“Not exactly a feast,” she said with a smirk.
“If you’d rather head out to the grocery store and pick up some supplies, I’m sure they’d be happy to help - oh, wait. No, they wouldn’t, because everybody is dead! I scavenged what I could from the convenience store down the street, but it’s not like we can reasonably expect to have gourmet cuisine at our disposal, given the circumstances.”
“This used to be a gay bar, wasn’t it?” Luna’s voice had taken a subtle edge.
“Yes,” Michael said. “Is that a problem for you?”
“Maybe it is,” Luna said, her upper lip curling into a slight sneer. “What makes you think that I want to be counting on a den of faggotry to be a safe haven?”
“Luna!” Tanya broke the stunned silence. “Michael has taken us in to his home, shared his food, and offered us shelter for the first time in days. His personal preferences are a matter between him and the Lord, and nobody else. You may not like them, but please - accept his help with us..”
“Not sure where you’ve been for the last few days, girl,” Luna spat, “but the Lord isn’t exactly helping us out here, either. If we want to keep ourselves safe, we need to rely on ourselves, and that means we need to trust each other. You two I think I can trust. This one? I don’t know.”
A bottle of rum floated down from a shelf full of liquor behind the bar, coming to rest on the table nearest to Luna. Although obviously guided by Jeremy, his attention wasn’t on her - it was focused on the blade he cradled in his hands. When he spoke, his voice rang with an authority unlike any he had ever wielded before, surprising even himself.
“All of you, stop it. I don’t care what your personal feelings are right now, but they’re not helping the situation. If you need a reality check, I’m happy to provide it. We’re in the middle of an undead city, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of zombies, in a landscape which has been changing before our very eyes, and where the undead are only half as strange as the other things we’ve seen, including one of the goddamned horsemen of the apocalypse. If you want to step outside and shed yourself of the burden of being around a gay man, you go ahead and do it, but don’t expect to live long. My suggestion is that you relax, take a seat, and have a drink. We should be able to wait out the night here, and in the morning we’ll try to get to the Army base. It’s our best shot at survival.”
With a snarl, Luna picked up the bottle of rum. Spiderwebs of frost spread outwards from where her fingers gripped the glass bottle, and she took a swig, grimacing as it went down. She took a seat with her back to the wall, keeping a careful eye on Michael, but not stirring up any more trouble.
The sheer level of attention which Jeremy was paying to the sword in his hands brought both Michael and Tanya by his side to assist him. He placed the sword on the counter, and carefully traced several of the complex runes on the blade with the tip of his finger.
“Are you really sure you should be playing with that?” Tanya’s voice trembled slightly. She was obviously unnerved by the presence of the artifact. “Are you even sure you should have taken it?”
“Yes, and yes,” Jeremy said, the corners of his mouth wrinkling upwards in the hint of a smile. “You can’t tell me that you didn’t hear it - that you didn’t feel it.”
“Hear what?” Michael and Tanya asked in unison.
“The sword,” Jeremy said, closing his eyes and letting his fingertips dance over the runic impressions. “It has a voice. It called to me.”
“And what did it say?” Michael was suddenly serious.
“The words...I didn’t understand them. They were in a language unlike anything I’d ever heard before - like music heard from a great distance.”
“What did it sound like?” Tanya asked.
“I'm not sure I can pronounce them, either,” he said with a laugh. He took a deep breath. “But I'll try,” the words that followed tumbled clumsily from his mouth like a toddler trying to imitate its parents' speech. Even his fumbled pronunciations and stuttered guttural attempts at pronunciation carried an air of familiarity to Tanya. She recognized slight bits and pieces of a language, and in much the same way that she could differentiate between Mandarin and Japanese based on the vocalizations, even without speaking either language, she could also place the language that he spoke.
“I've heard that somewhere before – one of my Bible Studies classes. It's called Enochian. The speech of angels,” Tanya whispered. She placed her hand gently on Jeremy’s shoulder. “Fallen angels in this case, most likely. Jeremy, I know that you don’t believe the things that I do, and that’s fine, but please listen to me: we need to get rid of this sword, before it brings down evil upon us.”
With an impossibly practiced ease, Jeremy hefted the sword and flicked it about in his hands, pulling away from Tanya and spinning it around like a martial artist with skill beyond his years. With a deft twist, he pulled the tip of the blade across the back of a chair, and the chair split apart with a whispered whoosh. He stopped his movements and looked at Tanya.
“This may not be what you want to hear,” he said, his voice distant and still, “but we’ve had evil brought down upon us already. We can run, and we can hide, and we can force our way through the crowds of undead here and there, and we can live to fight another day, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t already face-to-face with evil. This thing is a weapon - and if what you believe is really true, it’s the sword of Death himself. That seems like a useful tool to have at our disposal.”
“Well...” Tanya sighed. Try as she might, she knew that she couldn’t win this battle, and that Jeremy had a point. “OK. But please, do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise me that if you start hearing that thing talking to you again, that if it’s telling you to do anything that would harm any of us, or that it’s going to hurt us, you’re going to throw it away and forget that it ever existed.”
Jeremy considered her request and nodded. “That seems like a fair deal.”
“We’re all going to die,” Luna muttered as she took another swig from her bottle of rum.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” Michael exclaimed, popping open a can of beer and slamming his head back to take a deep draught. He then reached behind the bar and hit an unseen button. The thumping bass of dance music reverberated from the nearby dance floor.
“We’re definitely going to die,” Luna muttered.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Won’t the sound draw a little too much attention to us?” Tanya was smiling at Michael’s enthusiasm, despite her reluctance to actually play along.
“I don’t really care,” Michael said with a crazed laugh. “What are they going to do, break in here? Not like that wouldn’t be totally obvious, and it’s not like we can’t defend ourselves. Besides, I’m not sure about the rest of you, but if I don’t let loose and relax for at least a few minutes, I’m going to go totally crazy, and I don’t think that’d be a whole lot better than being dead. Better to be a corpse that lived his life in the way he chose than to be a cowering, shrivelled shell of a man clinging to his life desperately, begging for it not to be taken, even if all he gets to feel is fear and the icy hand of death hovering just over his shoulder.”
Jeremy and Tanya exchanged doubtful looks, but eventually shrugged and followed Michael to the dance floor. It didn’t take long for Luna to follow, grumbling and muttering, and bringing her bottle of rum along with her.
Although Jeremy had suspected that allowing himself to relax enough to enjoy the moment was going to be difficult, he found that the energy in the room changed drastically once they stepped on to the dance floor. Realizing the he was still carrying Death’s sword, he instinctively plunged the blade into a wall; the unknown metal of the weapon tore through the wooden wall with ease, embedding itself with all the effort of a dart slamming into a cork-board. With his burden released, Jeremy felt the thump-thump-thump of the music coursing through his veins, and began to
dance. He had never been much of a dancer, only awkwardly shuffling around at school dances the rare times that he was able to put together the courage to ask someone to dance. It was a great surprise to both himself and Tanya then, when he began to leap and bob and twist with a grace that seemed almost superhuman. Michael needed no invitation to join in, and even Tanya began to let herself loose, spinning around the dance floor with a grin on her face. The pent-up frustrations and fear of the past few days were gone, leaving only three young people free to flow and move in a beautiful and expressive symphony of limbs and sweat. Although she did not join in the dancing, even Luna couldn’t help but crack a smile as she watched her companions let go of their troubles and dive into the music.
So entranced in the music were the entire group that they wouldn’t have had any chance of noticing a disturbing turn of events, even if they’d been at a vantage point where it was visible. In the lounge, peering between gaps in the tables stacked against the walls which barricaded the patio, was a pale, gaunt face that stared through the opening not with mindless dead eyes, but with burning pits of malevolent energy that pierced the material shell of the building to glare hungrily at the living souls inside. A long, bony finger tapped at the glass, cracking and popping it until a small hole was open; the baleful apparition began to lose its shape and material form, dissolving into a sickly yellowish vapour that flowed up and through the open hole in the door. As the vapour swirled and took form inside, all of the food - heavily preserved and dried though it was - crumpled and shrank; beef jerky turned black spotted with white mold, and the liquid in the bottles around the bar evaporated, leaving behind a spoiled and rotten scent.
On the dance floor, other unforeseen events were happening. While the young men and woman danced, and Luna looked on, the runic engravings on Death’s sword began to glow with a gentle blue outline, pulsing softly in time with the music. The flashing of the runes grew in intensity until, as Jeremy leaped past the sword in a frenzied dance, a blue-white bolt of electricity jumped from the pommel of the blade, fueled by smaller sparks and flashes of power that crackled from the blade’s runes to the pommel. The force of the discharge lifted Jeremy off the ground, suspending him in mid-air, frozen in place and howling in pain. Michael fumbled at a control panel in the corner to silence the music, while Tanya fought the urge to grab Jeremy and pull him away from the blade.
“We have to do something!” She was almost in tears, her joy having melted away as quickly as it formed.
“What? If we touch him, it could kill us - or him!” Michael was just as panicked as her. Luna remained silent in her corner of the room.
The energetic discharged lasted for a matter of seconds that felt like an eternity. When it ceased, Jeremy dropped to the ground, gasping for breath, and Death’s sword was nowhere to be seen. As Michael and Tanya rolled him over onto his back, they saw thin, spidery lines of script running up from his wrists and disappearing below his shirt sleeves.
“He...he didn’t have tattoos before, did he?” Michael was certain he would have noticed ink as prominent as this.
“No, nothing. He’s too young for tattoos - but what...” Tanya’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t finish the sentence. In a flash, all of the joy and elation that had filled her heart had vanished, replaced by a cold uncertainty that gnawed at the pit of her stomach.
“It’s OK,” Jeremy rasped, still gasping frantically for more air. He pushed himself to his knees, and with the help of his friends, pulled himself up to his feet. He wobbled dangerously, but did not collapse when they let go. “It was...I don’t know how to explain it. The sword...became part of me.”
“I knew you should have never taken that thing,” Tanya said.
“I knew I should have brought another bottle,” Luna spoke up from the corner. She tilted the bottle upside-down, but not even a drop spilled out. “Guess I need a refill.”
“Yeah, you go help yourself, honey,” Michael dismissively waved his hand at her. “Don’t worry at all about your friend just about getting electrocuted to death by a magical sword. No, alcohol is much more important.”
As she staggered out of the room, Luna extended her middle finger, flashing the gesture behind her head at Michael as she headed to the bar. She had only taken one step outside of the room when she slowly backed in again, her face pale and her body trembling.
“Um, guys?”
“A little busy right now,” Michael turned his back to Luna, and stepping so that he was positioned between her and Jeremy. “Are you sure you’re OK, big guy?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he said with a weak smile.
“None of us are going to be fine,” Luna’s voice quivered fearfully. She was continuing to creep backwards, her gaze never leaving the doorway, until she stood beside her three companions.
“Bitch, what are you talking about?” Michael whirled to face the doorway and see what had startled Luna so much. He wasn’t prepared for the sight of a lean, almost skeletal, seven foot tall creature gliding in the doorway, its head scraping against the top of the opening. In its hand was a scale made of gold, and its thin lips were stretched out into a gruesome mockery of a smile. When it spoke, its voice rang with echoes of distant cries and whipping winds; it stunk of ruin and starvation and decay.
“Behold the living,” it spoke, its horrific voice sending shivers down Jeremy’s spine. “Your efforts have been weighed, and you have been judged, and your sentence shall be delivered. Your greed has consumed you, filled your bellies with bounties you do not deserve, and elevated those who should have been ground to the dust. I have come to claim repayment.”
“Famine,” Tanya whispered, mesmerized and unable to move.
“And who are you to judge?” Jeremy’s voice was suddenly much stronger than before, and he stepped out in front of his companions to confront the Horseman.
“You know who I am,” the Horseman replied, staring at Tanya with an intensity that weakened her knees. “She has told you.”
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Jeremy said, snapping his fingers to draw Famine’s attention. It worked, and the creature’s unsettling gaze turned towards him. He turned his forearms outward so that the spindly script imprinted upon them was clearly visible to the Horseman. “You see, I’m not inclined to take threats from you, or anyone else. I do not recognize your authority, Horseman. If you value your existence, I suggest you depart.”
Famine roared, and with a flick of a skeletal wrist, a blast of greenish-yellow light flew across the room and enveloped Jeremy, expelling all of the air from his lungs and causing him to hack and cough uncontrollably.
“Foolish child,” the Horseman’s voice rose, finally betraying a hint of a human emotion - anger. “Your death will be slow and painful.”
From behind Jeremy, a jet of flame flashed outward from Michael’s outstretch palm, searing the air and washing over the Horseman in an angry blaze. His action spurred on Luna, who released a plume of ice in the Horseman’s direction; the ice and flame collided, forming a column of superheated steam where the Horseman stood, and Tanya reached for the only weapon she could find - a nearby bar stool, which she flung at Famine with all her might. The assault caused the gaunt figure to reel backwards, stumbling and flailing to regain his balance; this in turn caused the nauseating vapour surrounding Jeremy to disperse, freeing him to breathe normally again. An instinct that he couldn’t explain kicked in, and he propelled himself through the air towards the Horseman with a shove of telekinetic force; as he arced downward towards the imposing creature, a pair of blades appeared in his hands, shimmering into existence out of nothingness in a silvery flash of light. Each blade bore a startling similarity to Death’s sword, and the weapons tore through Famine’s skin like paper, slicing through brittle bones as if they weren’t even there, and splashing black ichor across the wall.
A cold wind blew through the room, keening as if mourning the loss of its master, and Famine’s body faded to dust, which swirled and vanishe
d, leaving behind only the golden scale. Jeremy kicked it cautiously with his foot, and breathed a sigh of relief when nothing happened. The blades in his hands vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared.
“Well, that was...interesting,” he said.
“That’s an understatement,” Luna said with a shrill laugh. The encountered had served to sober her up, although she was more than a little shaken by the sudden turn of events.
“How many more of those things are there?” Michael nudged Tanya’s shoulder. She didn’t respond at first; her gaze was drawn to the golden scales, her eyes locked on them in rapt fascination. When Michael nudged her shoulder again, her reverie broke, and she shook her head.
“Two more. War and Pestilence. Do the rest of you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Jeremy took Tanya’s arm and gently guided her to a seat.
“That voice. It’s saying...I don’t know, but it seems important.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Michael offered. Jeremy and Luna murmured their assent.
“It sounds like what I heard when Death was defeated,” Jeremy said, brushing a stray lock of hair from Tanya’s cheek and looking her in the eyes. “Do you think it wants you to do something? Something with that scale?”
“Yes,” Tanya’s voice was faint and distant, as if she was fighting the urge to give in to what the unheard voice was asking of her. “I think...I think I need to take it.”
Cautiously, Jeremy leaned down and picked up the scale from the ground. Given its small size, it was astoundingly heavy - so much so that he had to use both hands and all his strength just to lift it. When Tanya plucked it from his hands, it was as if she didn’t feel the weight at all. She held the instrument on her lap, staring at it, running her fingers across it as if she hoped to unlock its mysteries. Unlike Death’s sword, there were no markings, no runes, no ancient script - the golden surface of the scale was simply dull and flat, unmarred by any kind of imagery. As she turned the scale over to examine the reverse side, it seemed to lose its consistency, as if it was made of wax melting in hot sunshine. The metal bent and drooped, then melted entirely, turning into a golden viscous liquid that slid down her hands and forearms, and slipped below her shirt. In the blink of an eye, she was clawing at her skin and gasping for breath; Michael and Jeremy both tried to hold her and get a better idea of what was happening, but her thrashing knocked them both to the side like chaff in the wind. As her throes reached their peak, Tanya fell to her knees and cried out, slamming her fist to the ground in pain. The blow caused the floor to buckle and bend, though it did not break. Finally the pain and thrashing subsided, leaving her curled up in the fetal position on the floor, sobbing and gasping for breath. Jeremy knelt down beside her.
The Dead Rise Page 15