“We will be surrounded by dead on all sides,” Galen continued, “and we will be walking, hand in hand, across the fields of asphodel. We will see things that aren’t real. We will sense danger where there is none. Whatever weapon you wield, know that you are very likely to use that against a friend because what you think you see is not what you see. Because what appears before you is not what is before you. Yet, you must remain vigilant. You cannot simply ignore every threat. There are wights out there. Undead which have the left over intelligence of the bodies they have taken. Undead which you cannot hurt with your old world weapons, be they knives or bullets. You can only strike at them with fists, or rock, or whatever Hell stuff surrounds you. Sometimes they even have the remnants of that body’s personality. While the corpses will not be able to tell that we are living, the wights can. They may ignore us. They may attack us. Some can even direct the dead around them. Should one strike at you, you may not know it is a wight. You can tell what they are because they have black eyes, like a dyitzu, but now that I have told you this, you may see black eyes on your friends. On random corpses. Or it could be that your mind exaggerates the danger. You may see an attacking phantasm that you know must not be real, however, that phantasm can simply be the mask that you’ve placed on a real danger. There will be no way to know with any certainty that the choices you are making are the right ones. There will be no way to eliminate doubt. There may be no time for skepticism, and you may not be able to afford the foolishness of faith.”
Arturus swallowed down the bitter undead flesh. His stomach heaved, trying to reject what he was giving it.
No. I know better than you, my body. Let me show you what happens if we’re wrong.
He let the dark thoughts come in. He let his fears touch his body as surely as the hands of the corpses would. They put their fingers in his mouth. One was biting at his ankle, ripping through his flesh. He felt the muscle of his calf give way. A tooth caught on his Achilles tendon. He tried to shake his leg loose but they were all around him. Clawing him. Covering him. One’s hand reached down into his belly and caused it to erupt with a fiery pain.
See! Look at what I show you. I have to eat this.
He picked up the arm. It was moving. Fighting him, clawing at him.
Let it fight.
Arturus took another bite, and another.
“We have miles to cross, and only a general direction to head in. Our senses will be disturbed. Yet, we must move quickly and efficiently. If we stay here too long, we might succumb to death or begin to come back to life. In either case, we will be dead. If you get lost, if you let go of the hand in front or behind you, there will be no time to come back for you. Know this, that hand is the only thing that keeps you alive. You must cling to it as you would to your very life. Nothing, and I mean nothing can separate you. It simply cannot be.”
Arturus’ lips felt dry. The blood in his body was sluggish. Coagulated. His skin was already a grey color. Lesions had appeared on his arm, though he could not say if they were real or dreamed. Spots of dead flesh covered him.
“If we have been out there too long, we may have to kill a corpse and eat from it to keep our balance. You cannot all attack at once. Only one of us will make the kill, and the rest will consume the meat off of that corpse. If you attack one, and damage it sufficiently, it will respond with violence. In our weakened state, such an attack might prove more than we can overcome. It will not take much in the way of damage to push us over the line from barely living to barely dead. There is no return after you have gone too far. There is no coming back.”
Arturus’ tooth hit bone. The rotten substance crunched under his bite. He chewed it, grinding up the bone between his molars, and swallowed it. To his right, Johnny was struggling to eat some more.
Kelly looked at him. Her eyes were staring right through him. Her pink lips were now grey. Her pale ivory skin marked with the scars of rot. It had spread across her quickly, or at least that’s what he imagined. How long had it been since they’d started? Hours? Days? Who knew? He’d thought it had not been long, but certainly he was no judge of time.
“I’m sorry,” Arturus told his mother.
“I know you are,” the angel responded.
“I didn’t mean to be something you hate.”
“You are an abomination. Your father and I should never have consummated the feelings we had that night. You are a thing that should not be. But this, this that you are doing now, I approve of it. The closer you come to death, the closer you come to my acceptance. The closer you come to my love.”
“I—”
“Hush now, young Turi. Your father is speaking. Listen to him. He wants what is best for you.”
“ . . . to clear the fields, then we will be in the mines. Assuming that I have control of my faculties I will lead us to as safe a place as I can find. I will, if I am capable of doing so, get you some food and water. If I am not able to do so, one of you must. It is possible that, by will alone, you can begin the healing process. However, it is not likely after such a harrowing journey that any of us will have the fortitude to do so. For your body to help you with this fight, you must feed that portion of you which is alive. That means food and water. I can tell you that if you don’t get these things soon after we arrive, it is unlikely that any of us will live. Now I have instructed you to eat all your food. If you have hoarded some for whatever reason, know that after crossing the fields of the dead it is unlikely that your food will have made it untainted. Eating rotten food will only push you farther towards death. What guns you have with you may fail. Your clubs may break. Your boots may rot off your feet. Your clothes will rot off your back. Your body will rot from the inside. But you must keep going. You must not let go of that hand. And if you are dismembered, you must hang on by any means that you have left at your disposal.”
Arturus saw that Johnny was bent over on his hands and knees. He was lapping up his own vomit with his tongue.
“Do you see that, mother?” Arturus asked the angel.
“Humans are just animals, Turi. There is nothing sad to see there.”
“But it’s Johnny. He’s my friend.”
“Abominations don’t have friends, Son.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think he is my friend. I think that he is in a lot of pain. You’re an angel. Can’t you bless him? Can’t you use your holiness to give him some sort of reprieve from Hell?”
“I can,” said the angel, “but I choose not to.”
“You are very close, Turi,” Galen’s voice came down to him from where he stood, high on a mountain top over the ceiling. Clouds of mist broke over his shoulders like a wave of water cresting him. “Just a little bit more. Take two more bites and stop. Wait. I will give you further instructions.”
Now that Arturus was nearly dead he could hear the corpses better outside. He could feel their wants. He could sense their memories. Many of those memories had been taken away, as if they’d been drinking from the river of forgetfulness. Yes. As if they had drunken from the river Lethe. But some memories remained. Some few. More like impressions of memories. Just the echoes of the great despair they felt.
“I loved a woman,” said one.
And it had loved a woman. Arturus wasn’t sure where she’d come from or where she’d gone or if the man had been able to marry her or not, but he had certainly loved her. There was an image, a Minotaur above her. Staring down. The man screaming for her to run. But she couldn’t, she wasn’t fast enough.
“I know you’re in there,” said another voice. “I will not be fooled. If you come out pretending to be dead, I will follow along with you, and just when you think you are safe, I will strike at you.”
“Not me,” said another voice. “I need not follow you. You’ll die on your way. I’ll not spend the effort. You’ll join me on your own.”
Those must be the wights. The intelligent ones. I hope Galen heard them.
Johnny had been moving the vomit with his tongue. He had pus
hed it so far across the floor that it had started to climb the wall. Johnny crawled along the wall after it, lapping it up. Avery was there too, defying gravity.
“You can’t catch us,” Arturus told the wights outside, “we can climb walls.”
He felt then the ability to fly, only when he soared upwards his body wouldn’t go with him. He decided that he would float through the wall and see the wights.
Don’t go far. You know Galen told you not to fly too high. The sun might melt your wings.
Arturus left his body behind and passed through the wall. There they were, the wights. They were inhuman looking. Bulbous faces and rotten appendages came out from all portions of their bent and elongated torsos. Huge black eyes, faceted like a diamond, stared down at him.
“I’m going to eat you,” said one.
“I’m going to kill you, and when you are just a wandering corpse, I’m going to take you across the Carrion—no one will bother us while dead—and then I will take you past the barrier and leave you for Rick to find.”
Arturus shook his head. “You will not. I will not let you.”
“That is enough,” Galen said, taking away the corpse’s dismembered arm.
“If you are not sure if a thing is real,” Galen said, “ask your friend to confirm it for you. Don’t tell him what to confirm, because he may then see it as reality—not because it is real—but because you put that thought in his mind. Know also that you can hallucinate his response to your question. It may lead you astray into believing what is false, or disbelieving what is true.”
Galen might not even be speaking right now. He could have said that a day ago. An hour ago. He might say that in the future, and I’m just remembering it now, before he says it.
“We are ready,” Galen said. “Stand.”
On shaky legs, Arturus stood.
“Now take my hand,” Galen said.
Aaron grabbed it. Then Avery grabbed Aaron’s. Then Kelly grabbed Avery’s. Then Arturus grabbed Kelly’s. Then Johnny grabbed his.
Outside, the undead called to him, a chorus of wailing voices.
“Follow me,” Galen said.
The gate that separated them from the undead was a shaky, brittle thing. The shackles that held it shut might have been strong, but each of the two rusty doors looked as if they might easily break off of their hinges.
Galen took them to those doors.
The corpses on the other side paid him no heed. He unlocked the shackles and tossed them aside.
Arturus remembered what Kelly had said to him once.
Do you like me better chained?
Galen led them into the sea of undead. He could not go quickly because there was barely any room to move. The dead were packed close together, their vestigial breaths filling the air with their sorrow. Arturus could see the dead’s memories drifting out of their heads as they forgot them. They could try to hold on to the memories, but eventually they would all fade. One was trying to keep his memories in. Its hands were on his head, but the memories slipped right through his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Arturus told him.
The corpse pointed to Arturus’ head, and Arturus saw that he was losing memories too. They were floating away. He saw the one where he’d learned of his mother.
Oh. I liked that memory.
And then another, from when he’d made a mistake and shot a man.
I won’t miss that.
But though it would free him from guilt, forgetting that moment would be a horrible thing. Then he might kill someone else again in the future because he couldn’t remember the lesson that he’d learned with that man. Then his experience would have been for naught. He would have shot someone and had it mean nothing.
No, I can’t forget you.
But the memory floated away.
Every step was a battle. The undead were pressing against him from all sides. Their fingernails, long and yellow and rotten, scraped against his skin. Their lifeless visages passed by him, only inches away, each one more rotten than the last. Pale paper thin skin stretched taut across their faces. Rotted through cheeks revealed the hollows of mouths. Chest wounds showed the grey innards of kidneys and intestines and lungs.
Kelly’s hand seemed to be slipping away. He grabbed it tighter. Then it slipped again. He grabbed her around the wrist. She looked back at him. The left side of her face was all rotten, the right, pale beyond possibility—but her eyes were pools of blue fire.
I will not let go. I will love you.
“Even if we die,” she said, “don’t let go. Let us wander these fields of asphodels for all eternity, hand in hand.”
I will not let go. Not even in death.
“I’m following you,” said the wight.
No you’re not.
“Yes I am.”
Ha! I fooled you. If you were a wight, you wouldn’t be able to read my thoughts.
“You are very wise.”
Wiser than you.
“Don’t worry. I will continue to follow you. Sooner or later I will convince you that you are not real. When you are not real, then I will be as real as you, and then I can attack you like I promised.”
I will never be a dream.
“So you say. But all men dream. Wouldn’t your mother like you better as a figment of her imagination? That’s where you can go, if you become a dream. You can go to her and she can dream you, and then maybe she can love you.”
Galen loves me. Rick loves me. I don’t need a mother’s love.
“All people need a mother’s love, Turi. Even a dream.”
And it seemed very sad that his mother didn’t love him. He wanted to cry, but corpse’s eyes couldn’t cry. That seemed the saddest of all—that the dead couldn’t cry. It seemed like they were the ones who needed to the most.
He kept a tight grip on her wrist while Johnny kept clung to his other hand, and together they waded through the undead masses. The tide began to thin. There was space around him, now. Galen was leading them up a hill. Or was it Death? Was Death the leader of their column? Was it he who they followed? How could a man know when death comes to everyone?
The asphodel flowers were brilliant candles of white light at his feet. Red lines of blood ran through the centers of their petals. They were so beautiful. They waved in the wind that was the breath of all the corpses as Arturus and those whose hands he held climbed higher, and higher.
And then, there they were, at the precipice of this hill, looking all around them at the sprawling Deadlands. The fields looked endless. Here and there, more packs of corpses wandered. Some so thick that the dead were forced together, shoulder to shoulder, and there would be no room to move between them. Other packs were looser so that one might wind their way in and out of the crowd. Trees, living dirkenwood trees, shot out from the hills at random places, spreading their dark green leaf laden branches low over the flower pocked grass of the fields.
The ceiling of the cavern dipped low in places, nearly touching the ground, and then soared back up in others. It was as if he was looking at a formation of upside down mountains. Maybe there was another Turi on those slopes, walking upside down.
He saw mist pouring in from one direction. The mists rolled along the hills, spreading out between the trees and covering the asphodels. It rolled over corpses and settled in the flower strewn valleys.
It was in that direction, towards the mist, which Galen led them.
Someone has to stop this.
Ellen stood close to Rick at the edge of the crowd of Harpsborough villagers. The balconies of the Fore above were filled with brightly dressed Citizens. No one was horrified. No one was outraged. It just seemed that people wanted to watch this happen.
“They can’t let this go on,” Ellen said.
“Were you the queen of a city, Ellen,” Rick said in a hushed voice, “I would live in it.”
“But these people are modern people! They lived in America. How could they do a thing like this?”
Father Klein’s
words haunted her. Not their meaning, but that he believed them. She had heard people argue like that in the old world. They would defend the uglier parts of the book most people had long since attributed to metaphor. She hadn’t thought it was dangerous then. She hadn’t understood why anyone would even bother arguing with them—but now she understood.
This is what happens when people like that get power.
“It’ll be okay, eventually,” Rick said. “It’ll heal.”
Like that’s any excuse.
Martin led Massan up to a woodstone table. “Just be calm, keep your hand as still as possible.”
“I’d much rather you do it,” Massan replied.
“I wish I could, too,” Martin answered. “I’ve experienced this, myself. I just can’t. Man, I could try, but I can’t be a part of this.”
Massan nodded.
Ellen turned to Rick. “Please stop this.”
“It is beyond my control.”
Massan dropped down to his knees and placed his hand on the table. A leather strap was used to hold his hand in place. Men stood nearby with cloths ready, Ellen assumed, to stop the bleeding.
Massan had a calm look on his dark face.
How can he not be afraid?
Graham walked up to the table. He had a cleaver in his right hand. His face displayed a frozen grimace.
At least this hurts him. At least this is a painful thing for him to do.
Massan looked into the crowd. His gaze settled on one place and stayed there. Ellen watched his breast swell. It was as if he was drawing strength from someone.
Kara.
Ellen turned, and indeed, it was Kara that Massan was looking towards. The woman was close to Ellen, not more than twenty feet away. Her hair was a disheveled mess, her eyes were red and puffy, her hands were held over her heart. Kara gave a smile, a smile that conveyed her support.
Massan’s head was as still as a statue. He did not move as Graham walked up and stood over him. Massan did not move as Graham raised the cleaver. He did not move when Kara shouted.
“Stop this!” Kara’s voice was desperate.
March till Death (Hellsong Book 3) Page 18
