Just one zombie

By Strega

"Brother," said the gate guard. "You don't need to go. It is just one undead. If it comes out of the grove," he pointed as the tree-covered knoll next to the town graveyard, "A patrol will get it."

"And," said the other guard, "People who go in the grove sometimes don't come out. We've gone in to check. Sometimes we find their clothing, so something happened to them, but we never find the cause."

"Which is why I should go," said Brother Varn. A newly frocked Priest of Pelor, he touched the sun disk holy symbol at his throat with poorly disguised pride. A flanged mace hung at his side and a chainmail byrnie protected him from neck to wrist to knee. He paused to pull on his open faced helm. "I will root out whatever terror lives there, as Pelor is my witness."

"Sir," said the older guard, "Don't go alone. If you can wait a few hours we can gather up some militiamen."

"No," said the priest. "This evil needs to be found and quashed. Only one zombie came out of the graveyard, if we wait more will rise."

"But," said the older guard, about to point out (very reasonably) that there was a good chance that the zombie wouldn't come out of the grove. The place had a bad reputation for a reason and it wasn't just travelers who went in and didn't come back out. Maybe they could root out the cause if they tried hard enough, but it was useful to have a no-go zone blocking one approach to the town. Even bandits knew to stay away. Whatever was in there only bothered people who entered the woods so they left it be.

Brother Varn was having none of it. "Enough. I will see you in an hour." He checked the mace at his side and strode toward the trees.

The younger guard glanced at the older, who shrugged helplessly. He waited until the priest was out of earshot before speaking. "Well, there goes another one."

Brother Varn entered the woods, eying the thick, growl-together canopy with some disquiet. So dense was the foliage overhead that little undergrowth grew down here. There was simply no light to support it. The advantage to that was he had a clear line of sight and the scanty grass and occasional light-starved shrub let him spot the scrapes left by clumsy zombie feet.

He picked up the pace as a faint groan sounded somewhere ahead. The zombie's trail led past a green shrub growing out of a mound of what might be droppings of some sort. Brother Varn paused, realizing that most of the undergrowth, what little there was, similarly sprouted from old and new droppings. So. There was something here besides the undead, something fertilizing the wood with its leavings. He resolved to keep a close eye on his surroundings.

Another undead groan sounded from ahead. There was a sound of struggle, the rattle of metal, and the zombie somehow managed to sound surprised. Both the struggle and groan were cut off by a peculiar slurping sound. Brother Varn readied his mace and rounded a thick, mossy oak trunk. He would confront this evil and vanquish it, as was his duty.

He paused in mid-step. Here was the zombie's trail, the scuffs heavy undead feet left in the dirt, and a mark where it clawed mindlessly at the bark of another tree, but no zombie.

There is a reason monster hunters travel in groups. That way they can watch each other's backs, and if a single one does something foolish, as Brother Varn did as he followed the zombie's trail to its end, hopefully someone would think to look up.

Brother Varn's first indication that something was badly wrong was a wet noise from overhead. Slowed by inexperience and the unfamiliar weight of his armor he didn't leap aside in time and a fleshy pink tentacle as thick as a woman's wrist slithered down out of the canopy and wrapped around him. The sticky tentacle lifted him from his feet and dragged him upward.

It all happened so quickly that Brother Varn, startled and hanging in midair, managed only a weak swipe of his mace as the tentacle reeled him in. The rubbery thing resisted the blunt weapon and as he tried to swing again he saw at last the source of the tentacle. It emerged from the furry cylindrical snout of a bulky green beast perched on a thick tree limb. Curved claws anchored it in place and a long prehensile tail wrapped around the tree trunk to steady it.

Near-sighted eyes peered uncertainly at Brother Varn, but tall upright ears were focused on the sound of his struggle. The thing was the size of a horse but shaggy and mottled green. No wonder he hadn't seen it lurking overhead. Brother Varn gritted his teeth and readied his mace, relying on his armor to protect him from the thing's claws.

Brother Varn discovered too late that the claws were the least of his concerns. As the pink tentacle, which he only now realized was the thing's tongue, pulled him in, the long rubbery snout suddenly parted to reveal a toothless maw. With a long slurp he was stuffed in, pulled by the tongue and sucked in by a peristaltic ripple that moved through the surrounding flesh.

In just a few seconds the horse-sized beast simply ingested him, swallowing him from helm to boots in one long gulp. The slimy flesh of its tubular mouth squeezed his rump and legs and he felt the grip of actual jaws, long toothless things that did little but hold him in place. Big as the thing was there wasn't room in its long snout for a whole man and his head and upper body slithered into a wet chute of flesh that could only be its gullet.

It was eating him! His training didn't cover this and his mace was pinned to his thigh by the thing's tube-mouth. cheek. Brother Varn grunted and squirmed, trying to open up enough room to fight, but the dire anteater - belatedly he remembered hearing about these things - simply lifted its swollen snout and swallowed.

Brother Varn cursed (he'd have to do penance later!) as the rubbery snout clenched down, squeezing him into a gullet that eagerly gripped and carried him deeper. With just that one gulp he slid heavily down its throat, mace, armor and all. He felt the thing tense and then relax as it swallowed its meal and despite his best effort to struggle he slid helplessly into the beast's stomach.

Where he was not alone. A groan sounded as he was forced into the gut alongside someone else, and the scrabble of long-nailed and very strong hands against his armor told him who it was. Reflexively Varn gripped the sun disk holy symbol at his throat.

"Avaunt, thing of darkness!" A holy light sprang from the disk, illuminating the fleshy pink walls pressing in from all sides, the thick slime coating them and most importantly the animated corpse in the stomach with him. It whined and tried to retreat from the glow, driven back by the light. He wasn't powerful enough to destroy it but the zombie cowered helplessly, doing its best to retreat.

There was nowhere for it to go. The zombie struggled to get away, but the thick muscle and fur surrounded them squeezed them together as intimately as lovers. Thick slime coated both of them and though he knew the zombie had only been in here a minute longer than himself he saw the redness where the caustic belly juices worked on the dire anteater's meal. His armor protected him for now but he had to subdue the zombie and somehow fight his way out. His holy light had no effect on the perfectly mundane fleshy walls, nor did his healing spells seem a solution to this problem. He could cast all the healing he had and still get a trip through the thing's bowels.

There was just one problem with his plan to struggle free. The zombie, unable to withdraw from the painful light, groaned and scrabbled at him again. Any undead will fight when cornered, even against the glow of a holy symbol.

It was stronger than he was and there wasn't enough room to swing his mace. Brother Varn gritted his teeth as the zombie tried to bite through his mail.

"Avaunt!" The glow strengthened, and the zombie moaned and tried to pull away, only to be foiled once more by the stomach walls. There was simply nowhere to go and after a moment it clawed at him again.

"Avaunt!" But even as the word left his mouth, the fleshy walls squeezed tighter around them. The dire anteater shifted its claws to give its belly room to droop below the branch and as the slimy walls slithered over the two of them they came to fit more perfectly around the beast's double meal. There was a sense of renewed pressure as the walls squeezed in and even from inside it Brother Varn heard the long belch as the beast vented the air that went down with its food.

Don't go into the woods alone, the guards had said. Wait for help, they'd said. Varn hadn't listened. Now here he was, fighting a frantic zombie in the tight pocket of a giant anteater's belly. With no room to swing his mace Brother Varn drew once more upon his holy powers. He could hold the zombie at bay, but not do that and attack the stomach wall at the same time. As the hot digestive slime flowed in, filling the space between them and oozing into the gaps of his armor, there was less and less room to fight and less and less air to breathe.

Brother Varn's faith saved him from the zombie for a time. It did not save him from a still worse fate. With a last burp the dire anteater settled down to digest its meal, confident that the weakening struggle in its midsection would soon stop altogether. It was right. The zombie didn't need air and lasted longer than the armored man, but without that armor to protect it it was soon too softened by the copious flow of stomach acids to do more than twitch. Bit by bit it ceased to do even that.

---

"What do you suppose happened?"
The older guard shrugged. A dozen militiamen and even the town mayor were here, rooting through the woods in search of the young priest.

"Who knows." The older guard fingered the flanged mace they'd found next to the priest's chainmail and partially digested clothing. All the leather was gone, digested away and leaving the mystery predator via a different route than the retched-up metal and cloth. The fresh piles of droppings told them, if the corroded armor wasn't enough of a clue, that their young priest had been eaten, digested and shat out by some beast. "Not a dragon, I guess." A dragon, after all, would have digested the flat-topped helm and other metal as easily as it did their owner.

Of the dire anteater there was no sign. The interlocking limbs of the grove let the beast move where it willed and it was a dozen trees away, still fat from its recent meal and hearing the movements of many people. Cautious by nature, it simply sat in a tree fork, resembling a mossy boll or parasitic growth. It would move again when it was hungry and safer prey was available.

"They never listen," said one of the militiamen. He was poking through a pile of droppings with a stick, winkling out various coins that made their way through the mysterious man-eater more or less unchanged. Corroded bronze and iron belt buckles, along with other bits of valueless gear small enough to be passed, were left where he found them.

The glitter of gold showed as the sun disk holy symbol, undamaged by its passage through an anteater's bowels, showed its face. With a grimace the militiaman used the stick to separate it from the brown mass and fragments of softened bone and flipped it onto the cloth he used to collect the coins.

"I told him the zombie wouldn't be a problem," the junior guard muttered. "It went into the woods, and when they do that they don't usually come out."

"Well," the militiaman said. His poking at the pile of poop uncovered a set of shackles the zombie, a prisoner hanged and buried before rising from his grave, had worn. "The zombie came out of something all right, just not as a zombie. I guess that priest caught up with him after all."

With a morbid laugh the senior guard waved to the mayor and the militiamen, who were grateful to leave the dark, foul-smelling wood. With the slimy pellet of regurgitated armor gathered up and the droppings poked through there was nothing left to show that Brother Varn had been here at all. All that remained was a new layer of fat on a sated predator and assorted piles of droppings.

There is a reason monster hunters travel in groups. Brother Varn didn't learn that lesson soon enough and somewhere, in some distant heaven, he was explaining to his god how he ended up in the stomach of a beast only smart enough to lurk in ambush for the weak and foolish.
With the militiamen gone and silence restored the dire anteater stirred. Moving with almost imperceptible slowness it traveled from limb to limb until it was above the picked-apart piles of droppings from its latest meal.

It was only an animal, but it was not stupid. This wasn't the first time a group of people came to poke through its leavings, and it knew what would happen next. Word of the priest's fate would make its way through the little village like lightning and someone would wonder if valuables might still be had in the leavings of the mysterious predator. The locals were too familiar with the danger of the woods to try but there was usually a traveler, a tramp, someone poor enough and desperate enough to try.

In place, perfectly camouflaged and hidden in the fork of a tree above its newest droppings, the anteater settled down to wait. The pink tip of its adhesive tongue appeared and moistened its chops. It was a patient beast. Hopefully a single human or other two-legs would come to look for loot, or if it was lucky, several in succession. Failing that, some animal or undead might wander by. It wasn't picky. Human, undead or animal, they all filled its belly just the same.