He was staring up, so I stared up. Like he said, there was now a light in one of the tower windows, not white, but a strange flickering orange. A sense of foreboding came over me, something I’d not felt in centuries. “Fire,” I whispered, still unsure if I was actually seeing what I was seeing.
“No,” said Dara. “Can’t be.”
But it was. And it wasn’t alone. Soon enough, more lights came on, shining in windows all around the square, both high and low, but all from above. “That explains it,” I said.
“Explains what?” asked Ricky.
I tried to move in reverse, but the throng was too thick. “Explains why you were the only crumb we found.” I turned his way. “We were looking in the wrong place.” I pointed all around. “Should’ve been looking up, not down.”
Just then, one of the lights came hurtling our way, a flaming torch landing with a dull thud to our left, lighting a long desiccated zombie, then two, three, like so much kindling. Poof! they went.
“It’s a trap!” shouted Dara, hysteria in her voice. Which meant that yes indeed someone was watching out for us. Watching and waiting, that is to say.
“All zombies HALT!” I shouted, my lungs burning.
Those zombies on our sides immediately halted, but still the fires kept coming and coming, raining down as if all hell had broken loose, which probably wasn’t all that far off the mark. Still, at least with the zombies halted, we could run, to a certain degree, between them.
Had we been able to see.
Had it not been dark out.
Had the burning, blazing, fiery zombies around us not darkened the square with fine white ash and thick black smoke in about two seconds flat.
“Dara!” I shouted.
“Creature!” she shouted back, somewhere off to my side, though where I hadn’t a clue.
The flames kept whizzing by, smacking into the ground, more zombies immediately engulfed, their groans at once extinguished. By then, I could barely see a foot in front of me and all I could hear were the belching flames as they took to the sky. I had to get out of the square; that much I knew. Had to find cover, escape the flying torches, escape certain, to use the word loosely, death.
Just then, the zombies under my control had started moving again, pushing me, bumping me, turning me this way and that. I could still make out the tower high above, so at least I was moving in the right direction, almost to safety.
“Everyone head where I’m heading,” I managed to cough out.
Thankfully, that’s just what the nearby throng did. As one, we made it to the edge of the square, the flames no longer reaching us, though the area we’d just come from was completely swallowed up in a sea of fiery red and sooty black, piles of mangled, scorched corpses everywhere.
“Dara!” I hollered. I waited, but there was no reply. “DARA!” I knew my heart was no longer beating, but I could feel the phantom pound just the same, lub-dubbing in double-time.
Somehow, Ricky was still by my side, separated by a mere few intact zombies. “I don’t see her,” he said. “Don’t hear her.”
I could barely make him out in the darkness. “She’s there. I know it.” And I felt it, too. After three hundred years, we had a connection of sorts, as if we were wired into the same circuitry. Perhaps, since I’d turned her, she and I were one, far greater than the sum or our parts.
“But can we afford to wait here for her?” he whispered as he pushed ever closer, until we were again side by side. “If the square was a trap, then what if this is as well? What if we’re being cornered now? Could we even see the enemy approaching?”
I knew that what he was saying made sense, but I couldn’t leave without her. I couldn’t. But where was she? Still in the square? That was the one place we couldn’t go, the torches still firing down upon it, the clattering of wood still evident. Up was also not an option, the memory of our all-too-recent slow-going stair adventure still fresh in my head. Plus, up was where the enemy was.
“I can’t leave her,” I cried out, turning his way. “I won’t.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “You have to. You won’t do anyone any good if you’re captured. Or worse.”
Oh, to still have tears, I thought. But he was right. If she was captured, injured, in need of me, I had to make sure that I was safe, had to make sure that I could be there for her, and in one piece. Though every moment I stood along the sidelines was another chance of getting caught, especially if this too was part of the enemy’s plans. After all, someone had years to work it all out, perhaps decades, centuries. I, suffice it to say, barely had minutes.
I looked from the blazing inferno up ahead before turning back his way. “Fine, but close by, not so exposed. That way we can keep an eye out for her at the very least.”
He nodded, and into the shadows we moved.
Eventually, we stopped hearing the clattering of torches in the square. The onslaught, it appeared, had ended. Did the enemy think we were dead? Impossible to say. Though, to be certain, dozens and dozens of zombies were now no more than ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But was that Dara’s fate? I prayed not.
“She’s out there,” I whispered to Ricky as we hunkered within a tattered felled awning, the torn gaps allowing us to see the moonlit street in front of us, the zombies once again milling in all directions, oblivious to the recent massacre.