“Someone must have corralled them in and locked them away,” Brook whispered, nodding at the heavy board across the door. The sound that had drawn them to the building was the wood splintering apart from the dead pushing on it from the other side. The air was molasses-thick with moans and the smell of rotten bodies.
Solloway wrung the neck of his axe. “Do you think? Or did they turn while they were behind the door? Many years ago, in the War for the Green Lands, men would fall ill and turn undead without even being bitten. The darkness had somehow taken root in them. It could be this is what happened here.”
Brook and Solloway’s bubble of speculation was popped by another violent crack from the heavy wooden board barred across the doors, piercing the air like a warning shot, like the last desperate click of a clock’s second hand. As thick as the board was, it wouldn’t hold; it was already bulging like a bull frog’s throat from the force of the corpses pushing on it. They wanted the humans that stood outside, desired their living flesh. It was making them ravenous, and they surged against the door with greater and greater strength. Another crack in the wood appeared, then another.
“Let’s go,” Solloway grunted. “Before it’s too late.” Just as the sergeant and Black Wing turned, the board broke apart and fell to the ground. Without it, there was but a small chain, which was already coming lose as the dead pushed harder and harder on the door. Rays of slanted sunlight fell on their rotted teeth and jaundiced eyes, focused on the travelers who stood just a few short spans away.
Then the chain came lose enough that one crawled through the door, then another and another. Lothario went wild as the dead men approached, their teeth gnashing and high-pitched screams escaping from their throats. Solloway had to use all his strength to get his horse under control.
Mercer didn’t hesitate. Even if he wanted to, it was as if Jai Lin imbued his body with a powerful urgency. He ran up, the sword’s blade trailing behind him, until he was a breath away from the closest dead man. He brought the sword up, and what had once been a middling man with wild gray hair and a belly like a buoy fell under Jai Lin, his decapitated head somersaulting through the air with an arc of spiraling blood ribbons trailing it. The next, a short, fat woman with blood caked around her lips, Mercer cut in half, from head to waist, putrid viscera spilling out.
“The chain is going to give!” Brook cried, firing an arrow into another frenzied killim that had escaped from the building. Whether it held the door together or not, it made no difference: more and more undead were getting free of the door, flooding the street like water from a burst pipe. There was no end to what the building contained. “Mercer! Mercer, we have to get out of here!”
Mercer barely heard her. The hypnosis had fully taken hold of him, the same that always did when he was fighting dead men. Despite the blood and gore, despite the physical exertion required by his swordplay, the same tranquility he’d have upon waking from a satisfying sleep would come over him, a calm that made his body limber and Jai Lin always strike true. He wanted to cut them all down, was fascinated by the myriad ways their bodies could come apart. He could go on like this forever, he could…
...wait. Was someone calling him? Was someone trying to wake him up?
“Mercer!” Brook ran up next to him, was shaking his shoulder. He turned quickly on her, his sword arcing through the air, aimed for her arm. He stopped within inches of her skin, the fear he saw in her eyes snapping him out of his trance.
“What’s wrong with you?” She spat. “We have to go!”
Mercer looked around, suddenly aware of just how many dead men there were running towards them from the building. Without a moment’s more of hesitation, Mercer turned and ran after Brook, back down the street of the opulent facades. The snarls and growls of the zombies that chased after them echoed off the buildings.
Solloway was mounted atop Lothario at the junction in the road, the horse nervously stomping at the ground. “Let’s go!” He yelled, his voice with a power and resonance that neither Brook nor Mercer had heard since meeting him. It was the voice of a commander to his troops in the thickness of battle.
They all ran further down 23, deeper into Young Poe's Keep. As they passed by more homes, particularly the few that had newer clapboard additions, the undead would stagger out, some naked, some covered in blood, all drawn to the noise and scent of the humans and animals.
“There are so many of them!” Brook said. Indeed, it seemed as if the entire town trailed after them, choking the street for as far as they could see. Where had all these killim been the night before, she wondered, when she and Mercer had passed through? Had they all really been locked away in that building, an entire town’s worth of cannibalistic corpses?
“By the Fist!” Solloway yelled, as Lothario neighed and reared up. There was no going forward. Staggering towards them from the other direction was another horde of undead, impeding any forward progres on 23.
“Up this way! Quick now!” Solloway yelled. He pointed with his axe up a narrow road that winded its way away from 23 and up a tree-lined hillside. It was a way out of town, but meandered north, away from the Mountain Road fork. Mercer and Brook were both gasping for breath, but nodded and followed in the dust cloud Lothario made as he galloped up the road. They could hear the undead tearing through the buildings and detritus in the streets behind. Though their lungs burned and their vision had become blurry, any slowing down would mean certain death by tooth and claw.
The road was taking them up into the hills. Homes had stopped appearing with any sort of regularity, their places taken by oak and maple. Just when Brook thought she couldn’t run uphill any longer, the road leveled off. To its left was a steep ledge that led down to a ravine, while a sheer rock face was to the right. There was no other way forward. The road ahead bent sharply around the hillside, Solloway pulling sharply on Lothario’s reins as he rounded it, the horse rearing up on his hind legs. He set the air alight with a barrage of curses.
“Damn them!” He yelled. “Those bastards blocked the road!”
The town-folk of Young Poe's Keep, at some point in time, had blocked the snaking road with stacks of old carts and useless machines from the long ago. The subsequent wall they had made was double Lothario’s height, at least three carts wide and went from the vertical hillside to the drop-off. While there were plenty of handholds for the humans to grab onto and use to climb, there was no way that Leo and Lothario could get over it on their own.
They could hear the horde of undead snarling up the road after them, just beyond the bend. “We have to climb it,” Mercer said.
“Damn it, I’m not leaving Lothario.” Solloway dismounted and stood between his horse and the oncoming wave. The first few of the horde could be seen, shambling around the bend. “I’ll fight them all if I have to, but I won’t leave him.”
“You can’t!” Brook said. “There are too many of them!”
“Then I’ll go down fighting. I’m a soldier of the Fort. I won’t turn and run like some nancy from Lazarus Township.” Solloway weighed the double headed axe in his hand, saw everything that was at stake mirrored by the flat steel: the smaller blade had reflected in it his stripes and medals, his honor, his pride, while the larger blade, the skull cleaver, was fogged with Lothario’s anxious breaths. It was this side of the axe that called to him now, the side that would not let him turn and run.
He loved Lothario. The stallion had been a wedding gift from his mentor, Paulo Lautrec, the finest axe man the western cities had ever known. Lothario had been through everything with Solloway and was as much a part of him as the legs the sergeant used to walk, a friend he could rely on without question. Solloway would die for the horse, and intended to that day.
Mercer came up next to Solloway, Jai Lin in his hand. “Think of your mission, Sergeant. Think of how important it is to get east of the Hud, to avert the war that is coming to the Green Lands. Today is not your day to die. Too many innocent lives are relying on you.”
S
olloway didn’t look at Mercer, but he knew the young man was right. Damn it, if the kid doesn’t sound just like his father, Solloway thought. He threw his head back, a scream erupting from his throat that made even the undead hesitate in their mad rush. He knew there was nothing he could do but run.
He turned from the oncoming horde and bolted back towards the wall with Mercer. He stopped in front of Lothario, who snorted and kicked at the dirt, and put his forehead to the Arabian’s. “I’m sorry, old friend. I’ll see you again, in the endless Fields of Gold that wait for us beyond this life.”
Brook was already atop of the wall, loosing arrow after arrow into the tumult of teeth and limbs, always striking true but not slowing the undead in the slightest. Leo scampered around on the ground. He was anxious, despite Brook doing her best to keep him calm through their mind link.
“Grab Leo and hand him up to me!” She screamed to Mercer, who was looking past Solloway at the corpses who were almost on top of them. “Mercer!”
Mercer snapped out of his reverie. He wrapped his arms around the eager pup’s torso and then slung him over his shoulder before starting his way up the wall of carts and twisted metal. He could feel the wall shake as Solloway leaped onto it, the large man wasting no time in climbing. He was past Mercer and to the top of the wall just as the first of the undead got to the horse.
Mercer turned at the stallion’s frightened whinnying, at the percussive thump of hoof on flesh. Lothario was on his hind legs, kicking at the zombies and knocking whole waves of them back. His fight would be in vain, however; there were just too many of them. One eventually got its teeth into the horse’s hind. Blood began to flow, and the circle of undead around Lothario grew more dense, more frenzied. Leo whined into Mercer’s ear, then gave an anguished bark. Mercer had to turn away; the scene below was too terrible to watch.
Mercer handed Leo up to Brook and then climbed over the edge of the wall. Solloway stood as still as stone, while his algae-green pupils flickered with a fiery hatred. He clicked back the hammer on his old pistol, outstretched his arm, aimed.
“Goodbye, old friend,” he said. The gun went off, the burst of a cannon. A spray of blood went up from Lothario’s head, right between the black Arabian’s eyes. The horse went down without so much as a whimper, the pallid, moaning bodies crowding in on Solloway’s now lifeless friend.
No one said anything. They all just watched, the air thick with mastication and the frustrated grunts of the undead who could not get to Lothario’s corpse. Though a direct view of the feast was impossible from their vantage point, Brook felt her stomach start to give, and before she could calm herself, she was ejecting the morning’s meal onto the bent metal and plastic under her knees.
“Are you alright?” Mercer asked, going to her. He brushed some of her hair back behind her ear, not wanting the raven strands to get caught in the spit and mess.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “That was… that was stupid! Why did you have to go look in that building? Why didn’t you listen to us?”
Mercer was caught off guard. “I’m… I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just how it is sometimes, with the sword. It’s how I survive…”
“What’s done is done,” Solloway interjected. His voice had returned to the same raspy whisper he spoke with before they had been running for their lives. “Lothario died a hero’s death. He’ll have a revered place in the Fields of Gold, and I will see him again. Though you should have been more cautious, Mercer, none of us could have known that there would be an entire town’s worth of undead waiting for us in that building. We wanted to see if there were any survivors, didn’t we? What if, instead of corpses, there had been people hiding in there? But… there weren’t. The undead have come back to the Green Lands, I’ve seen it for myself. Gods…” The soldier started down the other side of the wall, his gun reholstered and the axe back in his belt. “Come. Let us go.”
Mercer saw that Solloway had managed to grab one of the packs off of Lothario in his dash for the wall. While that was good, there were also many provisions in the other packs that the horse had carried which were now lost under the horde of dead men feasting below. Depending on what was in the pack, they may only have food for a few days at best.
Once over the other side of the wall, they walked in silence along the winding road. More than once, Mercer thought he should say something to Solloway, offer some sort of condolence, but the look on the large man’s face convinced him otherwise. Solloway looked like he was ready to kill something, and Mercer didn’t want it to be him. The sun had descended another hand in the sky before they found a trickling stream. They stopped in the shade of the beech and bum yum trees that surrounded it and took a rest.
“There was a sign back there,” Mercer said. “Most of it was rusted away. It said ‘Now entering Po.’ Someone painted the word ‘Old’ on it too.”
“Old Poe’s Keep must be straight ahead,” Brook said. “The Young Poe townsfolk said the ghost city was haunted. Maybe that’s why they put a wall across the road.”
Solloway grunted, then took a swig from his canteen. His cheeks were flush and his eyes seemed to be swimming. “Good. We need provisions. All that we have in this pack are some dried meats, books and gauze. No more medicine or food. And after this,” Solloway shook the canteen around in the air and chuckled. “No more spirit.”
“You’re drunk?” Brook asked.
“Damn right, girl.” Solloway laid back on the grass and let out a big sigh. “Some of the finest Lazarus Township bourbon right here. They say it can bring the dead back to life, you place it to a man’s lips right after he’s breathed his last. Wish I could have put it to Lothario’s lips.” Solloway chuckled, which did nothing to hide the immense anguish the man was trying to dampen with drink. If anything, it only made it more sad.
Brook took no pains to hide the disgust from her face. Black Wings did not imbibe; it was not their way. She’d caught Crow drunk a few nights, but had never told Old Wren despite her disappointment with her older brother. Mercer was certainly not one to judge; he knew very well how drink could be a panacea for loss. It was only after losing Nan and his sister that he had found liquor’s soothing hand. He soon began to actively search for it, would shuffle for days through the myriad ruins of the Borderlands in a drunken stupor, on the lookout for anything he could drink to numb the pain away.
Brook got up and went after Leo, who was lolling around in the stream, cooling himself off. Mercer could tell that she wanted to be off on her own, perhaps to decompress after all that had just happened. He himself was exhausted and felt he could fall asleep right there in the mulch. He had barely laid his head down upon a pillow of composted leaves when Solloway began to talk to him.
“I saw what you did back there. What the sword did.”
Mercer sat up, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb, boy. You had the same look your father always had. Like you were hypnotized. I’d always ask him about it, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. Eventually, I was able to get it out of him. It’s that sword. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it pulling you, guiding you, whenever the living dead are afoot.”
He had never told anyone else about the strange bond between him and the sword, about how it wordlessly communicated with him. “You’re right. It’s like it’s drawn to the dead men. The only reason I turned down that road was because Jai Lin was directing me to that building.”
Solloway sat up. His drunkenness appeared to have evaporated. “I knew it. I saw how you just walked heedlessly along, immune to that lovely little lass calling after you, how you went to killing those corpses with no worry or care.” The old sergeant took Mercer in with his light green eyes. “Let me see the blade.”
Mercer reached behind him to where Jai Lin was resting in its leather scabbard. He brought it around and unsheathed it. Jai Lin was a long sword, with a straight, double edged blade that ended in a sharp tip. The steel always seemed
to catch just enough light so that it glowed softly, even in absolute darkness, as it had in Darnell’s shop. Hairline cracks ran through its middle, fractures from the day that his father had run Godwin through and ended the war. Solloway moved closer to Mercer so that the two men were seated only a foot or so apart from each other. The large man nodded to himself.
“Look at the blade’s edges,” Solloway said. “Really look at them.”
Mercer did, knowing what he’d see. Or rather, what he’d not see: the sharpened edges of Jai Lin were so sharp that they were a blur to the naked eye, a gnat’s eyelash of nondescript dimension. Mercer had spent many a night in front of a campfire looking at Jai Lin, wondering where the steel ended and the air around it began. “The blade is so sharp that it is hard to see its edges. It blurs.”
Solloway smiled, his teeth like rounded white stones beneath a bale of bristly hay. “Ah, is that what is going on here?”
“What do you mean? That’s not it?”
“No, Mercer. Not if your old man and the cosmologists at Ithaca are to be believed. Do you see how the blade is black along the edges, before it gets blurry?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Have you ever wondered why that is? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because the blade is lined with darkness, with what the cosmologists called dark matter. Invisible to the naked eye, but what your father and other smart types at Ithaca believe makes up most of the universe. This sword proves its existence. It can feel out the dark aether that all beings swim through, anticipates how they’ll move. It’s how you can always strike true, how the sword draws you like a magnet to strike here or there. It’s a powerful weapon, made in the long ago by technology that has since been lost. It could prove destructive in the wrong set of hands. Your father therefore made a safeguard against anyone else wielding it. Look at the hilt.”
Mercer didn’t have to, for he knew exactly what he’d find there. “It’s a picture of a crane. My family’s sigil.”
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 8
