Everything was quiet.  Sam didn’t even recognize the street as the undead seemed to be missing.  He saw thousands of tormented wraiths walking around.  They screamed instead of moaned.  None of them noticed him, but Sam instinctively knew that they were an army of souls trapped inside of their walking corpses.  Sam shuddered; glad he wasn’t one of them.

            He was sure he’d died.  The undead had torn apart his body so surely there wasn’t enough left to reanimate.  The last thing he remembered was the most intense pain of his life, but it had all lifted.  He wasn’t distressed as the others.  In fact, he felt pretty damn good.  The fatigue from the previous days was gone and there was no sign of the sweat and dirt that had accumulated on his skin and clothes.  The smell of decay was absent for the first time in half of his life.

            “You’re one of the lucky ones,” a familiar voice said.

            “Paul?”

            “They are the damned.  They see and sense everything their bodies do, but they have no control.  I felt it until you freed me.  I pray that one day they will be free of their curse.”

            Sam remembered Paul’s thrashing corpse, nailed to the cross.  The last thing he’d done as he left the compound was to put the soldier out of his indignity.

            “I thank God that I was unable to hurt anyone, but it’s a good thing I was trapped.  You see if I’d have moved on there would be nobody to fight him.”

            “Who?”

            “Lenux.  He never crossed over and his rage has made him powerful.  If we don’t stop him he’ll find someone else to influence.  He’ll find more people to torment.  And he’ll never leave Jack or Helen alone.”

            “I can feel her,” someone else said.

            Jasper appeared next to Sam.

            “Connie’s waiting for you, but this will take all three of us.”

            “Where are we?” Sam asked, already knowing the answer.

            “Don’t you recognize the building?  You died right where you’re standing.  Poor Jack saved you a lot of pain, but even if they hadn’t spotted you there wouldn’t have been enough left to trap you.”

            As Paul walked away, both Sam and Jasper were drawn to follow him.  As they passed through the crowd of oblivious souls, Sam noticed that his feet weren’t moving.  It was as if his boots were glued to a conveyor belt.  Jasper kept repeating his wife’s name.  The night before his death, all he’d wanted was revenge.  Now that his wife was again within reach, it seemed he wanted no more to do with the battle.

            Jasper’s form momentarily broke away from Paul before it snapped back as though attached to an elastic leash.  As the dead man moved closer to Paul, he struggled less.

            “Who are you?” Jasper asked.  Though he was only a few feet away from Sam, his voice sounded distant.

            “A friend.  The same men who killed your people had me nailed to a cross.  Now we’re going to make sure that one of their leaders ends up in the right place.”

            Sam looked around as they moved back towards the tower.  He saw faint echoes of the battle around him.  He mostly saw flashes of human forms trapped in death for a brief instant before the form would disappear again.  The gunfire was faint, but he could hear it looping around the building.  Occasionally a shout would pass by him but he had no sense of what was going on.

            “I’m sorry that there’s no time to train you.  If you concentrate on one of the sounds, you’ll eventually be able to see what’s going on around you.  I’ve been able to communicate with some of the living in their dreams.  Sometimes I can send signals to someone when they’re awake.  Lenux, on the other hand has been able to form apparitions.  He can have a coherent conversation with someone who’s awake.  Alone, I’d be powerless to fight him, but together we might be able to put him down.”

            “What’s with the birds?” Jasper asked, looking to the orange sky.

            It seemed to be on fire, but below the inferno several birds passed overhead, circling the building.  All of them were a stark black.  Perhaps they were ravens or large crows.  Sam hadn’t noticed them before.  He was sure they weren’t there before he’d died.

            “I don’t know,” Paul said.  “They follow us everywhere.”

            Paul passed through a wall.  Without any though, Sam and Jasper followed.  Though they’d entered on the ground level, they were somehow exploring the second story.  As he saw and heard more echoes of death, Sam tried to concentrate on the ones that were happening now.

            As he concentrated, his flashes grew into visions.  He could see troop formations moving at the bottom of the stairs.  Though they were greater in number, their men had the inferior firing position.  They were gunned down much faster than the men they attacked.  Figures moved towards the stairs, obscured not as if they moved through fog, but like they were made of it.  When one of them fell to a bullet, his body would tumble to the floor, dissipating before impact.

            Paul moved through the fray, untouched by the battle.  Jasper seemed more alert and in the moment as they advanced.  Maybe it had to do with their proximity to his body.  Sam flashed and saw the body, laying on the ground in one of the fourth story rooms.  Another man was dead in the room, but he wore black.

            “Jack…”

            “He’ll be having more nightmares when this is over, but he’s alive,” Paul said.  “Lenux is close.  He’s dismayed that his people haven’t been able to carry out swift vengeance and he’s afraid of us.  He’ll say that there is no God, but he knows that he can’t escape judgment forever.”

            As they passed one of the rooms on the fourth story, Sam caught a glimpse of Jack, Ted, and Turnbull firing out of the window.  Jack was fighting to suppress tears.  When he’d gone through the window there hadn’t been reinforcements at that side of the building.  Perhaps they’d swung around to see if the defenses had thinned.  Maybe they wanted to sneak someone inside to neutralize some of the defenders.

            No matter, Sam realized.  There wasn’t much he could do with the information.  He had the feeling that Paul had as much to do with the location and timing of the battle as Lenux did.  Paul wouldn’t have put his people in danger if he didn’t think they’d have been able to survive.  The cultists had been thinned out by Olmstead’s men who were all but nonexistent on the battlefield.  The earlier combat had helped to level the playing field.

            Once they cleared the fourth floor, the echoes of battle ended.  Everything was quiet.  The still would have been peaceful if it wasn’t so ominous.  Sam was in new territory.  He didn’t know what if any dangers lay ahead.  It was also strange being led by Paul, who’d been under his command in life.

            Sam knew his former subordinate would do a better job of leading than he had.

            “I’m sure none of the others blame you for their deaths.  I don’t.”

            Sam kept expecting a sermon, but none came.  The young soldier just gave words of encouragement where they were needed.

            “I held the two of you back because I trust you.  Sam, I’ve worked with you for years and there’s nobody I’d rather watch my back in a fight.  I have no connection with the other soldiers who’ve fallen.  There’s no way I could have held onto them and there’s no way I could tell how they’d react.  Both of you need absolution, not from your sins but from your guilt, before you can face the judgment of God.

            “Jasper, while I didn’t know you in life, I’ve seen you in action.  I know what kind of a man you were before your people were slaughtered.  Know that your family is okay and seek justice, not vengeance.  Rage and hatred are his weapons, not ours.”

            Again, Sam was amazed that Paul had avoided a sermon.  From being on this side since his death, Paul was probably not privy to what lay past the light, but he held fast to his convictions.

            As they moved upward, Sam started to feel a simultaneous chill and heat.  He could almost see the darkness through the walls.  He received more flashes, but these weren’t from the battle or the battle ground at any point in time.  They were visions of Lenux’s atrocities.  He witnessed several shootings, both carried out and overseen by their query.  Visions of rape and brutality fluttered around the room.  Among them, he saw Helen pinned to the floor, screaming as her face was pushed down.  He saw a Holy Lieutenant fight his way through a crowd of ghouls after being bitten get taken down and torn apart by his own men.  They were led by Lenux.

            He saw the ravages of the mass executions Reed had committed after being deceived.  Most of their civilization had been slaughtered or ran into the wilderness.  Their army turned its might and fury inward as the leaders waged war upon each other.  The defeated faced execution by crucifixion.  He saw a soldier named Cooper kill one of his own men at Lenux’s insistence.

            The visions were not just limited to mayhem that had been committed, but fantasies and desires.  Sam felt Lenux’s desire to destroy his messiah and rage that he’d been unable to exact his revenge.  In the mix, Sam felt something else… fear.

            Lenux knew he was being pursued, but there was something else that frightened him.

            As they got closer, Sam could feel Paul and Jasper’s thoughts.  He was starting to receive flashes of death from those he’d known in life.  He felt teeth gouge into his flesh.  He witnessed several of his friends die from the mystery infection that always followed a zombie bite.  Even the ravages of cancer that claimed Jack’s mother.

            Next to him, Jasper reeled as he felt his wife die a thousand times over.  Many of his friends had been mutilated and tortured by the cultists before their deaths.  Their pain played through his head as they moved forward.

            Paul relived his death on the cross.  While he felt many of the deaths Sam did, he also shared the fates of thousands of victims.  He saw victims from before the dead had started to walk.  Mostly they were cultists who tried to leave, but at least one reporter had been murdered as well as a middle aged couple who tried to rescue their teenaged daughter.  After society collapsed there was nobody left for the cultists to hide from and the situation exploded.  They slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands, committing acts of unimaginable depravity.  Paul witnessed all of it, but it was nothing new.  He’d been seeing the mayhem since he’d been freed from his body.

            Sam witnessed everything that went through his comrades’ minds just as he knew they saw his visions.  They weren’t debilitated by the pain, but driven.  It forged them almost into a single entity and pushed them onward.  Suddenly, it didn’t just feel like the three of them facing the unknown.  They seemed to be in the command of an army.

            The feeling changed when they found Lenux.  His rage was overwhelming.  As they entered the top level room where Lenux cowered, an inhuman roar overpowered them.

            Sam lunged forward, but his target moved back.  The room seemed to move back with him, impossibly stretching the distance between the attackers and their prey.  He didn’t look as he had in life, but seemed to be made out of pure shadow.  His body was featureless.  Though it was clearly a human silhouette, sometimes his form seemed shapeless.

            As the images of death and torture became more and more intense and vivid, Sam felt himself fly.  Finally moving faster than Lenux could retreat, Sam struck his prey.  Paul and Jasper followed, grappling to the shadowed form.  Amazingly, they pecked at his face.

            They’d changed forms.  Somehow Sam wasn’t amazed.

            As they attacked, Lenux ran out of room to retreat and ran to the roof.  Big mistake.  The birds dove from the sky, descending on their target.  All of them shrieked, pecked, slashed, and flapped.  With every attack the experience of torment was shared by the group and amplified thousands of times as it was directed at Lenux.

            Sam wondered if they could kill a soul.  Would they have to attack forever or would they be able to push Lenux into Hell?  Sam supposed it didn’t matter.  He didn’t have anywhere better to be.  His parents and brothers had all died around the time the dead started walking, unless years before that.  Though it would have been nice to see them again, there was nobody he ached to visit.  He could attack for as long as he needed to.  Be another five minutes, or the rest of eternity.

            Suddenly, Lenux screamed and melted away.  Perhaps he’d retreated, wanting to take his chances on the other side.

            Feeling Paul at his side, Sam asked: “What happens next?”

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