8.
Amelia and Boon stood in the treeline looking out at the vast expanse of the valley before them. It was practically a perfect oval, stretching a mile across and framed by the impossibly tall and impossible dense forestry of ol' Calamity. The shape made Amelia think of an arena; a massive colosseum of natural design. The moon hung high above, casting a bright and gentle blanket of soothing blue over the area. A cool breeze was coursing over the flat grassland and welcoming Amelia in with a playful stirring of her curly hair. Regrettably, that breeze also carried an aroma most unpleasant with it.
Amelia could not enjoy the tranquility such a spot may have ordinarily afforded, for the valley was absolutely swarming with the shuffling, moaning, putrid members of a ghoul horde.
Amelia had once heard a shaman of the Black Lagoon refer to the rotted creatures as "zombies". She had found that to be such a funny little word. It had struck her as something sad then, that these shambling brainless creatures could not name themselves. Other children of the night could proudly declare "I am a Vampire!" or "I am a Wraith!" or "I am a Mole-Person!" (maybe with slightly less pride). But 'Zombies' had to simply accept whatever name others applied to them. Un-dead. Living Dead. Re-animated. Shamblers. Biters. Walkers. Crawlers. Stalkers. Shit-for-brains-carrion-food. Amelia had always stuck with 'ghouls' because it had a certain romantic flair to it. And in her deepest secret core Amelia believed that all things deserve a touch of romanticism.
There was nothing romantic about the disgusting display laid out ahead though. There were at least a hundred of them. Probably closer to a hundred and fifty if she was being honest. They were all clustered in a shifting dog pile in the center of the valley, with a few dozen stragglers aimlessly roaming along its perimeter. Amelia could not shake her disgust at that squirming pile of ghouls, all crawling over each other and biting and gnashing. There must have been one hell of a buffet dinner at the center of that rotting mass.
Amelia made sure her rifle was fully loaded, and double checked the store of ammunition she kept in her satchel. A long time ago, a close friend by the name of Eric had taught her the secrets of gunpowder and lead-work, so she never found herself shy of bullets. But she couldn't afford to run out here. There wasn't much in the way of raw material for metal work in the middle of a tangled forest.
"No coincidence, by my reckoning. Message points our way here and the ghouls just happen to be having a feeding frenzy where x marks the spot. You're going to hate me, Boon…"
He let out a low mrrrrr in anticipation.
"... but I need to see what all the fuss is about under all that. Maybe a big, tender wolfman would be enough to distract them from whatever slim pickings are left there?"
I am not tender, his eyes said.
"Follow the tree line down to the western side of the valley, and just make some noise. A lot of noise. It's not like any of them could catch you anyway. Just run them in laps for a minute while I get a look."
Boon gave a low growl but took off into the woods without any further complaint. He charged ahead at full speed, but somehow did so without making a sound. Amelia was consistently surprised at how quiet such a massive beast could be. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and drew out her hatchet. There would surely be a few ghouls that wouldn't give chase and she'd need to deal with them as quietly as possible. She had ensured her rifle was prepared, but she prayed she wouldn't need to use it.
Only a minute had passed before she heard the booming yet sad call of the werewolf echoing from the edge of the valley half a mile away. She could see Boon perched on all fours like a dog begging for table scraps, howling away at the night sky. In between the long cries were a series of whining yaps that Amelia couldn't help but feel were curses aimed towards her.
One by one the ghouls lifted their weary heads and turned in his direction. Even at a distance Amelia could tell that these had been dead a long, long time. Most of them were bald, or rather, scalpless entirely. Their clothes, had they ever had any, had rotted and fallen away with the rest of them long ago, but their nude bodies were featureless shriveled husks that bore no remaining trace of gender. Amelia felt an odd stirring of guilt. She was likely interrupting the first good meal they'd had in ages.
One by one they climbed out of the pile and began their long slow march towards Boon. Some raised withered hands, clasping desperately, in his direction. Some let out long moans that Amelia couldn't begin to interpret. Some had to crawl along the ground because the muscles of their legs were too emaciated to function. It was rather like watching the world's slowest-moving avalanche. A wave of ghouls trickling westward at the best pace their poor bodies could manage.
After a few minutes Amelia emerged from the safety of the treeline and crept along the plain towards its center. Boon was barking madly from the branch of a tree, some twenty feet off the ground. The horde was clamoring beneath him, arms raised. They collapsed and crawled atop one another at the tree's roots. Like ants they slowly began to scale each other and pile themselves higher and higher against the trunk. Boon would have to move, and soon.
There were indeed some stragglers; ghouls too deprived of their senses to even follow the hoard. Some were wandering in circles with their empty sockets pointed upwards. Some were half-embedded in the ground as though they never managed to fully rise from their graves. Others had no limbs left with which to move, so could only clack their teeth and strain their broken spines. Amelia felt an overwhelming pity, thinking of these poor creatures that had wasted away to the point where they could no longer see or hear or smell. They only knew hunger and darkness, both equally never-ending. Well, not quite never-ending.
Her pity did not slow the swing of her hatchet. Quick, controlled strikes to the forehead kept her progress silent and unnoticed. There were roughly a dozen aimless ghouls leading up to the epicenter and she darted in a zigzag pattern from one to the next, making her singular, surgical strikes as she went. As she drew closer she could see the still-dead corpses of the horde's victims. Steam was rising from their licked-clean rib cages. Amelia saw traces of clothing; hand-stitched and made of animal leather.
These humans were forest-dwellers.
Humans were living in Calamity Wood.
Her momentary burst of hope could not combat her crushing horror as she took in additional details. Their faces, covered in blood but still recognizable, stared at her in frozen terror above their now fleshless bodies. The ground all around them was a sickening mire of mud, blood, and human debris. She walked from one devoured corpse to the next, looking for any detail that may explain why she was led here. One had gray hair. Three of them had full beards. Two of them only showed the earliest traces of stubble. And in between the six corpses, lying at the exact epicenter of the blood covered feasting ground and the valley itself was a small, curled up figure with long, filth-coated hair.
It was a girl.
A little human girl.
One who had only known maybe half a decade upon this earth. Amelia sighed deeply and sat heavily onto the ground next to the child.
She couldn't bring herself to turn the tiny body over. She knew she needed to see it, to find the reason for all this; but damn it all… in all her lifetimes she had bore witness to enough dead children.
Across the valley, Boon was in full jaunt. Amelia could see him lunging from tree to tree as the crashing waves of corpses flowed after him. She couldn't waste time.
She bit her lip and leaned forward with an outstretched hand towards the child. She didn't grab hold. She halted with her quivering palm hovering only inches above the blood-soaked young one.
The child was breathing.
It was impossible. An army of the undead had crushed this very soil and the humans upon it into an indistinguishable paste. No human, let alone a child, could have remained untouched. If the girl was only moving Amelia would have assumed she had turned; already passed over and returned anew as a fresh ghoul upon the world, as her six companions soon tragically would. But she was breathing. A universal and undeniable sign of life. And despite the gore coating her Amelia could detect no abnormalities with the child's body.
She breached the gap. Her hand gently laid upon the girl's shoulder and felt the tiny shudder that reverberated from it. She applied no pressure; no force to turn the girl over. She only let her know that someone was there for her.
But her other hand was on the hatchet. As one hand caressed another was prepared to kill. She hated that part of herself. She needed that part of herself. She ran from it as equally as she relied upon it. The impossibility of this child's survival was fighting tooth and claw with every maternal instinct buried within her.
The girl slowly rolled her head around to look at Amelia. The filth covering her face made her eyes shine like silver dollars in contrast. They were blue and calm and clear. Amelia knew something was wrong immediately by the lack of horror within them. The girl's expression was more like that of one waking from a pleasant nap. She smiled, and Amelia shivered at the sight of her teeth. Even for a child's, they were too small and too pointed. The girl noticed Amelia's reaction, and shut her lips for a moment. She smiled again, and now her bright little chompers looked the right size and shape.
"Let a girl put on her morning face first, at least." The voice was that of a child, but not the tone. There was an intelligence there beyond the girl's years, and a merriment that was sickening to behold given the horror all around them. "My hero, rushing in to save sweet, innocent, little ol' me." She waved her hand in front of her face in a mocking pantomime of someone fainting. "Of course you weren't exactly expecting a fair maiden yearning for rescue, were you? No no, you were just riding yet another excuse to kill some creatures that weren't even bothering you, weren't you, my lady?" The child stretched out her arm and waved at the trail of dead ghouls Amelia had left behind her.
Amelia stood up and loomed over the little girl, who did not bother to move from her reclined position on the ground.
"If a sliver of their rational thought remained within them, they'd thank me for the mercy."
"Mercy?!" cried the child. "Interesting! So it's 'mercy' when the big bad human lover uses her big bad weapons to put down the eeeeevil monsters? Of course! Why when I looked upon you my first thought was, 'Now there is a kind, loving, and merciful individual. I'll just ignore her scars and her gun and her dead face all covered in the blood of Calamity.'"
Amelia listened very carefully to the rhythm in this thing's way of speaking. Her eyes squinted and she thought on the sharp tiny teeth she had spied in the girl's mouth.
"It's you, isn't it? The frogling."
The "girl" fluttered her eyelids. "Why, I'm not sure what you could mean? I'm just a lost little human brat that had to go and sneak out into the Wood. Just an adorable blue-eyed little bitch that ran off where she had no business going and brought her monsters running after her." She sat up suddenly. When Amelia's hand instinctively twitched towards her rifle, the creature giggled. "Monsters with guns. Monsters willing to use aaaany justification to use those guns. Monsters willing to call it a fucking mercy."
The child stood up, and Amelia took a step back. In truth, she had no clue what this thing even was. A skinwalker or a Kanima, perhaps? Her eyes darted over to Boon. He was slashing and tearing at the horde from atop yet another tree. She tried to ignore the creeping exhaustion slowing down his mighty blows.
"I don't know who or what you are. I'm not your enemy, but you are putting my friend and I in danger, and I will know why. Now. Why have you brought me here?"
"To do what you do, my lady! I want you to kill! To bring your mercy to the next creature who oh so truly deserves it!" Her eyes turned blood red and her mouth stretched open so that a gangrenous twirling tongue could come slithering out of it.
Amelia brought the rifle around and pulled back the hammer. The girl's smile widened. The mostrous tongue crawled back into its hole. Amelia had taken her last step backwards. She would not retreat further. The girl stepped forward and leaned back slightly as the barrel of the gun pushed against her forehead.
"Well, monster killer? All you have to do is squeeze."
Amelia felt a stirring of pity swell underneath her confusion and fear. "Is that what this is? Do you wish to die, creature?"
The girl's eyes darted to the right and all traces of inhumanity disappeared from her face. She now bore only the look of a frightened, lost child.
"No. I just needed them to see you pointing a gun at me."
Before Amelia could respond there was suddenly an eruption of shouting from the right of them. Several men had burst through the treeline and were charging straight at them. One of them, an older man with a large knife in hand, was yelling, "No, Horace! Stop! The biters!"
Amelia turned her head enough to see them without taking her rifle away from the girl. She was glaring over her raised shoulder as they ran up, stopping about 15 feet away. The one with the knife was old, his balding gray hair pulled tight behind his head. The one up front stared back with the eyes of a madman. He raised his hands and there was something glimmering held in…
Amelia nearly screamed. A double barrel! It's a goddamned double barrel!
"Let her go!" the man screamed. "You let her go now or I-"
"Shut up!" she barked back. Across the valley she could see Boon's head dart in her direction as he made his great lunges above the horde. "Where did you get that gun? Who gave it to you?!"
He inched closer and yelled louder. "Let her go or I'll put you down! Now!" Several of the ghouls at the edge of the horde began to turn back and look in their direction.
Tears were flowing from the innocent little thing at the end of Amelia's gunbarrel. "Daddy, she wanted me to take her home! She wants to hurt everyone there!" she choked through sobbing gasps. Amelia bellowed back "Don't you dare! No one is hurting anyone! Don't fire that damn weapon!"
"THEN LET HER GO!" the armed man screamed as he began marching towards them, shotgun still pointed. Boon noticed the majority of the horde slowing down and yearningly gazing back to their previous, and now resupplied, feeding ground.
Amelia turned to look directly at the man. "Dammit man, the horde! This thing isn't even-"
The girl grabbed the barrel with both hands and screamed in a desperate and wounded tone, "DADDY, SAVE ME! SHE'S GONNA KILL ME!"
Amelia barely registered the sound of the gunshot before the sledgehammer hit her in the chest. She flew spiraling backwards and crashed into the dirt, showered by little pieces of herself landing on top and all around her. Her skull collided with the skull of one of the corpses on the ground, and one of them cracked from the blow.
Amelia couldn't know for sure if it was hers, because Amelia was already long gone.