Land of the Beautiful Dead

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The ferryman had six more fares in the back of his van and a long way yet to drive, so he didn’t stop at town. He just rolled up to the docking gate, opened up the hatch and told her to get out.

Lan got out, moving carefully along the van’s armored roof and trying not to look at the Eaters clambering below her. They hadn’t seen many on the drive, but there were always Eaters at the towns and this one was pretty big, as towns went these days.

There were kids up on the wall, taking shots at Eaters and smoking. They had bows and buckets of smouldering pitch beside them, but it had rained most of the morning and the dead were too wet to burn, so they were using guns instead, showing off the wealth of a town that could afford to waste bullets on Eaters. When they saw her, one of the kids dropped a ladder and steadied it for her while another jotted down the name painted on the side of the ferry beneath the picture of the red-haired siren with her sword raised high over a heap of decapitated corpses. The Boudicca, it said, which Lan only knew because the ferryman had bragged it up all the way from Morrow-up-Marsh where he’d taken her on.

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