Ch 2: THE VILLAGE OF THE DEAD

THE VILLAGE OF DRUMMONDVILLE, IN SOUTHERN BRETENLANDE

Marten was the last man alive in the village.

He was reasonably sure of that fact. The living population had been in rapid decline for the past several days, and dwindling at a slower rate for a week before that. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that there should be a handful of survivors hiding as he was, but his instincts told him otherwise.

He didn't know precisely what disease was causing the recent dead to rise and starve for violence, but he had seen enough to know that to die at their hands was a singularly terrible fate, as bad or worse than wasting away under the infection itself. He hadn't quite reached the point where he was willing to kill himself to avoid it, but that was only because he clung tooth and nail to the hope that he could still escape. He was armed with a scalpel, for all the good that would do him, what with the dead's resistance to injury. His escape, therefore, must rely on stealth.

He was holed up in the mayor’s house, which was one of the finer residences in Drummondville, with fortified walls and a sturdy foundation. The mayor had been the one to summon Marten from his nearby hometown to lend his expertise. Marten had never seen an illness so easily cut down adults and children alike, regardless of their age or prior health.

The mayor's son hadn't been the first infected, but he was the first Marten watched die of it, succumbing in his bed after three terrible days. Marten had never seen anything move so quickly, reducing a youth in the prime of life to a sickly, withered husk in such short order. The disease, whatever it was, seemed to spare no one. Marten immediately bid the mayor quarantine the village for fear of plague.

That night, the mayor's dead son rose from his bed, turned, and sank his teeth into the tender flesh of the maid who was tending the candles as his mother and sisters sat vigil.

It all escalated rather quickly, from there.

Now, ten days after arriving in Drummondville and five since the mayor's son rose from the dead as a flesh-starved corpse, Marten was hiding in the mayor’s wine cellar, having barricaded all but one point of entry, and was trying to gather his courage to attempt an escape.

The dead didn't yet have his scent or they would have found him already. If he could only make it out of the village with all its nooks and crannies ripe for ambush, he had a chance of fleeing on foot. Only the freshly dead had the strength and flexibility to keep pace with him. Those that had been dead for days already were stiff and shambling, their bodies beginning to decay around the wretched infection that forced them to keep moving and gave them such terrible hunger. The kind of hunger known only by the worst of men.

Marten gripped his scalpel tightly in one hand, his other hand clutching his satchel of books and surgical tools to his side. The scalpel was a delicate instrument, thin and easy to drop, not intended as a weapon at all. It was wickedly sharp and if he had mortal enemies to fear, it might have offered some protection. But these walking dead would persevere through any injury until they were utterly destroyed, and Marten couldn't deal that kind of damage without losing his own life in the process. Still, he was unwilling to leave behind the only weapon at his disposal.

The wine cellar had a single tiny window, high up, which he had boarded over, and two doors. One door, he had also boarded up, and the second, he had locked and barricaded in a way that he could easily dismantle again. Having reached the end of his rations, and not keen on the idea of starting in on the wine, no matter how expensive and aged the collection, Marten eyed the door that would take him back up into the house.

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It had been quiet upstairs for two days, now. There had been sounds from outside, though he doubted they were sounds of life. The last bout of screaming had died out early the previous night, with nothing since.

Try as he might, he couldn't find any optimism in that fact.

Judging by the sliver of light creeping in around the window boards, the day was overcast, though, if it was raining, it wasn't heavy enough to strike the glass on the other side. He had been diligent in counting the days, though the precise hours had slipped from his grasp, pushed out by the panic and gut-churning dread. The hour was sometime past noon; he wouldn’t know anything more exact until he got a look at the sun, which wouldn’t likely be until he left the village entirely. The dead had no shortage of places to hide or lay in wait, but the daylight would at least damper their element of surprise.

“No way out but through,” Marten whispered to himself, and got up from his crouch to unbar the door.

After removing the barricade, he stood with one ear pressed to the wood, listening intently for any sign of movement from the house beyond. After two full minutes of silence, he pulled himself together, turned the lock, and twisted the handle. Hugging his satchel close, wielding his scalpel in the other hand, he advanced into the house proper.

The basement was dark. There were enough windows to keep him from walking into anything, but they did nothing to lighten the shadows where any corpse might be hidden. The candles and oil lamps that would have illuminated the house had long since burned out, or been knocked over or snuffed. Inching along the corridor towards the staircase that would take him to the main floor, Marten tried not to think about who or what would benefit from deliberately turning out the lights.

The staircase was solid stone, and as such, couldn't creak to give him away. He thanked the gods for small mercies. At the top, he had to set down his satchel and pocket his scalpel in order to lift the heavy bar from that door, too. Nothing had breached it since he had hidden in the cellar and locked every door behind him, but, as he crossed the threshold to the ground floor, he found it wasn’t for lack of trying. Dead nails had scratched and scrabbled at the door, senselessly trying to claw their way through like a wild animal.

Swallowing, Marten crept across the hall to the nearest window, drawing back the heavy curtain just enough to peek through. Outside, the world looked dead. The sky was grey, drizzling light rain into muddy streets. Marten could see over the small front garden to the street beyond. It was uncannily deserted. It wasn’t an overactive imagination to blame for the sense that the street had seen awful violence recently, and had only been vacated after the fact. Looking from the window, he couldn't tell whether there was blood mixed with that dirty rainwater, but there must have been. The sickness moved too quickly and killed too efficiently for there to be housefuls of survivors just waiting to come out in the open again. The village had the look of a battlefield, muddy and ravaged. Marten expected that as soon as he left the house, he would find it smelled like one, too.

He let the curtain drop. Straining his ears, he made his way along the hall towards the main entrance, where two great staircases swept down from the upper levels into a wide-open foyer featuring the front doors.

Half the rooms along the hallway stood open, and he had to check each one before proceeding, refusing to allow anything the opportunity to sneak up on him from behind. He checked from each doorway, not daring to actually enter every room, for fear of stirring up any corpse that may otherwise not notice him. With every doorway he passed, his heart kicked harder against his ribs, and he had to bite his lip to force his breaths to come evenly. He had broken out in a cold sweat before even leaving the cellar, and he had to keep a white-knuckle grip on the scalpel to stop it from slipping from his fingers.

At the edge of the foyer, he paused. It was the first open space he’d had to cross, and it unnerved him. There were too many potential lines of attack, and nowhere for him to hide while he dismantled the barricade against the front doors. Shifting his weight, he glanced at the nearest window. On the ground level, the drop was only a few feet, but shattering the glass would draw the attention of anything in the vicinity. Even if the doors would be slower, at least he could take down the barricade in relative quiet.

As he weighed the risks against each other, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Slowly, he turned. At the top of the nearest staircase leading to the upper level, the mayor stood, staring down at him.