Healer's Gambit (part 3 of 3)

Seeing Falko on his feet braced between my two classmates, I winced at the memory of the lifetime of agony we'd shared only a little while ago. Falko's clothing that still hung together did so by threads and dried blood, every inch of it stained dark red. He looked like a man starved for days. Tufts of hair patched his otherwise bald scalp, most of it yanked out by zombies looking for any sort of purchase on his body. Though his strength must be waning every second, he still kept a white-knuckled grip on his axe hanging at his side. The worst of the damage I could see in his eyes, darting left and right seeking out the next threat coming to cause him harm.

Once I got close enough, very slowly as not to startle Falko, I slipped off my cloak and draped it around him. With a surprising amount of strength I didn't think he had in him, Falko took me to the ground with a shoulder tackle, riding me to the stone floor. A knee in my chest, he raised the axe to strike.

"We're safe now. You got us to safety," I repeated over and over. I held my arms out and away from my body, gesturing to the other two to stay back. I kept my eyes locked with Falko's, trying to find something in there that recognized me: conveying the memories of bones broken, of flesh rendered and torn, of the eternal pain that would never end. With a simple nod, he pulled the pin from his tongue and dropped it on my chest. Then, he got off of me.

Still cautious, I stood slowly. "We'll get you to a real healer as soon as possible, get you fixed up properly," said, trying to convey a friendly smile as I reached out to him.

Falko subtly stepped away, avoiding my touch. "It isn't over yet," he said, walking down the hallway, "You said that the zombies weren't created by a virus, which means the necromancer rose them from the dead. They could've ran off into the town or anywhere else, but they all came this way. The necromancer is close-by, and we're going to find them."

"It'll take us some time to get the Detect Dark Magic spell ready. Are you sure you don't want to rest, or even sit this part out?" Isabella asked, placing a hand on Falko's shoulder, then immediately removed it when Falko let out a bestial growl.

It took the four of us another half-hour to locate the necromancer hiding within the castle walls with the spell. Now that our lives weren't under constant threat, we could not only take the time to complete the spell but actually maintain it while we searched the school grounds and all its hidden chambers. Resurrecting and controlling as many zombies as he did must've weakened him a great deal if he could no longer hide his presence from a simple detection spell cast by four underclassmen.

"So how are we getting in?" I asked as the four of us stared at a bare stone wall. "Do you think there's a password to open the door, or a hidden lever someplace?"

"Step. Aside," Liza said sternly from behind me. I felt the air charge with electricity before I leapt out of the way. A blinding Boom! shook the walls, and for an instant I thought the entire castle might fall down around us. When I could see again, the wall that blocked our path lay in ruins, a thick fog of dirt and debris hanging in the air.

Falko stepped through the hole first, axe in hand. Where he found the strength to keep pushing his body forward after what he'd been through, I'll never know nor hope to ever need to find in myself. A small fire appeared in his free hand which he used to light two torches against the wall. The room appeared to be a storage room filled with rolled rugs standing up against the walls. In the middle of the room stood an old man whose bones probably weighed more than the skin, muscle, and fat clinging to it. A bone grey cloak draped over him. The necromancer. 

Falko approached first, the axe still held down at his side. The necromancer lunged, a knife in hand, one last desperate attempt. The knife sunk into Falko's chest, sliding between his ribs. "Controlling an entire horde may be too much for an old man passed his prime, but once my poison turns your body into a corpse you'll be my puppet. Then we'll see how your friends fare when they're fighting you."

Looking over Falko's shoulder, I smiled at the necromancer as Falko yanked the knife from his chest, the wound already closing. "Healer," I introduced myself, gesturing to my hand on Falko's shoulder. "Now let's all just sit tight until the Council Authority arrives in the morning."

I prepared myself for perhaps one more trick from the necromancer. Instead, it was Falko that moved first, stabbing the knife through the dark wizard's hand and pinning it to a wooden beam against the wall. He raked the axe across the necromancer's mid-section, a line of blood forming on his clothes but not deep enough to reach organs.

The necromancer laughed. "Frail child, that was not nearly deep enough for a killing blow. Perhaps you've used all your strength against my puppets?" He paused, seeing the anger and rage in Falko's face. "Ahh, or maybe that was not meant to be fatal. Do you mean to torture me then, because I can assure you, I will be long dead before you can find any manner of satisfaction." The necromancer grinned even wider, his smile an acid that almost melted the anger from Falko's face into one of despair and frustration.

The final lesson in pain is that it doesn't just end when the body heals, when the bones reset, when the scars fade. Depending upon the amount of trauma the body sustains, it could take even longer for the mind to heal. Healers-in-training spend their first-year learning to heal their bodies from a variety of injuries; and the only way the school teaches is first-hand, constantly breaking the students' bodies. At the end of the year, the school offered all students that passed several counseling sessions over the summer to help with healing our minds with what we'd put ourselves through.

I stared at the necromancer and his toothy smile as if he believed he was the one who was victorious. My body started to shake as my mind returned to the very recent memory of teeth rending flesh and ruthless hands tearing at limbs. I thought about lying on that damn couch trying to describe the helplessness I felt against a seemingly neverending parade of death and torture to someone I knew would never understand. Counseling, as if surviving a thousand, ten-thousand near-death experiences in a matter of hours at the hands of a madman can be cured with mere words. Authority has always put itself between victims and the punishment to be delivered to their assailants, as if they are in a better position to dole out just vengeance than the one that was injured. No, if Falko and I were to truly heal from our experience, we needed to do it on our own, with our own hands. And, I thought, looking at the necromancer's frail body, he'd need to survive for all of it.

I pushed my way passed Falko's frozen frame and slapped the older man in the face. The necromancer recoiled in pain, screaming. And so did I as a spike drove itself into my left eye, the pain of a knife stabbed through my right hand. I glanced up to see Falko looking at me, his resigned face gone and replaced by one of surprise. I nodded.

The necromancer reached for the pin I'd jabbed into his eye with his free hand. With a quick swing, Falko removed it with his axe, the hand dropping to the floor with a wet thud. The necromancer still screamed, trying to pull the pin free from his eye with the bloody stump of his amputated hand. Falko rested the axe on his shoulder while his free hand held another ball of fire. A maniacal grin spread across his face, a contagious one too as I felt his glee spread to my own face. "The Council doesn't arrive until morning. It's only a couple hours away but, trust me, with the experience we just had we know how to make even one hour feel like an eternity."

The axe head swung and I felt it bite into my shoulder, just deep enough to hit bone but not to sever it. Flames scorched my face, melting flesh down to the jaw bone. Like with Falko, I did nothing to numb the necromancer's pain. In fact, I turned up the pain sensitivity as far as I could, causing the necromancer to scream even louder, while ensuring the shock didn't kill him. Through the pain, I felt my own face mirror the same smile on Falko's face. Falko was right, I thought, closing my eyes and embracing the pain, we were in for a long night.

Inspired by a very, very old Reddit Writing Prompt about being attacked by zombies when your specialty magic is healing. And by very old, probably one of the first ones I saw when I started responding to prompts. Wait, you're thinking, why are you only posting this now? Well, this story, like "The Cape" was one of the those stories that I got really carried away with, so instead of ever posting the story, it sat in my head unfinished in other notebooks. Then, since I was writing all those other zombie stories recently, I figured now was a good time to finally get it done. I'm pretty happy about the middle section of the story (I even did research, sort-of, of different body parts that were attacked by the zombies). If this were something I was submitting for publication or getting paid to write, yeah, there's things I'd go back to fix-up. That beginning, we should've gotten more of a look at the 4 students and who they were. Probably introducing the necromancer's motivations, and where the damn faculty disappeared off too that put the four kids in charge of castle defense. If I understood more about mental health (or bothered with research) that ending shouldn't have been so rushed, maybe introduce more about PTSD  and trauma than what I added in there real quick. But those can be added in if I ever find someone looking for a short zombie story, which by the way this already comes in at almost 4800 words (why I split into 3 parts) and if I added everything else, I'm guessing closer to 6000 words which is way too long for these blog posts.

And just for more about the story as it's been sitting in my head for so long. It would be the longest thing I'd written (thus worth more in terms of money per word), it would have horror and action and fear and emotion and just desserts. The other responses to the same prompt, or course, had the main character doing things like healing the undead to counter the necromancy or healing the zombies so their souls could pass on properly. I definitely know that my idea was so much better. I mean, using one of your partners as bait that you keep healing, what a fucked up plan. At least it's not something I'd ever seen anywhere else. Probably because it's such an asshole thing to do. That said, sad to say, this story for the longest time, is what I considered to be my magnum opus, the greatest thing I'd ever written. I know, right, what an insane thing to say - How can you know something is good if you've never written it? And just off the top of my head, I could name at least three stories I've written that are better than this one, one of them even being my Pokemon Fanfic that I also haven't finished so I guess I really haven't learned my lesson. But anyways, it's finally finished after all these years, leaving, I think, just one or two or five more of these types of stories to go before I've gotten through my backlog of unwritten crap. And yes, I also know how insane it is to think that I would send this off to be published as it ends with the main character/s torturing the shit out of the bad guy. Yeah, I'm not so fucked up that I don't know how fucked up that is. And yet, that's probably the one part of the story that I wouldn't compromise if asked, it's definitely staying in.