Ruin and Rebirth

by Michael Whitehead

  They almost made it without further loss of life. It was so close in the end. The house that was their destination was within sight when a group of Risen came up the hill behind them. One of the legionaries was the first to see it, and pass a message up the line. The Risen were still far enough away that the women and children were invisible to the undead but unless the creatures changed their path, they would walk straight past them.

  “We have to run,” Flavia whispered urgently to Secundus, but even in the darkness she saw him shake his head.

  “If we run to the house, they will catch us. They are much faster than young children.” Secundus began to reach a hand up to signal more of his men. Flavia knew what this meant, more sacrifice, more death in order to save her and the other women and children. Her heart sank, but before Secundus could signal the order, a hand reached past Flavia’s face and stilled the centurions hand.

  Pamela, her face white and scared in the darkness, shook her head at the centurion. Flavia’s maid, a woman she had known since she was a girl, passed the child that she held to her mistress. Flavia took her without thinking, not understanding what Pamela intended to do.

  “You will need all of these men in the days to come," she whispered, "I will just be one more mouth to feed.” Flavia finally realised what Pamela meant to do and she wanted to scream at her not to go. There had been too much death, so much loss. To lose such a gentle soul would be too much.

  “I love you mistress,” Pamela said, her dark eyes catching the moon light. Then she turned and stepped into the street.

  At first the undead did not see her, she waved her hands at them and almost in unison, their heads came up and the movement of their bodies changed. Pamela moved, slowly at first, then with more urgency toward the street that ran away from her friends and away from the house on Palatine Hill.

  Flavia watched in mute anguish, her heart screamed in silent impotence. She sent all of her love out to the brave woman whose sacrifice might save them all. The Risen charged after her, they were much too fast for her to outrun, not that she ever intended to.

  When she was far enough away, Pamela began to sing. It was sweet, melodious and so loud in the darkness of the dead city. Flavia did not know the song, she hoped it was a song from Pamela’s childhood and that she would meet her ancestors soon.

  “Come now,” Secundus said. Flavia wanted to hit him, he was heartless. Did he not know what had happened here, what had been lost. Then she realised, he knew better than any of them. He had fought on a hundred battle fields and lost more friends and comrades than Flavia could ever understand. He also knew that loss was pointless unless those that lived on could benefit from it.

  They left the shadows and ran pulling the children behind them in panic and desperation. One final push and the prize would be gained. A Risen stepped into Secundus' path, but he didn’t even miss a step. He turned and rolled his sword into the side of the undead face. The blow split the creature's head and Flavia felt spots of fluid flick against her face. The children screamed but further down the hill, at that exact moment there was a louder scream of pain. Pamela died in agony so that they all might live.

  The area in front of the door was empty and Secundus had it open in seconds. They all pushed their way into the lush and lavish rooms beyond and tears enveloped them all. Flavia felt her knees weaken, through shock and relief at finally being safe. She sat down with her back against the wall, she didn’t even notice as the children she was carrying were taken from her arms. It was a while after they arrived that she looked up and with watery eyes saw that her group was not alone.

  The house already had a number of people in it, Secundus had mentioned that he already had a group of survivors, Flavia guessed this must be those people. Somebody handed her a cup with a warm drink in it and she took it gratefully. She sipped it and tasted spices that warmed her insides.

  Some of the children that had come with them were already running about the house, playing. Flavia laughed at how resilient the young could be as she watched them make new friends and laugh with old ones.

  Many of the younger ones were still being held by their mothers or the other women who had made the journey. Slowly the new arrivals were being helped into rooms in the large house by those who already called it home.

  Flavia pulled herself to her feet and wandered around the property. Families had made homes in rooms or sometimes corners, if the room was big enough. Everywhere she looked she saw damaged souls and loss. The eyes that looked back at her had seen things they could never forget, and they had all lost loved ones, family, and friends.

  She turned into another room and saw Secundus talking to two of his men, so she waited in the doorway for him to finish and then approached the centurion. He had a dazed look on his face and Flavia realised, probably for the first time, these men were still only human, like all the rest in this house. They were made of the same flesh and bones, they thought the same things and felt the same way that the rest of them did. The fact that they could use a sword and fight did not make them less human or numb to the magnitude of recent events.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him, standing back.

  Secundus rubbed at his stubble darkened face with his hand, his eyes were damp when he looked back at her. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” he admitted.

  “You are doing a fine job so far,” she reassured him, not wanting to patronise him with false praise.

  “I am losing people every day, I am a centurion, I lead trained men. I have no idea how to look after these people.” He motioned with his hand, taking in the house below them.

  “Then bring my husband here. He is a brilliant man - let him take some of the weight off your shoulders.” She smiled, moving toward the centurion. He was decades younger than she was and in this moment he seemed to her like a child in armour. She reached up and, not even knowing she would do it, pulled his head toward hers. She kissed his forehead and then rested her head against his. He did not resist the moment of tenderness.

  “Thank you,” she said to him. He said nothing. She kissed his head once more and then turned toward the door. She did not intend to look back at him, wanting to leave him to his grief and pain, but as she left the room she glanced at him. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he looked so lost and helpless. A hero in pain. She closed the door, giving his grief a place to hide.

  Outside the door, two young girls ran up to her, they were chasing each other and the youngest of the two pulled the hem of Flavia’s tunic out to make a hiding place. The two girls ran around her legs giggling and trying to tickle each other.

  Despite her pain Flavia saw the reason they were doing all of this in those two girls. Not just those two, but the rest of those in this mansion and the potential hundreds trapped in houses and hiding places across the city. They were the reason they must fight on. It was those children that made the loss of the legionaries and women like Pamela worth it. There was always the chance of a future, there was always hope.

  Chapter Twelve

  When the raiders arrived in town, they did not look like men who expected resistance. They kept to a loose formation and Vitus could see them looking from side to side, but it was a cursory thing. They looked like men who had convinced themselves that they were walking in to an empty town and they expected the townspeople to be unaware of their arrival. Furthermore, they would expect no resistance from old men and religious women.

  The raiders rode to the edge of the town and tied their horses before moving in on foot. There were fifteen of them, Vitus saw at a glance. They had a sixteenth man, and he was hand tied but had not been gagged. Either he had convinced his captors that he was not a risk of warning the townsfolk, or the raiders needed him to talk enough to risk it.

  Like a lot of the people in the town, the man was a couple of decades older than Vitus. His hair was still dark, showing no signs of grey, but had receded from his forehead in two long patches. He walked freely, nobody held a sword to his back, and Vi
tus began to suspect he was selling his friends for his freedom.

  The bandits all looked like men but a few had their faces covered and might be otherwise. Most looked lean and fit and used to work, if not fighting. It occurred to Vitus that he might be looking at former legionaries. If this was true, then this fight might be swift and terminal. Something about the way they had wandered up the main street of the town with unguarded arrogance told him that these were not professional soldiers, however.

  He watched them walk the street almost casually. They passed the two houses that held Gallus and Tatius without a second glance. Vitus waited until they were level with the two buildings where Garic and Hakor were hiding. This was the moment that instinct told him to start the fight.

  There were two stragglers perhaps ten yards behind the main group, none of whom had the sense to spread themselves out and making them harder to hit. Vitus drew his bow and centred on the furthest one of the two, who dropped like a half empty sack as the arrow penetrated his throat.

  The second man turned to see his friend spraying blood into the wind. He opened his mouth to shout a warning to the rest of the raiders, but an arrow silenced him as it entered his head, just behind the temple.

  What wind there was blew into the faces of the marauders as they walked the street. Vitus guessed that this was the reason that nobody in the group heard two of their number hit the ground. He had expected the raiders to be separating by now, aware that they were under attack but they remained oblivious. He was pleased to see that Lucia was holding her nerve, as it would give him the chance to take down one last man.

  If he chose to keep firing into the back of the group, he might force them to run forward, straight at himself and Lucia, rather than back the way they had come and toward the fighting men. He chose to break his cover and show his hand. He drew a third time and drove an arrow into the chest of the man leading the group up the street.

  This time nobody missed the body falling to the ground. Almost half of the raiders dropped to one knee, seemingly unaware that they had no cover behind which they could hide. This alone reassured Vitus that the men were not trained to fight.

  Lucia chose this moment to start firing from her hiding place. Her first shot took one of the men who had reacted quickly and was running toward one of the buildings. He spun forward with a shaft sticking out of his thigh and became the first man who was able to scream after he had been shot. He took the opportunity and let out a yell that could have raised the dead, were they not already walking around.

  Vitus took two more of the kneeling men quickly, and they fell almost at the same time causing the rest to split up and finally run. Lucia missed with a second shot but her third was the best of the fight so far. A running man with a dark and heavy beard, almost reached the house were Gallus waited. He was on the heels of another bandit when Lucia’s arrow pierced him in the back of the neck. It was a shot that Vitus would have been proud of.

  The street was clearing and he was pleased to see that the raiders were heading in all directions. There was no cohesion to their retreat and they thinned their numbers, exactly as Vitus had hoped they would.

  Despite his best laid plans, two of the raiders were heading in the direction of Lucia’s hiding place. Vitus took a moment to unstring his bow before dropping it and heading down the stairs, drawing his sword as he ran.

  He almost missed the raider who was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. As he stepped off the last step and toward the front door, a blade came at him, just visible from the corner of his eye. There was no time to bring up his own weapon and instead he fell back against the bottom three stairs.

  His attacker was tall and thin with dark puffy circles under his eyes that gave him the look of a fish. He stepped toward Vitus but left himself open and kicked out hard toward the man’s knee and was rewarded with a cracking, snapping noise that drew a high pitched scream. He fell backwards out of the door and Vitus followed, glancing around for any signs of danger.

  The man scrabbled backward, on his hands and good foot, dragging his twisted left leg like so much useless meat. Sweat stood out on his forehead and he was obviously in a lot of pain.

  Thinking of Lucia, he brought his sword down into the tall man’s midriff. His victim let out his breath in a fine spray of red droplets and was still. He turned to head toward his sister, but came face to face with a Risen that bared its teeth as it lunged toward him. Had it been whole, his life might have ended there on the street of a small Italian town, but the creature had one arm dangling loosely from its shoulder. It had been almost torn away and seemed to be held in place only by the tunic it wore.

  He rolled away from the one grasping hand and gave himself space to fight. The Risen seemed to be alone and Vitus now had the advantage. He sidestepped once more and backhanded his sword across the creature's face. It looked at him for a moment seemingly puzzled by how the encounter had turned out, before collapsing face first into the dust.

  Vitus stepped back and became aware of the sounds of fighting from the other parts of the street and a male voice let out a cry of pain, but he was unable to tell exactly where it had originated.

  Running up the street to the house where Lucia was hiding, Vitus saw that the front door was ajar and he stopped in the street to listen. The atrium was quiet and he pushed the door to see a set of stairs leading to the floor above. Dust coated the steps and two sets of footprints marked where Lucia and a second person had gone up. Lucia’s small treads were whole and unhurried, but the second set looked like the person had been running.

  Vitus forgot caution and took the stairs two steps at a time. The landing at the top was quiet and he made his way to the only door that led to the front of the house, sword drawn and ready. He came to the door and before he could open it, Lucia spoke in a shaking voice.

  “You can come in, he’s dead.”

  Vitus pushed the door but it stuck against something when only halfway open. He slipped through the gap and almost stepped in the puddle of blood that had formed on the floor. The body of a raider was sprawled, one leg up against the wall, like he was trying to walk up it, a knife wound in his throat.

  Lucia was standing, looking at the knife in her hand, and the blood that ran down the handle and over her fingers. She looked at Vitus and then back down at the man’s body. She let the blade slip from her fingers, and it clattered on the wooden boards.

  “I heard him coming and hid behind the door, I didn’t even see him, I just swung the knife,” she said with a hitch creeping into her voice.

  Vitus bent down and picked the knife up, he wiped it on the clothes of the dead man, before offering it back to Lucia. She looked down at it, reluctant to take it.

  “Your life is worth a thousand of his,” he said to her and did not move his hands, waiting for her to take it. “I wish it were different for you, but this is the way the world is now.”

  “Well, I hate it,” she said, tears falling on to her cheeks. “How do you stand it? All the fighting, the killing. How do I know that he wasn’t desperate like us? How do I know that he hasn’t got a wife and child?”

  “You don’t,” he said honestly. “You do know that he came here to take from us, to steal our food and more. You know he didn’t try to trade or talk to us. You also know his people have killed townsfolk before.”

  She was beginning to nod as Vitus spoke and he took the opportunity to press the knife into her hand. He pulled her to him and hugged her head to his chest and she sobbed once, then she pushed herself back and looked at him.

  Outside the sounds of fighting were fading away and he could hear Gallus shouting, but the words were lost to the distance. He moved to the window and saw the legionary helping Hakor up the street and Garic was moving in front of them, but Tatius was nowhere to be seen.

  On the street between himself and his friends, the captive who had brought the raiders to the town was dead. In the midst of the fighting he had been forgotten by both sides. A Risen had not missed
the opportunity and the bound man was now providing a meal for the grey-skinned monster. Vitus watched as Garic almost casually ended the creature's unnatural life with a blow from his sword.

  “Is anything worth all this fighting? What is waiting for us, if we win?” Lucia asked from behind Vitus. “Why shouldn’t we just admit defeat right now, the life we knew is already gone. My father is gone, Rome is gone, my aunt and uncle are probably dead by now. All these creatures were once living people, and the worst of it is that I keep forgetting. Thousands and thousands of people, all gone. All the lives that might have been, ended. All the women that will never have children, all the generations of people who will never exist. We can never get back what we have lost. Then on top of all that, the people who are left can’t even fight together, we chose to fight against each other. We scramble for the scraps of what we once had.”

  “I wish I had answers for you, Lucia. I really do,” Vitus said, turning away to the window. His friends were making their way toward the house. Hakor was obviously injured and Vitus felt concern for the missing Tatius. “All I really know is that we will never win what we don’t fight for. I don’t know what waits for us over those mountains, but I know I need to find out. It’s not in me to give in, and while I breathe, I hope.”

  He moved toward Lucia wanting to pull her toward him, to hug her once more, but she turned away from him. He stopped and let her walk away. Each of them would cope with this new life in their own way, and all he could do was be ready to help her when she asked him to.

  They made their way down the stairs and back out onto the street. Hakor was in obvious pain and Gallus was helping the big man walk. Vitus saw a large wound in his thigh, blood was welling in the cut.

  As they got closer the legionary said, “Tatius is badly hurt, he took a knife to the side. He’s awake, but bleeding badly.”