A/n's: So, I had notes for the first chapter – but I forgot to add them before creating and for some reason my edits don't stick, so here they are now instead. On the Devil's Left is the full-born Resident Evil based fic that I mentioned in the author's notes of The Devil. I expect this to be a multi-chaptered work, in which each chapter is inspired by, and named after a different card of the tarot.

Now, I should mention, the quote I used at the very beginning of OtDL is one I heard somewhere ages ago that I desperately wanted to use (it should fit rather nicely) but couldn't find again to confirm what my memory was telling me was the correct quote. So, by chance, if you know the quote and I've gotten wrong, do let me know so I can fix it. Also, I lost my beta for this chapter, so if my grammar is worse than usual, that's why. I did re-read it and did to my best, but, well, I suck. Forgive me.

Oh, and as always, enjoy!

Disclaimers: Don't own, blah blah, don't sue, etc, no monies, blah blah.

Warnings: Swearing, some gore.

Chapter Two

Ten of Swords

"A man dead with ten swords in his back, it's a nasty looking card. Sometimes everything just...goes wrong. And yes, things are as bad as they seem. But, as the fellow in the card indicates, the swords have done their worst. You can't be more dead. It is over."

-Thirteen, Aeclectic Tarot

He was like some poor, mangled marionette, cast aside by his careless puppeteer. He hung limp, swaying lightly from his lines, one of his arms was jutting out at an odd, obviously unnatural angle. His face…was a mess. It was hard to say for sure, but while he may have been handsome once (and there were a few features left intact to add viability to that theory) he was something fearsome to behold now.

Great patches of bare and blistered skin curved over his skull, leaving him more bald than not. One of his eyes was swollen shut and from the corner something dark was oozing slowly; there was a glint of something shiny embedded into the brow bone above and in the eyelid. The rest – almost the entire other side of his face - was an uncertain mass of damaged tissue. A deep, angry red in places, charred grey and black in others and, there, from his jaw down along his throat and disappearing under the collar of his strange clothes –

Military perhaps? It does have a bit of uniform-flair.

-was a gaping wound, shiny and almost wet looking, inside which I was certain I saw I gleam of white bone. The ground beneath his feet was pooling into a puddle of red-black as blood dripped from under the cuff of the sleeve covering the broken arm – whether it was from the break itself or some other injury unknown I couldn't say.

Either way, it was fairly clear that the poor bastard was in quite the state.

My eyes slowly scanned upward, pulling with difficulty my car wreck like fascination with his horrible wounds up to the twisted wealth of fabric wound amongst the tree limbs above his head.

Parachute. And…- my eyes ran along the tangled lines to the heavy straps snug on the man's shoulders – and a harness. He must have bailed from a – plane!

"Fuck me, it was a plane crash!" I heard myself whisper aloud in disbelief.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Daryl's head tilt in my direction.

He apparently didn't dare take his eyes off our 'find.'

"You think?" he asked. "Seems kind of…odd. Who flies now'adays?"

I shrugged. "Military maybe. There's gotta be some of them left somewhere, right? I mean, just 'cause it's been a long time since we've seen anyone doesn't mean they're not out there…" I trailed off as the man twirled lazily in the breeze and flashed me the mutilated side of his face again.

I closed my eyes, waiting for the moment to pass, but I could still see it – him – on the insides on my eyelids. He would be waiting for me tonight in my nightmares, I could already tell.

"Either way, it must have been one hell of a spectacular failure leave him like this even bailing out."

"Is he…dead?" Sarah whispered, speaking for the first time from behind Daryl's back, eyes turned resolutely on the ground and decidedly away from the man in the tree.

"Gotta be," Daryl said with a shake of his head as I mumbled, "God, I hope so."

I didn't say that just because in this strange new world of ours the dead had the nasty habit of crawling out of their graves to seek the flesh of the living and I didn't want to have to kill him a second time; I also didn't want to imagine what this sorry soul would have to go through if, somehow, his awful injuries hadn't killed him outright. The pain he would go through, the suffering he would experience….

Surely no one deserved that.

"We should – shouldn't we do something?" Sarah asked softly, glancing at me weakly from under Daryl's arm. "It's not right,…is it? To leave him like that? We should bury him?"

Daryl exhaled heavily and looked at me as well. "We don't have anything to bury him with. And if he is infected he might come back while we're messing around trying to get him out of the tree."

They were valid points – but….

But it would be disrespectful to leave a body like this. It should be cared for, so the spirit can be free to make its journey to the happy hunting grounds in peace.

"She's right, Daryl," I sighed. "Just because time's are tough doesn't mean we should stop paying the dead their rights. We've got matches, we could – burn him."

He watched me, obviously uncertain, for several long moments then sighed as well and took a sloped look of acceptance. "Fine, but we should still check out the smoke too – make sure fly-boy here didn't start a forest fire."

I nodded, and glanced at the dangling man again. "Okay, so how about you check out the smoke, make sure we're not going to die fiery deaths and we'll," I offered Sarah a little smile of solidarity, "get our friend out of the tree in the meantime."

Daryl glanced over his shoulder, "You up for that, Scout? Or would you rather come with me?"

Sarah chewed her lip and looked for a moment like she wanted nothing more than to cling to Daryl and go far, far away from the dead man. But then she lifted her head, shifted her backpack and nodded at me.

"I'm the one who said it, I should help."

"Sarah," I couldn't help but grin at her, "You are the coolest eleven-year-old ever."

Her lips didn't quite make a smile, but her eyes looked pleased as she moved away from Daryl to stand at my side.

Daryl shook his head. "I have got to stop letting you two hang out together, you're a bad influence," he told me.

"Oh, come on, think how awesome your life would be with two of me," I shot back.

He snorted a short laugh before growing serious again. "Be careful you two. I don't care: no dead man is worth losing either of you."

"We will," I promised. As I spoke I felt a small hand slip inside mine and I gave Sarah a comforting squeeze. "You watch out for yourself too."

"I will," Daryl assured in return.

Then, with the plan laid out and no further excuses to hesitate, Daryl turned away, walked into the trees and shortly disappeared, leaving Sarah and I alone with the task of fetching a dead man out of a tree.

~.~

Pulling him free was out of the question. If respect was what we were going for than it would be highly inappropriate for one; and two, I really didn't think it would work. So, the best plan I could come up with was to climb up beside him and cut the lines holding him to the parachute.

It turned out to be easier said than done.

Oh, the climbing itself wasn't hard, I'd had years of practice at that as a tomboy youth, but the cutting…that was another story. The lines were tangled up in the branches with the fabric of the chute, snarling out like some great spider's web in every which direction and cutting the few closest to my ungainly perch and I found I would have lean over him, perilously close, to cut the remaining.

"Are you okay?" Sarah called up from the ground after watching me fret for a few minutes.

If he was going to reanimate, he probably would have gone and done it by now. It's usually quite immediate, isn't it?

"Yeah," I replied, trying to sound more confident than I felt. "Just trying to figure out what's the best way to do this." I leaned to peek down at her from between the leaves, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my knife-wielding hand while clinging to the tree with the other. "Be sure to stay back now, Sarah. I don't want him falling on you."

I saw the head of red hair nod, then withdraw from view as the girl stepped back so as to be clear of the fallout.

Turning back, I took one more deep breath, reminded myself again that zombies usually came back shortly after their death, and slowly started to stretch out toward the man. Even as I curled my fingers around the lines needing to be severed and starting slicing with my knife I watched his face, expecting any moment for his eyes to snap open and for him to turn on me with bared teeth.

He didn't, but it still turned out be a good thing I was watching him so closely.

If I hadn't been I'd have never seen the pulse beating, faint but steady, in his throat as I cut his last ties to the parachute.

~.~

I had no hope of stopping him, he was too big and I was too late, but I tried anyway, grabbing at his shoulder as he started to drop away from me. His weight snatched at me, sweeping me easily from my perch. My knife went flying, dropping somewhere out of sight, as I tumbled after him.

For a moment we were simply falling, tangled together, leaves swiping at us – then we were landing. Hard.

Pain (the padding I had built up on my rear-end seemed to have little to no helpful effect) washed over me, lancing from my throbbing tail-bone up the length of my spine to explode before my eyes in a set of bright, flashing stars. There was no breath in my lungs, driven out in a rush by the solid male body that came slamming onto my chest as we struck the ground in an undignified heap.

"I thought we were trying to not get squashed?" came Sarah's voice over the sound of tentative footsteps, surprisingly dry for an eleven-year-old. "Did you fall?"

"Sarah!" I choked her name, wriggling an arm free and waving it. "Help me – he's alive! He's still alive!"

Her face appeared above mine as I pushed up on the man's broad shoulders (I suddenly aware of how remarkably big he was now that he was on top of me) and with her help we managed to roll him over off of me and onto his back.

"Are you sure?" Sarah asked breathlessly as, with a wince and hiss for my sore butt, I rolled and climbed up onto my hands and knees.

Reaching out I pressed my fingers to the good side of his neck – yes, what I'd seen in the tree was real. A steady pulse was beating beneath his skin.

"I'm sure." I released him and reached for the pack on Sarah's back. "Come on, Scout, you're the one with the first-aid badge. I need your help."

"I don't-" she shrugged off the backpack and whipped it around in front her, yanking on the zippers and hurriedly pulling out the long, green stemmed plants with both hands. "I didn't bring anything. Just some water and some bandages, just in case, I didn't think we'd need them – we were going to be back before dark, just one day, I didn't-"

"It's okay," I assured, worried as she started to sound a little hysterical. "We can make that work, right? We can bandage him up for now and take him back to the mill and we can fix him up properly there."

Her mouth worked uncertainly for a moment then, "We need to splint his arm. I know how make one from sticks-"

I nodded, "Good thinking, that's something we can do." I glanced around. "Why don't you go get what you need and I'll work on getting the sleeve out of the way so we can see how bad the break is."

"Okay." Sarah nodded in return and stood.

She's unarmed.

"But don't go too far, okay? Just in case something else is wandering around out there."

She nodded one more time then sprinted away between the trees, but she was good on her word. Even though I couldn't see her I could definitely hear her, crashing around in the brush, snapping twigs and rustling leaves.

Leaving her to it, I looked back down at the strange man and – found myself momentarily at a loss.

"Sorry about the tree bit," I whispered to him. The need to apologize might have been silly, but it was suddenly paramount. "I didn't know…I was just trying to help. Forgive me?"

He remained silent and still and I nodded, "Yeah, I wouldn't either. Just don't hold it against me, huh? I'll make it up to you in the long run, I promise. Just – not now, 'cause I'm pretty sure what I have to do next is gonna hurt just as much."

I reached for his arm, running my fingers lightly down the length of it before trying to it gently. His clothes were even stranger up close than they had been at a distant. He was completely decked, from head to toe, in fine, lightly checked black leather – complete with soft, well-worn gloves. It was badly scorched in places, completely burned through in others, but there no denying what it was.

Whoever this guy was, he must have had one hell of a day job. Or a completely swinging private life.

Impressive though it was, the leather was a problem. Too tight on his body I couldn't roll up his sleeve to check the severity of his broken arm, I'd have to cut it away, and, of course, I'd dropped my knife during our tumble from the tree.

For the best actually, you'd probably have stabbed yourself, or him, or both if you'd managed to hold onto it.

With a sigh I looked around, trying to spot the familiar grip or perhaps something shiny amongst the leaves and grass. It couldn't have gotten too far.

As I leaned this way and that, searching, a sudden movement caught my attention and I reflexively reached for my bow – only to remember it was sitting feet away, resting against the tree I'd propped it on before heading up into the treetop. But it was only Daryl, stepping into view, looking startled as his gaze moved between my face and that of the unconscious man.

"Jesus, Daryl, step on a twig next time. You scared the living hell out of m-"

His hand twitched and there was a soft click-

The safety on a gun being turned off….

-and the barrel of his pistol started to lift, leveling on the man before me – and I threw myself forward, spreading my arms out over him.

"No! Daryl, don't! He's alive – alive alive!"

At my shouts Sarah came barreling back, popping from in-between a tree and a scrubby pair of bushes, a stick in each hand.

"Sarah, stay back," he ordered the girl and she stopped dead in her tracks. To me, gun still raised he said, "Get out of the way. Move before-"

There was a soft noise and something warm stirred against my cheek. I turned my head, looking down – and I was unexpectedly caught, trapped in surprise by the sudden appearance of my own reflection: a mane of shoulder-length brunette hair framing a heart-shaped face; a sensible nose, a mouth with the lower lip slightly fuller than the upper…and pair of wide eyes that couldn't decide if they were more green or brown.

Then the moment broke…and I realized I was seeing myself mirrored in a pair of slitted, crimson-colored eyes that were staring up at me from above a snarling mouth.