Death After Death Ch. 21-22 (Patreon)

(Author’s Note: I feel like maybe this chapter should be lengthened and split into two chapters, but I didn’t want to dwell on Simon’s love story too much. Let me know what you think. Does it need more?)

Ch. 21 - Just a Barmaid

When Simon woke up in the fresh air and the empty bed of his cabin, a small part of him had died. He felt more hurt than he’d been by any of his deaths. The pain he felt as he imagined what had happened to poor Freya was worse than the first time the skeleton knight had killed him or the time the slime had suffocated him to death. His disused emotions had stayed in their lockbox where they belong for so long, that feeling this sense of loss for a sweet young woman was devastating.

Freya had actually liked him. She thought he was funny, and cute, and now she was dead. He would have happily died a dozen times to prevent that, but now he would never get the chance. Or would he? It was only after he’d spent several minutes just laying there and feeling sorry for himself that he realized she was still down there on the sixth floor. Maybe not the version of her that remembered him, but she was still the girl he’d been close to falling in love with. Surely if he saved her again, and they spent a few days together it would be just like it was before, wouldn’t it?

With that thought in mind, Simon quickly started to get ready. He’d promised himself he would take the levels he had on lock nice and slow to use them for practice, but he threw all that out the window, charging into the depths as soon as he was geared up. He didn’t even bother to bring food - just his weapons, his armor, and a single lit torch. It was all he needed. This wasn’t about learning or even progressing. This was about Freya and filling the hole in his heart that should never have been there in the first place.

He rushed heedlessly through level after level, killing what he needed to and no more to get past the next challenge. Being apart from his girl when he knew exactly where to find her was a special kind of torment. The only thing that even slowed him down was the slime, but as soon as he forced it from the water, he burned it to ashes with two simple words. He was a little surprised at how much more effective his fire spell was that it was last time, but he didn’t have time to try to understand why.

He just rushed on to the door that led to his favorite besieged inn. In the backroom where he always appeared, he found the same zombie that always tried to eat him, and Simon dispatched it with a single wet crunch of his mace. Then, he turned, ready to go find Freya, when suddenly the door burst open, and the blond girl with the pitchfork that had killed him not so long ago. Was standing there.

“Who are you,” she demanded. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” She jabbed the air a couple of times just as she did before, but this time Simon was actually still capable of speech as he had nothing but a scratchy throat. The woman was the same busty blond wearing the same dirty blue dress as last time. Her eyes were hard, and she had a bloody bandage covering a wound on one arm. Even if he didn’t have first-hand experience that she was the killing type, he would have believed it just from her appearance.

“Woah, easy there!” he said, backing away. “I’m a friend of Freya’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Her pitchfork lowered almost immediately, and a sad look crossed her face. “A friend… of Freya’s?” She opened her mouth and was about to say something else, but the sound of breaking wood ripped through the room, and they both turned to face it.

The boards on one of the windows had failed, almost identically to the last time he was here. That made sense. The levels were always very similar, but never quite exactly the same.

“Hold on,” Simon said, pushing past her. “Let’s take care of this, and then we can find her. It was only after he said he was a friend that he realized that might cause him problems later when he was talking to her, so he was happy for the interruption.

This time, one of the zombies made it all the way in before he brained it, and he had to kill three more to block the hole before he went for the trestle table like he did last time. “A little help here?” he asked. This time there was no help coming, and he had to push it all the way to the window by himself. When he looked around, he saw the blond girl was still here, but she’d sat down at one of the clean tables and was drinking some kind of liquor straight from the bottle.  She might be feistier, but she wasn’t in a much better place than his Freya had been. That made sense. He wouldn’t want to know anyone that could live through a situation so awful and come out the other side unaffected by it.

“So, where’s Freya at,” Simon asked, as he walked back to the table and tried not to show how out of breath he was. Her only answer was a distant look in her eyes, and another swig from the bottle.

Simon sat down and tried again. “Is everything okay? Look, if more try to get in I promise I’ll protect you, but first I want to make sure that—”

“She didn’t make it,” the woman said, looking at the floor instead of at him. “Okay? She didn’t make it, and there was nothing I could do. She’s gone.”

“Gone? That’s not possible.” Simon retorted. “She has to be here. There’s no way out of this place. I’ve looked.”

“I’m telling you, she’s—” the woman tried to reply.

“Freya!” Simon shouted. “Freya, where are you!” The other woman shook her head as he got up and started looking for her. The longer Simon looked, the louder he shouted until eventually, on the edge of hysteria, he found her in one of the guest rooms of the second floor. At some point in the last few days she’d been turned into a zombie, and after that someone had mercifully put her down. It was horrendous, and gut-wrenching.

Simon just stood there like a baby for several minutes, and it was only after he pulled himself together that he slowly came downstairs and returned to the table with the woman that was apparently the sole survivor in this version of the level. Was there a fifty-fifty chance that he would get either one, he wondered? Could he just kill himself and try again in the hopes of being reunited with Freya? Well he could of course, the question was should he. While he rummaged through his thoughts and tried what to do next, the two of them just sat in near silence while the zombies moaned and shuffled outside.

“Did you know her well?” The other woman asked finally.

“I would have liked to know her better,” Simon said, not looking up.

“I hear you,” she agreed, sounding slightly drunk as she passed Simon the bottle. He took a long swing of something that burned as it went down. It was too raw and fiery to be called whiskey, but it was probably its distant cousin somehow. “I wanted to know a lot of things. What the sea smelled like. If a girl from Schwarzenbruck could ever amount to anything. How Helfun Orgson kissed. But then the world ended, and I never got the chance. It’s a tough break for both of us.”

“She was just such a sweet girl.” Simon whined. “I don’t know how this could happen to her.”

“Look out on those streets. Every monster there was a good guy or a sweet girl only a day or two ago. It ain’t her fault any more than it was theirs.” Simon shrugged. She wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t want to agree to anything that would make her death or the way it affected him feel less special. The two sat there for a while, slowly getting drunker and more philosophical, but neither of those things helped Simon to climb out of the morass of hopelessness and self-pity that he was slowly sinking into.

Eventually, the barmaid said,“let’s have a tumble. Maybe the last one before the world ends. What do you say?”

Simon looked over at her like he’d misheard the woman, but between the way she was smiling at him and the fact that she’d let the left strap of her dress slide off her shoulder in a way that practically let her tits spill out left no room for doubt.

“We can’t,” Simon said, ignoring the way his body responded to the beauty. “I don’t even know your name, and you're drunk. That’s not exactly the way these things are supposed to work.”

“Well I’m Brenna, and the dead aren’t exactly supposed to be rising from the grave neither, but here they are,” she said, standing up and walking over to him. She grabbed the other strap and let the dress fall, pooling at her feet. “Come on. One last fling before we all go off to meet our maker. There’s no harm in it.”

For Simon, this was a surreal situation. Not only was he actively grieving the loss of someone, which he swore he’d never do, because it was stupid, but he was being hit on by a woman who was way hotter than he’d ever been with in his whole life… and he was turning her down. Down to her slippers, her small clothes, and the bandage on her arm, she was a wet dream if he’d ever seen one. Back home she would have been a bikini model or a starlet, but here she was just the second serving girl in a backwater town.

She walked around him, slowly admiring him and complimenting him, and in a way that was almost more attractive to Simon than the amount of skin she’d put on display. When she started to undo his shoulder straps, he didn’t fight back as much as he should. This wasn’t really wrong after all. It only felt wrong. By the time he saw Freya again, he would already be at least one life removed from whatever he did with Breanna today. It would be like it never even happened. Part of Simon recognized that he’d already given up trying to fight what was going to happen next, but he was too numb to care as they walked up the stairs. Now he was just looking to justify why it was okay to himself, but he knew that was just the alcohol talking, and that he’d regret it tomorrow.

Somehow he still couldn’t make himself stop though as she started to kiss his neck, and grope him under his breastplate. “Please,” she pleaded. “Just one more time… I need it so badly. I…”

Her words trailed off as she moaned in his ear, and while she gasped and trembled, his second thoughts grew to a crescendo. As much as he would love to spend the night with her, he knew that his heart wasn’t in it. “Brenna, you’re a beautiful woman, but we can’t do this. My heart belongs to— Ah what the fuck,” he suddenly pulled away as he felt her bite him. Simon whipped around to see that all the panting and the moaning she’d been doing for the last few seconds hadn’t been some kind of foreplay; she’d become something less than human.

And she’d just bitten him.

That thought barely had time to sink in as he fumbled for a weapon. The only thing in reach was the bottle they’d been drinking from, but that shattered when he struck her and left her largely unfazed. She snapped at him again, and he fended her off as best he could, but without his bracers on she managed to bite him one more time before he put her down by smashing her head into the counter several times. She was strong, but she didn’t weigh much, and a broken neck put zombies out of action as easily as breaking their skull.

After that, all that Simon could do was stare in horror at his wound. This was not good, not fucking good at all.

Ch. 22 - Worse than Death

Author’s Note: This is a very disturbing chapter on a variety of levels. Reader discretion is advised.

Why would I write it? It wasn’t just to create stakes for Simon, although that was part of it (because if you can’t truly die, then you risk nothing in dying.). I feel like so many monsters in these sorts of stories have been trivialized to the point of meaninglessness. It’s gotten to the point that they not only can’t provide a challenge to the main character, but they are no longer really a threat. I can’t fix that, but if I can try to help my readers think differently about things like the lowly goblin and zombie over the last twenty chapters, then that’s enough for me.

Simon cast his healing spell on himself immediately. Twice. In both cases it seemed to work, and closed the wound leaving only a small dark scar on his forearm. He couldn’t see the back of his neck but he imagined it was much the same based on what he could feel. That didn’t stop whatever dark magic was in that bite though. He could feel it, and he didn’t have a spell to cure disease or curse or whatever this was supposed to be.

“This isn’t good at all,” he muttered to himself looking at the beautiful dead girl on the floor. There was a coldness in his arm, and a fever just starting to cloud his thoughts. He’d seen enough movies to know how this was going to end.

“I’ll be fine,” he tried to tell himself. “I come back every time I die.”  It was true. Every time he’d died he’d come back completely unscathed, but this time there was a feeling of dread similar to the first time he’d thought the skeleton knight was going to try to take his soul. As a feeling of weakness began to overtake him, Simon started to climb the stairs. He didn’t have time to make a noose that would snap his neck, and he doubted he had the willpower to bash his brains out, but he was pretty sure he could dive well enough to shatter his spine on the cobbles in front of the inn.

It was just a precaution, he told himself, rushing up the stairs even as his body started to respond more slowly. As he began to fumble and limp on his way up the second flight of stairs, Simon started to panic. It was too soon. Why had Breena lasted for hours or days as a human, while he could feel himself turning after mere minutes? The best answer that Simon could come up with was the location. She had a bite on her arm, and he had one right next to his fucking brain stem!

He would have kicked himself for how stupid he’d been if he had the energy. He let himself get distracted by her body and completely missed the obvious warning sign. Recriminations could wait until later though, he decided as he leaned heavily against the wall and climbed the last few steps, if there was a later.

Simon managed to make it to the window, but by that point the world was a haze, and he lacked the strength or coordination to make a proper dive. The best he could do was fling himself from the opening, and tumble down the brown tile roof painfully until he landed on the street three floors below. Sadly, half a dozen zombies broke his fall, and his last seconds of life were spent being torn to pieces while he screamed weakly.

Then suddenly it stopped.

Suddenly the zombies lost all interest in him, and started to mill around looking for their next target. Simon thought it was strange that he was still around to see that, but he supposed that blood loss from so many small, shallow wounds could take a while to add up. It wasn’t until he started to stand up, and when he realized he no longer had any control over his own body, that he truly began to panic. He was trapped here, but his hands and feet were moving without any conscious direction from him. Worse, he was trying to stop the movements, but it was like his mind was completely disconnected from the body he’d lived in all his life. It was worse than disorienting, it was traumatizing. It was like someone else had taken him over, and he was being forced to do whatever they said.

That didn’t stop it from moving, though, or from hurting. Every wound that had been inflicted on him, from the ribs that were broken in the fall to the smallest of bites, ached as he moved, but it wasn’t enough to stop him, or the hunger that was building inside of him. For most of today, Simon had been sad and pleasantly intoxicated. He hadn’t eaten, but he hadn’t been hungry either. Right now, though, he was ravenous, and the hunger just kept growing and growing inside of him. It got worse though when he turned to the delicious smell of prey somewhere in the distance. Even in a city this ravaged, and this full of the dead, somewhere, someone was alive, and his mouth watered with the desire to devour their flesh.

It was disgusting, and made him feel unclean, but Simon couldn’t escape it, or even fight it. It was a hunger so loud and all consuming it drowned out all other thoughts, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. All he could do was watch, feel, and endure, but after only hours as a member of this shuffling mob slowly drifting towards the next likely meal he felt himself going mad inside his own rotting corpse.

For days all he did was wander, moan, and try to force his way into closed doors and boarded windows without much success. Then one day, a starving couple made a break for it, leaping from rooftop to rooftop in an attempt to escape the undead that crowded the streets and chased them slowly. Weak as they were, though, the man fell off the rooftop nearest Simon, and he was able to devour the man’s lifeblood along with several other zombies before the light in his eyes went out forever.

It was the single worst moment of Simon’s life, not just because of what he’d done, but because in that terrible moment his dark hunger finally quieted, and he could think again. His mind could scream and rebel at what he was being forced to do. He couldn’t stop it, though. He was powerless to stop anything that was happening. Something broke inside him when he tasted that warm coppery flavor on his tongue, but what was left of his sanity felt like it shattered completely when he saw that man he’d just helped murder stand back up and join the ranks of the dead.

Now the forces of death pursuing the crying woman left alone on the rooftop were stronger by one, and in time the man that had just died might be forced to kill his beloved. It was a truly horrible idea, but the zombie that was once her partner could do more to hold himself back from such an awful thing than Simon could as he groped for the next source of fresh meat that was fortunately several feet out of reach.

The only solace from these thoughts was the maddening hunger. Once it got bad enough, even his self-pity was drowned out by his need to feast on the living.

Eventually there was no one left alive inside the city walls, and for weeks the zombies were able to do nothing but scratch the gates and the bricks in order to try to escape to hunt down the life they could sense somewhere beyond them. They should have stayed like that, but eventually some adventurers decided to open the gates to do the heroic thing, and slay the growing evil. They were unsuccessful. They slew hundreds before their band fell, but unfortunately Simon was not among them. He lived long enough to watch all their members fall to exhaustion in the endless tide of death, and though he didn’t have to live with the guilt of murdering any of them, he was set free on the world along with the hundreds of others.

They ravaged the countryside. Slowly spreading out, until he was but one slavering mouth among dozens rather than hundreds, as they slowly devoured all in their path. In each farm and village the zombies encountered, their numbers were whittled down until there were only a few left, only to be replenished by the risen dead of their victims, until the force was bigger than it was when it had started.

They were a plague, and Simon was a part of it. Some towns fell in hours, and others in days, but eventually they all fell, and through all this Simon was trapped in an endless cycle of impossible hunger followed by guilt and shame and the truly awful things that were being done by his body. It wasn’t by him. That’s what he tried to tell himself whenever he murdered another innocent person that was too slow to escape from him and his rotting companions.

Over the months that Simon endured all this he gathered an increasingly painful collection of wounds of all kinds, but by the time he received most of them he could no longer feel anything at all. Arrows. Crossbow bolts. Cuts and lacerations. A crushed collarbone and broken arm. For a long time he endured a sword through his guts until his body began to rot enough for it to fall away. The pain got worse and worse for weeks as he walked around with a chest full of broken bones until one day it started getting better. That was because his flesh was rotting away like everyone else’s, and though that was a different sort of horrifying, at least it didn’t hurt anymore.

That didn’t stop the hunger, though. Nothing did.

Simon was grateful that he couldn’t see what any part of his body beyond his hands, and occasionally his feet looked like, though those were disturbing enough in their own right. In the moments of lucidity after he’d sated his hunger again, he would look at those glimpses of himself and truly despair. No matter how bad it got though, he never became lost in his despondency. He couldn’t. Each new horror was worse than the last as he slowly but surely became unhinged.

Then finally there was a real army waiting to face them, with mages and knights in plate mail he couldn’t bite through, and rank after rank of soldier wielding halberds. Simon could have wept for joy if he’d still had eyes. He could only see now in the fuzziest of ways, like he was seeing the auras around the people, and not actually the people themselves. There was finally someone that was going to strike him down, so he could be done with this, but the horde had once again grown to the size that it was impossible to slay them all, so the army retreated behind walls, resorting to arrows and magic to whittle away the endless tide.

Simon had to wait weeks more for release for his torments. No matter how often they shot him from the walls with longbows, they always managed to miss his head, leaving him to bask in his hunger and pain that much longer. Eventually, though, he was bathed in magical fire by a spell that didn’t sound so much different from the one he knew. Like everything else, that fire didn’t hurt at first, but as it finally began to boil away the last of the tissue in his skull, Simon’s long numb body once again recalled what pain was. Eventually, driven half mad by the pain of being burned alive, Simon slipped slowly into the gentle release of darkness. Secretly, he hoped that he would just stay dead after this.

No more pit, no more reincarnation, no more of anything at all. Just the sweet caress of oblivion.

Alas, when he opened his eyes once more, he found himself staring at the familiar rough timbers of his cabin. He’d felt angry and frustrated before in this position. He’d felt cheated and screwed over while he laid here before. He’d even felt despair in that initial moment, but the one thing Simon had never felt until now was damned.