Feeling too revealed, Mercer started up the ladder, thanking Old Wren again as he did so. The old man wistfully ran his arthritic fingers over the words inscribed upon the wall as he watched Mercer go: FEMA fallout shelter model V0211. It was the name those in the long ago had given to the underground chambers in the time before the Great Dying. It was one of five in the Broke Tooth Hills that the Black Wings traveled between and built their longhouses around. Taking refuge in the chamber was how Elon and the ancestors had survived after the black blood from the earth had run dry and fire had fallen from the sky. Would it protect his people again when war came to the Green Lands? Had he done the Black Wings a disservice by pulling them away from the warrior’s life? He was too tired, too old to pretend he knew the answers to these questions. Things would play out as Elon and the ancestors willed it.
As Wren made his way to the ladder, he wondered if he had been too hard on the young man. No, he decided. Mercer was strong. The young man had to be, having lost so much. He just hoped the combined strength of these three new companions was enough to divert the oncoming waves of men and killim about to crash on the Green Lands.
Interlude
HE CALLED HIMSELF PLAGUEWIND and his powers were great and strange. The poison wind that cut through the Blight heeded his every command, as did the corpses that wandered the sands, hungry for human flesh. There were so many of them, more than the stars in the sky, more than the old gods, and he was sending them all north, his children, to the only fertile swath of land left on the entire dead world. They were the inheritors, the future, and he was their shepherd.
The same radioactive waste that had killed the land for hundreds of eye-spans around had also preserved the millions of dead beneath its orange sand; though it had twisted them like fruits or fungi in the sun, it likewise also saved them from decay. An endless variety of his children could be called from the ground, matrons, soldiers, stewards, their bodies in assorted states of blanch and bloat, all ready to do his bidding.
He wore a cloak around his body, his armor against the sun. He had been a cosmologist once, many years ago, and because of that knew the melanin in his skin had completely dried up. Even the sun’s lightest touch was enough to make to make the pus run like lava from his erupting blisters. Tumors of varying sizes lined his body, some forming on the backs of others like albino frogs playing piggyback.
In the beginning, when his body had started to change, he had tried to cut the growths out with knife or scalpel, but had quickly given up in the face of their persistent metastisizing. Thus, not only was his body malformed and sickly pale, but also scarred with gashes and crosses. His disgust with his transformation gradually shifted into acceptance, then glowing approval. He found it appropriate that he now resembled his children, and knew that the gifts he had been given were so much greater than what had been taken from him.
The zombie-tongue: it had given him such power, power he couldn’t begin to fathom in his old life. Godwin had barely grazed the surface of what was possible with the rare ability, had left so much for Plaguewind to play with in the decades since his failed war.
A century and a half since the Time of the Great Dying had reduced most structures in the Blight to dust, yet somehow the crooked house still stood. One of its outer walls had completely fallen away, and its siding was the same dull orange as the sand; it had become one with the Blight, as petulant and poisonous as the wasted soil it stood upon. It was in the basement of this crooked house that Plaguewind sat in a nest of dirty linen and plastic sheets, waiting in the cold and dark for the emissary from Revelation Island to arrive.
Revelation Island was off the coast of the Blight, a half a day’s journey by boat from the mainland. It was far enough to be immune from the radiation that seeped into every rock and twisted blade of grass that grew from the Blight’s depleted soil, but close enough for the Church’s religious fervor surrounding the end of days to remain hot. The Church of the Bleeding Christ, the sole occupants of Revelation Island, saw the Blight’s long dead landscape as justification for their beliefs, as proof that their god had an unsatiated thirst for retribution against humanity. It was this same religious zeal which had made them reach out to Plaguewind. To fulfill their prophecies, they needed him and his strange powers.
Come late afternoon, Plaguewind limped up the basement stairs on his bloated legs and waited by the front door to the house. He knew the apostle would be arriving shortly. After a few minutes, through the gaping wall in the side of the house, Plaguewind could see a cloud of dust on the horizon. His children watched it too. He could feel their hunger, their insatiable desire for human meat. Though it pained him to have them so distraught, he kept the tendrils around them tight, kept them from lunging after the man bounding across the blighted plains on the back of his motorbike. The corpses merely gnashed their teeth and clenched their claws while the emissary rode through their thick throng, getting closer and closer to the crooked house.
He wore a dull yellow suit over his entire body. The Apostles knew this land was poisoned and that even the briefest exposure to its air would spell a long and painful death. Despite their belief at being divinely protected in all they did by their god, the Bleeding Christ, they were also a careful lot, surprisingly pragmatic.
The Apostle skidded to a stop outside the house and quickly dismounted from the old motorbike he had ridden the hundred or so eye-spans from the coast. He backed away from the undead which approached him from all sides, an old handgun brandished in his hand. “Get away from me! Help! Help me!”
“They won’t hurt you…” Plaguewind called out, shuffling through the debris and garbage that littered the foyer before the doorway of the old house. The undead all stopped and gazed upon Plaguewind as he approached, as if the deformed man in the cape had just flipped a switch and turned them off. “...though they want nothing more than to tear you limb from limb and suck the marrow from your bones. I’ll keep them from doing so.”
“Plaguewind…” The Apostle said, going to one knee and dropping his head down in reverence. Plaguewind made his way down the stone steps connecting the door to the sand.
“You’re late. You kept me waiting.”
“I’m… I’m sorry. The ruins along the coast are treacherous. There were three of us at the onset. The other two did not make it.”
“A pity.” Plaguewind did not need the Apostle to tell him this. He had been watching, the dark tendrils like what the cosmologists at Ithaca called optic nerves, showing him what his children saw, what they felt, even at vast distances. He had seen how they had assailed the three Apostles in the dead cities by the water’s edge and overwhelmed them with their sheer numbers. He had seen how this man standing before him had left one of his fellows to die, had only revved his throttle harder after his brother had crashed his motorbike and gotten pinned under a pile of rubble. The way the man fell, the undead corpses could only get to his legs, could only eat him slowly. His death had been long, drawn out, and Plaguewind knew that the Apostle standing before him had heard his screams over the revving of his motorbike, and would hear them in his dreams until the end of his days.
Plaguewind could have stopped his children from attacking the men. It was in his power to do so. Why would he, though? He thought it only fair that his loyal army of corpses should eat what they had caught, and if the men couldn’t escape, well… wasn’t that the sort of fate the Church believed in? Inescapable destiny? Damnation for all?
“Did you bring that which I asked for?” Plaguewind asked.
“Of course.” The Apostle reached into his dusty pack and pulled from it a rod about two hands long with a large, black crystal adjoined to its one end. A tinge of ‘lectricity ran through Plaguewind’s body, his bulbous tumors quivering like freshly bloomed flowers in a spring breeze. He couldn’t believe what was before him, what was being given to him so freely.
“The Sceptre of Jai Lin…” Plaguewind whispered. Though the undead still stood still, their vacant gazes
all moved to look upon the dark crystal atop the sceptre in the Apostle’s hands. The noxious wind kicked up, blocking out the sky. “Give it to me.”
The Apostle hesitated for a moment before handing the sceptre over. The hunched-over man felt the sunlight singe his fingers as he wrapped them around the sceptre’s cold metal, an unknown alloy, but he didn’t care. Already, the power was flowing through his body. He could see more dark energy than ever before, could see the dark tendrils reaching past the Blight, through the Borderlands and into the only fecund jewel in what was an otherwise dead crown.
“Is it everything you hoped it would be, Plaguewind?” The Apostle asked, hopeful.
“Everything and more. Thank your masters for me.”
“It will be my honor. You are the prophesied final horseman of the apocalypse, Plaguewind. The Church will do anything for you. Already you’ve led the risen dead to the Green Lands, so that they will consume the blasphemous. Only through you and your actions will the righteous inherit the earth as our prophet foretold when the old cities all burned...”
Plaguewind held a hand up, stopping the Apostle’s diatribe mid-sentence. Gods, did these Apostles like to blab on with their proselytizing nonsense. He’d never met an Apostle from the Church of the Bleeding Christ who was not in love with his own righteousness, and he’d met many in his day. Or at least the man he was before becoming Plaguewind had.
“That will be all,” Plaguewind said. “You may leave me now.” The Apostle seemed taken aback, as if he expected more from his fated meeting with the prophesied final horseman of the Apocalypse. Still, he did as he was bid, and got back up and on his motorbike. Plaguewind watched as the ancient vehicle’s back tire kicked up dirt, the Apostle whipping around and heading back towards the coast. He’d let him get away just far enough, to where the coward would breathe a sigh of relief, thinking he was safe. Then, like a puppeteer, Plaguewind would reach out through the dark tendrils that connected him to all his children, stronger now with the sceptre, and allow them to feast. If the man escaped, so be it; Plaguewind didn’t care one way or another. He got what he wanted. He now had the Sceptre of Jai Lin.
Plaguewind shuffled back into the crooked house and descended the creaky wooden steps that led to its basement. He limped past milk crates of old newspapers and moldering mannequins, to the nest in the farthest, darkest corner of the basement. It was here he could best see the dark tendrils that connected him to all blighted things. Now that he had the sceptre, he could see as far away as Ithaca and the Aderon Mountains and could send his children there. He could command the poison wind to eat away at the Borderlands and make all the fertile land that lay to the north just as barren and cancerous as that which he now resided in. With the sceptre, his power had grown tenfold.
He allowed himself to leave his body and follow the dark tendrils north, to the shuffling, decayed corpses they were connected to. People were dying, the sickness spreading; more of his children were being born than ever before and he held sway over them all.
Ah, but there was one tendril pulling especially hard at him, urging him to follow it. Curious, Plaguewind flew along, lighter than wind and shadow, the tendril’s magnetism growing stronger the further north he went. He passed through the heavily forested Borderlands, vaulted over the Axe Man’s River and went up into the Broke Tooth Hills of the Green Lands. The tendril vibrated with a quake-like intensity as he neared the place where the Mountain Road forked. He was close to the tendril’s source. What dark, blighted thing could have drawn him here so strongly? Though disembodied, Plaguewind still felt a fuzzy lightness, moth wings of anxiety brushing his belly at what he might find.
He almost shouted when he saw what was at the tendril’s other end. Rather than one of his children, there was a young man with the gold eyes of a wolf walking through the Green Lands, two human companions with him, as well as a horse and a dog. On his back was that which the dark tendril was tethered to, that which had pulled on his attention so forcefully. Plaguewind recognized the sword at once. It was the sceptre’s companion, forged in the long ago by warrior monks over a white hot forge. It was what had stopped General Godwin almost three decades prior and the only thing which posed a threat to his takeover of the Green Lands. It was the Sword of Jai Lin, and he wanted it fiercely.
Chapter Five
Lothario
MORNING HAD BEEN IN ITS INFANCY WHEN MERCER, Brook and Solloway left the Black Wings camp, so they were already on the outskirts of Young Poe's Keep by mid-day. They had stopped atop a rise in the road where the forest hugging 23 came to an abrupt end. With the sun having burned off the autumnal morning fog, they now had an unfettered view of the trading town below. Lothario, Solloway’s black Arabian, munched on some high grass while Leo chomped after the beetles which lazily flitted through the air. Their animal companions thus occupied, the three human travelers scanned the buildings for signs of movement, living or otherwise.
“It’s possible that you killed all the undead in Young Poe's Keep,” Solloway said, his eyes squinted and unblinking. “The rest of the town could have survived and fled before you arrived.”
“It’s possible...” Brook said, though she didn’t believe Solloway’s theory for a moment. The killim they had seen the night before were fast and dangerous, and the town-folk of Young Poe's Keep were merchants and tradespeople, not warriors. She, Mercer and Leo had a difficult enough time fighting Young Poe’s killim. The town-folk would not have stood a chance. Plus, they moved with a speed and limberness that belied their only recently having turned.
“Look!” Mercer said, pointing down into the town. “There’s someone down there. What do you think? He sure moves as a dead man would.”
None of them could be sure. The figure was the size of a tick from where they stood, and draped in shadows from the surrounding buildings. It clearly had a limp but could have easily been a person who was hurt.
“There is really only one way to find out,” Solloway said. “We’ll go down there and look for ourselves.” Mercer and Brook agreed. Solloway took Lothario’s reins and they resumed their march to Young Poe's Keep.
The road leveled out when they entered the town. Mercer had Jai Lin drawn, Brook her bow in her hand. Though the thick forest had ended behind them and the sun was blazing, the ruins of old buildings were now crowding the road, and the dead could easily have been hidden in their shadows.
Solloway had his one fist wrapped around Lothario’s reins, the other gripping the handle of a double-bladed axe. Its handle was wood, a gray, sticky tape wrapped around the areas where Solloway regularly held it. No one spoke as they looked for the figure they had seen atop the hill. The silence was so heavy that Lothario’s hooves upon the hard-packed road were like heavy mallets on kettle drums. It was all they heard, in addition to their breathing, until the sound of splintering wood called out to them like a hurt animal in a trap.
The travelers all turned in the direction of the noise, down a side street connected to 23. A building at the far end of the street was the source; more specifically, its large wooden doors, which pulsed in and out, as if the structure was seething at having been discovered. Mercer felt Jai Lin pulling him towards the building. He followed the pull of the sword, Brook and Solloway watching him with curious eyes as he made his way down the street.
“Mercer?” Brook called out, but Mercer didn’t heed her. Jai Lin had a need and he would not deny it, had never done so since taking the sword down from its place above the cold fireplace. He walked faster.
“Wait, boy!” Solloway rasped. He and Brook trotted at a short distance behind Mercer, Lothario and Leo by their respective sides. The tape around Solloway’s axe squealed as he gripped it tighter. “He’s going to get us killed.”
The interiors of the large homes lining the side street were as buckled as an octogenarian under the weight of life, as could be seen through the windows on their still-standing exterior facades. It was as if the homes were too proud to let anyone think that the
sun had set on their days, desperately trying to keep up appearances for the newcomers. Sizable front yards acted like a sea of overgrown shrubs and trees between the dusty road and their brick walls.
Some homes still had their signs hanging outside, rusted plaques with names that ended with the letters “M.D.” or “Phd.” Mercer imagined it had once been a community of the old world’s aristocracy or cosmologists, and that this building at the end of the road, the biggest of all, had been a meeting place of sorts for them. Now the homes all stood empty and in ruin, their windows watching silently as Mercer and the rest made their way down the street.
Mercer suddenly halted. Though Jai Lin was urging him forward, what he saw through the crack between the two great doors of the building ahead made him stop.
“My god…” Mercer said. “Those are…”
“Hands.” Solloway had come up next to him. It had been a long time since the older man had seen the living dead, and even when he had, it had been on the field of battle. He had been wearing the heavy armor of a sprocket knight and was surrounded by his fellow soldiers. Then, he had treated the ravenous corpses as enemy combatants and nothing else. He had tried to not focus on the rotting flesh his axe would cut through or the vacant yellow eyes which had stared at him with a pain and hunger he intuited to be fathomless. It was that same pain and hunger which was now clawing desperately to get out of the building, arms upon arms, their skin peeled back and rotten, and there was nothing he could do to avoid or compartmentalize it.
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 7