Death After Death

Chapter 22: Worse than Death

Simon cast his healing spell on himself immediately. Twice. In both cases it seemed to work, and closed the wound, leaving only a small dark scar on his forearm. He couldn’t see the back of his neck, but he imagined it was much the same based on what he could feel. That didn’t stop whatever dark magic was in that bite, though. He could feel it, and he didn’t have a spell to cure disease or curse or whatever this was supposed to be.

“This isn’t good at all,” he muttered to himself, looking at the beautiful dead girl on the floor. There was a coldness in his arm, and a fever just starting to cloud his thoughts. He’d seen enough movies to know how this was going to end.

“I’ll be fine,” he tried to tell himself. “I come back every time I die.”

It was true. Every time he’d died he’d come back completely unscathed, but this time there was a feeling of dread similar to the first time he’d thought the skeleton knight was going to try to take his soul. As a feeling of weakness began to overtake him, Simon started to climb the stairs. He didn’t have time to make a noose that would snap his neck, and he doubted he had the willpower to bash his brains out, but he was pretty sure he could dive well enough to shatter his spine on the cobbles in front of the inn.

It was just a precaution, he told himself, rushing up the stairs even as his body started to respond more slowly. As he began to fumble and limp on his way up the second flight of stairs, Simon started to panic. It was too soon. Why had Brenna lasted for hours or days as a human, while he could feel himself turning after mere minutes? The best answer that Simon could come up with was the location. She had a bite on her arm, and he had one right next to his fucking brain stem!

He would have kicked himself for how stupid he’d been if he had the energy. He let himself get distracted by her body and completely missed the obvious warning sign. Recriminations could wait until later though, he decided as he leaned heavily against the wall and climbed the last few steps, if there was a later.

Simon managed to make it to the window, but by that point the world was a haze, and he lacked the strength or coordination to make a proper dive. The best he could do was fling himself from the opening, and tumble down the brown tile roof painfully until he landed on the street three floors below. Sadly, half a dozen zombies broke his fall, and his last seconds of life were spent being torn to pieces while he screamed weakly.

Then suddenly it stopped.

Suddenly the zombies lost all interest in him, and started to mill around looking for their next target. Simon thought it was strange that he was still around to see that, but he supposed that blood loss from so many small, shallow wounds could take a while to add up. It wasn’t until he started to stand up, and when he realized he no longer had any control over his own body, that he truly began to panic.

He was trapped here, but his hands and feet were moving without any conscious direction from him. Worse, he was trying to stop the movements, but it was like his mind was completely disconnected from the body he’d lived in all his life. It was worse than disorienting, it was traumatizing. It was like someone else had taken him over, and he was being forced to do whatever they said.

That didn’t stop it from moving, though, or from hurting. Every wound that had been inflicted on him, from the ribs that were broken in the fall to the smallest of bites, ached as he moved, but it wasn’t enough to stop him, or the hunger that was building inside of him. For most of today, Simon had been sad and pleasantly intoxicated. He hadn’t eaten, but he hadn’t been hungry either.

Right now, though, he was ravenous, and the hunger just kept growing and growing inside of him. It got worse though when he turned to the delicious smell of prey somewhere in the distance. Even in a city this ravaged, and already so full of the dead, somewhere, someone was alive, and his mouth watered with the desire to devour their flesh.

It was disgusting, and made him feel unclean, but Simon couldn’t escape it, or even fight it. It was a hunger so loud and all consuming it drowned out all other thoughts, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. All he could do was watch, feel, and endure, but after only hours as a member of this shuffling mob slowly drifting towards the next likely meal he felt himself going mad inside his own rotting corpse.

For days all he did was wander, moan, and try to force his way into closed doors and boarded windows without much success. Then one day, a starving couple made a break for it, leaping from rooftop to rooftop in an attempt to escape the undead that crowded the streets and chased them slowly. Weak as they were, though, the man fell off the rooftop nearest Simon, and he was able to devour the man’s lifeblood along with several other zombies before the light in his eyes went out forever.

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It was the single worst moment of Simon’s life, not just because of what he’d done, but because in that terrible moment his dark hunger finally quieted, and he could think again. His mind could scream and rebel at what he was being forced to do. He couldn’t stop it, though. He was powerless to stop anything that was happening. Something broke inside him when he tasted that warm coppery flavor on his tongue, but what was left of his sanity felt like it shattered completely when he saw that man he’d just helped murder stand back up and join the ranks of the dead.

Now the forces of death pursuing the crying woman left alone on the rooftop were stronger by one, and in time the man that had just died might be forced to kill his beloved. It was a truly horrible idea, but the zombie that was once her partner could do no more to hold himself back from such an awful thing than Simon could as he groped for the next source of fresh meat that was fortunately several feet out of reach.

The only solace from these thoughts was the maddening hunger. Once it got bad enough, even his self-pity was drowned out by his need to feast on the living.

Eventually there was no one left alive inside the city walls, and for weeks the zombies were able to do nothing but scratch the gates and the bricks in order to try to escape to hunt down the life they could sense somewhere beyond them. They should have stayed like that, but eventually some adventurers decided to open the gates to do the heroic thing, and slay the growing evil. They were unsuccessful. They slew hundreds before their band fell, but unfortunately Simon was not among them. He lived long enough to watch all their members fall to exhaustion in the endless tide of death, and though he didn’t have to live with the guilt of murdering any of them, he was set free on the world along with the hundreds of other zombies.

They ravaged the countryside. Slowly spreading out, until he was but one slavering mouth among dozens rather than hundreds, as they slowly devoured all in their path. In each farm and village the zombies encountered, their numbers were whittled down until there were only a few left, only to be replenished by the risen dead of their victims, until the force was bigger than it was when it had started.

They were a plague, and Simon was a part of it. Some towns fell in hours, and others in days, but eventually they all fell, and through all this Simon was trapped in an endless cycle of impossible hunger followed by guilt and shame and the truly awful things that were being done by his body. It wasn’t by him. That’s what he tried to tell himself whenever he murdered another innocent person that was too slow to escape from him and his rotting companions.

Over the months that Simon endured all this he gathered an increasingly painful collection of wounds of all kinds, but by the time he received most of them he could no longer feel anything at all. Arrows. Crossbow bolts. Cuts and lacerations. A crushed collarbone and broken arm. For a long time he endured a sword through his guts until his body began to rot enough for it to fall away. The pain got worse and worse for weeks as he walked around with a chest full of broken bones until one day it started getting better. That was because his flesh was rotting away like everyone else’s, and though that was a different sort of horrifying, at least it didn’t hurt anymore.

That didn’t stop the hunger, though. Nothing did.

Simon was grateful that he couldn’t see what any part of his body beyond his hands, and occasionally his feet looked like, though those were disturbing enough in their own right. In the moments of lucidity after he’d sated his hunger again, he would look at those glimpses of himself and truly despair. No matter how bad it got though, he never became lost in his despondency. He couldn’t. Each new horror was worse than the last as his mind slowly but surely became unhinged.

Then finally there was a real army waiting to face them, with mages and knights in plate mail he couldn’t bite through, and rank after rank of soldier wielding halberds. Simon could have wept for joy if he’d still had eyes. He could only see now in the fuzziest of ways, like he was seeing the auras around the people, and not actually the people themselves.

There was finally someone that was going to strike him down, so he could be done with this, but the horde had once again grown to the size that it was impossible to slay them all, so the army retreated behind walls, resorting to arrows and magic to whittle away the endless tide.

Simon had to wait weeks more for release from his torments. No matter how often they shot him from the walls with longbows, they always managed to miss his head, leaving him to bask in his hunger and pain that much longer. Eventually, though, he was bathed in magical fire by a spell that didn’t sound so much different from the one he knew. Like everything else, that fire didn’t hurt at first, but as it finally began to boil away the last of the tissue in his skull, Simon’s long numb body once again recalled what pain was. Eventually, driven half mad by the pain of being burned alive, Simon slipped slowly into the gentle release of darkness. Secretly, he hoped that he would just stay dead after this.

No more pit, no more reincarnation, no more of anything at all. Just the sweet caress of oblivion.

Alas, when he opened his eyes once more, he found himself staring at the familiar rough timbers of his cabin. He’d felt angry and frustrated before in this position. He’d felt cheated and screwed over while he laid here before. He’d even felt despair in that initial moment, but the one thing Simon had never felt until now was damned.