by Ledger,John
Jeremy stumbled forward as the mob of the undead pushed the old door off of its hinges and started coming through. If this house wasn’t on fire somewhere, it would be soon. Jeremy broke what was left of the old glass out of the window and climbed out. The heat from multiple fires was hot on his skin and smoke filled his lungs. This town was catching fast. It had dried quickly and the old wood was turning to kindling. A new group of the flaming dead suddenly took notice of his presence in the street.
Just then, Scott ran screaming around the corner and spied his old friend, standing there in awe of the spectacle around him. “Don’t just stand there! Run, damn it!”
Scott ran past him and Jeremy wasted no more time following the only remaining Oathkeeper. Gushers of methane powered blazes had erupted all throughout the town and continued to spew towers of flame every few feet. The entire town was quickly becoming an inferno, not unlike hell itself.
A group of zombies had converged around a plume of fire and stopped their progress out of town. They quickly turned their attention towards the people and began moving their way. Blue flames clung to their bodies and culminated in an orange and yellow mass.
The men stopped in their tracks and Jeremy sighed, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
Behind them, an army of flaming zombies were slowly closing in and flames blocked their exit on either side of the street. Jeremy suddenly realized how hot it had become and he was starting to sweat profusely.
He looked over at Scott and he was pouring sweat also. “We’re going to have to punch through.”
Jeremy looked at the group of zombies blocking their escape. He knew his friend was right. He tightened his grip on his machete and yelled over the roar of the fires. “We made an oath! Let’s do this!”
Together, they ran at the mob of the burning dead, hacking and slashing as they went. The heat was unimaginable and the Ranger felt his face burning, but he dared not stop. So many, all around them. The heat took away his breath and he could feel his eyebrows burning as they kept coming. With one outstretched arm, he pushed against rotted torsos until his palm stopped feeling the burn. He knew what that meant, the tissue had been burned through to the nerve and the skin on his hand was lost.
Still, they kept surrounding him. Pieces of dead flesh dropped off of their burning bodies and their open, masticating mouths were filled with flame. Jeremy squinted his eyes against the heat and coughed. Smoke was filling his lungs and he knew he couldn’t do this much longer.
There was a break in the mob and Jeremy pushed through the flaming zombies and ran for it. Flames gave way to blackness and he took a few steps before falling to the ground.
Something was on top of him, beating on his skull. Jeremy fought, but he couldn’t shake it. He rolled over and in the firelight he could see Scott swatting his scalp. “What are you doing?”
“You’re on fire! Your hair’s on fire!” He was beating out the flames of Jeremy’s singed scalp. The soldier splashed some water from a nearby puddle on the Ranger’s head and patted it one last time.
They had made their way out of the flaming mob, but the undead had started advancing on them again. “We’re not out of this yet! Let’s go!” Jeremy stood up and together he and Scott ran away with the little bits of energy they had left.
His lungs were burning with pain and his legs were weak from exhaustion, but he knew he couldn’t stop. All around them, plumes of flame spewed high into the night sky, lighting their way. The now familiar thump of an eruption sounded, but they didn’t see it. The fires were still catching.
Jeremy’s eyes started to adjust to the dark again as they ran away from Nebo Valley. In the distance, he could barely make out the tree line against the stars. “That way! That way!”
He didn’t know if the zombies could climb out of the dried lakebed or not, but it was their only chance. His grandfather had sworn that they would, but he never saw it.
A plume of flame erupted from the ground close to Jeremy and sent him sprawling across the lakebed. His body was beaten, battered, and exhausted, but he managed to find his footing and get back up on his feet. Scott was there, pulling at his arm. “Get up! We have to go!”
On shaky legs, Jeremy stood and looked back. A smaller group of flaming zombies were only a few feet away. He limped further into the safety of the darkness and closer to the edge of the lake.
The ground finally firmed up beneath their feet and he could feel grass under his step. They were on the edge and the ground began to rise sharply. The two men climbed the embankment, turned around, and sat down to catch their breath. The lake bed was alight with too many geysers of flame to count. They could see what remained of the town of Nebo Valley. It was a deep red flame with a blue base.
All along the lakebed, as far as they could see, smaller flames moved and then stopped. Their trail to the bank was littered with hundreds of similar fires. On the eastern horizon, they could see a pink tinge to the sky. The sun was coming up.
Scott spoke through panting breath. “Look! They’re burning out!”
One by one, the burning corpses had stopped moving. The fire had taken its toll. The group that had chased them had left its members in a line, burning on the bed of Lake Bowie.
At the bottom of the embankment, one zombie, still aflame, stumbled across the lake bed. Scott stood up and wielded his machete.
Jeremy stopped him. “No. I need to see if it crosses over.”
The corpse, fully engulfed in blue and orange flame, stepped slowly onto dry land and paused. A piece of flesh fell from its chest and landed in a smoldering pile on the ground. It raised its flaming head as if to look at the two men, even though its eye sockets were nothing but chimneys of smoke. It stumbled towards them.
Five steps was all it took for it to crumble to the ground in a burning heap.
Scott wiped his face with an open hand. “That solves that. They can’t leave.”
The ranger shook his head. “No. That one may have just burned out. We still don’t know. The only way to put out that fire is to refill the lake. Come on, we have work to do. We made an oath.”
FOG AND THE SEA WITCH
Amanda M. Lyons
May12th, 1715, Aboard the Sea Witch
Esteban and I, the last remaining men of the pirate vessel Sea Witch, stood firm on its planks, adrift on a sea of fog and oddment. We had been here for what seemed like ages, nearly blind in the wet damp weight of the fog. The decks were awash with old blood and dismembered corpses, the fetid stench of which tore at our guts as much as the weight of our uncertain future as we watched and waited for it to return.
It.
What else could we call it, not having truly beheld it as it ripped them apart in our absence?
The ship rose and fell with the soft currents, the water too still, too quiet.
May 13th, 1715 Aboard the Sea Witch
All remains still and quiet, a supernatural calm that screams of biding time and impending doom. Neither of us dares to move from the decks, hidden here next to the walls of the Captain’s quarters with our weapons nearby. Esteban has fallen asleep for now, startling to wakefulness when the weight of his body shifts away from my own with the currents. I understand his need for comfort and know that it is just as important to me. The balmy sea water, caught in cool molecules within the fog, seeps along the flesh, mingling with sweat from the heat, a thick and cloying thing that never seems to abate. Still, I watch, never daring to let my hearing fail to catch the slightest change.
I suppose now would be the best time to record what little we do know about what befell the rest of the Sea Witch’s crew, the wretched stinking filth of them festering around us. So here you are.
It was late in the afternoon when we saw the massive wall of fog roiling ahead of us, white and almost seeming to glow in the gold and salmon tones of the sky. It had been another hot and balmy day, sweat thick on our skin and in our clothes so that even the saltwater of the sea was a blessing as it splashed at us. We
did not think much on the fog, it was too large a bank to avoid and we men knew our way about the ocean, most of us having dwelt there all of our lives. We had a while yet before the sun would sink into the sea, but each of us longed for it and the cool that came, little more than the balm of trading the sun for the moon and its indirect light. Dinner would be ready soon, some salmagundi made from fish, cabbage, and a few other things we had in stores. A little of the hard tack too, to fill it out. Soon, someone would need to go below and fetch some rum, I was looking forward to it, all of the end of the night things that mean relaxing and taking an account of the day.
Esteban and I were the new men, taken on by the captain only a few months before though we both had our own history with the sea and other vessels. He and I were amiable enough where it mattered and smart enough to follow when it came to the captain’s dealings. Nothing bad had come of our joining the Sea Witch and we were well adjusted to interaction with the men once the usual haranguing had passed. It helped that I had saved two men in the midst of a nasty storm that the other men valued, and that Esteban was more than capable with rope work and other such skills that other men had only a little more than passing knowledge of despite their years at sea. We did not tell them about us, of course, taking our moments as they came and the ship was quiet enough to slip away. That was why I was looking forward to getting the rum, you see. Invariably, they sent us down to fetch it.
Looking at this all now, I wonder if things might have been different if it had been more than that single fog bank, quiet and seemingly harmless. Would we have been on guard? Might we have inferred the danger? Of course, that is almost certainly what it intended, what it had hoped to portray so that it could lull us in, take us without warning. Cunning and hunter’s skill, those are what we face now.
Regardless, we were there at the end of the day, sweating and tired, drifting toward our end as if it were any other day at sea. When the cook asked us to go down to the hold, we went, closing the door after us.
It was thick with sea salt and dust down there, the smell of spilled rum and brine adding to it, familiar scents, but a bit strong nonetheless. We looked around quickly and, interlacing our fingers, slipped along the rows of barrels to find a moment’s secret space. Esteban’s skin was darker than mine despite the sun’s burning mark on my own, his deep black eyes locked on mine as we met in the dark, two dark haired men with beards and dirty clothes. I will not bother you with the sordid details of it. I’m sure you know the ways that a couple may join in fevered embrace where time and lack of privacy leave you with little time to impart more than the weight of a passionate eye, lips, and hand.
Standing there as we were, locked on each other, we were struck motionless when we heard the first cries. There was little preamble, no monstrous roar. Only the sound of pounding feet, howling men, and the terrible garbled blare of dying. We stood where we were for a time, listening to it all in horror, unable to fathom what it was that had made the men above prey. Then the weight of it hit us in the dark crimson drip of blood that began to come down, first in small drops which struck Esteban’s eye, and then thin patters that fell on us at random as we looked at each other, wide-eyed with shock.
I can hear you judge me now, this from a pirate? Yes, a pirate, not some knob-headed idiot in an adventure tale, but a real man on a real ship where he had not encountered anything but man and nature in all his seafaring years. And now it was quiet, so quiet that we could hear the whimper of those who remained, dying slow deaths on the deck as we listened.
“Should we go up there now? Try and see if any of our men remain?” Esteban was as frightened as I was, but he knew what we owed the others.
“Yes,” I told him “but we should be careful going up.”
He nodded, pulling his cutlass and assuming a cautious stance as we crept toward the stairs. My own cutlass in hand, I reached out to carefully push open the door of the hold. I’ve told you what it is we live with now, the rotting bodies and fetid stench, but then it was all scarlet and crimson with bright splashes of bloodless flesh. Guts, shit, and piss thrown the width of the deck in bright trails. It was a nightmare, much of it of death and what remained, but there were still those who wept, groaning, pleading life trapped in its ending.
We waited several minutes; wanting to be sure it was clear before we came up out of the hold and giving everything we could see a good glancing over before we got out of there. Gathering my courage and pushing aside my fear, I threw the door wide and we crept out onto the deck to take it all in. The sight was bad, and the sound of mewling human wreckage overwhelming enough that we put them out of misery as we moved, more to assuage the sound than to offer them mercy, I must admit. There is nothing quite so unnerving as looking down on a man who is little more than scattered organs, shattered ribs, and the broken remains of a skull, it only worsens when that man was your shipmate, a member of a crew of men who you had grown to trust, and for whom you cannot draw forward grief at rendering what remains lifeless. And when he is only a disembodied head with eyes that roll over and over? Well, then it is your comfort alone that matters.
Esteban moved with me, our feet skittering on scraps and gore, our eyes roving over the fog at every sound but finding nothing at which to strike. Everything was warm white mist and scattered remnants, a whimpering horror revealed by every careful step and slow drift of shifting fog.
May 14th 1715
After all that we saw, all of the night which passed before us, it is a wonder we passed into the fitfull sleep that befell us, but we did and still we remain. It’s daylight now, what must be somewhere in the midst of the afternoon based on the light that drifts in through this fog.
I came awake first, and then Esteban with a flutter of terrified movement and wide eyes.
“Has anything happened? Are we still here, Tobey?”
“Yes, we are safe, and no, nothing new has happened.”
He got to his feet with clear reticence, the joints of his limbs tight and aching from the angles he’d assumed in his sleep. I felt such pity for him, to be trapped here and unable to find some solace, not even in my presence.
“Can you eat? We could go below decks where it’s less…abominable. Perhaps go over what we might do and then see what we can do about getting out of here.”
“Can we? Have we even drifted much since we came into this bastard fog? Nothing’s come for us yet, but it must, don’t you think?”
“Esteban, I…I’m not sure what to tell you. I can only offer what I have and then do what I can. We don’t even know what it was that befell them all…” I looked out into the fog then, trying to see beyond it and seeing little more than a few feet of water near the ship.
He took my hand and we went down to try and eat as we considered our situation.
We settled with our tack and some rum, nibbling at first, and then a bit more enthusiastically as we got on with it. Miserable and reeking of the deck, we decided that perhaps we could use a little time below for what little we ate to settle before we set to the task of clearing the deck. It would not be an easy job, and involved some risk considering we had no real understanding of what we had survived and seemed to be awaiting.
After an hour or so’s rest we slipped up the stairs and carefully out into the last of afternoon, what little of it we were afforded through the fog. Using pitchforks, we hauled the remains to the railing as efficiently as we could, flipping off and into the drink. It takes more than a few men to run even a moderate ship like the Sea Witch, and our job was not so small it could be handled readily before the sun dropped. Nevertheless, we stood on a ship clear of corpses by what would have been a few hours after sunset and that left us with gore and the other remainders of dead men, not much better, but certainly less offensive than it had been. Task complete, we drew some buckets of water up from the sea and used them to clear the space around the captain’s deck, a place where we could peer out at the dark and hope to be prepared. The rest would have to wait until the lig
ht returned.
Thick with gore and shit from the dead, we drew a bit more to wash ourselves and then gathered arms for the long night. Esteban offered to take first watch because I had taken the night before. I took him up on it and slipped into a deep sleep.
I awoke to horror.
It was the dead of night, that feeling of darkness and oddment was thick in the air- and thick with other things too. Esteban stood a few feet from me, his cutlass locked in combat with the dagger of some terror I could not quite make out from the boards of the deck. I shot up from where I had laid and then the truth became clear.
It was dark, but I could see them, the rotting hulks slipping up and over the edge of the ship in small groups reeking of death and sea, thick with seaweed and other such things which had wound themselves through the rot of their bodies. They were silent but for the sound of water dripping and wet things slithering, even the clink of the dagger which came to try and stab Esteban was nearly silent.
These were the remains of our men, the fruit of our evening’s labors plopped back onto the ship in some new form. What dread magic was this? How did those gobbets of humanity come to be so whole and present of form that they could return now, ready to attack and destroy? There was little I could do then but join Esteban in his efforts. They had come from bits and pieces, what now could we do to stop them?
With my pistol and cutlass drawn, I prepared to enter the fray. Slicing out toward the monster which assailed Esteban, I managed to sever some of the vegetation that held it together and it fell to the ground in scattered gobs and pitiful piles of bone. The dagger it held fell with a clatter, and soon we stood back to back, turning as needed to lash out at the dead men who came to confront us from the depths. Stroke upon stroke, lash against lash, and man upon man, they attempted to attack in numbers. Spellbound, I must assume, and therefore unrelenting. We struck out again and again, pushing them back from us with care to avoid making contact with their flesh, decay and the unknown making us err on the side of caution. All the better if we avoided being bitten, god knows they gnashed their teeth whenever some segment of our bodies grew near enough.