I crouched along with my five lieutenants creating a circle in the mud. Around us swayed the rest of my undead horde: some gnashing their teeth, others grasping at the empty air, none of them quite still. Embarrassment and rage took hold of me for a moment and I splattered the muck with a fist before regaining composure, smoothing it out once more. "That fucking wizard reduced us to nearly half our numbers. Such an insult cannot go unpunished," I said motioning to our undead surrounding us as I drew a crude map with my other hand, my ashen flesh contrasting sharply with the dark-brown twig I'd plucked from the ground. Tools, I thought, looking thoughtfully at the stick, such a shame that so much of it was lost now that the living were gone. Or at least now that they'd become just another endangered species of this planet.
"Franks," said Hate/Love hesitantly, trying to find the words. Hate/Love, the newest of our Pale Mind collective having recently fed on enough fresh brain matter to awaken a consciousness. Not enough to remember his past but enough to read the words on his knuckles. "Magic isn't real,, right?"
I glared at him, "I don't know Hate/Love, the fire shooting from his fucking hands seemed pretty real. Maybe we can ask our roasted Shamblers if they think it's real? Besides, I'll bet a couple years ago, you wouldn't have said zombies, especially ones that could talk, were real, yet here we are." I pulled a sharpened bone from my belt and stabbed it into my chest for emphasis. No fear of injury, no pain, just in and back out with only a couple bits of necrotic flesh falling out of the wound and stuck to the bone.
"Sir, you really shouldn't be doing that, especially with food scarce as is," said Tasha though with more annoyance than actual concern.
Waving the bone, I said, "One hole in my chest means nothing if we can't get passed that damn wizard."
"We can't stand against the wizard's magic, Franks," said Richard, standing up and gesturing to the group. "Let's just cut our losses and move along. I'm sure there's other -"
I didn't let him finish. Couldn't lest I find myself wrestling control of the horde from another Pale Mind, especially one that I had brought up and nourished. With Richard's back turned, I stuck the sharpened bone through the temple of his skull into his brain. "The Bots and their AI overlord control the desert behind us and The Rage roaming this region tear apart anything this moves, including other undead. Our only option is to kill the wizard and take his manor. That's our path to safety," I said, dropping Richard's body to the ground. I eyed each of my remaining lieutenants in turn, taking note of Vic and Baby's hungry eyes. "Rich goes to the Shamblers," I growled, "His brains are no good for feasting but we should not let the rest of his stupidity go to waste."
"Franks," said Vic, his eyes now slightly downcast while eyeing the bone still dripping brain matter, "Richard has, um, had a point. Taking on the wizard isn't going to be easy. I, we just want to know that you have a plan."
I raised the sharpened bone before flipping it over and offering the blunt end to Vic, who hesitantly grasped it from me. "Tools," I replied. "Tools are what separates us from the other animals and it will be what grants us our dominance over them, as rabid and ferocious as they may be." Then I turned my back to the group, letting my mind join with the rest of my mindless horde.
With Richard dead, well actually dead, I felt a number of our Shamblers start to slowly peel away, mostly those furthest from the presence of myself and my remaining Pale Minds as we now were one less Mind to hold their numbers. I closed my eyes, focusing on the connection I held with every one of the undead in my horde, from the cognitive Pale Minds, the monstrous Hunters, and the mindless mob of Shamblers. Their connection to the horde faded until eventually they simply disappeared. In the next couple of minutes, I felt twenty-six of our number vanish from my control.
I opened my eyes. "A loss, but not as many as I expected," I said to no one in particular. "Perhaps I really should have let Richard have more the brains." With the remaining ninety-seven undead under my control, I marched us through the woods back to the wizard's manor maintaining cover in the trees while avoiding the open road. Though the Breathers were nearly extinct, it was still best wander as just another horde to avoid suspicions amongst the other forms of undead that populated the globe. Along the way, I gave a slight psychic "push" to any Shambler we happened upon, pulling them along like an avalanche picking up fresh snow as it races down a mountain. With only five Pale Minds, including myself, in my horde, I'd reached the limit on the number of undead I could directly control, but bringing along potential reinforcements couldn't hurt.
We made it to the edge of the woods without incident. Without encountering any living thing, actually: no Breathers, no wild game, not even a bird or rodent. I couldn't imagine the wizard having enough canned foods to survive this long. Perhaps the wizard survived with farm animals and crops hidden on the other side of the manor out of view? I held my horde at the tree line and allowed the wild zombies I'd pulled along to enter the barren field between us and the manor first. After crossing thirty-yards of packed dirt, the wizard made himself known as several dozen ragged ghouls rose from the ground. Standing apart from my horde and the more populous virus-created zombies, the wizard's ghouls stood in various forms (not just undead humans but animals such as wolves and deer) as well as in various states of decay from those that looked dead only a few days ago to bodies that were more bone than flesh. Standing out amongst the ghouls however were a couple of hybrid bodies, fusions of parts not just of different human bodies but mixtures of different species - human bodies with wolf heads, horse bodies with human torsos, and other more nightmarish mixtures. Most terrifying to me though was that many of his ghouls held some sort of weapon in hand (metal pipes, cleavers, axes, etc), curiously even those without a muscle structure to do so. The wizard's undead stood-statue still, letting the wandering undead bump into them as they slowly trudged in the direction of the manor.
"He's not lashing out at them like he did when we last entered his territory," said Tasha, watching along with me.
I nodded in agreement. "Perhaps he's saving his strength, testing these if they are -" I paused, thinking back to our first encounter: wandering to the manor grounds, probing these odd undead as I would others. "Dammit, he's looking for me. I tried to probe a couple of the skeletons, curious how they still moved. That must've been what triggered him to attack us the last time, me trying to get into the head of his ghouls to add them to our horde."
Tasha stared at me, lifeless eyes still managing to parrot a glare before taking a group of Shamblers to blend with the roaming zombies. The rest of my horde waited in the trees, watching. Once Tasha wound a twisting trail halfway across the barren field to the manor, I motioned for my last three Pale Minds to take another portion of our Shamblers into the field. If the wizard suspected anything, no alarm was raised or at least not one that I could sense.
My three Pale Minds now halfway between the trees and the manor and Tasha a blur and outside the psychic bond of the horde, I urged the remainder of the Shamblers and all of our Hunters across the hard-packed dirt while I crawled amongst them. It was slow going, dragging myself and the roughly eight-pound pack through a sea of zombified legs and feet. After ten minutes it dawned on me that as a human, I wouldn't have had a clue where I was going amongst the zombified body parts. Thanks to the horde, though, I could "see" through their eyes, at least the ones that had eyes. The Shamblers were nearly blind though I could make out the shape of other zombies and the mansion through their cataract-ridden eyes. My Hunters though, or at least two of them, had nearly perfect vision thanks to the diet of fresh eyes in addition to the muscle and sinews I directed them to consume. Thanks to whatever strain of the zombie virus that infected my horde, you are what you eat.
Once I got halfway across the field, I gave the order. "Attack." On their own, undead don't attack other undead as there's no food in doing so. Under the control of Pale Minds like myself, we could guide Shamblers, Hunters, and others under our control to attack other forms of undead. And that's what they did. The Shamblers began grabbing at the ghouls, dragging them to the ground and ripping into them as if they were their usual living prey. My five Hunters were much more ruthless and effective, using their huge bodies and brute strength to smash through anything in their path as they barrelled their way to the mansion.
The wizard's ghouls were quick to respond - axes chopping, pipes swinging, fangs biting. Part of me still wondered how those made of just bone did that, though the simple answer was probably "magic." It was too bad that I would never get the answer as I planned to kill the only one with it. Though the ghouls had tools, we had numbers. In the time it took for the wizard's undead to aim a "killing blow" on one of my undead's brain, the horde was able to bring them down, like a crashing wave, and began tearing them apart.
Soon they changed tactics on us, seeking instead to disable and maim rather than outright kill. More of the horde had legs chopped or arms broken by the ghouls' tools, rendering their numbers ineffective, almost worthless. After all, what good are numbers if they're all crawling through the muck or grasping uselessly. Ready to counterstrike, my four lieutenants unslung shotguns - Benelli M1014 12 gauge semi-automatic models scavenged when we overran a Breather fort several days earlier - and began putting holes in the enemy. It was too bad I couldn't equip all of the horde with firearms but it was only the Pale Minds, those who ate enough brain matter to return their consciousness, that had the fine motor functions to load a shell into a tube and pull a trigger. Unlike ourselves, the virus-created, the wizard's magic kept his undead on their feet even with their brains blown-out. Instead, I had my Pale Minds focus their shots on the mid-section, severing spines from legs to drop the enemy undead to the ground for our horde to finish off.
As chaos reigned in the battlefield, a green light filled the middle room on the second floor of the manor - the wizard finally giving us his full attention. As the light grew brighter, other undead ran from the mansion, each one also emitting the same eerie ermine glow. Despite being the size of a normal human zombie, they appeared to move as fast and strike as hard as my Hunters which stood twice their size and weighed nearly three times that. Worst of all, these magically-enhanced undead outnumbered my Hunters four-to-one and more continued to rise. Then, the main event arrived as the wizard himself stepped out of the room, off the balcony, and floated in the air. His hands held in front of him, a green flame lanced down into the battlefield, burning his and my own zombies alike. I felt the connection with at least half the remaining horde simply vanish, unfortunately along with the connection to two of my Hunters and two of my Pale Minds. They'd be the hardest to replace as the world was running short on fresh, Breather brains to feast upon. I set my gaze upon the wizard, floating in the air, and wondering just how much stronger I might become if I ate his brain.
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