“Thank you. I… I must have… broken a vial in my pocket when… when I fell. I’m okay though… My shirt is made of a fireproof material for… for just such an occasion.”
Solloway and Mercer exchanged uncertain looks, both at a loss for words. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Brook asked. Leo trotted up to the cosmologist and began to lick the man’s hands.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine… Oh dear, oh dear, you like how that tastes, do you?” Jompers started to laugh, enjoying Leo’s uninhibited taste for the flammable liquid that now coated Jomper’s fingers in a sticky syrup. “It’s okay. The substance is completely safe to consume, just highly volatile when thrown.”
“Why did you follow us?” Solloway asked, unmoved by the cosmologist’s friendliness.
“I… I thought you were all someone else. You see, I was in Young Poe’s Keep before… before…”
“Before everyone got sick, died and then rose from the dead? Yeah, we saw what happened there. I’m on to you, cosmologist. You nearly blew us all to fish guts when I asked you what happened in that town. We saw that old building with the board and chain across its doors. Someone had to put it there, and I’m thinking that someone was you.”
Jompers searched Solloway’s face for a moment, finding it impossible to gauge the man in the moonlight. What did the soldier think of him? Jompers knew that if he was going to be honest, now was the time. “You’re right. It was me. I put the board and chain across the doors of that hospital. You must understand… they were sick! I stuck with them for close to a week trying to care for them, but, but… there was nothing that could be done. They all had bad blood. I’m… I’m sorry…”
Jompers felt the tears welling up and dropped his gaze, ashamed to look any of the travelers in the eyes. Then he felt a soft hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Brook smiling sadly. “It’s okay,” she said. “You did what you could, I’m sure. You said your name was…”
“Jompers, Jedediah Jompers. And you are?”
“My name is Brook of the Black Wings. The swordsman who saved your life is Mercer Crane, and this barrel of giggles is Master Sergeant Roderick Solloway, from the Fort at Kingston.”
“Ah yes, as I said, I could tell from the moment I first laid eyes on you. You’ve quite a few many medals, Sergeant. And thank you, Mercer Crane, for helping me as you did. I owe you my gratitude. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I am sorry for before, for having almost triggered the explosives.”
“Yeah, well just be glad it didn’t happen. Or my spirit would trade in its time in the Fields of Gold just to follow you around and kick you in the ass for the rest of eternity.”
“I would deserve no less, sergeant. But now, the reason I ran to catch up with you all was because there is…” Jompers was cut off by an audible click that came from further up the path. Everyone turned in the direction of the sound and found Leo, sitting on his hind legs, his tail wagging and his tongue lolling out of his mouth. Underneath his bottom was a thin, silver wire that glowed in the moonlight.
“Oh dear…” Jompers said, just as the hoses he had hidden in the trees began to spew out bilious clouds of green vapor. “Try to hold your breath and run!”
Mercer tried to do as Jompers urged, but there was no getting away. He felt the gas seeping into his pores, his eyes watering as it caressed his entire body with oily fingers. His mind was slipping, the world rapidly breaking apart. A wind buffeted him like the bristles of a broom, quickly sweeping him under the rug of the rational and into a maelstrom of madness.
Chapter Eight
The Apostles
A TORNADO OF DUST, sand and confusion whipped around Brook like a virulent flock of hawks, its appearance sudden, without warning. Just a moment before, she had been on a thin path through poplar and flametip trees, Mercer, Solloway and Leo by her side, as well as the strange cosmologist with the tattoos and yellow skin who called himself Jompers. Where was she now? It was if a storm had just dropped down and whisked her away.
She tried to catch her breath, but the wind would seize it right from her throat and run fast with it away from her. Dust coated her mouth, sand stung her skin. It coated everything with a brown haze, including her senses. She couldn’t string thoughts together, felt like she had left her mind back on the winding road with the men she had been traveling with. She struggled to put things in perspective, to make sense of her thoughts. If she could, perhaps then she’d be able to get out of the dust storm and figure out what was happening, where she was.
A hand grabbed tightly to her arm and she gasped. Just as quickly as she had been swept away from the path, the storm stopped, and she found herself staring into a familiar face.
“Mercer?” She said, finally able to find her voice, her breath. “I… I feel so strange…”
“Me too…” Mercer said. His pupils were dilated and his lips trembling. “I think it was the gas that came out of those hoses. It’s affecting our heads in some weird way… wayyyy...” He held the word out, taken aback by how it sounded. There was a fear in his eyes that Brook had never seen before. “Where are we?”
Now that the dust storm had mysteriously stopped around them, Brook could take in their surroundings. It was like no place she had ever been, though its features seemed taken from one of Old Wren’s stories. Everything was…
“Dead,” Mercer said. “Everything.”
He was right. They were amidst the ruins of an old city, a once thriving metropolis of colossal buildings that had crumbled into rubble. They stood atop a pile of debris, of twisted metal poles and wires, squarish, charred hulks of towers looming over them on all sides in various stages of decay. Everything was the color of dust, of old bone, of death.
“Are we… is this a dream?” Mercer asked, drawing Jai Lin from its sheath. “Are we dreaming?”
“Together? How could that be possible?”
Mercer opened his mouth to answer, but found his attention diverted by a drone that was echoing off the empty shells of buildings a ways off, down what must have been a wide promenade in the days when people still lived in the old city. From down this road, a yellow speck appeared, rounding a building and gunning straight for them.
Mercer could just make out what it was: a man in a yellow suit riding a motorized bicycle. A motorcycle, as his father had called it. Mercer remembered the stories the older Crane had told him as a child, of outlaw gangs and rebels without causes. The motorcycle was careening down the road, dodging piles of debris and barrelling through potholes at a breakneck speed.
“What is that?” Brook asked.
“It’s a motorcycle, a vehicle from before the Time of the Great Dying...” Mercer gulped mid-sentence; he could now see why Yellow Suit was in such a hurry. Coming around the same corner the motorcycle had just screeched around was a phalanx of undead, so dense that they more resembled a wall of limbs and gnashing teeth than individual bodies. There seemed to be no end to them.
“That guy has the right idea,” Mercer said. “We have to get out of here! And fast!”
He grabbed Brook’s hand and with as much haste as he could afford while still avoiding the bent shrapnel and broken glass that waited for them at every step, he started down the pile of rubble towards the ground.
“Wait, Mercer. I think I know what this is.”
“What this is? What do you mean?”
“You were right, I think. This is a dream. A dead dream.”
Mercer stared at her blankly. Dead dream. The term conjured up the nightmare he had only the night before, where Nan and Nina had died again and his father had become something twisted, monstrous. “A dead dream? Is that like a vision?”
“Yes, it is a vision, but it’s more than that. It’s of the final moments before a person dies, usually at the hands of a killim. I’ve been a dead dreamer since I was a little girl. It’s a terrible gift, but one of great value. My people have learned much from dead dreams and have avoided much danger because of them. Come, we have to follow this man on the�
� the motorcycle. There must be a reason we are here, a great deal we can learn from him.”
“Maybe, but there are also more dead men down there than I’ve ever seen in one place. It would be suicide to go down there.”
“Nothing can happen to us in dead dreams, Mercer. It’s as if we are invisible, observers of that which has already happened. Come on!” Mercer allowed Brook to lead him back in the direction they had come, towards the part in the road where Yellow Suit was fast approaching. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a misguided idea, that this wasn’t just a dead dream as Brook believed, but still he let her lead him.
“Have you ever shared a dead dream with someone else?”
“Well, er… no. I agree that it’s strange and unusual, but everything has been since I’ve met you, Mercer Crane.”
They got to the road just as the motorcycle was about to pass. The man’s suit covered him from head to foot, while a transparent rectangle ran across his eyes; they ballooned when they saw Brook and Mercer. He pulled a short-barreled pistol from his belt and squeezed off a shot at them, but the bullet went wide when the motorcycle hit a pothole it couldn’t sail through. The handlebars jerked and the back tire left the ground as the man lost control.
Yellow Suit tumbled off the bike, his body skidding across the pavement before hitting an especially large rock and launching into the air. He came down on a series of rebar rods snaking out from a crumbling cement pillar, their tips made sharp from the wind and sand. Their rusted lengths stopped Yellow Suit’s escape from the pursuing undead once and for all.
“God-father, no!” The man screamed, grasping onto the metal rods that stuck out through his shoulder and thigh. “Please, no, don’t let me die like this. Please, please, please…”
Brook and Mercer carefully approached the man, who kicked at the air, his feet inches off the ground. He had dropped his pistol when he tumbled off his bike. “What do you want?” He cried as they came closer. “Who are you? How are you not dead?”
“How do you see us?” Brook asked.
The man squirmed against the rebar rods. His feet dangled a few inches from the ground. Blood was pouring from the man’s wounds, quickly staining his yellow suit a dark brown. “Oh god-father, most merciful and just to his servants, please take me with your peaceful hands, please take me...”
“Here, friend, let me help you.” Brook reached up to try and remove the mask from the man’s face, to help him breathe, but he kicked her away.
“No! Have mercy, please! Don’t make me breathe the poisoned air! Don’t let me die that way!”
“Poisoned… air?”
“The air will burn my lungs, will make my skin turn purple and slough off. This is the Blight, you fools! How you two are unharmed is beyond… god-father…!” The man coughed, smatterring blood on the interior of his rectangular visor. “You two… you must be angels, sent to collect me before the dead can… consume me...”
Even through the red droplets, Mercer and Brook could see how the man’s pupils trembled, could see his cheeks arched up in a hybrid grimace and grin. The man thought he was having a divine experience.
“We’re not angels,” Mercer said. Behind him, reverberating around the ruins, came the collective roar of the ravenous corpses, a cannibalistic tidal wave rushing towards them. “We’re just normal people from the Green Lands. Now please, how can we_”
“The Green Lands? The land of the… unrighteous! Heretics! The dead are coming to it… yes, to finish the Apocalypse that began long ago. The Undead King is leading an army of the undead… and now he has the sceptre...”
“The Undead King?” Mercer’s flesh erupted in bumps as he remembered the crooked house, in whose basement resided the malformed man who pulled on all the dark tendrils like a puppeteer. The man who had beckoned to him from his nest of plastic and paper. Mercer walked closer to the dying man suspended from the metal rods. “Who is the Undead King and what do you know about him?”
“His name is Plaguewind… He’s the final horseman… and now he has the tool needed to fulfill the prophecy… the Sceptre of Jai Lin… nothing can stop... him... now…” The man was losing life quickly. Blood had pooled below his dangling legs and his head hung loose from his neck. “He’ll be in the Green Lands by… the next… full moon…”
Mercer felt Jai Lin pulling on him. He turned around, and saw exactly what he was afraid he’d see: the streets were teeming with undead, crawling over one another in a great wave of grasping hands and decayed flesh. They’d be on them in mere minutes.
“Brook, we have to go. Now!”
“Okay, okay!” She followed after Mercer, who was running in the opposite direction of the corpses, but then turned to look at Yellow Suit. “I’m… I’m sorry.” Her words fell on deaf ears: the man was already comatose.
“Brook!”
“I’m coming!” She bolted after Mercer, past rusted carts and twisted poles that once illuminated the street with ‘lectric lights. She couldn’t help but look over her shoulder at the oncoming horde. There were so many of them, their bodies in varying degrees of rot. Some walked on broken limbs, some even crawled, but no level of infirmity was severe enough to stifle their desire to consume human flesh. Teeth gnashing, fingers grasping, Brook was so transfixed that she failed to see that Mercer had stopped in front of her and she ran straight into him.
“What is it? Why did you stop_ by the talons of Elon...” She trailed off as she saw what Mercer had already seen: coming from the other direction was another horde of the undead, equally as massive, equally as hungry. They were in the middle of two oncoming waves, which would soon crash together and rip them limb from limb.
“We’ll be okay though,” Brook said, uncertainty underscoring her voice. “This is a dream. We’ll wake up. We can’t be hurt in dreams.”
She didn’t let on that her dead dreams always ended when the subject died. Should they not have awoken when the man in the yellow suit went limp on the metal rods? Perhaps he had yet to die, had yet to release them from this nightmare.
“Dream or not, I’m not about to take any chances. I’m getting away from here before they catch up to us. Come on!” Mercer grabbed her hand and led her up a steep incline of pockmarked concrete that ran away from the street. It led to a burnt out husk of an old building, the floors mostly eaten away but the steel frame still intact. Brook and Mercer hurriedly inched their way across the thin beams, a cold, mildewy air billowing up to them from the dark depths below. They got to the other side just as Yellow Suit’s first screams filled the air. The corpses had found him and were feasting.
“He was still alive…” Brook said. Still, the dead dream continued.
“Well he’s not anymore. Come on!” Razor wire lay in their path on the other side of the building, several spools thick and atop a row of squashed carts. The two carefully made their way over it, both their noses wrinkling at the brine being brought to them on the breeze.
“Do you smell that?”
“Yeah. Ocean.” They made their way past the rusted carts and found another pathway. If their noses were to be believed, the sea was straight ahead, away from the dead who were closing in on them from behind. Mercer risked a look over his shoulder and saw desperate hands clutching at the steel beams of the building, saw the maddened eyes and rotted faces of those who were successfully making it through to the other side. The razor wire Brook and Mercer had carefully climbed over was already carpeted by the first wave of corpses, creating a bridge of bodies for the remaining undead to effortlessly cross. “Come on!”
They rounded a row of squat houses and at last saw the ocean spread out before them, beyond a cracked highway that separated the dead city from the sand. They both ran for it, not sure of what salvation they’d find at its edge, only that there was no safety to be found in the city.
“Brook,” Mercer said when he hit the faint line where the dry sand met the wet. “I don’t think this is a dream. No matter what happens, I just want you to
know_”
“We’re getting out of this, Mercer, so don’t waste your breath on good-byes.” Mercer looked over at her; beneath a brow glistening with sweat were a set of eyes the color of the hottest night in summer, glow beetles blinking in their humid darkness, the tint of her irises fluctuating like the undersides of leaves. There was a mirth beneath the fear and confusion, in the whites of her eyes; it was always there, a conviction that, despite everything, it was all going to be okay.
Gods, he was really falling for her, he realized.
“It’s not that,” he continued. “I just want you to know that I’m glad we met and that we got to fight side by side.”
Brook smiled. “I’m glad too.” And she was.
They stopped at the point where the waves met the sand, shards of jellyfish gleaming under their feet despite the low gray light. “Dead men don’t go in the water,” Mercer stated, looking out at the black, frothy ocean.
“What other choice do we have?” She wasn’t about to say it, but she didn’t know how to swim. Still, this was their only chance, and she could wade out just far enough that the killim couldn’t reach her.
Brook followed Mercer as he moved out into the water, the salty foam of a passing wave taking her breath away as it kissed her hips. The water smelled of black blood, of old machines, but still she smiled. She had always wanted to see the ocean, to look out and not know where the water ended and the other side of the world began. If she was to die, at least she had been able to feel the salt water on her skin, and at least she had been able to do so with Mercer. She felt right being with him.
He stopped when the water was up to his waist and turned to look at her, but his gaze jerked away to what was happening on the beach. She turned, gasping as she followed his eyes. Along the entire shore were killim, shoulder to shoulder and motionless, watching them with their blank eyes.
The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One Page 13