|Type| Horror Short Story
|Origin| This was a monthly writing challenge for the Midnight Faith, a horror writer Discord community I’m part of. The story is based in the world of Five Pillars LARP (and players can even meet the two characters in that game).
|Prompt| Zombies
|Words| 2,680
The trees swayed in the night, branches rustling like wind chimes for the dead, dropping dry leaves. A slim figure swathed in a hood and shawl trudged through the dark, lugging a sack over its shoulder. The heaviness made it stagger under the effort. The trees thinned on approach to a stalwart square building of stone.
She found it damp inside, pungent with the scent of fungi and moss, of mouse droppings and mold. An old altar with the crumbled feet of some long-demolished statue stood against the back wall. A cold fire pit contained only ash and a cracked kettle on its side.
The woman offloaded the sack with a heave. It hit the ground with the clattering of heavy brittle contents. She wrestled with the woven exterior until she found the base of the sack, then gripped and dragged it upward, dumping all the contents unceremoniously. Fingerless gauntlets, a belt with pouches, wads of clothing, and bones fell out. So many bones. A full skeleton, at least, and rolling out at the last, a skull.
She threw the sack aside and picked up the skull by hooking her fingers into the eyeholes. She turned it, admiring the curled ornate gold inlay set throughout, encircling the eye holes, depicting horns across the forehead, lotus blooms on the cheekbones. This she handled gently, and traced the whorls of bright gold with her fingertip for several moments. She laid it atop the pile and shuffled back to the wall, dragging her leg in a limp that was not only caused by her burden.
She settled on the cold stone and threw back her hood to breathe easier. She unbuckled her sword belt and leaned the weapon against the wall, close at hand. Her hair was ratty and knotted back in gnarls away from her face. She lit a long-stemmed pipe older than the temple she sat in, passed down from… someone she’d conquered? Someone she’d rescued? She’d forgotten. But she liked the chewed stem and thoroughly blackened chamber. It had an air of history, whether or not it was hers. The weeds she lit smelled of bog and lavender, sickening and refreshing, and she wondered who’d given her the recipe. They eased her aches nonetheless.
The purple smoke furled up her face like blind fingers searching. It wafted through her sinus and puffed out of her dead eye hole. It curled from the edges of the ragged wound where part of her cheek had been torn away years—decades?—ago. The edges of the ghastly ruination were painted with makeup she’d bought off some elven woman who promised more than it had delivered, but it hadn’t intended to be used like this in the first place. She’d pressed glitter dust against the makeup until it stuck, hiding a bit of her necrosis with a single lurid flourish of beauty. She liked to jest to friends, when she made them, that it drew the eye away from everything else.
There wasn’t much to do but wait for her Dead Boyfriend Forever. She looked at the skeletal pile of Billy Gilt, DBFF and snorted. Maimed by his zeal for valor, again. Well, nobody had burst into their shelter yet, so it seemed she would have time to patch up while she waited.
Deadsmeralda couldn’t remember her original name, and she’d picked the current one, thinking it clever. Nor did she remember her living profession, her family, or her home. She wielded dark humor and disapproval toward emotional displays to protect herself. But she was fresher than Billy Gilt, whose flesh had long since rotted away and whose memory had more holes than his skull. They held each other to the path, probing each other for sanity, for the remnants of purpose, checking for the first tinges of madness. They died alongside each other, rose in front of each other again and again, asking the same first question.
Have you forgotten me yet?
History was for the living, and so the dead known as revenants forgot their pasts, traded for the curse of reanimation upon reanimation. So far, the pair’s pursuit of justice was intact, but it would not always be. Perhaps the gods’ favor would leave them and they would become inert; dust swept away on the wind. The deceased god Kellach would be unsatisfied by their conquests in service of his justice, or the god-creature of death, Bâs, would require higher tithes for each resurrection until death claimed them.
Perhaps they would lose the rest of themselves, like the lost legion. Deadsmeralda thought of them with scorn though her feelings were laced with almost superstitious fear. The High Fleet of Morgulay, referred to colloquially as the lost legion, could barely be called an army, but there was no term that suited it better. The fleet originated at the Harbor of Morgulay, a fortress that had fallen long ago and no longer existed. That mattered not; on sea or on land, the fleet were numerous and unkillable, a horde of undead that were utterly self-dispossessed. Only Admiral Duvich and his captains and strongest warriors remembered their pasts. The mindless undead across the land were gradually collected and subsumed into the roaming fleet, provided of the collective’s murderous purpose, since they had none of their own. The fleet’s bleak existence might have been sad if they didn’t perpetrate horrors on every other species. In their insanity, they believed the world to be in a state of death, and all living creatures to be theirs to take, to save by forced recruitment into the fleet. To deliver the living into their proper form as the world came to a close.
When Deadsmeralda thought about the lost legion, she thought about the inevitability of loss. A revenant’s being was something she couldn’t understand, nor could Billy. She wouldn’t let him talk about it, either, except in jest. Gallows humor was good for hinting at things that mattered without crying about it. It was better to focus on what they had than what they’d lost. She and Billy were accountable for each other, a promise more sacred to them than marriage, until death actually did part them. Then, if one of them rose with the madness in their head and nothing else, the inescapable fury of the soulless, at least they would die by a trusted hand. If Billy went first, she’d kill him and burn his bones to ash. She’d travel until she found some ritual last rites that could put him to eternal peace. And if she couldn’t find one, she’d kill him as many times as it took for him to stop coming back. Better that than be left to wander, unloved and forlorn, in such a state that only the lost legion would have them.
Pretty pointless to focus on all this right now. She was getting melancholy.
She finished her pipe, happy with the buzz and deadening of sensation that the herbs produced. Then she lit a hasty fire in the pit. Once she had enough light, she pulled out her needles and nicest thread—for revenants that still had flesh on them didn’t skimp on good thread—and made the rip in her trousers wider. The gaping wound in her thigh had stopped bleeding, but then, she rarely bled much anymore. She winced as she punctured both sides of the wound and pulled the first stitch taut. Twenty minutes later, she had a seam neater than any chirurgeon’s from knee to inner thigh. She switched to her shit-tier spool and hastily sewed up her pants with that. Clothing was cheaper than skin, from the first death to the last.
She might have days to wait for Billy’s resurrection. It could be hours, days, weeks…each death was an unknown. She talked to Billy, sang songs to him that she’d picked up from taverns over the years, be they bawdy or merry. She drew on the magic of the Pillars and called elemental fire, throwing little gouts of flame at the corpse flies that dared disturb her. She cackled as they sizzled midair and fell by her side. Otherwise, she fell into a deathly trance when she got too bored. It was better than dreading what he might have lost when he finally returned.
The days expanded and passed, each feeling longer than the last. Sometimes the vigil took hours, sometimes weeks. He would return, but what state would he be in after? Would he remember her face and voice and the time they’d shared, the threads that stitched them together through time as surely as her leg? Would he have forgotten more of their past this time? Waiting. Waiting. She walked a circuit around her camp at twilight to make sure none would bother her, and batted at shadows with her sword, dancing deadly in the cool moonlit air. Her stitches held; she was good at her work. She’d had practice. And they had practice at resurrection, at waiting for each other, at holding on.
He always did this! He kept putting others before his own safety! Just because they were immortal didn’t mean he should act like they were. When things went bad, Deadsmeralda was in favor of saving their own skin, but the bonehead had more unshakable valor than marrow. He’d promised her every time she scolded him. “Yes, my lovely bog maiden, I do so swear. If ever a future job should turn against us, I will flee right after you!” And he’d broken that promise every time.
She grew impatient one evening and kicked the bone pile. Her voice rasped from vocal cords tortured by smoke inhalation and decay. “Bud, ya gotta come back. Ya didn’t turn to dust on-site, so I know ya’s comin’ back. Hurry up already! I’m outta herb ta smoke and the trail’s gone cold ages ago.”
There was no answer but the buzzing of a fly as it explored the inside of the ornate skull. She picked up the skull and growled at it desperately. “Billy, swear to Kellach, quit bein’ dramatic! I can’t do this without ya!”
She couldn’t. Not just the hunt for the ones who’d escaped during the job, or the ones who killed him, but everything. Living would be the death of her if-
“Dearie… dearest… dear,” a gravelly voice whispered out of the depths of the skull. “You called… and lo, I returneth.”
She dropped the skull on the pile quickly and knelt beside it. The transformation came quickly now that it had finally begun. The skeleton was bathed in gloomy yellowish-green light and the pieces drew together as if pulled from within. They clicked and squeaked as they joined and locked into place. The eye hollows of the skull lit, glowing unearthly yellow. The naked skeleton pushed itself upright and looked at its gnarled hand. “Worry not, fair lady Deadsmeralda. It seems I am yet favored by the Domara. Therefore will justice be served.”
“So says you. Did Bâs take that long to get annoyed with ya?” Deadsmeralda snorted dustily and rolled her good eye, which glimmered yellow. “Do ya remember me at least?”
Billy paused a beat too long and grinned at her, not that he had much choice. “Who would dare forget you, darling?”
“Ya didn’t lose too much memory, then.” She grinned back, finally admitting relief, showing off her savage stained teeth. “Saved ya some hooch. And yer sittin’ on yer pile o’shit.”
“Pardon me for my state of undress.” Billy Gilt rose and drew on his clothing, fine and elegant, compared to Deadsmeralda’s garments, which could’ve been the set she’d been buried in. Billy’s were ripped and utterly drenched in hardened blood—the blood of others. Billy bled less than Deadsmeralda. That is, not at all. But the fight had been fierce.
He clicked his teeth in disapproval and poked his finger bone through a rent in his shirt with an air of grievance. “Alas, t’was good muslin. What the devil took me out this time?”
Of course, he couldn’t remember the last half hour preceding death. No one remembered that. But what else had he lost with this resurrection? Deadsmeralda began to catch him up. “Remember findin’ the Red Right Hand camp? Them bandits weren’t alone, but we went up and you tried to talk to ‘em.”
Billy nodded. Then stalled, and rotated his skull instead.
Deadsmeralda huffed. “Okay, well, you figured you could threaten them until they gave over the murderer among their number, but they just laughed at us. So I took a few of the boys to the side for quiet ops in case that didn’t work out, and guess what, it didn’t.”
“Ah, I see,” Billy said. Deadsmeralda could read embarrassment from his slight adjustments in posture, though his skull was incapable of expression.
“So, you took them at their word and got mad. You attacked from the front and we hit ‘em from the side during your distraction. But you got got by this diabolic thing they had there.”
“Diabolic nephilim?” Billy guessed.
“Nah, somethin’ bigger! A beast with horns. Prob’ly a Weird them guys had under their control.”
“Did you kill it?”
“You got anything left in that brain pan? I RAN, bud! Or there’d be nobody here to wait for youse.”
Billy scratched his head, making a hollow rasping sound, bone on bone. “Then… you recovered me after the fact?”
“Their guys fought our guys, and their beastie went ballistic on you and then everyone else.” Deadsmeralda stomped some beetles that came to investigate her boots, drawn to her ripe scent. “I nabbed yer body and rushed away till I could hole up here.”
“But did we get the murderer? All those villagers hired us to get revenge for the killings…” Billy’s fingers clacked and squeaked as he clenched them into fists.
“I didn’t ‘zactly have a spare minute to check the bodies to see if any matched the description!”
“The trail may be cold, but harken. The dead have their own ways of pursuit,” Billy said. The glow from his eyes blazed stronger. “We will return to the blood-drenched place and search among the dead. He will be there, and if he is not, we will find a way forward. Justice will be served, my ghastly siren. I will not suffer a killer to live, even if it takes finding and putting down every last one of that camp.”
“And the contract’s gotta be fulfilled so our pockets can be.” Deadsmeralda said, coming close to straighten Billy’s mantle. She brushed her filthy hands along the seams to clear some cobwebs, tender now that he was animate in front of her again. She’d been afraid to show affection until he’d resurrected. She always was. “Ready when you are, ya golden fool.”
Billy nodded and threw back the last contents of the flask Deadsmeralda had salvaged. The clear liquor splashed on his white even teeth and dissipated into ash as it fell beyond his maw. He peered at her intently. “The gallows call for the villain’s neck. We will hunt him and all his ilk down.”
Deadsmeralda would never have made it this far nor had this fulfilling an afterlife without her DBFF. Which raised the question: What would happen when the first of them was lost, the other left to waste into madness? Who would it be? Deadsmeralda had ideas about that, all of them bleak and savage. But until then, there were always people who paid to make other people pay, and shiny things to spend the money on. Yet, Billy Gilt would be golden whether they were rich or poor. He illuminated her life with senseless bravery, his purpose incandescent. He claimed to follow her lead, said he would be nothing but empty shaking bones without her, but she knew humor only got you so far. Her path was guided by his beautiful determination.
Deadsmeralda’s smile was an evil rictus, stretching too far across her cheek, but Billy’s was expressionless and eternal, somehow alarmingly friendly.
“The gallows call the guilty,” she agreed.
AJ Reid 