Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (32 page)

“Maybe she rose to her feet, and lived,” Barak said grimly.

“There is a wide swath of soil, like a furrow, leading away from the rock. She was dragged away, eaten. Not all the dead were in the house. And the dead caught her right after she leapt—otherwise the neighbors would have come for her first.”

The desire for this to be wrong gripped Barak’s heart so fiercely it startled him. “No, a neighbor saw her wounded—one of
the men who barred the door. And came to pull her away. That’s what the marks in the soil mean.”

“Would he have dragged her body along the earth between the houses? He would have lifted her and carried her in his arms. What she did was holy, Barak. God gave her a great task, and she leapt for him. You do not carry an injured holy one to safety by dragging her body through the dirt.”

He winced at the thought. The scene Devora suggested was too terrible. That a girl—a child—might risk so much, and achieve such a victory, only to fall to her death: it was an injustice that blasphemed God and mocked the Covenant. He could not bear it, or accept it. A
navi
Devora might be, but she did not have that look in her eyes now, the look that meant God was showing her visions. And these were only marks in the dirt. They might mean something else. They might mean anything. It was only dirt.

A cough in the street behind them interrupted, and Barak turned to see Omri walking his own horse toward them, with a tether about the neck of Barak’s steed. In the light of the torch he still held, Omri looked pale. As he drew near, his gaze flicked to the corpse in the street and the body it had been eating. He stopped and sat his horse, staring down.

“Rare for there to be just one,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Devora said. “It is rare.”

Omri stepped the two horses in a wide circle about the body. Their eyes rolled, and Barak’s horse shied, nearly tearing the tether from his hand; at last he was near enough and he tossed the tether to Barak, who caught it deftly out of the air. “Horse nearly galloped back to Shiloh,” Omri said, tearing his gaze from the horror in the street. “I should ask you to barter that breast-piece for him.”

“He’s worth more than a breast-piece, Omri.”

“Then trade me her.” Omri attempted a smile and gestured at the
navi
, who swung about with her eyes dark and fierce. “She’d be pleasant. Worth the loss of a horse.”

“She’s
kadosh
,” Barak said, taken aback.

Omri seemed to notice how they were all looking at him: Zadok, Devora, Barak. The Canaanite’s eyes were lowered, but her shoulders were tensed.

“She’d do,” he muttered.

“Touch her and die,” Zadok said quietly.

Devora just gazed at the Zebulunite coldly, which seemed to bother him more than Zadok’s threat.

“You needn’t act like I tried to lift your skirt,” Omri said in a subdued tone. “If a man doesn’t break this silence with a jest, it’ll madden him.”

Barak gestured at a cache he’d spotted to the side of the burned house, a great pit dug into the ground, likely walled with stone, concealed now beneath a great wooden cover. “Break open that cache, Omri. May be supplies we can use. Supplies this town won’t need.” He cast a grim look at the burned house.

The Zebulunite walked his horse toward the cache, grumbling beneath his breath. Omri had challenged Barak for the leadership of the camp while the men were still gathering, days ago. Barak had bested him; now it seemed Omri wanted to show Barak he was still a man. But Barak had no time for this. He stepped beside Devora quickly and growled, “Don’t entice him, woman. I’ll not have the two of you bring shame on my camp.”

Devora flushed dark with anger. “
You think
—”

“You must have glanced at him,” Barak muttered irritably.

Devora hissed through her teeth, but Barak was already moving, mounting Ager. Stroking the horse’s neck to calm him, he nudged Ager into a trot around the corner of the broken house toward that cache. Even as he did, Omri pried beneath the lid with his spear and levered it up, then tipped it over. That great cedar lid fell back and slammed down against the earth, a sound that echoed up the street between the empty houses, revealing a great hole in the ground. A sickly-sweet stench rolled out, and
Barak gagged a moment, cursing silently in his heart. Fool townsmen had stored
meat
in there. But it had gone bad; surely they’d
salted
it, at least. He’d hoped desperately to find vats of grain, unfouled grain.

“Whoa,” Barak murmured to his horse, which was shying nervously at the reek. The animal whickered and stood breathing hard. Barak leaned down over its neck. “Good, good,” he whispered in his horse’s ear.

“
Navi.
” Zadok’s voice was urgent.

Barak glanced over his shoulder at the nazarite and the
navi
, saw Devora’s eyes widen. A small figure was climbing up narrow steps out of the cache, a silhouette against the shadows. A dull sheen of eyes in the moonlight. Several other shapes were coming up the steps after it. Lifting its foot from the last step, the first moved out of the cache and staggered across the trampled earth toward them. It was small—stood no taller than Devora’s belly. Some of the others climbing out behind it were even smaller.

Children.

These were children.

He took a breath. Something unsettled him, but he felt a flood of relief that drowned any uneasiness. Children. The promise of the Covenant, that the People would live and thrive and fill the land, no matter what came. A rush of faith into his heart such as he had not felt since he was a small child, sitting at his grandfather’s knee hearing stories of their People’s escape from the brick pits of Kemet and their taking of the land. This was surely a mighty sign. During the raids a few years ago from the fortified settlements on the coast, it had been common enough for encampments to hide their children in pits or caches concealed beneath thick brush, to be retrieved later once the threat was past. This town had been eaten by the dead, and perhaps its last men and women had fled into the hills with the dead close behind, after first ensuring their children’s safety in that cache.

“Children!” he called to them, the joy in him nearly choking his voice.

At the sound of his voice, the children—so
many
, climbing out of the cache—lifted their arms in the dark. And with a shock, Barak knew that something was wrong. Badly wrong.

Those dull, glinting eyes.

High, wavering moans as the children lurched out into the street.

Devora let out a wordless, anguished cry, and Hurriya made a small, choked noise. The
navi
’s cry fell upon Barak’s heart like the stone that triggers a landslide. He lurched into motion, wheeling his horse about. “Back!” he called hoarsely. “Fall back!”

Zadok swore and lifted his spear, moving his horse between the
navi
and the advancing children. Devora just sat her horse, gazing at the children with a horror as though she were watching the entire land burn. The children were lurching toward her horse; in a moment, they would close about Zadok’s horse and hers like a tide about a rock.

“
Navi!
” Barak’s voice was too high, like a child’s. “Ride! Ride!”

She didn’t move.

Omri too sat his horse as though frozen.

Zadok let out a battle shout and sent his horse into the dead, laying about with his spear, using it more as a staff then an impaling weapon, knocking the small corpses from their feet with the force of it. It took them a moment to get back up, and Zadok wheeled his horse, spinning his mighty staff as easily as he might a child’s toy. But there were too many. Their moans filled the air, drowning out all thought and hope.

Barak saw two small girls lurch past the nazarite, toward the
navi’
s horse—he could almost hear words in their moans. He was certain—he could almost hear words. The moans tore at his mind. Barak screamed and drove his own gelding between the
navi
and the children. His heart beat, cold sweat stung his eyes;
he lifted his spear but froze, those tiny, glinting eyes gazing up at him; he didn’t know what to do. Children. Children of the People. He couldn’t spear children of the People.

A hand grasped his calf, closing about the bronze greave, the fingertips digging into the exposed skin at the back and pulling. Panting, Barak of Israel gazed down into a hissing, livid face, a face gashed and darkened with dried blood, the eyes scratched and unseeing though fixed in the direction of his thigh. The thing that had been a small girl hissed like an asp, its teeth stark in the night, gums drawn back.

“El,” he gasped. “El, El, El—” The name of God, over and over and over, like a child’s syllable chanted against some groping terror in the dark. He couldn’t move; he felt the tug on his leg, so strong. The face bending toward his calf, even as the other girl reached and took his foot. Other children—such small, small beings—staggered against his horse, their little hands reaching up at him. The animal trembled violently, its back rippling beneath Barak, but it was well trained. This horse had carried him in a charge against raiders from the coast. The horse shook as with fever but did not bolt.

Devora’s high voice startled him from his paralysis.

“Run, girl! Move! Now!”

Hurriya slid from the saddle and fled, stumbling, for the far side of the ruined house.

Then Devora cried out in a screaming ululation that rose in pitch like a shriek of steel, then fell into words, a battle song, old Hebrew, the dialect of their grandfathers in the desert, when every hand, living and dead, had been raised against their tribes. Devora rode at the children. Her white horse slammed bodily into the crowd of dead, beating aside the small bodies with his great flanks; in a moment the
navi
was at Barak’s side, her face stern, her eyes cold fire, her hand white about the hilt of that iron blade; her arm swept down, and the weapon scythed through small
bodies, cutting away arms, shearing flesh and bone. The girls fell away from Barak’s horse, cut open, hands and arms severed from them—but even as they fell beneath Shomar’s hooves, there was no blood. There were no screams. Only those keening moans of hunger all about them.

Then Devora had ridden past, taking her wide-eyed gelding in a wide circle through the street, her blade slashing and cutting. Zadok fought his way to her side, and the two rode together, spear and blade. Even as Barak shook away his panic and hefted his own bronze spear again in his hand, he saw the two girls lurch back to their feet near his steed. Their arms were gone; one’s chest had been crushed by the hooves. Yet their dull eyes were fixed on him; their mouths gaped in wordless hissing. The stench of them was vile, worse by far now that their bodies had been carved open. They were unclean. They were reaching for him.

With a shout, Barak lunged to the side, driving the spear into one child’s brow. The small, decaying body went limp, but the spearhead had caught in its skull and could not be pulled free; the child’s corpse hung as a dead weight on the end of the spear, nearly pulling Barak from his horse as the girl’s knees buckled. The other came at him, and Barak drove his sandal hard into its face, driving it back a few lurching steps as he fought to pull his spear free. He was drenched in cold sweat; his heart hammered within him.

Devora’s song rose into those high, desert wails, then fell again and again into words, as she rode among the dead. Numbly Barak lifted his eyes to her, saw her bound hair shining in the moonlight, her sword an arc of white in the air, never still. Behind her galloping horse, a trail of bodies, shattered and reeking. A few staggered to their feet or crawled along the ground after her; the rest were still, their heads carved open in terrible wounds. Zadok had ridden now to the edge of the cache, was spearing the corpses as they stepped out. Omri had joined him there and lent his spear to the fight, though he looked ready to be violently ill.

The body by Barak’s horse hissed, and with a curse the chieftain plucked out his knife and drove it hard into the thing’s forehead. He shuddered as it twitched and went still, sliding off the blade and dropping to the earth, on its back. Panting, he gazed down at it in cold horror. It was a girl. Just a small girl. It still wore the dirtied remains of a woolen dress; the cloth had been torn away from its right shoulder, baring a breast as flat as a tablet of stone. Barak ducked his head to the side and vomited, his midday meal rushing up his throat in a steaming flood. He choked and coughed, drew the back of his hand across his lips. His other hand gripped the haft of his spear, rigidly, a child’s body still impaled on the bronze head.

Barak the vintner, war-leader of the northern tribes, sat his horse shaking. He drew from his saddlebag the shofar Laban had brought to him when he first formed the camp. The ram’s horn Othniel himself had blown when he fought the first raiders from the sea, when Barak had been just a boy. Now Barak lifted the shofar to his lips and blew a long blast. He needed his men. He needed God. He needed someone, anyone, to share with him the terrible responsibility of fighting these walking corpses that had once been breathing, laughing children. The call of the horn echoed through the town.

T
HE CHILDREN
tried helplessly to reach up and grasp at Devora’s feet as she rode through them. They strove to catch her, to pull her from her horse, but their small bodies were no match for either the strength or speed of the gelding Lappidoth had given her—or the savage reach of the
navi
’s blade. Behind her by the cache, Zadok and Omri jabbed their spears downward again and again, like Canaanites on the lake spearing fish. The light from Omri’s torch shone on the hissing faces.

A few moments more and it was done. Devora turned and cantered back, taking out the few that were still staggering or crawling along the ground. The blade cut through scalp, skull, and brain. In the end, there was only a street filled with bodies, strewn across the packed dirt from where Barak’s steed stood shying to the open cache.

She rode to the cache and glanced down the steps into it. Small bones lay scattered at the bottom. Bones of children. Bones picked clean and cracked open for the marrow. In the deaths of so many children of her People, whether mixed with heathen or no, Devora could see the death of the Covenant. She could see the touch of the
malakh ha-mavet
, as though its mighty wing had swept over the town and all those touched by its shadow had died, regardless of promises made or promises kept or promises broken.