The Boneyard

The sky was cloudless and bright.  Vladimir gazed at the high gibbous moon.  He pushed his senses out.

His soldiers waited in their places in the clearing.  It looked like newly plowed field, uneven with large clods of hard earth.  The night before, it had been a snow-dusted pasture, abandoned by livestock and left to the occasional deer.

Beyond his soldiers, a safe distance away in the trees, Vladimir sensed the gleaming eyes and steaming breath of the pack.  He normally stayed out of the territories claimed by the packs.  He did not fear them.  As a general and king, he knew the cost of conquering those who could not be readily subjugated or eradicated.

He was here by invitation tonight.  The pack was frightened.  They were immune to much that troubled ordinary men, but they were mortal.  They did not know if one of their own could fall to the corruption, but they dared not risk it.

They viewed Vladimir and his kind as immune to disease.  They also saw a kind of rightness in calling him.  As the pack leader had put it, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

He had watch scores of men dig graves for hundreds of his enemies.  His own sword had cut through the diggers’ necks before he kicked their bodies into the trenches.  It was how he rewarded the valorous vanquished and warned those who remained.  These memories stirred nothing in him but the one emotion he had carried with him from his former life, bloodlust.

A barely perceptible shiver in the earth drew his attention back from distant memories and distant watchers.  He looked down.  As he watched, the clods began to shake and tumble over boiling soil.  Fingers poked out of the soil like sprouting plants.  They grew into hands and arms.  In a moment, heads arose.  Thin remnants of hair were matted with dirt.  Cracked papery skin stretched across skulls, pulled back in grimaces from yellow teeth.  The bodies were covered to varying degrees with rags crusted over with mud and blood.

Vladimir’s troops were held their positions.  Two hundred bodies surrounded them, thirteen warriors including himself.  As a man, he had lead thousands and defeated tens of thousands.  He had never faced an enemy like this, animated by dark energy.

The walking dead began to move.  They turned toward the village that was a few mile to the south, almost straight toward the moon.  He had seen the chimney smoke and rising heat, but he did not know how these corpses knew where to find the living.

The bodies moved around him as if he were a stone in a stream.  Those arms that reached out to draw flesh to clacking teeth turned inches from his chest.  He did not like it.

He reached for his sword and as one, thirteen blades flashed in the moonlight.  It was followed by a rumble of cracking vertebrae, falling skulls, and tumbling bodies.

He didn’t need to speak.  His troops knew their orders.  They stacked the bodies.  They piled the heads separately.  It was work beneath skilled swordsmen, but none complained.  They were too proud to show a hint of dissent in the presence of the beast that had crept up to the edge the clearing. With a signal from their captain, the creature fled to fetch fire.

Vladimir’s soldiers would not stay to watch the fire.  They had a village to visit before dawn.