Nightmare of the Dead: Rise of the Zombies (15 page)

She hesitated. For one moment, she understood something she hadn't felt since she was a little girl, cowering beneath the covers while waiting for the riding crop to fall.

Fear.

Ambala might die.

Cursing herself and every god she could think of, Neasa stealthily traversed the shadows beneath the awnings of quiet businesses while young men shot at each other for no other reason than the fact that their superiors told them it must be done. She ducked behind wooden beams and could hear the whimpering and haughty prayers of the town's frightened denizens through the walls. If she wiped away the dust from the windows, she might see the huddled families quivering behind furniture while they waited and hoped. This part of the Shenandoah Valley was hotly contested, and it didn't matter to the townsfolk who won, so long as they were allowed to survive within the homes they'd built. So many war refugees had fled for the frontier from the valley, but there were others who'd staked their livelihoods on the homes they built upon the strength of their backs.

The door to one of the houses across the street slammed open and a group of screaming men poured into the street. They held their faces and shouted into the dust while the battle raged. The men were shot several times, but instead of dying, they flopped into the middle of the town's only street and melted away.

A large woman with a bonnet on her head stepped out of a house holding a shotgun in her hands. "No! This is our home! Get out!"

Neasa wanted to tell the woman to get back inside, but why? Her own actions and desires confused her. Only a handful of months ago, she would have shot Ambala and ended her life. She would have lit out of town without a second thought. Why did she care about this foolish woman, who danced the dance of death as a storm of bullets punched through her corset and pushed the gun from her fingers? While the woman's blood decorated the home she'd live in, Neasa realized she knew where the doctor was: the men who'd exploded into the street had been given the same thing the man in the saloon had surrendered to, and at any moment, they would undergo their own horrendous transformation.

All she had to do was storm across the street and she could blow a hole through the doctor's face.

Soldiers reloaded their rifles, and the dead woman sat beneath a window with her eyes opened upon the shotgun that lay across her lap, as if surprised at the death such instruments of war could deliver upon the living.

From out of the shadowed doorway stumbled a tiny girl clutching a doll tightly to her chest as if she'd just been roused from a deep slumber, her mouth open as she knelt next to the dead woman. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook the corpse.

Neasa ground her teeth together. Damn everything. Why did that woman have to sacrifice her life? The little girl had to be protected; she'd just seen her mother die.

She leapt up from her position near the porch and grabbed the screaming girl who'd looked upon the corpse of her mother. With her head down, Neasa reached back to the porch and grabbed the shotgun, which was presumably loaded. She clamped her hand around the girl's mouth and could feel the hot, wet tears against her hand.

"We have to hide," Neasa suggested. "Do you have a favorite spot?" the girl nodded. "Can you show me?"

She wasn't thinking clearly. How hard could it be to make a stand from inside the house? Why did she suddenly care so much about this little girl? Her own feelings hardly made sense. Mercy and salvation was for the weak. What could she do for the girl when the battle was done?

The window's glass shattered, while outside, a hundred men seemed to be screaming all at once. The doctor was going to get away. Ambala was going to die.

The girl
led
Neasa to a dark bedroom in which curtains were drawn tightly over the window. The girl scrabbled onto her hands and knees and slipped beneath the mattress that was positioned against the wall. Neasa followed her, and returned her hand over the girl's mouth, holding her tightly against her shoulder while her other hand rested on the shotgun. An oil lamp rested on the edge of an oak chest of drawers. 

"It's going to be okay," Neasa said. "I'm going to protect you. I'll keep you safe. Shhhh. I need you to help. Be brave now, for both of us. Be brave."

There was hardly room beneath the mattress for both of them, but Neasa was no longer thinking. Her battle instincts failed her at last. She deserved to die; she understood her motivations at last, and this confusion that forced her to hide with a whimpering girl in her arms had been borne from her days with Ambala.

Days where she sat on the edge of a bed with Ambala sleeping soundly beside her, thoughts of a future she never believed she could want, a destiny that shouldn't have belonged to her, taunting her with the promise of peace. She would stare at the tattoo on the inside of her forearm and realize that it was likely over. There was something else besides murder and mayhem. After the doctor was killed, there would still be Ambala. Instead of death, there would be life.

With the quivering girl beneath her forearm, they listened to the sound of lives ending. An animalistic, wild roar silenced the volleys of gunfire. Someone shouted for God.

Heavy footsteps pounded against the floor. She could feel the little girl's heart beating within her tiny body. A pair of booted feet stopped upon the horizon of shadow outlined along the wood floor. The doll lay nearby.

A heavy tempest of blood battered the child's toy.

Neasa sprang up from beneath the mattress, her strength and will pushing it all aside while she pulled the trigger on the gun, which thundered in that confined space. She didn't see the creature's face, but it slapped the weapon from her hands and then slapped her hard across the face with its other wet, bloody hand, sending her straight to her back.

Her first thought surprised her: the girl.

Her second thought alarmed her: pistols.

The oil lamp had fallen and shattered in the blood on the floor. Flame leapt to life, and the little girl screamed. The pistols didn't leap into Neasa's hands as quickly as they should have—her unsure hands dropped one of them while she lay on her side. The figure in the flames roared, and the little girl's scream suddenly ended with a long stream of blood splashing across the ceiling as something was ripped or shredded, perhaps the mattress, or perhaps…

A scream across time and pain. A final shout for
love, hope,
and every dream that ever was or ever could be. A scream of soul-rending anguish. Everything lost in a single word.)

Rediscover the gravity of existence. Arrive upon the surface of the troubled waves and gasp for light and breath. The heart is beating. The chest rises, falls. The tongue rolls over a pair of cracked lips. Memory shapes itself into a woman.

May 25th-28th, 1863: The Return of You

"I remember now," Neasa said while buckling the gunbelts over her waist.

Ambala sat on the floor of the tent with her arm draped over her knee. "You are here because I want to know. I always wanted to know. You need me to tell you, but this was something that you knew then. I wonder if you can say it now."

Neasa looked at the butts of her revolvers. She found it difficult to look into the other woman's face. "I remember the confusion. There are things I don't know, but I know that Doctor Lynch is my brother. I wanted to kill him. He created those things, and I…we…have seen them before."

"There is something else," Ambala noted.

"Yes. I don't know if I can tell you anything. This isn't easy for me. I've just read the story of someone else's life, and it's all supposed to belong to me, to define me. But it doesn't anymore. It didn't the last time I saw you, and here we are…I'm still…you want me to either disappoint you or reaffirm something you already think you know."

Ambala sighed. "The poison has run its course. It opened your mind, but you do not remember all. This, I understand. You can live, now. This thing is possible. You can also die. I have not decided yet which it will be."

"How did you survive that day?"

"I began to dream, much as you have. The poison is not fatal. The Yankees won that fight, only because the entire town burned. I was picked up by the men and women outside who help me today. They are not soldiers of fortune, they are soldiers of freedom."

"And the war continues."

"It does. Perhaps it always will."

"I know what you felt," Neasa nodded. "I didn't want to admit it then, but I know, now."

"Then say it. Do not hide. What did I feel?"

"You loved me. I didn't want to leave you. I went into the fight to save you, but you think I wanted to run from you. Your death wasn't something I wanted. I didn't want us to end. It wasn't finished, although it was supposed to be. I can't tell you for sure if it was going to go further, because I don't know. I wanted to save you, and I never wanted to save anybody, or anything, before then, when I saw you dying. We both had a reason to live. I don't think I ever had one before you. The emotions nearly got me killed. I don't remember why, or how, I left…"

"You don't say what I want you to say."

"Because I can't. It's something I don't understand, but it was something I wanted to discover, to know, to feel. I thought I knew who I was, but when I was with you, I didn't know anymore."

Ambala smirked. "That may be the closest I will ever get. Do you wonder about your life, now?"

Neasa looked into her face, though it was a gaze she couldn't hold for long. She sighed and looked away. She stepped close to the tent's flap and looked upon the lingering mercenaries.

"There was a little girl. She watched her mother sacrifice herself to protect their home. The love that woman had for her daughter was so powerful, so extraordinary, that she could overcome fear of death to preserve her daughter's life. And I tried to help. I wanted to do it. It was something I never wanted before. There was a fire, and the girl…I don't want to think about it. Not now."

"I want to believe you."

"What are you trying to do?" Neasa asked. "What's the point of this camp?"

Ambala stood nearby her and looked at the camp. "My mother told me once the meaning of my name. It is 'scar.' That is me. I am a killer, like you. But there is a power that drives me, a feeling. You would call it passion. If enough white men die, then there will be more little girls born into this world with both parents. There will be families that love one another not because they are afraid, but because life is good. Freedom is not for me. I escaped my master a long time ago. But I have told you all this before. You are nothing, you have nothing. You kill because you can, and because you must. There is no passion. You do not have a soul."

Neasa stifled a laugh. "So you wanted to save me? You knew all these things about me, when we were together. You know me better than I do, and maybe you always have. How does this change anything between us? Will you kill me because I don't know how to love you?"

"You want to live. This is not the same woman I met."

"There's a little girl I won't ever save. I think I'll try, now. Again and again, I will try."

Ambala placed a hand on her wounded shoulder. "I want to believe you. Until you know yourself, I can't trust a stranger. Not with love."

"I'm not Neasa Bannan, am I? She's been dead for a long time."

"Is this an answer that you need?"

"I remember being there, at Harper's Ferry, where she died. I don't know why I was there. There are too many gaps. I feel that I have been her, before."

"And so you have."

"Doctor Lynch—Saul—is the man I have to kill. This hasn't changed. I don't know what he wants, or why he's doing it, but we've always hated each other. Whatever he's trying to accomplish involves more death. It involves more damaged families. More little girls without their mothers."

"And now you have a purpose. In this, you will find yourself."

"Will I find you?"

Neasa slipped an arm around Ambala's waist. She dropped her hand upon the dark-skinned woman's shoulder, and it felt natural to hold her, to want to be held.

"When does the killing end?" Ambala asked. "It doesn't end until we end. This is the way of things. There is nothing else for us."

"This isn't about who I was, so much as it's about who I can be."

"And so your brother must be killed."

"Until he's gone, he'll always be a part of my life."

A moment of resumption. The renewal of a life that was about to be lived. To be understood is to be known, and to be known is to exist. She wondered about all the blood she'd spilled, only to surrender to this concept of self that she didn't deserve. Years had been spent wearing the guise of a stranger, a manufactured persona designed by the desires of a woman whose name was recalled only as Mother—the authoritative manager or artist, the voice within the shadow, the heart that did not beat but instead pulsated. Neasa had breathed as the product of another's imagination, and in the hours of darkness spent in the arms of someone who knew her, she'd uncovered a life within the machine.

"You want this," Ambala whispered.

"I wanted it before," Neasa returned the whisper. "I need one more death, so I can be."