The forest floor was dense with undergrowth and tree roots, reaching up to trap an unwary ankle. The going was slow, machetes deployed left and right. Several times they had to double back and cut a new path when the vegetation became too thick even for chopping. After half an hour, Raven’s muscles had a nice burn happening, sweat soaked into her black fatigues. The sixty pound pack wasn’t a burden yet, but it would be if they had to keep up this pace and exertion for too long.
A deep moan rose up, drifting through the trees from somewhere ahead. Boss’s fist shot up and the Squad froze. Something moaned again, then another off to the left. A third joined it, then a fourth and then there were too many to place and count.
The Squad split their line out wide, scanning left and right through the darkness. Crunching and cracking of leaves and twigs joined the melancholic laments as several somethings shambled towards them.
“Two o’clock,” Smoke said, then vanished. He reappeared moments later behind the silhouette of a man and took its head from its shoulders with a single machete stroke.
Then there were figures everywhere, pushing out between the tree trunks, faces slack and groaning, the stench of rotten flesh filled their nostrils.
“They fucking zombies now?” Taipan asked
Jet stepped forward and said, “Sit on the floor.”
Her voice was deep, powerful, and the compulsion to drop her ass to the leaf litter was almost too much for Raven to ignore. And the command hadn’t even been directed at her.
“Sit down!” Jet ordered again, clearly using more than mere sound, the waves of her voice something beyond the simply auditory. “Not working!” Jet told the Squad, but they could see that for themselves.
Smoke blinked in and out again, machete flashing. Heads rolled.
Taipan crouched, made complicated gestures and barked a short word. Flame shot from his outstretched fingers and engulfed an approaching figure. The attacker went up in flames, flesh and clothes crackling, but didn’t slow for a moment.
Taipan pulled a machete free and hacked the burning man down. “Fuggen hell! Flaming zombie attack!”
“Engage and destroy,” Boss shouted. “Decapitate for your best chance. Questions later.”
Raven chose to ignore the nature of the enemy, treat it like any other, and fell into the dance. Her jade dagger was more than a simple edge, its magic froze everything it cut. Limbs and heads shattered to flesh cubes when they hit hard roots or branches, or she hit them with fists and feet after a stab or slice. The machete in her other hand carved bigger wounds, her ambidextrousness making her into a whirling, scything tiny tornado of death. This is what she lived for, to get in close, to move, dive, duck and weave, cutting anything that strove to interrupt her movement. Nothing was as pure as the slice of a sharp edge.
She caught glimpses of Jet, expert strikes of hands and feet, fighting like some master from a movie, not speaking at all. Smoke popped in and out of sight, appearing randomly to decapitate, then vanish again. Taipan reached and lunged, wiry and fast, chopping two-handed with his machete as though it were a sword. When he took out a leg and the thing fell, he’d lob flame at it to burn it where it lay. Boss slammed all around himself, sometimes lifting the revenants high to smash them down over a bent knee. He left more alive than dead, disabled with destroyed spines and necks, reaching and dragging themselves over the rough ground. The Squad’s magic pulsed and flashed, quick-fire spells of speed and protective wards, deployed smoothly with fists and feet and blades. Raven used combat magic of her own, practiced surreptitiously in theatres of war around the world, but realised dimly that she had so much to learn from these people.
In minutes it was over, silence settling but for the gasping of breath as the Squad re-joined one another.
“Anyone hurt?” Boss asked.
“One of the fuckers bit me,” Jet said. She held up her left arm, a deep crescent in her wrist leaking thick blood that looked black in the night.
Boss started to dress the wound, rinsing it with saline and disinfectant first. “Anyone else?”
Taipan leaned forward, stared hard at Jet’s eyes. “Er, Boss… Were they zombies?”
“There’s no such thing, you fucking idiot, I already told you that,” Boss said. “She’s not going to become one of the walking dead.” Something moaned near his foot, a broken man twisted in all the wrong directions, dragging itself one-handed over the ground. Boss slammed a boot into its head, stoved the skull in. The stench of rotten meat swelled in the air.
“You’re sure?”
“These are rezzers. They could have been here for years, decades, without the magic refreshed, so they’re starting to rot, that’s all. There’s probably a lot more.”
Jet reached up and slapped Taipan’s cheek. “Stop being such a buttercup.”
Smoke put a hand on Raven’s shoulder. “You were quite something to watch there. Like a razor-sharp godsdamned ballerina or something.”
The others nodded, smiled agreement.
Raven couldn’t help smiling too, wondering if she’d earned her place a little more securely. “It’s my gift.”
“Fall out,” Boss said. “Go wide, and listen for more.”
They proceeded more cautiously than before, fanned out across a wider area, eyes peeled. Moaning and guttural coughs erupted now and then, homing in quickly on the Squad. Taipan took out a pair of rezzers with quick double-handed machete strokes.
“I thought you said these things were intelligent like regular people,” he said.
Boss stepped sideways, slammed a fist into a rezzers face, collapsing its head with inhuman strength, then threw a scowl at Taipan. “It’s not only the flesh that rots when the magic is left to degrade. The orders remain, but their brains have moulded out too.”
Jet grimaced. “That’s fucking horrible.”
“Yeah. I’m guessing they have two over-riding commands. Stay within a certain area and kill anything that enters that area. The necromancer would check in on his more active thralls, keep the magic fresh and therefore the rezzer would retain its humanity. These ones, he’s just left to nature.”
Raven shivered at the thought, imagined their active brains understanding their fate as their sense of self slowly decayed. “This is actually a fate worse than death. I thought that was just a figure of speech.”
Boss glanced over at her, slight shake of the head. “There are many fates worse than death. Concentrate, people.”
Something swung down from a tree limb directly in front of Raven, leering and drooling, it howled as arms thrust forward, fingers wriggling like hard, hungry worms. Raven bit back a yelp of surprise, ducked and slashed upwards. Her jade dagger clipped one arm and it stiffened immediately. She spun to one side, whipped around a heel kick, and the arm shattered into a thousands shards of frozen meat. As the rezzer strained about, its remaining arm clawing at the air, she ducked back under and slammed the dagger into its back. Hard ice spread like a fast-blooming flower across its body and she punched right through, destroying its spine and organs. It fell limp from the tree and she stepped over it.
“Damn fine knife,” Smoke said. “You made a rezzer ring donut.”
Raven grinned. “Yeah, long story attached to this.”
“You’ll have to tell me some time.”
“Sure.”
The night was largely starless and the darkness under the trees wasn’t much relieved when they emerged from the densest part of the forest and began the slow climb up the mount on which the castle sat. It loomed over them, massive and foreboding, a black silhouette against the slightly lighter sky. Night goggles on, marked for silence, the Squad crept over rocky ground, hunched low, eyes everywhere.