Empty Road
Berend leaves Warder in the nurses’ capable hands. He’ll be back later, when he’s found his things and a safe place to sleep, and maybe something resembling a meal. It’s not like Warder is going anywhere.
Bodies in varying states of decay clog the stairwells, lying piled against the doors and draped over the edge of the stairs. Some are fresh, their wounds raw and crimson, dressed in bloodstained nurses’ uniforms or fresh bandages. Berend steps over a gray-skinned body, naked except for the torn remains of a shroud clinging to its shoulders, its arms broken off above the elbows. He finds the missing limbs a few steps later, clutched in the hands of a fresher corpse, the back of its skull smashed in from a fall. Blood slicks the steps, sticking to Berend’s boots.
They were tearing each other apart. Behind the sleeve he put up to shield his nose from the haze of disinfectant and decay—so thick he can almost see it—Berend grimaces. A horde of undead isn’t an army; there’s no loyalty or camaraderie. They’re a haunting by another name, a manifestation of the pain and rage of a spirit who can’t accept that it’s dead. Losing limbs doesn’t stop them, nor does smashing their faces against a stone wall. A little collateral damage wouldn’t make a difference.
Berend knows this. Still, his empty stomach turns, and he walks a little quicker, trying and failing to ignore the horrific squelching sounds that follow him, echoing down the stairs.
He sees his first living person as he emerges into the foyer. Another nurse, her cap askew and her apron torn from waist to hem, throws a bottle of disinfectant at him as he opens the door. The acrid smell blooms from the broken glass and makes Berend’s eyes water.
He holds up his hands. “Wait! I’m alive. I’m not one of them.”
She’s already hefted another bottle, but she starts lowering it as Berend blinks and squints through the stinging in his eyes. She’s perhaps forty, solidly built, with two gray streaks in her dark hair and her sleeves rolled up over muscled forearms. Dark stains cover her shoes and stockings, suggesting that she’s kicked her way into surviving the afternoon.
“Who are you?” she asks, and then, more importantly, “How did you make it out?”
“We barricaded the doors on the third floor. It was me, two nurses—Amalia and Margot—and a couple of patients.” It doesn’t sound like very many, now that he says it, and there aren’t many alive down here. “Have you heard anything from outside?”
She looks at the windows, and Berend follows her gaze—the glass is broken, and three of the dead skewered themselves on huge, pointed shards sticking up from the bottom of the frame, oozing thick, black blood and embalming fluid over the casement. Outside, the city is bathed in red from a strange, dark sunset, the intruding forest landscape standing black and foreboding in the distance.
Of course she hasn’t heard anything from outside. Outside has its own problems.
“Is there anyone else with you?” Berends asks.
The nurse sets her bottle of disinfectant down on the floor. All the tables in the foyer have been smashed. The largest piece remaining looks like a leg, broken almost in half, a fringe of splinters surrounding the break. “A few,” she says.
Not many, is what Berend hears. Not enough.
“You’ve got a couple more upstairs,” he offers. “I’m going to try to find the watch. If I can, I’ll send them your way.”
She frowns. “Is that it, then? Are they down for good?”
“I think so.” They haven’t gotten up again, and it’s been what, half an hour? An hour? It’s a good sign, but he doesn’t know. He has no idea what Isabel did to fix this. It might not be permanent. “Maybe get everyone out soon, just to be sure,” he adds.
She turns and walks into a side room without so much as a goodbye, but Berend can’t fault her. He’s getting to the point where talking is more effort than it’s worth, and he wasn’t throwing heavy glass bottles at the dead this entire time. He drags himself across the foyer, stepping over shattered glass, splintered wood, and broken bodies, reaches out over the corpses piled against the doors, and throws the heavy iron latch open. Bodies spill out into the red-hued evenign as the doors swing open. Berend clambers out after them and takes his first deep breath of fresh air all day. It smells a little of pine, but that might be his imagination.
Why is it so dark? It can’t be that late, though his sense of time hasn’t been very sharp lately. A lack of sleep will do that to a man.
He doesn’t smell smoke. The only other time he ever saw the sky this red a decade ago, when a stray cannon sparked a fire that devoured a huge swath of inland forest. After a brief renegotiation, the Sons had transitioned from fighting the other army to fighting the fire, digging trenches and clearing brush. Smoke clung to his hair and clothing for months afterward, no matter how many times he washed or did his laundry. He’d smell it in the middle of the night and wake in a panic, fumbling for a hatchet or a bucket of water that he no longer needed to keep by his bed.
Now, there’s no fire. Given the disaster that has just occurred, Mondirra can count itself fortunate indeed. The sun has just become a dimly glowing jewel crowning the horizon, probably at about the same time the forest appeared, and half of the University District decided to climb on top of the other half.
Berend will have to make that climb sooner or later. Right now, he wants to find Isabel. If nothing else, she’ll tell him how much danger he’s in right now, and he can plan his next steps accordingly. Steps like eating and sleeping, and recovering his saber for whatever new hell is in his near future.
Isabel had gone toward the temple district, where the priests of Ondir were facing down the watch. Would it be too much to hope for that they’d resolved their differences in time to save a few lives?
Either way, that’s where Berend’s going. He sets out northward, up the empty thoroughfare that slants slowly upward toward the hill where the churches sit. The city has never been so quiet, not even in the middle of the night, and he’s been out and about at odd hours enough in his life to tell. Instinct tells him he’s walking into a trap, that there’s an ambush waiting around every corner, but he knows it’s foolishness. The dead can’t plan an ambush, even if they were to get back up again. He walks in the middle of the street, visible as daylight, but he can’t bring himself to call out and draw more attention. It’s not as though he’ll be much help to any survivors, anyway, with his empty gun and complete lack of supplies. Under his feet, the cobblestones are stained red and black by the surreal light, as though he’s walking over a landscape of dried blood. If there is blood on the street, he can’t see it, and it’s a small blessing.
No one calls out to him, either. As he gets closer to the Temple District, the remains of the organized defense begin to appear: wooden barricades with sharpened spikes facing outward, broken pikes, spent shot. A little farther, and he sees the first of the dead, thrown upon the barricades. An abandoned carriage sits hulking and shadowy on a corner, its horses and occupants long gone. More dead crowd around its wheels.
The wind has picked up. It howls down the empty streets, stirring the corpses’ ragged clothes and thin hair and tugging at Berend’s sleeves. It’s cold, and smells of water—a storm is coming from the sea, he guesses. He can’t see lightning or hear thunder, so it’s a ways off, yet.
That’s strange. Shouldn’t he be able to see the water from here, or at least a few of the taller structures near the docks? The temple of Ondir, its dome like the back of an enormous beetle, lies a stone’s throw away, lumber and bodies littering its steps like refuse brought in on high tide. Behind it, the cemetery has been reduced to a few headstones close to the building, the rest swallowed up in a thick, red-tinted fog.
It must be quite the storm on its way. The last thing the city needs is flooding in the streets and waves swamping the docks. I’d better get to higher ground, Berend says to himself, the thought accompanied by competing images of waiting out the storm in front of a roaring fire, a plate of something hot in his hands, and huddling under the overhang of the temple of Alcos as rain sluices over his feet and down the steps.
He’ll find Isabel first. She deserves to enjoy some rest, too—or suffer with him, as the case may be. If she’s anywhere, she’s in the temple of Ondir.
As he heads toward the low, dark dome, its sprawling cemetery remains shrouded in mist. No matter the weather, he should be able to see the larger mausolea from the base of the stairs, but they don’t appear. There is only fog, and a faint, pale shape stretching east-to-west in the middle of it, lit from within by a strange, ghostly light.
There are also ghosts.
They gather around the few visible tombstones, a crowd of vaguely humanoid figures that glow and flicker in the mist, a handful at first. More appear when Berend comes closer, pressing together with broken, staccato movements, as though they’re all trying to occupy the same square foot of space.
Not one of them is whole.
A disembodied arm reaches up toward the reddened sky and disappears in a flash. A face, mouth open in a silent scream, stretches out from the group toward Berend before folding in on itself and blinking out. Three pairs of legs tread on each other’s feet, combining and separating as they move.
He can’t count them. There might be twenty, or there might be a hundred. Mikhail might be among them, or poor Bessa Kyne, but Berend can’t see any of them clearly. He wants to call out, but his voice catches in his throat.
Is this Warder’s doing? Are these all the people Geray murdered? There’s so many.
And there are more, as he can see when he walks into the cemetery. Another dozen, another hundred—it’s impossible to say. Even as he gets closer, the fog remains just as thick, swallowing up the northern third of the city. Since the eastern quarter or so is taken up by the vertical forest, it doesn’t leave a lot of city left.
A familiar dread, cold and heavy as iron, settles in Berend’s belly. He’d had a good hour or so without it and hadn’t properly appreciated it.
He’s about to leave the ghosts and the expanse of fog to enter the temple when he sees a lone, dark shape stirring the gray. Someone’s out there—someone alive, even, or at least corporeal—the first he’s seen since leaving the hospital.
The figure comes closer, and Berend has the impression of tall black boots and an ill-fitting shirt, rather like the one he’s wearing.
“Isabel?”
She stops, and she raises a hesitant hand in something like a wave. Berend would have thought she’d be at least a little happy to see him, but he’ll take it.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, when she’s emerged from the fog and looks clearly like herself.
“What do you think?” says Berend, trying for a casual tone. “I came here to find you. I’m alive, and I wanted to make sure you were, too. I’m fine, by the way, thank you for asking.”
So, there are twenty-six chapters total in the current version of Part Three. I’m going to keep posting them on the current schedule for now, and I’ll let you know if that changes. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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