Death After Death

Thinking fast, Simon rushed across the room and brained the two that were trying to struggle their way through the gap in the boards. They just flopped there, like the world’s most disgusting cork, and their dead weight mostly kept the rest of them from coming through. He looked around and grabbed the closest trestle table, knocking it over to make a crude barrier. Then he started shoving it towards the breach.

It was heavier than it looked, though, and moved slowly. By the time he was halfway there he had to take a break, pick up his mace, and go for the new one that was trying to climb its way over the top of the other two lifeless corpses who had already breached the window.

“Can I get a little help over here,” he called out in annoyance as he smashed the latest corpse three times before it finally stopped twitching. Though, at least it seemed like none of the other boards were breaking under the strain, so if he could block this gap off it would probably hold for a while.

“Yeah. Right,” the woman said, finally stirring herself to action as she finally did something besides pointing her knife at anything that moved. She joined Simon as he put his back into it, and seconds later the table slammed against the wall, crushing the zombie corpses with a wet crunch.

Simon stretched and took a look around the room after that. Looking for any other threats and finding none. The common room was completely trashed obviously, and a few dead bodies lay amongst the toppled tables and scattered crockery, but most of the furniture had been piled messily to block the front door.

“Not exactly the place to grab a pint and wait for this all to blow over, is it?” Simon asked with a laugh, but when he turned around to face the dark haired girl, she was just looking blankly at her hands, and the wall of dead just outside the window. It was the first time Simon noticed that she was splattered with blood.

“You okay over there, sole survivor? You get bit or anything?” Simon asked.

“No, I - it’s not mine. It’s Brenna… she just… and then I-I—” the girl started crying then. She’d obviously had to do something terrible to survive this long, but Simon wasn’t terribly interested. Her tears were making him uncomfortable.

While she started to sob, he turned around to give her some privacy and started searching the first floor of this building. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for. More zombies? The next floor? Something to eat? It didn’t matter. Right now, all that mattered was giving his mystery girl a chance to calm down, so he could find out what had happened.

The first floor revealed a well stocked bar, a kitchen that had definitely seen some bloodshed, a set of stairs leading to the cellar, a second set that led up to rooms on the second floor, a looted pantry, and a random assortment of dead bodies scattered throughout. It was pretty gross, honestly. Some of them had been dead longer than others and were really starting to smell.

Not ready to face the crying girl yet, Simon started upstairs. He supposed he should do something about that, of course, but he wasn’t any good with those sorts of emotions. He just didn’t have much experience in that area. If Women were a category on his character sheet, they would probably be rated at very poor, along with spell casting. The difference between the two, of course, was that Simon had some idea of how to get better at using magic, but women were still a complete mystery to him.

Upstairs wasn’t much different than downstairs, and as he went room to room, ready for a fight, he found no new zombies. When he got to a room that faced the front of the end, though, all he could do was stop and stare as he got a good look out of an open window. For the first time in his life, his jaw literally dropped as he looked at the horror this city had become.

From the common room all he could see were boards with glimpses of zombies struggling just beyond them, but the view from the second floor he could see just how much carnage there really was. He was in a medieval city, or at least the corpse of one, because whatever had happened here had definitely killed it. The living dead were crowding the streets as far as he could see in both directions, and here and there, buildings were on fire. It was a complete mess.

Suddenly, Simon was struck with a pang of remorse. He regretted his joke about the pub from that horror movie. This wasn’t a joke. They were real people. At least they were to the girl downstairs, and he should try to respect that. For a moment he thought about continuing his search to try to find the door to the next floor, but his remorse won out, and he came back downstairs to see if the mystery girl had calmed down.

She had, and was sitting at a table when he got downstairs. She immediately picked up her knife again when she saw him, but at least she refrained from pointing it at him when he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Easy there, ummm Ma’am,” he said, walking slowly over to the bar and digging around for a rag before he dampened it with a half empty mug of beer and set it down on the table in front of her.

She just kept staring at him suspiciously, so he finally said, “For your hands,” before he sat down at the table on the opposite side. She looked like she needed a whole lot of space right now, and he was much happier to give that to her than to be stabbed.

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“Thanks,” she mumbled, wiping off one hand. Once it was clean though, she just stared at both her hands. One clean, one caked in dried blood, before she finally looked up at Simon with a hint of panic in her eyes. “I had to, you understand? I didn’t want to hurt Brenna, but then she…” The woman trailed off into silence after that, making the whole situation that much more awkward for Simon.

“Hey, don’t worry about that,” he said, trying to sound sympathetic, even if it was really strange finally talking to someone new again. His life had finally come unpaused, and this woman would do for now. Maybe there were other people he could meet on other levels too. “You did what you had to do. Anyone could see that. This is a nightmare, and you can figure out what was right and what was wrong after you wake up from it.”

“Really,” she asked, tears in her eyes. “You understand?”

“I do. Killing someone is hard,” he lied. Dying was hard, but killing the other guy before they killed you - that had become the easiest thing in the world for Simon. “You’ll get through this, and then it won’t seem so bad… Now, what’s your name?”

“It-it’s Freya,” she stammered.

“That’s a very pretty name,” Simon said, even though it seemed out of place anywhere but a Viking movie. Who knew, though, maybe this fantasy kingdom had some kind of Viking subculture. “I’m Simon. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Si-mon?” she asked, mispronouncing the letters of the unfamiliar word, but that didn’t bother him. “You’ve got a strange accent Simon. Where are you from? Why are you in Schwarzenbruck?”

“Ummm… I got lost on my way north,” he fumbled for an answer. “Before everything had gotten crazy. Do you know what happened here?”

“I don’t. Not really. I don’t think anyone does,” she shook her head. “One moment it was just a normal spring day, and the next - well, the next the gods had abandoned us to evil.”

“I mean - was there some necromancer, or maybe an evil army of the dead attacked the city?” Simon tried again, trying to get a better handle on what was happening. “Where did all these zombies come from?”

“I don’t know,” Freya said, finally starting to clean off her other hand as her mind switched on after hours of shock and denial. “Mr Olggen, the owner. He said that they’d barred the gates when the adventurers had come back complaining about a plague of death, but somehow they got inside anyway.”

Not likely, Simon thought. These zombies didn’t seem particularly fast or strong. One of those adventurers must have gotten themselves bit, and then a few hours later they’d turned on their fellows, spreading the disease. That’s how it would have happened in a movie anyway. It gave him something to think about at least, as he studied Freya looking for any sign that she was bitten, but finding nothing. She was a lovely girl. Under all the dirt and signs of crying, with dark hair and a cute, if not particularly well-endowed body. She wasn’t his type, but he was sure she’d make someone happy someday if she survived this.

“Do you suppose there’s still enough food left in this place for you to make us something to eat?” Simon asked as he saw her start to tear up again. “I’m going to check all the other rooms to make sure that there’s nothing in here that can hurt us, and then I’m going to get rid of these bodies before they attract vermin.”

“Get rid of the bodies?” she asked numbly. “How?”

“From one of the windows on the second floor. I know its not the kindest thing to do,” he added quickly as he saw a look of shock bloom across her face, “but if we leave them here we’ll be sick in no time. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No, but—” she started to say.

“Well then you make us some lunch Freya, while I go work up an appetite,” he said, standing. She obviously didn’t agree with the decision, but she didn’t protest it either, so Simon got started. He checked the basement first, and found plenty of beer, but thankfully no dead bodies. After that he dragged all nine bodies on the first floor up to the second with frequent breaks, because it was exhausting. The third floor held only a single room on one side of the building, that must have belonged to the owner because it was nicer than the rest, and storage on the other side. That was where they would sleep tonight, he decided, because it seemed the most defensible. So once he was done with the bodies, he dragged a couple mattresses upstairs so that Freya would have a place to sleep too.

When he finally got back downstairs, she’d reheated some mystery stew that looked a little suspect, but tasted delicious. Simon didn’t even care that his next death would probably be from food poisoning. He was just glad that it was neither bread nor cheese for once. That alone made it almost as good as his last real meal of fast food nuggies and extra dipping sauce.

They talked through lunch and after, and slowly Freya opened up more and more. Apparently there had been a necromancer, but he’d been defeated years ago, and no one had paid much attention to this backwater after that. Other than the occasional goblin raid, it had been a nice place to grow up, until the dead had risen up and killed everyone she’d ever known anyway. Every time Freya started to get sad, Simon tried to change the topic, but fortunately they ran out of daylight before they ran out of topics.

“Don’t even think of trying anything,” Freya warned him as she slipped into bed fully clothed. “I’m sleeping with this knife. Just so you know.”

“The last thing a hero like me would do is take advantage of a woman,” Simon assured her, offended by the suggestion. This world obviously had a lot more problems with toxic masculinity than his did, but he could forgive her for the accusation. The world was a pretty crazy place right now.

Simon had already taken his armor off during dinner, but he stacked it up neatly after he barred the door and hung his weapons in easy reach in case something went bump in the night. After that, he crawled into bed and stripped down to his small clothes. This mattress was filled with something besides straw, so it was actually a lot more comfortable than the one he’d grown used to in the cabin. Even with that, it felt pretty strange to be sleeping anywhere but the bed he’d grown so used to, in the past few weeks.

Weeks? Days? He wasn’t really sure how much time had passed in the pit. He had no way to keep track of that sort of thing. The only measure he had was how many times he died, and this life was one of his longest so far. Simon tried to puzzle it out anyway, but fell asleep before he could come up with a conclusive answer.

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