by Stant Litore
Something grabbed at her ankle and she shrieked, falling again; something fell on her in the dark, and she felt a cold, dry hand clutch at her face. A hiss above her. She kicked wildly, writhing, a jagged stone beneath her cutting her back. Wetness trickled hot over her thighs, the reek of urine. A face above her, its mouth open, teeth bared.
Then the weight was lifted from her, and a man stood over her. A faint gleam of metal. Again the hiss, and then the chop of iron into flesh. Regina kept kicking, and the man above her swore. “Lie still, you slut.”
She froze, the sound of his voice confirming that the shape that stood over her was living, not dead. Her heart pounded. She started repeating her name to herself, silently, again and again. She was not Dora. She was Regina. Regina Romae. The cords bit at her hands.
Another hiss, and she cried out, her mind going blank as her whole body flinched, anticipating the cut of teeth into her flesh. The man above her danced in place, and again she heard the chunk of metal into meat. A heavy figure fell across her feet and she twisted, kicking it off. It did not grasp her or bite. Then the guardsman’s hands were on her arms, pulling her to her feet again.
She swayed. It was so dark. She could hear the dead wailing, very near. The man who held her was only a silhouette against the blind night. She moaned.
His hand struck her face.
Then the ground left her feet and she was over his shoulder, his hand on her rear. She felt the hard rhythm of his strides; he was walking very quickly. There was moaning loud behind them. She didn’t kick; the pain in her face had cleared her mind. She sucked in short, sharp breaths, desperate for air.
She was Regina Romae. Regina Romae.
Anger and shame lit in her, a heat that drove away fear. Not in years had she shaken apart so badly. The warmth of her own urine on her leg made her furious. She could hear her own sobbing breaths, her quiet whimpers, and she clenched her teeth, stopping them. Lifting her head, she gazed into the dizzy night behind them. She could hear the dragging footsteps of the dead; she could hear their moans. They were close.
Then the guardsman carried her out from the close streets, and he strode up a long slope, the tenements of the Subura replaced by gardens and villas; without buildings leaning close overhead, there were stars, many stars, brilliant and sharp in the sky. In their light she saw the dead shamble out of the close-packed alleys and stumble uphill after them. They didn’t move fast; the guardsman was young and strong, and, if unburdened, could outrun them. But now, bearing the weight of two captives, one on either shoulder—
Regina watched the dead with wide eyes. There were thirty, maybe forty. Still more shuffled after those. Dark figures in the starlight, barely separable one from another. Just shadow shapes that had lurched out of some child’s nightmare with hunger and clutching hands and a need to kill. They moaned as they followed.
The sight shook her. What could even Polycarp do against so many? And how many more still shuffled in closed rooms in half the tenements by the river, waiting for a door to open, or tumbling by accident out the window to crawl up the street seeking someone to devour?
The guardsman’s breath wheezed beneath her.
“Don’t stop,” Regina whispered. “Run, run.”
She didn’t know she’d spoken aloud, but the guardsman’s steps quickened; the jostling of his shoulder against her belly deprived her of her own breath. She could only watch the dead as they lurched up the hill, nearly a hundred of them now. Their moaning filled the air. As though overnight the Tiber had become the Styx, and the boatman had confused his directions and was ferrying the dead over from the farther shore.
But the guardsman’s sprint was brief; he began to pant and his pace flagged as the uphill road became steeper. Regina’s heart beat wildly in her ears. Behind them, four of the dead had lurched ahead of the rest. Here on the Palatine slopes, the road was sunken, a wide channel to carry away sewage, with raised steps in the middle to keep the feet of affluent citizens dry. At this time of night, there was little fluid in the road, and even little scent, for water had been poured down it after sundown to cleanse the road. But the shin-high embankments to either side of the road served to confine and channel the dead, as long as the prey they sought was directly ahead. That kept most of the dead pressed tightly together; as the group shambled forward, they impeded each other.
But those four who were ahead climbed the road steadily, having more room, one of them slouching a little to the side, another with its arms lifted and reaching for its prey. The guardsman wheezed and stumbled to one knee.
“No!” Regina cried. “Get up, get up! They’re right behind us!”
Her captor planted both of his palms against the moist pavement and gazed forward at the rising slope of the hill. With a roar like a beast, he thrust himself back to his feet, both captives still on his shoulders. One hand on each, he stumbled furiously up the incline.
The dead were only a few paces behind. They did not tire or stumble.
Regina fought her bonds, twisting her wrists, panting with fear as she tried to slip one hand free. She took care not to move her hips much; she didn’t want to fall to the hard pavement, to lie there bound as the walking corpses closed in on her, their hands reaching for her. She strained and gritted her teeth and pulled at her wrists; pain flared in her lower arms. She couldn’t get her hands free.
The guardsman was fighting for every step; the uphill sprint had wearied him. Perhaps if given a moment to stop and breathe, he might recover enough to finish the climb quickly.
The dead would not give him a moment.
“Please,” Regina whispered, “please.”
One of the dead lurched close, its eyes dull, its teeth glinting in the starlight. Stretching out its arm, its fingers clutching at her. Regina tried to twist her head away, breathing in tiny gasps. She moaned through clenched teeth, tensing.
In the next instant the corpse’s cold fingertips brushed her hair.
A dark blur crashed into the thing’s head; the creature staggered to the side, hissed, then took a step back toward them; a man in leather armor shoved the guardsman with his captives behind him, then swung a great wooden cudgel, slamming it a second time into the corpse’s head. This blow knocked the creature to its knees, even as the three other dead stumbled near.
Moaning—not a moan of pain but that long, low moan of hunger—the dead corpse began rising to its feet again. Their rescuer swung the cudgel, but now two more of the dead grabbed his arms, pulling him toward their mouths. He cursed and kicked one of them hard between the thighs with his boot, but the creature did not wince or move. Regina screamed as the corpse pressed its mouth to the soldier’s wrist and bit deeply. Blood welled up around its teeth, dark in the night.
The guardsman slid his captives from his shoulders; Regina felt the pavement hit her back and rump hard, and sucked in her breath. The fourth walking corpse bent and snatched at her hair. But the guardsman’s knife slid from its sheath in a song of metal, and he drove his blade into the creature’s chest. That did not slow it. Regina cried out as she felt her head lifted by the hair, her wrists tied helplessly beneath her. The thing’s face a shadow above her, its teeth reaching for her. She tried to speak, to beg, to scream—no sound came.
A blade shone for an instant before her face. One more hard tug on her hair and then the pull was gone; she fell back hard to the stones. She saw long strands of her hair still caught in the creature’s hand, the ends severed.
The guardsman’s rough hand grabbed her, dragged her a few feet up the road. As other feet pounded past her, she rolled to her side and retched into the street.
Several men were wrestling with the four dead; they had cudgels, and one or two had knives. She saw one cudgel come down again and again on a hairless head that kept snapping its jaws and hissing; skin and gray matter and tissue spewed from the growing wound in its skull, until the thing just fell to the side and lay crumpled like tattered clothes tossed into the drain.
T
hen it was over.
Four corpses lay still in the street, and one of the soldiers bent to wipe the mess from his cudgel on a tunic one of the bodies wore.
Regina retched again, tasting her vomit on her lips and in her mouth. She groaned. Her back ached from the impact of falling several times onto hard stone. She coughed and fought to stop her belly from heaving. Her hair, cut short on the left side of her head, got into her eyes. The moaning of the larger group of dead—who must be very near now—was loud. For a moment, with one side of her face pressed to the street, she could hear their approach through the rock. She could hear both the moaning and the scraping of their feet. She began praying, whispering.
There were soldiers in the street, between her and Marcus and the dead. Several armored men. One knelt, clutching his arm. To her horror, blood ran from beneath his hand and spilled to the pavement like water from a fountain, an urgent stream of life leaving him. The man groaned something that Regina didn’t quite catch, and then a new man stepped into view, tall and broad- shouldered, a giant with a high mane on his helmet. An officer, a centurion. There was no gladius at his belt, but he held a long cudgel with a jagged scrap of bronze fixed to the end.
He stood for a moment before the wounded legionnaire.
Behind him, Regina could see the slow-moving, steady advance of the dead. They were close enough to throw stones at, with accuracy. She rolled onto her back, glanced once at the star- pierced sky, once up the road to the high, quiet villas of the wealthy, sheltered among dark, tall cypresses. Marcus lay there in the road, near enough to touch if she weren’t bound; his face was turned from her and he wasn’t moving or making any sound, but she could see the rise and fall of his chest.
She had to protect him. She had to do something. She forced herself to breathe. There were armed men here—disciplined, trained legionnaires; she and Marcus would not be eaten. She just had to pull herself together, think, survive. She had to. How the cords bit at her wrists!
She glanced back down the street toward the dead in time to see the centurion raise his cudgel.
“You did your duty,” the officer said.
The wounded man lifted his head and closed his eyes. Regina shut hers quickly as the cudgel came down.
When she opened them a moment later, the man lay in the street, his head caved in on one side, blood running, slow and dark, down the stones toward the staggering dead.
Her belly heaved again.
The centurion turned to her captor, who stood now to one side, his chest heaving as he recovered his breath. “Run past,” the officer barked. “We’ll divert them, lead them back toward the river.”
Regina’s captor panted, tried to force out words. “There may—be others—don’t get caught—between—”
“I know my work, guardsman.” The centurion’s face was hard, and the anger in his eyes, cold and violent, made Regina flinch—though that restrained fury was directed not at her or at Marcus but at the guardsman who had trailed a crowd of walking dead up the hill toward the parts of Rome the centurion believed worthy of defending.
Turning from them, the centurion gestured quickly with his hand; men in armor but carrying only cudgels and staves moved past in a quick but orderly line. By law no soldiers who marched in any army of the state could carry sharp iron within the ancient boundary of Rome, so in the recent disorder the magistrates had hired mercenary guardsmen to keep the streets clean of dead; Regina’s captor was one of these hired men. The centurion and these twenty were not. Their training had been brutal and without reprieve or rest, and they had been tested perhaps in the swamps of Germania or along Hadrian’s Wall, at those distant frontiers where most of Rome’s armies held watch, far from the Eternal City. Now, striking an uneasy truce between the security of Rome and the laws of Rome, this centurion and his volunteers had ventured into the city in their armor, taking up improvised weapons that held no blades.
They were few, but they were Roman soldiers. Where they marched, the world knelt.
Regina gazed at the hard eyes of the centurion, and for just a moment he looked at her. She caught her breath at what she saw. A kind of strength she’d seen before only in Polycarp’s eyes. What this man said, he would do. The moaning of the dead was loud behind them, but she believed him. He would divert the dead from the hill.
She also saw that his eyes were not those of a man who expected to survive this night.
Grunting, the hired guardsman lifted her to her feet. “You’ll have to run,” he growled by her ear. She nodded. He tossed Marcus back over his shoulder, gripped her arm above the elbow, then pulled her with him as he broke into a fast walk. Swiftly, they left the legionnaires behind. She heard human cries and shouts amid the moaning of the undead, but she did not look back. She kept her eyes focused on the street above her, praying that she would not stumble or trip.
The Roman villas to either side of the narrow street were silent and dark. There were no windows, for on the Palatine Hill houses kept their windows on the inside, looking into the garden. The outside was only a wall, closing out any sight of what walked in the street. Regina thought of the families in those homes, stirred from sleep by the wailing of the dead. Even at this moment, perhaps a dozen mothers or nurses were clasping small children close, stroking their hair and whispering comfort into their ears. Perhaps a dozen slaves stood waiting by villa doors with staves or brooms in their hands, ordered to beat back the dead if the walking corpses should burst in. No lamps had been lit; no voices were raised in the dark. The men and women of upper Rome were simply waiting within their walls, silent and wide eyed, hoping the clamor in the street would pass them by, the way a tempest might pass by a forest of oaks.
Regina’s sides burned, but she forced herself to match the guardsman’s pace.
The moaning of the dead was farther behind now. She didn’t dare cast a glance over her shoulder to see if the legionnaires had indeed led them away from the street. A glance back might mean tripping. She couldn’t bear to lie helpless on the pavement again, not even briefly. With the dead falling behind, relieving the sharp edge of her terror, she began to worry for Marcus. She didn’t know how badly he’d been hurt. He might need a poultice and a stay in bed; instead, he was being jounced about on a guardsman’s shoulder.
She stubbed her toe hard on the stones, clenched her cry behind her teeth; the guardsman’s hard yank on her arm kept her upright, kept her moving, though agony shot through her foot and up her leg.
“There it is,” her captor breathed. “Justitia’s temple.”
Ahead of them, beyond the next villa, she saw a high, marble wall and, towering out of the courtyard behind it, the pillared façade of a high building, white and gleaming under the stars. Nestled against the outside of the wall was a smaller, blockier structure, an official’s station. Several wooden sheds had been erected to either side of that station. A man leaned against the side of one, looking down the street at them. Another guardsman.
Regina tried to move her hands in her bonds, but she couldn’t feel them; the cord had numbed them. Her captor dragged her toward one of the sheds. The other guardsman swung the door open, revealing a gaping, dark opening. It recalled to her heart the opening to the cargo hold of the slave ship that had brought her to this part of the world years ago. Her hands had been bound then too. Tears ran down her face unchecked. She’d been dragged uphill from the shattered refuge of the insula to this small shed that a Roman might toss a slave into. Of everything that had befallen her since she was pulled from the door of the insula into the street, nothing had terrified her as much as that dark opening of the shed. In her heart she cried out, though she kept her lips still. She didn’t know where Polycarp was or what would be done with them—she cried his name silently as the guards pushed her through into the dark closeness of the shed. One of them—the new guard—caught her by the arms before she fell; she was pulled back against his body, and a rough hand slipped beneath her nightdress, groped her thigh with thick, seeking fingers.
She flinched and made a high, keening sound that shamed her. Her body tensed like a branch bent back too far, ready to break at another touch.
“Time for that later, Decius,” the guard who’d carried her said. “Reports to make, and I need you. Whole bloody Subura’s full of dead—can’t you hear them?”
The other guardsman grunted his assent and took his hand from her. In a moment she felt cold steel against her wrists, and then the cord parted, and her wrists were free; the guardsman shoved her to the straw. Marcus was thrown down beside her.
The door slammed to.
Regina lay panting, sobbing, on her belly in the dark. Only the freedom of her hands kept her from panic. She was not bound; she was not in the slave hold. There was warm straw beneath her, not wood chips. This was not the past.
She pushed herself up on her hands, trying to breathe through the tightness in her body. Faintly, through the chinks in the shed’s walls, she could hear the moaning of the dead as they hunted in the streets of the Subura, pitting the strength of their ravenous and unmet need against the discipline and order of the Roman soldiers.
Dawn came, a faint and furtive light between the boards of the shed. The distant moans had been silent now for some time. Perhaps the danger out there had passed. Perhaps not. The shivers of reaction from their panicked flight had come and gone, leaving Regina exhausted, hungry, weak. She sat with her back to the wall of the shed, still holding Marcus, who groaned from time to time but did not wake. Parts of her own body ached with stiffness and bruising. Her own odor was offensive to her; her skin was coated in a grease of sweat and dirt, and she yearned for a basin of water and a clean cloth. Her emotions were fierce animals within her, prowling and roaring, making her thoughts flee about. First, her horror at the rising of the dead en masse. Would even the battle discipline of the military men avail to stop the hungry dead? She knew Polycarp, who would bring the dead absolution and rest, would have saddened at the waste of the corpses that had been destroyed during the night. But surely Polycarp had never imagined having to contend with so many. Regina found her faith shaken. Suddenly the Apostle’s Gift seemed a solution meant for a gentler world; this world was one of hunger, filled with those who would devour you—both among the dead and among the living.
