Rise of the Dead Prince (15 page)

The thing was surprising nimble still, given that the armor was thick and almost ridiculously heavy. The hunter and the farmer were in no way going to let the thing get up again, however. The fight became mercilessly one-sided, if in fact it had been any other way from the onset. Like miners working a vein of ore, the two men hacked away at the armor straps. With a scoop from Trent’s hoe, the other side was revealed; and again, the men commenced to hacking. Finally, the breastplate cracked open like an egg, and with a final downward chop, Trent ended the fight. Start to finish, the encounter had been around twenty seconds long, which might not have been a terrible thing if it were not for the rules of survival in Ar
novo.

The men exchanged frantic glances. They had just made enough noise to wake the dead, were it not for the fact that they were already awake. It was not so much that they were afraid, but more that they were stunned. They had not heard this much noise in weeks. Instinctively, they had learned to bolt at the sound of commotion. And bolt they did, but only for a brief few seconds before Dor stopped them. He laughed, and this time, he didn’t care how loud it
was.

“We’re surrounded. All sides, brother. And I bet they’re all like this one here,” he said, gesturing to the fallen skeleton. Soon the bet was confirmed. The clanking of metal was heard on all sides. Trent suddenly cursed loudly. Dor turned to see what it
was.

“My hoe is cracked from all that whackin’ on the metal,” he said, dropping it with finality. With a grunt, Dor tossed the big man the heavy s
word.

“Happy birthday,” he said with a grin. Trent caught the blade and immediately began to spin it in his hand as though it were a rapier. Slowly, a wide toothy smile appeared on his tan face. Dor quickly retrieved his hatchet and began to look all over with his brow furr
owed.

“Which way, brother?” asked Trent. Dor laughed a
gain.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” he respo
nded.

“In that case, let’s head west for a change,” Trent said with a head nod to the
west.

“You reckon they got a nice mace for me over there?” said Dor, running
west.

“I expect we’re goin’ to find out,” replied Trent, still smiling and twirling the blade even as he
ran.

“Hey, Trent,” hollered Dor over his shou
lder.

“Yeah?” said Trent, trying to pick up his
pace.

“There’s a
whole bunch
of ’em out there,” he said hap
pily.

“Oh yeah? I kinda figured that,” replied Trent with a light chu
ckle.

“I reckon that means we got pretty close,” said the hu
nter.

“I reckon so,” said the fa
rmer.

22
The Road Alone

M
eier had traveled due south from Targov in a practically perfect line. There had only been a couple of tiny towns on the way, and these Meier gave a wide berth. The last thing he wanted was to go up against even one more of those terrible skeletons. He had passed a few farm houses, and he avoided getting too close to these as well. One couldn’t be too careful. The worst part of the trip, even worse than the terrible danger itself, was the eerie silence that Meier encountered at every turn. With the exception of the cawing of an occasional crow, it was like the whole world had died, leaving him alone to wander the ruins. It gave him a cold shudder every time he thought about it for too
long.

It was on a damp and chilly morning that Meier made a silly decision born of sheer boredom and curiosity. He spied a large house in the distance, and there were several fields aroun
d it.

“A plantation,” Meier muttered to himself. Plantation owners, he knew, were richer than the average farmers by a significant margin. So, he reasoned, they might have better weapons lying around than the ones he was carrying. In hindsight, Meier had realized just how fatuous this plan was. The truth was that he was so terribly disinterested with the trip in general that he took an inane risk just to break the mono
tony.

At first he crept up on the house as though it were a sleeping dragon. Part of him half expected to see a swarm of bones flood out of the entrance like angry ants from a mound. Another part of him just laughed and laughed at these precautionary measures. This was certainly no town. It was just a big house. And besides, he was sure that Allie could have handled whatever was inside. Therefore, in his addled mind, it followed that if she weighed one hundred pounds and could devastate everything in her path, he should be able to hold his own for a while, being one hundred and fifty pounds himself. The wild card, of course, was to factor in the effects of riding a four-legged demigod and assess how much difference that
really
made.

For no real reason at all, Meier blushed a purplish blush. Alone in his own mind for as long as he had been, the thought of Allie tended to have this effect. He saw her in his head, stabbing and twisting with her pitchfork, a snarl on her pretty little face. She was his hero. Snapping out of his daydream, Meier realized that he was getting really close to the house. He had a hand on either side of his belt to silence his saber and dagger from rattling. In a moment of inspired negativity, he ruminated over just how incredibly useless the dagger was. Still, he thought, it might come in handy at some point. He fantasized about throwing it end over end with Ian-like accuracy into the head of some
strigoi
, just before it pounced on Allie. Then he could be her hero
too.

Of course, the
reality
was that he couldn’t even hit where he was throwing, let alone figure out how to do that magical thing that people did to make the knife actually stick in things. He had practiced on the occasional hay bale that had crossed his path, and somehow he had the knack of landing the knife flat-ended around 90 percent of the
time.

Oh well,
he thought, he might at least manage to stun something if he threw really hard. To that end, he had actually succeeded once in getting it to go into a bale point first, and hard at that; but then he had a terrible time digging it out, as it had disappeared entirely into the mite-infested hay. Luckily, the chiggers had no real interest in dead pe
ople.

In any case, he was around fifty paces from the door of the house when impatience got the better of him. He started to walk normally. Why he did this was simply because he was painfully tired of creeping up on a house. If anything was inside, he would find out anyway, so why not just march forward confidently? It was a good question, but the answer would soon be obvious. Sure enough, the second he straightened out and let his belt hang normally, there was a scrabbling sound from within the big house; and then a bonewalker appeared in the doorway, followed by another, and then another. There were three in all. Meier gulped. It was three more than he felt like he could handle, and his feeling was not far from wrong. Charging in was an incredibly stupid idea, but he did it anyway. He even let loose a battle cry, which was even more idiotic than the charge. If Meier had not already been dead, he would have been lucky to be alive for very much lo
nger.

It was when the three monsters hissed their gritty hiss in unison that Meier began to have second thoughts. He halted in his charge, drenched in the sudden realization that he had no idea what he was doing. The skeletal assailants continued the scramble toward him, clacking and clambering over each other like hungry dogs fighting over a Meier-shaped pork chop. It was then that Meier’s survival instinct kicked in. He looked the situation over and saw their weakness. They did not fight in harmony. At least, these ones did not. They almost seemed intoxicated. That could be both good and bad, but how to take advantage of it eluded him. Meier needed a moment, so he opted for a strategic kiting maneuver. In other words, he shamelessly ran like c
razy.

Rather than run straight away from the beasts, he took off diagonally at an angle forty-five degrees to his right, the house being on his left side at another forty-five degrees. In layman’s terms, this meant that Meier started out by running almost toward his pursuers, but off to one side. He did this to see how they would turn. It was a perfect success. As they adjusted to turn and give chase, they fell all over each other in a tangled mess of b
ones.

Very interesting,
thought Meier. He needed to keep them together. Now would have been the time for stage 2 of his plan, if only he had dreamed it up yet. It was time for more of that strategic kiting. He ran at top speed for the nearest fence, which was not too terribly far. In one graceful moment, he executed a stunning leap over the top rail, but since it was Meier, he managed to snag his scabbard on a bit of wire and fall flat on his face regardless. Cursing into the dirt upon impact, he found that he was cripplingly winded. He groaned in pain. In a great testament to willpower in the most exigent of scenarios, Meier pulled himself up and started to run desultorily across the cleared field. The earth was tilled and soft, which made for muddled footing. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the bones had come to the f
ence.

He dared to look on for a while over his shoulder, all the while running forward in agony. Meier needed to see how they would react to the obstruction. Rather than bound over as he had (or tried), they stopped and sort of fell over in a roll, getting their footing far faster than he had. That was interesting as well. Meier couldn’t say why just yet, but there was something important to learn from that. Then it hit him. Fine motor control! They didn’t seem to have it. He cursed himself for being such an impatient goof. The house was probably safer. He’d bet they couldn’t even open a door if it didn’t have a latch. Of course, how that helped the present situation was something he hadn’t come up with so far. He looked over his shoulder again. They were gaining, and Meier could barely stand the pain of running with the wind knocked out of
him.

It was about the time that these thoughts had fully passed through Meier’s panicked brain that he managed to run into the one and only thing that was in the field. And he hit it very hard indeed. Now it was the side of his face that screamed out in agony. His ear was ringing like a bell, and his chest felt like beaten drum. He was in too pathetic a state to do very much but look up at his assailant. There it was, a wooden cross in the ground eight feet high with a straw man lashed to it. Had he not been in such paralyzing pain, he might have thought that was funny. He saw the face of the scarecrow, smiling down on him with his burlap face and yarn features. How could he have missed seeing the one obstruction in the f
ield?

It went to show that people really ought to watch where they were going, even when being chased by skeletons or maybe
especially
when they were being chased by skeletons. Either way, Meier was in no condition for a self-addressed lecture. He had skeleton problems. Meier jumped up and drew his saber. He glanced at the tarnished blade then glanced up at the scare
crow.

“Wish me luck,” he said to his inanimate witness. Suddenly, Meier’s eyes got wide. He threw his saber down into the sod, and there it stuck, straight as a mile marker. “I just thought of a way you can help out!” he told the scarecrow. The bonewalkers were closing in. He just hoped his new friend wasn’t buried too deeply. With a gut-busting heave, Meier freed the scarecrow from the earth, and it was not a moment too soon. He had to make his move the same second the scarecrow was free. They were already in range, and any longer would have been too
late.

With a heave, Meier swung the wooden cross in a circle around his body, catching all three of his attackers perfectly as he did so. Luckily, they were light, or his swing would not have worked, light perhaps, but not weightless. It was quite a strain for Meier, given the multiple factors against him. These included, but were certainly not limited to the fact that he was not very strong and that the combined weight of an eight-foot pole, a straw man, and a trio of writhing undead murderers was about all he could manage. Meier wondered if his adrenal gland still worked but quickly decided that none of this would have been possible without it. He leaned back and put his weight against the pull to counter the outgoing force. If he could just go a little faster, this harebrained scheme just might work. He needed to get the skellies good and scrambled into each other. He couldn’t really tell, but the plan seemed to be wor
king.

The bonewalkers were thoroughly crunched into the crook of the cross, held in place by the force of the spin. Looking from outside, it must have seemed quite an odd sight; and indeed, it was, but there was no one to witness it. Or at least that is what Meier thought. Even if he had been the kind who pays regular attention to his surroundings, he was far too busy at the moment to notice the eyes on
him.

But returning to the matter at hand, Meier was trying to get a few more good spins in to make sure the bones were satisfactorily tangled. He had to take into his calculation of things the fact that he needed to be sure that he didn’t use all of strength before he let them down. Another growing factor was overwhelming dizziness. They had been around about twenty times or so when Meier was beginning to be truly and thoroughly bothered by it. As a child, he had always been the kid that vomited all the time. But then he had
also
been the kid that fell down, fell behind, fell off, or fell asleep all the time as well. If Meier had been carrying anything in his stomach, it would have more than likely been all over the place. Still, it was his head he was concerned with. How could he fight when he couldn’t even walk? He made his
move.

With a final spin, he pulled the cross up as high as he could manage and then brought it down into the soft earth like a pickaxe. The collision was surprisingly violent, far more so than Meier had expected. Had he really been going so fast? Apparently, he had; and as a result, he was also much dizzier than he had planned for. He took a crazy step sideways, all the while feeling his body turning in the direction of the spin. He forced his brain to fight the feeling. These first few seconds were critical. He started to look for his saber but fell over instead. It was a typical outcome for Meier, but he did not quit giving it his best. When he finally managed to roll into a crouch, he was happy to see that the saber was right there in front of
him.

“Ha!” he yelled and quickly snatched it. Turning to face the business at hand, Meier got a cold surp
rise.

The cross was broken in several places, but that much was to be expected. The surprise was in that Meier had hoped that the skellies would still be pinned so that he could hack at them with impunity, and yet they clearly were not. So much for that whole plan, thought Meier, but he spotted something that was odd enough to pull it from the ashes of failure. The skeletons weren’t moving. In fact, if appearances were to be believed, the bones he saw were all kinds of messed up. The swing couldn’t have been hard enough, he thought, to break the spines.
Certainly that was not possible in this cushioned soil
, he told himself. Meier took a closer look, creeping up carefully. There was a head inside the ribcage of one of them, which he supposed was a good sign. There was a leg or two wrapped the wrong way around the remains of the pole.
Good
, he thought. At least one of them couldn’t run. He couldn’t see their backs though. It began to spook him that they were being so very still. He just knew that any second, any moment now, that they would spring into life and start grabbing and stabbing in ear
nest.

He took another step and then decided to prod about with his saber to see if they moved. No movement whatsoever. Meier decided he would have to be sure. He raised his weapon to hack though a rib cage and then, “
CAA
AAWW
!”

A clarion screech came from just behind him. To say that Meier was merely startled would be an understatement so egregious that one might as well have described the surface of the sun as “a little warm.” Meier yelped so loud that it echoed off the house two hundred yards away. He literally vaulted straight up in the air and then landed on his backside in the dirt. His breath was already labored from everything else, but now he was positively in a frenzy. It was enough to make one lose all bladder control. Luckily for him, Meier’s bladder was as empty as his sto
mach.

After he fell to the ground, Meier quickly turned with saber in hand to face the noise that, as he calmed down, became oddly familiar. What he saw looked quite a lot like a bird rolling around in its death throes, wings flapping and twitching all around. Several feathers had been lost. There was a sort of muted, raspy, cawing escaping the creature, but nothing overly audible, at least not yet. Another loud caw blasted through the
air.