The People's Necromancer by Rex Jameson

Author:Rex Jameson [Jameson, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

The Dead Souvenir

The Archer, de facto leader of the Red Army now that Jeremy Vossen had abandoned them, walked into a house on the outskirts of Dona, a town roughly seven miles north of Mallory Keep. The house was one of dozens he had entered that day, looking for loot. He cared not for the women, not like many of his men. He’d pay for a well-kept whore when he needed that relief.

His men had already visited this house. A woman lay dead in the kitchen, her blood draining through the loose gray boards to the cold, hard-packed ground below. The house had been mostly picked clean of whatever few trinkets and metal that had remained in this hovel of a home.

He came to the house for something else.

“He’s out back,” a grisly man named Murphy with a red sash and blood-stained brown tunic said.

The Archer grunted. He exited through a creaky door that was only attached at the bottom hinge and strode confidently down the stairs. A thigh-high gray wood fence with many loose boards surrounded the small yard. A simple clothes-line spanned the middle of the muddy field, blocking his view of most of a shed at the back of the property. A few blood curdling screams could be heard nearby where his men slaughtered another family. Closer still, the sound of thrusting from his men taking liberties. His eyes weren’t on the rickety projects around him but the trail of blood from the steps to the shed.

“He turned tail,” the grisly lieutenant behind him said. “Soon as we came through the door. Didn’t have a lick o’ fight in him.”

“Sounds about right,” Archer said.

“Frank caught him in the back,” the man said. “He dragged himself yonder there. I knew you wanted to see him. That’s why I sent Frank to find you.”

Archer nodded as he pushed through the creamy sheet with the blood stain from where a hand had pushed it aside. His dark brown boots sloshed in the crimson mud along the stained ground.

“Where were you going, Karl?”

He pushed the door to the shed inward. Karl coughed, favoring his stomach as he lay on his side looking at Archer. A loose board had been disturbed near Karl’s head, exposing a hole in the floorboards.

“How you doing, Stan?” Karl asked, feigning pleasant conversation.

“Is that where you hid it?” Stanley the Archer asked. “Has it been here all this time?”

Karl coughed on his blood. “Go to hell!”

Archer laughed. “If only you’d have had that much fight in you at the dig… Did you run away like this when Sam needed you at Xhonia?

“Demons,” Karl said. “Demons… killed your brother. Black… Came out of the hole. Hot breath. Claws… Fangs…”

“So, it’s not your fault?” Archer asked mockingly. “You did everything you could.”

“They were… eating us…”

“How did my brother die?”

“Not well… Not well at all…”

A tear welled in Archer’s eye. He had raised Sam in the wilderness. The boy had only been sixteen. He had never been in love. He had never been out of the south.

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