The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (31 page)

“Careful, Mercer,” Jompers yelled. “This road isn’t much of a road. There are roots and holes everywhere.”

“And it’s as dark as my ass crack, too. Don’t go running us into a tree going this fast, boy!”

“I’ve got this,” Mercer said. He felt under the steering wheel. Under the dashboard of his father’s backhoe had been a switch for the large vehicle’s lights, two mantis eyes on stalks above the cab which could cast a half-circle of light on the area directly in front. Mercer found a switch, but all it did was cause a low, yellow light on the left side of the cart to start blinking.

“What are you looking for?” Jompers asked.

“Lights. There’s usually a switch_” The cart’s tires crashed through a large water gully that ran across the road, the occupants in the back almost bouncing out. Mercer’s chest cracked into the steering wheel, knocking the wind out of him, while from the engine came a terrible groan as the car’s momentum propelled it through the trench despite its angularity. Mercer was able to keep the car from swerving out of control, but everyone in the car was shaken up.

“The Fist be damned, I told you not to drive so fast!”

“It’s either I drive quickly or we go back in that cell. Which will it be, Sergeant?” This quieted Solloway, who maybe would have balked at such backtalk were he not in the condition he was. Mercer felt around some more, clicking switches when he found them, and finally he happened upon the one he was looking for. Two white lights on the front of the jeep clicked to life, revealing the dark road ahead. This far out of camp, and this deep in the forest the road was nothing more than a strip of knee-high grass that ran through the trees.

The cart seemed to find every rock in the road, to the point where everyone was getting frustrated. Still, they had made a good distance between themselves and their pursuers, so much so that the sound of gunshots had faded completely. The Rip was rearing itself up before them, a dark behemoth against the sky.

“Kill it,” Solloway yelled. “Now!” Mercer downshifted into first, then neutral, before slowing the cart to a stop and then shutting it off. His ears were buzzing from the drive, but they also seemed more attuned to the sounds of the nighttime forest around them. He heard crickets buzzing and the screech of bats as well as the wind going through the upper branches of the trees.

“Let’s go, down to the boat.” Solloway said.

“We’re going back in the boat? Oh dear, oh dear…”

“What’d you think, Jed? That we’re going to go over the bridge? You saw how heavily guarded it was when we were rowing in. Dusty has men guarding it up and down. It’s the only real way into his camp from the Green Lands. Now come on, let’s go.”

Solloway gingerly stepped down from the back of the cab, but after taking just a few steps, his legs buckled from under him and he stumbled to the ground.

“Solloway!” Brook yelled, going to him. He had fallen into a tangle of thorns and briars right off the road. He clawed at the trunk of a warty old flametip tree, desperately trying to lift himself back up.

“The Fields of Gold are calling to me, I fear,” Solloway said. His voice was different, softer, more gentle. It sounded as though he were ready to settle down for a long hibernation, perhaps one he would not wake up from.

“Don’t say that, Solloway,” Mercer said, helping him up. “We’re going to get you better. Jompers here will patch you up once we get away from here.”

“There’s no place to go, Mercer. Don’t you see? War is coming. Nowhere is safe, especially not for us.”

“That’s the wound talking, not you. Come on… stand up!” Mercer got Solloway to his feet, and once he had, they made their way together down the slope towards the Hud’s muddy shores.

“Where’s Jed?” Solloway asked, after Mercer had dug up their buried packs and clothes. The inky darkness of night was beginning to fade to gray. Morning was coming. “Did we lose him again?”

“I’m right here!” Jompers called, leaping over stone and branch as he hurried down the hillside. “I just had some things to attend to at the cart. And look who I found!” A large puff of silver and white feathers hooted from its place on the cosmologist’s arm.

“Rory! You found him.”

“He found me, Brook. Just flapped down from the sky and landed right on my head.”

“I’m touched at your little reunion, Jed, but can we just please get the hell out of here?” Solloway was gesturing towards the rowboat, which Mercer had already put out into the shallows of the river.

“Of course. Here I come.” Jompers stepped into the boat with help from Mercer, as did Brook and then Leo. Before Solloway could follow suit, there was a thunderous boom from back the way they came. All looked up the hillside as a mushroom cloud of fire and black smoke erupted over the trees. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…”

“What the… Jompers, what did you do?”

“I… I planted some traps on the cart, in case Dusty Yen’s men caught up with us before we got safely away. It would seem they were closer to us than we thought.”

The screams of dying men were carried down to them on the light breeze of early morning, punctuated by the sound of bullets tearing through the air.

“Damn them, they were sneaking behind us!” Solloway yelled, clenching his fists towards the trees. “Should have known better than to underestimate them. If only I had my axe…”

“Solloway, watch out!” Solloway ducked his head, narrowly dodging the first arrow in a barrage of bolts and bullets.

“Get behind the benches and stay low!” Solloway yelled. Jompers and Brook did as he said, their cheeks finding the cold metal under the wooden seats. Solloway had come by a second wind of strength, which allowed him to help Mercer push the boat out into the water despite his injuries. The turgid, muddy water churned around their legs as they fought against the current.

“Solloway, get in the boat! I can push it out!”

“The tide has gone out. If we want to get this boat out into the water quick, we_” With a resounding thunk, a harpoon impaled itself through the side of the row boat, a thick cable attached to its rear. The cable grew taut and pulled on the vessel, almost capsizing it as Mercer and Solloway continued to try and push it.

Mercer followed the length of the cable back to shore and saw Alyssa standing atop a promontory of jagged rocks, her hair shining silver in the soft gray of the morning, a smoking, long-barreled rifle in her hands. She had shot the harpoon from the gun, Mercer realized, as the length of cable it was attached to ended at a pulley staked to the ground by her feet.

“The Fist be damned,” Solloway said. “This woman will be the death of me yet.” He grabbed on the cable, the veins in his neck bulging as he tried to yank the harpoon free from the boat. Despite his brute strength, it wouldn’t give.

“Throw me a knife!” He shouted, the bullets from unseen gunmen raining down around them. Jompers peeked his head up and tossed Solloway a long blade with a serrated edge. The sergeant went about trying to cut the cable, but again, it was no use. The cable was strong and would not break so easily.

“Give me one of those fire bombs you have, Jed! Now!” Brook handed Jompers the bag of pyrix spheres he had given her, which the cosmologist threw to Solloway. The sergeant caught it as he was already sloshing his way back towards the shore.

“Where are you going?” Brook yelled after him. “Get back to the boat!”

“We’re not going anywhere as long as we’re stuck by that harpoon! I’ll be right back!” He winked at her, then turned back towards the beach. He could see them all, the soldiers, where they had taken cover. A dozen or so guns and bows were aimed at him with enough ammunition to fell a hundred undead. He smirked. Paulo would be proud.

He made it to the shallows just as a bullet sailed past his leg, zooming so close that there was an audible whistle. A slug finally struck true, meeting his shoulder with a dull thud. It didn’t slow the large man in the slightest. Just as Solloway got to the beach, a mercenary bolted out from the cover of the forest, a rusty machete in his hand. Solloway effortlessly dodged the man’s attack before putting the serrated knife into his skull.

“Surrender now, Solloway!” Alyssa called from her place above the sands. “You don’t have to die like this.”

“Like what, Alyssa?” Solloway shouted, running towards her perch. “Like a warrior? Like a soldier? Like a true axe man from the Fort at Kingston?”

He reached into the satchel of pyrix spheres and produced so many that several tumbled out of his hand, harmlessly bouncing on the beach. With only a moment to gauge how far it was between himself and the staked cable, Solloway threw the spheres into the air with a savage grunt. Most flew askew, but a few flew true.

“Pyrix spheres…” Alyssa whispered. She dropped her harpoon gun and jumped, just as Jompers’ bombs landed where she had been standing. They immediately burst into flame, engulfing the entire peak with a white-hot ball of fire. The cable pulled taut between the pulley and the boat melted just enough to snap, freeing the rowboat and allowing Mercer to push it further out into the river.

Solloway was out of breath, his hands on his knees. The slug in his shoulder had made his entire arm go numb, and there was a buzzing in his head that was clouding his vision with a dull static. Once he made it to the boat, he’d sleep for days, he thought, maybe even weeks. He just had to make one final dash, draw upon one more burst of power.

“Paulo, if you’re watching over me, give me strength…” The wizened face of the sergeant’s old mentor appeared before him. Pushing the pain and fatigue from his mind, Solloway took one more deep breath, then began his run back towards the boat.

“He did it,” Mercer said, jumping up into the row boat. “The crazy Old Bear did it!” Solloway was running through the shallows with his legs as high as possible, his back to the beach. If he had been watching the shore, he would have seen the most beautiful sunrise, the horizon pink, the sun’s peeking parabola burning off the prior evening’s fog. He would have seen Alyssa, bruised and battered from her fall, aiming Solloway’s own pistol at his back. He’d have seen the steel hammer cocked, the trigger pulled. He would have seen the grief that had become the gray of her eyes, would have known the scorn in the lines in her face. He would have seen the young woman who loved him once, the old woman who loved him still, the woman he had never been able to love in return.

He would have seen all this had he been facing the beach, but he wasn’t. He was looking west, towards a sky that still held in its firmament stars silently sighing. He was smiling, believing that they were free and clear of the camp, that they had all survived despite the odds against them.

He didn’t even feel the bullet go through his back and out his chest.

All he knew was that he suddenly felt light, as if he were floating in the water despite his feet being sunk into the muddy sand.

“What…” Solloway looked down at his chest, saw the blood blooming through the fabric of his off-white shirt. Another shot rang out, the boom of a cannon. This bullet didn’t strike as true as its brother, finding his upper arm instead and taking a huge chunk of flesh with it.

“No!” Brook screamed, crawling over to the edge of the boat. Mercer wrapped his arms around her waist so that she wouldn’t fling herself overboard. “Solloway!”

The old sergeant, whose men had called him Old Bear, locked eyes with her. He tried to mutter something, but his lungs had filled with blood, so he just smiled. In his algae eyes, Brook saw sadness, but also a liberation of his spirit. The man was ready for the Dusk.

With a quick flutter of his eyelids, Solloway said good-bye to her, to Jompers, Mercer and Leo. His friends. Then he turned, ever so slowly, to face the woman who had shot him through the back. Alyssa fired again, the bullet clapping the water to Solloway’s left. The old sergeant took a step forward, his palms raised to his side, his face serene.

“I am a soldier at the Fort of Kingston, a keeper of the peace,” he whispered, mouthing the vows he had never forgotten, had always kept close to his heart. Another shot was fired, and Solloway felt his liver burst as the bullet went through his abdomen. He hunched over, the surge of pain that emanated through his body undeniable, but he swallowed it down, and continued.

“I will defend the realm until the end, my watch will never cease. And when I fall in battle, or my time here has grown old, I will join my fellow soldiers, in the_”

The last bullet in the gun’s chamber was fired, Solloway’s head snapping back as it went through his forehead. The Old Bear crumpled in the shallows of the Hud, his body slowly turning over in the river’s current until he was face-down, his broad back like a beach shoal of bleeding sand.

“You will join your fellow soldiers… in the forever Fields of Gold,” Alyssa finished, wiping tears from her cheeks. She dropped the pistol to the ground and watched silently as Willis Crane’s son furiously moved the rowboat’s oars through the water.

They had by now gotten well beyond arrow-range, and there were no boats to pursue them by. She didn’t care that they were escaping. She didn’t know what she felt. All she did was watch silently, motionlessly, until Mercer and the rest were nothing but a speck moving south along the Hud, the wails of the Black Wing girl having already faded beneath the soft crashing of the river’s waves on the shore. Solloway still floated face-down in the shallows before her, his heavy boots anchored in the mud. The pink light of morning tinted the fingers of blood that reached from his wounds for the long-gone rowboat into a red the color of clay.