The Dead Rise

by David Thompson

  "By a flamer?" Chris' laugh sounded more like a giggle, or perhaps a titter. He held up his left hand and a flash of flame erupted from his fingertips. "Don't worry, the irony isn't lost on me. I mean, bad enough that this horrible disaster hits, everyone I know dies, and leaves me to fend for myself, but I get a superpower that just happens to validate every joke I used to hear whispered behind my back? Just great."

  "At least you're taking it well," Tanya said with a hopeful smile. She was inching closer to Jeremy, feeling a territorial need to draw a metaphorical line in the sand and make it clear that he belonged to her. Her efforts were for naught, because Chris didn't even seem to notice her presence.

  "Have you seen any other -"

  "People with superpowers?" Chris cut Tanya off mid-sentence. "No. You three are the first I've seen. I guess it means that at least I'm not a complete freak. Well, I guess it really only means that I'm a freak in the company of other freaks."

  "Not quite what I meant," Tanya's retort was tinged with bitterness. "Survivors. Have you seen any other survivors?"

  "Not today," Chris' overly cheerful mood suddenly deflated. "Not since...I don't know. Late last night, maybe. It doesn't sound like a long time, but the last three days have felt like decades. Last night...may as well have been another lifetime ago."

  "I think we need to stay together," Jeremy said. "It can't be a coincidence that we just happened to bump into each other here. What are the chances that four people with superpowers just happen to find themselves together in the middle of..." He couldn't quite finish the sentence - not because he didn't want to, but because he realized that he couldn't think of any words that would adequately describe the situation they found themselves in.

  "An apocalypse?" Chris offered helpfully. His high spirits were returning quickly.

  "I suppose that's as good a word as any," Jeremy admitted. "We're on our way to the Legislature. I hear there's been a base established there; sounds like it's our best chance for both protection, and maybe evacuation to somewhere safe."

  "There's nowhere safe from this," Luna grumbled.

  "Sweetie," Chris said to Jeremy, oblivious to Luna's complaint, "I'd get behind you and follow you to the depths of hell."

  Having been raised in a small town without any real exposure to gay men, Jeremy wasn't sure how to react to Chris' gentle flirtation. Back in Estevan, when life had been good and safe, the normal response would have been to lash out, to mock Chris for being different, and then either ignore him or torment him. In retrospect, he realized acting like that had been childish and idiotic. Now that such foolish behaviour was so obviously self-destructive, he realized he needed to set aside the small-town prejudices that had been bred by lack of exposure to anything outside of an idyllic small-town life. He smiled at Chris.

  "I hope you're serious," he said. "Considering what we've been through so far, 'hell' may not be a bad way to describe what we're likely to encounter."

  Chapter 7

  Day 5 – 21:00:00 CST

  Downtown Regina

  Following the violent confrontation where they had met their newest companion, the group was able to resume progress towards their destination, making their way slowly but surely westbound down Victoria Avenue's cramped streets, sticking to what little cover they could safely find, and sound found themselves within sight of the next landmark in their trek towards the Legislature - the intersection of Victoria Avenue and Broad Street, one of the city's two main north/south arteries. Towering hotels stood watch over the north-east and north-west corners of the intersection, and a 12-story black glass-and-steel office building stood over the south-east corner. The south-west corner of the intersection was occupied by a parking lot and a large billboard. The billboard had once hosted an advertisement for a local clothing store, showcasing an attractive young model showing off her stylish clothing. Somebody had spray-painted black X's over the young woman's eyes, and the motto "TOO LATE FOR US" across the body of the billboard. A shiver ran down Jeremy's spine, only partly brought on by the cold night air.

  The intersection itself was eerily empty; it had always been one of the busier parts of the city, bustling with life and the roar of traffic and bleating horns. The horns were silent now, and no engines could be heard anywhere. Compared to the highway leading in to the city, there were comparatively few cars in the road in the blocks surrounding the intersection, leaving nothing to block the cold breeze that howled through the nearby downtown core with a terrible moan.

  He had barely taken a dozen steps into the intersection when Jeremy stopped cold in his tracks. He held up his hand, signalling the others to stop - Tanya and Luna did so immediately, but Chris had been walking several steps in front of Jeremy (despite his earlier flirtatious promise to stay behind him), and it took a few seconds before he realized that he could no longer hear footsteps echoing behind him. He turned to see what the matter was, opening his mouth to ask why Jeremy had stopped, but was silenced by the intensity with which Jeremy shook his head, demanding silence. He cocked his head, and listened to hear something, anything over the distant howling of the wind. At first he heard nothing; it took great concentration before he could finally hear a very distant clip-clop sound. Glancing around, he couldn't find the source of the noise, and he shrugged at Jeremy.

  "Probably nothing," he said dismissively. "Let's get going."

  The sound rose sharply in volume, turning into the distinctive clattering of horse's hooves coming from the north. As the foursome turned to face the sound, they could see a form on horseback in the distance, galloping towards them with terrible speed. As the distant horseman passed beneath streetlights on the way towards the group, the orangeish-white glows flickered and died, preventing them from catching a good look at the horseman until he was nearly upon them. By the time the rider was a block away, they could see that he rode a pale grey horse and robes; a hood obscured his face, but there was no mistaking that he held a sword in his left hand. The blade glittered and flashed in the flickering lights as he approached, showing no signs of slowing as he neared. The pale horse cried out as the rider descended upon the group; the sound was less like a horse and more like the cry of a ravenous predator swooping down upon its prey. Jeremy was the closest to the rider, having pushed Tanya away at his approach. He twisted and jumped backwards to escape the ancient pitted blade that the rider swung towards him, but was too slow. Time slowed down as the blade descended towards him, arcing in a deadly motion that would tear through his neck and shoulder and bury the blade into his chest, but as the deadly instrument drew so close to his flesh that he could sense the warmth being sucked out of the air in its vicinity, his body lost all cohesion. With a puff, his entire form dissolved into the air, and the blade whistled angrily through the spot where Jeremy had stood. The horseman roared in rage, his momentum carrying him on past the rest of the group as he pulled on his horse's reigns and attempted to turn the beast around.

  With an audible whoosh, Jeremy's body rematerialized back where it had been standing. Rather than fear, Jeremy's face was a mask of bemusement and violence as he sneered at the rider, who had now turned around and was bearing down on the group again. Focusing himself on a point in space directly in front of the rider's mount, he thrust his arms outward, fingers flared. A burst of telekinetic energy erupted from his palms, vibrating and so powerful that it visibly shimmered in the air as it lanced out and smashed into the head of the horse-beast. A shock wave burst outward at the point of impact, rupturing the pavement with its force; the creature reeled, shook, and collapsed from the powerful impact, throwing the rider through the air. Any elation he might have felt at the blow was quickly lost as the rider slammed into the pavement, driving its shoulder down with inhuman force, bouncing itself into the air, and landed on its feet with supernatural grace. The rider's hood had fallen back, revealing a greyish-white skull beneath; its mouth was filled with teeth that had been filed down to razor-sharp points, and burning red globes of malice hovered in its
eye sockets. It still brandished its sword in its left hand, having never dropped the weapon despite the fall.

  Jets of flame were loosed upon the rider from its left; Michael cackled as he unleashed the firestorm upon the creature. At the same time, waves of frost filled the air, pulsing and churning from Luna's position. The cold cracked and shattered bones on the rider's right side, even as Michael's assault seared and scorched its left. The two attacks met in the middle, fire and ice combining to form clouds of superheated water vapour which immediately began wearing down the creature's skull. Tanya hurled a human-sized chunk of concrete, torn from the road by Jeremy's assault on the rider's horse, and struck the rider in the back, knocking him to the ground. A lashing tentacle of force extended from Jeremy's right hand, grappling at the hilt of the rider's weapon, trying to pry it free from the unearthly creature's grip. Shaking off the devastating blows that had already been rained down upon it, the rider rose to its feet again, wrenching the sword to shake free Jeremy's telekinetic grip, and swinging the blade at the tentacle of force, as if trying to sever it. The blade crashed against the telekinetic limb with a clang, as if it had struck a solid object. Jeremy reeled from the force of the blow, but quickly adapted, wielding the telekinetic limb as a sword of his own; steel crashed against shimmering air in a rapid-fire flurry of parries and thrusts. Although there was no denying the superior skill of the rider, it suffered from its inability to see Jeremy's telekinetic limb, and the rigid sword found no easy purchase against the agile, writhing tendril of force. As the rider delivered a powerful overhead blow down against the telekinetic limb, Jeremy twisted and wrapped the force-tendril around the blade and pulled sharply. The movement took the rider by surprise, and the weapon was torn from its hands. The situation took a turn for the better as Jeremy's telekinetic limb wielded the rider's blade as its own, hacking and slashing at the rider as it attempted to escape the weapon's keen edge. The rider's unnatural speed and agility proved no match against its own weapon, however, and the blade finally struck home, cleaving down through the rider's skull as if it were no more substantial than papier-mache. The creature crumbled and collapsed into a heap, its body dissolving into a faint grey powder around the blade, which clattered to the ground atop the corpse. The rider's horse, still unmoving on the pavement, also dissolved into nothingness, and after a brief gust of wind blew the powered corpses away, all that remained was the mysterious rider's sword.

  It was with great caution that Jeremy approached the sword. Michael stood by his right side, and Tanya his left, while Luna lurked in the background, unwilling to approach the weapon. After a gentle nudge with his foot did nothing except move the sword slightly, he reached down and grabbed the hilt of the weapon in both hands. He lifted it gently, holding it out in front of him at arm's length, tip pointed towards the sky. The blade, despite having shone in the streetlights during the attack, was made of some sort of ancient, dull steel, pitted with countless black marks. Despite the obvious age of the weapon, it held a viciously sharp edge, and tapered down to an elaborately decorated hilt scrawled with runes that Jeremy did not recognize.

  "What was that thing?" Michael's voice barely rose to a whisper. His face was ashen grey, and he trembled slightly in the wake of the adrenaline rush the fight had provided.

  "I don't know," Jeremy's voice was also a whisper, but one of reverence for the weapon in front of him. He couldn't take his eyes away from the way that the remaining streetlights glinted and sparkled against what seemed to be a dull blade.

  "I do," Tanya muttered.

  "Don't be afraid to chime in," Michael implored her. "I'd like to at least know what just about killed me."

  "When the Lamb opened the fourth seal," Tanya recited, drawing a measure of steadiness from the rote recitation, "I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, 'Come!' I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him."

  "Let me guess," Jeremy said with a sideways glance, "Revelations?"

  "Good guess, for a heathen," Tanya's laugh was the first positive sound she'd made in far too long. "More specifically, a passage discussing one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse - Death."

  "This is usually the part where I'd made a sarcastic joke or snort derisively," Jeremy said seriously, "but considering that I just had a telekinetic sword fight with a horse-riding corpse that survived a hammering by fire, ice, and a pretty damned big piece of pavement, I have to say..." His voice trailed off thoughtfully.

  "You have to say what? Don't leave me hanging," Michael gave Jeremy a playful shove that broke his reverie.

  "I...not sure where I was going with that. But hey, I just got a brainwave. Does anyone else think it's a coincidence that these superpowers the four of us have developed are elemental?"

  "What?" Tanya and Michael were both confused.

  "Well," Jeremy said, pointing to Michael, "Fire is pretty obvious, right? Then water," he gestured at Luna, "and Tanya's strength and durability can only be earth. And me...well, what's telekinesis but control over the air?"

  "I'm confused," Luna spoke up. "She says that thing was one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Christian beliefs, right? Elementalism isn't Christian - it belongs to much older traditions than that. Indigenous cultures all over the world have venerated the elements...so are we in some Christian apocalypse, or some crazy elemental nightmare?"

  "Can't it be both?" Jeremy lowered the sword to his side, turning his attention on his companions. "I'm not much of a philosopher, but I've never been much for religion, either. I've always had this feeling deep down that everyone has things just a little wrong...but that doesn't mean that they couldn't have some parts right, too."

  "So you're saying," Tanya said slowly, "that the apocalypse revelation talked about is happening now?"

  "Well, yes," Jeremy said, then shook his head. "And no, too. Think of it like this - some holy man in a bronze-age tribal society has grown up hearing the stories and myths of his ancestors and contemplating them, and working what he calls magic around them. Suppose he suddenly has a breakthrough - smashes through whatever boundaries we call reality surround us with, and force us down to this existence with. He gets a quick glimpse at the universe as it really is - but not enough to understand it all. What's he going to do with what he saw? It'll be incorporated into his existing set of beliefs - he'll add some things, and take out others that don't fit nicely with what he already believes. So yeah, maybe someone once had a...I don't know, a vision, an experience, whatever you want to call it. Something that showed him that there was something that would eventually swallow up all life on earth. And maybe, just maybe, whatever he saw was an army of undead being lead by a skeletal horseman...one of several. He'd tell that story to his fellow tribesmen, who would tell it to their children, who would pass it on to their own children, until it eventually got written down, translated, re-translated, interpreted...and eventually you end up with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

  "I guess what I'm really saying is that maybe what we're witnessing is actually the end of the world - but the real end of the world, not the one we've heard told over and over again by people who didn't understand what they were seeing. Something distinct from human religion. And maybe elementalism ties in to it - hell, I don't think it could be a coincidence that we're imbued with some sort of elemental power, fighting against an encroaching chaos that threatens to engulf us. Seems more symbolic than anything - the constituent parts of Earth fighting back against that which would destroy it."

  "Not that I don't appreciate the opportunity for heady philosophical debate," Michael said with an impish grin, "but we did just about get cut in half by something - whatever you choose to call it. Maybe we could adjourn the conversation to somewhere a little more comfortable?"

  "You have any suggestions?" Jeremy asked. "I'm afraid none of us are all that familiar with the city."

  "There's a bar nearby," Michael tilted his head. Two blocks down t
he road, Jeremy could make out the flickering glow of a rainbow-coloured sign that Michael was indicating. "It's not much, but it'll be quiet, and should be safe."

  "Should be safe?" Luna emphasized the word "should".

  "It's been keeping me safe since all this trouble started," Michael said with a shrug, "except for my little foraging run that ended in...well, zombies. And if you want to get technical, it's really been keeping me safe since I turned legal age, but that’s a story for another time."

  The group scurried to the doors of the bar in silence. Once they reached the front door, Michael pulled a ring of keys from his pocked and unlocked the door. Once the group had ducked inside, he locked the door behind them, then lead them inside. A darkened coat-check area had been converted into a makeshift barricade, with tables pressed up against the stained-glass windows that kept what was obviously once a gay bar private. Michael slid another table in front of the front door, bracing it against a chair that he pushed up against the wall, wedging them together tightly. Beyond the coat-check and foyer, stairs lead upstairs and downstairs - the downstairs was blocked off by closed doors, and Michael lead them upstairs. In the dim lighting of the bar, they could make out a dance floor on their left, which they bypassed as they made their way into a lounge just beyond. The lights inside were on, providing a dim light throughout the lounge. The building had obviously been rundown but well-cared for before the entire world had fallen apart, and it was obvious that Michael had converted it into his own personal living space - the tables had been cleared and pushed to the side, barricading a set of glass double-doors leading to an outdoor patio in the rear of the building.

  “Alright, ladies and gent, welcome to my humble abode. I’ve got drinks and...well, beef jerky and potato chips are about all the food I have left.” Michael tossed a few bags on the counter. Jeremy and Tanya tore into them, while Luna held back.