As the group was preparing to break up for their beds, and Alexius was rolling up the map, a shot rang out from the courtyard area.
“…..the fuck?!” Tal froze for a moment, mind racing trying to think of the cause of the weapons fire, “Shit! Levi!”
The group moved into high speed at the mention of the captian’s name and shoved past one another to get through the office door. Tal barreled past John and Christine, who followed him with Alexius and Kushka at the rear, and began running full tilt through the church. Lydia and Salma were sitting in the pews, Nadir pacing by the sanctuary, all of which turned from the sound of the gunfire to the group racing through the door. Tal pushed open the door to the courtyard to find brother Sergius lying in a pool of his own blood, a single headshot having done the deed, and standing on the stone lintel above the wooden gate was Levi, a pistol in his hand and a brightly lit lantern at his feet highlighting him against the night sky.
Ben and Isabella ran around the back of the church from the garden area to see what the commotion was. The entire group took in the sight of the murdered monk and raised their eyes to watch Levi let the handgun drift over each of them to finally settle on Tal.
“Ah. Glad you all came. You’re about to be judged for your crimes.” he said, eyes wide and crazed.
“What the fuck are you doing, Levi? You shot Sergius! And you just rang the fucking dinner bell for any of those dead bastards in earshot!” Tal’s voice brimmed full of barely contained rage. He wanted to scream at the son of a bitch and pull him off the wall to beat him within an inch of his life, and then take that inch away. But he didn’t want to ruin the chance that maybe, just maybe, the dead were far enough away that they couldn’t track the source. Plus Levi had a pistol pointed at his chest, so there was that. Isabella began whispering Oh my God over and over again as Ben tried to hold her to his chest and hide the body from her. By this point Salma and Lydia had exited the church and upon seeing the scene, sought protection from behind Omar.
“Oh the fucking apostate speaks! You shit, you’re the worst of all of them! Colluding with the enemy, the very people that would see us dead?! Getting all chummy with them at prayer time? Yeah, I saw you! Though I hardly needed the extra proof that you were a traitor.”
“I’m a traitor?! You murdered an innocent man, and probably killed us all anyway! Traitor to what? It’s all gone, Levi, Israel, Palestine…the whole world is gone!”
“Good. You are all too polluted to be saved now anyway. You don’t see! But I do! Those Palestinians probably brought this curse on all of us! And you’re too blind to see it!”
“I see a bunch of Palestinians here! On the same side of that gate as us! Trying not to fucking die, same as us! Trying to help us not die, too! Can you see that?! They lost people too, goddamnit! …Where’d you even get that fucking gun from?”
“The dead monk was just an old man, Barzani. When I knew what I had to do, I broke into that one’s room” he casually flicked the pistol in Ben’s direction “took his weapon and climbed up here. What was the old priest going to do, wrestle it from me?”
Tal’s head swiveled to take in Ben’s horror and embarrassment at having
unintentionally armed the maniac.
“Then why kill him?”
“As you say, to…ah…ring the dinner bell, was it?” the sound of wailing could be heard from below, along with the shuffling tramp of many feet. Apparently, the shot had been heard clearly enough and the dead were zeroing in on their position. “I’m going to let them in, let them have you and drag you down to hell. As God intended.”
“Fuck you, Levi. Christine, bring him down.”
Christine lifted her rifle to her shoulder and pulled the trigger so fast, Tal had barely finished speaking before Levi shuddered and a crimson flower began to bloom on his chest.
“No…fuck you.” Levi smiled and as his knees buckled; his left hand dragged the oil lamp at his feet backward as he fell on the other side of the gate.
The muffled sound of glass shattering was followed by an immediate woosh as the flame ignited the spilled oil and the fire climbed hungrily up the wooden doors of the gate. A hellish light sprung up from behind the gate, casting flickering shadows on the stones of the staircase. The dead were still coming, and Tal raced over to the wall to see how many had come calling. Light from the now blazing wooden gate illuminated between fifteen and twenty of the shambling dead, which were quickly closing the distance to the last landing.
“Shit! Everybody get ready! Old as that wood gate is, dried out in this dessert heat, the fire will be through it in a minute and the dead with it! Kushka! Get some water up here!” Tal yelled, all need for stealth and silence rendered pointless.
“There is no time! The well is too far! Tal, you have to get them out! I will distract them as best I can.” Alexius reached under his habit and drew a Cossack shashka saber, and saw Tal’s astonished look. “I kept it. As a reminder of days past.”
“Father, we fight together, we get out together.”
The gate was set into the wall, between the outer parapet and the spot where the wall went back to surround the monks cells. Tal motioned to the group to head to the wall, with any luck once the wood gave out, the dead would run past them deeper into the monastery grounds and his group could just flank them and head out the gate. The old ‘switch-aroo’. If it worked. The dead had made it up to the final landing; some of them stopping to eat at a still breathing Levi, a short scream his only selfdelivered eulogy. The rest began clawing at the gate, many catching fire as they did so. The immolated bodies of the undead began to pile in front of the wooden gate, adding further fuel to the already blistering heat of the fiery portal.
At least that’ll thin the herd by a few.
“I am a Catholic monk, my life belongs to God, my duty and my privilege is to save the souls of those who cross my path. I can do that now, Tal Barzani, and give you all time to get clear. Promise me you will not fail to keep them safe, and I can go to my Lord a happy man.”
His mind was made up, and if Tal was honest, it was probably the only way they were going to get clear. And even then it was a gamble.
“I promise Father.”
Tal moved his group back along the side wall, keeping them hidden from view of the gate and crouched at their head. Once the gate gave way, and the old, dehydrated timbers would not last long under that heat, they had to be ready to move as soon as he was reasonably sure the last of the dead had taken the bait. Father Superior Alexius would almost certainly die, providing people he hardly knew a chance at life, and Tal reckoned that made him as much a hero as any man or woman he’d ever known.
The flames of the gate had weakened, having eaten through much of the dry wood so quickly, and small ember-rimmed holes began to appear where the fire burned through or the fingers of the dead found sufficient purchase. Once they caught sight of Father Alexius standing with his back to the church building, the ravenous beasts let loose a howl and redoubled their efforts. The timbers gave way with a crack and the gate collapsed as they loped through, some still burning, the howls mixing with the rush of noise that only wood ablaze crumpling in on itself can make.
Tal kept his hand up in a fist, belatedly hoping that they would all understand that sign as STOP, WAIT.
The first of the dead made a mad dash straight at the big Russian priest as he whipped the shashka in circles over his head. Tal could hear the old priest, his voice strong and steady, speaking to himself in Russian – and though Tal could not make out the words over the song the damned were singing, nor understand the language, he thought he could make out the gist.
“ O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who hast trampled down death and overthrown the Devil, and given life to Thy world,…” the saber removed the first creature’s head straight from its shoulders, the corpse falling to slide past the old priest, stopping with a wet thunk as it hit the stone wall of the church.
“…do Thou, the same Lord, give rest to the
souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away…” a second beast had made it to Alexius, and with the ease of muscle memory, he used the backswing of his previous strike to take the undead’s legs off at the knees, the body flailing as it tried to figure out a way to turn itself back over, its clothes dusted with embers from the gate.
“Pardon e very transgression which they have committed, whether by word or deed or thought. For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind; because there is no man who lives yet does not sin, for Thou only art without sin, Thy righteousness is to all eternity, and Thy word is truth!”
The remaining creatures rushed the priest, his saber strokes dipping and diving like a raptor after prey. Had they been normal men, the blows the monk struck would have laid low the whole lot, but some of the strikes were meant to kill men who could still bleed to death, severing arteries and veins, disabling nerves which sadly no longer mattered to the walking deceased. Severed limbs and open wounds barely slowed the creatures, and only the occasional decapitation or pommel strike to the head felled them. Four of them now lay defeated before the feet of Father Superior Alexius, some now fully ablaze, but the remaining six brought him down, the sounds of teeth tearing flesh and muscle cleaving from bone reaching Tal and his band even at a distance. But after a few moments no more dead were streaming through the hellish portal, and so whispering a final ‘Amen’ for the fallen priest, he led the survivors out the remnants of the gate and down the stairs to the wadi floor.
They reached the still warm sand of the dessert floor, and had barely taken their first few steps before brother Kushka screamed. It was dark down there, so dark one could hardly see beyond a few feet in front of them, and then only because of the weak light cast from the flaming detritus that had once been the monastery’s gate. Two of the creatures had materialized like phantasms and pulled the monk into the darkness, his shrieks the only indication of where he’d disappeared to. Salma and Lydia fled screaming into the night, Omar yelling for them to come back to the safety of the group to no avail. The rest ran up the wadi, darkness closing in on them like a malignant veil the farther they ran from the monastery, until all was blackness and sound. The crump of boots in the sand, the occasional muzzle flash of a rifle or handgun, whether at a foe or the specter of one was impossible to know. The ragged breaths of a half a dozen people, the screams of the confused or dying, the crying of the frightened or wounded. Tal couldn’t tell what was what anymore, only that this was a familiar refrain to a melody that had spanned eons. War at night was terror in every possible way. If there was nothing in front of you, then you were terrified that there would be any second; and if there was something in front of you, it almost certainly wanted you dead. The brief orange-white flash of small arms fire blossomed in the night like evanescent micro suns, illuminating scenes from the worst that nightmare could offer.
Everything appeared wrong in the arbitrary light. There was no plan anymore, save run and hope. The screams and cries of women were indistinguishable from those of men. Even the colors were wrong; the bright flashes of muzzle fire only washing skin and terrain in a ghostly farce of white, and blood became as black as liquid obsidian. The prayer on every person’s lips was the same, “Please let me get out of this alive. Don’t let me die like this in the dark. I had so many hopes.” The momentary brightness of each bullet fired was a blessing and a curse, for by it you could see where you were running, but also what you were running into. The desire for the next shot warred with the infantile hope that there wouldn’t be another; the need to see your path against a child’s belief that if you couldn’t see the object of your fear, then it couldn’t see you either.
They ran for hours, or minutes – it was hard to tell – but after an intolerable time of darkness and rising terrain, they saw the electric street lights of a town in front of them atop a low plateau. Tal headed for them immediately, the desire to be away from the undead so strong, that it overpowered the knowledge that darkness concealed her supplicants equally. Before long the lights became bright enough that he could see the outlines of his companions, fleeing alongside him with the same fervency. Once they were close enough to the settlement, Tal began to slow his pace. He wanted to round up his people, do a count, and see who had survived the run to wherever they were now. The advent of the light restored some semblance of rational thought to him, and he figured that the beams came from street lamps powered by whatever remaining solar panels still functioned on top of the light poles. The invention of solar technology had been a boon out here in the dessert of the Levant, so much direct sunlight that you had to be a fool not to capitalize on it, though that also meant that the battery banks of the grid would eventually run down – due to a plethora of variables that Tal didn’t know – and right now he needed to know who lived and who…hadn’t.
“Form up!....or gather round! Get the fuck over here! Who’s here? Who’s hurt” he shouted, all ideas of noise discipline forgotten as he tried to count survivors.
Christine and John materialized first, she tactically carrying her rifle and he holding a bloody rock in his hand. Next came Omar and Nasir, wide eyed and frightened, the front of Nadir’s trousers darker than the rest. Isabella appeared and began frantically calling for her father, until Ben too emerged and joined them. Each began to hold one another and check for wounds, until Tal brought them up short.
“We aren’t safe yet! I don’t know where the fuck we are, but our best chance is that settlement”, he waived his Jericho toward the lights some thousand meters away, “find a place to hole up till day break and sort ourselves out. Where are the women?”
“They ran. I have not seen them since.”
Offered Omar.
“Shit. Mother….alright, we’ll hope they
head the same way, but if not…there’s not much
we can do till dawn. Let’s go and maybe they’ll
see the lights….”
Tal was interrupted by a scream. One of
the creatures manifested suddenly from the
darkness and grabbed Nasir by the arm as they
stood listening to Tal, and he quickly threw up
the other across the beast’s throat, its teeth
gnashing inches from his face as it shuffled
forward trying to pull him close. The group
stood stunned for a moment as the boy was
wrestled to the ground, his assailant falling on
top of him, but it was Ben who moved first. “NO! NO! C’mon! Come for me!” when
the undead didn’t break off, he dove straight at
the beast, connecting with its chest and knocking
it off the youth. As they fell, the creature sank
its blackened teeth into the crook between Ben’s
shoulder and neck. The wound wasn’t fatal,
only a little blood slowly leaking down Ben’s
already stained shirt, but then again it didn’t
have to be. He let out a scream and wrenched
himself away, grabbing one of the plentiful rocks
that littered the ground in the desserts of Israel
and bashing it into the undead’s head. He didn’t
stop until John grabbed him, until the sound of
the rock hitting flesh had become the sound of a
rock hitting soup.
“Shit! Tal’s he’s bit!” yelled John,
staunching Ben’s wound with his hand.
“Is the boy ok?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, he’s good. You saved him. You
got it.”
“Isabella, come here child.” The young
girl ran up to her father, tears streaking her face. “We know what this means, yes? I can’t
keep going with you, I’ll become like them and
you’ll be in danger.”
“No! Papa, we’ll get you fixed! You
woul
dn’t hurt me! Please, don’t leave me
alone!” she clutched at his shirt with both hands
and sobbed between words.
But Ben knew that a bite was the end.
Eventually, he’d turn and just like his wife, he’d
try to kill everyone around him. Including the
daughter he loved so much.
“Tal. You will keep her safe for me?” “I’ll do my best.” He said trying to give
the old man hope without outright lying to him. “Your best will have to be good enough.
John, help me up.” As Ben regained his feet, the
sounds of howling ghosted over the wind from
the way they had come. The undead could
probably smell them, especially since Ben’s
wound was bleeding freely. He closed his eyes
for a second, swaying a little on his feet, and
steadied his resolve. “Christine…I wonder if I
might use one of your grenades?”
She handed him a grenade from behind
her belt and told him how to use it. Ben thanked
her and held it to his heart like it was a precious
heirloom.
“Good. Now go, all of you. I will lead
them away from you as best I can, but you must
hurry to the town and find a safe place. I don’t
think I have much time.”
Isabella became hysterical and tried to
lunge at him, hold him, and not let him go. But
Tal scooped an arm around her waist and began
hauling her up the hillside. The rest of the
group looked at Ben for a moment before they
followed Tal and the screaming girl, until Ben
was alone in the faint light, and he pulled the
pin from the grenade. Holding the spoon down,
he turned to his right and began to run, singing
Seven Days Dead Page 10
