Maureen
There was a wizened woman, sitting next to a cauldron. She was feeding wood to the fire underneath it.
Maureen squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again. The old woman was still there. “H-hello?” Maureen said.
The sound seemed distant, far away – maybe not her own. The old woman heard her, though, and turned to look at Maureen. Then she looked past Maureen. “Girl, your friend's awake.” Everything was so strange.
A hand was on Maureen's shoulder. Some girl loomed into Maureen's field of vision. Maureen knew this girl. “Hey, Maureen? How are you doing?” There was a hand waving in front of Maureen. “You okay? You took a pretty big blow there.”
A blow? Yes, she had been hit. She remembered that. An elbow, huge, and so much muscle. “I was hit,” she said. “Where was I hit?”
The girl's face took some expression. Concern? “You were hit on the head, Maureen, side of your face.”
Maureen lifted a hand. It felt heavy, leaden. She brought it to her face. It felt like cloth. Bandages. She pressed down on the bandages. Was the lack of sensation normal? She pressed harder.
“Uh... don't do that.”
“Do what?”
“Press your wound like that. You probably shouldn't be touching it.”
Okay. That made sense. Maureen put down her hand. “Should it hurt?”
“Uh... I'm not sure. Selena injected something into you.”
“Oh.” Maureen knew Selena too. “What... what's going on?”
“We're waiting here until you're good enough to travel. Then we are getting Sunder. We found out where he went. Narma told us.” She nodded at the old lady. The old lady didn't notice.
“Oh,” said Maureen. “Am I good enough to travel?”
The girl shook her head. “No, you're not.” She bit her lip, then stood up. She was skinny. “Hey, I'm going to go get Selena. You hang in there.”
There was an old woman, sitting next to a cauldron. She was feeding wood to the fire underneath it. There was the hilt of a sword sticking out of the cauldron. Why would you cook that?
Maureen squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again. Her face throbbed. The old woman was still there. “Who... who are you?”
“Oh, you're awake again.” The old woman poked the wood under the cauldron, then shuffled over to Maureen. “Are you going to hang around with us, or is it going to be like the last two times?” The woman put a hand on Maureen's forehead. It felt like old paper, but much colder.
“I... I'm confused,” said Maureen.
“Yes, yes you are, aren't you. At least you admit it.” The old woman smiled. Her name was Narma, Maureen remembered. “You got your head mashed up real well. You should have seen your face when they bent the helmet to get it off your face.”
Blow? Yes, there was a blow. She remembered it. She had just driven her hammer into a knee, then there was this glimpse from the side, only a flash. It was an elbow, but... all wrong, with black ooze on too many muscles, and no skin at all. It was from a monster, not a man or a woman. They had been fighting.
“We won?”
The old woman smiled. “Yes, I suppose you did. But everything else is all doomsday, from what I hear. Do you remember what's happening?”
Maureen tried to think, but everything hurt, throbbed in rhythm with her heart. She saw flashes of a lab, a headless corpse walking, something wretched dropping down from the ceiling. A girl, standing back up, all too young. “The dead. The dead are coming back to life.”
“Oh, we wish. But the dead are still dead. They just happen to be getting up and walking around. Not very dead of them, heh heh heh...” There was some sort of horrible hopeless sadness in the old woman's eyes. Maureen could see it for a moment, but then it was gone again, masked under warm concern. “Oh, here come your friends now.”
She could hear feet on stairs, and then the sound of someone knocking on the door. She tried turning her head to look, but it just hurt too much.
“Narma, how are the weapons doing? Are they sterilized yet?” A young voice. Selena's voice.
“Your friend is up, by the way. Looks like she might stay with us this time.”
Then Selena was there, in front of Maureen. “Hey, look at me.” Selena's head was moving side to side. It was weird. “Okay, tracking, that's pretty good. How does your face feel, Maureen?”
“It hurts. Throbs.”
“And yet you talk. With a shattered cheekbone, and a head that got banged far too hard.”
“Oh, ah.” Maureen stared at the girl. “What happened.”
“We got lucky. Um, you remember the big dead guy?”
Maureen nodded. Now that Selena had mentioned it, talking did hurt.
“Okay, well, Perl sliced up one leg, and got batted away. You got the knee, though, and that kinda saved us.”
Maureen kept watching the girl.
“Well... yeah, then he smashed in your face. Good thing you were wearing that watchman helmet, or you would have been a goner. But you got him in the knee, and he went sprawling out past Perl. By the time he got up to his knees, Lore, that crazy girl, had grabbed one of my bombs and rolled it underneath him.”
Maureen nodded. That made sense. Blew him up.
“Well, it didn't seem to hurt him much, but it did blow apart the floor. And with all that weight, the dead man went through the first floor, all the way down to ground level. I got to the top of the hole, Lore threw down a flare, and I emptied nearly all my ammunition to his back. Lore dropped another bomb on it, too, but it rolled off before exploding. I swear, I kept expecting the damn thing to get back up at any moment.”
Maureen closed her eyes, and leaned her head back. She was sitting upright.
“Hey. Hey, Maureen?” Selena sounded worried.
“How's Maureen doing?” Another voice this time. Male. Deep. Perl.
“Uh, she was awake for a bit. Better than before, I think.”
“Look, we really do need to go. The city is just going to get worse. Can she come with us? If you give her some of that stuff of yours, she won't faint, right?”
“I don't think so. Look, I'm a scientist, not a physician, but you don't just walk away from a blow like that. I thought she was dead. It's not just a matter of waking up, you know. I could give her some stimulants, but she'd still be a liability. I don't think she really should be moving for the rest of today, let alone right now.”
“Then we are going to have to leave her. Barricade the room again. Narma will have to take care of her. We'll try to come back here and get her.”
“Hrm. Worked out well for Jack.”
“Well, we'll be leaving the city after fetching her, not walking into the middle of the damn infestation.”
Maureen opened her eyes. “You're just going to leave me here?”
Perl turned and looked down at her. “I don't think you can come with us. The boss made a beeline for the main guard station after he picked up... picked up the girl he had stashed here. Apparently he actually meant to stop by the Life Temple on the way.”
“What he means is that you'll be safer here.” Lore's voice, this time. From... from the doorway. “Just sleep a bit, and we'll be back before you know it, okay?”
Maureen tried to smile, but it hurt too much. “Okay. Just come back.”
Selena started to say something. “Well, if we don't, then--”
“We'll be back, Maureen,” said Lore. “You can count on it.”
Lorelei
“You know, last time we were on the streets, there were people running away from the Life Temple,” said Lore.
“I know,” said Perl.
“There aren't any now.”
“I know.”
“There was a reason we circled south around the Life Temple last time.”
“Yes.”
“But we are going straight towards it now.”
“I know.”
“Even if Sunder took this exact Spoke, if he ran into the dead, he could have run away on a different road, and circled around.”
“True.”
“And if Sunder hid in a building, if the infestation is getting worse, then getting there won't be as easy for us as it was for him.”
“Probably.”
“And if he hid in a building, how would he see us?”
“He would.”
“How can you be sure?”
Perl paused for a moment, and sighed. “Because something like that always happens. And Sunder always winds up on top, in the end. Stop with the questions, okay?”
“Sorry, I'm just... worried. Nervous.”
Perl regarded her for a moment, then started onwards again. Selena nearly bumped into Lore from behind.
“Hey Selena?”
“That hallway. It was by design.”
Lore blinked. “What?”
“Back in the lab, we passed that hallway with the two creatures? The one with the arms, and the one with the tongue?”
Lore shivered. It wasn't something she liked to think about. “Yeah, I remember. It lashed that tongue out at me, like... like a horrible frog or something.”
“Well, I thought that they were created by the cultists, experimenting with the substance that keeps these things alive. Medical experiments, twisted but fascinating.”
Lore would not have described them that way, but she bit her tongue. Selena continued.
“But that's not it at all. It's a tendency built into whatever animates these corpses: If they find corpses with broken spines that can't be reanimated – and Sunder's initial attack there left no shortage of those - then they take off parts of those bodies and add it to themselves.”
Lore suppressed the urge to retch. Her memories of going to the highest floor of that tainted building, and surveying the mutilated remains of the other tenants... Lore shivered. “Look, could we not talk about that?”
“But don't you see the implications? Something like that could hardly be emergent behavior, it's too...”
“Ssssh!” Perl stood over them, glowering. “I think we want to go around that, so let's hush down a bit.” He pointed to down the street, on the right-hand side. Lore squinted there was a small building with a lot of windows and painted a sign hanging outside. It had some words, and a painted image of a horse rearing up.
“A tavern?” asked Lore? The lights were dim, and there were none of the sounds that Lore associated with such establishments. None of the laughter, none of the yelling, singing, cursing...
“'The Dancing Horse Tavern' according to the sign,” said Selena.
Perl shook his head. “But look outside the doorway, on the ground.”
Lore squinted in the deepening twilight. There was a great dark expanse around the doorway. “A puddle?”
“Blood,” said Selena, and suddenly it all clicked together for Lore. Blood was slowly draining out of the tavern's doorway, filling nearly half the street. Lore took a step backwards. There must have been a slaughter.
“I've seen battles with less blood than that. This here was a bloodbath, and that means nothing good for us.” Perl slunk into the shadows on the other side of the street, his heavy footfalls muffled in what turned out to be aged night-soil.
As they passed the tavern, Lore dared a glance in the door. She recognized the familiar uniform of the City Watch, and a habitual thrill of fear ran through her body. But as she watched, the watchman lifted a severed arm to his mouth, the biting, chewing, and swallowing strangely loud in the all-too-silent city. Lore averted her eyes, and focused on stepping quietly. This city was not for humans anymore.
Next: Chapter 7