The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (18 page)

“God-father, no!” The man screamed, grasping onto the metal rods that stuck out through his shoulder and thigh. “Please, no, don’t let me die like this. Please, please, please…”

Brook and Mercer carefully approached the man, who kicked at the air, his feet inches off the ground. He had dropped his pistol when he tumbled off his bike. “What do you want?” He cried as they came closer. “Who are you? How are you not dead?”

“How do you see us?” Brook asked.

The man squirmed against the rebar rods. His feet dangled a few inches from the ground. Blood was pouring from the man’s wounds, quickly staining his yellow suit a dark brown. “Oh god-father, most merciful and just to his servants, please take me with your peaceful hands, please take me...”

“Here, friend, let me help you.” Brook reached up to try and remove the mask from the man’s face, to help him breathe, but he kicked her away.

“No! Have mercy, please! Don’t make me breathe the poisoned air! Don’t let me die that way!”

“Poisoned… air?”

“The air will burn my lungs, will make my skin turn purple and slough off. This is the Blight, you fools! How you two are unharmed is beyond… god-father…!” The man coughed, smatterring blood on the interior of his rectangular visor. “You two… you must be angels, sent to collect me before the dead can… consume me...”

Even through the red droplets, Mercer and Brook could see how the man’s pupils trembled, could see his cheeks arched up in a hybrid grimace and grin. The man thought he was having a divine experience.

“We’re not angels,” Mercer said. Behind him, reverberating around the ruins, came the collective roar of the ravenous corpses, a cannibalistic tidal wave rushing towards them. “We’re just normal people from the Green Lands. Now please, how can we_”

“The Green Lands? The land of the… unrighteous! Heretics! The dead are coming to it… yes, to finish the Apocalypse that began long ago. The Undead King is leading an army of the undead… and now he has the sceptre...”

“The Undead King?” Mercer’s flesh erupted in bumps as he remembered the crooked house, in whose basement resided the malformed man who pulled on all the dark tendrils like a puppeteer. The man who had beckoned to him from his nest of plastic and paper. Mercer walked closer to the dying man suspended from the metal rods. “Who is the Undead King and what do you know about him?”

“His name is Plaguewind… He’s the final horseman… and now he has the tool needed to fulfill the prophecy… the Sceptre of Jai Lin… nothing can stop... him... now…” The man was losing life quickly. Blood had pooled below his dangling legs and his head hung loose from his neck. “He’ll be in the Green Lands by… the next… full moon…”

Mercer felt Jai Lin pulling on him. He turned around, and saw exactly what he was afraid he’d see: the streets were teeming with undead, crawling over one another in a great wave of grasping hands and decayed flesh. They’d be on them in mere minutes.

“Brook, we have to go. Now!”

“Okay, okay!” She followed after Mercer, who was running in the opposite direction of the corpses, but then turned to look at Yellow Suit. “I’m… I’m sorry.” Her words fell on deaf ears: the man was already comatose.

“Brook!”

“I’m coming!” She bolted after Mercer, past rusted carts and twisted poles that once illuminated the street with ‘lectric lights. She couldn’t help but look over her shoulder at the oncoming horde. There were so many of them, their bodies in varying degrees of rot. Some walked on broken limbs, some even crawled, but no level of infirmity was severe enough to stifle their desire to consume human flesh. Teeth gnashing, fingers grasping, Brook was so transfixed that she failed to see that Mercer had stopped in front of her and she ran straight into him. 

“What is it? Why did you stop_ by the talons of Elon...” She trailed off as she saw what Mercer had already seen: coming from the other direction was another horde of the undead, equally as massive, equally as hungry. They were in the middle of two oncoming waves, which would soon crash together and rip them limb from limb.

“We’ll be okay though,” Brook said, uncertainty underscoring her voice. “This is a dream. We’ll wake up. We can’t be hurt in dreams.”

She didn’t let on that her dead dreams always ended when the subject died. Should they not have awoken when the man in the yellow suit went limp on the metal rods? Perhaps he had yet to die, had yet to release them from this nightmare.

“Dream or not, I’m not about to take any chances. I’m getting away from here before they catch up to us. Come on!” Mercer grabbed her hand and led her up a steep incline of pockmarked concrete that ran away from the street. It led to a burnt out husk of an old building, the floors mostly eaten away but the steel frame still intact. Brook and Mercer hurriedly inched their way across the thin beams, a cold, mildewy air billowing up to them from the dark depths below. They got to the other side just as Yellow Suit’s first screams filled the air. The corpses had found him and were feasting.

“He was still alive…” Brook said. Still, the dead dream continued.

“Well he’s not anymore. Come on!” Razor wire lay in their path on the other side of the building, several spools thick and atop a row of squashed carts. The two carefully made their way over it, both their noses wrinkling at the brine being brought to them on the breeze.

“Do you smell that?”

“Yeah. Ocean.” They made their way past the rusted carts and found another pathway. If their noses were to be believed, the sea was straight ahead, away from the dead who were closing in on them from behind. Mercer risked a look over his shoulder and saw desperate hands clutching at the steel beams of the building, saw the maddened eyes and rotted faces of those who were successfully making it through to the other side. The razor wire Brook and Mercer had carefully climbed over was already carpeted by the first wave of corpses, creating a bridge of bodies for the remaining undead to effortlessly cross. “Come on!”

They rounded a row of squat houses and at last saw the ocean spread out before them, beyond a cracked highway that separated the dead city from the sand. They both ran for it, not sure of what salvation they’d find at its edge, only that there was no safety to be found in the city.

“Brook,” Mercer said when he hit the faint line where the dry sand met the wet. “I don’t think this is a dream. No matter what happens, I just want you to know_”

“We’re getting out of this, Mercer, so don’t waste your breath on good-byes.” Mercer looked over at her; beneath a brow glistening with sweat were a set of eyes the color of the hottest night in summer, glow beetles blinking in their humid darkness, the tint of her irises fluctuating like the undersides of leaves. There was a mirth beneath the fear and confusion, in the whites of her eyes; it was always there, a conviction that, despite everything, it was all going to be okay.

Gods, he was really falling for her, he realized. 

“It’s not that,” he continued. “I just want you to know that I’m glad we met and that we got to fight side by side.”

Brook smiled. “I’m glad too.” And she was.

They stopped at the point where the waves met the sand, shards of jellyfish gleaming under their feet despite the low gray light. “Dead men don’t go in the water,” Mercer stated, looking out at the black, frothy ocean.

“What other choice do we have?” She wasn’t about to say it, but she didn’t know how to swim. Still, this was their only chance, and she could wade out just far enough that the killim couldn’t reach her.

Brook followed Mercer as he moved out into the water, the salty foam of a passing wave taking her breath away as it kissed her hips. The water smelled of black blood, of old machines, but still she smiled. She had always wanted to see the ocean, to look out and not know where the water ended and the other side of the world began. If she was to die, at least she had been able to feel the salt water on her skin, and at least she had been able to do so with Mercer. She felt right being with him.

He stopped when the water was up to his waist and turned to look at her, but his gaze jerked away to what was happening on the beach. She turned, gasping as she followed his eyes. Along the entire shore were killim, shoulder to shoulder and motionless, watching them with their blank eyes.

“They’re not moving or growling,” Brook said. “Why?”

The answer had appeared behind them, levitating further out in the ocean. He called to them without word or name, without voice. Brook and Mercer felt him, knew that he was there, waiting for them. They turned, and it was the man in the yellow suit, floating above the waves. His head moved around his neck as though it were an insect beneath the mask, while his body hung limp, save for one forearm draped like a hook over his belly.

“You have what belongs to me
…
” Yellow Suit said. He moved his arm away from his stomach, revealing a large tear in the suit through which his gut’s viscera winked out at them like an infected eye. Intestines spilled out into the waves with loud plops as the man levitated higher into the sky. In the same jittery fashion as he had moved his head, Yellow Suit began to tear his protective gear off, revealing pasty white skin covered in thin cuts and wounds. Rather than float away on the ocean’s breeze, the tatters of the yellow suit rewove and reformed themselves into a thick, dirty cloak that draped around the man’s body. Tumors erupted on the lacerated white flesh before the cloak had completely covered it. Soon, only the man’s hands and chin were visible.

“You…” Brook heard Mercer whisper. He pulled Jai Lin from its sheath, and she followed suit, notching an arrow to her bow. “Plaguewind.”

Plaguewind seemed to shudder when he saw the blade, but then began to laugh. Brook felt any and all hope die within her.

“Ah, so you’ve learned my true name? That’s all the better. You can scream it as I have my children peel the flesh from your bones. Now, I’ll be taking the sword.”

Plaguewind lifted a malformed arm into the sky. In his hand was a metal rod furnished with a large black crystal. Black tendrils erupted from it, up towards the heavens like bolts of lightning. The low-hanging cumulus clouds grew darker as they absorbed the tendrils, and began to whirl about, a vortex around which Plaguewind’s sceptre was the axis.

The shallows Brook and Mercer were wading in began to be sucked out deeper into the ocean, sinking below their waists, then their knees, until they were standing on nothing but wet sand. Mercer spun around, expecting the dead men to be upon him now that there was no water between them, but still they stood motionless on the beach, watching the events unfold with their vacant eyes.

“Brook, shoot him! Now!” Brook let loose an arrow, then another, but Plaguewind merely held his free hand up, and the arrows splintered apart in mid-air, falling like matchsticks onto the sand.

“Such primitive weapons,” Plaguewind laughed. “How far man has fallen in so short a time. A century and a half ago, man had the power to explode the world a hundred times over. We were gods. Now…” he chuckled. “Look at what we’ve devolved into. Primitive cave men with bows and arrows.”

Primitive cave men with bows and arrows.
Mercer had heard those exact words said before, had in fact heard them many times, always from the same mouth. It would always be when they returned from a trip deep into the Karyatim Wild Lands southwest of the Preserve, when they would travel from tribe to tribe bringing medicines and books to the people who lived in the woods and salt flats. They’d return to the house Mercer had grown up in, next to the pond at the bottom of the valley, and after making a cup of coffee and plopping into his easy chair, his father would lament on how man had devolved into primitive cave people with bows and arrows.

Plaguewind’s voice echoed around in his head. It didn’t sound anything like his father’s voice, but the
way
he spoke, the
things
he said…

“Pa?”

Brook looked at Mercer, her mouth agape. “Mercer?”

From under Plaguewind’s hood, Mercer could see the malformed man’s jaw moving, could see silent words forming on his lips. It looked as if he was arguing with himself, for one moment his jaw would be slack and pleading, the next his razor sharp teeth would be exposed in a gnashing snarl.

Suddenly, the dark tendrils stopped emanating from the sceptre, and the clouds slowed their spin. Plaguewind had become still, his jaw slack.

“My son…” Plaguewind whispered. “I’m so sorry…”

“Pa!” Mercer ran forward, his feet splashing through the low shallows. The dead men on the beach were moaning again, but their groans were quickly drowned out by a rumble. The ground was shaking. Behind Plaguewind came the source of the tremors: all the water that had been sucked out further into the ocean was returning, a tidal wave that blotted out the sky. It was like the great waves the Boat People and beachy men said drowned the great cities in the long ago, at least an eye-span high and rushing in at them at breakneck speed.

“By the talons of Elon…” Brook whispered.

“Run!” They turned to run, but there was no escaping it. They were but fifteen strides from the place they had been standing when the wave caught up with them, sucking them up into it before crashing on the shore.

Mercer bolted upright, his hand instinctively going for Jai Lin’s hilt. The sword wasn’t there, his hand alighting instead upon a human-sized sack of flour and some dented metal cans. He always kept his sword next to him while he slept. Where was Jai Lin? Better question still, where was he?