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A loud crunch told him he’d connected with something solid. His foggy eyes followed, and he saw the bone-crushed face of a corpse, mouth gaping, broken jaw hanging precariously by its hinge.
“Snap out of it!” Kai’s roar reached his ears in a muffled rumble.
Sorin saw that the warrior had his long axe in one hand, while he held Ere aloft with the other by the scruff of the male’s neck.
“Draugar!” he shouted, eyes alighting on the undead creatures surrounding them on all sides, smelling strongly of decaying bodies.
“Cut off their head and limbs! They have less coordination then. But you cannot kill them. They are already dead. Just stop them from having leverage to pull you down. We have to get to the other side!”
As he spoke, Kai swung his axe in a three-hundred-sixty-degree arc around his body, clutching Ere close to him all the while. Around him, some zombies’ heads got lopped off, some arms got hacked.
But they didn’t stop coming, crowding around the three of them, hundreds of fingers pulling at their clothes, their flesh, trying to drag their bodies back under the bog.
And fuck! Some of them wielded weapons too.
Sorin hissed as a rusty sword glanced his side, tearing through cloth and skin. He sidestepped minutely and used the attacker’s momentum to bring it close, snatching the sword right out of its hand and using it to behead it in one clean sweep.
At the same time, he spun around to face another, stabbing the weapon into its chest to keep it at bay, while breaking its arm off at the elbow, its own sword still gripped in a skeletal hand.
Sorin shook the limb off his second sword, pulled the first one out of the body, and sliced through the neck with a cross-wise move, using the two swords like scissors.
Thus armed, he battled more of the horde that came at them, while slowly but surely making progress to cross the bog.
“Sorin!” Ere called out.
At the same time that Kai said—
“Duck!”
Sorin went low a moment before a flying axe took off two zombies’ heads as it whirled by.
How many had they dispatched by now? Hacked into too many pieces to drag them down?
Two dozen? Four?
But they kept on coming. The entire swamp was filled with them.
Groaning like ghosts and screeching like crows. Sagging faces with rotten teeth. Many without eyeballs; and those with, had no lids, just marbles goggling in sunken sockets, rubbery gray flesh stretched over jagged bones.
How long had they been fighting?
Minutes? An hour?
But they were no closer to the other side of the bog.
His strength was waning. He could feel it.
He was made of flesh and blood, after all. He was human. He could tire. He had no flames with which to burn the corpses that crowded around him. No lightning to strike them to ash. No wings to lift him out of the swamp.
He could die here.
Rest here…
It would all finally stop.
Ere’s squeak of dismay brought Sorin out of his own head.
He reached his Mate in two long strides, slogging through the clinging mud with renewed strength.
