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.

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.