Her cries were horrible. Even with his face averted from what was happening, his emotions warred within him, he wanted to attack the monster, to draw its attention away from the girl, but he could not predict what would happen if he did. The woman grunted across from him, the ring she fought to free still planted firmly in the ground, but she continued to pull, her determination and strain clear in her narrowed facial features. She must be mad; there was no way to get free, certainly not like this.
After a few moments, the sound of the girl’s shrieks and the creature’s grunts stopped. He looked back in time to see it getting off her, its hand releasing her throat and leaving terrible red welts where it had been. The girl skittered back against the wall, whimpering as thin trickles of blood fell in a line after her, pooling under her where she sat. His gaze fell on the creature, curling into a glare of hate for what it had done to the girl that sat before it.
It stood there for a moment, sneering at the woman he’d been traveling with, and then walked out of the building. Apparently tired and breathing heavily, she let herself fall back and rest against the wall. When she had caught her breath, she looked at him and opened her mouth to speak.
“I want you to at least try to pull that chain of yours free, Henry. I’m strong, but as you can see, not strong enough. You might have a chance.” She didn’t look at all pleased to admit this. He felt a little gratified by that, and bent to put his strength toward pulling his chain out of the ground. It didn’t budge, but he continued working at it, hoping to loosen its hold in the earth. There was no change.
The woman groaned, sounding defeated. He lay back to rest a moment and then tried again. Still nothing. He lay back again trying to gather enough strength to try once more. When he opened his eyes again, sunlight seeped through cracks in the ceiling. He knew at once that he had fallen asleep.
The woman lay against the opposite wall and the sight disturbed him. There was nothing wrong with her, she simply lay there. He wasn’t used to being the first to wake, much less so late into the morning. She stirred, looking exhausted, and then sat up.
“Did they take anyone in the night?” She asked.
“I can’t say. I slept, almost as much as you did.”
“Then look around, will you? I can’t see as much of the room as you can.”
He was about to ask her why this was, and then he saw the new chains around her neck, binding her there.
“Stop staring at me and look around, damn it!”
He turned and looked. Last night’s victim lay curled against the wall, comatose, the rest seemed as close to being fine as one could be in a place like this.. Looking into the far corner however, he saw that the man without eyes was missing.
“There’s one gone, the man who-ah-lost his eyes.”
Her eyes closed and she moaned. “That was Alex Pereneaux; he’s been through a lot and he’s been one of the greatest helps in keeping people going. The girl who was raped last night is his daughter and that’s why we have to get out of here. If we can save Alex and his people I want to do it.”
“And how do you intend to do that? We have no weapons, we’re chained, and hell, you can’t even move your head! I think they intend to keep us where we are for a long while.”
“Aren’t you even the least bit concerned for your wife? Failing that, your own skin? They’ll wait for her to join them now. That’s how close she is to death, Henry. And they don’t keep male prisoners for long; they eat them as soon as possible. Women can be forced to bear their children, but men have no purpose here.”
“Then why haven’t they done it to you? What importance are you to them if they aren’t already forcing themselves on you?”
She bowed her head against the chain at her throat. “Bateman’s been after me for a very long time, since the very beginning of all of this. He was one of Jared’s highest men…” She lifted her head and tossed it violently back against the thatch. The material around the chain broke away and the chain fell from her neck. “God, that feels better.” She pulled at her arm chains again, this time digging at the dirt around the ring, gouged out the hidden shape of the chain’s base with her long fingers and slowly made it give.
There was a riot of sound outside the hut shortly afterwards and two zombies came to take her away. Clearly her movements had not gone unnoticed, not that she had made any special effort to be covert. Henry didn’t know what to expect now, but it couldn’t be terribly good. They unlocked the chain and quickly tied her hands with a band of leather as she fought them, glaring as they manhandled her to achieve their goals. Tied and caught between the pair of them, she was then escorted out. Henry was left alone with the others after that, afraid for her, for himself, and for his wife without her understanding to guide his actions. He didn’t have long to consider things; within a moment’s time, two others walked in and unchained him as they had her, wrapping his wrists in leather straps and pushing him toward the doorway.
I guess I’m zombie food now, he thought to himself, the fat man gets eaten. It didn’t take much thought to figure out that as they walked him toward the middle of camp-and straight toward the central fire there. They’re going to barbeque me, oh, now this should be fun. He was wrong; there were other things in store for him now. Instead of continuing on, they stopped by one of the lodges, and from out of its depth came his wife.
He knew in a matter of seconds that she had died. The light here, so close to the fire that he felt its heat burning against his back, though it was several feet away, was unforgiving. Her eyes, once a rich warm brown, were now glazed and marred by a bluish haze. Though the zombies were still relatively new to him, he understood their undead status because he had never seen them when they were alive; his mind didn’t challenge him to consider it as it did now with his wife. She was awake, she was thinking, but she did not feel and she wasn’t truly his wife anymore. The stark realization of that fact cut into him sharply. A dull, cold ache swelled in his bowels and up through his gut to his heart. They'd been together for a long time, almost eighteen years now, and he'd grown used to her presence, the nuances of her being. She was gone, totally and utterly gone, and he could do nothing to change that. He ached for her to come back, not out of love, but out of regret, a frank ownership of the things he had failed to offer her in their life and the loss of what he had taken for granted in her presence. Like a boy regrets the loss of a puppy killed in the street, a being that had offered comfort and been entrusted to his care was ripped from him in an instant. The tears that came to his eyes stung and startled him.
What came next did nothing to aid him with any of it.
“I want us to be together, Henry. I want so badly for everything that’s happened to go away,” she moaned. “I need you to die, to become one of us, Henry!” It was Rachel’s voice, it was her body but it all rang wrong in his ears, all horror that invaded on the fresh grief, chewed on his spirit.
“Rachel, I-” He moaned, struggling to put words to what he felt in this moment.
“Become one of us, Henry.” The longer she spoke the clearer it was that the words weren't hers, he knew that, felt it in his bones. They were too cold and foreign, too directed. His mind struggled to process it all; one dark kick to the teeth after another in the last several minutes and no clear path of action ahead of him, no time to think. That was intentional too, of course it was.
“Rachel, I can’t do that, I-what about Karen?” His voice was a cracked thing as he rubbed tears from his eyes, tried to keep them from coming so that he could be sure of what he looked at, what happened around him.
“Fuck Karen! What about us?” She growled back. Rachel had never been so savagely angry in her life.
Something mournful and violently angry rose up inside him in response and answered for him, something that wanted to pay for all the angry words that he’d ever thrown at her, and all that happened since their crash only a few days before. In the days that had passed so much about him had changed, already he was beginning
to see what his ego had blinded him to over the course of their marriage. Henry now understood the weight he carried for everything.
“What would I have to do?”
“Do?” It asked, almost confused that he’d given in to its whims.
“Yeah, what would I have to do to make this all up to you?” His voice was quiet, repentant and sad. His throat ached, clicking as he swallowed his grief.
“Die, of course. Die and die and die!” It sang in a high and mocking child’s voice, too alien to have any resonance with his wife. Still, he wondered if it could offer some idea about what had happened to her.
“Will it hurt? Does it hurt to die? What will happen to me?” He wanted to know if she was in there, if maybe past all the demented anger and morbid motion, Rachel might really be trapped inside it.
“There can be pain.” It nodded, its eyed locked on his despite their apparent blindness, its head cocked to one side in consideration. “There is no God, Henry. There is only blackness…and then you wake up here…and all you have to do is…” It chuckled gleefully. “All you have to do is feed.” For a moment he thought. Yes, he decided as its face went slack in thought, its eyes roving like mad marbles as it looked inside its mind for the answers it gave. She’s still in there. He knew it now, but he also knew in the end that she was a puppet, a pawn to be played, to push him into action no matter how trivial he was to this strange world.
He stepped back from her, running into one of the zombies that brought him here. The force of his large body hitting its weaker one toppled it over and into the burning fire that stood behind them. There had been no thought to the action, some instinctual pulling away that had bought him something like hope. The burning zombie howled with pain; the sizzle and pop of what little remained of its body cooking away was horrible, scenting the air in shades of rot and sweetness, then, finally, char.
“What have you done?” The Rachel-thing wailed.
She was horrified, but Henry knew that it was exactly what he’d needed. He ran, not knowing where to go, but certain that he had to get away from the thing who was once his wife.
“Come back, Henry!” she hissed, chasing him. “I need you!”
He ran back to the hut that was his prison only a few minutes before, and inside to the people that were still bound there. There was little thought in any of it, pure instinct drove him here and now he made use of it, skidding to the ground to inspect the bindings that trapped the others here. The chains were bound by tightly wrapped chicken wire; he unwound each knot as quickly as he could, freed as many as was possible before the zombies came to claim him again.
The first he rescued was the girl who’d been raped the night before; there was nearly a yard’s worth of wire when he had finally released her. He shook her awake and pulled her to her feet, ordering her to help him let the others go. He went to the zombie-mother next, unbinding her arms as she looked up, a strange expression on her face, rage and gratitude built and culminated into some fierce thing he could not define. Getting to her feet, she ran to the girl and helped her release another woman. They would have to hurry; the sound of several angry zombies outside the hut made it clear that time was short.
The moment was strange and passed in a whirlwind of motion and thought. He saw what would happen only a few seconds before it did; the savage maw of the mother’s face making it clear what she felt about the creature that had come from her body. The creature, her baby, had been put inside her against her will and forced her to care for it when it was born, the horror of its life a burden and pain she could no longer bear. Tears came from her eyes even so, tears for longing and for pain, tears of a mother about to destroy her child.
She lifted the child like a cannonball, hefting it to shoulder height as it cried, and then she shifted her hands to hold it by its feet. Squinting her eyes closed, her teeth clenched with a terrible moaning hiss and something gave inside, some line she had to cross to let this happen. Spinning, she built up momentum, a snarl of rage curling her lips as she moved. When the momentum had built up enough she let the thing go, tossing it into the woven wall of her prison, another sort of chain binding her here torn free. When it struck the wall, it broke up; the frail body, made even frailer by the condition of its being, broke apart, ending its cry of terror and rage. Disgust and horror mingled in Henry’s heart and mind. Monster or not, it had been a child, and this murder was beyond his understanding. The woman nodded in silence, acknowledging that she understood, pain and anger dueling in her facial movements.
Then, satisfied that she was free from this place, she drew a chain from the dirt and bunched it in half. When the zombies came for them, she motioned for all of them to move back, tossing the chain into the air like a lasso and spinning it into a deadly pace. When the zombies entered the room she let it go, the force of her motion having given it enough force to eat up the space between. It struck quickly, leaving several of them in scattered pieces; it was sheer luck that their attackers were of the older group, rotting things that time had slowed.
She wasn’t done. Marching across the room, she lifted two of the remaining torsos by their heads; it was clear what she intended now that he saw the direction in which she walked. He picked up two more, careful to avoid their jaws, and the two of them threw the creatures into their own bonfire. The sight of these others ablaze, their pained voices howling from the flames, was enough to hold many of the others back, fear clear in their features.
The other captives stood back in the hut, afraid of capture, and waiting to see what they should do. The zombie-mother motioned for them to follow, her impatience clear in the curt hand motion she made. ‘Come,” she said to them. “You owe them your life!” She turned to him, the cunning look of her eyes alight with a sheer haze of mania. “You will help us, Otherworlder, help us save your companion.” She walked away from him and toward the largest hut. He could do little else but follow, assuming she was sane enough to know what she was doing.
Walking around the left side, they found the door and walked inside.
When Henry looked back he saw that the other prisoners, now escapees, were following, but they stood back. Afraid of the zombies, yes, but also afraid of him; he was an unknown, they could not foresee what he would do. He was from another place, maybe even another time, a place where things were still civilized; where the monsters still hid behind kind faces and kept to themselves. And then there was the woman; they held her in awe, that was clear, and so by association that same awe came to fall on him, colored by fear as it was.
Turning back toward the inside of the hut, he moved inside. The interior was dark despite the open doorway and there was something here that crawled along his skin, prickling and cold like electricity. It made him cold and nauseous at once, something dark and alien. In a far corner a flame burned on a five- foot pole, lending a vague light to the murk of the room. A few feet from that torch sat the woven backed chair of the ZombieLord, the creature that ruled over these creatures. His teeth shone brightly in his face, his lips gone, what skin and muscle remained atrophied and cracked with age. Amid the desolation of his face, yellow eyes peered out at Henry, mocking him with the creature’s arrogance and the power that had been crawling over his flesh since entering this place.
His eyes would not have left that being were it not for the whimper he heard from the corner then, the sound of a tortured soul trying to hide its fear and weakness. When he turned to see who it was, shock moved over him.
There, bare and on her knees, knelt the woman.
Across her bare body were lines of blood and cuts that had been made with a sharp blade. She shuddered in pain, the depth of the cuts made apparent by the grooves left in her skin by them, and yet it did not seem they could be the whole reason she was so tormented.
“Her pain is not entirely physical,” the Zombie Lord croaked. “The majority of her pain comes from the damage I have done to her soul with the power of my own. Watch!”
As he spoke, the woman fell o
n her back, arching it in pain. Her teeth pushed tighter together as the pain increased, forcing her into a ball of torment, attempting to hold back tears of pain. Henry’s nausea increased, the horror of this scene, and his embarrassment at seeing her so exposed making him cringe. It was not her nudity, not really, though it was one more shield from the outside world for her. His shame was in seeing her strength torn down and the torture that had been done to her made out to be nothing.
“Stop it,” he demanded as he walked toward the Zombie Lord. “I said stop it, Goddamn you! I’ll knock your fucking head from your shoulders! I’ll tear out your heart with my bare hands! You can’t do this to her!”
The glee faded from Henry’s face as the Lord turned his angry countenance on him. Suddenly there was a pain in the base of his neck and he stopped where he was, the pain grinding into his spine.
“I am not moved by your threats, human! As you can sense, now that a fraction of my power has shifted to you, there is very little chance of your coming any closer to me. I suggest that you leave me to my vengeance and my pleasure. Better yet, stay and dare to attack me. I can find a thousand ways to make you regret it!” The tone of its voice had hardly changed; emotionless and cold, he spoke as if he had an eternity to waste.
Other Dangers: Slipped Through Page 3