Age of the Undead, page 9
part #1 of Zombicide Black Plague Series
Ratbag shrugged and whistled to Fang. At once the wolf lunged forward, dashing off in menacing silence. “Ya gonna bashem der cadavaz?” he asked, pointing after the wolf.
“Ambush!” Gaiseric growled. “We were going to ambush them here!” He didn’t argue with Ratbag but set off after Fang.
“Maybe you should have explained your plan to him,” Helchen suggested as she ran after Gaiseric.
The courtyard acted as a kind of garden for the surrounding buildings. Gaiseric spotted a couple of dead hogs in a sty that stretched along one of the walls. A few rows of mostly trampled vegetables. A collapsed coop for chickens. A quick glance revealed nothing that could have set off Fang nor where the wolf had gone. Then Gaiseric noticed an open door, a kind of angled hatch, between the courtyard and the building to its left. As he hurried towards it, he heard angry snarls echoing up from below.
“Be ready,” Gaiseric advised Helchen. “I’ll try to draw them out after me. You shoot the first zombie you see.” He gave the witch hunter a warning grin. “Just make sure it’s a zombie.”
“I hit what I aim at,” Helchen responded. From her tone, Gaiseric wasn’t sure he should be reassured by that.
The thief dropped down into what proved to be a root cellar. The light was sufficient that he could see Fang on the floor below. The wolf was pawing at a door set into the opposite wall. Gaiseric could hear movement coming from behind the panel. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone in there?”
His answer came by way of a frantic pounding against the door, shaking it on its hinges. Fang snarled, its attention fixed on whatever was inside. Gaiseric started to back away. “Hello,” he called again. “If you’re in there, you’d better answer.”
“Over here,” a raspy voice replied. It surprised Gaiseric so much that he almost stumbled down the steps. That desperate, wasted voice hadn’t come from behind the door, but from under the stairs.
The thief peered over the railing, noticing for the first time that there was a man in the cellar. He was huddled up in the corner. The floor around him was dark with blood. Gaiseric dropped down, ready to render what help he could to the invalid.
Before Gaiseric could so much as start for the back corner, however, the door exploded off its hinges and crashed to the floor. A grotesque, hulking zombie stomped out from a closet-like space. Fang lunged at it, but the wolf’s teeth just nipped the flabby hide. The brute swung its arm and sent the animal tumbling across the cellar. Then it turned toward the thief.
Gaiseric thrust his sword into the zombie’s chest, but he couldn’t drive the blade deep enough to strike its heart. The animated corpse swatted him with the back of his hand and threw him halfway back up the steps. He landed hard, the breath forced from his lungs in a pained gasp. Stunned by the impact, he watched in numb horror as the brute started to climb up after him.
“Keep your head down,” Helchen barked at him. The witch hunter leaned down into the cellar and shot her crossbow at the creature. Flesh and bone exploded from the side of its face, one eye rolling free from its shattered socket. But even this hideous injury wasn’t able to do more than make the brute stumble.
Helchen grabbed Gaiseric with both hands and pulled him up into the courtyard. The hulking zombie was right behind them, its eye dangling down past its chin on a string of veins. The creature reached for them with its swollen hands, intent on tearing the life from their flesh.
Gaiseric’s ears rang as a bestial war cry echoed through the courtyard. The next instant he saw Ratbag charge at the lurching zombie. The orc swung his spiked mattock at the brute’s head. The impact pulverized its skull and spattered the wall with a mash of bone and brain. The headless body toppled backwards, sliding noisily down the steps back into the cellar.
“Keen ta lamp der cadavaz,” Ratbag sneered at Gaiseric. He tapped a clawed finger against his brow. “Dizzy az wingmauz.” Being called crazy by an orc was a new experience for the thief.
“There’s somebody down there,” Gaiseric said as he struggled back to his feet.
“Quik orn cadava?” Ratbag grumbled.
“Alive,” Gaiseric told his companions. “Or at least he was.”
They hurried back down the cellar stairs. Gaiseric took the lead, alert for more undead as he descended into the cellar once more. Helchen kept her crossbow trained on the doorway the brute had broken through. Ratbag went over to check on Fang. It seemed the zombie hadn’t done more than phase the wolf. It shook its head and snarled a greeting to its master when the orc approached.
“Nah chaw der cadavaz,” Ratbag snarled as he picked up his wolf. Gaiseric watched as the orc squeezed Fang, forcing the animal to hack up the contents of its stomach. It was at once an impressive display of strength and a crude exhibition of wariness the thief hadn’t considered before. What would happen if an animal ate zombie flesh?
The man in the corner was a different matter entirely. Gaiseric could see at once that he was quickly losing what little vitality he had left. He’d been badly mauled, his belly torn open and what looked like a bite taken out of his knee. It was difficult to be certain with all the blood that covered them, but Gaiseric thought his clothes were too rich for those of a peasant or tradesman.
“Listen to me,” the dying man groaned when Gaiseric and Helchen crouched down beside him. “You… have to… help…”
Helchen shook her head. “Make your peace with the gods,” she informed him. “You’re beyond anyone’s help.”
“Not… not me…” he gasped. The man stared up at the ceiling. “They sent me… to get help…”
“Who are they?” Helchen asked him.
“At… at the… leatherworks…” the man muttered. He lifted his hand and pointed at the broken door. “Follow… the marks…”
“But who are ‘they’?” Gaiseric pressed the man. Whatever answer might have been coming left the wounded man in a rattling burble. He sagged back against the wall, his hand flopping to the floor.
“So much for that,” Gaiseric said, stepping away from the body.
Helchen gave him a sharp look. “He said someone needed help.”
“He didn’t say who,” Gaiseric retorted. “For all we know, it’s a bunch of corrupt old burghers he’s talking about.” He thrust an accusing finger at the headless zombie. “Don’t forget that he pointed to the very place that lovely thing came from. Which means there’s probably more of them.”
“Propa bad cadavaz,” Ratbag said, kicking the corpse. Gaiseric could swear the orc was grinning.
“Whoever it is, they need help,” Helchen said again. “If that’s not enough for you, consider that we could use their help too. We’re strangers to Singerva, they probably aren’t. We could use someone who knows their way around, who could lead us back to Alaric or over to the tower Hulmul was talking about.”
Despite his distaste for the idea, the rogue had to admit she was right. “I hate it when something I really don’t want to do makes sense,” Gaiseric conceded. “Let’s see what we can do for light in there. Some of the rails from that pigsty might be a good foundation for torches.”
Gaiseric had just turned to climb back to the courtyard when he saw Helchen suddenly smash the dead man’s skull with her mace. “What did you do that for?” he demanded.
The witch hunter shook the blood from the sharp flanges. “He’d been bitten,” she said, gesturing at the injured knee. “From what we know of this damnable plague, anyone who dies after being bitten by a zombie becomes a zombie.” Helchen hooked the mace back on her belt. “Why wait for the weed to grow when we can crush the seed?”
Gaiseric felt a chill crawl down his spine as he moved up into the courtyard. There were times when he could almost forget Helchen was a witch hunter, then she’d do something ruthless and remind him precisely what she was. Her proactive measures for destroying zombies were an example. Mutilating a corpse after it was dead was one thing, but he wondered if she’d wait until a zombie’s victim was dead before taking steps to make sure they wouldn’t come back.
•••
The tunnel at the back of the root cellar appeared to fascinate Gaiseric. Helchen supposed the thief wasn’t cosmopolitan enough to be familiar with the devious methods of city folk. Any community that grew to the size of Singerva was bound to be crisscrossed by subterranean passages and chambers. Helchen had seen enough in other settlements to know that smugglers often created vast networks to get contraband to their customers. Merchants would employ the same tactics to sneak goods past the excisemen. Dwarfs, never particularly interested in human laws, would often go to ground and return to their roots when they settled among men, maintaining only a token presence on the surface while most of their activity went on below ground. Then there were religious dissidents and heretical cults, all employing tunnels to conduct their proscribed meetings.
It was these last that made witch hunters inured to discovering such passages beneath the very streets of a city or town. Helchen herself had often accompanied Captain Dietrich on raids into places every bit as dank and sinister as the tunnels they were now traversing.
Though she couldn’t recall any that smelled nearly so vile. The tang of urine was heavy in the air. The dying man had spoken of a leatherworks, but Helchen hadn’t quite appreciated that the industry might be underground. A boon for Singerva, to be spared the stink of such an odorous trade, but it did trap the rank smell in the tunnels.
“If this can’t kill someone, I doubt there’s much zombies can do to them,” Gaiseric said, his voice muffled by the cloth he’d wrapped around his face. He probed ahead with his torch, ready to jump back if one of the undead suddenly shambled out of the darkness.
“It does take some of the veneer away,” Helchen said, glancing down at her leather boots, “to know this part of the process.” She looked back at Ratbag and Fang. The wolf was continually stopping to rub its nose against the floor. The orc, by contrast, appeared more disturbed by the flicker of the torches than the stench in the air. She’d heard their eyes were especially good in the dark and suspected the torches spoiled his enhanced vision. It was something Ratbag would have to adjust to. She wasn’t going to walk around blind in these tunnels just to accommodate him.
“How far do you think these tunnels go?” Gaiseric wondered. “I mean, how close are we to whoever that fellow wanted us to help? We still have to try and get back to Alaric and Hulmul. For all we know, we’re getting farther and farther away.”
“We’ll stand a better chance of joining Alaric if we have someone with us who knows Singerva,” Helchen reminded him. She sighed as she considered their best bet for doing so. “We know they’ll try for Vasilescu’s tower, we just need someone who can lead us there.”
“But how long are we going to keep crawling about in this reek?” Gaiseric pressed. “Just how far did that guy go to look for help?”
Helchen considered the question. “It depends when that zombie caught up to him,” she decided. “With such severe wounds, he couldn’t have gotten far.” She dipped her torch toward the ground and motioned for Gaiseric to do the same. “I think we’re here,” she whispered.
There was a subtle change to the atmosphere ahead. Not so much a brightening of the gloom but rather a lessening of the dark. Helchen could hear a dull, persistent roar, a sound she associated with swift-flowing water. An underground stream would explain why Singerva had put its leatherworks down here. The water would help carry away the waste from the industry without lugging it up into the streets.
There were other sounds as well, noises that were all but drowned out by the roar of the stream. That mix of shouts and screams they’d heard before when trying to break the siege at the guildhall.
“Datz gonna bein’ a bulgin’ sockdallapa,” Ratbag stated, hefting his mattock.
“We probably want a better plan than just storming in there,” Gaiseric told the orc.
Ratbag gave the thief a surly look. “Ya bein’ der kroakjoy.” The orc’s tone was such that Helchen knew he wasn’t happy hanging back, but at least he had sense enough to do so.
“We’ll have to get up as close as we can,” Helchen said. “See what the situation is, then decide what to do.”
The witch hunter carefully advanced down the tunnel, motioning for the others to hang back. If there was a mob of zombies waiting ahead, there wasn’t any reason they should all walk right into their arms.
Instead of the undead, however, Helchen found that tunnel opened into a big cavern ahead, lit by dozens of lanterns strung along the walls. She saw the vats where the tanners treated hides. Above the vats, suspended by posts, was a flue that snaked its way across the chamber to an enormous, odious reservoir. The smell told her what was in there wasn’t water.
Away from the vats, a stream cascaded through the cavern, powering a series of mill wheels before shooting into a channel beneath one of the walls. Helchen didn’t know what the wheels were used for, but she saw that they were connected to a tower-like structure. It was here that she spotted the people the dying man had implored them to help. When she saw them, she regretted the callous way she’d treated his body. He’d deserved better than that.
The people scrambling about the upper levels of the spire were all youths, the oldest couldn’t have yet seen his sixteenth summer. From the uniformity of the robes they wore, Helchen judged them to be students and racked her memory trying to recall if Singerva had a university. Whatever the case, the man they’d found in the cellar must have been their instructor, doing his best to save them from the zombie invasion. He’d brought them below ground to try to keep them safe.
Only the undead had followed them. All about the base of the spire, a horde of zombies had gathered, scratching and clawing at the structure, trying in their clumsy fashion to climb up to the students. Helchen watched as youths hurled bundles of leather, loose stones, even spare slats for the mill wheels down at the creatures, trying to hold them back. There was only so much such resistance could accomplish, however. While the walkers were too slow to pose an immediate threat, the runners were able to scramble quite high before being knocked down by some missile hurled at them from above. Once the students ran out of their improvised ammunition, the faster zombies would be all over them.
“Marduum, I won’t leave them to be slaughtered,” Helchen swore. If Dietrich had been here, he would have reprimanded her for being soft. He’d always tried to teach her that it wasn’t a witch hunter’s province to protect the innocent, but rather to punish the guilty. She’d never been able to reconcile herself to that mindset.
Yet what could she do? There were at least forty zombies around the spire. Too much for her motley collection of fighters. Helchen wondered if they could lure them away but abandoned the idea. The roar of the stream would drown out any noise they could make, and to get the undead to take their eyes off the spire would mean walking right up to them – hardly a viable plan.
Helchen took off her hat and ground her knuckles against her forehead, as though she could drive an idea into her brain by force. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize a way to save the students. It was difficult to concentrate. The roar of the stream was deafening. The stink of the reservoir…
The witch hunter opened her eyes and stared at the cistern-like fixture and the posts that supported it. A good sharp hit in the right place and the foul reservoir would burst. Granted, it would take incredible strength to deliver such a blow, but she had access to just the right person.
“Gaiseric! Ratbag! Get up here!” Helchen called to her companions. She smiled as the thief scrambled up to her, then nodded to the orc as he ambled over, his wolf whining at the smell from the reservoir. An eager gleam came into Ratbag’s eyes when he saw the zombies below and she could hear his knuckles crack as he tightened his grip on the mattock.
“Listen carefully,” Helchen said. She gestured at the mattock and then over to the foul reservoir. “Hit that in the right place, and you’ll destroy every zombie down there with one blow.” She wasn’t sure how much of that Ratbag understood, but from his expression whatever he had gleaned was to his liking.
Helchen lowered herself to the little ledge that skirted the periphery of the cavern and beckoned to Ratbag. The orc shouldered his mattock and followed her along the narrow expanse until they stood beside the cistern. She gave it a careful study, trying to envision how the structure would react when its integrity was compromised. She needed a precise angle to achieve her purpose.
Ratbag shifted impatiently as Helchen inspected the reservoir. She wished she could be absolutely certain, but she didn’t know how much time the students had left. “There,” she said, pointing at one of the support posts that gave the reservoir its shape. She hurried out of the way as Ratbag stepped forward with his mattock.
“Dis’ll bein’ der swell rumpuz,” Ratbag bellowed as he struck the post. The orc sprang back along the ledge as the impact wrought destruction on the reservoir.
Straining to contain thousands of gallons of urine for the leather-making process, the cistern needed only the slightest dint in its structure to bring disaster. The outer wall crumpled, bursting apart where the pressure was greatest. A deluge of liquid foulness slammed down into the cavern. The flues, the vats, all the tools and racks of the tanners and leatherworkers were smashed in an instant, broken into unrecognizable detritus as they were propelled into the underground stream.
The same fate befell the zombies. Uncaring of their imminent destruction, the undead continued to claw at the spire even as the flood carried them away. By the dozens they were bashed against the cavern walls and sucked down into the stream. Helchen could see a few of them clawing at the water before they were dragged into the subterranean depths.
