Walking Dead
“You should have predicted this, Sentinel,” Geray muses. He hovers two feet above the floor, as though to emphasize his relative safety and removal from the horde of undead at the door. “Hundreds of thousands of wandering spirits with nowhere to go, and the god of the dead absent. If they were a living mob, they’d have torches and pitchforks. I dare say you’d fare better were that the case.”
Isabel doesn’t have the will to stop herself from putting her hands over her ears. The pressure makes a dull roar that drowns out Geray and the wet, solid blows the walking dead are doing to the whitewashed wooden door. The lock is good iron, and the door itself a single, heavy oak panel, but it won’t hold forever.
This isn’t the first outbreak she’s witnessed at a hospital, though it is certainly the largest. Field hospitals tend to have it the worst, with their concentrations of soldiers who died by violence and their lack of permanent wards, but anywhere the dead rest could be susceptible. If there were ever any wards on this place—and there may not have been, given the university’s current relationship with the temple of Ondir—they’re long gone now.
It should be simple. She’d request the names of the dead, choose the two or three most likely to have passed on in fear, draw her circle, and call them up. In half an hour, the dead could be carted back down to the cellar, and operations would continue as usual. How fortunate that a Sentinel happened to be here.
But she’s not a Sentinel. She doesn’t even have her uniform. In one pocket of her borrowed trousers sits Risoven’s bell and a stub of a candle, more for comfort than for utility. Her book remains in the rubble of Arden Geray’s house. In her other pocket is a hunting knife, the only weapon she could find in the temple when Berend called her away to the Belisia estate. It’s not even silver.
She still has her wits, and she has Berend, and as much as she wishes she didn’t, she has Geray. Even without her magic, no one else here has a better chance of fixing this. She takes her hands from her ears.
“There are thirty bodies at each door, by my count,” Geray says, floating back into view. “More downstairs. Do you think we’ll still be tethered together when you die? I hope not. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”
Isabel turns to Berend. “You said they summoned some priests from the temple?”
“That’s what the nurses told me,” he says. He’s produced a pistol from somewhere, and he checks it over before pulling back the hammer. It won’t do much to stop the horde, but maybe it’ll buy them a minute or two.
The battering on the doors has grown more insistent, an arrhythmic roll of a huge, flat drum. A trickle of old blood, embalming fluid, and gods know what else creeps underneath the nearer side. Isabel can smell them, the unmistakable miasma of rot, sickness, and cold, damp earth.
She wants to curl up with her arms over her head and cry. Promising herself that she’ll be able to do that later, she squares her shoulders and takes a deep breath. The smell turns her stomach, but it reminds her of her training.
“Barricade both these doors,” she tells Berend. “Chairs, beds, anything heavy.”
To Geray, she says, “Go outside and look for the priests.”
His gaunt face pulls into a scowl. “We’re on the second floor. They’re probably not here by now, anyway.”
“I don’t care. If you want to be free of me, then you need me alive to figure it out later. Find the priests.”
Geray’s morose expression doesn’t waver, but he drags his feet across the hall and through the door of Warder’s room, a wake of mist and cold air following him.
Berend holds the gun stiffly at his side, and his face is steely. “What are the priests going to do that we can’t?”
“Theoretically, they can help me see into the nether world,” Isabel says. “Or do it themselves, and maybe persuade whatever spirit is raising these bodies to calm down a little. I hope.”
Something heavy slams into the door, shaking dust from the lintels. “That’s a lot of maybes,” says Berend.
“It’s the best I can do right now.”
“All right.” He uncocks the gun and returns it to his pocket. “While you’re waiting for the ghost, help me move some beds.”
The three rooms between Warder’s and the nearer door are unoccupied. Isabel doesn’t know why she assumed this floor would be full. And what about all the people downstairs? The dead must have torn through them on their way up.
Do what you must, and save as many as you can, said the priests of the Inquisition, at least as far as the textbooks in Vernay went. Other texts, the kind Isabel wasn’t permitted to read on church grounds, portray them as ruthless, bloodthirsty, and lacking in pithy proclamations. She hopes that, if nothing else, she’ll be remembered gently.
She takes one end of the first bed, linens and all, and Berend takes the other. With a bit of maneuvering, she backs out of the room and up the hall. They push it against the door just as a tiny crack forms beside the frame, a thin black line in the white paint as long as an outstretched hand. The lock still holds; the doorframe will fail first.
It’s a twenty-minute walk from the temple district to the university, depending on one’s pace. That means nearly an hour for a messenger to get there and back with someone from the church, and that’s assuming that the Temple of Ondir isn’t still being guarded by the city watch and isn’t too preoccupied with the dead in their own halls. The doors aren’t going to last an hour.
They put a bed against the door at the opposite end of the hall, where dust and chips of paint rain onto the floor with every blow against the other side. Fortresses have withstood the onslaught of the awakened dead, but this is not a fortress, and the dead are already inside.
With the help of the three nurses, a second bed goes on top of each of the first. The whole structure quivers, but it stays upright.
Berend steps back to admire his handiwork. “Now what?”
“Now we try to find a way out,” Isabel says.
He gives her a blank look. “I think we just barricaded both of them.”
“No one’s getting out that way. We’ll have to go through a window or something.”
“Has the watch been called?” Berend asks the nearest nurse, a pretty dark-haired girl with a heavy pair of shears in her apron pocket.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. We only had the alarm to lock the doors.”
“What about the patients?” another nurse, the one who attended to Warder, asks. “They can’t climb out the window.”
Do what you must, save as many as you can. “I know,” Isabel says. “The watch has more men, and they have ladders.”
“What about the people from the Temple?” asks the first nurse. “I heard there was a Sentinel here in the city.”
That hits Isabel like a slap to the face. She bites her tongue and looks at the floor. “They’re on their way. It’s just going to take a while.”
“I suppose it’s time to start tying bedsheets together, then,” says Berend. It’s a peculiar sort of calm he’s put on, as though nothing they do will matter, but he’s decided to do it anyway, just for fun. It makes Isabel’s heart drop into her belly, but the nurses nod and set about removing linens from their barricade.
With the alacrity of a military garrison, they strip the beds and hand the sheets to Berend. He ties them together in a series of overhand knots, his hands steady and his face calm, though he flinches ever so slightly at each blow against the doors.
The small crack beside the first door climbs up to the top of the frame, shedding dust and splinters as it goes. The beds groan, and their feet scrape against the floor.
“Ladies, if you’ll follow me,” Berend says. He carries the improvised rope to Warder’s door and throws it open.
In the bed, Warder wakes with a start and a silent cry of alarm. The stack of notes still lies on top of the coverlet, beside one pale hand. He reaches for his notebook.
Berend slings the rope over his shoulder and grabs the post at the foot of the bed, nearest to the window, with both hands. “Sorry, friend. Hold on tight.”
Even if he had the strength in his bloodless arms, there’s nothing for Warder to hold on to. His face shows all the indignant protest he can muster as Berend drags his bed to the window and ties one end of the sheets to the post.
Isabel throws back the curtains and opens the window. Bright sunshine and a crisp autumn breeze enter the room, chasing back the smell of death. From here, the city is quiet, as though nothing is amiss—but the throngs of university students who should be passing by in the street below are absent.
The hospital’s front wall is smooth stone, with only thin bands of mortar to offer any foothold. It’s not far to the ground—too far to jump, certainly, but if the sheets can get someone halfway—
The groan of wood and the crack of splinters interrupts Isabel’s thoughts. One of the doors has failed; she guesses the farther one, by the muffled volume, and that the lock has been pushed through its frame. Since a rush of clumsy footsteps on broken, rotting feet doesn’t follow, the barricade is still holding.
“One of you first,” Isabel tells the nurses. “Climb down and get the watch. Tell them to send as many as they can.”
They look at each other, and Warder’s nurse steps forward. She has the strongest arms of the three of them. Her mouth presses into a thin, bloodless line as she takes the end of the sheet.
Berend places the rickety chair under the window. “All right, love. Take it slow. We’ve got the other end.”
“Be careful of the front door,” Isabel warns her. “There are more downstairs, and they’ll be looking to break out.”
The nurse holds up a hand. “Stop, both of you, before you make me change my mind.”
She climbs onto the chair and looks out into the sunlight. Taking one steadying breath, she kicks off her shoes and gives the rope an experimental tug. Berend’s knots hold.
The other end of the rope goes out the window, and she follows it feet-first. Hand under hand, she climbs down until her head disappears from view.
Isabel leans out after her. She can’t see the front door, obscured as it is by its flanking columns and a section of roof, but there isn’t a flood of undead pouring out. That’s good.
There is a mass of dead on either side of the corridor, and they are pressing inward as two unified bodies, grinding the barricade against the floor and turning both doorframes to splinters. It is at that moment that Geray reappears, passing through the outer wall of Warder’s room and into the relative shade, where his translucent form is visible.
“There are two priests of Ondir en route,” he says. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Isabel turns from the window. “The people from the temple are almost here.”
Geray crosses his arms over the ragged hole in his chest. “You could thank me, for once, Sentinel.”
Berend can’t hear him, so he says, “You next, then. I’ll hold here as long as I can.”
Forward to Chapter Twenty-Four
I ALMOST FORGOT TO POST THIS CHAPTER but I remembered before it got too late! Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
One thought on “The Book of the New Moon Door: Part Two, Chapter Twenty-Three”