The Beautiful Dead (12 page)

“To hell with
this,” I mutter, annoyed by the absurdity of this whole thing. Before Helena
can stop me, before Grim realizes what I’m even doing, I’ve risen, pulled the
sword from the henchman’s bony hand and am marching wildly out of the
root-laden grotto to confront the army myself.

Yes, Grimsky
cries out in protest for me to return.

Yes, even
Helena hollers out, “What are you doing??”

The onslaught
of deathly nightmares are far more gruesome upclose. The lot of them look
freshly heaved from the foulest, grimiest, oldest of tombs. Some of the figures
are still partly adorned in fettered flesh, giving them unbalanced, offputting
exteriors. Only a few have eyes—or the semblance of them—and they wear frayed,
threadbare clothes, mere suggestions of clothes perhaps, hanging off their
mangled, rigid forms.

These are what
one imagines zombies to look like.

“Deathless,” I
call out, assuming so from the way in which the Judge threatened them with this
steel blade, the apparent weakness of said horrors. “Stand down, or I’ll cut down
every last one of—”

And then
something quite unexpected happens.

The army stops
advancing, the front line of the easily-over-thirty-or-forty zombies looking
quite surprised in doing so. Their expressions—if one could even read their
expressions—seem collectively, all of them, startled by my demand. It is like
only a moment ago they had blood in their eyes, murder in their gait … and now
they all simply stand still, loitering in a mass stupor.

Then, without
seemingly being instructed to do so, without explanation or cause, they do
something else unexpected: They slowly lower to one knee, bowing their heads.
First the front row, then the second row, then all of them. Every last one of
them, now bowed before me.

My sword of
steel wielded, I slowly bring it down to my side, astonished, watching this
dead army kneel in front of me. It’s like I’ve suddenly been elected to be their
commander by some force unseen. Was it the sword? Was it my words? A magic
spell? My fabulous hair?

Still stunned
by this display, I don’t notice Grimsky and Helena coming up to my sides, also
watching in joint amazement the spectacle before us.

“What,” Grim
breathes in my ear, “did you … do??”

“I was hoping
you’d tell me,” I whisper back. “You’re the one who seems to know and
not
know anything.”

For the
longest moment, we just stare, the three of us. Staring at the rows and rows
and rows of kneeled skeletons. Or half-people. Or zombies—I’m still not sure
what to call them—Loyal subjects of mine?

There is a
shout from behind the sea of half-people-zombies. A few words: “Up, up!—On your
feet, up! Idiots!” And the skeletons, confused and disarrayed, rise to their
feet once again. They part right down the middle to make way for yet another
odd figure to draw near: a short, stumpy male. His right leg is a contortion of
metal plates and knobs, causing him to hobble. It is an effort with each step
for him to lift it, every footfall walloping the ground. As he comes closer, I
notice one of his eyes looks like a green, glinting jewel … an emerald, maybe.

“You,” he
shouts, and I’m surprised by the high pitch of his voice. “You with the sword.”

I frown. “Me …
What about me?”

“You will come
forth.”

“Like hell I
will.”

Grimsky steps
in front, shielding my body with his arms. “She won’t be going anywhere.
Neither her nor any of my friends have done you or your Deathless harm.”

“You,” he
speaks stiffly, pointing now at a very dazed Helena. “You are her Reaper … You
will come too.”

Helena’s eyes
flare and she takes a step back, wordless.

“No one’s
going anywhere,” Grim declares, struggling to sound bolder than he looks. “No
one at all.”

“You three,
then, all,” the little man decides with a patient wave of his hand, “will come
with me. You, you, and you, to the Necropolis.”

“We will not
go to your city of death!” Grim goes on, glaring at the metal-legged man. “We
refuse to bow to your will! You cannot take us by force!”

The short man
neither speaks nor makes a gesture, and at once Grimsky collapses lifeless to
the ground like a doll, just as the Judge, Marigold, and the other did.

I kneel by
Grim’s side, panicked. “What did you do to him??” I demand angrily to know,
examining Grimsky like a nurse, as if searching for a sign of life on an Undead
person were possible. “What did you do to all of them?”

“You,” he
murmurs, patient as ever. “Will you come willingly?—Or resist?”

“Resist, you
metal-legged freak!” I spit back.

And that’s the
last thing I remember.

C H A P T E R – N I N E

For the second
time in my life, I wake to the sound of screaming.

This time, it
is not my own. I’m not even certain my eyes were closed, but the world seems to
materialize into place all around me, then go away several times. Maybe I’m
blinking, or maybe the world’s blinking in and out. The last thing I saw that
made sense was the emerald-eyed metal-legged thing patiently ordering me to go
with him, and me saying hell no. I wonder now if the stumpy metal-legged man
has cast me to hell.

“Winter.”

They’re
dragging me someplace. Blurry as my vision is, I think I see people standing
like X’s against the walls, which confuses me until I realize they’re bound by
chains. What could have been some kind of underwater opera, I realize now, is
the sound of their agonized screams.

The. Only.
One. Left. To. Blame. Is. You.

“Winter.”

Black out. I
open my eyes again, still being dragged somewhere, I catch sight of a young man
with red hair fastened to an iron block—and I watch dreamily as his arms and
his legs are unceremoniously removed, one by one. The volume of his screams is
startling, to fathom the depth of sound one person can make.

“Winter, wake
up.”

I’m in hell,
because when I open my eyes again, people are burning. If I squint, I see two
young boys in tiny iron cages that hang above sweltering coal pits … Men bound
in chain being dragged as I am, lugged away to wherever, I couldn’t guess …
Women being hung by their hair, arms flailing, their voices hoarse from hours
of crying out desperately to be saved, to be spared.

YOU DID THIS
TO YOURSELF.

What I at first
think to be a macabre painting on a wall is, in actuality, a bookcase of heads
freed of their bodies.

“If you don’t
wake up now …”

A violent,
torrential wind assaults me from all directions. Anywhere my eyes try to focus,
I see white wisps of my own hair like ghosts encircling me.

My hair.
Winter. That was my name, wasn’t it.

Maybe a great
storm is raking over the land, ridding it of all us horrible, earth-poisoning
Undead. Just as the rain tried. Just as the grass pulls away from our feet.
Just as life itself recoils at the very sight of us.

“Winter, look
at me. Over here. Look.”

I regret very
much waking that first day of my Final Life, coming toward the accented voice
of the woman that would come to hate me, the woman I call Helena. Coming toward
her voice in the same way a drowned soul surfaces from the depths of a murky
pool. The world getting clearer, clearer, clearer as I ascend …

“Winter, wake
up.”

Speak of the
devil. It’s Helena’s voice I keep hearing.

“I’m awake,” I
respond lazily, not sure where she is, but sure she’s there somewhere. “What do
you care?”

“Winter. You
need to turn around.”

“Why bother?”

“Turn. Around.
And look at me.”

Suddenly I’m
aware of the dry, rocky soil upon which I’m seated. I’m outside somewhere,
windy. I’m no longer being dragged anywhere, if I ever was. I notice metal bars
digging into my back—the outer wall of my little prison-cage that’s holding me.
The air still thrashing about, I slowly twist myself around and peer through
the metal bars. Helena is there, standing in her own cage and looking quite
perturbed.

“Good. Now,”
she says, “I need you to shut that girl up before I find something to stab her
with.”

It suddenly
occurs to me there is someone screaming, so I turn the other way to find a
little girl in another adjacent cage making the shrillest sound I’ve ever heard
my whole Second Life.

“Hey,” I call
out weakly to her. “Hey, can you—”

Screaming,
screaming, screaming.

“My name’s
Winter. What’s yours?”

Screaming,
screaming, screaming.

I tiredly turn
back to Helena. “It won’t work. We must endure.”

Helena rolls
her eyes, huffing hotly. “I should never have been a part of this. I wish I’d
never—”

“Yeah, yeah, I
know.” I stare off, exhausted.

“—pulled you
out of the ground,” Helena finishes, like I didn’t know what she was going to
say. “I should have refused to partake in this ridiculous search party, Trenton
law or not. I would be in my home right now, happy, pouring myself a tall glass
of pink lemonade.”

“This world
has pink lemonade?” I ask sleepily. “What does it taste like? Sand? Tire
rubber? Beetles’ eyes?”

“Like
pink lemonade!”
snaps Helena.

The little
girl is still screaming. Clumsily, I tug off my shoe and chuck it at her. It
goes through the bars, lands four feet to her left. I was never a very good
aim.

Amazingly, it
does the trick. The girl stops screaming, momentarily distracted by the shoe.
Trembling, her eyes overflowing with tears, her bottom lip wiggling, she just
stares at the shoe like it were a tiny mouse that’d come up to greet her.

Then the girl
eyes me, wipes her nose with the whole length of her short skinny arm. Pressing
her face suddenly against the bars of her cage, she squints and says, “Are you
one of them?”

I blink the
sleepiness from my eyes. “One of who?”

“Them,” the
girl says. She couldn’t be a day older than seven or eight. I shrug at the
girl. She lifts an eyebrow uncertainly, then asks, “Do you have a mom?”

I laugh. For
some reason, I find the question very funny. Maybe it’s the way she asked it,
so innocently. Maybe it’s the fact that the idea of having a mother is so, so
far away from my consciousness right now … The only mother-figure I could
possibly name is the one at my back, the one in the other cage, the one who
hates me.

“I’m sure I
do,” I tell her with a smile. “I’m sure we all do. We have to have moms, don’t
we?”

“Crypters
don’t have moms,” the girl states.

Crypters.
Suddenly my eyes are wide open, like the simple word arouses life into me,
energy where there was fatigue, alertness where there was drowsiness.

“Crypters,” I
repeat, realizing what she is. “You’re a Human girl.”

She wrinkles
her face again, puzzled. “Aren’t you?”

This poor
little girl. Where’s her family? Where’d she come from? “Yes,” I lie to her,
just to comfort her, just to put her at ease, just so she doesn’t start
screaming again.

Then she says,
“Your hair is pretty.”

I’m touched.
“Thanks. You have pretty hair too.”

The girl
clings to the bars of her cage to support herself as she keeps her reddened
eyes on me. Her wavy brown hair is a tangled mess. Her clothes are torn and
dirty. Her face is blackened with soot except for small raccoon circles around
her eyes, cleaned completely by her recent tears. Real Human tears.

I clear my
throat. “I’m Winter. What’s your name?”

“Megan.”

“Nice to meet
you, Megan. Do
you
have a mom?”

She nods. “Mom
and dad are probably looking for me right now. I was bad.” Her face still
partway wedged between the bars, she casts her eyes down at the ground. “I went
where I wasn’t supposed to go.”

“Where was
that?”

“The woods.
That’s where they got me.”

“Who got you?”

“Them.” She
looks off to the side, squinting in the distance.

I follow her
gaze. I see many other cages now, large as dog kennels, a generous five-by-five
square feet of space in each, roughly, arranged in seemingly countless rows
with narrow aisles between them. These cages extend into the distance where a
tall warehouse stands, and even from this far away I can make out graffiti
pouring down its walls and spirally smokestacks issuing from tall pipes that
jut out of its roof. Other buildings and factories and metal sheds stand all around
us, giving the impression that we’re housed in the middle of an abandoned
industrial city. Maybe that’s exactly where we are.

“When my mom
finds me,” says Megan, “the first thing I’m going to tell her is I’m sorry.”

A sigh escapes
my lips. “I’m … sure she knows that.”

“Sorry because
my little brother wasn’t careful either, and he was killed,” she goes on,
stonily. “And now me.”

I put a hand
to my mouth. “Oh, Megan. I’m … I’m so sorry about your—about your little
brother. Listen to me. We’re going to get out of here, okay?”

Sweet as my
dialogue is with the little Human, Helena has to go and ruin it. “There’s no
use,” she calls out, annoyed. “We’re all going to die soon. Give it up.”

“This,” I
snap, spinning around to glare at my maker, “is not your prisoner-conversation.
You are not allowed. This is
my
prisoner-conversation, between me and
this sweet little girl Megan. Go find your own conversation!”

I turn back to
the girl. “Tell me about your home.”

She responds:
“I’m really hungry.”

Hunger. That
gives me a sudden thought. Adjusting myself on the dry, gritty ground, I very
quietly ask, “Do you know a John?”

Her lip starts
quivering again. Her eyes swell. “Will you make sure to tell my mom and my dad
that I—that I hid the thing by the anvil?—Please?”

“Did you know
a John?” I repeat, hoping the blasting wind masks my voice enough so Helena
doesn’t hear this. “Where do you come from, Megan? Where do you live?”

“I buried it,”
she goes on, her face so pushed into the bars that her mouth stretches twice
its width. “I buried it so it would stay safe. Tell them that.”

“Megan,” I
persist, an unanticipated sense of urgency finding me suddenly, shaking my
throat. “You have to tell me where you live. Please.”

“Promise
you’ll tell them that.”

And then I
hear the chains. From the vast rows of people-coops draws forth a singular
figure—what appears to be part man, part skeleton, part office nerd—and he
lazily makes his way through the maze of cages. For the first time, I realize
how many people are imprisoned here with us … All of them making small noises
and gasps, scuttling to the opposite sides of their cages as he passes. All of
the prisoners deathly afraid of him, this half-skeleton in a tattered dress
shirt and tie—I take him to be a prison guard of sorts. Or Death’s tech
support, one of the two. Lengths of chain drag behind him, rattling with the
weight of what appears to be hundreds of keys.

As the guard
turns onto our little row, I realize he’s headed directly for my cage. Whoever
he is, whatever purpose he’s here to carry out, I’m clearly about to learn. He
frees one single key from the chain that drags, fumbles with it in his hand to
unlock my door.

No—To unlock
hers.

“Tell them,”
the girl almost yells, her voice going up an octave as she realizes the
skeletal guard has come for her. “I hid it. They’re going to be looking for it.
Please!”

“Tell me where
you live,” I urge her, desperate. “Tell me quickly so I may find them!”

“The apples,”
she says, tears falling down her face. “I forgot to tell my mom about the tree
by the lake. No one … no one’s going to know about it after I’m gone …”

The guard has
opened her cage now and steps inside.

“I’ll tell
them,” I promise, no idea how in the world I’ll be able to fulfill it. “Just
tell me where they are!”

And the guard
neither threatens her nor utters a word. He merely stands at her side quietly,
then with care extends a skeletal hand in her direction, offering it. The girl
peers up, her body visibly shaking. With long and painful hesitation, the girl
finally takes the guard’s hand, lifts herself up off the ground, then seems to
walk with the guard hand-in-hand out of her cage … almost like she were
perfectly willing to go with him all along. And as they walk away, she neither
looks back nor makes another sound.

Then they’re
gone. I just stare after her, mystified, confounded, aghast at what I’d just
witnessed …

“Good try,”
Helena grunts. “We’ve been trying to find where the Humans live for quite some
time. You would have done the Mayor of Trenton a great service had the little
bleeder spilled their whereabouts.”

“I wasn’t—” I
start to say, then sigh. “What’s the use, anyway … We’re not making it out of
this place, are we?”

“No, we’re
not.” Still leaning on the bars at the corner of her cage, she seems to inspect
her nails. “What you said to that girl, that was … sweet. Who’s John?”

“I … I don’t
think ‘sweet’ is going to get us out of here,” I mutter, dodging her question.
I’d really hoped she hadn’t heard his name …

“Get
comfortable. We could be waiting here a few decades before we’re tended to,”
Helena sings, her accent thick as it’s ever been, “and then this whole turmoil
will at long last conclude. I could use a cigarette.”