The Secret Zombie History of the World Read online

  PART ONE

  VIKINGR

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOG

  ATLI SHOULD HAVE been home hours ago. Clutching the bundle of gnarled sticks tight to his chest as he emerged from the trees onto the broad curve of the riverbank, he looked south towards the distant, looming shadow of the Middagsberg. His heart sank. It was even later than he’d thought. The low sun, a watery smudge of light in the late summer mist, had long since passed the cleft in its summit, and was already half-way to the mid-afternoon daymark – the ragged edge of tall pines puncturing the horizon on the mountain’s shallow western slope. For a moment he imagined his father looking up at the same line of trees, his face livid with anger, cursing his son’s name.

  He would get a beating again. It was part of the routine.

  He shivered, turned his eyes resignedly to the ground, and kicked idly at the wet, grey stones that littered the bank, the smell of the damp wood in his nostrils. The threat of his father’s stick across his back should, he knew, be sufficient incentive for him to head back home in good time. That was certainly the intention. But it just made him all the more determined to stay away. And the longer he put off his return, the more severe became the inevitable punishment – and the more gloomily reluctant he became. A vicious circle. “Like a dog chasing its tail,” his mother used to say. It had been eight winters since she’d passed, when Atli was barely five years old, but he still recalled her words from time to time, although her face was now lost to him.

  It had been this way almost as long as he could remember. He often wandered by the water now, dreaming of change, escape – something, anything – but where that change might come from, even he could not imagine. And as he dreamed, and his father fumed – increasingly at odds with the world, as well as his own son – each grew more distant from the other, more stubborn, more deeply entrenched, until Atli had begun to fear where it might ultimately lead.

  He flicked a loose stone with his foot so it tumbled and splashed, coming to rest in the shallows at the water’s edge – the edge of his world. These waters were their protection. That’s what his father always told him. To Atli, however, they seemed more like a prison. To the north, through the woods and beyond the village, was the river Svanær. South of the village – and on whose banks Atli now stood – the wider, meandering Ottar. Each provided them with plentiful fish and formed a barrier against overland raiders and outlaws. To the west, on the spur of land that dwindled to a point where the two rivers met, was thick forest with good hunting – accessible only from their village. To the east, the fertile land and rich pasture upon which they’d built their farms rose to distant, rocky fells – a natural discouragement to any who did not already know the paths, and which had long proved its worth. As his father had said so often, it was the land that supported them, and the land that kept them from harm. Atli thought of all the times he had sought solace down by the water’s edge, and wondered how often, had the river not been here to protect them, he would have kept on walking until that familiar landscape were left far behind.

  There was one threat the land did not keep them safe from, however; a danger that tormented his father’s mind and had become the subject of repeated, dire warnings. River raiders. Pirates. Vikingr. “If you see vikingr,” his father said, “you must run. Run as fast as you can. They are bad men. Desperate men. They will cut a man’s throat for the fun of it – and much worse. They steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Even the animals. They dishonour and kill women. They eat children. I have heard it! Remember, you must run – and warn the village. But make no sound!”

  “How will I know them?” Atli had asked.

  “You will know them.” His father had nodded with a kind of portentous unease. “They will come from the river. And you will know them...”

  There hadn’t ever been a raid in these parts. Not even further downriver was such a thing heard of these days – at least, not as far as Atli knew. And anyway, if he did encounter vikingr, the one thing he wouldn’t do was run. He would beg to be taken with them.

  He sighed and gazed longingly across the still water – or, at least, as far as it would let him. In the last few hours a thick shroud of fog had rolled in from the estuary. Following the course of the river upstream with eerie precision, it hovered silently over the river’s surface now, mocking its shape, obscuring the tall trees of the opposite bank as it thickened the air. Dead. Impenetrable. Ungraspable. Like a ghost, thought Atli. Like the creeping ghost of the river. Images crowded his head from old stories his father had told – of whispy spirits escaping from the bodies of the dead, of glowing smokes and fogs seeping out of mounds and barrows and taking terrible, half-recognised shapes that sucked the life out of the living. Another chill ran through him. He kicked at the stones with a sudden anger, as if to banish thought with physical action – any kind of action – to kick his childish night-terrors away. He refused to succumb to the anxieties and superstitions that had taken over his father’s life. He refused to live in fear. Every day now he saw it in his father’s eyes, and it made him ashamed.

  Superstition had been the other half of Atli’s upbringing. When he was young, the stories had seemed magical – dwarves and elves that lived in the earth and forged great gifts of gold, spirits and serpents that lived in the woods and the water, gods who turned men’s fortunes, playing cruel tricks on the proud and bestowing blessings upon the brave. Although, in his heart, he had never quite believed in their literal truth, as others seemed to, they nonetheless had their own reality – one that he loved. They existed in another world. And they were an escape from his own.

  Then, after his mother died, the tone of the stories changed. Each one became a warning. Another stick to beat him with.

  All manner of irrational fears seemed to take over his life. His father became obsessed with death. At wakes – where most were content to drink and share good memories – he cut a gloomy, troubled figure, repeatedly warning those present to take precautions against the corpse’s potential return. He would insist upon an open pair of iron scissors being placed on the chest of the deceased, and always afterwards could be seen sprinkling salt along the threshold. It was protection, he said, against the draugr – the undead – who returned to inflict untold horrors upon the living. In regions to the south, there was talk they were on the rise. He’d heard it from a merchant who refused to go near the place.

  Privately, many scoffed at him for wasting such precious commodities. Others simply laughed at his ways. Once, when he was too young to know better, Atli had asked his father if it wouldn’t be a good thing for his mother to come back. Wasn’t that what they all wanted? A weird terror burned in his father’s eyes. “Try to understand,” he said, his voice trembling. “It is not they who come back, but something else. Something terrible.” His eyes widened. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. “You would wish to see her again. You would welcome her in when she came knocking at night. But it would not be the mother you knew. Imagine a lumbering, soulless mockery – heavy with the stench of decay, her body bloated, distorted, monstrous in proportion, her heart empty of feeling, her head a foetid shell, her eyes dead as a fish’s, her only emotion a blind envy for the living whose flesh she is driven to devour, crunching the bones, drinking the blood in great gobbets...”

  The image haunted Atli’s nightmares for years.

  Then, in his eleventh year, he had come to his current realisation. It was fear, not anger, that drove his father. And that, ultimately, was why he hated him. It was not because he was a bully, (not only was he bigger than Atli was, but bigger than most of the men in the village), nor because he thrashed him on a regular basis. He hated him because he was a coward. Atli knew that he bore the brunt of the man’s frustrations only because he could not offer any resistance. His father beat him not just because of what he did or didn’t do, but because of all the other people and things in life that he was too afraid to confront – chief among them, Atli had b
egun to suspect, himself. His own weakness. The weakness to which the father knew his son’s eyes were no longer oblivious. The weakness which Atli doggedly refused to inherit.

  He trudged to the edge of the river and stared momentarily at his own indistinct reflection in the water, then kicked another pebble and watched the ripples break it apart.

  Vaguely he wondered what was going on back at the village. Not long ago there had been a distant clamour of shouting from that way – some sort of argument that was best avoided, probably. Recently, a fight had broken out over a pig which had wandered into a neighbour’s house and eaten a cabbage that had been cut for dinner. Bera, the woman of the house, had demanded compensation for her loss. Yngvar, the pig-owner, had countered by accusing Bera of trying to steal his pig. After a lot of shouting, during which Bera had cracked Yngvar across the temple with a wooden ladle, it ended with a rather fearful Yngvar conceding that his pig had probably wandered of its own accord and Bera accepting a quantity of pig dung – some of which had already been deposited in her house – in payment for the cabbage. Such were the heady thrills of farm life.

  Now, Atli could see there was also a thick column of dark smoke coming from that direction. Perhaps they weren’t so desperate for his kindling after all. Gripping his bundle under one arm he crouched down to pick up a smooth, wet pebble, and hurled it at the water. It was swallowed instantly with a loud plop. He screwed up his face in frustration, grabbed another, flatter stone and, crouching lower this time, aimed it at a shallow angle. It skipped once, twice, three times.

  Good. But he knew he could do better. Seven was his record. It needed a certain kind of stone, though. His eyes darted about the shore by his feet, among the wet pebbles and grit and occasional patches of green weed that waved in the lapping water. A perfect stone caught his eye – nicely smooth and flat, with a notch in its edge for his forefinger. He snatched it up, aimed, and let his arm sway back and forth for a moment, rehearsing the arc of the throw. Then... Snap! Cracking his whole body like a whip, he let the stone fly. He knew from the moment it left him that it was a perfect throw. The shimmering stone skipped across the smooth water, dipping like a dragonfly, weightless – three, four, five – until finally enveloped by the fog. In the stillness of the afternoon he could still hear its sound: six, seven, eight, nine... ten?

  That couldn’t be right. Yet still it kept going. He’d lost count, but stood, holding his breath, ears on stalks. He could still hear the surface of the water being broken. A fish? No. A steady rhythm. He’d swear to it. But different now. Surely the fog must be playing tricks? No, there was definitely something. Another sound, that had at some point merged with the first. Slow and steady. And not receding, but coming closer.

  Atli fought against the images of wraiths and phantoms that suddenly flooded his mind. His father had warned him the fog brought terrible things. It was the cold breath of Niflheim – of Hel itself. Who knew what horrors travelled within it? Atli got a grip of himself. Such things were not real – or, if they were, they were not part of his world.

  But the sound kept coming all the same.

  A sequence, continually repeating, echoing weirdly in the dull air. A splash of water. A hollow clunk, like wood against wood – but somehow multiplied. A creak. Then again. Splash. Clunk. Creak. Over and over. He bit his lip, frowning hard, straining to penetrate the grey murk. He knew this sound – but couldn’t place it. It grew closer. His mind raced. The hairs on his neck prickled in slow recognition. Involuntarily, he began to take slow steps back from the water.

  Then a great shape loomed out of the fog.

  The head and neck of a dragon.

  Gliding straight at him in a moment of surreal silence, the dragon’s huge bulk bit into the grit and pebbles of the shore and drove part way up the bank with a crunching of wood, stone and water before coming to rest just yards from Atli’s astonished face. He was dimly aware of the loose bundle of twigs falling one by one from his enfeebled hands. High up and to the left, a figure emerged from nowhere and landed heavily on the rocks and shingle. A tall man, broad-shouldered, beardless, but spiked with blond stubble, ice-blue eyes glinting behind the eye-guards of a steel helm.

  Run, said a voice in Atli’s head. Run as fast as you can. But he could not move.

  The man took three steps towards him – mail-coated, rings shimmering in the feeble light, circular shield strapped to his back, gold-hilted sword drawn and ready – so close that Atli could make out the pattern-welding on the gleaming blade. A hint of a smile flickered across the man’s face, his sword point hovering barely an arm’s length from Atli’s chest.

  Another figure – a giant of a man – heaved itself over the right side of the ship, making the ground shudder as his feet sunk into shore. This one was equipped much like the first, but for his simpler helm whose rim rested on his heavy brow, and the dew-damp fur of some grey creature wrapped across his shoulders and tucked into a wide leather belt. Dark, deep-set eyes peered from amongst unruly black hair and beard, fixed intently on the boy. He spat in his palms, and, holding Atli’s gaze, reached over his left shoulder and drew forth a broad-bladed axe.

  Behind him, another man landed on the shore. And another...

  One by one they spilled over the sides and crunched and splashed down onto the riverbank – twenty, thirty, more – until the grey stone beach and misty shallows around the dragon’s oaken hull were filled with men, some trudging shoreward from the deeper water, emerging from the fog like ghosts – grim-faced, steel-helmed, girt with hide and mail, until, finally, it seemed the whole river’s edge shimmered with the glint of weapons.

  Though he had never seen such a thing in his whole life, Atli recognised them instantly.

  Not ghosts.

  Worse.

  Vikingr.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CREW OF THE HRAFN

  BJÓLF ERLINGSSON TOOK another step towards the boy, eyes fixed on him, sword steady. He gave a nod towards the ground. “You dropped your sticks, little man.”

  A rumbling laugh ran through the assembled men as the lad crouched and began to gather up the scattered firewood. Bjólf watched the farm boy with amusement as he tied up his bundle – stick-thin legs and crude, ill-fitting clothes, no doubt cut from the roughest, itchiest, shittiest blanket in the place; the blanket even the dogs rejected. The look of it, the smell of it... It all seemed so familiar. It was at times like this he was reminded exactly why he’d left that life behind all those years ago. True, the plundered cottons and silks to which he had since become accustomed may have meant him facing danger and death on a daily basis, but it seemed a fair trade. Hel, how those bloody blankets had itched!

  “Are you from the village?” he demanded. The boy nodded hastily, jumping at the sound of the man’s voice. Bjólf rested his sword casually over his shoulder – looking momentarily like a wayfarer with his bundle of belongings – and scanned the treeline ahead, taking note of the path that disappeared into the wood. He nodded towards it. “How far?”

  “Six hundred paces...” In spite of his obvious efforts, his voice sounded thin and reedy.

  Gunnar Black-Beard shifted his axe from one hand to the other. “Hm. The boy can count.”

  Fisherman, thought Bjólf. Counts the fish for his father. He knew all about that. Most of his men knew it, in one way or another. And those who denied it most perhaps knew it keenest of all. Bjólf turned back to the lad. “You have animals there? Food? Valuables?”

  “Animals... and food. Not the other.”

  “We’ll have to make do with that,” sighed Gunnar.

  Godwin snorted dismissively, resting his hands and chin on his massive axe. “Everywhere the same. You’d think there was no decent treasure left. How’s a man to make a living?” A few of the men muttered at his words.

  “Have I ever let you down, Godwin?” Bjólf shot back. He didn’t give him a chance to answer, but turned to the boy again.

  “Any weapons there?”

  H
e shook his head.

  “Then we go,” said Bjólf. And with that he made a sudden move towards the boy, his sword raised threateningly over his shoulder.

  I’M DEAD, THOUGHT Atli. I’ve told him what he needs, and now he’s going to kill me.

  In the moment that followed, he involuntarily pictured the heavy blade slashing downward and across in one movement, the catastrophic moment of contact stretched out into a slow, dream-like sequence – the sword’s edge striking his left shoulder, parting the flesh, shattering the bone and not stopping until it had come clean through to the opposite side of his chest, severing his head, shoulder and right arm in one continuous action.

  Curiously, it was not fear that took hold of him in that weirdly suspended moment, but a kind of anger. With tears suddenly stinging his eyes, he inwardly cursed his own inability to act – cursed this last, lost opportunity – and wondered abstractly whether he would remain conscious long enough to gaze up at his own lopsided, headless corpse, its insides still pumping, and see it sway and fall.

  Without warning, the beardless warrior thrust out his left hand, ruffled his hair with a gruffly dismissive laugh, and gave a nod to the giant alongside him. Then, to Atli’s great surprise, the entire party of men began to move rapidly up the shore, the ring of metal against metal filling the damp air. Slowly, the realisation dawned that the man had no intention of spilling Atli’s blood on the dull, grey stones of that lonely beach. There was, as far as Atli was concerned, a far more terrible fate in store.

  He was going to ignore him.

  Atli couldn’t stand it. With a mixture of anger and desperation, he whirled around to the rapidly receding throng and called out: “I could lead you!”