Ch 3: THE CORPSE MAYOR

Marten hadn’t seen the mayor since the man had locked himself in his private chambers following the demise of his wife and children. By then, the village had already been in ruins. The infection had spread with blistering speed; no amount of politics or leadership could have helped it by that point. The last political act the mayor had made before locking himself away to grieve was to close the roads and send messages to every neighboring civilization that they were not, under any circumstance, to be visited.

The mayor had held his wife’s hand as she died, just as he had held his son’s and daughters’ before.

There was no possibility he’d escaped the infection that felled his entire family and their village beyond.

Marten adjusted his grip on his scalpel.

At the top of the stairs, the mayor stood with both hands grasping the banister, leaning his heavy weight against it. His mouth hung open just enough for a rattling breath to escape in the sound of Marten's name.

“Help us, doctor,” the mayor groaned, and Marten flinched, taking a halting step forward to try to get a better look at the man.

If the mayor wasn’t yet a corpse, he certainly looked the part: sallow skin, hollowed cheeks, his skin hanging loose in places where he had lost a terrifying amount of weight in so few days. His hair, normally thin, was straggly and plastered to his scalp with sweat, which beaded against his skin to give him a sickly, feverish sheen. In the overcast lighting, Marten couldn’t be sure whether the man's lips and fingernails had the distinct blueish-grey of a corpse, and he did not wish to approach nearer to find out.

But, if the man yet lived, Marten was oath and duty-bound to help him.

“Mayor Drummels?” he asked, taking another careful step toward the stairs. “Are you well?”

The mayor wheezed, a drawn-out rattling sound, and listed to one side as if unbalanced by a strong breeze. There was no such draft in the house. Concern for his patient outweighed Marten’s concern for the danger, and he made for the stairs. If the mayor was already dead, Marten would be able to tell before he walked in reach of the man, who hardly looked capable of standing upright on his own, never mind launching an assault.

Marten failed to account for the rest of the family.

As soon as he set one foot on the bottom stair, the mayor’s wife rushed out from the servants’ quarters under the staircase, coming up behind him in a swarm of stained skirts and foul breath. Even if Marten hadn't witnessed her death days earlier, there was no mistaking her for a living woman. Her skin was grey, her lips cracked and black, her hair greasy, and her clothes and body alike reeked with the sickly-sweet stench of decay that Marten knew all too well.

He abandoned the staircase before she reached him, turning and throwing himself toward the front doors. Behind him, the mayor began lumbering down the stairs to join his wife, who was faster and lighter on her feet, moving in pursuit of their guest doctor.

Marten took one look at the door before realizing he had no hope of disassembling the barricade before the corpses were on him. Gritting his teeth and swallowing his panic, he made for the nearest window, swinging his surgeon’s bag at the drawn drapes with all his might. It took him three swings to smash the glass. Tearing the curtains down and throwing them out to hang over the window frame and drape down outdoors, covering the worst of the shards with heavy velvet, he took a deep breath and leapt, just as the corpse’s fingers closed on thin air where he'd been standing a second earlier.

As he feared, smashing the glass caught the attention of every sentient being in the area. Another one of the dead staggered out of the shadows, dragging itself towards the mayor’s house. Now that Marten was outside, the sounds of violence elsewhere in the village were obvious. The buzz of flies was skull-rattling.

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Clammy with fear-sweat, Marten cursed his cowardice as he realized he would have to leave any survivors to fight on their own. Panic overrode every higher thought that would have urged him towards bravery, stealth, or caution. He had no chance of surviving the entire village, with a corpse in every house and building waiting to lunge and sink their teeth into him. Abandoning his plan to make for Main Street and exit the village by road, Marten rerouted to go around the back of the mayor’s house and onto the smaller street behind, and from there, escape through the surrounding farmland. As Marten fled, the corpse followed, creaking and groaning as it shambled towards him, open-mouthed.

The mayor’s wife grabbed him as he passed the house’s back corner.

Hooking her fingers in Marten’s coat collar, she yanked him back by the scruff of the neck and threw him to the ground. He fell hard on his backside, catching himself on one elbow and jarring the nerve as he hugged his satchel to his chest with his other arm, still holding tight to his scalpel, his one line of defence. Scrambling out from under her skirts, Marten slashed at her wildly as she advanced, but the dead had no natural fear of weapons. Reaching down with stiff limbs, she caught him by the ankles of his boots, ignoring his clumsy kicks, and held him in place as her husband joined her.

She’d been dead for longer, but her husband was slower, his bulk dragging at him despite his relative freshness.

“Mayor Drummels,” Marten gasped, trying desperately to loosen the woman’s hold on his ankles. He couldn’t sit up properly without letting go of his satchel, and it felt like the only shield he had. “Mayor, do you understand me?”

The man had spoken to him on the stairs, but the words must have been a dying echo of his last thoughts, mimicking coherence without any conscious thought behind them. Because the man was undoubtedly a corpse, and looking more like one of the slavering, mindless infected dead with every passing second.

Dropping heavily to his knees, the mayor’s mouth gaped open before reshaping into a snarl. He shouldered his wife out of the way by clumsy accident or hungry intent, Marten didn’t know. As the two corpses loomed over him with grasping, claw-like fingers, Marten scrabbled backwards, hands and elbows pushing desperately against the muddy grass.

The corpses were impervious to pain. When he managed to plant one boot against the woman’s collarbone and shove, she barely reacted except to hiss, drooling bloody spittle, and tried to sink her teeth into his ankle. She couldn't penetrate the leather of his boot, but Marten could feel the pressure from her teeth, and he yanked his leg back, biting off the panicked shout that wanted to escape.

Lashing out with his blade, Marten cut the mayor across the chest. The man fell back, not hurt but unbalanced, buying Marten the chance to get his legs under him, scramble onto his hands and knees, and make a break for it.

But the ground was slick with rain. He barely made it two steps before he slipped, falling on top of his satchel and crushing the air from his lungs, and then they were on him again.

They pinned him face-down in the dirt, shoving at one another and snapping like wild dogs as they each tried to claim their place on top of him. If he couldn't get away, he prayed they would kill him before playing with their food. He should have killed himself in that cellar when he had the chance. His fingers were bloody and black from clawing in the wet dirt, trying to drag himself out from under them, and his trousers were torn at the knees. They had his blood’s scent now, so even if he escaped these two, the entire village of infected dead would converge on him before he limped his way beyond its boundaries.

Blunt teeth sank into his shoulder where the muscle met his neck, his collar dragged down to expose bare skin, and he yelled, twisting in the corpses' holds as he tried to buck them off. Their breath reeked like dead meat, and he couldn't tell whether it was the stench of their own decay or that of their victims caught between their teeth.

As he struggled to fight them off, trying to keep from suffocating every time they shoved his face in the mud, clanking footsteps rang out. Marten couldn't turn his head to see who approached, but he heard in perfect clarity the swish of a greatsword slicing the air, and felt the impact when the blade slammed into the first of the two bodies on top of him. He felt the instant the first body went slack like her strings had been cut, her head lopped off halfway through the neck to tumble over his shoulder, a mess of matted hair and gore. The mayor met the same fate a second later, and Marten scrambled out from under the corpses' dead weight, dragging himself through the dirt to get away from them.

Their eyes stared blankly at him from sunken, ashen sockets, bloodshot and glassy, their tongues lolling from split lips. For that second, the only sound was his own harsh breathing and his heartbeat hammering against his ribs.

Then the buzzing of the flies returned, and Marten flinched, coming back to himself, and looked up at the stranger who had saved his life.