Weekly Drabble #276: Scars - Professionals (Patreon)

This week's prompts are 'zombie outbreak response team' from 'Sam C' and 'the cycle continues' from LystAiP, with a short jaunt back into Scars to see how a country thousands of miles from the front lines of the Scarring is getting along in its aftermath. Enjoy!

~

Professionals:

Captain of One Hundred Barlton Cresh grunted as he pulled his sword out of the young woman’s skull, kneeling to wipe it off on her dress. As he rose back to his feet, he glanced around. They’d all but finished grinding out this hamlet. His men, three platoons of good, obedient soldiers, were completing with their own handiwork, putting the ends of swords and spears into the handful of villagers still writhing on the ground. There wasn’t a single man, woman or child left alive. With graveyard humour, or dour pragmatism, the soldiers hefted up their kills, carting the bodies off to be heaped into a pile in the town square. The mass of bleeding flesh still twitched here and there and there was the occasional muffled moan, but the business was just about done.

Before each corpse – or near-corpse – was heaped onto the mound, the men held it up for inspection. While his two peers oversaw the cleanup, Lieutenant of Thirty Sreztka had set up position in the square.  made notes on his tally sheet, his quill all but a blur as he wrote notes on every victim. A few were left by his feet, their countenances and injuries to be sketched. Records had to be kept, and Sreztka was meticulous in that regards.

The man was a wealthy noble’s son, and scarcely fit for combat, but he’d earned the respect of his men for his quick, iron-trap mind and ability to come up with tactics even in the most dire of circumstances. Despite having  precious little talent for it, he was still willing to blood himself alongside his troops, even though he’d vomit after each battle. As opposed to many other poppinjay officers who never truly earned the respect of their subordinates – sometimes suffering ‘unfortunate accidents’ in the field because of it – Sreztka’s men looked after their lieutenant once blades had to be drawn.

One of his troops, a tall brute that Cresh had had to discipline more than once for his temper, pulled a kerchief from the pocket of the corpse he was hauling and offered it to Sreztka, tapping his own lips to signal where a bit of the lieutenant’s returned midday meal sat. Sreztka nodded in thanks, cleaning his mouth quickly. No, he didn’t have the stomach for it, but he was a fine administrator. His blood was even bluer than Cresh’s and he knew how to ably navigate bureaucracy and the egos of wealthy men. With him at hand, Walker Company got its supplies quicker than it ever had, and the lieutenant even smuggled in additional ale for his platoon, something that Cresh turned a blind eye to.

Corpsegrinder troops had precious little to look forward to, so he wasn’t about to hold fast to rules when it improved morale and helped a new lieutenant and his troops mesh better. Speaking of new blood... he turned to Walker Company’s newest soldier.

Mage Third Class Abella Vistelo held her staff in both hands like a child clutching a stuffed animal for protection. She hadn’t thrown up, but she was as pale as a ghost and trembling, her eyes focused on the young woman whose skull Cresh had so recently split. This was her first grinding, and it showed. She might not be the youngest member of Walker Company, but if she wasn’t, there’d certainly be only one or two men younger, and each of them had blooded themselves, something the spellcaster had yet to do.

“It’s not her,” the captain said. His words cut through the sorceress’s haze. She raised her head.

“What?”

Cresh pointed the tip of his sword at the corpse. Its eyes were yellow and rheumy, its flesh had turned grey, its teeth had strings of meat stuck between them and its broken fingernails were worn and bloody. “Whatever person you were thinking of when you looked at it,” he told his mage. “It’s not her. It wasn’t her ever since-” he knelt, pulling back a piece of fabric and exposing the filthy bitemarks on the corpse’s upper arm. “-since this happened to the poor bitch.”

“I know,” she replied. “I just...” she looked around at the village, swallowing. Just up the street, there was a boy no more than eleven or twelve impaled against the side of a house, a spear run through his skull. As she watched, two of Cresh’s men pulled the spear out, the first one holding the weapon as he pantomimed the act that had killed the child.

No, she corrected herself. It hadn’t been a child. “These were people,” she said at last.

“Aye,” the captain agreed. “They were. They stopped being people when the curse got them. If they were people, we wouldn’t be here. We’re not called ‘peasantgrinder troops’. We’re Corpsegrinders and you are, too.”

There was a flash of indignation in the young woman’s eyes. Corpsegrinders were the lowest echelons of the Kingdom of Aariol’s army, but among the most necessary. Aariol was a northern country, bordering Jherland. When news of the Scarring had first reached them, it had been dismissed as rumours and wild tales from drunken traders. Then it had been called exaggerations. Then, there’d been assurances that something so far from the kingdom’s borders that they needn’t concern themselves with it. When the first reports of plague had reached the capital, they had been deemed unrelated.

Mistake upon mistake upon mistake and it culminated in a horde of hundreds of thousands of former citizens eating everything they could get their hands on, from grain stores, to pets and animals in the fields, but most preferably their fellow men and women. These hadn’t been ‘mere’ undead, but carriers of a demonic infection, their swollen and rotting bodies eventually bursting as the Kindred gestating within those bloated, shambling forms within erupted from them.

Though it had been a bloody, grinding war with a brutally high cost, the seemingly endless swarm of infected humans, animals and slouching, groaning inhuman horrors had eventually been beaten back. These days, the crown and the nobility claimed it was due to their efforts and brilliant military strategy, but those who were there, like Cresh himself, knew that there’d have been no victory without the Salvation and the wave of soulfire that burnt back the tide of Black Kin and dragged them howling back into the abyss.

If only that had been the end of the kingdom’s problems. Cresh himself didn’t know – and he wasn’t sure whether he liked it better thinking that his superiors didn’t either, or did and were keeping that from him – where the outbreak of true undead had come from, but it had erupted shortly after the end of the Scarring. Some said a necromantic cult had chosen that moment to make their bid for power, some said the demons’ assault had uncovered things best left buried and some even said that this was the result of a desperate attempt to use prohibited magic, combating a mindless horde with one of their own, but it had gotten loose.

Whatever the truth was, a strain of the blood curse had spread, turning men, women and children into flesh-craving monsters, nearly finishing what the Scarring began. In response to this new threat, the Corpsegrinders were formed; at one point they had been elite regiments sent to quell the outbreaks, but after three decades they had lost their prestige and were now seen as the military equivalent of janitors, cleaning up messes others considered themselves too good to dirty their hands with.

Sometimes for a year or two or three, there would be quiet and Cresh could start thinking his task done. And then... then an urgent message would arrive and he would muster his troops grind to whatever poor souls had fallen afoul of the curse now. A zombie buried and inadvertently released, a contaminated well, a sick individual taken in by those who didn’t know better. Each time it was different, but still the same. Cresh and his people searched for the ultimate cause of the outbreaks, but they’d yet to find it. Until then... they’d go grinding when they were called to do it.

Vistelo was going to have to get used to that. Even though she was a war-virgin (and some of the men had speculated on her status in other regards), he was glad to have her. In other nations, witches and mages were viewed with suspicion and mistrust. If he were honest, that wasn’t uncommon in Aariol either, but they knew the value of the metaphysical arts and its practitioners. Walker Company hadn’t had a mage for nearly two years, since the last one had... well, that had been a bad business.

Despite the difference they could make, the upper echelons hadn’t wanted to assign a valuable, trained battle-mage to a Corpsegrinder unit. Cresh had been all but begging for the last year until Vistelo had showed up with papers of introduction. The captain wondered if Sreztka had had something to do with that, though the lieutenant had made it a point to be elsewhere whenever the mage was around and he sensed a certain antipathy from her towards the young officer in kind. He would have to keep an eye on that situation and make sure it didn’t start to affect the unit.

Something else he had to worry about. Shitty gear, insufficient support from the higher-ups, a never-ending struggle to keep the people no one in high towers gave a shit about safe and now his best lieutenant and his mage had some kind of personal issue. If it came down to it, he honestly didn’t know which one he’d keep.

The joys of life in the service.

“Come on,” he told the young woman. “That pile’s getting high. Let’s get it lit before something crawls out.”

Abella looked like she didn’t know whether she wanted to cry, throw up or sigh in vexation. Thankfully, she did none of those and headed towards the slowly-growing mound of bodies. Sreztka saw her coming and half-turned to put his back to her, which the mage pretended not to notice. The air took on an electric, greasy feel a split-second before a gout of flame erupted from the head of Vistelo’s staff, the mage playing it across the oozing pile. The witchfire set cloth and meat ablaze with equal ease and soon a reeking black column of smoke was rising into the sky, the village filled with the stench of tainted, roasting human flesh.

Cresh looked at it and let out a deep breath. They hadn’t saved a single soul from this village, but at least they’d kept the outbreak from spreading beyond it. Until the next time. And the time after that, until there were no more times and nothing more to grind.