The silence of the forest was not peace. It was dread suspended in time.
Snowfall returned by mid-morning, descending like a burial shroud over pine and stone. The wind had died, but the air was no kinder—dense with frost and the faint stench of death that no man could quite name.
Henri Fontaine, bloodstained and weary, trudged at the head of the battered quartet. His musket hung from his shoulder like a forgotten oath. Beside him limped Aubert Lucien, who clenched his teeth against the pain radiating from his broken ankle, using a snapped branch as a crude crutch. Barbier Bréon, face drawn and grey, moved with mechanical rigidity, always watching their flank. And Louis Caillard… Who... hadn't spoken in an hour.
Snow crunched beneath them, each step a prayer against cracking branches or distant howls. They didn’t know where they were going. Only that they were away.
They wandered aimlessly through a grove of black trees, frost etching the bark like ancient runes. Henri’s legs burned. His lungs ached. But the forest didn’t care. It swallowed men whole, and left only echoes behind.
Then Lucien stopped.
“There,” he said, voice thin. “Someone’s lying there.”
Beneath a sagging spruce, half-buried in snow, was the shape of a man—frozen stiff, mouth ajar in a scream that would never end. His coat was torn, his boots bloodied, and his hands clutched something still.
Henri knelt, brushing frost from the corpse’s chest. The man was French. A signaler, if the shattered horn by his side was anything to go by. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed. Not glowing. Not like Duroc. Just dead.
Tucked in his inside coat was a map. Still dry. Still marked. Henri unrolled it slowly, breath catching as he saw the tiny ‘X’ near a wooded ridge—not quite close from their current position.
“Look,” he whispered, pointing. “We’re here. He must’ve been trying to reach the camp. The main column’s stationed beyond the river bend.”
For a moment, hope flickered.
Then it died under the sound of Louis’s voice.
“Forget it.”
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The three turned. Louis was pale, trembling, fists clenched at his sides.
“We’re not going back. You saw what happened. The dead don’t die anymore. They hunt. We’re four men! Four! We won’t make it to the army. We won’t make it anywhere!”
“You’d rather run?” Bréon growled. “To where?”
“South,” Louis said. “Austria. Spain. Anywhere. We find a road, we find a horse, we leave this cursed place behind. I’m not dying for Napoleon! I’m not dying for some map and a grave.”
“You’ll die alone, then!” Lucien snapped. “You think we'll even make it there? You think the rest of Europe is untouched? That they’ll take us in with open arms while we’re half-starved and covered in blood?”
“It’s better than marching into another butcher’s den!” Louis yelled back.
Henri stood between them, jaw set. “Enough.”
The word cracked like a whip through the trees.
He looked at them—really looked—and saw what remained: fractured men, shells of soldiers. But behind Bréon’s fire and Lucien’s pain, there was still resolve. Behind Louis’s fear… there was grief.
Henri held up the map. “If there’s any place left with weapons, food, shelter—it’s with the army. We tell them what happened. We regroup. We fight. Or else everyone who died back there—everyone we left behind—was just meat in the snow.”
A long pause.
Bréon nodded first. “He’s right.”
Lucien followed.
Louis didn’t speak. But he didn’t argue either.
They turned west.
The hours blurred.
The sun began to dip again, casting long shadows through the trees. Twilight in the forest was no friend. It crept through the branches like ink spilled across glass. Mist coiled around their legs, thick and white like breath from a dying god.
Then came the sound.
A branch snapping. A low moan.
They froze.
From the mist, something moved.
It was hunched, slow—dragging one leg like it was made of wet rope. Skin sloughed from its face like candle wax. Its eyes were dull and milky. Its breath came in rasps.
“Another walking corpse,” Bréon whispered. “Just like the others.”
Then two more stumbled from the fog. Then five.
And then—sprinting—a man burst from the haze.
Except it wasn’t a man.
Eyes glowing faint red. Barefoot. Shirtless despite the cold. Teeth bared in a beast's grin. It screeched, lunging forward with speed unnatural for anything still bound by blood and bone.
Louis fired. Missed. Bréon didn't miss. The shot took the monster in the shoulder, but it kept coming, shrieking like metal on stone.
Henri thrusted with his bayonet. The red-eyed thing howled, snapping at him, before Lucien caved its head in with a rock at full force. Blood spattered the snow like ink on canvas.
The shambling corpses behind didn’t scream. They just came.
Slow. Methodical. Endless.
“Run!” Henri yelled.
They ran. Again. Through branches that clawed like hands. Through fog that tasted like dust.
Louis tripped. Bréon hauled him up. A corpse latched onto Lucien’s coat—Henri turned, stabbed its eye socket, before kicking it violently until it releases it's grip. They continued to run away from the closing Corpses.
Minutes. Hours. Time lost all meaning in the chase.
Finally, finally, the moans grew faint. The red-eyed ones did not follow far. The slow ones faded like ghosts.
They collapsed in a hollow near a stream, the water frozen solid. Breathless. Soaked in blood, sweat, and snow.
No one spoke. Not for a long while.
Then Bréon, voice hoarse, muttered, “They weren’t the same.”
Henri looked at him.
“The ones with the eyes. They’re fast. Erratic. But the others—” he paused, catching his breath, “—they rot. They moan. They move like puppets in sludge.”
Louis wiped his face. “Then what the hell are they?”
No answer came.
Henri simply looked into the fireless dark, snowflakes catching in his lashes.
"Don't know...”
But he knew this much: the world had shifted. These weren’t rebels or wolves or ghosts. These were cannibals of flesh and soul, rising from the dead. Some burned red. Others burned out.
But all of them… were coming.
And they were far from done.