Death Valley

The carriage plummeted.

The glittering sphere continued to enlarge until creating a bubble that entirely encased the carriage.

The purple and silver bubble landed against a ledge with a rubbery boing sound, bouncing erratically off. Inside the bubble, Anna, Clara, and Dilara tumbled about the carriage enclosure like laundry in the express dry.

The bubble continued its wild descent then began bouncing and rolling across the valley floor, splashing up sheets of pink water from shallow pools and raising clouds of pale mineral dust.

It finally struck a carbonate encrusted wooden building, flattening it but stopping its forward momentum.

After having a moment to settle, the bubble popped, leaving the carriage upright, the three inside piled up as one tangle of arms in legs in the middle of the floor.

“I’m going to hurl,” Anna moaned from within the mass.

She immediately realized the stylus was missing from her hand.

Panic set in. “Where’s the stylus?!” She instantly thought of Dilara.

“I’m outside and all wet,” the stylus called.

“Let us avoid that again,” Clara murmured from the top of the pile, slowly untangling herself from it. She looked down at Dilara who was in the middle of the witch sandwich, now appearing in her mid-forties.

“You got old.”

“Be silent!” she snapped, slowly sitting up, looking at her hands which had fine lines and several small sun spots.

“Why did you do that?” Anna asked of the duchess’ choices. She still felt queasy as she scootched aside, staring at the changes to Dilara. Anna had a feeling the young noblewoman was likely gone forever, replaced by an older version that magic could no longer restore after the bite of the stylus.

“Why do you ask so many questions?” the graying duchess replied bitterly.

“Will you rapidly age more?”

“How should I know?!” her voice pitched with fear.

Anna reached for her pall which had slipped off her in the tumble cycle, now piled up against the rear window. As she pulled it towards her, one of the gauze wrapped disembodied hands tumbled out. It skittered about on its fingers as if a frightened animal, then sought safety within the layers between Dilara’s dress and overgown.

“Heavens,” Clara toned, mortified.

Dilara gently stroked the hand sized bulge hiding under her overgown. “It is all I have left of a dear friend claimed by time.” Her voice tinged with emotion. “It appears I have lost the others.”

Anna said nothing, fearing that anything she could say would be mistaken as hurtful. She draped her pall around Dilara’s shoulders. “Hopefully this should protect you from aging further.”

“Anna!” Clara protested. “You need that!”

Anna shook her head. “I already survived The Great Undeath once. It's going to be either me or it this time.”

Dilara looked down at the pall, apparently not sure what to make of the gift, but then clenched it closed about herself with her left hand.

Outside through the open door the shallow red stained waters still rippled with the aftershocks of the carriage’s landing. Dilara slowly rose on sore joints. “We have disturbed the waters. The zombies will be arriving shortly.”

“How would you know?” Clara asked.

“This is my second encounter,” Dilara answered. She looked about the enclosure, collecting the scattered quill pens. She found four, though one was severely bent. She frowned deeply, tossing it out the door. “With limited resources, this will be an abbreviated battle.”

A quill was extended to Clara.

“Tell me you know something,” Dilara muttered.

“I know enough,” Clara said, using her hand to push up into a ready position atop the cushioned seat, one foot on the floor with her other leg tucked underneath her. She took the outstretched quill, then looked at the nib. “How can I write without ink?”

“It has an internal reservoir, though finite.”

“And what surface do I write on?”

“On your forearm. It will not be comfortable, but it will suffice.”

The second quill was tucked under the pall. A moment later the gauze wrapped hand emerged, climbing up Dilara’s arm to sit atop her shoulder, quill at the ready to write.

“Handy,” Clara murmured.

“Silly jokes are beneath you,” Dilara muttered as she readied the third quill in her right hand.

“What about me?” Anna asked.

“You have that wretched stylus.”

“It takes one to know one,” it quipped from outside.

The gauzed hand scratched a short Persian sentence on the side of Dilara’s neck, causing the duchess to wince. The letters pulled away from her skin, forming into a large broach to keep the pall clasped about her shoulders. With her left hand now no longer needing to hold the pall in place, Dilara wrote on her palm. The spell lifted the stylus out of the shallow waters outside and brought it to Anna, drying it completely before it touched her skin.

“The waters here are very caustic. The Great Undeath is adapted to them. We are not. We need to work towards higher ground.”

The carriage started to move along the street between the preserved buildings. While the waters appeared quite shallow, the mineral crust underneath cracked easily, causing the carriage to list abruptly and become bogged down in the mud underneath. The wheels spun and churned before finally finding purchase, slowly making headway toward the city’s central plaza.

“Do we have a plan?” Clara asked.

“Whatever plan I had from before, I nuked it from my memory,” Anna admitted, chagrin.

“Just as well. Because it failed,” Dilara said. “I fared little better and it was long, long ago, so I am certain things have changed.”

“Stylus?” Anna asked of the object.

“Don’t ask me, I party wiped too.”

“Anything at all that could help?”

“There is no point in wasting our time on the zombies. They are infinite.”

“I am going to the driver’s box,” Dilara said, moving to the open door. “Conserve ink,” she told Clara with a finger point. “And no mass death magic,” she added to Anna with the same finger. “It could affect us.”

Clinching her quill between her teeth, Dilara gripped the door frame and swung outside the enclosure, slowly climbing her way up onto the driver’s box. Clara shut the door once Dilara was clear.

The carriage clattered onto firmer crust, cobbles of a main street just under the surface of the shallow pink water. It paused however.

Outside the glass, Anna could see why. Waves of zombies with pale, fibrous flesh were lumbering down the main street from both directions. Some wore heavily corroded and mineral-encrusted armor. Others were dressed in scraps and tatters of linen and wool or were entirely bare. Pale fungal fibers threaded through the mineral-encrusted skeletons, twisting around the bones like muscles and tendons. Their faces were gone, replaced by smooth, drone-like chitinous plates. Large black mushroom caps crowned their heads, freckled with raised, wart-like crimson markings.

“Main street or side street!” Dilara yelled from the driver’s box.

The waves coming down the main street were so numerous they could easily overwhelm the carriage.

“Side street!” Anna shouted back.

Waves of Persian magic arced out from either side of the carriage, one emerald green, the other shimmering silver. The arcs passed through multiple rows of the zombies, instantly turning fungal flesh to stone, creating an interspersed stone barrier to slow the ranks behind them.

The carriage rolled forward immediately, leaving the secure encrusted cobbles for the unknown shallows of the side street.

Anna could not see immediately ahead. Not that she wished to. Zombies filed out from the alleyways. Anna put the stylus’ crayon to the glass window next to her, writing out adjective heavy, fragmented sentences that reduced them to dust.

“Your grammar is a crime!”

“What are you, the comma police?!”

The carriage suddenly jerked to a stop. Clara looked around for the source.

“Mud!” hollered Dilara from the front.

A multitude of fingers started tapping on the underside of the carriage as the dead rose from the streetbed.

The wheels of the carriage spun at high speed, spraying mud ineffectively.

Hands gripped the spokes, freezing the carriage wheels.

“It’s a zombie mosh pit!”

“Dilara?!” Anna shouted.

“Problems of my own!” she called back from up front.

Clara raised her right elbow, clenched her eyes shut, and smashed a glass window.

“You are paying for that!” Dilara howled from above, her feet pattering atop the carriage roof.

Clara leaned out through the broken window, writing briefly on her forearm. The ink sent a pastel yellow butcher’s knife through the hands gripping one wheel, freeing it.

A smooth drone face plate appeared in the door’s window. The zombie leaned back and smashed through.

Anna’s eyes widened.

It shoved both arms through for her.

A pastel yellow disk sprang up in front of them, causing the brittle bones to collapse on impact.

Anna reduced the zombie to dust.

A shadow blocked out the cloudless skies.

“Need you up top!”