Redemption of the Dead (11 page)

* * * *

10

Grassy Hills, Evil
Beasts

“O
kay, I’m a
little weirded out,” Billie
said.

Nathaniel had opened a portal between
realms and brought her back into the world she left after drowning
in the lake. She had asked him if she was returning as a
ghost.

“No, no, of
course not,” he said. “I’d never see you become that which we fight
against. You are going back risen from the dead, complete and
whole. I have a special job for you and you must complete it.” He
handed her a bracelet. It was a simple gold band with a clear stone
in the center.

“
When it lights white, you know you are near. The moment you
are, you
will retrieve
it.”

She assented and now he brought her
here to the top of a huge hill overlooking many others, all covered
in dead, dry grass. The sky above was still gray and brown out here
in the countryside.

Billie turned to talk to the angel,
but he wasn’t there.

“Hello?” she called into the air. “You
can’t just drop someone off in the middle of nowhere and expect
them to do a job especially since you said what I should do
involves people.” No reply, not that she expected one. “I thought
angels were supposed to be nice.”

She
proceeded down the hill, admiring the beauty despite all the dry,
yellow grass and the various shrubs which looked more like masses
of twisted coat hangers than vegetation. After the ravages of Hell,
it was strangely beautiful. Had life gone on normally, maybe one
day she’d wind up in a place like this—far away, secluded, a chance
to breathe and just take in the Earth as God made it before Man
screwed it up.

Keeping a sharp eye out for any creatures, she was relieved
that, so far as she could tell, she was out here alone. Not a
single soul dotted the landscape. The only thing that gave her a
sense of direction right now was a cottage way in the distance, the
only structure out here that was a place to
go to
. She headed
that way, keeping an eye on the bracelet for the stone to glow
white. What she was supposed to find with it, she didn’t know. The
angel didn’t say.

The air was
stale and the freshness one would expect to experience out here was
nowhere to be found, yet to breathe the air of the Earth . .
.

As
she walked,
she thought about
where she just was and even though it was over and now locked in
her memory, the mere thought of the agony of those flames still
caused her to tense up and be sick to her stomach with regret. She
couldn’t believe that such an awful place could exist and that
people went there. Couldn’t believe the evil creatures that lived
there had found a way to infiltrate the land of the living and
violate human beings by possessing them, their body no more than a
shell-like vehicle to be driven around, used and abused.

Even here on
these fields, the spiritual side to all this really bothered her
and it was certainly not what she had expected nor hoped for even
when the world died and the dead began to rise. But it was reality
now and she had to resolve to just accept it and move
on.

She rounded
a hill and found a path of worn grass mixed with a little bit of
dirt. The ground was extremely dry, no rain having come down since
a year ago. Nothing but death.

A low moan
rose on the air, coming from beside her. She stopped in her tracks,
and slowly turned her head to the side, seeing nothing but a hill
that rose several feet above her head.

That didn’t sound human either,
she thought.
Not
“dead human,” anyway. Too low, full.

Cautiously, she slowly walked forward,
keeping one eye on the cottage far ahead, the other on the hill
next to her, anxious for something to come at her.

“Why’d you leave me out here,
Nathaniel?” she sang quietly through gritted teeth.

After around
twenty more paces, the low moan returned, a long one drawn out
followed by a series of short ones, some loud, some quieter. It
didn’t sound like they all came from the same source.

Billie picked up her pace.
Great. Now there’s a whole shwack of them after me and I’m
completely unarmed.

She kept
moving, checking over her shoulder, listening as the moans grew
louder, closer. The foul stench of rot and carcass hit her hard;
she had to pinch her nose and breathe through a palm over her mouth
to block out the smell.

The hill beside her began to taper
off, its crest getting lower until it matched her height then her
waist then knees before leveling off.

The moans continued.

Billie turned.

A herd of
cattle—at least twenty-five of them, if not more—was slowly moving
toward her as a group. Each cow had clouded, milky-white eyes, all
fixed on her. She noticed their normally brown and black hides were
drawn taut across their frames like cracked leather, the hair
rubbed off in large random patches. A few of them were missing a
limb or two. One didn’t have hind legs and was dragging itself
along the grass.

The low moans rose in volume the
closer they neared, as if plainly telling her they saw her and
she’d be their next meal.

Billie knew
the Rain had affected all things living, but to see such enormous
beasts like this coming toward her really hammered home the foul
deathly taint that was on all that lived. Seemed everything good
this world once had to offer had completely fallen by the
wayside.

Those eyes .
. . she’d only seen cows in pictures, never up close like this.
They didn’t look like that in magazines; they were gentle, even
cuddly. Those white eyes stared at her with malice behind their
gaze. She imagined the demons within the beasts, each of their
sinewy frames wearing the cow like a bad suit.

The cows
bellowed a deathly moan, and started stomping toward her. Billie
tore off down the path; the sound of hooves on dirt and grass rose
up behind her, growing louder and louder. She sprinted as hard as
she could, not knowing where she could go to escape these things.
She had precious few seconds if escape was even possible. They’d
gain on her in no time, four legs to two, even if those four were
undead.

Digging deep
and summoning as much leg power as she could, she bolted down the
path, not daring to look over her shoulder at the herd coming after
her.

The yelps of
panic bubbled out involuntarily and soon she was shrieking as she
ran. She never was like this even when the dead first rose, but she
was broken and couldn’t take any more. Nothing mattered but
instinct and survival.

The undead
hooves clomped hard and quick along the ground, each
fifteen-hundred-pound beast gaining ground with each passing
second. Soon their moans were so close Billie’s innards began to
vibrate. Her legs fatiguing, she pushed herself harder, her only
hope being Nathaniel wouldn’t just drop her off simply to die and
go back to that terrible place.

A loud buckshot cracked through the
air; the sound of dead weight thundered behind her. A wild series
of thuds and moans followed right after, presumably some of the
cattle tripping over the fallen one.

The fallen one? Who did that?
she wondered. Too terrified to look back, she hoped that
whatever just happened would happen again. It did; several gunshots
rang out, the blasts heavy and powerful. Thuds and trampling hooves
filled the air. Billie dared herself to take a sneak peek over her
shoulder, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. The path in front of
her was the most stable so she chose to follow it instead of
veering off to the side and onto the rolling hills.

More
gunshots, probably upwards of ten having been executed since she
first heard them.

“Thanks! Thanks! Thanks!” she
screamed, hoping whoever was out there would hear her. It was all
she could do.

Low, deep moans came in loud along with a wheezing snort.
This time Billie
did
look over her shoulder and saw a
mid-sized undead cow with sloppy patches of rotten flesh over its
body chasing her, just mere feet away.

Screaming,
she ran fast then felt something harder than rock slam up into her
backside, knocking her up and off her feet. She flew face forward
into the dirt and grass, skidding her arms, knees and chin.
Immediately a harsh pinch gripped her Achilles through her
shoe.

She crawled on her belly, trying to
get some distance, but was instead pulled back by her foot.
“No!”

She rolled
over, the cow’s muzzle twisted to the ground with her foot. The
beast jerked its head up, trying to get her foot back to the way it
was, lifting her legs off the ground in the process before they
fell back down in a hard bump. Billie used her other foot and
kicked at the thing’s head. Stomping against its skull was like
stomping hard on a cement floor.

A couple more gunshots took down two
more cattle in the herd beyond. The remainder were still heading
toward her.

“This one,
this one, this one,” she screamed, pointing at the cow that had her
ankle in its mouth. Its powerful jaws squeezing down, she felt her
ankle pop out of place. Yelping from the pain, she kicked against
the thing’s head with her other foot nonstop until after a thunder
crack, the cow’s head exploded in bone, brain and black blood. She
kicked free the foot that’d been in its mouth, did a reverse
crabwalk and got back to her feet, only to trip when the foot that
the cow had injured gave out from under her in a sharp spike of
pain. Either her ankle was broken or it was indeed out of
place.

Doesn’t matter, keep going.
She got back onto her good foot and hobbled and hopped down
the path. The last of those things would be on her in a hot
minute—a hot
second
—if a miracle
didn’t happen soon.

More shots rang out. More thuds. More
scrambling hooves.

A shadow
figure swooped in from the side, grabbed her in its arms, and
picked her clean off her feet as it ran. Now upside down over the
figure’s shoulder, it took Billie a second to realize that whoever
this was was huge, wore jeans, and smelled smoky like from a
wood-burning stove.

“Hey, slow
down,” she said, bouncing up and down against their shoulder, her
gut taking the punishment. “You’re hurting me.”

“Better me than them,” he said. There was an accent to his
voice. Polish? Deutsch? It was hard to tell, but definitely
European,
thick
European. “My brother got the rifle.
You come with me. He take care of the beasts.”

At least you speak English,
she thought. Maybe Nathaniel
did
know what he was
doing?

After a few
minutes, the man slowed his gait, eventually stopped and put her
down. He towered over her—he must have been nearly seven feet
tall!—the width of his chest and shoulders was wide enough three of
her would be able to lay across his torso. He wore a gray and beige
plaid shirt, had blond hair and a scruffy golden beard. His eyes
were green and despite the danger of what just happened, Billie
just stared at them. So green.

“You okay, yah?” he said. His voice
was smoother now, less choppy and whispery than when he was
running.

“Yes,” she said. A sharp pain in her
ankle told her otherwise. “I mean, no. No. My foot . . . ankle . .
. the cow bit me.”

“Come here, yah?”

Before she
could reply, he knelt down in front of her, and pulled her close so
hard she fell against him. He lifted her sore foot.

“You have shoe th
at’s
ripped,” he said. “Did it bite hard?”

Billie
winced from him handling it. “I don’t know, maybe. It bit, but I
don’t know if it bit through. Didn’t feel any teeth, but I’ve never
been bitten by a cow before so I don’t know.”

The man
tugged the shoe off and felt up and down her ankle, squeezing it in
parts. Each time he applied pressure it sent a deep shockwave of
ache through her foot and calf. A sudden, violent inner pop rocked
her leg and she collapsed into his arms.

“Th
ere, better,” he
said.

She pushed herself off him. She still
couldn’t put any pressure on her foot without it hurting and
feeling weak, but it did feel like something inside had realigned
itself. “Thanks.”

“We go this
way,” he said and pointed toward a small hill that, she saw, hit
the path she’d originally been on on the other side.

A couple more shots rang
out.

“That’s it,”
he said.

“What’s it?”

“All dead,
the cows. Twenty-two shots, twenty-two cows.”

“Oookay.”
She followed him over the hill and back onto the path on the other
side. That cottage was close, and it took only a few moments more
to understand this was where they were going. She pointed to it.
“You live there?” He didn’t seem to have heard her. “I said, do you
live there?”