Unholy Night

the opportunity she’s been waiting for, he thought. Her chance to kill me for abandoning her. But Sela had no intention of stabbing him. She stepped closer and pointed at the horde.

“I’ll stay with you,” she said. “Help you fight them off.”

Balthazar grabbed her hand. “No.” He pointed to Joseph, Mary, and the baby. “Without you, they’re as good as dead.”

“Without me, you’re dead!”

“You know how to fight, Sela, how to survive. Get them to Egypt.”

“There’s no way you can — ”

“Shut up!”

He grabbed her arm, hard. Seventy yards…

“Run, now, while you still have a head start. Don’t stop; just keep going. I’ll buy you a little time.”

He pushed her away. Sela turned back toward the frightened carpenter. Toward the little girl and the sleeping baby. She knew Balthazar was right. They were as good as dead without her.

“Sela,” he said.

She looked back at him, frightened but still so beautiful it wasn’t fair, and for a moment, they were back in the waters of the Orontes, all golden and forever. Balthazar had a sudden urge to grab her, to kiss her one last time just for the hell of it. What did he have to lose? He was probably moments away from a grisly death, and besides, something about the look on her face told him she was thinking of doing the same thing. But before he could work up the nerve to do it, the wail of the approaching dead shook the past away and summoned Balthazar’s eyes to the urgent now.

“GO!” he yelled. And they did.

With the others making their hasty retreat south behind him, Balthazar turned back to the mass of hideous rotted flesh. There were about forty of them, he guessed, less than fifty yards away. He saw one corpse dragging itself along the ground with long yellowed fingernails, having lost its legs in life or death. Another’s torso had been horribly twisted, forcing it to move backward — which didn’t really matter, since it didn’t have eyes anyway.

They don’t need to see, thought Balthazar. Something else is doing the seeing for them.

Sela was right, of course. He was as good as dead. If for no other reason than he had no idea how to kill what he was about to fight. For all he knew, his blade would bounce off these creatures like they were made of stone. For all he knew, he would burst into flames the moment his skin met theirs. Nothing would surprise him. Nothing could anymore. But it didn’t matter. Even if it meant the most painful, hideous death a human being had ever experienced, they weren’t getting the baby, and they weren’t getting her. Twenty yards…

He gripped the handle of his sword tightly… breathed deep of the desert air.

Okay, Balthazar… let’s die.

He charged. And as he neared them, and their faces came into crystal focus, Balthazar saw just how wretched they were: pockets of embalming fluid trapped under their hardened skin, the black rot of their teeth, the patches of hair clinging to their scalps in grays and blacks and browns.

Upon meeting the leading edge of the swarm, he was greeted with good and bad news: the bad news was, these creatures were faster and stronger than they looked from a distance. The good news was, his sword seemed to work just fine.

He went to work, chopping away at limbs and necks. Hacking away at the leathery skin and hardened sinew that held them together and trying not to focus on the terrible, chemical smell of the long and leathery dead — at the demons grabbing at him with their dry fingers. Their bones cracking, their skin ripping as they moved.

He was suddenly twelve again. Back in the shallow Roman graves, digging up the freshly slain bodies. Looting them. Fighting off the fear, the terrifying, almost real visions of the bodies coming to life. Visions of the dead grabbing at his clothes and hair. Pulling him down into the graves with them. But those had only been visions. The monsters were real now. They moved without blood in their veins, without hearts in their chests. They had no lungs or vocal cords, yet they each emitted a strange sound. A wheezing, guttural moan that sounded to Balthazar like an endless last gasp. Together, they created a chilling chorus.

There’s something about that baby.

Maybe he would find out what it was on the other side of death. Something waiting for him. And what of the dreams he’d had when he lay dying from a stab wound? What of those strange visions of old men in pink and purple rooms? And what of the Man With Wings? The man whose face had made Balthazar weep at the sight of it?

Abdi’s face.

That’s who it’d been, hadn’t it? Abdi, the grown man he never got to be? A man with wings, holding on to his big brother and soaring over the desert of Judea? Guiding him through an ocean of time and space? Balthazar had thought of them as visions. Nothing but the vivid dreams of a dying mind. But now, staring death both literally and figuratively in the face, he accepted that they might have been something more. In fact, he hoped they were.

Balthazar slashed and kicked and pushed at the corpses, but they were massing around him faster than he could fight them off. One terrible face after another. One brittle set of mummified fingers after the next — their ancient fingernails scratching at him. Grabbing at his clothes. If I only had a torch, I could set them alight. They’re so dry that they’d go up like a sun-baked grass roof. But all he had was a sword and a pair of quickly tiring arms to wield it with.

They’re winning.

There was no doubt about it. And as they swarmed over him, Balthazar screamed. Not from any fear but from knowing that this was his moment — his last chance to make his presence known on this earth. He screamed until he could taste blood in the back of this throat as the swarm of dead fully enveloped him.

Peace at last…

And as he screamed, the dead suddenly and uniformly dropped to the ground, as if the strings holding their limbs aloft were cut in one swoop. And with a dull, dusty thud, they were nothing but sinew and bone again. Silent. Balthazar stood there, breathing heavily. In awe of the sight. Somewhat in awe of himself.

He’d won.

By some miracle, he’d been spared. Just as he’d predicted, some unseen force had smiled down on him at the last possible moment. If the Jews called it God, so be it. Whether it was God, or luck, or something else, it didn’t matter. What mattered were the others. He could catch up to them now. Take them the rest of the way to Egypt and be done with this. Thank God. Or whatever.

But just as he was allowing himself one little victory, one little moment of open-mindedness, another sort of rumbling shook the optimism right out of him. Balthazar looked around, sure that he was about to catch sight of a second wave of rotting beings emerging from their tombs. But there was nothing. Nothing except the rumbling. A different kind of rumbling, now that I think about it. A much more… familiar… kind of —

It was the beating of hooves against the desert floor.

Balthazar looked past the lifeless bodies on the ground before him — up, up — until he saw what seemed like a thousand horses riding at him down the center of the narrow valley from the north. He couldn’t see the faces of the men on those horses, but he imagined most of them bore the smug, self-satisfied look of men who’d pulled off another clever ruse.

The Romans were coming.

The small horde of dead had been replaced with a gigantic horde of the living. It wasn’t an improvement — not numerically, anyway. But at least Balthazar knew how to kill the things riding toward him. Once again, he raised his sword and readied himself for a reckless, suicidal charge, all in the name of buying his friends — now there’s a word that just popped in there and I didn’t expect but seems fitting — a little time.

Let’s die…

He was done running. He’d spent so much time moving from place to place — searching for the pendant, stealing to survive, killing to live. It was good to die. If his death could buy his friends a little time, then so be it. You deserve to die, after all the things you’ve done. After all the lives you’ve taken. After all the things you’ve stolen — the objects, the futures.