City of the Undead: A Zombicide Black Plague Novel by CL Werner

Author:CL Werner [Werner, CL]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Epic, Media Tie-In, Fiction
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Well before the sun fully set, the canals of Zanice were plunged into darkness. Only those waterways maintaining a straight course for an appreciable distance managed to receive any light. For the rest of the city, the tall buildings acted like the walls of artificial canyons and blocked the descending sun. In better times, Shareen realized, lamplighters would have drifted down the canals, igniting the oil lamps hanging from iron posts every few hundred yards along the track. She could picture the effect in her mind, thousands of flickering lights to drive back the shadows and transform Zanice into glittering magnificence.

That beautiful image, like so much else, was lost to the Black Plague. Zanice was no longer a vibrant, wondrous place, but a scene of brooding desolation. The shadows clung to the buildings like mammoth bats, slowly stretching their wings to draw more of Shareen’s surroundings into darkness. The shadows were everywhere, advancing and expanding to plunge the city into an early night. The shadows, where even the least of them might conceal an undead figure ready to resume its cannibalistic rampages.

The gurgle of the canal was the only constant as the expedition drifted through blighted Zanice. The barge on which they traveled wasn’t the most elegant of boats, compared to the shapely gondolas and sleek skiffs that they might have appropriated – ones still floating, that is. None of them, however, could have easily accommodated so many people and certainly not a huge orc.

Helchen and Videric had decided that the strength of the vessel was more important than its speed. Neither of them were absolutely certain that the sea serpent couldn’t swim into the canals or that it might not have progeny small enough to do so. Shareen agreed that having a boat that could survive an attack at least for a few minutes was essential.

Looking into the polluted waters made Shareen think she’d prefer being killed outright to sinking into that morbid morass. The barge continually bumped into floating corpses, either brushing them aside or pushing them under. Abandoned boats, smashed crates and casks, wrecked furniture, all the debris made for a slow passage. Ursola and Videric kept busy pushing away such obstacles while Ratbag exerted his inhuman stamina to pole the barge through the murky water. Gaiseric kept at the ready, Cryptblade clenched in his hand, leaping into the fight when a zombie crow would fly up from the dead bodies to try its luck against living prey.

Twice, larger human zombies grabbed Ratbag’s pole and tried to climb up from the canal. Though the undead were dispatched almost as quickly as the lone crows, they were a stark reminder of the threat lurking underwater. With no need to breathe, the zombies that ended up in the canal wouldn’t drown. They simply lingered on the bottom, reacting to whatever disturbed their mindless lethargy. The vision of swimming through the polluted muck only to have decayed hands grab her from below was a constant fear pulsing through the wizard’s veins.

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