But Ye Shall Die Like Men {1/2}

[ficofandalasia]

Master Post
Part One || Part Two




PART ONE

Chapter One: Atlantis

Rourke had spoken of night as if Atlantis truly had a day. True, it had seemed light in the great cavern compared to the tunnel that had preceded it, but Milo did not realise until the light of the crystal was restored how dark it must have been before.

With the light, crops returned, their leaves glowing with a beautiful bluish tinge. It took barely any time at all for the Atlanteans to bring back to domesticity animals that had grown feral, to clean the creeping vines and ivy from their buildings and statues, to begin to prosper and grow once again. It was strange to be teaching them to read their own language, but they learnt fast, and could help with his vocabulary in return.

He had never really thought of Kida as a princess, let alone a queen. Yes, these were her people, but he was not from Europe with its Kings and Emperors. In any case, he was working beside her, and for all of Milo’s imagination he could not think of himself as a prince.

He took it for granted, though, that she would tell him everything. Her advisers were admittedly less certain of this strange surface boy - and oh, had he been called young, when they thought he was not listening! - but he trusted Kida completely.

Which was why he did not expect to hear raised voices from the consul room.

"How can we be sure that it will not begin again? We cannot be sure of what they stirred!"

"It has been three years, Taragnula!" Milo froze as he heard Kida’s voice, sharp and angry. "We would have known long ago if the Plague had come again."

"We never did understand it," Taragnula replied. Milo knew him well, a man at the Atlantean equivalent of middle age, stern and usually quiet. The intensity in his voice drew Milo closer, to the pillars at the edge of the chamber.

Kida was standing at the central, round stone table, her advisors around her. She had that tight-jawed look on her face again, which worried him. "No carrier could live that long."

"Silence!" Kida barked, and her advisors - all hardened warriors - shied from her. "You will not keep scaremongering like this. And you will not tell Milo-"

As if by some complicated yet entirely scientifically explicable turn of events, Kida looked up and saw Milo at that very moment. There was a strained pause as she straightened up and her men fell sternly, almost angrily silent.

Milo gave his awkward grin-and-wave combination. "Hello."

"It seems we never need to say anything directly to him," said another of the advisors, younger and rasher, always with fresh scrapes on his knuckles from getting into fights."He seems to know much about our people without our even speaking."

"Speaking to walls, and hearing them," said a third.

It was on the tip of his tongue to start explaining linguistics and history and cartography and, well, all of the things that he did and was interested by. But before he could speak, Kida strode across the room and grabbed him by the wrist, proceeding to drag him away.

"You are dismissed," she snapped over her shoulder. "Go back to the people. There is always work to be done."

"Kida-" Milo began, but she simply ignored him and tugged harder on his arm. He realised that she was drawing him up the steps of the citadel again, up high above the city. This late and night, there were few flyers, their lights like mobile stars as he and Kida reached the top and its cool, temperate air.

"Kida," he repeated, panting slightly with the speed at which she had been dragging him. "What is it?"

Her eyes were glistening; he realised that it was with tears. "My advisors are frightened," she said quietly. "They are worried that we will raise an old evil once again."

"I know that you wouldn't misuse the power of the crystal, Kida," he said gently, and went to put his hands on her shoulders. This time, though, she shrugged them off, and Milo drew back warily.

"It is not the crystal," her voice was thick, and even after all of his time in Atlantis he found her words a little difficult to understand. "It was... after."

Kida turned, looking out over the skyline of the city.

"We are a long-lived people, Milo. You know that. And my people are not fools. Well... we did not think that we were fools. Do you imagine that we would just forget, forget everything that we had ever known and done?

"No," she said fiercely. "Time cannot hurt our people. The waves... yes, they did hurt, but they could not leave us like this. It was the Sickness that almost destroyed us."

"The Sickness?" echoed Milo. Kida did not look round.

"Some called it a curse. I refuse to. I remember it - though I was young when it began. Nobody can be young for long, after all. It was an illness, a plague. We did not understand. But it poisoned our ground, made our plants rot in the soil, and..."

A painful pause. Her face almost crumped, then she stilled, the Queen of Atlantis once again.

"It took our living. But that was not enough. It took our dead, pulled them from their graves, and turned them into monsters. Monsters with a taste for our flesh."

For a moment, when she turned back towards him, he was acutely aware of the ages in her eyes.

"The battle took us years - centuries - to finally win. And you have seen the cost. Our great power, our civilisation, bought to ruins and living in a shell of its own glory. My advisors fear that when you and your people returned, you could have awoken the Sickness once again."

Milo finally broke his silence: he laughed, nervously, reaching up to adjust his glasses. "That's nonsense. Right? Like you told them. It couldn't come back."

"I don't know, Milo," she replied, and wrapped her arms around herself despite the fact that it was never cold here. "We can never be sure."



Chapter Two: Whitmore Estates

It was, thought Audrey Ramirez as she pounded in a zombie's head with a wrench, really not a good day.

Of course, there had been many bad days in the last three years, but this one was taking the biscuit.

"Vinnie!" She hollered, kicking what remained of that particular zombie back over the wall. "Get that damn bridge down!"

"I'm working on it!" he called back, the comment punctuated with the reports of a revolver.

"Then work faster!"

Another rotting creature lunged through the doorway, and Audrey bought her wrench down two-handed. There was a splatter of black goo and a nauseating wave of stench that it was impossible to get used to, but she refrained from gagging and delivered a swinging upwards blow to what remained of the zombie's draw, sending it into the doorframe. Bar a couple of twitching blobs on the floor, it seemed that things were clear, but she hefted the wrench in her hands again before advancing carefully down the corridor towards the western guard-tower.

An explosion rocked the air, sending puffs of dust streaming from the walls and letting Audrey stumble against the stone. Muttering a Spanish profanity, she regained her balance and continued, switching to a one-handed grip and keeping the other arm raised, elbow out and the thick gauntlet that she wore very reassuring, ahead of her in the gloom. They needed more fuel for the generators, that much was clear: if they couldn't spare it even to light an attack, things were getting desperate.

"Thank you, Vinnie," she muttered, though the words were slightly bitter. Severing their last link to the outside world had not been a decision easily made (they had been grateful for Whitmore for building his mansion in such a godforsaken, stupid place, but that did not mean that they had understood in the slightest his reasons for doing so) but the bridge had needed to go if the horde was at their door.

The dust settled, she coughed, but the adrenaline rush was fading as she heard the dulled sounds of more gunfire outside, rarer now than they had been in the early attacks. There was only so much ammunition, after all. Letting the wrench fall back to her side, Audrey slowed to a normal walk and shook her head.

Definitely not a good day.

Without warning, one of the wooden doors ahead of her - all barred, and checked weekly - exploded inwards in a shower of splinters and with an ear-splitting wail. Audrey's body reacted fast, mind only catching on a moment later as she leapt forwards, bringing the wrench down overarm and onto what transpired to be the exposed stump of the neck of one of the zombies.

"Whew," said a voice to her left, "thanks for that. Thought it was gonna get messy cleaning that one up."

Audrey turned a withering gaze on Sweet, who was currently in possession of filthy rubber gloves, a fire extinguisher, and a slightly surprised expression.

"It's still gonna be messy, Sweet. Did you have to take the door out?"

He gave an apologetic shrug, the brass cylinder in his hands glinting in the light from behind him. When they had found the over-large versions of the Pyrene cylinders in some of the many basements of Whitmore's mansion, they had almost thrown them aside in frustration, but they had turned out as useful battering rams for breaking into some of the areas of the house.

Also, in Sweet's hands, for decapitating the living dead. But most of the rest of them left that to him.

"Come on," he said. "Clean-up’s pretty much done now, though there'll be a sweep to do when we can spare the light. Time to get ourselves back to the meeting room, take stock of everything."

"Yeah," said Audrey grimly, thinking of the explosion, the loss of the bridge. "We need a meeting all right."



They were - of course, considering how this day was going - late. Audrey rolled her eyes as she and Sweet sidled into the back of the meeting room, as they now called Whitmore's study in at least a vague attempt to ignore how ludicrous this was, and attempted to not be noticed. Not an easy task with fewer than a dozen of them left nowadays. They received something of a glare from their 'head of operations', but nothing was said. There was not much point, anyway, any more.

"Even with Mr. Santorini's skill with improvised chemical explosives," their HO continued, the slightest touch of humour twisting her voice as she did so, "our resources on that front are severely depleted. Frankly, all that does it make it the same as any other front."

She turned to the blackboard behind her, waving a contemptuous hand, or perhaps more accurately the revolver in it, towards the list. "Explosives, ammunition, medical supplies, water, fuel, food. Everything is running low, gentlemen."

Audrey was used to that by now. She let it slide.

"And now we have been forced to sever the bridge. Our previous two excursions from our base have been almost entirely unsuccessful in any case, but it should now be clear that these will no longer be possible. To add to this, it is clear that our location has been discovered by some of the undead, and we are all quite aware that this means there will be more coming.

"Are there any questions?"

She cocked an eyebrow and her hips as she turned to face them, but of course it was utterly unnecessary. They all knew how this goes, and had suspected for a long time what will be coming. They just hadn't wanted it to happen quite yet, because it meant so much danger for them all.

"Gentlemen, it appears that the time for procrastinating has finished." She never had approved of the Whitmore base, not really. She had made that clear from the moment she had come out of her coma, not that there had been much gratitude to Sweet for even managing such a thing. "We need to move, and we need to do so before our chances are completely eradicated. Mr. Santorini, I would like you and Miss Ramirez to go down through the cellar corridor and investigate the closure at the other end."

As if they hadn't been there half a dozen times before, together or separately, even without anyone asking.

"Mr. Grace," a nod to one of the stern-faced soldiers who had made it this far, "you will accompany them. You will take a radio, but maintain absolute silence unless in an emergency situation. Do you understand?"

There were rumbles of agreement from all around the room. They all knew what rode on the state of the tunnel out of the mansion.

"Good," said Helga Sinclair, and finally put her revolver back into its holster. "Everyone else, let's get the generators up and get a sweep going. I for one would actually like to get some sleep tonight without the risk of getting eaten before dawn."



"I'm sure this could have waited until morning," grumbled Audrey, as the three of them levered a piece of twisted, rusted metal out of the path.

"Yeah," said Vinnie thoughtfully, "but then it wouldn't have been as annoying."

It seemed as good a reason as any. She snorted, treated the moved piece of metal to a hearty kick, and adjusted her kecks with a hearty tug of both hands. The one thing that they could say for Helga was this: she had kept them alive. No, more than that, she had made them alive, when previously they had been doing nothing more than running and hiding in buildings, and were starting to wonder whether it was worth bringing her along at all.

But Sweet had refused to live a patient behind. So most of the time Helga had been slung over his shoulder, still unconscious, and he had been feeding her by tubes which meant that she still occasionally coughed up blood to this day. But they had kept her alive, and so she had returned the favour.

Two and a half years of returning the favour. They had been ground down from thirty-one people to ten, and that wasn't even counting Whitmore himself. At least Helga had dealt with him cleanly, for his sake.

"How long was this tunnel again," Audrey called to Eyes, as they called Mr. Grace. Some of the remaining men from Whitmore's private army had given up their names - Jules, Andrei, François - but some of them had refused, and went by throwaway names instead, as if they were hiding from the rest of them. So Eyes it was, because Eyes had proven to be a quite exceptional sniper, and although there had not been much ammo or much opportunity, given the noise that a sniper rifle made, it had been quite captivating to watch him. Now, he was pacing out the corridor.

"Two hundred yards. I'm on about a hundred and sixty now."

She and Vinnie grunted a reply as they heaved another fallen timber out of the way, then hesitated for a moment as a slight scatter of earth came down from the ceiling and brushed across their faces. Fair enough, Whitmore had seemed to be a couple of hundred years old, but there was still not really any explanation for the fact that the place had contained everything from crates of dynamite to what appeared to be a Classical statue, which had been very useful for blocking a window on the ground floor. There was also no explanation, really, for the tunnel out of the place.

Unless Whitmore had been expecting the rising of the undead. Maybe the old man had spent too much time in Haiti or something, which was where the word 'zombie' had supposedly spread from following the start of this... this chorrada. Audrey had tried many words for it over the months, the years, but she really couldn't come up with one that she was content with.

"È un mucchio di palle" snarled Vinnie beside her as he kicked a piece of fallen stone in the dark, the steel toecaps of his boots sending up sparks though they would at least protect his feet.

"You can say that again," she replied, and they went to finish clearing the path to the end of the tunnel.



Chapter Three: Halbrook

"I told you we should have stayed at the damn mansion," said Sweet, although it was really more of a hiss as they hid in the back room of the bakers and hoped that the creatures outside would lose interest, or forget, or whatever it was that might buy them a bit of time. Having a couple of dozen of them outside wasn't the worst thing in the world that could happen, but it certainly wasn't what they'd been hoping for.

"Yes, Sweet, we should have stayed at the mansion," drawled Helga, "drinking toilet water and eating rats."

"I never said I cooked no rats," said Cookie quickly.

Helga rolled her eyes. "Don't worry, Cookie, we wouldn't have been able to tell if you did. Your cooking style is... consistent."

She shrugged her shoulders heavily, shifting the khaki military-style jacket that she was wearing over her vest top and pants. Once, the top had been white; now it was stained a dull greyish-brown with lack of good washing facilities and Vinnie's having used up all of the bleach in bombs a long time ago.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter. We heard them coming in before we even left, and there's been no sign of François or Chips. We've got to assume that the mansion has been overrun." She began another slow circuit of the small enclosed room which they were in, the heavy concrete walls and the oven taking up the entire back wall. "Which leaves us here."

"I told you we should have done some early packing," pressed Sweet. "Even with the damn bridge down, it wasn't going to last very long."

Helga paused by the doorway to give him a venomous look. From their seats on the floor, Audrey and Vinnie looked on with a minimum of interest, leaning together and waiting for a conclusion to be drawn. It was always Helga who made the decisions in the end: it had been her who killed Whitmore when he started to grow sickly and the wound on his arm became visibly infected; it had been her who had ordered Vinnie to collapse the first tunnel which they had found to keep the creatures out, even as the others had been frozen by Mole's screams; it had been her who had led them round the perimeter of the mansion and made it completely secure.

They still hated her, of course, for everything that had happened. But then again, they hated the world nowadays, including each other, for everything that had happened and was continuing to happen even now. Hate had become a sort of dull background to everything by now.

Vinnie reached over and hooked out the pendant that hung round Audrey's neck, his movements gentle even now. The crystal glowed slightly in the dark, though it seemed fainter than it had before, showing between his fingers even when he closed his hand around it. She put her hand over his for a moment, then nodded, and they shifted to simply sit, side by side, once again.

"Andrei, did you manage to pick up the radio equipment?" Helga was asking one of their ex-soldiers. He was younger than most of them, barely capable of growing the stubble on his chin, and had defter hands than would have been expected from a soldier. Of all of them, he had been the one without a weapon as they fled, as he had been carrying one pack in his hands as well as one on his back. Both now sat at his feet.

"Yes, ma'am," he replied. "But I think it was damaged."

"Ramirez, this is your territory."

Audrey levered herself to her feet and walked over to Andrei, who was now opening the upper of the packs. They looked inside and winced in unison at the wires and broken glass which greeted them.

"I'll do what I can," Audrey replied. "But it's gonna need time. And better light than that."

She nodded to the flashlights that Eyes, Sweet and Helga were holding, and which they were trying to sweep around to keep as much of the room lit as possible. Although they knew that it was sealed, the dark corners still seemed terrible, especially with the shuffling sounds that they could hear from the outside.

Shuffling which was getting louder. Everyone started, whipping round, as gunfire rang out from outside the room, then grunts of fighting and the sound of snapping bones and parting flesh. They knew the sounds well themselves, had heard them plenty of times, but they had not realised that there were others still alive. Despite their clinging to the radio, the air had gone all but dead over a year before.

"Survivors," Audrey said, quite aware she was stating the obvious, and lunged for the heavy metal door to the bakery. Her hands barely touched it before Helga had grabbed hold of her, throwing her back into the room.

"Surviving for now. Give them ten minutes and we'll see."

"Helga!" she said angrily, and wrestled down to duck out from under the woman's grasp. "They are survivors, and I am letting them in."

Before there could be anymore arguments, she grabbed her wrench off the ground with one hand and, in one bodily lunge, pulled open the door with the other. She was greeted with a trickle of red-black blood at floor-level, a wave of stench at every level imaginable, and the two people on the planet whom she least expected to see at this particular moment.

The pair turned to look at her with their own expressions of surprise, zombie gore dripping off the deadly-looking blades in their hands, as Eyes grabbed the door and pulled it further open to reveal the scene inside to everyone that might have been looking.

"Kida?" she said, in astonishment.

Helga appeared at her elbow. "Mr. Thatch?"