by Ember Lane
But Billy was right, the valley was mighty pretty. Its river was liquid gold, and mist speckled the fields and pastures that blanketed every single inch of the fine, arable land surrounding the market town. Three Valleys itself looked as safe as a castle, what with its huge stone and wood wall and its sentinel watch tower. The black flags of Morlock fluttered from its battlements, and that gave Merl some hope that all was right with Three Valleys; if all was right there, maybe the rest of the land still lived and breathed. Though Frank might kill all the all men from Morlock. He’d told Merl how much he hated soldiers, and Merl couldn’t fathom that as Frank also admitted he’d been a soldier himself.
Either way, Three Valleys looked free of zombays, and Merl reckoned they could get a bed with the coppers they’d robbed from the soldiers who’d attacked them. He hoped they’d get a bed for the night. Billy had snored like a hog the night before, and Merl hadn’t fancied sleeping on the top of the wagon like Frank had, as he didn’t want to get his guts punctured by an arrow. In the end, the only thing that had attacked him had been Billy’s blowy guts, but that was bad enough.
Yep, Merl fancied a bed all right. “Looks like the sickness didn’t get ‘em after all.”
“Oh, it got ‘em all right,” Billy said. “The gates are shut. Gates always open at sunrise, shut at sunset. Gates should be open, Merl.”
Merl turned to Frank, but Frank was nodding slowly. “Gates should be open, Merl.”
“What do we do, then?” Merl asked.
“Well, Merl,” Frank said, standing up on the roof of the wagon. “We need to get us some rope.”
“Why rope?”
“Because the gates are shut, so the place is going to be packed with the stinking bastards.”
“Why not just go around it?”
“Coz the road goes straight through it, and I’m not about to give up this monster wagon. Not for twenty Morlock soldiers or a town full of filthy zombays.”
Frank looked invincible, bathed in the morning sun like a golden God. Merl knew it was what one really looked like, and that his God was standing there looking west. Frank just needed his mighty sword in his hand to finish the job off.
“What’s your sword called?”
Frank equipped it. “This one? Scaramanza is its name.”
“And is that part of your tale.”
The sword vanished again. “It is much more than that. So much more than that.” Frank took a deep breath. “We need to get to a farm, Billy, preferably one with a well, something away from the river.”
Merl wondered when Frank had become their leader. He guessed it was the minute they’d left Morgan Mount and him and Billy had become the outsiders. Didn’t seem to matter to Frank where he was. He never got out of sorts like Merl and Billy did.
“Why do we need a well,” Billy asked.
“We don’t. Hopefully we’ll find a rope in a barn or the farmstead, but if we can’t, we’re bound to find one in a well.”
Billy looked up and stared at Merl. Merl kept his mouth shut, but Billy didn’t need to hear the words, they’d got through loud and clear. Frank really was the leader, and Merl couldn’t have been happier.
“Whatever you say, Frank, like.” Billy flicked the reins.
Merl looked west. “Is Quintz farther than the end of the valley, Frank?”
“Yes, Merl, yes it is.”
They finally approached Three Valleys about halfway through the day. The walls looked much higher from the ground than from up the valley. The noise that came out of the place was something awful too. It was a constant groan—like one long one—monotone, with not an ounce of excitement to it. It was the sound of endless suffering. Three Valleys stank too. It stank of rotten flesh and emptied guts. Merl kept puking over the side of the monster wagon. He wanted to run up Three Face Valley and never come back, and that was before he saw an odd cloud hanging over the town like a bubble of soot. That was before he could make out the buzzing sound that mixed with the groans.
“Blasted flies,” Frank told them. “The place is full of blasted flies.”
Billy stopped the wagon a hundred yards in front of Three Valley’s Gates, and Frank darted in the back and tore up Mrs. Chiver’s bedsheets into scarves. They bound them around their noses and mouths, and all got ready. Merl and Billy’s plan was simple. Leave it to Frank. Not only was he in charge, he seemed to want to do everything himself.
Merl and Billy were quite happy about that.
They found a rope at the first farmstead, along with some twine and some other essentials like water bottles, cooking stuff, another scythe and a whetstone. Frank had used the twine to bind the S hooks Merl had stolen from the butcher’s, and he’d made a grappling hook.
Frank walked toward the town wall, swinging the grappling hook round and round. Merl was standing next to Billy, and both had their scarves wrapped around their faces. Both looked like bandits. He decided Frank was as cool as a butcher’s ice pit
“We gettin’ ready, Merl?” Billy asked.
“Yup,” Merl replied.
He had his hand ax in a belt he’d fashioned from strips of cloth and had an old sword in his hand. Frank had told Merl he had to learn to use the sword, since it was more efficient, and it would build up the fighting muscles he would need to battle through to Quintz. The wizard had also shown Merl a few moves, but Merl wasn’t impressed. Still, at that particular point in time, if Frank had told Merl to jump into a fire mountain, he probably would have.
Merl did a bit of swishy-swishy with the sword, while Frank scaled Three Valleys’ wall like a mountain goat. He vanished over the top, and within moments a zombay fell from it thumping onto the ground and bursting like a turned pumpkin.
“Just plain weird the way they don’t scream,” Billy observed, but like Merl, he made no move toward the rope. Frank had told them to stay, and stay they would.
Merl was sweating the way his dad used to when Walinda Alepuller had visited their croft. He was trying his best to be brave, to be like Frank, but the idea of a whole townful of zombays lumbering toward him was a bit too much. It was like the shut door in the tavern—he was imagining the worst waited for them behind Three Valleys’ gates.
“Do you think they’ll be hundreds?” Merl asked Billy.
“Oh, yes, there’ll be hundreds.”
As Billy said it, the gates opened. Merl had expected the zombays to come rushing out, but instead, they just stood there lurching around and bumping into each other. He’d expected to see Frank run out too, but there was no sign of him. The flies appeared to catch a whiff of something, and they swarmed out, but after a little sniff around, the buzzing black cloud soon thinned. Frank appeared on top of the wall again and scaled back down it. He ran a wide arc to get back to them and soon stood next to Merl.
“Damn, that city’s full of the filthy bastards,” Frank said, taking a long draft of water. He passed Merl the bottle. “Right. Billy, move the wagon forward a little at a time until they start coming out. I’ve gotta feeling they can only sniff you out from a certain distance, or maybe it’s noise? Something like that. Whatever it is, we want them to come out bit-by-bit or we’ll be swamped and trapped in the wagon.”
Billy got up on the bench and inched the wagon forward.
“What about the horses?” Merl asked.
“Don’t seem interested in them. There’s nags roaming around in there as right as rain,” Frank told him.
“That far enough?” Billy hollered from the wagon’s bench.
“Billy, keep it down!” Merl shouted, just as the first zombays lurched toward them.
“Who’s shouting now?” Billy hissed.
“Calm down, you both.” Frank took a step forward. Scaramanza appeared in his hand. “Just mop up what I leave.”
Frank’s words were better than a stiff drink. Merl felt his fear melt away, and Billy jumped down from the bench. With Frank at the front, and Billy and Merl on his flanks, the trio moved forward to meet the zombay horde.
Merl swung his sword, getting used to the weight and practicing the few strokes Frank had shown him. He held his hand ax in his other hand. Lifting his mask and spitting a gob of saliva out, he stretched his shoulders, rolling the muscles from side to side, and cracked his neck too. When they were fifty yards away from the wagon, Frank burst into action, swiping Scaramanza through zombay flesh like a well-honed scythe through full-grown wheat. Merl held his flank position, desperate to get in his fighting rhythm. The waiting was worst bit.
“Hold here!” Frank shouted, as the zombays started lurching around him.
The smell thickened instantly, its stench intensifying ten, twenty, thirtyfold. Merl’s stomach tightened, pulsing and making him retch. Acidic liquid flooded into his mouth as he near doubled over with cramps. The horror of the past days revisited him like a marauding army hellbent on attacking him. Flies surrounded the creatures in a cloud of despite, landing on the dirty zombays and flitting across their milky eyes or vanishing into their gaping mouths. Maggots oozed out of hanging, dead flesh, and spilled from their noses and ears. Yet they still reached out, still lurched and grabbed, intent on Merl’s destruction.
He rallied and gathered his rage. His ire was born of seeing his dad reduced to a slathering beast. That anger that rose from the ashes of a life destroyed. Merl struck his first blow, slicing his sword across an undead’s cheek, and then burying its blade an inch deep in the noggin of an insidious old lady still in her nightdress. He thumped the ax down on top of a bastard’s bonce just for good measure, and skewered a barely-out-of-her-teens zombay, before spinning onto his next without hesitating.
They were all gray, all riddled with the black veins, and had snapping teeth. They’d all turned his father into walking dead, well, sitting when he’d found him, but that was beside the point. Merl killed without prejudice. He toppled all of them: men and women, children, old ’uns, young ‘uns, farmers, and soldiers. It was a blur of chopping and stabbing, of thrusting and slicing. He’d fend them off with his ax’s head and then decapitate them with his sword. Once again, he moved like the wind and had the strength of ten men, or it seemed that way.
The three of them fought, they retreated slowly as Frank directed, and they left a wall of zombay bodies. As the bastards scrambled over the decapitated remnants of their fellow town’s people, the three brave warriors finished them off with even more ease and then retreated to the monster wagon as the tide of doom that came for them waned.
“Merl, get up top!” Frank shouted, and Merl climbed straight up, untying the halberds and the scythe.
“Billy, you next!” Frank glanced around but quickly focused back on the job in front of him.
From where he stood, Merl could see Frank’s plan unfolding. The zombays closest still focused on their little group, but no more came from the city. He could also see the scale of the death they’d inflicted on the zombay horde. Frank had a wall of the dead-dead bastards around him.
“What d’ya reckon, like, a couple of hundred?” Billy asked, scrambling up onto the monster wagon’s roof and grabbing the scythe.
Merl swung his halberd down and chopped a foul zombay’s head in half. Another lumbered toward the wagon, bumping into its side as if its eyes had clouded over too much. “I’d say so,” Merl said. He gave up counting when he got to twentyteen—as that was as far as he could count. He wasn’t overly sure what a hundred was, but he was sure that the pile of zombays must be roughly that much.
“Looks a lot… thinner… in the town now.” Billy swung his scythe, and a squelching noise was followed by a dull thud.
“I think that was his plan,” Merl added, slicing his halberd back and forth down his side of the wagon and watching as limbs flew and blood spouted.
Frank jumped up onto the monster wagon. “Gonna have to turn it pretty tight, Billy. Them bastards were a bit more determined than I thought. They seemed slower when I was opening the gate.”
He might as well be a God, Merl thought. He does God-like things.
“Sure thing, Frank,” Billy said, dropping his scythe and scooting back to the bench. He grabbed the reins and turned the horses.
“Hold on tight, Merl. Gonna be a bumpy ride until we get clear.”
Frank wasn’t joking either. Merl clung on for dear life and the wagon’s iron-shod wheel carved a way through the dead-dead zombays. They burst. They popped. They spurted black and crimson blood like the wagon was rolling over heaps of devil berries. Frank stood, impassive, unmoved, the warrior he was, until his halberd dropped and swung like a bell’s ringer. Soon they’d carved their way through the dead’uns and onto clear ground, where Billy angled back toward the town gates.
“Pull it up, Billy, and see if the reins will reach up here.”
Billy ended up sitting on the wagon’s roof with his dangling feet on the bench. He flicked the reins and they started up again.
“Why’d you think the horses ain’t spooked?” Billy asked.
“Got nothin’ t’fear, I reckon,” Merl replied, and glanced at Frank hoping he’d approve. Frank was a long way away, and Merl reckoned he was thinking about that other time again. Whatever that time was, it was important to Frank, like good grass was to a sheep. But then Frank began talking again, and Merl listened hard, because Frank’s words were as precious as the nuggets folk sometimes found in Three Face stream.
“Horses know. They know who their enemies are, and they know who their masters are. A good horse will die for a good master. Feed and water them first, treat ‘em right, and they’ll trot to hell and back for you.” Frank whispered all of that, and then he thumped the end of his halberd on the monster truck’s roof and snapped out of the melancholic clouds that had settled all around him. “We treat the horses right, and they’ll plow through the bastards like Merl’s halberd through bonces.”
“To Three Valleys!” Merl shouted, and Billy flicked the reins. Before long, they had breached the town’s gates.
The zombays aimed for the wagon, which for some reason or the other had developed a squeaky wheel. Merl and Frank slaughtered everything as the horses forged through milling zombay ranks. Those that didn’t move were trampled under hoof or split in two by the heavy wheels. Merl turned back and would have thrown up, but his guts were emptier than Billy’s head. Some of the zombays were crawling after them, but just the top halves, and that chilled Merl right to his spine. They’d attracted a little tail of walking zombays too, and Merl suspected they’d have to deal with the stragglers before long.
Three Valleys was big, as far as Merl was concerned, but not that big in reality. It took Billy less than five minutes to drive them to the large inn in the town’s center. He turned the cart into the stables behind, and Frank and Merl jumped down. Merl pushed the gate shut while Frank chopped up all the zombays in its yard, and then they took a breath.
The inn was called the Grumpy Goose, and it was a grand two level building. Its back door swung open, but no more zombays came out. Frank took out his water bottle.
“My arms ache to buggery and back,” Frank said, and took a long draft of water.
“Careful with that water. The well’s no good.” Merl was over by it. A terrifying moaning was echoing up. “Zombay’s fallen in.”
“Add that to the list of things we have to check before we’ve secured a building,” Frank said, and he began laughing.
Merl didn’t know what securing a building meant, but he was sure it was a soldier’s thing. Billy jumped off the monster wagon and hollered down the well, and that only enraged the poor zombay bastard more.
“He’ll be moaning and groaning all night,” Billy said. “I’ll bet we won’t get a wink.”
“We ain’t sleeping in the wagon, Billy. We’re going to clear the inn and kip in there,” Frank said.
It sounded like heaven to Merl, heaven indeed.
“We set?” Frank asked, and he equipped Scaramanza.
Just the sight of the great blade sent adrenaline racing through Merl. He gra
bbed his hand ax and the butcher’s cleaver and retrieved some energy from the hidden depths of his guts. Limbering up, he realized how much his muscles ached too. “This fightin’ lark is harder than sheep sheerin’ day.”
“Harder than muckspreading,” Billy agreed, taking a sword and shield from the pile of weapons in the back of the wagon.
“I go first, then Merl. Billy, you take the back and cover our asses. If they come, shield bash ‘em and then chop-chop, got it?”
“Bash-chop-chop, got it, Frank. Oh, and Frank?”
“What is it, Billy?”
“Thanks fer lookin’ after us, like.”
“Yeah, thanks, Frank,” Merl added, and he really, really meant it.
Frank stared at both of them. He looked so normal now, now that he wasn’t stood on the wagon’s roof in the blazing sun. His copper hair was matted with blood and guts, and his chin had a burnished shadow since he hadn’t shaved all day. He wasn’t as tall either. This Frank wasn’t a God. He was one of them.
“The pair of you got me out of Morgan Mount. That makes us friends in my book, and friends don’t need to thank each other. Just keep watching each other’s backs.”
It was like they were all looking at each other at the exact same time. A bond was formed—more than a bond, more than a stupid fellowship, something truly precious. Merl and Billy were like carbon and iron, and Frank was a flaming forge, and together they were the strongest steel in the whole wide world. Together they were unbreakable.
“Let’s get ourselves a nice bed each, a stove to cook on, and some ale to swill,” Frank said, then he marched into the the Grumpy Goose.
And he tore straight back out again.
“Back up, lads, looks like a full house.”
The zombays wandered out straight after him, but Merl and Billy were still backpedaling. Merl upended himself on the well, and Billy got his foot stuck in a bucket. Fortunately, Frank maintained his calm, and Scaramanza glinted crimson. The steady stream of zombays fell, but Frank backed up until the three friends were all in a line.