Baskemont Chapter 13 - The Evacuation

“There’s probably a thousand of the damned creatures in there,” said Captain Masterton as he looked at the oncoming horde through a spyglass, “And they’ve got enough ex-Super Zombies in there to give us all kinds of hell.”

“How long do you reckon before they get here?” asked Captain Hollander from the Falcon Squadron, who had been whisked up along with Masterton by a very panicky Kenneth.

“Not long enough,” said Masterton bitterly as he briskly handed over the spyglass to Hollander.

“If we can hold the gate,” began Hollander as he looked at the oncoming horde, “we might have just enough time to get the others out of the city ‘n to safety. We have two Supers who have enhanced speed, ‘n you have at least one, so they can help quicken things up on that front.”

“Or we can get all the troops over here ‘n take on these critters,” snapped Masterton, “We only just took the damn city, Hollander!”

“We don’t have the numbers to hold them all off, Masterton!” argued Hollander, “There’s no point in us all dying just so there’s slightly less Zombies in Baskemont afterwards, when we can save ourselves, get more reinforcements ‘n take on this lot later! If they’re even still here!”

“Damn it, you’re right,” cursed Masterton, “Still, some of us will have to hold the gate – “

“I can hold it on my own, Captain,” suggested Katherine, “And then Kenneth can come get me out of here once everyone else is safe.”

“I hate to have to ask you to do that, Katherine, but we don’t have time,” said Masterton with some rare sorrow inflecting that proud voice of his, “Thank you, ‘n God’s luck be with you! Kenneth, let’s start the evacuation!”

“Two soldiers from my squadron, Privates Callahan and Trentbridge, have volunteered to help you block the gate,” said Hollander when they were down by the gate a moment later, “They’re no size-changers, but their enhanced strength ‘n durability should help keep that gate closed for longer. And a few more of the soldiers will try to fend off the ones that trickle through the gaps in the walls and such.”

Katherine had enlarged herself to a size at which she was able to almost fully cover the gate by sitting with her back resting on it, her feet and hands dug into the ground in front to provide more support. Callahan and Trentbridge moved to the two sections of exposed gate between her body and the hinges, briskly nodding to her as they dug their feet in and prepared themselves.

“Thank you, all of you,” she said, her voice shaking a little from the nerves.

“It’s you who should have all the thanks, Private Kenway,” said Hollander, tipping his head, “We may be losing the city once again, but at least we won’t all lose our lives thanks to your bravery.”

“If this plan works, then none of us should have to lose their lives,” said Captain Carpenter, who was also taking position along the ramparts along with a few soldiers from Eagle Squadron. Katherine recognised Brenda, the woman with the blue energy blasts, among the faces.

“Captain Carpenter! You don’t have to be - ” began Katherine, but a firm look from the captain silenced her.

“You didn’t have to volunteer for this either, Katherine,” reminded Carpenter as she charged up, “We all do what we have to do, where we can.”

“Brace for impact!” called out a lookout from the top of the tower.

The north gates of the city had been constructed from more metal than wood, with a dash of concrete thrown in there. At a more recent point in history, the gate had been fortified with more steel and concrete. This meant that, while the gate was thankfully one of the sturdiest structures in the mostly ruined city, it also had the cushioning of a gate-sized anvil.

BANG.

The impact, when it hammered at the gates, went straight through her bones and shook her very soul. Her vision rattled into a haze, she desperately dug in her feet and hands some more, her teeth clattering as she tried to grit them.

And the sound, the sound of a thousand screaming and growling and groaning Zombies only a few feet of metal away from her, it shook her almost as hard as their bashing at the door.

BANG.

“Don’t hold back!” commanded Carpenter as she and the troops at the ramparts began to blast and slice and punch and slam away at the Zombies pouring through the gaps in the walls. They had the advantage as long as they stayed on the inside, the few gaps in the walls acting like funnels on the invaders, but it only bought them a few minutes at most.

THUD.

The impacts grew harder, like colossal drumsticks beating a ghastly beat on her spine, but as she gritted her teeth harder and winced, the two soldiers behind her leaning into the gates with all they could muster, she could make out blurs from the square up ahead, the one with the cathedral. And the auras of teleporters as well, Lizbeth probably among them. The plan was working!

“Watch out, they’re climbing from the top!” came a call from somewhere.

…and she thought she could feel it. The sound of feet scrambling as they climbed up what must have been a mountain of Zombies piled up at the gate. No wonder the banging had been less frequent; they had now moved on to pushing with the weight and power of hundreds of Zombies squashed together. She could feel her feet slipping and dug them in some more.

Screams of soldiers being overwhelmed by Zombies began to reach her from above somewhere. Her body felt like it had been blended and then rolled out like a piece of dough. She desperately tried to focus on something else to stem the pain, the fatigue – and a vision of the bear totem flitted into view. This was why it had appeared, wasn’t it? This was what she had needed strength and courage for, this was why the guardian spirit had come to her.

The blurs were coming for the soldiers at the gates now. Just a little longer. Ignore the screams, she told herself over and over. Ignore the sounds of death. Ignore the voices of un-death.

And then came the sight that she couldn’t ignore.

One of the blurs had been running for the gate. And then… it tripped. They must have. The blur went careening into a house, smashing painfully through the walls and the woodwork before coming to a stop somewhere inside. But it was the yell of pain that drained the colour from her face.

She knew that voice. She had known it all her life.

“KENNETH!”

She tried to lift a hand, to reach into the house and pluck him out of there, but the gate shifted alarmingly when she so much as twitched her muscles. And so she found herself rooted to her spot not just in horror, but out of necessity. She could feel the pain draining her of hope, sucking at her fighting spirit like a monstrous leech. And she was helpless against it.

“NOOO! KENNETH!”

More Zombies were pouring in from above and through the cracks. She could see them in the periphery of her vision, creeping in like an overactive fungus from all sides. More blurs appeared, badly obscured by the tears welling in her eyes, and she yelled to them that Kenneth was in the house, pleaded with them that somebody needed to fetch him, please…

…but there was no time. The soldiers were all in reflex mode, their every move now purely on survival instinct. There were too many Zombies to think, too much of impending doom to flee away from.

The soldiers at her side had heard her though. They looked at each other, and then called something out to her. In the whirl of emotions currently wreaking havoc on her mind, their voices were a whisper in a hurricane. And then they ran towards the house. One at a time. The pressure on the gate grew tenfold with each departure, and she felt like a rubber band stretched to its limit over a hot plate. But they were going to get Kenneth, weren’t they? She just had to hold the gate for a little longer, just a few seconds more…

And then the two soldiers were washed over by a wave of Zombies that must have climbed over the wall. They fought hard, sending Zombies flying to and fro, their swings and kicks fuelled by desperation – and then they disappeared.

Katherine had no more energy left to scream. She had barely enough to keep the gate from bursting open. It was going to be time to run soon, there were no more soldiers left to defend her, and nobody was coming to save her. More and more Zombies were pouring in, crawling up to her trembling limbs. Her previous wounds were starting to crack open again, and her attackers were zoning in on it like hungry sharks.

There was nothing more for it. Summoning the last of her strength, she hurled herself away from the gate and began to run towards the house as the gate behind her exploded open in a shower of twisted metal, and a torrent of Zombies charged through the opening.

“KENNETH!”

She had one last scream in her, and used it as she neared the house, her movements slowed by the many zombies hanging onto her elongated limbs. She thought she heard a reply, but it was drowned out by the snarls of her attackers. She weakly swatted at them, but to no avail.

She could feel their teeth and claws eating into her skin. Her life was flashing before her eyes. All the memories with Kenneth were in painful focus.

At least we can find each other when we’re undead, thought Katherine bitterly as she prepared to succumb to the Zombies.

And then there was a tinkling. And a whoosh.

*

She was up in the air, all twenty odd feet of her, very high above the city, and beginning to fall. She could hear someone yelling in pain as they attacked the Zombies who had been clinging onto her. She raised her head weakly to find Lizbeth blipping in and out of vision, teleporting around her body as she dealt with the Zombies.

When Lizbeth saw that Katherine was not unconscious, she called out something. Katherine thought she could recognise the instructions.

Get smaller.

Her brain was so drained from all the anguish she’d had to go through that it didn’t take part in the rest of her actions up in the sky. She shrunk herself back to her normal size, and by some sheer miracle she was still near Lizbeth afterwards, the Zombies all detached from her as she rapidly shrank away from them. She reached out to one of Lizbeth’s limbs, unable to tell which one it was as they fell through the sky.

There was another tinkling and a whoosh.

And then a lot of crashing and crackling.

And a hard thud.

And then the sensations all faded away.

Baskemont Chapter 14 - Goodbye...

Katherine woke up to the sounds of someone whooping for joy.

She looked at the window, but the usual amount of sunlight wasn’t peeping through the curtains. That meant she had woken up too early. She would have cursed if she was awake enough. She tried to go back to sleep, burying her head in the pillow, but the whooping didn’t go away.

After what were some very long minutes of indecision, she decided to grouchily see what all the fuss was about.

The sounds were coming from Kenneth’s bedroom. As she walked over, an exciting thought pulsed through her mind: had he got his ability? There weren’t many other reasons for Kenneth to be this excited.

She found his room door slightly ajar, and pushed her way in to find a room that had elevated being messy to some kind of chaotic art form. Papers and clothes were lying around like drunken partygoers long after the party had ended. And in the middle of everything was Kenneth, who was running to and fro, tossing small things about, and then catching them, and then tossing them again, his limbs dancing around like excitable monkeys.

She was about to ask him what on earth he was doing when she noticed just how fast he was moving.

“Big sister!” said Kenneth in a state of euphoria, “Look how fast I can move! This must be my ability! I finally have an ability! This is so amazing!”

Katherine couldn’t help grinning too.

“Yes! Oh my God, you’ve got enhanced speed!” she said happily as she moved towards him to hug him, “I knew you wouldn’t be a Dudder!”

“Wait a minute,” said Kenneth, suddenly frowning, “What’s wrong with your legs?”

Katherine, a little puzzled, looked down to see several wounds gaping out from tears in her pyjamas. What in the – they hadn’t been there when she woke up, had they? She touched one of the wounds and found fresh blood on her finger.

“Big sister, help!” came the sharp cry from Kenneth.

She looked up in horror to see him drowning in a sea of Zombies, his skinny arms flailing as the horde of hungry creatures began to tear at him, hack at his fair skin.

“KENNETH! NO!”

*

Katherine woke up to the sounds of someone painfully coughing.

Before she could get up to see who it was though, jolts of pain ripped through her body like a swarm of eels. The shock of it had her immediately flat on the ground again.

The pain wasn’t so bad the second time she tried though, and she managed to prop herself up into a sitting position, leaning heavily against the tree behind her.

Tree?

Slowly, the details of a sparse forest at night began to bleed into her vision, and the eerie calls of undead birds began to seep into her ears. And through it all, the coughing occasionally popped its head in. The coughing, that was a person coughing, wasn’t it? She tried to locate the source of the sound, and found it reclined near another tree.

Katherine gasped. And tried to get up. The jolts returned, persistent but with less venom, and forced her to move much slower than she would have liked.

Lizbeth looked like she was just as exhausted as Katherine felt. She looked up as a distraught Katherine approached, and smiled feebly.

“Hey…”

“Twinkle! Damn it, you need help!”

“No, no… koff….I patched myself up… after I did you… koff…”

But Katherine fussed over her anyway, looking for any wounds that hadn’t been dressed or wrapped up. When she couldn’t find any beside one gash on Lizbeth’s back, she quickly patched it up to the best of her ability, and then sat down on the ground in front of Lizbeth in an unsatisfied huff. Even now, with her friend – her only friend, it felt like – on the verge of something sinister, there was nothing much she could do.

“Where are we?” Katherine managed, when Lizbeth’s coughing began to grate at the uncomfortable silence.

“I don’t know…” said Lizbeth, “When we were up there… surrounded by Zombies… koff… I took us to the first… empty space that I saw… koff!”

The answer didn’t really give Katherine anything to go on, but she didn’t want to press Lizbeth, not in the terrible condition she was clearly in.

Katherine thought she had borne as much pain as she could already handle in the last few waking moments she could remember. But more pain had decided to pile itself on her regardless; the sight of a broken, dishevelled Lizbeth crumpled on the ground in front of her was too much for her to bear. She curled up into a ball and buried her face in her folded arms, fighting back the tears.

“I’m sorry I failed you, Lizbeth,” she half-choked, “Everyone I cared about here – Kenneth, you, Dodo, Trigger – I couldn’t save you when I was supposed to. And now Kenneth is dead, Trigger is dead, Dodo is probably dead, and you… you’re here in this mess, and you’re hurt all over, because I couldn’t do my duty. And there’s nothing more I can do to make any of that better!”

Lizbeth let her blubber on for a few more minutes, only coughing intermittently, before speaking once Katherine had run out of tear-fuelled steam.

“Big Sis, don’t be an idiot… koff!”

Katherine raised her head in confusion.

“Eagle and Falcon are alive… because of what you koff! … what you did… I was already infected… before I came back… koff… for you and Zippo… are you sure he’s koff dead?”

Lizbeth had always been fair-skinned, but Katherine had never seen her look this pale before. It was as if her skin was slowly turning into some soft variant of alabaster. Her own skin was also probably several shades lighter from the toll all the anguish was taking on her.

“I saw him get thrown into a house, yelling – he sounded like he was injured. And I couldn’t move a muscle to save him. And then…” Katherine choked up again, the words wallowing in the stickiness of her throat, “the Zombie horde swarmed the house, and they swarmed me too, just before you took me out of there.”

The tears were finally allowed to trickle down her face. There was no point in keeping them back anyway.

“I’ve always looked out for him, always had his back since we were kids. And at the moment he needed me there the most, I couldn’t do it. And now he’s gone, and I couldn’t even say goodbye. What the hell kind of a guardian does that make me!?”

Lizbeth was quiet. It could have been because she didn’t know what to say, or because she was saving her strength; it was hard to tell.

Katherine fished inside her battered bodysuit for the bear totem. When she found it, she gave it one last look. “You found the wrong person to follow,” she told it, as if it would actually listen, “I’m sorry I failed you. Find another warrior who’s more deserving of your guidance.”

She then flung it away into the trees as hard as she could. But, by some strange quirk, the totem slipped in her grasp as she threw it, and instead of going far away into the forest, it rebounded off a couple of trees in their vicinity before landing around the spot where Katherine had woken up at. She briefly contemplated going after it to pick it up and throw it further away, but found that she didn’t care enough about it.

Also, Lizbeth had suddenly started coughing much more severely, an ugly sound that could have been her insides trying to cough themselves out of her. When the flurry of noise had died down, Lizbeth reached out for one of her short-swords with a hand that was shaking so hard the rest of her body was vibrating along with it.

She knew the answer already, but Katherine still found herself asking the question: “Twinkle, what are you doing?”

Lizbeth struggled more than usual to bring out the words.

“I don’t want to become… one of them… koff koff… rather kill myself…”

Katherine stretched out a hand and restrained her friend.

“No! I can’t let you do that to yourself, not after everything that’s happened!”

That plaster-skinned face simply turned towards Katherine’s own, the once intensely blue eyes somehow draining themselves of colour as well.

“Then koff do it for me… please… don’t let me be koff! One of those… things…”

As Katherine stared at the short-sword that had been lightly tossed at Lizbeth’s feet by a trembling hand, she thought back to Captains Masterton and Carpenter and how they’d solemnly shot down the two infected soldiers. They hadn’t enjoyed it, obviously, but they must have been able to summon some immense kind of will to do it. Looking at the blade now, Katherine was very sure that she didn’t have that kind of willpower in her already. Killing anonymous Zombies that were out for her blood was one thing, but killing a dear friend like this? Someone who had risked their life to save hers?

“Please…I beg you, Big Sis…”

And then the image of the Zombie she had let go wandered into her vision. Those lidless eyes staring at her, that croak of a voice pleading for mercy… she hadn’t found the strength to do the deed back then, with a stranger; how on Entropea was she going to find the strength to do it now?

Lizbeth was starting to reach for her other short sword now, and Katherine was shaken out of her reverie.

“No, no! I’ll… I’ll do it,” she said, her voice shaking as much as Lizbeth’s hand, “I promise.”

She picked up the sword on the ground, trying to recall the prayer that the captains used to utter. Maybe there was strength to be found in the prayer, even though Katherine herself had very rarely considered herself a religious person, and had all but given up on the idea of a deity looking out for her well-being at this point.

“Our great God in Heaven, here lies… here lies a soldier who fought with her friends and for her people, to reclaim Mortanny – no, Faeritalum… your land… from the monsters who… from the Zombies who have been here since the Great Plague. She fought brave, she fought hard, and she fought with honour. She saved my life, and countless others. I wish I could do the same for her, but I can’t, so this is the next best thing I can do. But it’s not easy, and I need your help. I need to find the strength to do it, at a time when I have been drained of it both physically and mentally. And… and it’s not easy because I have to kill someone who has only ever been a dear friend, the best of friends even… oh God please, please help me…”

And then she remembered the bear totem. It was maybe a bit silly, but she needed anything she could get. Promising Lizbeth that she would be back, she walked over to the patch of ground where she thought it had fallen down it.

It had fallen around there, hadn’t it? It must have, because it hit that tree over there, and then rebounded here, so – ah there it was!

It had only been a little scratched up by the throw. She carefully wore it around her neck, and then returned to where Lizbeth was, short sword held firmly in hand.

She knelt down beside her friend, and took a deep breath. She clutched the totem in her hand for a few seconds, as though it would help. It didn’t. She took another deep breath.

“Please… koff… do it quickly…”

The surest way to do it would be to drive the sword straight through her head. Both of them knew this. Not only would Lizbeth be dead, but she wouldn’t be able to re-emerge as a Zombie that way. Anything else would kill her, but not for long.

But something inside Katherine stirred, a feeling that was a bit like hope, but wearing all the wrong clothes and having an odd expression on its face. The Zombie who had asked her for mercy, the others at the camps that had not tried to fight them… maybe, just maybe, there were some people who re-emerged as peaceful Zombies, who didn’t try to kill anything that wasn’t already dead. It was worth a try, wasn’t it? What other options did she have at this point?

“I’m sorry, Twinkle,” she said with a hint of grim finality, and then, drawing back her arm, she plunged the sword straight into Lizbeth’s heart.

As Lizbeth’s eyes flung open in shock, the life already beginning to soar away from them, Katherine tried to dig the sword in even further, as far as she could, until it began to pierce through wood. And then she pushed some more, as Lizbeth’s face stopped moving altogether, frozen in a morbid state of confusion and pain. Her slim body, already limp from the disease, slowly settled into a state of complete lifelessness.

Katherine kept pushing until she could feel Lizbeth’s cold body hit the hilt of the sword. And only then, her hands slowly inching away from the handle, only then did Katherine finally stop and move away from Lizbeth. She stretched out a hand to close the lids of those frigid blue eyes.

And then, curling herself up as tightly as she could as the chill of the night began to poke its sharp fingers at her from all sides, she began to cry once more. Big, sloppy tears washed her away into a fitful sleep, filled with more visions of familiar faces drowning in abysses filled with snarling Zombies.

*

Katherine woke up to the sounds of someone snarling.

Oh no.

She woke up, her body a little sore from having to endure the cold with minimal protection and a generous helping of scars. It was still dark outside, but the forest had gone quiet, as though it too was taking the opportunity to sneak in a nap.

Quiet except for the snarling, that is.

Lizbeth had turned, and was now a Zombie. And apparently a very upset, and hungry one at that. As Katherine slowly approached her, her head snapped towards Katherine with an odd jerk, and she began to snarl even louder, hungrily even. Her hands were trying to pull out the sword that was currently pinning her to the tree, but the effort was proving futile. Even though Zombies were capable of above-average feats of strength at times, this was one feat that needed strength far beyond average; Katherine had driven the sword deep into the trunk behind Lizbeth.

Katherine’s eyes began to well up again; she didn’t know how much more sadness and misery she could handle, but the sight of a re-animated Lizbeth that clearly did not have peaceful intentions was about to break past that limit.

This part should have been easy, thought Katherine. She had dealt the killing blow to so many Zombies before this; her knuckles twinged with a knowing sensation at the thought. It was especially easy to kill them when they very clearly wanted to do the same to her. And yet… even with its skin starting to turn the greenish-brown shade of decay, its short hair starting to fall off and its exposed wounds starting to fester and bubble with pus, the creature pinned to the tree still had too much of Lizbeth left in it.

Katherine raised a fist, slowly enlarging as she prepared to smash in the creature’s head – and then lowered it. It wasn’t any old creature’s head. It was Lizbeth’s head. She had already killed her friend once, and that had taken everything out of her. She couldn’t do it again.

But she also couldn’t stay around with those awful snarls pounding at her ears.

“Goodbye, Twinkle, my friend,” she said sadly, “if there’s any of you still in there, somewhere.”

After a pause, she then added: “You deserve better than this.”

And then she began to wander away from the creature, her every step soaking with regret and trembling from the cold. She walked as far away as she could, the snarls dying down with every yard she covered. The forest gave way to a few clearings here and there, but was otherwise devoid of any kind of milestones she could measure her progress with.

Even when the growls had finally disappeared, she kept moving, fuelled by the fear that if she stopped, the cold would freeze her in place. Her feet began to hurt from continuously slamming onto the winter-hardened forest floor. The thought didn’t occur to her that she could increase her size until her head cleared the forest, and she could then see which way to go; her mind had been taken past its limit and, like a trembling rubber band, it had broken.

She kept moving, her steps becoming less and less sure, until she tripped on an errant root and collapsed in a sad heap on the forest floor. She tried to get up, but then asked herself what the point of it was. Where was she even going? What was her plan when she got there?

Rolling onto her back so that the clear night sky could be made out through the web of branches that was the roof of the forest, she stared for a while. She tried to find stars, but none glimmered that night. There was a faint sickly glow being delivered by a crescent moon that looked like it too was fed up with life.

Maybe this was appropriate, she thought. After having failed to save her brother and her friends, the only people she cared about, the only ones who would have gone through hell to save her in return, it was only fitting that she die here, in the middle of nowhere, alone.

She closed her eyes, and a different kind of darkness filled her vision.

Baskemont Chapter 15 - ...and Hello

When she woke up, Katherine’s first impression of the afterlife was that it was colder than she’d expected. She then wondered why she was covered by some kind of flimsy cloth thing that was very unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as a blanket.

The sounds of the afterlife began to enter her ears. She had been expecting the hums and soft voices of angels, or the agonised screams of tormented souls burning away in hell. What she hadn’t expected was the very ordinary sounds of a forest that had just woken up, accompanied by an assortment of mumbling groans.

And the thing that was floating just a few feet away from her vision looked remarkably like a flimsily constructed tent…

And then she felt her body, still hurting a little but quite tangible.

Apparently she wasn’t as dead as she thought.

And then another horrible realization sent a sharp shock through her system. She quickly threw off the scrap of cloth that was on top of her and began to examine her hands and her body. Her eyes looked for decay, for pieces of vomit-coloured skin falling off… and found nothing of the sort. Not only was she not dead, she was also not un-dead. And now, she was also thoroughly confused.

“Ah, it appears our guest has awoken,” rasped a heavily accented voice from somewhere to her right, “A very good morning to you, my dear.”

She turned around to greet her apparent rescuers and – oh God! She collapsed the shelter she was in by rapidly getting up onto her feet while inside it.

Zombies. Only about four or five of them, but they were standing there, gawping at her like she was some exhibit at a carnival. And the stare of a creature without eyelids is somehow several magnitudes worse than one that still has them.

And then the one in the middle spoke.

“Goodness me, girl, pray do not panic yourself so!” it said calmly, with that strange kind voice she could faintly remember the other Zombie having as well – the one which sounded like malfunctioning plumbing. “While it is a difficult battle we are currently waging against our instincts, we do not wish to kill you, contrary to what you may believe.”

After freeing herself from the shelter’s tarp that had wrapped itself around her when she had risen, Katherine pinched herself to make sure she was awake. It was a hard pinch, almost leaving a mark even, but the Zombies didn’t go away. But then she wondered if maybe the stories about pinching oneself in a dream were all that true to begin with…

“What… what do you want from me?” she managed.

“Well, nothing particularly at the moment,” said the Zombie, its half-exposed mouth drooping a little on the half that still had skin on, “Save perhaps for an introduction. What brings you here, Miss…?”

She stared at it, her body tensed in preparation for the surprise attack that was surely about to land on her. She quickly scanned the surroundings, and found more Zombies shuffling around what looked like a very basic camp. Any moment now, she thought.

“Perhaps we should introduce ourselves first, Captain,” said one of the other Zombies, “And if she still refuses to speak, then we really should introduce our teeth to that fine neck of hers.”

“Hush, Joseph you taffer!” scolded the first Zombie, as Katherine tensed up even more at the mention of teeth and necks, “Although yes, perhaps I shall start the introductions here. My name is Timothy Mossridge, young lady.”

Katherine was so shocked at this point that she involuntarily replied “Katherine... Kenway.”

“What? You’re not Indian?” asked the Zombie that was apparently named Joseph, “Timothy, she’s just another Super like the rest of them, we should – “

“I said shut that bloody trap of yours, Joseph, even if that may not be completely possible on account of a quarter of it having fallen off already!” said the Zombie named Timothy irritably.

“Joseph’s got a point though, Timothy,” said one of the others, “We only spared her because we thought she was an Indian, didn’t we?”

“Well let’s settle the matter once and for all then, shall we, Eleanor?” said Timothy, before firing a question at Katherine. “Miss Kenway, what does the totem you’re wearing represent?”

She may have been completely bewildered by what was going on, but Katherine could recognise a test when she met one. Especially one with life or death consequences.

“It’s the symbol of the bear, an animal spirit that represents strength, bravery and protecting others from harm,” she began carefully, “It can also be a symbol of leadership. And, like all other spirit guides, it appears when the person will need to use those qualities during the next stage of their lives. In some cases, it is the person’s chosen spirit animal, in which case that person has a natural aptitude for leading others and guarding them from danger.”

The Zombies were quiet for a while, as though digesting her answer. Then the one called Eleanor spoke.

“That sounds correct enough to me, from what I recall about Indian beliefs.”

The others murmured in varying degrees of assent.

“I have my doubts though,” began Joseph, eyeing Katherine with a stare that would have been narrowed if he had the facial features for it, “She could easily have learned that all from a book – “

“For God’s sake, Joseph, the girl looks at least part Indian, she has a totem for a necklace and she even knows what the damn thing represents!” said Timothy exasperatedly, “Are you so keen to have our gracious God heap even more divine retribution on your greedy soul?”

When Joseph didn’t answer, Timothy soldiered on.

“Good! Now, be useful and go fetch us some water for boiling, would you?”

When Joseph gave him a confused look, Timothy rolled his eyes. Katherine felt a slight chill in her spine as she realized how eerie the action looked when the person doing it lacked most of their face.

“Miss Kenway cannot drink the water in its current diseased state and expect to survive another day, can she? Now off with you and hurry back before we have to re-light the fire!”

As Joseph shuffled off, the other Zombies introduced themselves.

“I am Eleanor Raffles, my dear, and this is my husband Nigel Raffles. The other fellow is young Charles Hammond – well, I suppose he’s not all that young from your perspective, but he was only in his twenties, possibly around your age, when the Great Plague struck him.”

The others greeted her in similar amicable fashion.

“Um, hello, all of you,” said Katherine, still expecting to wake up at any moment from this bizarre experience, “I don’t really understand at all what’s happening here, but thank you for not killing me, I guess?”

“So why do you have the name Kenway if you’re Indian?” asked Charles eagerly.

“There’s no need to press her this early, Charles, I’m sure she will tell us eventually,” said Timothy, giving her probably the toothiest grin she had ever witnessed up to that point in her life, “Although that does remind me, I suppose you yourself must have several questions. All of which we will answer in due time, not to worry. Oh, God’s grace!” he suddenly slapped his forehead with an unpleasant squishing sound, “I must let the mistress know that you have awoken! Please, come with me!”

He had offered her a very withered hand, and withdrew it after seeing the look on her face.

“Ah, yes, you had better not touch,” he said before walking on in a curious mix of a shuffle and a walk that nevertheless managed to propel him in the right direction. As Katherine slowly followed him, so did the other three Zombies, all of them eyeing her with a morbid curiosity that was exponentially more morbid than the average onlooker could manage.

“I take it you’ve met the more violent members of our kind,” said Nigel, who had probably had a well-groomed moustache when he was alive, “And possibly killed them too?”

“I had to,” said Katherine, having decided that until she knew more, it was probably best not to mention anything Crusade-related, “I guess you know how vicious you - they can be.”

“But of course we do,” said Eleanor, “We were all like that ourselves, you know, a very, very long time ago.”

“You were?” asked Katherine with extra confusion.

“Right, of course you probably don’t know about the Phases,” said Timothy, “There will be time enough to – ah, there she is. Tabitha, dear! Our guest has awoken!”

“She has? Oh dear, and I only just finished stitching her a top!” came a voice from a small tent just ahead. As they approached the tent, a small figure shuffled out from inside it and bowed, her bones adding some unwanted clanks to the gesture.

“Tabitha Mossridge, my dear,” she said after straightening up, “Welcome to our humble little camp! And you are…?”

“Katherine Kenway,” said Katherine, not trusting herself to bow properly in return.

“Oh? But you’re Indian, aren’t you?” asked Tabitha, her one hairless brow raising up, “Ah, I suppose it’s from your mother’s side then.”

“She’s Indian enough though, we checked,” said Timothy, “I thought we might answer the myriad questions she must have for us over some tea, once the water has boiled.”

“Boiled? But Timothy, we cannot keep the fire burning for too long – “ began Tabitha.

“It will only be for a short while, dear, and we are far enough away from the roads that we should be left alone,” explained Timothy, “In addition, I have already asked several of our lads to patrol around the camp.

“Alright then, if you insist,” accepted Tabitha, “I must say though, it has been a long while since we had warm tea!”

“Well, we don’t often have living company these days, do we?” asked Eleanor.

“Certainly none as disinterested in bopping our heads off as Miss Kennedy here,” said Nigel.

“It’s Kenway, dear,” corrected Eleanor before Katherine had decided if she even wanted to.

A phrase that Katherine had read in a children’s book once suddenly came to mind: Curiouser and curiouser. If there was any phrase that perfectly encapsulated the current proceedings, it was this. She was beginning to wonder if she should pinch herself some more.

Or maybe she had inhaled some fumes from some plant that grew in these parts, and the fumes were wreaking havoc on her senses. But then, why was it that only the Zombies were behaving in such a surreal manner? The rest of the forest and the sky and the ground all looked just as dreary and muddy as they had the last few days.

Something was off here, but she decided to roll with it for the time being until she was in a better state to process things.

*

She was definitely not dreaming, she thought to herself as she tried to rub the hurt out of her hands, because if she had been, the little mishap would have snapped her out of it.

The Zombies had managed to procure a cup for her to drink the water from, but the sad little cup had very clearly needed to be washed in some of the boiling water to kill the germs in it. She had tried to do it without dipping her hands into the water, but the cup had slipped into the bucket, and in her attempt to quickly fish it out, she had scorched her hands.

Tabitha had tutted to herself, and had a look on her face that suggested she would have really loved to help or even do the washing herself, but sticking her festering hands into matters would have defeated the purpose.

Still, the tingling was starting to die down now as Katherine very cautiously sipped the water from the bowl. While they had been marching about, the soldiers had used some kind of filtration device to clean the water before drinking it, so it wasn’t her first taste of Mortanny’s rivers and pools. But there was something different about this water. It tasted like someone had added a drop of essence of mud to its flavour. But it was warm, and that helped overcome the taste issues.

“Are those really tea leaves?” she asked, pointing to the cauldron in the middle of their circle, in which the Zombies were brewing their ‘tea’.

“I highly doubt it,” said Eleanor, stirring the water with a stick, “To be honest, all of us here can no longer taste anything, so we simply put in whatever dead leaves or grass we can find that look close enough like the real thing.”

“And you drink it anyway…” wondered Katherine.

“It is the principle of it that matters,” said Nigel, “It reminds us of the days when we were more… ourselves.”

“And more importantly, it reminds us that we still have enough of ourselves inside us even now,” said Timothy, staring at the cauldron, “Even as we lose a little bit day by day.”

“We’re still dying, you know,” butted in Charles, answering a question which Katherine would probably have asked a few minutes into the future, “This Plague that we have just makes the process much, much slower. It is as though our deaths should have been a single page in a book, but the words have now been extended across several chapters.”

“And any day now, our books will come to an end,” said Nigel, accepting the cup of tea Eleanor passed him, “But there is no way we can know with certainty when that day will come. This Plague is an annoyingly unpredictable curse we have been afflicted with.”

“There is the Last Madness though,” pointed out Tabitha, and the whole group shuddered.

It may have been written in bold text on Katherine’s face at that moment that she very clearly wanted to know what the Last Madness was. This was probably the reason that Joseph jumped in with another question instead.

“So, tell us your story, Kenway: How does an Indian-looking girl like you take on an Anglish name like Katherine?”

Katherine’s mouth was already half open, so she simply had to pack up the Last Madness question for a later time and swap in an answer to Joseph instead before she opened it fully.

“I was adopted when I was too small to remember,” she said, her eyes dipping a little at the thought of her family, “I never knew or met my biological parents or family. I just knew that there was some amount of Indian blood in me because of the way I look.”

“Adopted?” asked Eleanor, “Do you mean to say they still take Indian children as slaves in Terra Magellar? God’s grace, if only they knew! We should warn them - ”

“Well, the blokes who come from there nowadays are hardly in a listening mood when they find us, are they?” pointed out Nigel.

“No, no, I wasn’t a slave,” corrected Katherine before the conversation derailed further, “My parents took me in as one of their own children. They treated me and loved me like I was their real daughter.”

“They must have been very rich then,” said Joseph, looking at his tea with an expression that was much harder to read without most of the necessary facial features, “Not too many poor families who would add more mouths to feed out of love and kindness and all that.”

“We were middle-class where I come from, so they weren’t particularly rich,” said Katherine in a bit of a rush, because she had a question she wanted to get out of the way: “Anyway, why is my being Indian so important to you? And what does your God have to do with it?”

The Zombies looked at each other for a brief moment.

“Well, it is the reason we are not going to kill you and convert you into one of us,” said Charles, as direct and blunt as a blackjack to the face, “So I would think it is just as important to you too.”

Katherine stared.

“Before the Great Plague, we were quite monstrous and cruel in our treatment of Indians,” began Nigel, as Timothy adopted a very pensive, faraway look, “Slavery was probably the least of the punishments we gave them. At the time, we thought them inferior beings to ourselves, and that our mission was to destroy their livelihoods and convert them to our own.”

“But then the Plague hit us, of course, and changed us into these hideous forms,” said Tabitha, “Not really living, and very slowly dying. Forever feeling the pain of our bodies shutting down. Eternally hungry since we are unable to eat anything other than rotted plants or living meat – “

Katherine recoiled a little at the statement.

“The point is, we believe that our God cursed us because of the inhumane way we treated the Indians back when we were truly alive,” said Eleanor, “and so we force ourselves to show them, and you, the kindness we should have done earlier. Perhaps then our gracious God will ease our suffering, or end it sooner.”

“Not everyone believes this though, or they don’t believe it strongly enough,” said Timothy, giving Joseph a dark look, “But when I think back to some of the cruelty we inflicted upon the Indians, and how we ourselves are now inflicted with this curse, it makes sense. We failed our God, and He lashed out at us for our sins; we should know better than to anger Him again.”

“It is not easy,” said Charles, after gulping his tea, “Even now, I have to fight back a strong urge to attack you and bite off your warm, sweet flesh. Something in the Plague also gives us this savage instinct to hunger for living animals, like fleas being drawn to a dog.”

“Yes, about that,” said Katherine, very eager to change the current direction of the conversation, “Eleanor said something about how you all used to be like some of the other Zombies I’ve come across; the ones that roam around in hordes and keep trying to kill me no matter how hard I attack them back in return. The really violent, primal ones. Were you all really like that once?”

“Ah, you speak of the First Madness,” said Tabitha, “When we first become Zombies, the urge to kill and eat living things overpowers every other thought and feeling in our bodies. The hordes you speak of are comprised of such newly created Zombies. Ever since the Crusades began, there have been many invading soldiers who have died over the years, and those who die here by our hands and teeth always become Zombies themselves.”

“The First Madness lasts for about twenty years on average, I would estimate,” said Timothy, scooping another cup of tea for himself, “After that, the urge weakens enough for the rest of our remaining senses and thoughts to take over. In that state, we are more like what you see now, more civilized and proper.”

“There are rumours that some of the hordes that roam out of Zyltravania are in a perpetual state of madness though,” warned Nigel, “I do not believe such a thing is possible myself, but I am not inclined to ask those hordes where they are from when I see them approach…”

“It makes sense, though,” said Eleanor, “Zyltravania was where the Great Plague originated, was it not? Perhaps the air there is so foul that they can never come out of the First Madness.”

“But those hordes come to these parts, where the air and the trees are almost as clean as they were in the days before Mortanny,” argued Joseph, “And they remain feral and bloodthirsty no matter how long they roam the Anglish plains.”

As the Zombies argued about the Zyltravanian hordes, a light bulb began to flicker inside Katherine’s mind.

“Wait a minute,” she said, interrupting the groan-flavoured debate, “so, every person who is turned into a Zombie will eventually become less violent and more, well, more like you?”

“They should, unless they died in Zyltravania, apparently,” said Tabitha, “Although, if there are any living people in Zyltravania in this day and age, I will be extremely surprised.”

Katherine was about to begin vocalizing her thoughts when another Zombie came scampering up to the group.

“There’s a group of new Zombies approaching the camp, Timothy,” said the new arrival, before goggling at Katherine. It was probably simply glancing at her, but its face was only capable of goggling with the remaining features it had.

“Well, why is that such big news to – oh, right,” said Joseph, also glancing at Katherine as the others all began to rise.

“If we moved only a little further to the South, they should pass us by, I think,” said the scout Zombie.

“Good, but I will need a few of you to hang around here and redirect them should they get wind of anything,” said Timothy, “Join us after they pass by.”

The Zombie nodded before scooting off to find other Zombies to follow it. Timothy announced to the others in the camp that they were moving, and in a very short time the shelters and items were all being packed up, the fireplaces were being scattered and the Zombies were beginning to shuffle away.

As they all ambled through the forest, Katherine caught up with Timothy.

“Do you remember the place where you found me?” she asked a little eagerly.

“Not exactly, but I can recall in which area of the forest it was, roughly speaking,” said Timothy, “why do you ask?”

Feeling excited after what had felt like an era, she then told him why.