by Gen Griffin
I nodded.
Seth gently eased me off of his lap and walked over to a standing mirror that Bud had set up in the far corner of the tent. He stared at his reflection for a long minute and then turned back to face me. “Well, that's certainly creepy.”
“You'll get used to it,” I informed him with a small smile. “It's not so bad.”
“I'd rather be a super zombie than be permanently dead,” Seth agreed with a small smirk as he blew me a slightly mocking kiss. “So tell me, what do you want to do now that Bud Moon's dead?”
I had to think about his question for a minute. “I don't think Bud's death changes anything, do you?”
“Depends on what you mean by change?”
“We still have thousands of zombies outside the gates of the city, ready and waiting to attack. The king still deserves to fall.”
“I like where you're going with this,” Seth said. “But what about all the innocent people?”
“How much zombie meat did you feed me?” I crossed my arms over my chest. “And don't bother telling me that you didn't.”
Seth almost had the decency to look a little bit chagrined. “Not as much as I'd wanted to. I think you might have eaten about three bites. Maybe five. You said it was chewy and told me I'd burned it.”
“I should have known that wasn't rabbit.” I shook my head at him and mulled over our options. “Gauge says that most of the people in the city are Changed and don't know it.”
Seth nodded. “Its a sound theory.”
“The only people who would be truly susceptible to the super zombies are those who have managed to avoid eating contaminated food. Within the city, I figure that's pretty much just the cannibals who have been buying all their meals from the flesh brokers at the meat market.”
Seth nodded again.
“I don't think I'd feel that bad about those causalities. Everyone else would be free. Really free. They'd be like us. Immune to zombies and free to live their lives.”
Seth looked thoughtful as he mulled my words over. He brushed his own hair back out of his eyes. “Think its time to let the zombies into the city?”
“How are we going to get the gates open?” I asked as a slight chill of fear and anticipation ran through my veins.
“I know where Bud put our rocket launcher,” Seth said.
It was a good enough answer for me.
Chapter 23
The horns had been boiled until the bone shone white in the dim moonlight. They spiraled up towards the sky, two viciously sharp spikes deeply embedded in the bone face mask. The mask itself was stark and alien in its smoothness. It covered most of Seth's face and had once been a face of its own. The white, unseeing pupil of Seth's dead left eye was peering out at me through the eye socket of some kind of large animal. The original skull may have been some kind of deer or moose. Seth wasn't sure of the origins because he'd never seen the live animal the skull had belonged to. The skull had already been a skull when he'd acquired it and modified it to suit his own purposes.
His shirt, if you wanted to call it a shirt, was sewn together using the rib bones of a large bull. He'd fashioned the bone into a kind of macabre body armor. Bony plates covered his shoulders, hips and knees. Nothing vulnerable had been left unprotected by the bones of sacrificed creatures. Gaps had been intentionally left in the armor to expose the never-healing wounds on his jaw, stomach, back and thigh. Those wounds were the most visible proof that he was not entirely human. No normal man could walk around with the bones of his own ribs showing through his back. No healthy human could hold a conversation when his jawbone was visible from outside of his mouth.
I walked over to him and put my arm on his. “Are we making a mistake?”
Seth's lip curled up on one side and he raised his eyebrow at me. “Getting nervous?”
“I feel like a monster,” I said as I looked down at my own outfit. I hadn't owned any nightmare clothing of my own, so Vera had let me borrow some of hers. I was literally wearing a bone corset. That is, a corset made entirely of bones. It was godawful uncomfortable and offered very little protection against the wind, but I had been promised that zombies weren't capable of biting through it. Shame being bitten by a zombie was fairly low on my list of concerns tonight. The bone skirt was a sight to behold. It was a leather micro-mini that someone had painstakingly trimmed in the bones of some kind of very small mammal. Because the micro-mini offered very little protection against anything, I was also wearing a pair of Vera's thigh high leather boots. A terrifyingly tall crown of horns and antlers topped my curly hair. There were an assortment of pearls and gemstones fastened into the godawful thing. The crown was, unsurprisingly, also Vera's. Seth's sister had clearly cornered the market on horrifying fashion choices.
“We are monsters,” someone said from behind me. I turned to see Gauge walking up to us with a scowl on his broad face. His blonde hair was completely hidden under another horned facemask. This one appeared to have been a bull in life, because two huge thick horns were coming out of either side of it's head, scooping low in a graceful curve before gradually tilting up to the sky. His chest was bare except for a black leather vest that I'd never seen him wear before. He had paired it with leather pants a pair of boots that were far more like Seth's than his scuffed brown pull-ons had been. He'd been spared a bone shirt because none of the members of the Church of Chaos had one large enough for him to borrow and there hadn't been enough time to make him his own. Lucky Gauge, because it turned out that clothing made from bones tended to stab you in the ribs when you were least expecting it.
“You think we've made a mistake?” I turned to face Gauge more completely and the crown tried to fall off my head. I had to grab it quickly and one of the horns poked me hard enough to draw blood. I wedged the heavy think back up into my hair with a silent curse.
“No.” Gauge shook his head and the horns never even budged. “Its just war. War makes everyone a monster.”
“Are you two ready?” Seth made moving in the bones look much, much easier than it actually was.
“I've been ready for a week,” Gauge said flatly. We were standing on the mountainside that stretched high above the city of Ra Shet. The Church of Chaos had an outpost of sorts and we'd used the five days we'd spent here to gather our strength for what I hoped would be our last fight.
I'd been here before, not too long ago. I remembered looking down from the top of the mountain with the city sparkling below us. Except the city was dark now and the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. I could see fires still burning in some areas to our South. The city of Ra Shet was dying.
Vera and the rest of the reinforcements from the Cube had arrived two days ago. Our people had been sneaking down into the city and keeping tabs on the state of the rather mindless battle the zombies were waging against the King of Ra Shet and his army.
Yesterday the king had fallen from power. Rumor had it that he was holed up in his palace in the center of the city with the doors bolted shut. Most of his army was either dead or in the process of becoming one of the new Changed. Despite the victory, the zombies were not in much better condition. The undead didn't care if they attacked the citizens of the city or one another. Their desire to consume human meat had overwhelmed any ability to think or reason that they had once had.
Every remaining member of the Church of Chaos was dressed in bone, including my own father. I still wasn't quite sure how I felt about Dad's decision to become one of the Changed, but he'd made the choice on his own and he knew what it entailed. I certainly wasn't in any position to judge his decisions.
In his own way, my Dad had been through just as much of a nightmare as I had. We'd spent a lot of our free time during the last week reconnecting. He'd told me about the first trip he'd made from the Cube to Ra Shet and his time in the meat market after my mother's death. He told me how Cecily had rescued him from the flesh brokers and helped him go back to the Cube to find me. I told him about joining the Scavengers and my first encounter wi
th Seth. Neither one of us was the same person we had been when we'd been a normal little family living in the Cube, but if my Dad could accept the Church and Seth, then I had to at least try to accept Cecily and Roger.
We weren't the same family, but we were still family.
“Are you ready, my priestess?”
Seth whispered the words in my ear. I leaned back against him, trying to ignore the feel of the bones on my corset coming into contact with the ones on his shirt. “Your ocean is sounding better and better,” I said as I stared won at the burning ruins below us.
He laughed softly in my ear. “Revenge first. Peace in the aftermath.”
I twisted in his arms so that I could face him. I lifted the bone mask so that it was no longer covering his face. His eye was still blood red. Mine were still yellow as a cat's. “Do you really think we'll be able to kill the king?”
Seth grinned wickedly down at me. “Do you trust me, Pi?”
“Yes,” I said.
Seth leaned down slightly and brought his lips to mine. My mouth met his willingly. The kiss was surprisingly gentle, almost chaste. His mouth was far softer than I would have thought possible. There was no pressure in his touch. No forcefulness. I kissed him back as if my life depended on it. As if everything I was and my entire life had boiled down to this one moment. This one touch. This one kiss.
Seth pulled away before I was ready to let him go. He smiled at me. A slow, sexy smile that left very little to the imagination. He still looked like a zombie to me. The scarring wounds on his face kept me from ever being able to completely forget what he was. He was a monster.
But so was I. Maybe we all were, in own ways.
Chapter 24
The king tried to run when Seth walked into the palace dressed in his bone battle gear with blood dripping from the blade of a broadsword. The majority of the king's human guards had scattered into the darkened streets and alleyways when they'd seen us coming. Only a few were brave enough to fight. Those who were died quickly at the hands of the Church members who had accompanied us into the city, dressed in bones.
I watched the king flee from Seth and I felt nothing. No victory. No sadness. No real emotion either way.
“Please. I'm begging you. Don't do this. I'll give you anything you want.” The king fell to his knees and began begging when he reached the far doors and found Gauge, also clad head to toe in bone, blocking his only possible exit.
I wondered how many people had begged the king to spare their lives over the years. The short, groveling man in front of us was the same man who had ordered Seth put to death by zombie in the city's west corridor. It was hard to feel much sympathy for a man who had spent decades executing children and cannibalizing his people.
“We don't need your help,” Seth had said.
“I'll give you money. Gold. Women. Power.” The king knelt on his scrawny knees and offered Seth all the riches that the city had to offer if he would only let him go.
The blade of the broadsword came down quick and smoothly. The king's lips were still moving as his head came free of his neck and rolled across the cool marble floor.
I'd thought his death might help bring me peace, but the truth was that nothing could make up for the loss of my mother or the death of my innocence.
Gauge and Seth took over the king's palace as their own. The two of them spent the next month leading clean-up parties through the city. Their focus was on removing zombies and zombie bits and pieces from the streets, but they also brought food to the injured and helped rebuild homes that had been destroyed during the battle. The people of Ra Shet seemed grateful for both the help and the protection the Church of Chaos offered.
Gauge's theory about the number of people who were actually Changed within the city walls proved to be highly accurate. Nearly everyone who had survived the second zombie apocalypse was now a zombie themselves.
We never did catch all the super zombies. A number of them had scattered during the weeks between our discovery of their existence and the day we took the city.
I hoped they'd all quietly rotted to death in the woods, but that might have been too much to pray for. Not that I had any real standard for what was or wasn't an acceptable prayer. The fall of the King had essentially confirmed the validity of the Church of Chaos's prophecies. Seth had saved the city from the flesh brokers and freed the people, though it certainly hadn't come about in the way that he had thought it would. Success was success as far as most people were concerned.
The people of the city would have willingly followed Seth as their leader, but Gauge wound up taking control because Seth didn't want to lead anymore. Seth wanted his freedom from the Church, its prophecies and the responsibility of leadership.
Truth be told, I was ready for some freedom myself.
Epilogue
Three weeks after the city fell, Seth and I took Gauge's Jeep on a month long trek to the ocean. The blue green waters were more beautiful than anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.
We set ourselves up in a little beach house with a porch that looks out over the water. Seth found a collection of fishing poles in the garage of the house. He's determined to catch one of those hundred pound fish his father told him about.
We've been here for almost two months and we haven't seen a single zombie.
“Do you think there are any humans left on Earth?” I asked him as we sat on the porch of our little house and watched the sun sink into the horizon in a burst of orange and pink.
“Does it matter?” Seth asked. He was stretched out lazily in a hammock. My head was resting on his chest.
“Kind of. If all the humans are dead or turned into zombies then we failed, didn't we?”
“We survived.” Seth save me a lazy smile. “And that's all that matters. At least until the next monster comes along and eats us.”
“That's not very comforting,” I said.
“It wasn't supposed to be. Relax and enjoy the day, Pilar. I promise you that we'll always be able to find plenty of monsters to haunt our tomorrows.”
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