Empire's End

Twenty-One / The Pack

Nickel, who had handled the rotters in Eviscerato’s circus, stayed close to the pack leader at all times. He had faithfully followed Eviscerato into undeath, and his loyalty was unchanged on the other side. The King of the Dead had no queen, of course, nor any friends among his court; but Nickel was something close to a companion. The beta zombie.

As such, he was sometimes one of the few allowed to feed alongside Eviscerato when the scraps were few. There were long periods roaming the badlands where they didn’t encounter any fresh meat — only more rotters to join the ranks and increase the need for food.

Despite that frequent shortage of flesh, the pack continued to grow. Eviscerato was fiercely territorial, and he wanted every undead under his reign; he also wanted enough troops for the Great Feast, when they reached the end of the road and found all the humans in their nest up north.

His sole drive was still self-preservation, as was the case with any undead, but unlike the others, he saw past his next meal. He knew his family would outlast the ferals who survived alone.

It was true that, in the beginning, they had traveled in wagons as the old circus. It was easy so long as he could contain his minions until they had gathered the meat beneath the tent. But word spread quickly from community to community. The living told stories.

So the badlanders grew to dread the sight of Eviscerato’s caravan. They would be prepared when he came. The King adapted. The element of deceit was traded for the element of surprise. The pack was growing far too large for even that now. Now they would have to rely on sheer numbers.

Eviscerato thought about these things, in his simple way, and he led his pack accordingly. Nickel always at his side, the Strongman at his back, then the rest of his freaks.

In life the Strongman had been called Jordan. An artist, he had designed all of the elaborate tattoos that adorned his massive bulk. His hammer still served the same purpose it always had — to pulverize flesh into a slick slurry — and sometimes after a meal he would sit and draw strange images in the blood that had pooled at his feet.

Claud and Chevis, the Siamese twins. They had been born into circus life. There wasn’t a surgeon that could separate them, not in the badlands, and they didn’t want to be apart anyway. In death they found that two mouths for one stomach was a luxury.

Thom, the many-limbed Geek, used to bite the heads off of infected animals. It was a wonder he hadn’t been infected himself until Eviscerato turned him. He still liked to pull the heads off things.

Walsh had been the name of the horned Dwarf. The runt of the litter, so to speak, he was able to squeeze himself past the others in a feeding frenzy and get what little he needed. Sometimes he was able to get into a barricaded building when the others couldn’t, slipping through a duct or crawlspace to ignite chaos among the living huddled inside.

Lee had juggled the fiery torches. In life, when he could spare it, he’d fill his mouth with grain alcohol and blow fireballs into the air. Now his belly was always saturated with fuel. It bled from all his orifices. He could produce a fireball at any time; it always captivated the crowd, living or dead.

The Petrified Man had been a reluctant performer, forced into the life by poverty and loneliness. A genetic defect caused his connective tissue to ossify when damaged, and the fusion of joints had led to his moniker in life. Undeath’s never-ceasing dance of decay and regeneration had now resulted in ossification beyond anything seen in the living world. Murphy had been the given name of this strange man of bone; he, however, had never known it.

The Fakir had never known his name either. He was little more than a cheap imitation of the traditional Sufi mystics, but he had graduated from firewalking to feats of suffering. A human pincushion, aroused by the needles he threaded through his skin, he was also a “blockhead” with a hollow cavity in his skull that allowed him to hammer nails into his head. He’d spent his life in a haze of drugs and pain; he awoke once to find “Regret cuts deepest” tattooed into his flesh. Apparently he’d entreated the Strongman to ink the words in his skin. Angry at himself, he’d tried unsuccessfully to carve it out with a razor… only later would he learn the Strongman had used an infected needle. He was to become part of Eviscerato’s undead family. And he held on to bitter regret until the very end. The words endured still in gray scar tissue.

This motley crew had progressed from the mindless state of the feral rotter to shrew animal intellect. But even they did not compare to the Omega, who at this moment was mingling with the rear of the pack and selecting his next victim.

Soon he would need to resume his search for the Reaper. This time, he would not walk away until the deed was done; this time he would have the strength necessary to simply tear the ghoul limb from limb. To Hell with prolonging the demon’s suffering.