Ch 4: A KNIGHT IN MATTE BLACK ARMOUR
“Hi there,” said Marten’s rescuer.
The newcomer was a knight, dressed in full, matte black plate armor from head to toe. He offered a wave with one gauntleted hand, swinging his greatsword up to rest against his pauldroned shoulder with the other. Its blade was streaked black with the corpses' blood. His visor was firmly closed; Marten couldn’t even see his eyes through the darkened slats.
“Hello,” Marten croaked, staring up at him.
“You're alive,” the knight said cheerfully, extending one hand to haul Marten to his feet.
Marten accepted, his head spinning dizzily with the change in elevation. The decapitated corpses of the mayor and his wife lay in a heap in the mud, oozing viscous black liquid that hardly resembled human blood anymore. Marten shuffled out of reach of the mess, feeling increasingly distant as he looked between the bodies and the knight’s sword. Shock, is what it was. He’d experienced it before, but that thought too felt as if it came from very far away.
The knight clapped him on the shoulder none too gently, and Marten’s knees buckled under the enthusiastic force.
“You’re the last man standing,” the knight told him. “I’ll do another sweep of the village to double-check, but I don't think anyone else will be lucky enough for me to catch them in time.”
“Is this luck?” Marten asked faintly.
“Are you from around here?”
“Easton, one town over.” Marten didn’t ask whether the knight was local. He clearly was not.
Marten knew very little about knights or armor, but this suit looked expensive and finely made, without a dent in it. It was not ornate, as Marten had seen some nobles make their ceremonial armor, but neither was it plain or ugly. The word for it, Marten decided, was intimidating. It looked like it should belong on the body of some dark sorcerer’s right-hand man. If the knight had been local, Marten surely would have remembered seeing him around.
“Were you here when this started? Do you know what happened?” the knight asked.
“The mayor called me to help. I arrived shortly after the disease had taken hold.” The enormity of Marten’s failure caught up to him. His voice cracked. “Within a day of my arrival, it was already spreading so quickly. With the mortality rate being so high, and with the threat of violence so great, I haven't been able to identify the infectious agents at work, let alone theorize an effective treatment.”
The knight scoffed. “You're a doctor? No offense, but no, no shit you couldn't figure out the disease. That’s because it’s a curse.”
Marten blinked. With the adrenaline of his flight-or-fight response receding, he was too tired to react any more strongly. “A curse,” he repeated. “Who would curse such an insignificant village? It’s a disease. Not a familiar one, but a disease of the blood, all the same.”
“You know how it spreads?”
“Through bodily fluids. The sick must succumb to their illness before they’re able to pass it on, but, once dead, they’re driven by a terrible hunger for violence.” Marten rubbed one hand over his eyes, trying to massage away the burgeoning headache pulsing against his skull. “It's a parasite, perhaps, killing its host body and then commandeering the corpse. I wasn’t able to perform an autopsy on any of the dead before chaos broke out and put a stop to my studies.”
“So, once the dead take a bite out of you, they pass the curse on,” the knight summarized. “Infection,” he amended, waving one hand. “Whatever.”
“Yes. I’ve yet to see a soul with any natural immunity.”
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“And how fast would you say the sickness sets in?”
“There are some variables to that,” Marten said slowly, eyeing the knight with increasing wariness as he hefted his sword to hold it at the ready.
“The missus here had her chompers in the back of your neck when I found you,” said the knight, almost apologetically. “And, like you just told me—no natural immunity. There’s no chance of you walking away from this without some cannibalistic impulses of your own. So, nice to meet you and everything, but I think I have to kill you now.”
A flare of hot pain cut through Marten's shock to remind him that one of the corpses had in fact been gnawing on him before the knight's arrival. Panicked, he clapped one hand over his neck under his collar, and drew it back glossy and red.
“I can clean it,” Marten said numbly, staring at his own blood.
Once the dead had begun to rise en masse, he’d not had the chance to sterilize any of the wounds inflicted on the living. There was no reason such sterilization would fail when so many other diseases were thwarted by soap and ethanol.
“Cleaning it isn't good enough. If that shit gets infected, it’s not gangrene you have to worry about. It’s going down the same road as all these other poor fucks.”
Frantically, Marten tried to recall whether he'd seen any of the corpses leave a victim alive once they got their withered hands on them, and what had happened to those survivors. The only corpses he’d seen get up again were those that had first wasted away from that awful initial fever that swept the town. The bite on its own wasn't enough to kill him, but if the mayor’s wife passed her infection on to him—
“The curse is in your blood, now,” the knight said. “Most of the people here got ripped to shreds, but there's some that were still alive when they started in on the whole cannibal thing. Which might be worse than doing it as a corpse. I don't know what they're capable of, thought-wise." The knight shrugged like he wasn't really interested in finding out.
“The living ones could still have some scrap of consciousness trapped in there?”
A rush of nausea swept through Marten’s stomach and his knees buckled as the adrenaline wore off, leaving him abruptly empty except for the feeling of horror and sickness. The knight caught him by the arm before he could fall.
“Well, they're definitely not conscious anymore,” said the knight. “These two were the last of them.”
“You cut your way through the entire village?”
He tapped the metal of his breastplate. “They can't bite their way through this. It was easy-peasy.”
“I need to collect samples,” Marten said, wild-eyed. “If I can study this before the infection takes me, I could find a cure. Or at least some way to buy more time before it kills me.”
“No, nope, you don't need to go anywhere near those corpses.” Taking Marten by the arm, the knight pulled him away from the bodies, and Marten staggered against him. “I'm going to drag them all into a big pile and set the whole village on fire. I’ve seen this shit before; it needs to be contained. If you want to take samples, take them from yourself before it gets into your brain and you lose your mind.”
With a wince, Marten probed the wound on the side of his neck. His hands were filthy, but he supposed that was the least of his worries. The bite was ragged, but not especially deep; the corpse hadn't succeeded in tearing the muscle, and he was in no danger of bleeding out. The surrounding skin wasn't yet hot or swollen.
“Come on,” said the knight. “You can watch me burn them, if that’ll give you some peace of mind. I’ll put you down at the last minute, before you lose your senses to this thing.”
If Marten acted quickly, he could flush the infection from his blood before it doomed him to the same macabre fate that had wiped out the entire village under his watch. He couldn’t risk simply cleaning the wound as he would with any average injury. Rather, he would treat it as swiftly and drastically as if he’d been bitten by a mad dog.
“Cauterization,” Marten said.
He had to cut away the damaged flesh beforehand to minimize the risk of the infection taking root in his blood. He had done the same for patients with threatening infections in the past, and it yielded a hopeful outcome. But he wasn’t confident in taking a scalpel and branding iron to his own neck, not when he couldn’t see what he was doing without a mirror or two, and obviously there was no other physician left in the village who might help him.
“Do you have any experience with minor surgery?” he asked the knight, without much optimism.
“You want me to do it? Fuck yeah! I can cauterize you, I’d love to. Cutting shit up and setting it on fire are two of my favourite things.”
Marten retrieved his satchel from the mud.
“I have surgical instruments, and supplies to clean and dress the wound after. I only need a strong fire and a brand.”
“Sure, whatever you say. And if we don't make it in time, I'll give you a quick, clean beheading as soon as I see you start to go.”
“Have you ever seen a living victim change?”
“Not in this village, but I’ve run into similar things before. It’s hard to miss. I figure when you try to take a chomp out of me, that's my sign to get the sword out.”
Marten let his eyes fall closed for a split second, gathering strength. If he was to keep the knight’s company for any amount of time, he suspected he would need it.
“Very well. Build your fire, Sir Knight, and let’s cut this infection out of me.”