Chapter 1: King of the Dead

There is no light of Heaven
Nor the raging flames of Hell
Only eternal darkness
In which the Old Gods dwell{br}

The man looked into his glass, watching the surface of the liquid shimmer from his breath. Through it, he could see all of the lines and scratches in the wooden counter. It was old, definitely prewar. A lot of the tavern had been renovated with the reclaiming of the town, but the new owner appeared to have taken a liking to the old counter, probably trying to give his bar some “character” that would draw customers. Despite a century of neglect, it had aged very well. There were several other people in the bar, all of them armed, a remnant of the apocalypse that humanity had survived. The last zombie died around eighty years ago, yet it was common in rural areas to carry a blade large enough to hack off a limb, as well as a gun to defend against any remnants of the chaotic years that followed.

There was music playing from an old stereo, classic rock. Though in this era, it was technically “antique” rock. In the corner, above the bar, a TV was showing the evening news. The news anchor was wearing a nice suit but missing a tie. Some things from the old world weren’t brought back to the new one. But the man wasn’t watching the news, nor listening to the music. He didn’t seem to even notice or mind the stench of cigarettes and the taste of bathtub liquor. His attention was focused on a large silver coin he was flipping back and forth across his knuckles.

The man was in his mid-twenties with long, dark hair. He had a large build from a lifetime of brutal training, but a handsome face, a fitting canvas for the smirk he wore as he stared at the coin. It was a smug grin, the kind that would anger some, unnerve others, and attract a few. It worked, drawing a cute little number to the seat next to his. Short blonde hair, blue eyes, an inviting cleavage, she drew the attention of every man in the room.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around here before,” she said. She then ordered a drink from the bartender.

Seeing her, the man’s gaze sharpened with desire burning within. “I’m just passing through, heading north.”

“But there is nothing up north. You’ll only find backwoods savages up there.”

“Oh, there is plenty up there. It just depends on what you’re looking for.” The bartender handed her a glass half-filled with an opaque liquid. She took a drink, leaving behind a smear of lipstick on the glass. “You might want to be careful flashing that silver here. The police won’t be able to help you if it gets taken.”

“I know how to keep it safe, but it’s not just the silver that gives it value.” He held it up, showing her the two sides. The coin had a glass lens pressed to its back. One side was a glistening mirror and the other was pure silver, engraved with a skull and incantations in a language that even before the war, few people knew about. “Without the glass, it’s just a piece of metal. Do you know how mirrors are made? A glass membrane is backed with a layer of a reflective substance, originally a mixture of mercury and tin. This is called silvering. Later, they were made using actual silver. In the modern age, the silver was replaced with aluminum.” The man eyed the mirror behind the bar. “That mirror is definitely aluminum.”

“I’m pretty sure the silver is the only reason anyone would steal it.”

“Only because they don’t know the true value of the mirror.” He then glanced up at the TV. It was a relic from the old world, but it still worked just fine. The news anchor was speaking with some government scientist about the possibility of the zombie plague returning. “Look at them, a hundred years since the undead rose and they still know nothing about them. They can’t even scratch the surface.”

The woman gave him an inviting look, knowing that there was more he wanted to say. She wanted to see if he had the courage to say it without needing to be asked and hoped it would be interesting.

The man smiled and held up the silver coin. “I know secrets about the dead. It was not a virus that allowed the dead to rise, it was the dead themselves. There is no light of Heaven, no flames of Hell, only the darkness of Purgatory, and when a hole is torn in that membrane, the dead pour back into our world. The “disease” that spread from person to person was really an ocean of spirits pouring into hosts. The darkness strips away all humanity. Once death has claimed you, your memories and feelings vanish, and you become an embodiment of hunger for that which you do not have: life.”

The woman rolled her eyes in disappointment. She had hoped he would be worth her attention, but he was just another religious nut. But when she looked back at him, she saw his gaze focused on her. The gleam in his eyes, that smirk on his face; they sent a shiver down her spine. The way he had spoken, it was not due to delusional beliefs or arrogant fanaticism; it was spoken in condescension, like he was explaining a fact to a child. He was indifferent to her reaction, or rather, it amused him.

“Relax, I’m just kidding.” He gave a hearty laugh, brushing aside her suspicions. “I love the different reactions people give when I start talking like that. It scares them, annoys them, or bores the hell out of him. Either way, it’s always funny.”

She laughed with him, and in her mind, laughed at herself for seeing things that weren’t there. He had just been smiling, that was all, and his sense of humor heightened her attraction. They began to chat, with more and more drinks being poured and consumed. The more she spoke, the more she drank, and the more obvious her intentions became.

“What do you say about getting out of here?” the man asked as the hands on his watch reached ever higher.

“You read my mind,” she purred. “I’ll call us a cab.”

“No need, I’m fine to drive.”

The man paid for their drinks and she followed him out to the parking lot, where light came only from the few lamps in the adjacent street. He led her to his pickup truck, built after the start of the reconstruction movement.

“I know of a nice motel nearby,” the woman said as she climbed into the truck.

“That won’t be necessary.”

Like a lunging snake, the man reached out and struck her in the side of the head with a solid punch. The force knocked her skull against the passenger door frame with enough force to draw blood. Her body became limp and the man bound and gagged her with a roll of duct tape. He then leaned out of the truck and jammed his fingers down his throat, forcing himself to vomit the alcohol he had consumed in the bar. He had only gone in there for a single drink, but in order to avoid her getting suspicious, he had to keep up with her. Of course, he had plenty of tricks to minimize the alcohol consumed, like pretending to drink, throwing up in the bathroom, and even pouring his drink into her glass when she was distracted. It was necessary, as he needed to keep a clear head for what would happen next.

As the man drove further and further into the wilds of northern Maine, signs of civilization faded. Even before the war against the undead, the upper half of the state was an untamed sea of wilderness, crisscrossed by some silent roads. After fifty miles from the coast, a state line, or the Canadian border, civilization all but vanished. That had changed when the war began. People fleeing the undead, and later, the warlords and their armies, headed into seclusion, hiding in the darkness of the trees. In the labyrinths of rolling hills and smothering forests of New England, humanity regressed into a Lovecraftian nightmare. Violent religious sects were born, inbreeding became common, and the line separating humans from animals blurred. These days, the towns were islands of civilization in an ocean of savagery, the forests filled with people who didn’t want to be found.

The man was still smiling, excitement keeping him wired as the hours passed. Frequently, he would stop to consult maps, but nothing else deterred him from his goal. After a while, the woman began to stir, slightly concussed from the blow she had received. Her wrists bound and her mouth covered, panic filled her and she gave a muffled scream. Without taking his eyes off the road, the ran reached over and grabbed her throat with a crushing grip. He never lost his smirk.

“Now, now, if you’re going to make a fuss, I can just toss you into the back and let the cold quiet you down. Sitting in the cab is a privilege that you should appreciate more.” Desperate for air, she gave in and became still. “Good girl. Now, how about you keep me company while I drive?” He pulled the duct tape off her mouth, and immediately she began to cry out in terror. The man again grabbed her throat, forcing her into submission. “There will be plenty of time for screaming later, but not in this confined space.”

He finally let go and she took some deep breaths. When she spoke, her voice was trembling. “What do you want from me?”

“I stopped off at that bar for a drink and you presented yourself on a silver platter. I decided that it might be a good idea to have some warm blood with me for where I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

The man chuckled. “Do you remember what I said before? About the spirits of the dead? Heaven and Hell do not exist, there is only the darkness of Purgatory, and in that darkness, souls are stripped of their humanity and become wrathful specters. Your grandparents, your mother and father, your siblings, your friends, and even you yourself are eventually transformed into the wretched dead. The dead do not feel joy, they do not feel love, they do not feel hope. They are embodiments only of hunger and hatred, those feelings directed towards that which they are no longer: life. I could end your life right now, and in seconds, your soul, the very essence that made you who you are, would be trapped in a realm of eternal night, being twisted by madness and horror into an entity even less than a demon in all but maliciousness. You would be but a drop in an ocean of insanity, an eternal sea that expands beyond the parameters of human understanding.

One hundred years ago, an incident occurred, in which that sea leaked into our world. An arcane ritual was performed, several failed necromancers trying to resurrect one of the dead. Through a doorway they opened, that sea, that liquid horror, poured into their bodies and turned them into the undead. Chaos incarnate, a formless mix of the gluttonous rage of all the dead, it robbed them of their sanity and even basic thought, and turned them into walking abominations. From there, they spread the disease, infecting others with that evil ichor.”

“How the fuck could you possibly know that?”

“I have my sources. Years ago, I learned of a cult that existed here in Maine. They believed that protection would come through appeasing the dead, and that the only way to save themselves was to give the infected a proper burial. They hunted down the undead, dismembering them and transporting them back to a site they believed was sacred. In a mass grave, hundreds and perhaps even thousands of zombies were buried, their severed limbs still twitching, their teeth still gnashing. That is my destination.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see. Oh, would you look at that?”

The woman looked ahead. They passed by a burned-down house, one wall still remaining. A body was nailed to that wall, crucified. From the level of decay, the man or woman had been hanging there for years. Sightings like the corpse became more and more frequent the longer they drove. Cars, either burned or abandoned, were left on the sides of the road, many still caked with blood. Their sides were plastered with graffiti, either nihilistic or religious in nature, telling those who passed that they had to save themselves, or that it was already too late. Crosses and other religious symbols were plastered everywhere, many adorned with skulls and various body parts. When the dead started to rise, people realized there was no such thing as a merciful God.

There were traces of battles from the last hundred years, houses with their paint scraped off by the peeling fingernails of the dead, riddled with bullets, and marked with the emblem of whatever warlord ruled the territory at the time. Remnants of barricades were on every road, built to stop, and likewise destroyed, by both the living and the dead.

Then something changed. Traces of the fight against the undead could be seen, but no signs of the human conflicts afterwards. No one had tried to stake claim over the area, no warlords or outlaws expanding their territory, even after the zombies died out. The land had simply been abandoned. Summer was just ending, but not a single leaf could be seen on any of the trees. They stood gaunt and lifeless, bare fingers reaching up to the stars. From above, one would see only a vast circle of gray and brown, like a cigarette burn on the flesh of Mother Nature.

Once the truck passed that perimeter, something stirred in the woman, piercing and cold. It was a fear that human words couldn’t properly describe, the sharpest fear she had ever felt, like an icy razor slowly severing the muscle threads of her heart. Until now, she had been utterly terrified of the man next to her, afraid of what he would do to her, but she now felt safer in that truck with him than tossed out into this dead zone. Her most primeval instincts were telling her that she was in a danger like no other.

She looked to the man, her captor, and yet somehow the closest thing she had to a guardian. She hoped to see that fear in him, to prove that she was not alone in feeling this oppression, but also hoped she wouldn’t, that he would be completely calm, showing that he still remained the thing that she should be most afraid of. She shuddered at the sight, a bloodthirsty grin on his face, eyes gleaming with ambition. He did feel what she felt, but he did not register it as fear.

Finally, the man pulled onto a dirt road. After a hundred years, it should have been overgrown, but nothing lived here. Life itself had left this place behind. He drove through the woods, coming out the other side into a clearing a mile in diameter. The women felt her sweat freeze, her lungs shriveling up. The land was cloaked in fog, but the moon above shone unhindered, and its light revealed a circular hill with a structure at the top. It was a ring of stone pillars, each one the size of a car, with huge arches, forming a perfect Stonehenge.

“This is the mass grave I spoke of. That hill is manmade, a thin layer of soil covering a mountain of corpses. Those pillars are the grave marker.” But the woman wasn’t listening. She had her face pressed to the window, eyes trembling. She could see movement in the fog, invisible forms darting in and out of the darkness, leaving the vapor curling in their wake. “They are made of the spirits of the dead,” said the man. The woman looked at him. “But do not mistake that for a sign of humanity. I told you before, death strips souls of all that makes them human and twists them with darkness, leaving them as only malicious wraiths that feed on life itself.

What possessed all those people one hundred years ago, it was the collective will of the Sea of the Dead, a chaotic nebula of horror and madness without a single solid thought, save for the desire to eclipse life. What you are looking at are the resulting forms of that collection, demons made of the blended existences of the dead and formed within their human hosts. They are drawn to us because they sense our living bodies, our fresh souls.

Because so many of their vessels have gathered together and come undone, they are able to partially manifest themselves. I imagine they’ve killed everyone and everything within five miles of this grave.”

The man then opened the door beside him, showing no fear in forsaking the small security of the truck. He grabbed a large duffle bag from the back and slung it over this shoulder, then went around to the other side and dragged out the woman. She kicked and screamed, fear running through her veins like ice water. The figures in the mist were beginning to close in, their meal in sight. His lips curling into a smile, the man raised the silver coin, flashing them with the mirror side. Inhuman screeches were heard and the figures vanished, receding into the fog.

“Silver, their greatest weakness. As a universal conductor, it disrupts their flow of energy and causes them to lose shape, but that is just the start. Silver mirrors are capable of becoming doorways to the other side, their power depending on their age. For a mirror like this, any demon so much as caught in its reflection will be immediately cast back into the void from whence they came.”

He solidified his hold on the woman and dragged her towards the monument. She could see them still in the mist, shapeless, colorless, invisible specters watching from the shadows. With that coin in the man’s hand, they dared not come close. The man and woman passed under one of the archways of the monument, where a stone table had been placed in the center as an altar for sacrifice. Shackles and chains were secured in the four corners, binds for whatever poor soul was offered to appease the dead. They had rusted in the decades since the monument’s construction, but remained strong.

The man threw her onto the altar and drew a knife. It was coated with a layer of silver. First, he locked her ankles in the shackles at one end, then severed the duct tape binding her wrists so that she could secure them in the chains at the other. “Did you know that when the Bubonic Plague was ravaging Europe, people would have orgies in cemeteries? They did it to spit in the face of death. How better for me to get these beasts riled up?”

He then cut away her clothes, the knife slashing both fabric and flesh. The woman screamed in pain from the lacerations, thrashing and pulling at the chains that locked her to the cold stone. As her blood streamed freely, a noticeable tremor moved through the fog surrounding the altar. Every demon that had been slumbering was now awake, stirred by the scent of blood and spirit. They converged on the monument, but the man flashed the coin, scaring them back. They formed a perimeter behind the pillars, staring at the humans and waiting for the chance to strike. The woman lay on the altar, the moonlight shining on her naked body, her hot blood catching its radiance. She cried, the only thing she could do was cry, and wait for the sound of a zipper being lowered.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you feel pleasure. After all, death is the climax of life.”

He then lowered his head and kissed her, first a gentle peck, his lips merely brushing against hers, then joining for a longer bond. She tried to resist him, but he grabbed her chin and forced her to remain still, to receive his cruel affection. His tongue infiltrated her mouth, probing every corner like a serpent following the scent of its wounded prey. But while one might think his attention was focused on her, his arm darted in all directions, pointing the coin at any approaching demons like it was a loaded gun. The mirror repeatedly reflected the moonlight, and that flash, no matter how small, bisected any dark wraith that it shined upon. Despite their fury and hunger, no demon dared enter the monument while he had that coin.

The woman soon gave in, letting the man have his way with her. But no longer needing to hold her head still, he was able to send his free hand south and cup a warm breast. Had the night gone as she had originally expected, the two of them writhing in the twisted sheets of a motel bed, she would have welcomed the touch. His undulating grip, kneading her supple flesh, would have made her gasp, and his fingertips, coaxing her nipples to full erection and pulling them towards the sky, would have made her whimper from the blissful sting. But all they did was fill her with revulsion. This act of foreplay, was he doing it for his own amusement, to rile up the ghostly spectators, or simply to humiliate her with deceitful kindness? She knew she was helpless against him, he knew that she knew it, she knew that he knew that she knew it, and any pleasure he gave her was just a reminder of the power he held over her.

His hand moved farther south, slipping between her thighs. She again tried to fight him off, pulling at the chains and closing her legs, but she could still feel his fingers brush against her womanhood. They slid down, stroking the plump lips of the outer labia, then rose back up, tickling the exposed inner petals. His lips left hers and instead found her breasts. He pulled on her nipples with his lips and cleaned the blood off her flesh with his tongue. The cuts from his knife, his tongue stayed near them like a lion at a waterhole. She could hear them rumbling, the undead, growling and snarling in rage and envy as he gluttonously licked up her blood.

Against her will, a small moan escaped her lips. The man’s efforts were beginning to wear down her defenses. Between his fingertips, he was rubbing the very edge of one of her labia minora, and the kiss of both his lips and the brisk night air on her naked body was sending bolts of electricity up her spine. Her clitoris had become firm and now fallen prey to the strokes of his thumb. His fingers at last penetrated her, and try as she might, she could not contain her voice. It was little more than a soft squeak, but to her, it sounded louder than the trumpets of Armageddon. His fingers stirred inside her with dexterity she didn’t know was possible, as if the bones in his hand had vanished.

Fresh tears fell from her eyes from the pain and disgust of this man inside her, violating both her flesh and her soul. The worst part was not the agony, but the lack of it. Her body was reacting to his touch, his fingers slick with her building arousal. Her mind knew and feared what would come next, but her body was beginning to crave it, these simple touches just appetizers to inflame her sexual hunger.

Finally, he pulled his fingers free and licked them clean. “My original plan didn’t include a victim, and I need to keep this coin raised to hold them back, but I suppose it would be rude of me to ravish you with the handicap of one of my hands occupied.”

She looked through her tears, seeing him retrieve the silver knife. But rather than bringing it towards her, he raised it to his own face. She began to scream, praying that this was just a bad dream, for the sight before her was cutting through her soul the way the knife had cut through her flesh. Without losing his smile, he dug the tip of the blade under his right eyeball. It was an effortless movement, the man prying his eye right of its socket and severing the nerve. She could see him shivering, his body surely reacting to the wound he had just inflicted, but his soft laughter told her that any pain he felt was nothing short of euphoric. He cast the eyeball aside, and in its place, he wedged the coin into the socket, the mirror side facing out. Her looked down on her and she could see her own tear-streaked face reflected in the glass.