Reluctant Necromancer

The next morning we packed up and headed back home. More dejected than vindicated. I hated that there wasn’t anything I could do. I hated knowing that I had tried my best and still failed. That’s not what the TV shows and books I grew up with taught me, even if the real world had repeatedly beat the truth into my head. It was still hard to internalize sometimes.

I admit that I moped in the back with Ashley as we drove home. But her shoulder was comfortable and she still managed to smell good. And she periodically pressed little kisses to my temple. So…I don’t think anyone blamed me.

It was about midmorning when we ran into a group of people walking down the road. Almost literally. We came up behind them over a hill and suddenly there they were. Oliver slammed on the brakes and people ran off the sides of the road. We narrowly missed hitting anyone.

Despite it being a road. For cars. We received lots of angry muttering and more than one judiciously held finger. Everyone in the van was breathing hard and trying to get our heartrates under control.

Mara threw open the side door, “Hey, what are you all doing on the road?”

“We’re heading to Turtle Creek,” an older woman grunted as she pulled herself back onto the road next to us.

“Ok, but why? And why are there so many of you?”

I finally perked up. This whole thing felt familiar to the last two groups of refugees we’d encountered. If they had left recently enough, this could be our ticket to finally finding out more information. Finding the people behind all this pillaging and unchecked aggression.

“We got run out of our own homes. Some group of assholes with guns and magic showed up and started blasting and shooting everything and then people. There were so many.” Her voice choked up. “I lost my Paul to those monsters.” She wiped the corners of her eyes. “Well, the rest of us all decided it wasn’t worth losing any more lives over and we grabbed what we could and headed out. Met up a few kilometers outside town and then we’ve been traveling together since this morning.”

“You’re not the first town they’ve done this to,” Mara told her. “We know of at least two more. We were out here trying to figure out what happened and see if there was anything we could do about it.”

The woman looked us over. Then huffed, “There’s only a handful of you. There were dozens of those monsters. And they didn’t care about killing people. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you think you could have done miss. Your best bet is to find somewhere with enough powerful people to huddle together with and hold them off.”

“I understand ma’am. We’re quite powerful in our own right though,” Mara insisted. “Can you at least tell us where you’re from? Let us take a look. Maybe see if we can do anything.”

“I don’t want to be the one to–”

“Leesward,” a man a few feet away interrupted. The woman gaped at him before stomping off.

“Thank you,” Mara nodded before closing the door to the van.

We all pulled out our phones to check where Leesward was. Jenny was the winner. “Found it,” she called out. Followed by Jeremy’s groan. I had a feeling they were very competitive with each other.

A few moments later we were turned around and headed back toward a new town. Leesward, I hope you can provide some answers.

It didn’t take us that long to reach the outskirts of the village. It wasn’t even large enough to really call a town. The villagers hadn’t travelled very far. They’d probably left in the dark of the night to avoid being discovered.

Knowing that there was a much greater chance that the people responsible were still around we decided to park off the road not too far from the edge of town. We didn’t want to be seen, but we didn’t want to hike an hour to get there either.

We all jumped out and ‘suited up.’ I summoned my spear and raised several skellies. I passed out more spears for each of them. John and Jeremy grew shiny in their metal skin. Ashley double checked all of her weapons. Josh summoned his bone spear. The others just kind of shrugged and waited on us. Stupid casters not needing to prep anything.

Josh, Jeremy, and Jenny all looked at the skellies with more than a little unease on their faces. None of them would stand near them and instead stood across the little clearing we found ourselves in. They kept sneaking glances at me as well, some of them looked less than pleased. But I pushed it aside for now. Wait until my skellies tripped their first ambush and saved all of us a lot of pain. They’d change their tunes then.

We walked through the forest near the edge of the road until we could see the first buildings and streets poking through the trees. I slunk up next to a tree trunk at the edge of the forest. Ashley stepped up beside me on the other side of the trunk. The others were staggered out further to our left and right.

Nothing moved in the backyards of the houses I could see. But the door in front of me was already kicked in. I listened closely and could just barely make out a few voices and then the sudden sound of breaking furniture.

I looked over at Ashley and then sent in my skellies at a run. I took off behind them and Ashley followed close behind. The others took an extra moment to realize what was going on. But I wasn’t about to let these people get away with anymore of this if I didn’t have to.

A few moments after the skeletons cleared the backdoor screaming erupted from the interior of the house. I quickened my steps and Ashley matched me, pistol drawn.

I burst through the backdoor and entered an absolutely destroyed kitchen. Shit was thrown all over the floor except the food which had been stacked neatly on the counters. I continued on into the next room.

The livingroom. Two men grappled with my skeletons. Another lay dead with a spear through his back in front of them. Bones were littered around the room from the brief tussle they’d had. It looked like they’d taken out two and a half skeletons. There was still a skelly from the waist up crawling after them, but I didn’t give him even odds of being much help.

Without missing a beat I charged across the room and shoved my spear through the side of the chest of one of the men struggling with another skeleton. He stumbled back and the skeleton shoved his spear through the front of his chest. A shot exploded in the room nearby and I saw the other man’s head snap back and his body collapse like his strings had been cut.

The rest of the group charged into the room immediately after. The new people all looked at Ashley and I like we were some kinds of monsters. Jenny sputtered a couple of things that would make a sailor proud. Mara stepped up between the two groups with her arms raised.

“Alright, let’s just talk this through before anyone gets upset,” Mara began.

“They just killed those people!” Jenny shouted.

“Oh come off it,” I huffed. “You knew what we were preparing to do when we left Whitcomb. You saw what these people did to the other towns. You heard what that woman said happened here. They’re not some innocent bystanders. They’re bad people.”

“I didn’t sign up to summarily execute people,” Jenny’s voice was still raised.

“Would you prefer to give them a chance to kill you first?” I asked disgustedly.

“How do you know that they would have? We could have captured them and taken them to Montgomery. They deserved a trial like everyone else.”

“I don’t know what reality you’re living in,” I squared up my chest toward her. “Maybe because the internet and phones still somehow work you seem to think that nothing has changed. News flash girly, we’re living in an apocalypse. We can’t even afford to feed the people already in town, let alone the refugees we just took in. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to share my food with these disgusting maggots. Especially not just to kill them later.”

“Who says we would kill them later?”

“What else would you have us do? The math doesn’t math. They have killed people, destroyed lives, run people out of town, and who knows what else.” I whirled around and kicked the body in front of me. “Fuck these people. They forfeited their rights when they decided they could take over and destroy towns because they wanted to.”

“Enough!” Mara bellowed.

The front door exploded inward and a deep voice yelled out, “Yeah, enough.” A fireball flew through the door immediately after. John shoved people aside and jumped in front of it. The fireball exploded across his chest and flung fire throughout the room.

I grabbed Ashley’s hand while she fired through the broken doorway. I dragged her backward through the kitchen and sent my remaining skeletons after our attackers. “Let’s go!” I roared as I dragged Ashley with me through the back door and we ran toward the woods. Smoke curled up from the house behind us.