Valley of the Dead by Kim Paffenroth & Dante Alighieri

Author:Kim Paffenroth & Dante Alighieri
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: kim paffenroth, dante, pride and prejudice and zombies, permuted press, Dante Alighieri, Zombies, living dead, george romero, inferno, twisted classics
ISBN: 9781934861318
Publisher: Permuted Press
Published: 2010-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Not foliage green, but of a dusky colour,

Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled,

Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.

Dante, Inferno, 13.4-6

They hadn’t gone far before Dante heard the sound of falling water, and soon after, they came to the waterfall the man had described. To their right was a trickle of water, which fell over a cliff and down into the ravine they’d been following up the valley. The stones at the top of the falls were a rusty red. Dante thought they must contain iron, or the leavings of a mine had been dumped into the stream. The water itself looked a foul pink near the banks, with a thin border of yellowish slime. The stream was small enough they easily forded it and climbed the trail on the other side.

The forest on the other side of the stream continued to get thinner as they went. They were up high enough that most of the trees were pines, and most of these appeared diseased and twisted, many of them dead. The forest floor was covered in what Dante imagined to be a millennium’s accumulation of needles, filling the whole space with a caustic, smothering scent. Both the needles on the trees and those on the ground were the color of slate. Once the sound of the waterfall had disappeared behind them, there was silence and stillness, without any breeze, without the call or movement of birds or any other animals. The whole place stung the senses in every way, either by starving, overwhelming, or seeming to deceive them.

The trail bent more or less north, so Dante looked to his left to see where the sun weakly illuminated the blanket of grey clouds filling the sky. The brighter spot in the cloud cover moved closer to the mountains in the west.

Adam must have noticed where Dante was looking, and seemed to guess his thoughts. “We will stop soon,” he said. “We should try to make it as far as we can. There are two steep ascents before the final, hidden trail to the pass. It is too late in the day to make it up the first of those, but we should get as far as we can in this forest and find a clearing to make camp. We will need to rest if we are to have the strength to overcome the final obstacles of this valley.”

Dante saw movement in the trees above them, and looked up to see dozens of vultures perched there. He did not remember such birds being as large as the ones he now saw, spreading then refolding their enormous wings. The motion set the branches swaying up and down, making the whole canopy above them an undulating mass of dark shapes. Dante could make out some of the birds’ faces, and they were horrible to behold, especially for a man with an imagination like his. In the birds’ tiny, shining eyes, he fancied he saw an inhuman intelligence to match their

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