I sat in a cage. Around me were other kids, others who had been captured. Some cried. Some stared. Some rocked back and forth and held their heads and muttered to themselves. Some had just laid right where they were and gave in. They gave in to the fact that we were all going to be eaten.
A bone clanged against a cage and the kids inside, twins, screamed. They shrank back in fear and held each other. The skelly walked over and picked up its arm. It waved it at them and held it by the elbow. The strings of muscles, veins, and skin (what was left) whipped out and secured the limb back onto the body. The skeleton walked away. Its feet clicked on the ground sending shivers down my back in spasms. The twins cried more softly now; they didn’t want to annoy the thing again.
Suddenly, sounds sprang up around us and throughout the castle. Some were grunts. Some were screams. Some were strangled laughs that sounded more like choking than anything.
The Queen was coming.
She was a skelly of course. All her flesh and meat and insides had been eaten by her husband the King and she did the same to him. They are always hungry though. The Queen soon found that gnawing on bones helped drive some of the hunger away so she chewed and ripped and crunched her husband till he was nothing more than a toothpick. She held that toothpick in her mouth now and walked on her skull shoes that were maid especially for her. They had been made out of her children’s own heads. Her cape was the skin of her animals and her crown was made from the jaws of creatures. At the front of it was a supposed bear jaw. She had supposedly gotten it from a bear that she had taken down all on her own but the rumor was that the animal had died in a cage at the zoo from heatstroke.
She stopped before the cages and with her one good eye, she scanned the kids before her.
She clicked her jaw and pointed with her scepter (which were just spines stuck together with a newborns skull on top) at the twins. They froze as the rest of the mishmash of undeads howled and clicked and moaned. They grabbed the cage and hoisting it up, they passed the kids along like a mash pit at a concert. Out one of the side corridors they went and not a single word was ever uttered from the twins again.
The Queen, delighted at her double header of a meal, strode up to her chair (just a normal wooden rocking chair), sat in it, and leaned back and rocked herself. That was all. From her viewpoint, she could see the entire great hall with all the cages and all the children. Her eye wandered across all of them and settled on me. I stared right back. From here, it was a little hard to see but I doubted that her eye was like the others. The others had rotting flesh and creaky bones and their eyes weren’t so much as glassed over as… as… alright, they looked like someone had peed on them or something. You could always tell from the eyes if someone was infected or not. Lucky for kids, it just killed them and let them rot like the dead dead. They never stood up or searched or try to eat people. They were just dead.
The adults and animals were different though. Younger animals were like young people. They die or get bit then they stay dead but adults were different. They came back and they didn’t even have to be bitten. Anything dead past a certain age would be turned into an undead. Things that were already dead would just claw their way out of whatever they were buried or entombed in and come after the living. Their bodies took their time eroding away though.
Just like the movies and books and video games all it took to keep them down was a hit to the head. The brain needed to be destroyed otherwise, even if they lost their entire body, they’d just keep trying. Trying to move. Trying to eat. Those that still had working vocal chords and tongues could actually talk. I’d rather have them moan. Oh and they could hear no matter what stage of rot they were at. The Queen was different. She still had a beating heart. There it was, sitting in her ribcage, the muscles, veins, and skin had sewn it onto her bones. Other than that and at her joints, there was just bones. Her eye rolled in her head to her other socket. Inside, past the darkness, I could almost see her brain. Her brain that beat right alongside her heart. She banged her spines on the floor and several skellies, two rotters, and a crawler came in through the side corridor. The one where they had taken the twins. She raised a glistening arm causing the fur to fall off to the side. She pointed at me and clicked.
That’s all folks.
