Valley of the Dead by Kim Paffenroth

was not the violent storm of earlier in the morning, but just a solid, even blanket of clouds that hung over them, lifeless and still. The sun was now only an indistinct area of lighter grey in the oppressive mass.
    After the four of them had been riding for some time, the trees gave way to another area that had been cleared for human cultivation and toil. There were no signs of people in the fields this morning. Dante noticed the ground was quite wet here, almost swampy, with puddles here and there, both in the road and fields. The water in the puddles looked oddly dark, as did the mud here. Perhaps such dark soil was good for the crops, Dante thought, more fertile – though he had trouble imagining this place full of plants and life. He gazed up at the lighter spot in the clouds, where he knew the sun was. Everything was still. Even the stagnant clouds didn’t seem to move. No birds, no sounds, no motion besides the miserable creeping of the four of them. The storm was preferable to the silent dread of this place.
    Ahead, a wall stretched across their path for quite some distance to either side. It looked to be masonry, about the height of two men.
    “What’s that?” Dante asked.
    “The settlement furthest up the valley,” Radovan replied. “It’s fairly big. The mining and lumber here are quite valuable and attract lots of people.”
    “Why do they have a wall?” Dante asked. “The last town didn’t.”
    “These people live far from civilization,” Adam said. “We have our lake to protect the monastery, but they need a wall, for beyond this town there are only wild things and savage men, even in the best of times.”
    Dante considered the situation. “Will we have to ride around it? It would slow us down a lot.”
    “We might,” Adam said. “There will be no choice if they’ve locked the gate and refuse us entry. But let us see if the gate is open, and perhaps we can go straight through. Of course, if the gate is open, then they must not be aware of the danger. We should warn them.”
    They went a bit further before Radovan raised his hand and they stopped. He pointed ahead to some reeds growing along the side of the road in the swampy ground. They rustled, though there was no wind. Dante strained to hear something more, voices or the braying of animals or the moan of the dead, but there was nothing.
    Dante followed Radovan and Adam in dismounting. This time Bogdana agreed to stay with the horses while they moved forward on foot to investigate. The three men had gotten quite close to the stand of reeds before they saw the source of the rustling. The tall stalks had been concealing four shapes: one human figure lying on the ground, with three others kneeling around it. The prone figure was a big man. He had been torn open in several places. The three kneeling figures were two boys and a woman. There was blood all over the four of them, spattered on the reeds, and more of it flew off their hands as they tore pieces from the man’s body.
    The boys were even younger than the two children Bogdana and Dante had killed at the river crossing. The woman had her back to Dante. She was kneeling near the man’s midsection, and from the motions and sounds she was making, it was clear she was pulling the man’s organs out and eating them. The two children growled at her, apparently displeased she was getting the better share of the food. She snarled back and swatted at the one boy who was struggling with the tough sinews of the man’s thigh, trying to claw out a piece of it with his fingernails. Dante watched as the other boy, near the man’s head, bent down further, placing his hands on the ground and leaning down to tear into the dead man’s neck with his teeth. As the child rose back up to a kneeling posture, he held one end of a long strip of flesh in his bloody mouth. The other end was still attached to the dead man, and the undead boy thrashed his head around like a dog would, till the morsel snapped and