Through The Valley

by Yates, B. D.

  "Guiltyyyyyy," came the hiss of yet another zombified person, stumbling through the trees and swatting at the snowy branches. This corpse had once been a policeman, its dark uniform stained and hanging loosely from a sickly body. Behind the reanimated cop, Emmit could see the swaying silhouettes of countless others emerging from the blinding brilliance. Fifty or more. Maybe a hundred more. There was a new sound rising with the wind, a sound like a strange language spoken in a loud whisper. It was a chorus of dead voices, all of them accusing him of being a thief or a robber or saying he was guilty. He had never done anything wrong in his life.

  Or have you?

  His mind was still a wall of locked gears; for all he knew he could be Jack the Ripper.

  They're swarming you. You need to move.

  It was too late. The topless thing was on him, its idiot grin spreading as it stretched out hooked hands and snatched his right forearm. Its grip was iron, vice-like. Emmit thought his bones might snap into shattered glass before it let him go.

  "Get the fuck off me!" He bellowed into its face, his vapor cloud disintegrating over the corpse’s discolored features. It grinned on, squeezing so hard that his skin was puffing up between its gnarled fingers. He jerked his arm with all the strength he could muster, but the fierce grip did not falter. Emmit drove his left fist into the semisolid meat of its chest, right between the pair of melted breasts, desperately trying to shove it off of him. It was like punching a side of beef hanging in a butcher's freezer.

  Suddenly his forearm felt like it had been dipped in corrosive acid. It was a pain the likes of which he had never felt before, like a swarm of oversized bees had lighted on his arm and were stinging him in unison. As the groaning, rasping crowd of frozen corpses closed in around him, he watched as the mounds of skin between the zombified woman’s fingers began to discolor and darken. They went purple, then muddy brown, and finally a necrotic black. He could see the discoloration beginning to travel up his arm like shadowy vines, and everywhere the darkness went, the pain followed. He shoved and punched at the zombie, making its half-naked body jerk violently. It went on smiling that vacant, idiot smile, oblivious to the pain.

  It's a dream it's a dream it's a dream it's a bad dream it's a dream—

  Emmit's eyes were shut tight as he tried to wake himself up. Abruptly he heard a sound like two heavy pieces of firewood being knocked together, and he felt something thick and liquid hit his face. He also felt the venomous grip on his arm let go.

  He opened his eyes just in time to see the topless dead woman spinning away from him, as if it were doing some sort of bizarre waltz. Its head was almost completely backwards, the fractured bones of the freshly neck and jaw jutting through its mottled skin like tent stakes. The creature fell to its hands and knees, crawling through the snow like a humanoid spider crab.

  Emmit stared down at the woman in shock, its backwards head beginning to twitch and nod as it tried to move it, keeping those blank eyes on him as it crawled toward his legs. The smile had not left its face although a flap of leathery skin had been scraped from its skull, exposing a set of broken teeth beneath. There was no blood; just a thick, syrupy ooze that coated its teeth and turned them pink.

  "Move your fucking ass numbnuts, there's Links everywhere!" Came a thunderous voice that hit him like a slap to the face. After the prolonged silence of the forest, the voice of someone else sounded much too loud and foreign. Emmit couldn't think. He was still locked in a deep state of paralyzing shock, watching a living corpse crawling towards him with its smiling, cheerful head on backwards.

  Another whack from behind him. He willed his petrified neck muscles to stretch and allow him to turn his head, and behind him was this new living stranger, his fearless savior.

  He was a hulk of a man, towering over Emmit and the cluster of walking corpses like a small mountain. He looked like a hobo clown; his clothing was a patchwork of multicolored fabrics, the stitching crisscrossing the back of his bulky coat large and sloppy. His entire outfit had been handmade, and the thread he had used to sew it looked much too thick to be anything but custom. Emmit could not see his face, but he watched the long weapon in his hands as it rose above his head and swung swiftly to the ground, over and over again. Between his quilted legs Emmit could see the writhing body of the policeman, its head now reduced to a small mound of gray curds and bone that looked like blackberry jam as it splattered against the snow. This man was beating the zombies to pieces with a club, a long wooden shaft with a pointed rock lashed to the end of it.

  Like a caveman, he thought, scatterbrained.

  This man did look rather like a caveman. His chestnut hair was long and wavy, collecting studs of snow and ice as it blew in the wind. He whirled around to glare at Emmitt, his eyes wild and his cheeks and nose a rosy red above a long and bushy beard. He appeared to be wearing war paint. There was a large black handprint covering most of his face, the finger marks extending up over his wide eyes and ending just under his hairline. Emmit could only stare at him unthinkingly until he realized that the man wasn't wearing paint at all; he had been scarred by the touch of one of the creatures. He lifted his own heavy arm and stared at it through his frosted glasses. He had a black handprint as well now, staining his skin like a bad tattoo.

  "Hey!" came that deeply thundering voice again, and Emmit let out a little cry of shock. "You better wake the fuck up or you're a dead man!"

  Emmit nodded absently as he looked frantically around them, his narrow face resembling a deer caught in a set of high beams. The dead people were packed shoulder to shoulder in places now, bumping into one another and tripping over each other, wedging themselves between tree trunks until they couldn't move and instead began reaching for the two men desperately, their decaying fingers clutching at the empty air. Their voices were becoming a growing roar that rivaled the sound of the wind. Emmit could hear the same old accusations they had already aimed at him, but intermixed were several new words grunting and hissing from the zombies' smiling mouths:

  Hitman.

  Murderer.

  Killer.

  Were the strange psychic zombies calling out the truth about his savior in the patchwork outfit? Did that mean the things they were they calling out about him were the truth?

  Suddenly the titan of a man was charging at him like a raging bull, pumping his arms at his sides with the club slung across his back. Emmit could see the bloodied rock poking up over his bulbous shoulder, and half expected the man to clobber him with it next.

  "Follow me, stay on my ass and for fuck's sake don't let them touch you!" He boomed, passing Emmit's paralyzed body like a speeding freight train. Emmit didn't have to think about it for very long. He turned and sprinted after the man, panting and gasping as his thin shoes punched through the snow in rapid succession. Behind him, the swarm of corpses had closed in, overwhelming the spot he had been standing mere moments before. They looked like the world's happiest, drunkest mob of protestors, if those protestors all happened to be dead and deteriorating even as they shuffled around the woods.

  Emmit ran until his body felt like it would shut down from exhaustion. The bearded hulk never lost any pace. He leapt over fallen logs and ducked under low hanging branches with such ease that he had to have known these woods like the back of his own hand. They hadn't even been following the path markers. It was either keep up with the man or die trying.

  There were a few of the corpses wandering aimlessly through the trees, grinning up at the gray sky as the two men shot past them. There were no more hordes, however, and for that Emmit was eternally grateful. He hadn't even had time to process his own name, and now here he was, dying of hypothermia, running from the living dead and chasing someone he knew nothing about towards a mysterious camp he'd never seen.

  His shoe snagged something under the snow and he sprawled forward into the fading light, instinctively bringing a hand to his nose to keep his glasses on. He landed heavily on his side, knocking what little breath he had left out of
him. Miraculously, the snow felt like a hot bath. He wanted to rake it over his entire body, build a nice little igloo for himself, and go to sleep. He didn't think he had the strength to stand again anyway. He was too weak for this survival stuff. He was done.

  Then he felt a gigantic hand close over the back of his shirt, and he was being yanked to his rubbery legs like a marionette.

  "It isn't much further," the man with the black hand on his face said, quiet now but his voice still shockingly loud in the silent woods. Emmit imagined the man's vocal cords as two thick leather belts, vibrating like tuning forks when he spoke. "Keep moving, we have food and a fire. You'll survive. But not if you lay here like a little bitch and freeze to death. Then you'll just be another Link for me to deal with."

  Link?

  "Li... what?" Emmit tried to ask, slurring. Fuck it. He was too tired and cold to give a shit about anything anymore. Death suddenly didn't seem like such a scary concept if it meant he could rest, and the pain would stop.

  "Later," the man said, nudging him forward with a fatherly pat on his back. "They know we're out here; we have to get back. Dig deep and keep running."

  He did. Somehow, he kept going. Willed his legs to keep pumping, keep plunging his scarcely protected feet into the thick snow. As his first day in the mysterious woods began to give way to night, Emmit began to smell something that reminded him of camping in the early fall and Halloween night; a burnt and smoky smell, the acrid but pleasant stench of burning wood and the enticing aroma of meat being roasted. Jesus he was getting hungry. His body needed fuel and he was pushing it on fumes.

  If the prospect of food wasn't enough to keep him going, the thought of being out in the dark woods alone with literal zombies certainly was. When his searing eyes happened upon a fluffy column of smoke, coiling up from the endless shroud of trees like a mythical serpent, Emmit found the last reserves of energy he had left and tapped into them. By the time he saw the dark, boxy shape of what looked like a ramshackle cabin, he was completely drained. He collapsed, falling into a deep sleep even before his body had struck the snow for the hundredth time. He stirred only once, when he felt big hands, like paws, digging into his armpits and dragging him.

  Chapter 3: Dinner in Hell

  Throughout most of his life, Emmit had been poor. He had never been homeless and sleeping on a sidewalk under a soggy newspaper, but he had also never been able to own his own car or his own house. He relied on a thrift store ten-speed to get him from Godfather's Pizza (where he sometimes cooked but usually delivered pizzas, forced to drive his boss's junky truck) to his tiny, shabby apartment. Emmit wasn't a worthless piece of shit, however. He had never even tried any drugs, didn't like to drink too much (unless he was feeling particularly low), and didn't sleep around. He just had rotten luck. Horrible luck, as a matter of fact, so bad that the "Mills Family Curse" was a running joke among his family.

  Emmit's eyesight had also always been poor. He had needed glasses as early as the first grade, when he had begun developing nauseating headaches while squinting down at books. Headaches that were so bad that they made him puke. He had always thought that in life, there might not be anything worse for a kid to go through than being "the new kid". Which he had been, of course. The new kid in a new school with big brown glasses that looked like a figure eight racetrack around his eyes, and hand-me-down clothes from his older cousins.

  The memory popped into his head as his eyes fluttered open, the skin of his face, arms, and back burning but not from the cold this time. It was heat, glorious, wonderful heat. Someone had placed a blanket over him as well. The blanket felt and smelled like a pile of old laundry, but it was cozy, nonetheless. He curled into a ball and let the memory play out, because it was really the only one he had. So far, anyway.

  It was first grade. Mrs. Z... Zimmern? Zimmerman!

  He could remember being so scared and nervous that he had been battling nervous farts, of which he had a seemingly endless supply. He had already missed the bus, on his very first day, and his father (who was a loving man stricken with a frighteningly short temper) was not pleased to have to drive him to school and then work a twelve-hour shift in a paper mill.

  He had been wearing faded jeans that were much too big for him, and a stained green sweater with a peeling stegosaurus on the front that had a little black bead for an eye. He never forgot watching the heavy door swing open like the iron bars of a jail cell, opening in on a strange classroom he had never seen before. The walls had been covered with colorful crafts and projects that he hadn't been a part of, because he wasn't a part of this school or this group of kids. He was an outsider, an intruder even. No one would want to make room at their lunch table for a dirty poor kid like him.

  There had been a gentle push on his back, and he had ambled in with his head down. He couldn't remember Mrs. Zimmerman's face, but he could hear her words just as well as if she had been standing beside him, saying them now.

  "Class, I'd like to introduce you to our new student, Emmit Mills."

  Emmit! He thought suddenly, jerking awake under the blanket. My name is Emmit Mills.

  The eyes. God, all those eyes. The children had looked up from their notes and doodles, staring at him, ogling him like he had been a slide of a nasty insect shone on the wall from a projector. He heard whispers. He heard snickers. His stomach gurgled loudly, definitely loud enough for all the pretty little girls to hear.

  "Nice glasses," a young boy had said to him with a small smile, and for the briefest of moments he had felt a swell of hope, almost palpable enough to make him cry. Maybe these kids would be nice to him. Maybe he would make friends and be welcome here, regardless of his old clothes and big brown glasses. The giggling that followed killed that hope swiftly. That young man had been Austin Seibert, who would spend the next ten years being the worst bully Emmit had ever dealt with in his life. He had mocked and tortured Emmit in every class they shared, protected from the teaching staff by his popularity and skill with a basketball, until he had been killed in a car accident their senior year of high school. Emmit had been the only student absent from the town-wide funeral.

  The faux compliment had been an obvious jab at his appearance, but his teacher had said nothing. She had sent him over to his new desk among the wolves, to sit and pick at the peeling stegosaurus while the rest of the class snickered and stared. He had felt like his glasses were a huge, infected wound on his face, one that would never heal. He had wanted so badly to take them off, to have normal eyes like everyone else. That dream wasn't the hand he had been dealt in life and would prove to be just one of many more bad hands to come.

  When he finally woke up in front of the popping fire, it was obvious what had triggered his recollections of being a first-grade loser. A group of disheveled looking men sat in a circle around him, staring him down like he had two heads and muttering to one another just like his classmates had. Emmit sat up slowly, bringing his knees up to his slight chest and hugging them defensively. He made himself look up at them, but only for brief glances. He felt like a dog, waiting for the swat of a rolled-up newspaper because he had dropped a log on the living room carpet.

  "He ain't even got any meat on him," came a scratchy, serpentine voice. "He ain't gonna do us any good."

  "It's not like we get a wide selection of new people these days, Poke," said a smooth, intelligent sounding man. “He could be a decent ally.”

  "Wonder what he did," came another voice from behind the others, one that sounded youthful, a kid. "Dude looks like a pedo."

  "I didn't do anything," Emmit snarled, before he had even realized he was speaking. The silence that followed was heavy with awkward mistrust. He fidgeted with his glasses nervously.

  "Everyone shut the fuck up," came the thundering bear's voice that Emmit recognized. He heard the weighty thud of boots crossing the floor, and the small crowd of men parted like the Red Sea. Emmit looked up from his little bed, which had been made for him at the mouth of a small square fireplace. Th
e man with the black handprint over his face was like a skyscraper above him, his eyes still wild but now somehow more compassionate. They were a piercing blue. He knelt in front of Emmit, resting his thick forearms across his knees.

  "How are you feeling? Better?"

  Emmit nodded slowly, subconsciously wiggling all his fingers and toes to make sure they were still there and working.

  "Confused?"

  Emmit nodded again. He opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it again. It felt wrong to speak, just as it had when he had been paraded in front of his new first grade classmates.

  "We've all been where you are," the marked man said calmly. "My name is Roy. I'm the one that built this camp, so think of me as the captain of the ship."

  Emmit held his hand out for the big man to shake, which he did, his giant hand swallowing Emmit's whole.

  "You're also the one that saved me," Emmit said quietly, giving the giant's hand one last firm shake to accentuate the point. "I'm Em—"

  "We don't tell each other our names," came the raspy voice again, from the man who had been addressed as Poke. "We all use nicknames. Only Roy uses his name because he never has to be the Provider."

  The Provider?

  "If you say another word Poke," Roy grumbled, "You'll be the next Provider."

  Emmit saw a sickly-looking man near the corner of the cabin raise his hands above his head, and his mouth indeed stayed shut. The flames flickered behind him, casting long shadows across the room that obscured the faces of the men he shared it with. Although he knew they were staring at him, it made it easier to relax when he didn't have to see them.

  "We have a routine when someone new stumbles into our woods," Roy continued, more sternly. "We have one small test for you. If you pass it, you'll be invited in and given food, clothing, and weapons. We also introduce ourselves, get to know you, and try to answer some of your questions. If you fail..."