The God Of The Undead

(John's POV)

(Alaska, edge of Tongass)

I couldn't feel it, nor could I care for the biting breeze of the seemingly never-ending cold of the Alaskan wilderness. It was something that never really bothered me when I first rose from the shadows of a large tree near the edge of the Tongass National Park.

On my shoulder sat the sadistic fairy of darkness, Dixie, and behind us was none other than a sizable horde of undead ready to bombard the near-impenetrable bunker of Allen's located near the center of the park. 

To be honest with myself, I truly didn't need my horde for what I was about to do, but then again, I wanted to see the struggle of a dying species as it's outmaneuvered and ravaged to the last human. I have a plan for the last human since I think it would be funny for what's to come in the end.

Next to me stood both Joselin and Joseph, already waiting on me to let them loose with the rest of the horde. They each had their own personally assigned objectives and now were competing to see who would finish first. It was obviously Joselin's idea, and sadly she herself didn't know the difference in difficulty of each other's task.

Joseph had the simplest of the tasks, which fell into his comfort zone as all he had to do was to cause as much destruction and devastation with his main body as possible while remaining the center of attention. On the other hand, Joselin was to try to take out as many obstacles that prevented the main attack force from proceeding with rushing the main entrance. Me, on the other hand, I had a meeting with an old acquaintance that landed me on the path I'm on now.

Everything was ready, and now we waited for one thing and one thing only, and that was the traitor. The traitor, someone that Joselin had gotten close to over the past 3 years out of curiosity and eventually established a close bond with. The real question is whether this bond was deep enough to open the large and thick doors that none of my undead, including the variants, could breakthrough. The gate was at best a meter and a half thick, which really surprised me as I knew it would have been expensive. The gate's expensive nature only shined a slither of light on how deep Allen's pockets were before brought the human civilization to its knees. 

As I was lost in thought, I could feel a surge of magic being created near the center of the Park and then rising into the air, revealing a ball of golden light that then exploded into a giant multi-colored Aurora Borealis that illuminated the night sky that shrouded all of my army except their glowing eyes.

Excellent, the signal for us to begin. As the Aurora Borealis shined bright into the sky, I raised my right hand and pointed toward the center of the park while saying, "Leave nothing behind."

At my final words, my undead army began their race toward the center of the forest where the Bunker is located while being led by both Joseph and Joselin. Joselin began jumping from tree to tree as if she was a rapidly moving pinball while Joseph expanded the shadow beneath him, and out came his true form, a giant and hideous bundle of shadowy tendrils dripping with some sort of liquified shadow that quickly dissipated before hitting the ground as he floated and flew off toward the center knocking down trees as he went. At this point, I left the main fighting to them since it would be a great chance to gauge what they were capable of. 

The scene of my undead army racing around me for the chance to taste flesh while being led by Joseph and Joselin was mesmerizing as it was truly straight out of a movie scene. As I flew into the air and began following them from behind to witness their efficiency first hand, I noticed that halfway into the forest were 25 individual lights of varying colors that emanated magic. It was clear that this was their defensive force, but I knew for a fact that this wasn't all of them as the bird that I had follower Alice and her group for the past 3 years has reported the exact increase of survivors living within the bunker, 42 to be precise. So either the rest were children and elderly, or they were those that couldn't fight; all that mattered was that we had 17 unaccounted for that includes Alice and her group, and I was not too fond of unknown variables in set plans yet what kind of leader of an army would I be if I didn't have a contingency for the unknown.

(20 min before John and his army arrived outside of Tongass National Park)

Nothing is worse than being awkwardly sad while resting between the legs of your lover with the back of your head on their c.h.e.s.t and your vision stuck to the ceiling. It had been almost a week since my mom passed away with that depressing forewarning of the future to come, yet I was still moping about while trying to deal with everyone's safety and needs. Yeah, I should have taken some time to deal with her passing, but things needed to be done.

Like the maintenance of the sensory stones. Carved stones with what Delia described as forgotten god runes that we, humans on this world and our neighboring cross-dimensional cousins, rebranded and degraded into a nonfunctional version that we call Nordic runes. Although it took a couple of months, we managed to make a less than desirable but efficient sensory array wherein which if anything, undead were to walk near one of many sensory stones, several people would be notified, including me. I hardly went to dispatch any since I needed to help micromanage resources along with making sure project: Quantum was ready at a moment's notice.

Project: Quantum was something that I and Delia had come up with when I was worried about an escape route in case we couldn't hold off a large horde and they somehow made it past that thick a.s.s doors Allen had installed as the main entrance. It was something that I worried about plenty when out of the blue Delia ask if I wanted to build a jump gate. A transdimensional portal that connected the gate to any predetermined destination on our world. Although it was a one-way ticket to anywhere it was better than being stuck in a bunker with one entrance and exit with the off chance of being cornered like rats.

When it came to the jump gate I asked several times why we couldn't connect to other worlds and just escape there. Her answer was simple yet filled me with shock as she said, " One it would take far more magical energy than anyone on this planet could muster even with what remains of my essence within you. Two the only alternative would be to sacrifice a hundred lives, and to be honest with you darling, even if we had that number excluding your family, I doubt you'd do it just to make Lana happy. So let us keep to the idea of hopping from one place to another in order to not be cornered, and please darling let us hope and pray that we don't end up in the middle of an ocean somewhere."

Her informative comment widened my horizon on a couple of things including my vulnerability to trying to mend my damaged relationship with my daughter. Other than the incident back at dirt path next to the highway that was flooded with undead where I chose to hold everyone at gunpoint as to not risk drawing attention to us by trying to play hero there were other moments that further separated us. Such as the time I had to sacrifice a large number of our survivors in order to make the final push to Allen's Bunker. No one was happy, most were pissed such as Lana, but most got over it after realizing that it was a hard choice to make given my position at the time being the only one coming up with solutions. Some times the sacrifice of others need to be made even if they are unknowing

I would have loved to have laid on the bosom of my lover for the few moments that would have felt like an eternity for me, but I guess destiny would allow such as the bracelet, several pieces of wood tied together using scavenged strings, on my wrist that was connected to the sensory stones began shining brightly. This wouldn't have been anything new since the undead would occasionally wander into our safe perimeter and we'd send someone to dispatch them quickly, but this time it shined brighter than ever while violently vibrating and eventually giving out as the strain it received was too much and the strings snapped. The bracelets shined but never vibrated and snapped meaning that either we were facing a horde bigger than we've ever fought or an undead stronger than we've ever fought just crossed our security perimeter.

I couldn't feel my face but I knew my eyes shot open wide and I jumped up startling Megan as I was running toward the door. Before I could reach the door Megan asked, "What's going on??"

Usually, I would smile at her clueless face, but now wasn't the time as she wasn't on the security team and those that were could easily guess the severity of the situation if their bracelets too have ended up like mine. I looked back at her and said, "We just went into a possible code red."