Barricade
Berend watches the window. He shouldn’t; he should be fortifying the doors, maybe figuring out some way to get Warder out of the direct path of danger. The nurse’s stockinged feet touch the ground, and she takes off running up the street. Isabel’s climb is slower, the soles of her boots scraping against the masonry wall and her arms unsteady. Berend checks the knots again.
The younger nurse approaches the door to the hall, one hand on the pair of shears in her pocket. She puts her ear to the door and listens.
“One of the doors is broken, but they can’t get through yet,” she says.
Her companion, a woman of about thirty with pale yellow curls escaping her cap, pushes past her and turns the latch. “Not yet. Soon, though.”
“Should we barricade the door in here?” asks the first. “What about the other patients?”
“We can’t just leave them,” argues the second.
Outside, Isabel’s grip fails some eight feet from the ground. She slides the rest of the way, her feet hitting the pavement with a slap. With a grimace, she looks at her hands and trudges away from the hospital.
“Well, we should do something before they break through,” says the first nurse.
“What else do we have?” says the other. “The cabinets, maybe?”
A questioning “Sir?” pulls Berend from the window.
“Sorry,” he says. “Our scouts are out. Hopefully they’ll bring reinforcements. My name’s Berend, by the way. And I’m not actually this fellow’s cousin.” If he’s going to die here, which seems likely, he might as well be honest.
The first nurse raises an eyebrow at his confession. “I’m Amalia. This is Margot. We should go. Now.”
“Right.” Berend checks his pocket for his pistol and follows them out, leaving a bewildered Warder in his misplaced bed against the far wall.
Both doors cling to their frames by splinters, but the right-hand door is halfway free, long iron nails holding the lock mechanism to a broken chunk of white-painted wood. Through the gap, three gray arms in tattered sleeves claw blindly at the bed posts holding the remains of the door closed. Their nails are torn, leaking thick, black blood. The mass of all the bodies behind the door bows it outward into the barricade. Creaking, groaning wood on both sides echoes down the empty hallway.
Berend approaches the broken door and puts his shoulder against the barricade. With both feet planted, he moves it barely an inch. The dead push back against him with an unholy strength, tearing at the splintering door and each other with unfeeling hands. The smell of an open grave wafts through the cracks.
They’re utterly silent, and that makes it worse. There’s nothing human about them anymore. Berend has held his share of doors before, and the men on the other side are always chanting as they push in unison or hurling insults, the same as those on his side. Here, there’s only a singular destructive impulse that doesn’t tire or listen to reason or fear death. Both the bodies against the door and the spirit driving them are already dead.
Gods, I hope you figure this out, Sentinel.
Amalia and Margot go to the supply cabinet and give it a shake. It doesn’t move. It’s solid wood—what kind, Berend can’t tell, as it’s been painted white like everything else. Even with his help, they won’t be able to move it.
A heavy, dead fist beats against the door, sending vibrations through the barricade and into Berend’s shoulder. If he lives, his joints are going to pay for this for weeks.
The nurses abandon the cabinet and go to the other door, Amalia’s small brown fist gone white-knuckled around her shears. “So what do we do?” she asks the hallway. “Just push against it until the priests get here?”
“What else can we do?” says Margot.
Nothing, Berend doesn’t say aloud. We wait, and hold, and hope that the gods, wherever they might be, decide to help us.
He’s got nothing against the gods. He fought in one of their names for years. But they take their own sweet time to get around to helping their faithful, and he’d much rather rely on tangible things that work on schedule. Such as a firearm.
He takes out his pistol and levels it at the widening hole in the door. It’s not going to stop them, but maybe he’ll take an arm or two off. He pulls back the hammer and fires.
Both nurses cry out in surprise. “You had a gun on this floor?” Margot demands, but her outrage is forgotten as the dead surge against their barricade. She drops down to the floor and pushes her back against the bed frame.
Sulfur and smoke sting at Berend’s eyes. The press of the dead doesn’t falter, but the gap in the door stays empty for a few blessed seconds. A bloody hand, missing its thumb and two fingers, reaches through the hole and grasps the door, heedless of the splinters. It leaves a pair of blackened, bloody streaks on the white paint.
“All right, angry ghost, whoever you are,” Berend mutters. “We understand your point. You can stop now.”
The dead push against the door. Another arm, this one covered in bands of dark bruises, crawls out of the gap and gropes in the air. It finds the edge of a sheet still on the barricade and yanks at it. Tucked in as it is, and trapped between the bed and the door, the linen catches and tears. The hand grasps another fistful of cloth and rips it away.
Berend makes himself look away. He’s seen it before, but the single minded, indiscriminate destruction of the awakened dead makes his blood run cold. If they were out to kill him, he’d understand it better, but they make no distinction between the door and his flesh. He takes another shell out of his pocket and sets about reloading his pistol.
He has three more shells, and barely enough powder for them.
The door gives a lurch, and he almost drops the gun as the barricade slams into his arm. One round did nothing. Another three won’t do much more.
He’s aware, distantly, of the bruise that will form on his shoulder, but he feels no pain. When the angry dead tear him limb from limb, at least he won’t feel much.
Think, Horst. His own life might be worth a couple of pennies these days, but he’s got the nurses and Warder to worry about, plus the others still locked in their rooms. Not that he’d mind if Warder met an unpleasant end, but he needs both of them to make it through this: Warder to do whatever calculations he needs to in order to undo the damage to Mikhail and Bessa, and himself to force him to do it.
The barricade creeps forward another inch, pushing Berend ahead of it. On the other side, the corpses are breathing, gasping at irregular intervals as they hurl themselves against the door, as though they think they should breathe but have forgotten why. Their breath smells of disinfectant and preservatives, a sharp, chemical odor that reminds Berend of the awful rotgut his companions would try to brew on long campaigns. On one memorable occasion, his captain had seized the entire supply—half a barrel’s worth—and had them throw it against the gate of the fort they were besieging and set it alight, while arrows and musket fire rained down on their heads.
Berend has an idea—a terrible, stupid idea, one even worse than trying to make consumable whisky out of rotten apples, and he well remembers the stomachache that resulted from that.
You’d better hurry, Sentinel, before I end up making everything worse.
He sets the pistol aside, out of the way of the barricade as it creeps forward. With one hand braced against the implacable advance of the dead, he takes the tattered linens in the other, pulling one torn sheet and half of another onto the stone floor beside him.
Most of the building is stone. It makes what he’s about to do only slightly less stupid.
He pours the last of his gunpowder—two shells’ worth—into the sheet and folds the corners over it. It’s the best he can do one-handed. That done, he takes the small, misshapen package and places it behind his head, in the reach of the grasping arms pushing their way through the door.
As soon as he feels it move, he turns around, aims the pistol, and fires into the gap a second time.
The explosion is barely bigger than the gunshot, but it’s enough. The sheet catches fire, blackening and curling around the rotting, alcohol-laden limbs of the corpses at the front of the mass. Their skin ignites, filling the space with black smoke and the smell of burning, rotten meat. Berend’s eyes water, and he coughs, turning his head away.
The fire doesn’t stop the onslaught of the dead. They feel nothing, they fear nothing, but still they burn, their fluids boiling and hissing and fragments of charred flesh dropping from their bones. Berend puts his back against the barricade, plants his feet, and shields the back of his head with his arms.
Amalia and Margot are shouting, but he can’t hear them over the terrible din at the door. Whatever they’re calling him, he deserves it, he’s sure. At least he’ll be the first to suffer if the fire spreads, and they might be able to get away.
A fallen ember touches the exposed skin of his left hand, and he jerks it back. Here is the fatal flaw in his plan: the barricade is almost as flammable as the bodies, and he needs them to burn before it does. He reaches down and grabs the other sheet. He can smother exactly one smoldering fire threatening to start behind his head.
It takes a long time for a body to burn. Even as desiccated as some of the hospital’s lost patients were, the mass of them remain standing and pushing forward even as acrid smoke fills the stairwell and flows around the door and into the widening gap. The door breaks at last, splintering straight across the opening between the stacked beds. Its upper hinge holds on for one agonizing second before it gives way, and half of the door falls backward onto the advancing dead. More smoke pours into the corridor.
Berend steps back from the barricade. There’s nothing he can do now. They’ll drag him into their midst by his collar and hair before he can pass out from inhaling smoke. Still they reach, tearing holes into the mattresses and digging their nails into the bed posts. Still, a slow, steady fire burns among them.
It isn’t fast enough.
And here I was worried that I’d burn the entire hospital down, is Berend’s bitter thought. Come on, Sentinel. Do something.
He has one slow moment, with the burning arms of the dead pushing against his barricade and their rotten eyes staring at him with a cold, impersonal malice, to hope that when he arrives in that terrible other place, Ondir will have come back and he doesn’t have to wait for an eternity. Maybe death won’t be so bad for him. He’s done a lot of things he regrets, and there are a lot of things he regrets not doing, but he’s been mostly all right as a person. He’s never killed anyone who didn’t try to kill him first—except for maybe Geray, but that’s a technicality. He would have gotten around to it if Berend had given him the chance.
With one final push, the corpses shove the barricade forward. One body, heedless of the fire in what remains of its hair, wriggles through the gap. It falls with a meaty thump and crawls, dragging itself along by its hands, toward Berend.
Behind him, Margot and Amalia cry out as their barricade fails. The sound of their hard-soled shoes running down the hall is overpowered by the wet, lurching march of the dead.
Berend’s pistol is empty. He holds it by the barrel and prays to whomever might be listening to save the nurses and Warder, if nothing else.
And Isabel. At least she made it out.
Forward to Chapter Twenty-Five
I think this story was always going to have a zombie attack. Thanks for reading! Also, the next chapter of Journey to the Water should post on Patreon tomorrow. I appreciate your patience.
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