The Undead King: The Saga of Jai Lin: Book One (9 page)

“I promised your father many years ago that I would always look after you. I’ve watched you grow, from young girl into womanhood, and I couldn’t be more proud of the person you’ve become. Elon be good, he will protect you on the road ahead. While killim may have come into the Green Lands, other humans are what you have to fear most. There are many dangerous and desperate people out there who will not hesitate to kill you just for no other reason than they don’t like your cloak. Just never forget who you are. Black Wings are the defenders of the Green Lands, protectors of the innocent. That is the legacy you’ve inherited and one I trust you’ll carry with you into the wider world.”

Brook fell into the old man’s arms, wrapping her own around his back. Mercer saw in their embrace how Nina used to hug their father, and he at once knew the sort of figure Old Wren had been in Brook’s life, and he in hers. He could only imagine how deep the holes would be that had already begun to form in both their chests and how filled with sadness they would become. When they separated, Brook gave Old Wren a kiss on the cheek, then climbed up the ladder before her tears had the chance to fall. Leo excitedly barked upon seeing her, the yelps fading as the two ran to the longhouse to get her things.

“Thank you for everything, Old Wren.” Mercer said, going to the elderly Black Wing to shake his hand. They shook, but Old Wren didn’t let go. His grip became tighter and tighter, Mercer’s fingers splayed out from the vice-like pressure.

“Ow! What are you_”

“Listen here, young man. I know where you were headed when you just so happened upon Brook in the Borderlands. Convenient then, that you can resume your trip to see the warlord you were hoping to join with. Your father may have been a hero, and you may be good with that sword there, but I swear on Elon and the ancestors that if any harm comes to my Brook and you have a hand in it, I will personally hunt you down and make bird food out of you. Do I make myself clear?”

“I would never do anything to harm… Ow!” Old Wren tightened his grip even further, causing Mercer to fall to his knees. He could feel the bones in his hand crumbling to dust.

“I said, do I make myself clear?”

“Yes sir!”

“Good.” The old Black Wing released Mercer’s hand and took a few steps back. “Be safe out there. There are men who eat human flesh and wear human skin in the mountains beyond the Seven Streams, and beachy men who will steal everything from under your nose if you so much as look the other way. That’s if they don’t outright kill you. Do not hesitate to use your sword on them, if need be.”

“Thank you for the advice,” Mercer said, shaking life back into his hand. He moved towards the ladder, turning to Old Wren one more time before he climbed. “It must be nice to have as close-knit a tribe as the Black Wings. I had that once. I had a grandmother and a sister who I cared for very much. I watched them die, saw them torn apart by the undead. I saw how terrible a place the world could be, how very pointless life and death was. I wandered for years, half-asleep, with nothing to live for. When I heard of Dusty Yen putting an army together, I thought it my opportunity to get my life back. I… I don’t know…”

“Why did you never go to Ithaca to find your father?”

“Because I was ashamed at having failed him, but also… My father left us. I wasn’t about to go look for a man that had turned his back on his family like that.” Mercer surprised himself, not believing that he had just said what he did. He had never given voice to the feelings he harbored towards his father for leaving, had let them boil inside of him like a silent stew of bile and anger. Now, for some elusive reason, knowing that his father had died allowed Mercer to free himself from some of the blame over what happened three years ago, let him share some of it with a man who would never come home again save in dreams.

Feeling too revealed, Mercer started up the ladder, thanking Old Wren again as he did so. The old man wistfully ran his arthritic fingers over the words inscribed upon the wall as he watched Mercer go:
FEMA fallout shelter model V0211
. It was the name those in the long ago had given to the underground chambers in the time before the Great Dying. It was one of five in the Broke Tooth Hills that the Black Wings traveled between and built their longhouses around. Taking refuge in the chamber was how Elon and the ancestors had survived after the black blood from the earth had run dry and fire had fallen from the sky. Would it protect his people again when war came to the Green Lands? Had he done the Black Wings a disservice by pulling them away from the warrior’s life? He was too tired, too old to pretend he knew the answers to these questions. Things would play out as Elon and the ancestors willed it.

As Wren made his way to the ladder, he wondered if he had been too hard on the young man. No, he decided. Mercer was strong. The young man had to be, having lost so much. He just hoped the combined strength of these three new companions was enough to divert the oncoming waves of men and killim about to crash on the Green Lands.

Interlude

H
E CALLED HIMSELF PLAGUEWIND and his powers were great and strange. The poison wind that cut through the Blight heeded his every command, as did the corpses that wandered the sands, hungry for human flesh. There were so many of them, more than the stars in the sky, more than the old gods, and he was sending them all north, his children, to the only fertile swath of land left on the entire dead world. They were the inheritors, the future, and he was their shepherd.

The same radioactive waste that had killed the land for hundreds of eye-spans around had also preserved the millions of dead beneath its orange sand; though it had twisted them like fruits or fungi in the sun, it likewise also saved them from decay. An endless variety of his children could be called from the ground, matrons, soldiers, stewards, their bodies in assorted states of blanch and bloat, all ready to do his bidding.

He wore a cloak around his body, his armor against the sun. He had been a cosmologist once, many years ago, and because of that knew the melanin in his skin had completely dried up. Even the sun’s lightest touch was enough to make to make the pus run like lava from his erupting blisters. Tumors of varying sizes lined his body, some forming on the backs of others like albino frogs playing piggyback.

In the beginning, when his body had started to change, he had tried to cut the growths out with knife or scalpel, but had quickly given up in the face of their persistent metastisizing. Thus, not only was his body malformed and sickly pale, but also scarred with gashes and crosses. His disgust with his transformation gradually shifted into acceptance, then glowing approval. He found it appropriate that he now resembled his children, and knew that the gifts he had been given were so much greater than what had been taken from him.

The zombie-tongue: it had given him such power, power he couldn’t begin to fathom in his old life. Godwin had barely grazed the surface of what was possible with the rare ability, had left so much for Plaguewind to play with in the decades since his failed war.

A century and a half since the Time of the Great Dying had reduced most structures in the Blight to dust, yet somehow the crooked house still stood. One of its outer walls had completely fallen away, and its siding was the same dull orange as the sand; it had become one with the Blight, as petulant and poisonous as the wasted soil it stood upon. It was in the basement of this crooked house that Plaguewind sat in a nest of dirty linen and plastic sheets, waiting in the cold and dark for the emissary from Revelation Island to arrive.

Revelation Island was off the coast of the Blight, a half a day’s journey by boat from the mainland. It was far enough to be immune from the radiation that seeped into every rock and twisted blade of grass that grew from the Blight’s depleted soil, but close enough for the Church’s religious fervor surrounding the end of days to remain hot. The Church of the Bleeding Christ, the sole occupants of Revelation Island, saw the Blight’s long dead landscape as justification for their beliefs, as proof that their god had an unsatiated thirst for retribution against humanity. It was this same religious zeal which had made them reach out to Plaguewind. To fulfill their prophecies, they needed him and his strange powers.

Come late afternoon, Plaguewind limped up the basement stairs on his bloated legs and waited by the front door to the house. He knew the apostle would be arriving shortly. After a few minutes, through the gaping wall in the side of the house, Plaguewind could see a cloud of dust on the horizon. His children watched it too. He could feel their hunger, their insatiable desire for human meat. Though it pained him to have them so distraught, he kept the tendrils around them tight, kept them from lunging after the man bounding across the blighted plains on the back of his motorbike. The corpses merely gnashed their teeth and clenched their claws while the emissary rode through their thick throng, getting closer and closer to the crooked house.

He wore a dull yellow suit over his entire body. The Apostles knew this land was poisoned and that even the briefest exposure to its air would spell a long and painful death. Despite their belief at being divinely protected in all they did by their god, the Bleeding Christ, they were also a careful lot, surprisingly pragmatic.

The Apostle skidded to a stop outside the house and quickly dismounted from the old motorbike he had ridden the hundred or so eye-spans from the coast. He backed away from the undead which approached him from all sides, an old handgun brandished in his hand. “Get away from me! Help! Help me!”

“They won’t hurt you…” Plaguewind called out, shuffling through the debris and garbage that littered the foyer before the doorway of the old house. The undead all stopped and gazed upon Plaguewind as he approached, as if the deformed man in the cape had just flipped a switch and turned them off. “...though they want nothing more than to tear you limb from limb and suck the marrow from your bones. I’ll keep them from doing so.”

“Plaguewind…” The Apostle said, going to one knee and dropping his head down in reverence. Plaguewind made his way down the stone steps connecting the door to the sand.

“You’re late. You kept me waiting.”

“I’m… I’m sorry. The ruins along the coast are treacherous. There were three of us at the onset. The other two did not make it.”

“A pity.” Plaguewind did not need the Apostle to tell him this. He had been watching, the dark tendrils like what the cosmologists at Ithaca called optic nerves, showing him what his children saw, what they felt, even at vast distances. He had seen how they had assailed the three Apostles in the dead cities by the water’s edge and overwhelmed them with their sheer numbers. He had seen how this man standing before him had left one of his fellows to die, had only revved his throttle harder after his brother had crashed his motorbike and gotten pinned under a pile of rubble. The way the man fell, the undead corpses could only get to his legs, could only eat him slowly. His death had been long, drawn out, and Plaguewind knew that the Apostle standing before him had heard his screams over the revving of his motorbike, and would hear them in his dreams until the end of his days.

Plaguewind could have stopped his children from attacking the men. It was in his power to do so. Why would he, though? He thought it only fair that his loyal army of corpses should eat what they had caught, and if the men couldn’t escape, well… wasn’t that the sort of fate the Church believed in? Inescapable destiny? Damnation for all?

“Did you bring that which I asked for?” Plaguewind asked.

“Of course.” The Apostle reached into his dusty pack and pulled from it a rod about two hands long with a large, black crystal adjoined to its one end. A tinge of ‘lectricity ran through Plaguewind’s body, his bulbous tumors quivering like freshly bloomed flowers in a spring breeze. He couldn’t believe what was before him, what was being given to him so freely.

“The Sceptre of Jai Lin…” Plaguewind whispered. Though the undead still stood still, their vacant gazes all moved to look upon the dark crystal atop the sceptre in the Apostle’s hands. The noxious wind kicked up, blocking out the sky. “Give it to me.”

The Apostle hesitated for a moment before handing the sceptre over. The hunched-over man felt the sunlight singe his fingers as he wrapped them around the sceptre’s cold metal, an unknown alloy, but he didn’t care. Already, the power was flowing through his body. He could see more dark energy than ever before, could see the dark tendrils reaching past the Blight, through the Borderlands and into the only fecund jewel in what was an otherwise dead crown.

“Is it everything you hoped it would be, Plaguewind?” The Apostle asked, hopeful.

“Everything and more. Thank your masters for me.”

“It will be my honor. You are the prophesied final horseman of the apocalypse, Plaguewind. The Church will do anything for you. Already you’ve led the risen dead to the Green Lands, so that they will consume the blasphemous. Only through you and your actions will the righteous inherit the earth as our prophet foretold when the old cities all burned...”

Plaguewind held a hand up, stopping the Apostle’s diatribe mid-sentence. Gods, did these Apostles like to blab on with their proselytizing nonsense. He’d never met an Apostle from the Church of the Bleeding Christ who was not in love with his own righteousness, and he’d met many in his day. Or at least the man he was before becoming Plaguewind had.