RACHAEL LAVIN
SIX MONTHS AFTER FIRST NIGHT
— 1 —
“Left! Right! Strike! Strike! Watch your footing!” A young woman’s voice carried across a grassy field as she paced between the long lines of fighters, dark green eyes watching her students run through training exercises. Dozens of people, from mid-teens to late forties, lined up in front of her in slightly askew rows, wooden training swords or large sticks gripped firmly in their hands, moving in unison through careful forms. “Don’t stop. I don’t care if you’re tired. Remember, the orcs don’t get tired. Ever.”
Orcs. It was what she’d nicknamed the living dead. It was maybe a silly name, borrowed from The Lord of the Rings. The difference here was that these orcs were real monsters. And they were dead. All of the millions, or perhaps billions, of people who’d died when the plague swept across the world had risen to become monsters. To become orcs.
She was not exaggerating to the people she trained. The orcs never got tired, they never gave up, they were relentless and insatiably hungry for the flesh of the living. Half measures and half-assed training were not going to help anyone survive. Only real warriors would live long enough to maybe try and build something, to take back some land from the dead and claim it as theirs. And so Rachael Elle worked her people harder and harder every day.
The late spring day came with an unseasonably warm breeze, the sun rising in a clear sky. In a normal world this would be a beautiful day, the sort where you wanted to be outside, enjoying and relaxing.
But this was not that world. Rachael knew that better than anyone here. She had led a group of cosplayers and other survivors out of a hotel in New York, fighting floor by floor against thousands of the dead. It had taken weeks, during which Rachael had changed from a fangirl playing at being a super hero to an actual warrior. Maybe not a hero—at least not in her own eyes—but a practiced killer. She got her people—and by then they were her people—out of New York and down into rural Pennsylvania, then to Virginia. Fighting every step of the way. Refining her skills and becoming more of a warrior, and more of a killer, every day.
And it wasn’t just the orcs she’d killed. While out on a scouting mission to find resources for her people, she’d come upon a bus full of terrified little kids. She’d pieced together that they were waiting for their protector; Dez, a raw and violent cop from Stebbins—the town where the outbreak began. Dez was in a running fight with a group of human monsters—all very much alive, but all the more evil for that. They called themselves the Nu Klux Klan, and they were rounding up women and children for the sickest kind of entertainment. Into this mix came a man, Captain Joe Ledger, who said he’d been a Special Ops soldier before the world fell apart. Ledger and his big combat dog, Baskerville, joined up with Rachael and Dez. There was a terrible battle at a farmhouse, and when the smoke cleared the Nu Klux Klan had been butchered.
The Rachael who left that carnage was immensely far removed from the naïve and earnest cosplayer who had been at the comic convention in New York. She wondered how she would look to her family, but forced herself to turn away from that thought. That kind of loss was a much more destructive bite than anything the orcs could do.
Rachael propped the long stick she used for training across her shoulders, hooking her arms over it, standing back to watch. She looked like an average early twenty-something, having exchanged her superhero costume today for a worn geeky T-shirt with a Batgirl logo, loose fitting jeans and heavy-duty, knee-high leather boots. Her long auburn hair was pulled up into a loose bun, wavy tendrils escaping around her face and blowing in the breeze. The only thing that seemed out of place was the sharp elven sword and dagger strapped to her hips.
“Brian!” she called out. “Foot! Stop crossing over. That’s how you trip yourself.”
They had only been training for a few weeks, but she was pleased how quickly her team was developing their skills. Brett and Rachael took turns training them, putting their little combat experience from LARPing—live-action role playing—to some use. Their form wasn’t perfect, but it kept them alive, and that was the best they could do.
It wouldn’t help them against a trained, living opponent.
But their targets were slightly easier.
“Again!”
Listening over the sighing wind for any sounds of the dead, she watched her trainees run through the exercises over and over.
Practice meant perfect.
Practice meant fewer people died.
Over the last few months, their numbers had exponentially increased. What once had been a tiny traveli
ng band of survivors that had barely escaped New York was now a full-fledged group. As their numbers increased, travel grew increasingly difficult, so the old hospital located on an earlier foray had proven useful as a refuge. After clearing it out and repairing the makeshift chain-link fences, they’d expanded the yards and added more outside areas—gardens and open areas for people to escape, even briefly, the confines of concrete walls. They set up traps in the surrounding woods, building fences next to it, upping their levels of security, and they drove the dead away.
It was almost like having a home.
But homes needed protecting, and the rumors and tales spread of the woman dressed as a superhero and armed with a sword, cutting through the undead. People traveled to join them, looking for safety, for a place to belong in their new, more dangerous world.
As their numbers grew, however, so did the threats. They would welcome anyone who wanted security and agreed do their part, but there were always enemies who would try to take their home, and orcs who stalked the landscape. Rachael couldn’t protect them all herself, even with Brett at her side. He was a brute of a man who used to cosplay Thor without having to use padding. Brett was enormously powerful and moderately quick, but he did not share Rachael’s combat intuition. Or her ruthlessness.
Then Alice, one of the women who had joined around the time of the battle at the farmhouse, expressed interest in learning how to fight so she could help, and that had given Rachael an idea. But she never expected the number of volunteers who stepped forward when she posed the idea to their group.
Wandering through the lines of training survivors, she tapped her stick lightly against legs and arms, adjusting stances and grips.
“Andy, foot farther forward,” came a familiar voice. Rachael smiled at the sound. Brett came up to join her on the field. She was glad he hadn’t left with their last patrol. The group was safer for having another competent fighter and . . . well, she was happier when he was around.
“Take a break,” she called out, handing her stick to one of the fighters as they walked away, “we’ll resume in twenty minutes. Make sure to stretch!”
She turned, walking with Brett a short distance away.
“How are they doing?” he asked. He brushed strands of long blond hair that had escaped from his ponytail out of his face and leaned back against a tree, folding muscular arms as he did so.