helena’s voice I keep hearing.

  “I’m awake,” I respond lazily, not sure where she is, but sure she’s there somewhere. “What do you care?”

  “Winter. You need to turn around.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Turn. Around. And look at me.”

  Suddenly I’m aware of the dry, rocky soil upon which I’m seated. I’m outside somewhere, windy. I’m no longer being dragged anywhere, if I ever was. I notice metal bars digging into my back—the outer wall of my little prison-cage that’s holding me. The air still thrashing about, I slowly twist myself around and peer through the metal bars. Helena is there, standing in her own cage and looking quite perturbed.

  “Good. Now,” she says, “I need you to shut that girl up before I find something to stab her with.”

  It suddenly occurs to me there
is someone screaming, so I turn the other way to find a little girl in another adjacent cage making the shrillest sound I’ve ever heard my whole Second Life.

  “Hey,” I call out weakly to her. “Hey, can you—”

  Screaming, screaming, screaming.

  “My name’s Winter. What’s yours?”

  Screaming, screaming, screaming.

  I tiredly turn back to Helena. “It won’t work. We must endure.”

  Helena rolls her eyes, huffing hotly. “I should never have been a part of this. I wish I’d never—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” I stare off, exhausted.

  “—pulled you out of the ground,” Helena finishes, like I didn’t know what she was going to say. “I should have refused to partake in this ridiculous search party, Trenton law or not. I would be in my home right now, happy, pouring myself a tall glass of pink lemonade.”

  “This world has pink lemonade?” I ask sleepily. “What does it taste like? Sand? Tire rubber? Beetles’ eyes?”

  “Like pink lemonade!” snaps Helena.

  The little girl is still screaming. Clumsily, I tug off my shoe and chuck it at her. It goes through the bars, lands four feet to her left. I was never a very good aim.

  Amazingly, it does the trick. The girl stops screaming, momentarily distracted by the shoe. Trembling, her eyes overflowing with tears, her bottom lip wiggling, she just stares at the shoe like it were a tiny mouse that’d come up to greet her.

  Then the girl eyes me, wipes her nose with the whole length of her short skinny arm. Pressing her face suddenly against the bars of her cage, she squints and says, “Are you one of them?”

  I blink the sleepiness from my eyes. “One of who?”

  “Them,” the girl says. She couldn’t be a day older than seven or eight. I shrug at the girl. She lifts an eyebrow uncertainly, then asks, “Do you have a mom?”

  I laugh. For some reason, I find the question very funny. Maybe it’s the way she asked it, so innocently. Maybe it’s the fact that the idea of having a mother is so, so far away from my consciousness right now … The only mother-figure I could possibly name is the one at my back, the one in the other cage, the one who hates me.