The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (17 page)

Suddenly, and with enough power to stem the flow of his tears, an alarm went off in his head like a nitrate explosive: why had they left him here? Was he not to be brought back to the Fort at Kingston or Ithaca to answer for his crimes?

“The soldier said they were headed east,” Jompers said, getting up to his feet. He was at once hit with such a wave of dizziness that he almost fell back down. He stumbled over to his work table and steadied himself as the realization seized him: they hadn’t come to seize him after all. They were on a journey to somewhere else, were just passing through. He had jumped to such an extreme conclusion that he had almost turned the ruins of this old mercantile town into dust. Gods, was he ever a fool.

It was then that Jompers’ eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no…” He had taken great pains to secure his position in Old Poe, and had therefore set a trap further down the winding road, a tripwire less than an eye-span from where the dirt path met the Mountain Road. Stepping through it would trigger several hoses hidden in the trees to spew out a noxious gas, the inhalation of which would cause delirium and hallucinations in its subjects that could last for several days. The gas was analogous to lysergic acid, and was a compound he had synthesized countless times; the batch hooked to the hoses was of an exceptionally high potency. He had to stop the three travelers before they tripped it, especially if there were undead wandering about. They had kept him safe, after all, and he was obliged to do the same for them.

“To me, Rory!” Jompers called up into the rafters. The horned owl fluttered down and landed atop his master’s woven sleeve. Hastily grabbing what he could, including his blunderbuss, pack and as many vials as would fit in his pockets, Jompers was down the ladder and out the door before the clock tower could have moved its minute hand, had it still functioned.

He ran quickly, heading east towards the Mountain Road, doing a sort of jig over the parts of the path where he remembered, always at the last moment, that there was a jutting rock or sharp piece of metal. He had no idea how long he’d been knocked out, or how long it had been since the travelers had left him in the tower. All he knew was that it was full night, and that every moment that passed was one where the unsuspecting travelers could have tripped his trap. Perhaps they were already wandering around the forest in a drugged haze…

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…”

Then he heard the unmistakable, raspy voice of the soldier from the Fort at Kingston from further down the path and Jompers breathed a sigh of relief.

“Hello! Hello, wait! Don’t go any further!” The cosmologist called to them. He was struggling for breath; running was not his strong suit. The sort of exercise Jompers excelled at involved at most his brain, his eyes and his hands, as they worked in conjunction to pore over the formulas from old texts and apply them to the manufacture of potions and tools. Still, he ran on, not willing to stop until he saw them before him. His head was pounding with each step, and his eyes cloudy as they searched the path for the travelers.

He missed seeing the root that stuck out from the road. His pack being so heavy and his hands encumbered with the owl and his gun, Jompers went down hard after his toe caught it, sliding several feet along the path before he came to a stop at Sergeant Roderick Solloway’s feet.

“What in the…” Solloway said, but his spat of curses was cut off by a muffled explosion from under Jomper’s prostrate body, followed by fingers of smoke that snaked out from the cosmologist’s belly and glowed orange in the moonlight.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…” Jompers said, rolling around on the ground, smacking the flames that were wildly dancing across his chest. Brook took her cloak off and draped it over the smoldering man. The flames went out, and Jompers lay staring up at the stars, breathing heavily.

“Thank you. I… I must have… broken a vial in my pocket when… when I fell. I’m okay though… My shirt is made of a fireproof material for… for just such an occasion.”

Solloway and Mercer exchanged uncertain looks, both at a loss for words. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Brook asked. Leo trotted up to the cosmologist and began to lick the man’s hands.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine… Oh dear, oh dear, you like how that tastes, do you?” Jompers started to laugh, enjoying Leo’s uninhibited taste for the flammable liquid that now coated Jomper’s fingers in a sticky syrup. “It’s okay. The substance is completely safe to consume, just highly volatile when thrown.”

“Why did you follow us?” Solloway asked, unmoved by the cosmologist’s friendliness.

“I… I thought you were all someone else. You see, I was in Young Poe’s Keep before… before…”

“Before everyone got sick, died and then rose from the dead? Yeah, we saw what happened there. I’m on to you, cosmologist. You nearly blew us all to fish guts when I asked you what happened in that town. We saw that old building with the board and chain across its doors. Someone had to put it there, and I’m thinking that someone was you.”

Jompers searched Solloway’s face for a moment, finding it impossible to gauge the man in the moonlight. What did the soldier think of him? Jompers knew that if he was going to be honest, now was the time. “You’re right. It was me. I put the board and chain across the doors of that hospital. You must understand… they were sick! I stuck with them for close to a week trying to care for them, but, but… there was nothing that could be done. They all had bad blood. I’m… I’m sorry…”

Jompers felt the tears welling up and dropped his gaze, ashamed to look any of the travelers in the eyes. Then he felt a soft hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Brook smiling sadly. “It’s okay,” she said. “You did what you could, I’m sure. You said your name was…”

“Jompers, Jedediah Jompers. And you are?”

“My name is Brook of the Black Wings. The swordsman who saved your life is Mercer Crane, and this barrel of giggles is Master Sergeant Roderick Solloway, from the Fort at Kingston.”

“Ah yes, as I said, I could tell from the moment I first laid eyes on you. You’ve quite a few many medals, Sergeant. And thank you, Mercer Crane, for helping me as you did. I owe you my gratitude. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I am sorry for before, for having almost triggered the explosives.”

“Yeah, well just be glad it didn’t happen. Or my spirit would trade in its time in the Fields of Gold just to follow you around and kick you in the ass for the rest of eternity.”

“I would deserve no less, sergeant. But now, the reason I ran to catch up with you all was because there is…” Jompers was cut off by an audible click that came from further up the path. Everyone turned in the direction of the sound and found Leo, sitting on his hind legs, his tail wagging and his tongue lolling out of his mouth. Underneath his bottom was a thin, silver wire that glowed in the moonlight.

“Oh dear…” Jompers said, just as the hoses he had hidden in the trees began to spew out bilious clouds of green vapor. “Try to hold your breath and run!”

Mercer tried to do as Jompers urged, but there was no getting away. He felt the gas seeping into his pores, his eyes watering as it caressed his entire body with oily fingers. His mind was slipping, the world rapidly breaking apart. A wind buffeted him like the bristles of a broom, quickly sweeping him under the rug of the rational and into a maelstrom of madness.

Chapter Eight

The Apostles

A
TORNADO OF DUST, sand and confusion whipped around Brook like a virulent flock of hawks, its appearance sudden, without warning. Just a moment before, she had been on a thin path through poplar and flametip trees, Mercer, Solloway and Leo by her side, as well as the strange cosmologist with the tattoos and yellow skin who called himself Jompers. Where was she now? It was if a storm had just dropped down and whisked her away.

She tried to catch her breath, but the wind would seize it right from her throat and run fast with it away from her. Dust coated her mouth, sand stung her skin. It coated everything with a brown haze, including her senses. She couldn’t string thoughts together, felt like she had left her mind back on the winding road with the men she had been traveling with. She struggled to put things in perspective, to make sense of her thoughts. If she could, perhaps then she’d be able to get out of the dust storm and figure out what was happening, where she was.

A hand grabbed tightly to her arm and she gasped. Just as quickly as she had been swept away from the path, the storm stopped, and she found herself staring into a familiar face.

“Mercer?” She said, finally able to find her voice, her breath. “I… I feel so strange…”

“Me too…” Mercer said. His pupils were dilated and his lips trembling. “I think it was the gas that came out of those hoses. It’s affecting our heads in some weird way… wayyyy...” He held the word out, taken aback by how it sounded. There was a fear in his eyes that Brook had never seen before. “Where are we?”

Now that the dust storm had mysteriously stopped around them, Brook could take in their surroundings. It was like no place she had ever been, though its features seemed taken from one of Old Wren’s stories. Everything was…

“Dead,” Mercer said. “Everything.”

He was right. They were amidst the ruins of an old city, a once thriving metropolis of colossal buildings that had crumbled into rubble. They stood atop a pile of debris, of twisted metal poles and wires, squarish, charred hulks of towers looming over them on all sides in various stages of decay. Everything was the color of dust, of old bone, of death.

“Are we… is this a dream?” Mercer asked, drawing Jai Lin from its sheath. “Are we dreaming?”

“Together? How could that be possible?”

Mercer opened his mouth to answer, but found his attention diverted by a drone that was echoing off the empty shells of buildings a ways off, down what must have been a wide promenade in the days when people still lived in the old city. From down this road, a yellow speck appeared, rounding a building and gunning straight for them.

Mercer could just make out what it was: a man in a yellow suit riding a motorized bicycle. A
motorcycle
, as his father had called it.
Mercer remembered the stories the older Crane had told him as a child, of outlaw gangs and rebels without causes. The motorcycle was careening down the road, dodging piles of debris and barrelling through potholes at a breakneck speed.

“What is that?” Brook asked.

“It’s a motorcycle, a vehicle from before the Time of the Great Dying...” Mercer gulped mid-sentence; he could now see why Yellow Suit was in such a hurry. Coming around the same corner the motorcycle had just screeched around was a phalanx of undead, so dense that they more resembled a wall of limbs and gnashing teeth than individual bodies. There seemed to be no end to them.

“That guy has the right idea,” Mercer said. “We have to get out of here! And fast!”

He grabbed Brook’s hand and with as much haste as he could afford while still avoiding the bent shrapnel and broken glass that waited for them at every step, he started down the pile of rubble towards the ground.

“Wait, Mercer. I think I know what this is.”

“What this is? What do you mean?”

“You were right, I think. This is a dream. A dead dream.”

Mercer stared at her blankly.
Dead dream.
The term conjured up the nightmare he had only the night before, where Nan and Nina had died again and his father had become something twisted, monstrous. “A dead dream? Is that like a vision?”

“Yes, it is a vision, but it’s more than that. It’s of the final moments before a person dies, usually at the hands of a killim. I’ve been a dead dreamer since I was a little girl. It’s a terrible gift, but one of great value. My people have learned much from dead dreams and have avoided much danger because of them. Come, we have to follow this man on the… the
motorcycle.
There must be a reason we are here, a great deal we can learn from him.”

“Maybe, but there are also more dead men down there than I’ve ever seen in one place. It would be suicide to go down there.”

“Nothing can happen to us in dead dreams, Mercer. It’s as if we are invisible, observers of that which has already happened. Come on!” Mercer allowed Brook to lead him back in the direction they had come, towards the part in the road where Yellow Suit was fast approaching. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a misguided idea, that this wasn’t just a dead dream as Brook believed, but still he let her lead him.

“Have you ever shared a dead dream with someone else?”

“Well, er… no. I agree that it’s strange and unusual, but everything has been since I’ve met you, Mercer Crane.”

They got to the road just as the motorcycle was about to pass. The man’s suit covered him from head to foot, while a transparent rectangle ran across his eyes; they ballooned when they saw Brook and Mercer. He pulled a short-barreled pistol from his belt and squeezed off a shot at them, but the bullet went wide when the motorcycle hit a pothole it couldn’t sail through. The handlebars jerked and the back tire left the ground as the man lost control.

Yellow Suit tumbled off the bike, his body skidding across the pavement before hitting an especially large rock and launching into the air. He came down on a series of rebar rods snaking out from a crumbling cement pillar, their tips made sharp from the wind and sand. Their rusted lengths stopped Yellow Suit’s escape from the pursuing undead once and for all.