Empire's End Read Free Page A

what the man really was—he rose and
thrust the blade out and spun with a battle cry that killed the
dead’s senseless conversation, as if he were an unwelcome guest;
and he most certainly was.
    As he spun, rising, the blade cutting upward
in a sweeping arc—heads flew off of shoulders and rolled through
the air. And those slashed across the torso opened up and rotten
gray guts spilled onto the street. Stomachs burst and vomited their
contents onto the man’s feet. He threw the blade out again,
spinning in the opposite direction, and cut down a dozen of them at
once.
    They were dead, the ones he’d struck—dead and
deader. They would not rise again.
    The others came at him. He planted the tip of
the scythe blade in an emaciated rotter’s gut and ripped through
his sternum and skull, halving the bastard. The blade turned and
tore downward, through the legs of another undead, then reversed
course and decapitated a hissing female. Her open throat continued
to hiss as foul ichor spayed into the air.
    The man barreled into a line of rotters,
lifting one off its feet and divorcing its legs from its torso with
a mid-air strike. He whirled to knife through the kneecaps of the
others, and they fell limp, never to get up again. Every blow with
the scythe blade was a death blow. The blade seemed cursed; no, enchanted .
    He had forged it himself, binding and shaping
the bone with dark magic, then endowing it with the power to kill
the unkillable—to reap the undead. Such a task had been his burden,
as he had once been the Reaper himself.
    For thousands of years little more than a
silent record-keeper, marking the passage of souls from one plane
to the next, the Reaper had felt obligated to take on a new role
with the rise of the undead. It was more than just a plague on
humanity; they upset laws and balances set before time began. With
every fiber in his being he’d hated them... and with that, he
himself had begun to change, even as death had.
    He’d found will, and righteous anger. And
when he’d found her —the one he dreamed about, the child from
the swamp-house—that had been it. He had relinquished his role as
Death and bound himself to the mortal coil upon which shuffled Man
himself.
    He was still a supernatural being, yes, but
so much more fragile than he had once been. Unharmed, he might live
for an eternity, but if the undead were to overcome him, and tear
him apart, he’d simply be gone. No afterlife awaited the pale man
with the black eyes. He was a spirit made flesh, and this was his only life.
    But he had accepted all this without
hesitation because it meant saving her . Lily, the child who,
once he found her, helped him to find himself. She had been forced
to live among the undead in the swamp-house by her mad brother,
forced to treat the cadaverous predators as kin. And the Reaper
had—
    You simply lost it. You lost it.
    But what he’d gained had been worth the
price. He was alive now. And he had begun to sleep, and to
dream, and in his dreams he saw the little girl and he knew he had
to find her again. To ensure her safety, of course, but more than
that. Their bond seemed beyond his understanding.
    Upon entering this strange new life, the
former Death had chosen a name for himself: Adam. And it was as
Adam that he spun like a grim dancer through this sea of severed
limbs and putrid gore. He’d already cut down a third of the mob;
the end was near, at least for today.
    Leaping atop the police cruiser, he vaulted
off the roof’s edge and took down a row of rotting fiends before
they could flinch. Some of the undead had begun to slow in their
approach, but the lure of the flesh was too great. None would flee,
making Adam’s job all the easier.
    And I am not a man of flesh. They could not
consume me. Although some have tried...
    He climbed the barricade of vehicles at the
end of the street and ran onto the municipal plaza to make his last
stand against the horde.
    When they came at him he spun right