We the People vol 2: Liberty or Death

“Thane!”

She half collapsed, half staggered into Bast’s arms. His hand ran through her silver hair, eye focused on her pallid, wrinkled skin.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“Nothing that a few brains won’t fix,” she said with some effort “is my army still coming?”

“Yes,” he raised his head to stare down the road. Thane peered through a haze of agony and weariness to see a dust cloud kicked up by her troops.

“Thane, you have to do something,” he said, panic rising in his voice. “They can’t just march right into Bennington looking like that!”

“I know,” she said “Help me walk.”

Thane, supported by Bast, led the corpse army into the forest. They halted at her command, swaying slightly with the breeze. Undead reeds in the wind.

Bast carried her back to their base camp. She wasn’t sure where the Major acquired the cerebral matter for the meal he brought her a bit later. Bast didn’t explain and she didn’t ask.

Feeling better, Thane sent for John Stark. The general took the sight of his unconventional forces better than she would have thought. He only retched once. After composing himself, he managed to speak quietly with Thane.

“I’m not certain I can do this, my lady,” he said “I knew some of these men, personally. Now, seeing them like this...”

As if on cue, a Minute Man lost the lower half of his jaw. Thane quickly picked it up and jammed it back into place. It fell back to the dirt, and she snatched it up again. After it fell a third time she kicked it into a nearby briar patch and stood bodily in front of the decomposing soldier.

“Uh,” she said lamely “it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Stark said, rubbing a palm down his face. “Will they even listen to you? They seem monstrous...”

They both noticed Bast approaching, ducking beneath a low hanging branch. The Major wore dark blue period dress, stained and worn.

“Thane can command them, Stark,” he said. Bast’s temple twitched as he looked the general up and down. “You just have to ride around and look impressive.”

“Be nice, Bast,” Thane said “not everyone is as unflappable as you.”

“Or as you, my lady.” Stark gave her a small bow with his neck. “Very well. I will do what I must for the common good.”

“That’s all we can ask,” Thane said.

The march from Bennington to Walloomsac was miserable for Thane. Though she wasn’t bothered by the torrential downpour that soaked the army to the bone, her companions often raised their voices in anger at the sodden conditions. Her problem was the constant, steady drain from her troops. She rode, bouncing, in the back of a flatbed wagon, the canvas covering useless to keep out the rain.

“Here.”

Thane lifted her head, shocked to see Bast seated next to her. She had not even felt him get in the wagon. He was offering a leather wineskin, his usual delivery method for her cerebral repasts.

“No,” she said, shoving it gently away “you can’t have too much of that stuff lying around. I’ll try to make it to Walloomsac first.”

“You won’t last that long.” Bast had the slightest quiver in his voice, though he was struggling to keep his face impassive. “Drink.”

Thane took the skin and drained around half of it. She thrust it back into Bast’s hand and wiped a line of viscous fluid that ran down her chin.

“Thanks.”

“Anytime,” he replied. They spent a long moment staring at each other.

“Thane,” he said, looking back the way they had come. Rain glazed his ebony skin, highlighting his handsome features. “We need to talk about the other day in Windsor.”

“Yeah,” she said, sitting up straighter. “I uh...what did you want to say about it?”

“I wanted to say...I’m sorry,” he said, still not looking at her. “That was inappropriate of me to kiss you.”

“Uh, we kissed each other,” Thane said. Suddenly she felt tongue-tied and twisted. “I mean, it’s not like you forced yourself on me or anything. It just...kind of happened.”

“I know,” he said, turning to meet her gaze. She was shocked at the tender light in his eye. “I need to say that I have no regrets.”

“Me neither,” Thane said. “Kind of felt...right. Natural.”

“We can’t do this, Thane,” Bast said, even as he moved in closer to her. “It will complicate things.”

“Yeah,” she said, putting her hand on the back of his head and pulling him close. “It could compromise the effectiveness of the team.”

“Lead to accusations of favortism,” Bast whispered, his breath hot on her cheek.

“Not to mention I’m only three years old,” Thane whispered back. Their lips met, and she melted into his arms. Gently, Bast pulled away and held her at arm’s length. His narrowed eye ran over her from head to toe.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is it my breath? Because I’m basically rotting and can’t help it-”

“No,” he said quickly, putting a hand on her cheek. “Nothing’s wrong. You’re just...cold. I’ll go get you some more food.”

“Bast, wait!” she said as he vaulted out of the wagon. “Are you scared? Really? Nothing scares you...”

Thane sighed, and gathered her knees up to her chin. She shivered, more than just from the cold.

Ahead of her wagon marched Stark’s men, the living ones. They numbered around three hundred, mostly Green Mountain Boys and Indians. The idea was to keep the conventional troops separate from the zombies, so as not to disrupt the flow of history more than they had to. The line of marching soldiers drew to a halt, and Thane heard a tumult ahead.

She heard Chui and James talking in the driver’s seat, and crawled over the army’s rations to reach them.

“Hey, Thane,” Chui said, trying to sound casual. She must have appeared terrible, because he tried not to look at her. “I think we’re almost there. A lot of shouting going on ahead.”

“Man, you look horrible!” James said. “Are you gonna make it through this battle?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Thane said with a wink. “I’m tougher than a two dollar steak!”

“Wonder how Hannah and Creepy are holding up...” Chui turned back to look through the wagon’s canopy, seeing the two girls riding in their own wagon. Franklin had been at the reigns, but he claimed the gout was bothering him and he had retired to the—somewhat—drier bed. Creepy had the reigns in her hands, seeming capable in spite of her diminutive form.

“So the idea is Rashemi is keeping the flies off your boys, huh?” James said “I get that, but what’s Faraday doing back there?”

“She claims that she can see the energy tether between me and the army,” Thane said wearily. “Supposedly, she’s acting like a lens; Magnifying the energy and taking some of the burden off of me.”

“Is it working?” Chui’s dark eyes ran over her ragged form.

“I think so, a little. I’m not as tired as I was.”

They stopped speaking when Bast came jogging up.

“The British are up ahead, some seven hundred of them he said.”

“Where’s Montel with his history book when you need him?” James asked.

“I just spoke with him. So far, so good. Things seem to be shaping up just like they’re supposed to. Stark is going to set up a defensive line. With the rain, we might get away with using some of our more...intact...soldiers for garrison duty.”

“I’ll go pick some out,” Thane said, sliding out of her seat. When her feet hit the ground, she couldn’t quite hold herself up, and ended up sprawling on her bottom in the mud.

“Careful.” Bast helped her up, then continued to support her as they headed back to the line of corpse soldiers. The two of them picked out a dozen who could have passed for living as long as no one got extremely close.

“Do they...do they always mutter like that?” Bast’s voice was steady but he was clearly unnerved.

“Sometimes,” she said. “When there’s unfinished business.”

The soldiers moaned and stuttered on occasion, belting out military phrases or calling out to family members. She was glad for the strong sense of purpose the soldiers had, because a little bit of it carried over into their unlife. Just enough to keep them moving forward as an army.

“Thane...” Bast’s eye was unable to meet her own.

“What is it?”

“Why don’t people come back all the way when you...do what you do? Animals seem the same, even that Megalodon you raised out of the Mississippi River last year.”

“I don’t know, Leroy.”

She laughed helplessly as they trudged through the mud.

“Maybe animals don’t have souls the way we do, or maybe they’re just simpler to put back together. It’s not something I’ve thought about too much.”

“Let’s just deal with the elephant in the room,” Bast said.

“What elephant?” Thane looked up at the pouring rain and laughed. “And what room, for that matter?”

“The elephant is this;” Bast took a deep breath through his nostrils and spoke in a rush “you’re not really alive, Thane. You can’t be.”

“Oh, come on, Bast,” Thane said with a sigh “Faraday can shoot lightning from her hands, Chui can speak any language, and Montel can defy the laws of space and time! Why are you singling me out for freak status?”

“I never said freak.” Bast’s jaw was set hard. “And I never will. I’m just trying to deal with things as they are.”

“So, what?” Thane pulled away from him, swaying a bit. “I’m dead? Is that what you think? Gonna call me a zombie like Chui and the rest?”

Bast rubbed his face, looking very tired.

“I won’t call you anything but your name. But the fact of the matter is we’ve been looking to find out who you are for three years Thane. Three years of the government’s best efforts and we still can’t prove you didn’t just pop into existence.”

“So? It took you guys ten years to catch Osama.”

“How do you know we wanted to catch him right away?”

Thane’s eyes narrowed. Bast rarely, if ever, said anything disrespectful of the US government.

“You don’t believe that,” she said with a sigh. Again she took his arm and leaned on him for support. “You DO believe that I’m some sort of, of warm corpse, though, right?”

“Not a corpse. Just beyond...beyond human.”

They sloshed through the mud in silence, the gray curtain of rain giving them a semblance of privacy. At length Thane spoke.

“So, if I’m not really alive, beyond humanity as you put it, where does that leave us?”

Bast gnashed his teeth so hard she could actually hear them grinding.

“It has nothing to do with us,” he said quickly “because it doesn’t change the way I feel.”

“And how is that?” Were they really doing this right now of all times? In the middle of a downpour, slogging through mud, while a thousand zombies trundled on behind them?

“I love you,” he said, cupping her chin with his hand. If he hadn’t been holding her, she would have fallen right then.

“Leroy,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “Don’t...”

“Don’t what? Are you in pain?”

She opened her eyes, saw the face of the man who she cared for above anyone else. In that moment, he wasn’t a hard boiled Major, wasn’t the man who’d abducted her off the streets of New York over a year prior. He was the man who loved her, and she couldn’t help what came out of her mouth next.

“I love you,” she breathed. Then the tears started, slowly at first, then racking her shoulders with heavy sobs. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to fix the past,” he said stoically “and return to make a better future.”

“No, you jackass, I mean what are we going to do about US?” She wanted to will the tears to stop flowing, but they continued to pour and pour like the rain. “I mean, God, just look at us...”

He took her hand in his own much larger one. They looked odd, his muscular and swarthy, hers thin and pale as moonlight. Then he gently turned her face toward his.

“All I see,” he said, single eye shining in the gloomy afternoon light “is a man and a woman. Ain’t nothing wrong with either of them.”

Their lips mashed together, and Thane felt not only an exultant joy but a fierce determination as well. Bast and her were together now, a united front against the world. They were going to fix the past. They were going to have a future.

And the British, or the German Dragoons or whoever it was they were fighting wanted to stand in her way, well…

They’d just better make peace with their gods.