Percy affixed a mirror to the deadly point of his spear and surveyed the area from a prone position. We all lay beside him, catching what glimpses we could in the glass.
“It’s bulky, but that spear comes in handy,” Garrett said.
Percy whipped his head around at that. “It’s a lance, Mr. Easter. Big difference.”
“Oh,” Garrett said. “Sorry. I thought lances were for, y’know, guys on horses.”
The other knights looked at each other, then over at Percy.
“I am heavy cavalry, Mr. Easter. I’ve just… lost my mount.”
“Is that who Sinistra is?” I asked. “You called out the name when—”
“Yes,” Percy said, cutting me off. “Sinistra was my mount. He fell in battle two days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and Percy nodded curtly.
“What’s it mean, Sinistra?”
Percy smiled and grumbled a small chuckle, though absent any mirth. “He was a destria. The same war horse you would have found during the war. Destria comes from Latin for ‘right.’ When we were training together, Sinistra always went his own way. If I pulled him right, he was just as apt to go left to spite me. So I named him Sinistra. Latin for ‘left’.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” I said.
He pulled down the mirror and nodded to the other two. He made a few indecipherable hand gestures that smacked more of modern soldiers than medieval knights.
“What war?” Garrett asked.
The knights took to their feet, the plates clanking lightly.
“The Hundred Years War, of course.”
“Did you think we worked for Medieval Times Dinner Theatre?” the Butcher said. “This armor is Milanese. Hand-crafted. It cost more than her fancy camera. The barbed flail is titanium with a depleted uranium core. Anachronism be damned, this thing could brain a bull with a single blow.” He pulled down his visor, cutting off any response.
“We’re re-enactors,” Philip said, features soft. His tone blended earnestness and patience. I had a feeling he’d explained this a thousand times.
“For the medieval period,” I said. “Yeah, I get it.”
“For the Battle of Agincourt,” Philip said. “This was our big one. Our annual re-enactment. The first biters came stumbling onto the battlefield, not two minutes after the whistle blew to get underway. Fortunate, really.”
We eased down a small slope into the Locus Inn parking lot. Of the three cars in the lot, two held bodies, but they weren’t moving.
“’Cause you had the armor on?” I said.
Philip made a see-saw gesture with one giant, gloved hand. “That, sure. But do you know much about Agincourt?”
“I know Joan of Arc fought in the Hundred Years War at some point, and that it didn’t last a hundred years but slightly longer. That exhausts my college world history requirement.”
Philip smiled, and it lit up the oval of his face in the helmet. It was the sort of smile that would have gotten my attention in a bar a week ago. Now, I didn’t know what it meant.
“The French were defeated at Agincourt because the field was sodden with mud. Knights in seventy pounds of armor don’t do so well when they have to wade through the knee-deep mud before battle. They reached the English exhausted and disheartened, so they were captured or killed with relative ease.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We’re the French,” he said. “They watered down the field, even got in there with hoes and tilled the soil. If the zombies had come just hours later, we’d have been too tired to stand, let alone fight.”
“But you weren’t tired. So what happened?”
Just then a moan sounded from near the entrance of the inn. One zombie became three, and then I spotted five more coming from around the corner or even getting up from the road where I thought they’d been just more dead bodies.
“You’re about the find out, mon Cheri,” called the Butcher. The voice came out crisp and held a note of bass and reverb. He must have installed a voice emitter inside his visor. The effect was chilling, which was no doubt his intention.
Philip shoved an armored finger toward an empty car, the doors hanging open. “Inside. Now!”
Garrett needed no prompting, but grabbed at me and yanked me toward the car. In seconds, we huddled inside, the doors locked. We’d seen them take apart the three guys back at Hanging Rock. Surely a few more would be okay.
No sooner had I considered this than a pool of undead spilled from the main entrance into the parking lot. Some wore hotel gear—maids and porters and kitchen staff. Why the hell had they stayed? Plenty of others wore military-grade riot gear. Wouldn’t have figured them for undead if not for them stumbling all over one another. Some moved faster than others, but all held a desperate, horrible longing to get at us—at them.
My insides went instantly cold and tight. Tears welled in my eyes for what was about to happen. This was it, my breaking point. When they were through with the knights, they’d find us or just wait us out. What did they care? This was the end of the Easter Twins, I had no doubt.
The zombies spilled into a long line, trying to get around each other for the first crack at the knights. In effect, they formed a twenty-foot wide wall of flesh, rolling toward them. The knights backed up, whether meaning to or not, almost against our car. They stood only feet away, poised but doomed.
They let out their cries: “For Henry,” “For France,” “For Sinistra.” That was when things got interesting.
Philip coiled himself like a snake preparing to strike, when he unwound, the long blade soared through a handful of zombies. The things never flinched, never wavered or cared. So Philip picked his spots as they drew closer: coil, strike, coil, strike. I could almost hear the wind whistling off that blade, could feel the power of the tremendous grunt he made, even without the Butcher’s voice emitter.
All the while, Percy went to work jabbing his lance over and over, hitting their exposed, dauntless, milky eyes more often than not, yanking it free a fraction of a second later. He was a piston and not a man only minutes from death. Surely, despite their bravery and precision, still, death would come for them. There were too many. I thought this even as the fallen formed a wall, tripping up the others. I thought it when the dozens more spilled around the sides, forming a semi-circle and encasing the knights. I certainly thought it when Philip ran out of steam and had to fall back, leaning against our car as heavy and heedless as a slumping bull who’d run his race and now only awaited death.
And then the Butcher came to life. Through the voice-emitter boomed the terrible growl I would have thought echoed from the dead if I hadn’t known better. The—what had he called it?—barbed flail swung as true and inexorable and arching as the sun itself. The heads of the zombies didn’t seem to slow its grisly work, as the thing collapsed skull after skull.
Still, they came, spilling over their corpse wall and surrounding Boucher. They were all over him, ants on an anteater, too many for even this slayer of the dead to withstand. But what could they do? His armor was too thick. They bit, they tore, the clawed, but the dead might as well have gone at him with fingernails as ineffective as their teeth were on that metal. The lot of which he’d said cost more than my…. My camera! I acted on instinct, yanking the camera free from my pack, fumbling with the controls, unseating the spent battery and reseating it over and over.
“What are you doing?” Garrett hissed, as if—amid the carnage—the zombies had any hope of hearing us.
“I’ve got to film this. It’s too… too important. I can’t—”
“The batteries are all shot, Shy.”
“Then give me your GoPro.” I dug into his gear, fingers seeking the small cube.
“That’s spent, too. I told you that. We don’t have anything.”
I looked up just as Boucher erupted from the dozen bodies on top and all over him. They fell at his feet, and Percy stuck them, holding the lance like a giant stabbing knife. Seemingly given his secon
d wind, Philip rose from the car and rejoined his comrades, his swipes timed and lethal.
“My phone,” I said and wrenched it free from my pants like it was on fire. I burst from the car, hit record, and entered my filming trance.
“What the hell are you doing?” the Butcher called, voice rough and angry.
I offered no answer, had none really. Philip turned around and spotted me and began my way.
“No,” I yelled. “I’m fine. Get back to work.”
The view from behind the phone lacked the filtered reality I enjoyed when using the 3-CCD camera, but it proved enough to keep my heart racing but steady—to keep my hands from shaking and ruining the shot. The grunt of the door opening telegraphed what I already counted on: Garrett, recorder capturing every audible nuance of this pandemonium, fell in beside me.
“Knew you couldn’t resist,” I said.
He put a finger to his lips and pointed at the still-coming horde. I got the message.
The fight continued for another five minutes. The wall of bodies grew, forcing the dumb latecomers to spend several seconds finding a way over or around their fallen ilk to get at us. This gave more than enough time for the knights to prepare. By the end, they were all heaving for breath, taking a knee at intervals, slapping one another and insisting this next one was theirs. Even before the last dead had fallen, they were laughing—laughing—and I even caught Boucher showing off for my makeshift camera, flourishing and adding several swings, building to the deathblow.
When the last of the zombies lay still, an intense tremor ran through me. Every sensation I’d stoppered during the battle now spilled out, compounded by an instant, tremendous weariness in my muscles. Even with the stench of the dead, their blackish, tainted blood flecked on my face, my clothes, my hands, I could only sit on the pavement, slumped forward like a toddler overtaken with an immediate need for slumber.
“You okay?” Garrett asked. His labored breathing told me he wasn’t up for running a marathon, either.
“This,” I managed, before pulling in a breath just to push words from my lungs. “This is so our new jam.”
***
As if a cosmic joke, our new knight friends knew as much about electricity as historical knights did. That is, virtually nothing.
“I’m an accountant,” Boucher growled. “I could balance the books for an electric company, but past that, you got the wrong guy.”
We’d settled into the penthouse, based more on the single entrance, they said, than the posh layout of the room. So after an impossible, if protracted, twenty-story climb, the knights spent the next half hour doffing their armor and inspecting one another like field medics over a wounded soldier.
Outside of his armor, Boucher was big but not huge. Percy was on the skinny side, and—sure enough—Philip was fairly gorgeous, even if the room had filled with the lingering scent of carnage: a mixture of iron and soured milk.
“How about the rest of you?” I asked. “Anyone ever fired up a generator, at least?”
“Retail manager,” Percy said, an arm over his eyes, lying over the white couch with his legs dangling over one side. “I can give you thirty percent off without breaking a sweat but couldn’t tell the maintenance guys where the generator was even located.”
I looked at Philip.
“Come on,” he said. I was sitting in a wicker chair, and he held out a hand for me to take.
“Me? I’m… I’m a cameraman. What the hell can I do?”
Philip left the hand mid-air, but his face broke into a smile. “You want power. You have to work for it. If I wanted pancakes right now, I wouldn’t expect Boucher to run to the Waffle House.”
“Waffle House doesn’t do pancakes,” Boucher said. “I used to ask for them just to piss ’em off, though.”
“Well, they don’t even do waffles anymore,” Percy said. “But I get Phil’s point, Miss. I wouldn’t want to take those stairs again, either, but we are kinda here for you.”
I shook my head. “No, I get it. Sorry.” I took his hand, and he lifted my cement-laden body off the chair. “You coming, bro?”
Garrett looked up from the bed. He’d only taken off his shoes before plopping down, the dirt and blood on him already painting the sheets. “I’m the sound guy. My stuff’s still got a charge. Your damn cameras are the battery hogs.”
Philip shrugged and led the way back down.
***
We’d secured the doors in case any zombies from the other hotels came to investigate. Still, a fear crept over me as we got closer to the ground floor. I’d yet to encounter a zombie I’d known as a human, and maybe that was for the best. I never saw them as anything but monsters. The downside was, the farther I got from the rest of the crew, especially Garrett, the more I felt alone and helpless.
Philip must have felt at least some of that, perhaps as much because he no longer had his armor as being away from the other two. He lacked the confidence he’d shown while armored. Sure, he still had his sword, but now it looked comically large. His underclothes looked more like pajamas than anything, compounding the more vulnerable effect.
Still, once we’d come back to the lobby, he kept his cool and used a map behind the concierge desk to locate the generator room.
“So, what, you’re familiar with this kinda stuff?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “Not at all, actually. I… I’m a musician. That’s my… day job, I guess.”
“You don’t sound so sure about that.”
“Few musicians are.”
“What do you play?”
“Percussion.”
“Oh, you’re a drummer.”
He jerked his head around to look at me. “Not like you’re thinking. Percussionist. Drums, sure, but other stuff. I’m not in a rock band.”
We reached the generator room. I figured we’d have to search out keys or push buttons at the desk, but the door was propped open with a toolbox. Philip pulled a flashlight from the top shelf and surveyed the room.
“I getcha. We’ve got a percussion guy we worked with on scores. For the docs we’ve worked on before. Maybe you could take his place.” I laughed, but an image of the guy we’d used for the score on our last two projects appeared in my head. A second later, he morphed into a zombie and bared his teeth. I pushed the image away and shuddered.
“You honestly think there’ll be a market for the film after this?”
We eased deeper into the room, the light dancing along the walls and around corners.
“This won’t last,” I said.
“You’re a week behind schedule, Shiloh,” he said, and despite his admonishing tone, I liked the way my name sounded coming from him. “No offense, but I don’t know you’re qualified to say that.”
“I saw what you guys did out there. Three of you.”
“We got lucky.”
“No, there wasn’t a smidge of luck as far as I could see, and I think the footage will say the same.”
He sighed and stopped moving for a moment. He turned and pointed the flashlight at my chest, I guessed to keep from blinding me. Chivalrous even in anger. “If we were anything but lucky, this wouldn’t have happened at all. You understand? If humankind were meant to endure this, we would have. You’ve been in the woods, and good for you. But you don’t know how fast things fell apart. You don’t want to know.”
Exhaustion sapped any words. All I could say, after several seconds of silence, was: “There’s the genny.”
***
Between a drummer and a cameraman, we had the genny running in ten minutes, which beat out my best expectations. From a panel of power boxes on the wall, we threw the ones labeled elevators and penthouse and left the rest of them tripped. Neither of us could guess how long the diesel would hold out, but why push it?
We rode the elevator up to the penthouse, every cell in my body saying a silent thanks for avoiding another trek up the stairs. The sound of music and celebration penetrated the doors before they opened. We entered
the penthouse to find three pajama-wearing men dancing on the beds drinking booze from airplane bottles. Music poured from a Bose stereo where Garrett had jacked in his phone.
Philip sighed but grinned at the odd scene. “Save me the Crown Royal,” he said.
I joined them, kicking off my shoes. Already the room was filling with the sweaty smell of us, and my eyes kept cutting to the Jacuzzi tub just visible past the cracked bathroom door. But Garrett put a tiny bottle of Bacardi in my hands, tapped it with this own, and we danced to a Taylor Swift song I never even knew Garrett had on his playlist.
***
The broad, bay windows showed black outside by the time I finished my bath and joined the others. I’d let them shower first, both so they wouldn’t continue to stink up the place, and so I could enjoy a long bath without harassment.
“’Bout time, Shy,” Garrett said. “You fall asleep?”
I worked the incredibly soft towel over my hair. “I could have. Everything charged up yet?”
He stood from the lazy circle the guys had formed around a poker pot made up of minibar snacks: pretzels and nuts and mints. “Yeah, the first set. I put on the spares, so they should be charged soon.” He dug into his pack. “Oh, and I found you these in the linen closet.” He tossed me a box of Tampons, beaming with pride.
The others looked at me and then promptly returned to their game.
“Now you care about that?” I said, the words hot with my embarrassment. I shoved the box into my pack. “Might not matter anyway, since we’re somehow on this subject. I don’t think Aunt Flow is making any visits today.”
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” Garrett asked me, genuine shock on his face.
“No,” I barked.
“’Cause there was that guy you brought home from Flannery O’Connor’s like a month ago—”
“Shut up,” I said and cut my eyes over to Philip without meaning to.
“It’s the stress,” Percy said. “I did a tour in the Navy. The stress of basic training often stalls menses. Some girls even skipped a month. The guys just couldn’t… Well. Couldn’t go number two.” He dipped his head in sudden embarrassment.
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