“Why does everything I touch die?” I stare at my hands like I have the magic power of death in them. “The Undead… We repel life, like opposite poles on a magnet. I was told that once by a friend. It seems true, so …” I look up at John. “Why don’t I repel you?”
“Who says you don’t?” he responds with a crooked smile, I think at an awkward attempt for humor.
But I’m not laughing. “Why doesn’t my touch kill you, John? By all rights it should.”
“I’m not the only Human you’ve touched.”
That much is true. Megan and the others I saved from the Necropolis … Though, after being freed, they certainly didn’t take their time to bolt. But then again, we were being chased down by nightmarish skeletons …
And then suddenly he’s in front of me, placing the fruit into the bag himself, so close. I hold my tongue, filled with doubts and frustration as I am, and let him fill the bag with beautiful things my touch will destroy.
“You’ve anything but killed me,” he says with a firmness in his tone. “And now if you don’t mind, my camp is on the other side of this lake.”
I gawk. “We’re already here?”
“Like I said, getting here was the easy part.” He gazes over the water, squinting in the dry morning air. “They should be awake by now.”
Just like that. Circling the perimeter of the unmoving lake, we enter another thicket of trees—only most of them dead—then pass into a brief clearing just beyond the lake’s reach. Ahead of us, there is what appears to be a clustered wall of dead branches and stones piled high enough to mask what lies beyond. A small opening grants access, toward which John and I cautiously approach.
When we pass through it, an array of tents is sprawled out, but no person is in sight. As though activities were abandoned mid-activity—a kettle of water sitting above an extinguished fire, a half-sewn shirt left on a chair—the camp seems otherwise vacant.
“John,” I whisper, but he hushes me right away, his eyes scanning the encampment warily.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
I spin around, my eyes eagerly pursuing the source of that voice. John puts a hand on me as if to protect me—or keep me from bolting, I can’t tell—and then he calls out, “I’ve returned! I have food! Chief, come out!”
For a while, nothing happens. I’m convinced the camp is occupied by bodiless ghosts. Then, one by one, heads surface. From the top of the wall, from the sides of tents, from the backsides of trees emerge girls in aprons, mothers, cooks, tinkers, craftsmen and boys.
And they’re all armed with deadly weapons.
“ARE YOU TURNED!”
I peer about, again seeking the person who’s shouting. John responds in a normal voice this time. “No. Want to hear my heart? It still rages on, as you know it to.”
There’s a zipping sound like a small airplane, and then an arrow is lodged in my chest.
“Ouch,” I say. “That was rude.”
I pull it out, toss it to the ground.
From everywhere, others begin to emerge. They are armed with swords and giant hammers. At seeing how I handled their little arrow, or perhaps noting that it drew no blood, the alarm in everyone’s eyes has all but tripled. I’m one of the forbidden Them, they’ve all realized. I’m a Crypter. An Abomination. It’s been confirmed.
“Do we chop it up??” a man with an axe calls out.
“Chain her down!” screams a cook from the back, stretching her dress to hide two little boys. “Chain her down and throw her into the lake!”
“Burn it! Tie it up and burn it!”
John calls out once again, trying to get this chief guy to show his face, but I’m already plenty fed up with these rude Humans. I mean really, you don’t have to have a pulse to show a little damn decency.
“You can try all those things,” I explain nicely, “but as it turns out, I’m pretty much unkillable, so it’d be a waste of resources and energy. Is that a stew?” I add, pointing at the boiling kettle.
Another arrow cuts through the air, goes right over my head so close it may have given me a trim.
I huff and holler out, “It’s no use! You’d sooner lay a hundred arrows in me, I’ll still be standing, just a bit less pretty. And it just so happens, we all have a much bigger problem on our hands!”
Then, to the apparent, panicked disapproval of several ladies at the far edge of camp, someone rushes toward us.
It is Megan.
“Winter!” she cries out halfway toward me. “This is Winter, the one who saved me! This is her! She’s alive!!”
“Not exactly,” I mumble.
But she’s crashed into me with a hug that vice grips would covet, and all my words are null. Her head buried in my chest, her arms gripping, I look up apologetically at the jaw-dropped archers, unable to talk.
“It’s true!” Megan pulls away from me to exclaim. “She freed me! She freed Hanson and his wife, and the twins and Laney and Judas, and—and she led us all to safety. You can’t hurt her! Nothing can! She’s immortal!”
I look from face to Human face, doubting her words are inspiring any more comfort in these people than mine did. But then, of the archers, two slowly lower their bows. “It’s true,” says one. “She got us out.”
“It was her,” a woman admits, only her head poked out from a small green tent. “It was her who saved us, at her own expense. I was there.”
Then from another tent, a man emerges. He looks like any of them, dressed no differently, but as he approaches he commands everyone’s attention. His solid jaw is furry and broad, his eyes fierce and powerful. I don’t need any hint … This man must be the chief.
“Give me a good reason why I shouldn’t order my men to pull you apart and bury you,” he says, coming to a stop several feet before me. The way he speaks—his every word like a stone block in the pavement of his sentence.
“For one, you can’t,” I tell him with more attitude than I should—though to be honest, I’m not confident I could stop them from doing exactly that. “And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, my intention is not simply to outrun the Deathless. My intention is to destroy them.”
“Deathless?” he says, squinting at me. His eyes flick between John and I. “That’s what you call them? Hmm … You’re the one responsible for saving a number of us.”
“Barely,” I confess.
“You are not like those creatures we hunt. Deathless.”
“No,” I agree distastefully. “And they are now hunting me, it turns out.”
The chief flinches, his jaw hardened. I worry he’ll command his men to tear me apart anyway.
Instead, he turns on John with a scowling glare. “And you, the prodigal dog, tail tucked in your legs. Have you told your friend that you’re a coward and a thief?”
“This is my home,” John answers in a near growl. “And my tail is not tucked. And I am no thief.”
“You stole precious supplies and fled in the night. Thought you’d make it well on your own, did you?”
“Our resources are thin.” John stands tall, facing his people. “I came upon a place long ago occupied by our people, now claimed by the Undead. I mistakenly assumed there would be food and supply in this place … this city. They call it Trenton.”
The whole of John’s journey is piecing together before my eyes as if I’d never all along bothered to see his side.
He goes on. “But the Undead that live there, they do not eat. Even their taverns held nothing real, not a speck anywhere. This woman you see, she kept me in her home, protected me and fed me. She is the reason I’m still alive. I owe her my life. Many of you do too.”
I look down, a smile trying to happen on my face. Hearing the usually-brash-and-hard-edged John speak about me like that, it’s almost embarrassing how it flatters me. I’m sure if I were capable, I’d be blushing hardcore.
“After many months, she had to depart on an errand of sorts, and in her absence, they found me. I was quickly brought before their so-called
mayor … and it was then that I learned who he was.”
The chief’s expression hardens.
“Their mayor is the Speaking Death. Their mayor is the one who destroyed our first camp. Their mayor is the one who took my parents.”
All trace of flattery and happiness drops from my face instantly. I stare at John in horror.
The chief takes a few steps toward him, studying his eyes for a good, hard while. Then he says, “You sure?”
“The Undead can mask a lot,” John admits. “I’ve learned it. They reconstruct themselves to appear alive. These Undead of Trenton, they are not the same as the Crypters we know. And they are being governed by a false idol. An evil idol. They are as innocent as Winter, as charmed as snakes in a wicker basket.”
“But snakes nonetheless.” The chief grunts, flicks his cold eyes at me. “And now you’ve brought this—” He hesitates, unsure what to call me. “Woman,” he finally decides. I can tell it took everything in him to call me that simple, dignified word. “You have doomed us all, bringing her here. The Dead will soon follow.”
“We will destroy them too. Don’t you see, chief? That is why I left. I was seeking a new life for us. A true home. Something better than a camp … Something real and true and alive.”
“Garden does not exist,” states the chief, getting to the point. “And you’re a damn fool, John. Your Garden is a fantasy … A story we tell children of this new, dead world, but you and I are no longer children.”
“We tell it to keep hope alive,” he presses, “because in this world, so little still is. Is it such a crime to believe in hope as a man?”
Despite the arguing, I see a change in the chief’s eyes. He may seem a stubborn fool himself, but at least he listens. The chief turns his head, appraising the faces of others in the camp who so desperately, who so hungrily hang onto every word of this exchange. The dream is alive in all their eyes, even I can tell that much.
And so the chief at last turns his gaze onto me. He doesn’t know what to say for a while. Maybe he can’t say a thing just yet.
So I do. “By all means, it would make more sense to run. We’re outnumbered. You’re killable, they are not. They’re led by a King who wants my head, and they have a Warlock among them who can turn me and my kind into dust with the flinch of a finger. But a life in hiding is no life.”
The people listen. Even Megan, her fierce, young face tensed with concentration. The kids of this camp, they’ve all grown up too fast, hardened too soon. What childhood has this terrible world given them?
“Warlocks, you say.”
“Yes.” I look at John importantly. He returns my stare with a hardened one of his own.
At last, the chief speaks with what I dare call respect. “So tell us, dead woman of Winter. What must we do?”
The entire camp waits. All of them, every single man, woman and child, from the chief to the girl to John at my side. Their faces filled from mouth to temple with great despair and a speck of hope. I don’t care if I never know my life, dead now and always, I won’t let them lose theirs.
I will never again taste of an apple, or fear, or love. Unlike them, I know what there is to lose … for these people, these beautiful living.
“Steel,” I finally say, a quiet answer. “Gather all the steel you have.”
C H A P T E R – S E V E N T E E N
M A D
How do you kill something unkillable?
“Well,” I reluctantly begin to tell the couple of young boys who asked, “what you can’t kill, you can in a way incapacitate. We need legs to walk and arms to wield weapons, don’t we?”
“And eyes to see,” one of them agrees.
“And teeth to feed,” the other chimes in.
“Except we don’t,” I assure them. “At least, my kind don’t feed. Their kind, on the other hand—” And I stop, remembering a taste of Human that once rested on my own tongue. A terrible, terrible pang of guilt courses through me before I decide to revise the course of this dialogue. “Just go for the legs. Chop off their legs.”
Passing through the camp, I join John by the anvil where, along with about seven other men and women, weapons are being forged in an effort to steel ourselves (literally) for the impending battle to retake Trenton.
“And they can’t be burned,” John is in the middle of telling one of the other men, his face scowled and hard. “I witnessed it myself. One of them, his arm completely set ablaze. It’s like even fire wouldn’t dare touch him.”
“Nothing natural can,” a lady murmurs, her eyes darkened by soot and lack of sleep or nutrition, I reckon. “Neither water nor fire.”
“Makes bathing a tricky effort,” I add with a smile.
The group of tinkers glance at me, none of them much lightened by my attempt at humor. The way John looks at me is, thankfully, the least contemptuous, but among his kind I can tell where his ultimate loyalty lies. I wonder, after the sacking of Trenton, will he still stand by my side, or watch me crumble with the Deathless?
Somewhere else in the camp, I’m drawn into a circle of chatty children, all of them wide-eyed and eager to have their questions about the Undead answered. Some questions I can’t even answer myself. Like, how does my kind just rise from the ground at our creation? Where do we come from? Surely the Undead, when they were once alive, didn’t all die in the same place, buried in the same field, to one day in the future come back half-alive. Also, how does more than just bone remain after hundreds of years of being buried and decaying? By my own admission, many I’ve seen and heard to be Raised were done so with plenty of flesh still intact.
“I never gave it much thought,” I admit. “I just figure there’s some kind of magic to it. How else can I explain my existence any better than you can explain yours?”
“What keeps you alive if you don’t breathe or eat?”
It’s a little boy who asks, and I just reply, “What keeps you alive when you do?”
“Oxygen and nutrition,” he says.
I return his answer with a blank stare.
Separated from the children, the ever-focused Megan is stringing bracelets in a neighboring tent. I sit next to her and admire her work.
“Steel,” she mutters. “Armlets of protection for the young.” She doesn’t pull her eyes away from the one she’s working on. Young, she says, as if she herself isn’t. “You survived the Necropolis with just a little ring, so …”
I squeeze my fist, feeling it press against my fingers. “One day, you won’t need any protecting. You’ll be free from the worst of my kind, forever.”
“I believe in Garden, like John,” she tells me, reaching for another fistful of steel beads. “No one may know where it is, but I know it’s out there. There’s grass taller than the trees, and trees taller even still. Flowers and fruit and even animals grow strong. I’ll never stop searching.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
Megan and I turn to the voice. The chief has appeared at the entrance to the tent, his arms hanging like an ape’s and his eyes narrowed.
“I don’t think so,” Megan says back. “Some here at camp even claim to have been there, to have seen it for themselves. I know it’s out there. It has to be.”
“They’re liars, dreamers,” says the chief. “We will not survive if we depend on a fantasy of some living, thriving place that doesn’t exist. Adapt to this world or let it end you. Grow as a weed grows, despite all odds … Even as all else refuses to take root, we must. The world is dead. Learn it, or die by it.”
She has no reaction to that, just beading the steel bracelet in her little hands as though he hadn’t uttered a word.
“If I could only remember one little part of my life,” I tell the two of them, “I think it would be simply a color. Green. How so very green everything must’ve been, back when the world was … whatever it was.”
The chief studies my expression for a while, the sound of Megan’s patient bracelet-making the only other thing in the tent. Then he simp
ly announces, “We leave at next sunrise,” and departs.
I watch Megan, her determined glower. Quietly, I lean into her side and whisper, “I believe in Garden.”
Without looking up from her work, she just smiles.
The sun is falling already on a long day of preparation, and after what feels like hours of working independently, John and I finally regroup at the entrance of the campsite. The woods stretch out before us, a lake somewhere beyond, and a captured city even further on. The world feels so very small, no matter how much of it I know is out there. Despite all the oceans and continents and cities I can’t imagine that exist on this dying planet, the only thing in my sight is Trenton, the little city I used to call home … and the vile thieves that took it from us.
“It won’t be easy, but it is possible,” I tell John.
He shrugs, picks at something on the wall he leans against. “This may end in our extinction.”
“Or mine,” I agree lightly.
“The whole planet’s going,” he mutters. “It’s just the next natural step for us … to go with it, fallen to a greater power. It is just painful, the dark humor of it all—being killed by the dead.”
“Everyone’s going to sleep.” I peer over my shoulder, catch sight of wisps of smoke from a campfire recently put out. “I wish you could see fire as I see fire.”
“We depart in the morning for Trenton, and will take a route through the Haunted Waste.” He nods at me. “The place you call the Whispers, Harvesting Grounds, whatever. That will be the easiest way, toward the gates that are least guarded.” He chuckles. “They won’t be expecting an army of Humans. All their foolish weaponry and scare tactics … Their Locks have no power over us.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the mayor?” I try not to sound too touchy.
“After my time observing Trenton, I think he plays both sides,” John tells me. “All I know is, he’s ridden with the Deathless before, and he’s ended many, many lives. He might be working with that Deathless King lady, his goal all along to surrender Trenton to her will. Or maybe he’s trying to take it for himself. Selfish and evil.”
The Beautiful Dead Page 22
