The Secret Zombie History of the World by Toby Venables

Author:Toby Venables [Venables, Toby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Horror
ISBN: 9781849977340
Google: lWuBAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Abaddon Books
Published: 2013-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

COUNTESS MADALYN SAT rigid on her horse. A long pole with a gleaming steel point was inserted through a pannier beside her saddle. From the top of it, Y Ddraig Goch, the dragon of Wales, billowed on a green weave.

It gave her a commanding aura, a queenly air, but those who knew her would say that her posture was just a little too stiff, her gloved hands knotted too tightly on her leather reins. Though her flame-red hair was a famed glory of the Powys valleys, her fleece hood was drawn up tightly. She wore a linen veil, drenched with perfume, across her nose and mouth. She looked neither left nor right, but focussed intently on the gaunt edifice of Grogen Castle.

From this position on the western bluff, it was difficult to see exactly what was happening over there. Palls of brackish smoke still cloaked the side of the fortress facing the river. The wall on that side had been blackened by fire, and massive projectiles were still being hurled across the water at it. With each monstrous impact, stones and bodies flew through the air, though no accurate tally could be made of the English dead. Likewise on the Barbican, which the great scooped throwing-machine located in the wood beyond the crest of the hill behind her had been pounding with showers of broken stone and metal. Consternation had been caused among its defenders, which intensified massively when, in scenes the countess had never thought she’d witness in a thousand lifetimes, human beings had also been flung up there, spinning through the air, turning over and over. In many cases they’d missed the Barbican altogether, falling short into the moat or striking the castle walls. Even those that reached it were surely landing with such force that they’d be broken to pieces. And yet fighting had followed on the Barbican battlements: figures struggling together, the flashing of blades, bodies and body parts dropping over the parapets, prolonged and hideous shrieks.

Of course, even concentrating on these horrible scenes was preferable to watching the mass of dead and decayed flesh shuffling onto the bluff around her. On first arriving here, she’d tried to steel herself, to face the reality of what she was doing. Initially it hadn’t been so bad – one stumbling, ragged figure had seemed much like another if you avoided looking at its face. But it wasn’t long before she was noticing the various methods by which these pitiful forms had first been sent from this world: the nooses knotted at their throats, the spears that spitted them, the crazily angled torsos where spines had been broken.

In some cases it had hardened her resolve, reminding her in a way words never could of the depredations inflicted on her people. An old man – eyeless, tongueless, waving stumps for hands – made her weep. A young man – naked, a festering cavity where his genitals should be, a beam across his shoulders, his wrists nailed to either end

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