Empire's End

0 / Grinning Samuel

The air was musty and stale, choking Ryland with every ragged breath. Seated on a rickety old chair before a table coated with dust, he imagined he was in the waiting room of a mausoleum. He’d been here two hours. Seemed the Reaper was overbooked today.

Before him yawned the mouth of a maze: a series of catacombs cut deep into the earth. A bitter cold whispered at him from the blackness, further constricting his lungs. In contrast was the warmth of klieg lights on his back; his long face was made longer in shadows cast sharply upon the table. On second thought, this seemed less a mausoleum than a television studio. Backlit like a late-night host, Ryland crossed one leg over the other and tapped his gold wristwatch, waited on his guest. Flanked by the klieg lights at Ryland’s rear were his audience, a huddled contingency wearing insect-like night vision helmet, hugging their M4 carbines which would punctuate his words like a laugh track if the guest wasn’t being cooperative.

The hush in the entrance of the catacombs was palpable as the mold in the air. His men’s breath, filtered through their helmets, was inaudible. Ryland coughed on a mote of dust. The sound cracked and echoed like a rifle report. Then the hush returned.

The hush was anticipation.

Something shifted in the catacombs. Ryland straightened up a bit, as a formality; although what was shuffling through the dirt towards the klieg lights likely couldn’t see him, not because of the lighting but because its eyes had long crumbled from their sockets.

Still Samuel always found his way to the table. Sometimes Samuel found his way to other things.

He was attired in a soiled and worn shirt from the colonial era that had once been white, but was now a dingy brown; same with his loose-fitting trousers. Samuel never requested new clothing. He probably only wore these threadbare threads out of habit. If they finally fell from his shoulders, revealing his emaciated husk of a frame, he’d likely not react.

Everyone always noticed his hands first. Ryland’s gunmen heard the rusty creaking of Samuel’s metal fingers, crude constructs tethered to his wrists with wire; fitted over what remained of his original appendages with an intricate system of antique clock parts housed within the palms. The mechanical hands flexed continuously as Samuel plodded along.

Once interest in the fidgety hands had waned, there was nowhere else to look but at his face: brown flesh-paper so fragile thin, stretched over an angular skull; the holes were eyes and nose had once been to serve purposes now fulfilled by other means; and the jaws. Another mechanism, screwed into the bone and affixed with steel teeth. Ryland stared in wonder, imagining the blind afterdead seated somewhere deep in the catacombs, working with hands that were not his own in order to build his razorblade smile.

“Grinning Samuel” was his full moniker (Samuel not being his real name, no one knew what that was). He settled in a chair opposite from Ryland and placed a small burlap sack in front of him. Stared, eyeless, at the living.

He was uncommonly picky and any transaction with him came with certain rules of conduct. Some had been established from the get-go while others were learned at great cost. Most important was the invisible line running down the middle of the table, separating Ryland from Samuel, a line of principle as effective as an electric fence. No one crossed that line. This cardinal rule was established when Ryland’s predecessor had reached out to grab that little burlap sack. In the ensuing melee, all the gunmen had swarmed past the now-screaming-and-bleeding liaison with every intention of dismembering Samuel.

And he’d killed every single one of them. Every one. The liaison had watched and died as blood jetted from the stump of his wrist. Watched and died while blind, smiling Samuel stuffed the gunmen’s remains into his stainless-steel maw. He didn’t feed often, yet he still thrived down here, in these catacombs beneath a defunct Protestant parish; a walking testament to the potency of the earth around him… the earth contained in that burlap sack.

Opening a briefcase, Ryland turned it towards Samuel. This was the transaction. He slid the case to the center of the table, just shy of that invisible line, and the zombie’s mechanical fingers rummaged through its contents. Watch gears, springs, miniature coils and screws. Although whatever it was that infused this accursed earth had kept Samuel from rotting away entirely — he still needed to maintain his most-used joints, his limbs, his appendages, those terrible jaws. They creaked as he fingered a brass cog.

Seemed like it’d be so easy right now to snatch the burlap purse with its pound of dirt and to riddle Samuel with bullets, throwing the table in his face, cutting him to ribbons with automatic fire. To finally storm the catacombs. As Ryland felt his own fingers jumping anxiously in his lap, hr forced himself to picture his predecessor, dying on the earthen floor beside this very chair, dying on his back in a shitty paste of dirt and blood.

Ryland was jarred back to reality as Samuel pushed the sack across the table. His sightless, metallic jack-o’-lantern visage turned slowly from side to side, as if surveying the firing squad flanked by klieg lights. Ryland, never certain whether the afterdead could still hear, mumbled thanks and took the sack. For the first time he addressed his team. “Fall back.”

They did, except for Goldhammer who came forward with a hazmat container the size of a lunchbox. Samuel sat quietly as Ryland took a handful of soil from the sack and, like a drug buyer testing the product, sprinkled the dirt over the dark mass in the container. “What’s his name?” He asked Goldhammer, who replied through his bug helmet, “Pancake.” Ryland smiled wryly and stroked the ball of black fur. Now he felt a rhythmic movement beneath his fingertips; the kitten shuddered, shifted. It was in an advanced state of decay and broken beyond repair by a callous parade of freeway traffic, so there was little for it do now but purr.

“Dirt’s good.” Goldhammer called back to the others. Another container was brought forth to receive the sack’s contents. Ryland closed the first over the cat. It muttered weakly with dead vocal cords. He smiled again. The sack was returned to the table beside the briefcase, both for Samuel to keep. Taking one in each metal fist, the zombie stood up.

The lunchbox in Ryland’s hands jerked, and even before the black blur flew past his face and down the tunnel, he knew; even as his legs pumped against his will, sending him past the table and over that invisible line in futile pursuit, he knew. Goddamned crippled cat! Ryland’s mind snapped as a clutch of mechanical fingers took root in the center of his chest.

Pulled off his feet by Grinning Samuel and out of reality by the numbing terror in his veins, Ryland head dimly the patter of bullets against Samuel’s back. Goldhammer, like a double-jointed ballet dancer, pirouetted off the table and drove a boot into the afterdead’s defunct groin. While his legs jackknifed through the air, he planted his M4 against Samuel’s temple and got off a good quarter-second burst of fire before the zombie punched through his body armor and yanked out a streaming handful of guts. A spurting, slopping mess that cushioned the soldier’s fall immediately followed it.

Ryland had been thrown clear of the battle and crashed into the dirt; having been tossed deeper into the catacombs he saw Samuel as a hulking silhouette against the lights, swaying under a barrage of gunfire. Ryland felt bullets zipping overhead and pressed his face into the earth, tasting that accursed dirt which Goldhammer had just died for.

Died… Christ.

The government had accumulated a half-ton of soil from the parish over the past three decades, and they run a battery of test, burying bodies and clocking their resurrection, administering strength, endurance and aptitude tests. What little intelligence Samuel exhibited was rare in afterdead (except those who stayed near their Source, of course); they usually came up sputtering the last of their blood & bile and clamoring for the nearest warm body, abandoning all higher faculties in the lust for living flesh. Indeed, such was the case with Sergeant Goldhammer, who sat up beside the besieged Samuel and fixed his bug-like gaze on Ryland. His exposed viscera were caked with soil, his back to the other men — but surely they realized what he’d become…

Goldhammer made a wet noise inside his helmet. Ryland heard it over the gunfire.

Pawing through his own innards, the dead soldier came at his former commander. Former as of thirty seconds ago — yes, he was fresh undead, and there was still some basic military protocol embedded in that brain of his, wasn’t there, so Ryland threw his out (wrist broken, he felt) and screamed “STOP!!”

Goldhammer did, crouching on all fours with a rope of intestine dragging between his legs. He cocked his head and was the perfect picture of a sick dog. He was trying to recognize the word and why it had halted him in his tracks. Ryland could see the gears turning, like the gears in Grinning Samuel’s jaw, and at that moment Samuel ripped into the firing squad and the hail of bullets was reduced to a drizzle. Goldhammer pounced.

Ryland pivoted on his broken wrist with a blinding snap of pain and caught the other between his glassy bug-eyes with a bootheel. Goldhammer grunted, batted the leg aside. They wrestled there on the ground with Ryland kicking himself further and further down the tunnel, all the while aware that soon Samuel would be finished with the others. Backpedaling on his hands and hindquarters, he disturbed a pile of pebbles — no, gears, the strewn contents of the briefcase! Ryland closed his good hand around a fistful of them and, with a half-hearted cry befitting the last act of a dead man, hurled them into Goldhammer’s face. Relatively pointless but still an amusing precursor to Samuel’s hand sweeping down like a wrecking ball and crushing Goldhammer’s skull against the wall. The soldier crumpled to clear a path for the grinning afterdead. His steel maw was painted with rust from the insides of Ryland’s men. The zombie knew right where his prey was, and Ryland’s situation hit rock bottom as the damaged klieg lights faded out.

“STOP!! STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!” he shrieked. He now knew for certain that Samuel could still hear by the way that his pace quickened. A barely discernable silhouette in the faint remnants of light, Grinning Samuel’s grasping fingers squealed as he drew closer. Ryland’s back struck a wall. He waited for those fingers to find his heart.

His broken wrist was jerked into the air. He screamed, imagining his entire arm to be gone. But it wasn’t, and Samuel wasn’t even moving now. With his breath caught in his throat, Ryland just sat and listened in the dark.

And then he heard it…

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

His wrist twisted a little. He bit into his lip while Samuel traced the band of his gold wristwatch. The pair remained motionless in the shadows for what seemed like an eternity, but Ryland counted the ticks and tocks and knew it was less then a minute. Finally, in spite of both terror and logic, he stammered, “it’s a Rolex.”

The watch left his wrist, and intact arm dropped into moist lap. Samuel could be heard shuffling off into the catacombs, going down beneath the parish churchyard where the mystery of his unlife dwelled. The tick-tock, tick-tock gradually ceased.

Ryland sucked icy air into his lungs and sat there for what really did seem an eternity. There were a few dull spots of light visible down the tunnel. There, he’d have to confront the remains of his slaughtered team; but Samuel did quite the number on them, and none would be getting back up. He pushed his ankles through the dirt until the circulation returned to them and tried to stand. Still a bit shaky, wrist throbbing like mad. And goddamn it was getting colder by the second. He took another breath, sat back down, and listened to the silence.

Then he heard it…

Meow.

Ryland smiled just a little, as much as his strength would allow, and reached a blind hand into the darkness.

1 / Rebirth

Hell, from a scientific perspective: the Big Bang spit sub-atomic particles in every direction through the nether. This newborn fabric of existence was torn asunder and sewn back together with every passing nanosecond — a ceaseless quantum storm. Chaos was, in fact, the seed of Order; and even now the matter both inside and out of our bodies is subject to this frenetic cosmic turmoil.

In the very beginning, through an infinitesimal rip that closed almost as soon as it opened — something struck through. Dark matter spewed across the infant universe at a speed beyond that of light, a speed reserved for the supernatural whose laws contradict all nature. Some of these tendrils of darkness were snagged in cooling gas clouds. Some of their dark energy was trapped within stars and planets.

This is a story about one world with this strange energy coiled about its core, leaking through fissures in the crust here and there to manifest chaos. It’s a story insignificant in the whole of time; nevertheless, the great architects record these events.

It begins with hot lead punching through the left ventricle of Pete Clarke’s heart. The bullet corkscrews through his meat, bounces off vertebrae and chews into bone. He feels its wake in him, a burning tongue lancing his torso, and he falls heavily.

Democratic Republic of Congo—2 hours earlier

Another coup, another civil war, another quiet genocide. Guerillas and tribes were clashing in the rainforests, senseless slaughter in which neither side understood the other’s agenda. Clarke’s team had touched down in the midst of it with mock UN seals adorning both their uniforms and their chopper. Whittaker skirted the makeshift encampment and snuffed a couple of colobus monkeys that had watched their descent from the trees. A veteran of jungle warfare and extreme survival alike, Whittaker took pride in securing the perimeter. His grizzled face was flushed with exuberance uncommon for a man his age. Bagging the monkeys, he slung his rifle over one shoulder and headed back to Clarke’s position. The team leader was hunched over a satellite phone setup. “Uplink’s not working,” he said softly, perhaps not even aware of the other’s presence. Whittaker clued him in by dropping the bag into the dirt.

“I said we wouldn’t need kickers.” Clarke muttered without looking up. “You don’t know this region any better than I do,” Whittaker replied. “Why not play it safe?”

“You just like plugging the little guys.” Clarke smacked the side of the console.

Whittaker grinned. “I don’t have any subordinates of my own to abuse, Captain.”

Clarke smiled back. He enjoyed the camaraderie among his men, but at the same time felt a twinge of discomfort over their complacency. Bradshaw was coming over now, lugging a few clear plastic cylinders; he guffawed at the sight of the monkey bag. He had a raucous belly laugh befitting an imposing black man, and Clarke had to silence him with a stern look. “Ken,” he said to Bradshaw, “see what you can do with the sat phone. I’m gonna go break Harmon in.”

Whittaker snorted as Bradshaw took Clarke’s place at the console. “Radio’s as good as any of this shit.” Punching keys, Bradshaw shook his head. “Time isn’t gonna wait for you to catch up, Whittaker.” He produced a few tiny plastic bags from his vest and tossed them. “Take care of the lanterns while I do this?”

Catching the baggies, Whittaker nodded gruffly and scooped up the plastic cylinders. The old man was efficient, good at following orders, but he longed to be the one giving them, didn’t he? Bradshaw watched him tromp away. No one had the heart to tell him that, at fifty-six years, with three decades of service under his belt, he was still a grunt doing busy work.

Harmon, on the other hand, had been charged with prepping the arsenal, a critical task. She didn’t view it that way, but no one ever did when it was their first time in the field. At least that’s what Clarke was telling her. “Widowmaker’s your best friend,” he said, perched in the side hatch of the chopper. He was referring to a cleaver-like blade with a molded grip and knuckle guard, a simple yet intimidating piece of weaponry. One was laid out for each team member. “That leads us to Rule One — no headshots. Your firearm is meant as a last resort. Bullet to the brain only kills what little impulse control still exists in afterdead. So if you shoot, aim for the limbs.” Taking up a widowmaker, Clarke slipped it into a sheath on his back. “Decaps will render them harmless. You’ve been trained in close-quarters combat — rely on your widowmaker.”

Harmon nodded absently; she’d heard it all before. He felt it bore repeating. Clarke eyed her uncomfortable stance, subtle curves concealed by a defensive posture and eyes shielded behind red hair. She was clearly conditioned to play it low-key and go unnoticed, and seemed quite attuned to it. “Rule Two — bites don’t infect. You’ve been told a dozen times, now believe it.” He took the opportunity to roll down the sleeves of his bite jacket: nylon-covered chain mail reaching over the wrists. “Too many assumptions and too little understanding about bites has caused men — and women — to lose it and get killed over a minor flesh wound. Romero-itis,” he finished with a smirk.

She frowned at the term. “You mean like the movies? Never seen them.”

“Really? Oh, you should. Romero’s are the best. Just remember the Devil had different ideas when he made his.

“Three,” Clarke concluded, “watch your dead.” Harmon looked up at that one. It never made sense until it was too late… she’d know what it meant soon enough.

Slitting open the tiny baggies, Whittaker emptied freeze-dried bugs into the plastic cylinders. He was setting them up around the perimeter, twelve in all, turning the rotors of the chopper into the hands of a clock face. Pausing at twelve o’clock, he winced. Back was going again. “Goddamn,” he whispered. This wasn’t a glamorous job — especially these little mop-up exercises — but at least he used to enjoy being in the field. Now he could only try to take his mind off his aching back by thinking about the grueling paperwork that waited back at the base. Bureaucratic horseshit had taken the wind out of his sails and the joy out of his work… no, it was age, and he damn well knew it. The night before, at a debriefing in Zaire, he’d excused himself twice to shake out a few drops of piss. The memory alone made his bladder start fidgeting right now.

The sun dropped below the tree canopy and he hustled to hang the bag of monkeys from a low branch. Done, he glanced over at Bradshaw, still fighting with that sat phone. Bradshaw was a dedicated soldier, one of the developers of widowmaker combat and a tireless jack of all trades. Whittaker liked to think of him as a friend, or at the very least, a good man who rose above his pedigree.

Clarke sat beside the chopper and watched daylight fade. They’d landed a good distance from the local skirmishes; most likely because the guerillas had been scared off by the brutal slayings of their comrades. This forest was rife with afterdead: walking corpses, dead tissue infused with the undefined catalyst that sprang forth from some Source deep in the earth. Clarke was most concerned about the stealth and speed of the reported killings. These afterdead had a pack mentality, which meant a couple of things. First, they had eaten enough living tissue to restore some primitive brain function, and second, they had also probably eaten enough to regenerate their rotted flesh — giving them the appearance of mortal men. It was another case of Romero-itis to assume that afterdead were all decaying relics of past life. The soul had been replaced with a new vitality. And it hungered. In his years leading these outings, Clarke had seen everything from near-skeletons to fully restored men, some of whom among the latter had developed chilling characteristics. The previous summer he’d caught one that had actually relearned speech, slurring something it’d probably heard from its many meals…”Please!”

Please. Did please mean anything to something that existed only to sustain itself? If so — did it understand that same sentiment when uttered by a mutilated victim, only to ignore their shared will to survive? Had the thing truly been begging for release so that it could go on killing?

No point in asking those sorts of questions. There were others assigned to figure them out. He just exterminated them.

Bradshaw called to him from the sat phone and shrugged in silhouette. “No uplink.” Harmon sat at the edge of the camp; she hadn’t yet forgiven Clarke for weapons prep. She probably thought the new girl had been stuck in the kitchen when in fact he trusted her more than anyone else. Because she wasn’t his friend.

Little things had been going wrong since they touched down, but it hadn’t yet seemed suspicious to Captain Clarke. Nor did it when the kickers, those dead monkeys dangling in a sack, begin shrieking.

“FUCK!” Bradshaw shouted, leaping up off the ground as his widowmaker leapt into his hand. He glided across the camp and sliced cleanly through both the bag and the monkeys’ skulls. “Whittaker!” He snapped. “You’re supposed to cut their fucking throats!”

The old man grunted. He was in a fighting stance, eyeing the trees. “See Clarke, the kickers went off before the—”

Four of the twelve cylinders, the ones on the same side of the perimeter as the kickers, bloomed with light. The fireflies inside had resurrected — embraced by the aura coming off of what was likely to be a large number of afterdead. They could be heard now in the trees: shuffling, sniffing, unaware they’d been made. Clarke glanced at Harmon. She had one hand on her widowmaker and the other on her Beretta. “No,” he whispered sharply, pointing at the gun.

Like the stage lights coming up on Act Three of a tragic spectacle, the rest of the bug-lanterns bloomed. “Christ.” Whittaker backed up. “They’re surrounding us.” Bradshaw reached into his chain mail for a second widowmaker.

Hell offered a moment of bemused silence before opening its maw. In that second, Harmon discerned a man standing no more than two feet from her, edging through the trees and then accelerating upon eye contact. She fell back, her heels rooted to the ground where she stood, the rest of her body fighting gravity while she tried to raise her pistol toward the naked ghoul.

Its face split like a ripe fruit as Clarke’s widowmaker carved into its cheek. He swiped the pistol from Harmon’s grasp; his face, gaunt in the lantern light, looked coldly at her, through her, then he finished the afterdead with a decap before spinning to open another’s neck.

They attacked all at once, two dozen of them. Bradshaw scissored one’s head off, ducking its flailing limb, planted his elbow in the gnashing jaws of another and shattered its neck with a cruel jerk before delivering the killing blow. Whittaker was hacking through them like a madman, mighty swings halving skulls left and right. He whooped when they tore vainly at his bite jacket; bellowed while cleaving into one pinned under his boot. He wasn’t the artist Bradshaw was. Dead was dead and technique meant jack when the bodies were all laid out. And they were going down fast, the pack mentality long abandoned. It was only hunger that mattered now. In a way, Whittaker understood them (decapped another), but he understood dogs too. Stifled a laugh as one of them shook his arm in its teeth. Decapped it.

Harmon had backpedaled to the center of the camp and gotten her bearings. The afterdead were native tribesmen, their nude forms almost pitiful as they came at the soldiers. The one thing that reduced her pity and brought her back to reality was their bellies: glistening, trembling, fat with meat. They ate well.

“Harmon!” Barked Clarke. “Secure the bird!” She pivoted towards the chopper and saw an afterdead climbing in. Its back was to her. Easy kill. Widowmaker in hand. With legs equal parts rubber and cement, she ran. The zombie paused in the hatch; she quickened her pace, raised the blade and made a grand arc down toward the base of its neck.

Corporal Bradshaw danced. He danced through the milling undead, taking a new partner with every second step. Pirouette, kick, surprise decap of the one at his rear. Split the chin of the female coming from the side. Her face was young and beautiful. He dashed it to pieces. Thankless work, all of it; the rest of humanity didn’t know about afterdead, but he did, and he danced only for them, designed a terrible new death for each of their kind. Spinning in the dirt, he drew closer and closer to the chopper. Cutting a swath toward Harmon.

Clarke turned to see Bradshaw lop her leg off at the knee.

Harmon’s blade had been a few inches from the afterdead in the chopper; she frowned as her balance shifted and the blade took its ear off. She kept going forward, into its back, and the two collapsed in a heap on the ground. It tried to roll over beneath her. She tried to get up. Couldn’t. Legs numb. She looked down and saw. Then came pain.

Clarke wasn’t sure what in Christ was happening until Bradshaw took her arm, the one that might have grabbed her gun had Clarke not slapped it away. And Whittaker, Whittaker was suddenly in the cockpit. The rotors began moving against the stars. Harmon screamed, writhing on top of the afterdead. Bradshaw peppered the ones on the perimeter with bullets. Clarke charged at him, not knowing what he should or could do, only feeling the certainty of the widowmaker in his right hand.

Bradshaw knew his captain was coming and met Clarke’s blade with one of his own. The other opened Clarke’s groin. The captain’s face flushed. He gaped at his friend. “You weren’t supposed to see,” Bradshaw said quietly, and shot him through the heart.

Harmon slung her remaining arm over the chopper’s landing gear. The thunderous din of the rotors almost drowned out the pain of teeth on her leg’s stump. More overpowering was her fear; fear of being left behind. They were lifting off now and her leg was tugged free of the afterdead’s mouth.

Bradshaw leaned out the side, steadying himself. He placed his pistol against her ear. “WHY,” she shrieked. He didn’t reply before firing, and by then it didn’t matter anyway.

The light and sound of the helicopter receded into the distance. Civilization left the Congo, reason left the Congo, and Clarke stirred at the footfalls of the surviving afterdead. They moved slowly toward him, eight left, although he couldn’t be sure of his count because his mind was screaming gibberish and images of Harmon’s dismemberment clouded every thought.

Struggling to his feet in a thick paste of dirt and blood, he trained his gun on the first comer’s kneecap. Wet copper filled his mouth; he choked, stumbled and missed the fucker by a good three feet. They shuffled onward. Feeling one at his back, he spun with the widowmaker at neck level. It bit into the afterdead’s jawbone; he wrenched the blade downward, took the head.

Sudden movement on the left. He fired twice. A startled corpse shook its pulped eyeballs from the sockets and staggered aside. Clarke’s legs buckled and he actually sagged against one of them. It embraced him hungrily. And now he wasn’t breathing right. Too much blood in his throat. Jamming his pistol into the hugger’s chin, he emptied the clip. No head left to deal with.

How many remained now — five? Three? How many were there to begin with? Another one caught his wrist. He lopped its hand and head off. They had all closed in around him, even the blind one. Good, he thought, ‘cause I can’t walk. Bracing himself on the sightless fiend, he decapped its neighbor. Then fingers from behind sank into the bloody ruin of his groin. Pain washed over him like rebirth, reaffirming everything alive in his body, and with endorphins spilling through his tired veins Clarke sawed into the horde.

It was seconds, maybe minutes later when he stopped, realizing he was chopping at the ground. The afterdead were all quartered and lying in their juices. So was he, he saw, tracing with bone-white fingers the flowering gash in his lap. And now he wasn’t breathing at all. Clarke accepted it. What else could he do?

A wet sound drew his attention to an armless torso lying nearby. The head was mostly intact, but its throat was cut from ear to ear, opening and closing along with its mouth. Smack, smack, smack went the ragged flesh. The thing wouldn’t accept death, even as it starved and fell apart here; instead it stared intently at the fresh meat scant inches away.

Clarke laughed and died.

A day later, he woke up.

2 / Chums

“Are you hearing anything I’m saying?” Stoddard barked through his mask. Bradshaw realized he’d been staring blankly into a pile of entrails and blinked. “Nope, not a thing.”

“Where’s your mind at lately?” Stoddard asked. He steadied himself on his shovel, presumably was scrutinizing his friend’s face; Bradshaw couldn’t tell thanks to that bug-like filtration mask. Stoddard had never gotten used to the smell, the stench of rot that blanketed the streets and permeated this truck. He used to puke all the time but had started taking caffeine pills to suppress his appetite (along with excessive amounts of Dramamine), and no longer ate while on the job. The glassy visor of the mask hid his eyes. It was unnerving, and Bradshaw was reluctant to talk anything other than shop under such circumstances. He looked back down at the entrails.

They were standing knee-deep in guts in the rear of a refurbished dump truck. The gleaming casings of intestines quivered as they jostled along. Bradshaw worked his shovel beneath a pile of cadaverous tissue. “This whole mope thing,” Stoddard called, “it got anything to do with why you’re on slop duty?”

Jesus. Did he really not understand? Two soldiers had died on Bradshaw’s last field assignment. It only made sense that he’d be confined to the base for a while. Only made sense he wouldn’t want to talk about it. Furrowing his brow, he said, “I’m burned the fuck out. I was burned out before what happened in Congo… I wonder if that’s why we lost them.”

Stoddard shook his bug head emphatically. “If you hadn’t been there, no one would have come back. Remember that.” It was quite the opposite, actually, but Bradshaw just offered a thin smile. “Thanks, Joe.”

“I’m serious!” The truck turned off of the tree-lined access road onto a residential street: all duplexes in bland pastels, typical of a military base. Scooping some viscera into his shovel, Stoddard lobbed it over the side where it splattered in the well-manicured grass. “So much for making it into Better Homes and Gardens.” He cracked. The houses looked like shit close-up anyway: walls spattered with rust-colored stains, windows smeared with filthy fingerprints. It was no problem to treat the grass, but no one was going to stand out here cleaning windows. Especially when the afterdead just messed them all up again. Like little kids trashing their rooms, only instead of dirty underwear and spilled Kool-Aid, it was dried-out organs and lost limbs. And here they came; hearing the truck’s rumble, the afterdead staggered out of open front doors, past the skeletons of cars and plastic flowerbeds.

It was important to put on the appearance of a real base, just in case some foreign satellite was able to punch through the scrambled signals shielding the area. Offices, hangars, a commissary, a school, a clinic. Traffic lights and trash dumpsters and playgrounds with little shoeprints stamped into the sand. All a brilliant facade — but now was feeding time, and all semblance of normalcy vanished as dozens upon dozens of dead converged on the street.

Bradshaw joined Stoddard in hurling shovelfuls of gore out the back. Those afterdead who were quickest fell upon the first offerings in a defensive posture. The others continued to follow the truck. “It’s funny.” Stoddard observed. “The runners are always going to get the most meat, and the more they eat, the stronger they get.”

“It’s not funny, it’s Darwin.” Bradshaw ignored the putrid rot in his nostrils, ignored the stumbling parade reaching toward him. “Before long those runners are going to be too healthy. We’ll have to take them out.”

“I look forward to it.” Stoddard replied. He reached behind his back to pat the sheath where his widowmaker was stowed. “Have you seen Postman lately?” He tossed another wave of slop. It hit a woman head-on. She collapsed, and Stoddard’s hand flew to his mask in shock; after a second, he started to laugh. Several other afterdead knelt to pick the gore off of her thrashing body. “Kinky!”

“Anyway,” Bradshaw muttered, “no, I haven’t seen Postman. Why?” Postman was one of the oldest specimens on the base. In the beginning, the scientists had suited corpses up in uniforms, to better identify them regardless of physical condition. So you had Postman, Electrician, Nurse (Stoddard’s favorite) and the like. After a while it was determined that specimens weren’t around long enough to require such measures. But a few of these veteran afterdead still existed on the base, and Postman was one. He — it, rather — endured because it didn’t feed often, which made it one of the weaker and less desirable subjects. The scientists said that Postman had learned to pace himself in order to avoid being targeted. But how the hell would he — no, IT, dammit — know to do such a thing?

“Postman took a headshot last week,” Stoddard said. “He tried climbing into Grimm’s slop truck, bought himself a lobotomy. Anyway, after Grimm came back and filled out the report, we had to go find Postman and verify it. So we go to the school, and he’s in there, but not wandering the halls like usual. He’s sitting on the floor with a stick.”

“This is one hell of a story.” Bradshaw flicked a string of meat off his waders. “Let me finish,” Stoddard scowled. “Anyway, Postman’s got this stick and he’s fishing around in the bullethole. He’s trying to get the bullet out.”

“How do you know he was after the bullet? Maybe he was just poking around.”

“Yeah, sure. They don’t get bored, Ken. Anything they do, it’s for a reason.”

Not true, Bradshaw thought. All they really needed to do was eat. Didn’t breathe, didn’t fuck. They barely qualified as animals, yet some rotter sticking a twig in his brain justified a twelve-page report in triplicate. More paperwork than he’d had to fill out after two field operatives died. Behind the truck, two males bent and bloated by decay played tug-of-war over a rope of tissue. Bradshaw heaved more chum at them, and the conflict ended abruptly. As more and more feed littered the street in the truck’s wake, the afterdead were falling to their knees like supplicants. There was something familiar and troubling about it… Reminded him of Sunday worship as a kid. He’d grown up in a Texas border town, his mother a black homemaker, Dad a Venezuelan preacher. Their very own little white church seemed to absorb the dry heat, and every week Bradshaw would stand in silent awe as Dad cried from the pulpit, sweat running in rivers from his face and fists. Looking back, it wasn’t any spiritual rapture that overcame so many in the congregation — it was heat exhaustion. But to the young boy it was a power radiating from his father. Even the walls ran with moisture. It was a local phenomenon, those glistening tearstains that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the walls. Especially on Sunday: as the worshippers swayed in praise, the entire room had seemed to vibrate. Bradshaw would grip his mother’s hand, head hot and swimming, the buzzing in his ears swelling to a crescendo, and the walls wept. They wept.

In lieu of a life-size crucifix there was a stained-glass image of the Savior behind the altar, and Dad meticulously polished it every other day. Bradshaw would sit in the pews sometimes and watch. Whenever his father’s back was to him, the boy reached out and touched the tearstains. He pressed his fingertips to his nostrils; the smell was sweet, like something from his mother’s kitchen. It made perfect sense to a child that Christ’s teardrops were of sugar and syrup. His wouldn’t be bitter or salty. Lot’s wife turned to salt because she disobeyed the Lord, Dad said.

One day, when it reached 110 degrees and dusty winds battered the church, and Dad was cleaning the stained-glass window, Bradshaw had felt the room vibrate again. The walls murmured to him. He pressed his hand to them, felt it. Then he looked up and saw his father’s fear-filled eyes fixated on him.

At the joint of the west wall and the ceiling there was a hole and it was from there that the bees poured. Bradshaw made it out, Dad didn’t. They said he was allergic. They said that thousands of bees had been nesting in the walls, so many that their honey seeped through when it got hot enough. That day, Nature had delivered a judgment against God, and that was the day Bradshaw realized He was just a snake-oil salesman, manipulating forces that were already there.

The lingering odors of slop duty hadn’t yet begun to fade when Bradshaw and Stoddard were sent into the bayou to harvest. The corpses seeded the previous day were reviving. There were a finite number of these Sources in the world — places where this strange energy, like honey, seeped through the soil and reanimated the dead — one was here in Louisiana, and so the base had been established. And despite the fact that fresh specimens were returning to life at that very moment, Stoddard was going on in a loud voice about the tattoo he always talked about and never got: “Death From Above” between his shoulder blades with an image of Christ behind the lettering. It was nothing but ironic to Bradshaw considering their occupation. Slogging through a stretch of mud filled with gnarled roots (nothing ever died out here, just kept growing), he ran that by Stoddard. His companion shrugged. “We didn’t make the URC, brother, we just plug them into it.” URC — Undefined Reanimation Catalyst. Scientific term for “we have no fucking idea.”

The first afterdead of the night was chained to a gnarled monster of a tree at the edge of the mud. It stared at them, perplexed. It was male, early thirties, saliva running from its lips and a rank odor coming off its soiled jeans. “He shit himself,” Stoddard spat. “Way to go, partner!” He clapped the undead on the shoulder and detached a thick chain leash from the tree. Bradshaw trudged on to the next rotter. “I’m thinking of getting a dog.” He told Stoddard as they hauled the lot out of the bayou, through a manned gate and onto a fenced pathway. “Retriever or something.”

“You’d keep it on-base?” Stoddard raised an eyebrow. “Why not?” Bradshaw replied. “You know they don’t mess with animals. Watchdog’s not a bad idea, anyhow.” He yanked one of his chains to get a straggler moving. It lurched at him; Bradshaw was ready with the stun gun and knocked it on its ass. He jerked impatiently until the wide-eyed corpse staggered to its feet. “Maybe I’m a little lonely. That’s not a crime, right?” Stoddard nodded in understanding. They were forced to make their home next door to these things — and the kicker was, the afterdead had better digs. It was almost maddening to plod through their rosy faux-neighborhoods, to look at that all day and then go back to an 8x8 room in a bunker. Grimm, one of the base’s certified lunatics, had decided to “move out to the suburbs” and seize a home from the afterdead. He’d done it, too. Cleaned out a house near the bayou, changed the locks and brought in what little furniture he could scrounge up. He actually slept every night with afterdead pawing at his bedroom windows — but still he slept in an honest-to-God bed, in a real house. Base Commander St. John normally wouldn’t have allowed such a stunt but Ryland wanted to see the outcome.

Ryland… shit. Bradshaw realized he was late for a meeting. “Let’s pick it up Joe.”

After depositing the afterdead in a holding pen and bidding Stoddard good night, Bradshaw walked to the truck yard. His path was protected by a low-voltage electric fence from which most afterdead had learned to stay away. Halogen street lamps cast the deserted streets beyond the fence in a garish light; that light ended at the yard’s gate, where he eased himself inside. “I’m late, I know.”

“Are you?” Seated on the front bumper of a slop truck, Ryland shrugged. “I lost my watch. How’re you holding up? You look exhausted.” It was a funny remark coming from him. Bradshaw sometimes thought that maybe, when God was putting Adam together, He wasn’t happy with some of the bones He’d rendered from the earth. Some were too angular, too odd, too cruel in appearance alone. So He threw them out, and someone else double-bagged ‘em in flesh and here you had Nathan Ryland. Cancerous jowls hung from sharply jutting cheekbones, above which sunken eyes were pitted into an oblong skull. And his face bore a greenish pallor, maybe that was just the lighting. Fish, the guys called him, though not to his face because he was frequently off-base as government liaison, and also because he’d have them castrated. Kneading his gloved hands, Ryland shivered. “So? How are you?” Bradshaw said he was fine and gave his report. The debriefing upon returning from Congo had been short and sweet; he’d been taken off field duty for a month; then ordered into counseling. “Hugs and hand puppets,” cracked Ryland with a lipless smile. “I’ve already spoken with Whittaker. So it was you who shot Clarke?”

Bradshaw raised an eyebrow, but nodded. “I’m sure you had no choice,” Ryland told the eyebrow. “Collateral damage. It’s a popular phrase with my friends in Washington. It means no more questions. You’ve got nothing to worry about, Ken.”

Bradshaw grimaced in the shadows. “I know that. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about Clarke.”

“No one said you had to be happy.” Ryland replied. “I’m sorry it took so long for me to get together with you. It’s a bad month. I’m flying to D.C. every other day and St. John’s on my ass to put in for a budget increase. He thinks I’m a lobbyist just because I don’t wear the uniform. But enough about my problems.” Standing up, he patted Bradshaw’s shoulder. “We’re good, okay?”

Bradshaw knew asking would be fruitless, but he did it anyway. “Clarke was a good… a good leader… why him? He didn’t need to be out there.”

“There’s always collateral damage. Remember that.” Ryland answered. His presence left the yard, and Bradshaw stood silent in his wake, a puppet without his puppeteer. After a few moments, he gathered up his strings and trudged toward the bunkers. On the other side of the electric fence, a silhouette peeled away from the night: a female, with papery gray flesh and hollowed-out knees giving her a strange falling-forward gait. She stopped a few feet from the fence, the muscles in her face working at something resembling a frown. Bradshaw ignored the thing and kept walking.

7,270 miles away, the relief organization Our World, based out of Brisbane, had set up a triage in Congo. They were dangerously close to the most recent clashes in the republic’s civil war, but Matt Hinzman knew that the needy tribal peoples would stay in their rainforest home — even if it meant running afoul of guerillas. As chief supervisor of the Congo effort, his decision went unchallenged, and even now, lying under a crumpled tent with his right arm gone, he didn’t regret making the call.

Sara Lister, a colleague of fourteen years, lay a few yards off. Her eye was pulled from its socket and rested in the hollow of a flayed cheek. Matthew heard feet shuffling at his back, but couldn’t turn over. He stayed motionless and hoped they couldn’t sniff him out.

The canvas tent pulled away from his body. He was turned to face a man wearing some sort of paramilitary uniform. Thank God! “The tribesmen,” Matt gasped hoarsely. “They tore us apart.”

The soldier traced Matthew’s jaw line with his fingertips. There was a nasty gash just below his chin. The soldier dug his fingernails in and pulled, paying no mind to the terrible screaming, which eventually stopped.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the camp, Clarke ate quietly. He eyed his surroundings in search of more meat. There was a half-devoured woman nearby clutching something in her hand. He recognized it: a pistol. He had one too, he thought, and fumbled around his waistline until he found it. The familiarity of it in his hand released a flood of memories, all clouded fragments. But recalling that he himself had been shot made him aware of the dull pain in his chest. Looking down, Clarke prodded the bullet hole. It hurt but wouldn’t keep him from moving. The hole between his legs was another story. He picked idly at the gashed tissue hanging out of his pants; more fragments came to him, the lingering memories of sensations for which he no longer had any use. Clarke tugged Hinzman’s upper lip off and chewed it for a while.

His brain shuffled his memories into some sort of order. Someone he trusted had shot him. Rules had been broken. He couldn’t recall every point of protocol, but he knew it was a mistake to leave him for dead instead of finishing the job. He never would have done that himself. Bradshaw — that was his name, Bradshaw — wouldn’t normally have done that, either. Confusing. His mind kept working while he ate. Good soldiers wouldn’t leave something like this to chance. They’d come back for him. Staying here to feed would be a risk, but then feeding anywhere would soon become a risk. He’d have to kill them all.

It was a simple decision made in the basest region of his mind. Self-preservation was his sole purpose. Clarke pulled Hinzman’s esophagus out with slick fingers. He knew he had to keep feeding in order to stay alert and heal these wounds. He knew a lot of things other afterdead didn’t.

3 / Drinks at Dusk

“I never win,” Whittaker grumbled into his Captain & Coke. The Captain was being an unsympathetic prick this fine evening; Whittaker could barely feel the warmth of the liquor in his belly, not with the knot of anxiety that grew tighter with every spin of the roulette wheel.

Spending a furlough in Vegas was always an exercise in pain. Every dollar that came out of his pocket went straight into the casino’s, or into his liver — he knew it and everyone around him knew it. They encouraged it. Whittaker was used to rolling with the punches, though. He’d return to the base next week with a few bruises, take some ribbing from his comrades, then it was back to work. In the end, he figured, this yearly gouging in Vegas was better than sitting at home alone getting wasted (although the booze there was a hell of a lot cheaper).

Whittaker watched the last of his chips jump from his hands like he was a leper, then he left the casino-hotel, crossing the street to a strip joint. Ah, warm ten-dollar beer and the plastic smiles of girls whose age was anyone’s best guess in the garish crimson lighting. He took a table near the back of the room. Immediately there was a girl striding toward him. “Hi,” she said in a half-pert tone. It was early evening; Whittaker wasn’t big money. She hadn’t even brought along a bottle of champagne to hock. “What’re you in the mood for?”

“I…” He scratched his beard, leaned back, looked at the shadowy girl in the red lights. “I don’t know. I’m all right. Thanks.” She was gone before he knew it. He wiped a layer of sweat from his brow, opened his jacket, and wondered what the fuck was keeping him from putting a gun in his mouth. Christ, his sidearm was in the rental. Right across the street. He could do himself there in the car, no point in going up to his room. There’s a story for the fellas back at work. Whittaker finally cashed out. What took him so long? He winced at imagined eulogies punctuated by hollow laughter. Fuck that. He knew why he always came out here.

Leaving the bar without a drink or a dance, Whittaker got into the rental car. Like the casino and the strip joint, it smelled of stale cigarettes, and the A/C blew a hot wind across his eyes. He pulled out of the lot and headed north. A/C never got any better; he shut it off and rolled down the windows, cradling his pistol in his lap.

Away from everything, he got off the highway and felt out a spot that seemed right; he stopped and inhaled the air. It was just beginning to grow dark. He reached under the passenger seat for the bottle of Myers Dark he’d kept there. He didn’t need it in order to go through with this. It would just be nice. Getting out of the car, he sat himself on the hood. The door popped behind him — he turned, certain he’d shut it, and a dark blur snatched the gun from his hand. He felt it against his temple and that feeling was suddenly the last thing in the world he wanted.

“Clarke.”

He looked like he was still alive, by God, he really did. His movement was fluid, his eyes glistened red as the sun went down. But there was nothing, NOTHING in his face. No emotion, no steeliness either. Just nothing.

“Who ordered you to kill me?”

Whittaker swallowed a lump of phlegm. “I won’t ask twice,” Clarke told him. Same voice, same cadence. He couldn’t be undead.

“I don’t know,” Whittaker breathed. “B-Bradshaw handed down the order. I don’t know who told him. But it wasn’t you, Pete! Harmon was the target! You were just in the wrong place!”

“I think you’re lying,” Clarke replied. He took the gun away from Whittaker’s head and slipped it into the waistband of his pants. “I’m going to torture you until you tell me what you know.”

“I don’t—” Whittaker’s words and teeth were blown out of his mouth by the liquor bottle. He felt it shatter against his head, a painless, stunning sensation; then fire spread down the side of his face. He reeled and tried, stupidly, to run. Clarke flattened him on the hood of the car and pressed the jagged remnant of the bottle’s mouth between his upper lip and any teeth that were left. “So you know I mean it,” Clarke said flatly, and he sliced the lip off.

Whittaker howled, beat against his attacker and the car, but Clarke held him down with one rigid arm. That’s when Whittaker knew for certain that yes, he was looking at an afterdead. And his entire face was on fire now, hot blood filling his mouth. He spat and whimpered. “Thlease!” He cried. Red flecks misted Clarke’s face. Clarke stepped back and stomped, once, and this time the pain was instantaneous. Whittaker’s shin splintered like a rotted branch. He was thrown to the desert floor.

Whittaker could only roll from side to side, sobbing and choking, waiting for the next blow. Pain radiating from above his neck and below his waist met in his stomach. He puked his guts out in the dirt, Clarke silent this entire time. “WHY?!” the old soldier bellowed.

“I’m going to kill them before they kill me, again.” Clarke didn’t see the point in explaining himself, but he had to work through Whittaker’s shock to get information. Falling silent once more, he watched his victim paw at the ground.

“How dith you geth here?” Was the next question. “We leth you in Congo!”

“Boat. Stowed away. I’m going to ask you questions now.” Clarke knelt beside Whittaker, making a conspicuous display of the pistol. “This wasn’t your first hit, was it?”

“N-no.”

“You and Bradshaw, you worked together? And you say you don’t know who the orders came from?”

Whittaker shook his head madly. Clarke reached down and touched his ruined cheek; blinding pain shot through Whittaker’s skull, blurring his vision. It was a shard of glass that Clarke was retrieving from Whittaker’s face, and he sucked the blood from it before tossing it aside. “If you don’t know anything else, you’re useless to me.”

Whittaker tried to sit up. He was batted down like a rag doll. He said every prayer he knew and begged for mercy. “Thlease don’t!” Whittaker’s face darkened. “Thith ithn’t about protecting yourselth. It’s about REVENTH! You’re juth like me! Juth like—” He was still screaming when Clarke put a round through his head. It wasn’t a mercy bullet; just easier that way.

Clarke fed, eating around the alcohol-soaked pieces.

Ryland’s office was located in a nondescript storage building. At least that’s how it appeared on the outside. Inside was one of the most heavily fortified and upscale structures on the base. Passing through its weathered metal door, the young man who had an appointment was surprised to find himself in what looked like an office lobby. The soldier at the metal detector waved him forward. “Cervantes?”

Nodding, the olive-skinned man stepped through the security checkpoint. The soldier spent several silent minutes reviewing Cervantes’ paperwork; he didn’t scrutinize the forms, just stared at them. Stalling. Finally, another soldier entered the lobby from the back with an automatic swinging brazenly in his right hand. “Go with him,” the first soldier muttered, and handed over the papers.

They moved briskly down a quiet corridor, where the soldier rapped on the door marked ADMINISTRATIVE LIAISON. A murmur from inside, then Cervantes entered the office alone.

“I apologize for the cloak-and-dagger bullshit,” was the first thing Nathan Ryland said. Blowing the steam off a cup of coffee, he motioned to a chair on the other side of his desk. He was a stout man in a crisp suit, its soft colors masking the pallor of his tired flesh. “Whenever I bring an appointee onto the base, the brass are especially skeptical. Even the fact that you’re military doesn’t help. They consider you to be my man, cut from the same cloth as me. Just the same,” Ryland smiled, “once you’re out there among the rotters, you make fast friends.”

Ryland liked to read people by making them nervous. Cervantes knew that the moment he came in. The nonchalant gestures, the thin-lipped smile. Eyes like cold marble, though. This little back-and-forth that Ryland did with newcomers, it was just pretext, the sort of behavior expected from men in black. For all this, Cervantes only went into the man’s consciousness for a fraction of a second, and even then, barely dipped his toes in the water. But Ryland knew.

“So, Cervantes, tell me about myself.” He folded his meaty hands on the desk. “Why did I appoint you to this post?”

“You believe I can use my telepathy with the afterdead.”

“We discussed that at Fort Leavenworth. Tell me something that I haven’t said.”

“I prefer not to dig that deep into someone else’s head. Sir.”

“That must take remarkable discipline.” Ryland replied. “Most with your ability don’t make it half as far as you did. I understand that refining one’s own subconscious can be… distressing?” Cervantes only nodded.

“Now then, speak from your own intuition. What do you think you can do here?”

“I know there’s little sense in reading their thought processes — they seek only self-preservation. There’s no motive or intent that isn’t visible on the surface. There’s no community dynamic. They barely acknowledge one another. But they acknowledge the living.”

“And you’ve been able to affect the perception of others so that they don’t see you. Creating a perpetual blind spot.”

“Yes — but only for myself, and only against minds of limited function,” Cervantes replied.

Ryland nodded along. “That’s all we need. See, there are certain areas of the base that are inaccessible, places with high concentrations of afterdead. I’d like to get into these areas and see what they’re doing without disrupting them. Commander St. John doesn’t agree — but I usually get the last word when it comes to government property.”

“You mean the base?”

“I mean the zombies.”

Ryland tapped his keyboard for a few minutes. “We have a soldier named Grimm who’s been living out in the field, in one of the houses in those mock-up suburbs. He’s been sending back a lot of interesting observations about the dead around there. At least he was. It’s been two days since we heard from him. Some grunts drove by the house and didn’t see anything, but the congestion was too great to risk getting out of the truck.”

“You don’t think he’s dead?” Cervantes asked.

Ryland shook his head. “And even if he was, we’d have to verify it and pull out the remains. What I need you to do is get into that house without disturbing the dead. Can you?”

That had been the question. Cervantes still wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, even as he was jostled along in a Humvee on the base’s quiet streets. The descending sun turned the afterdead up ahead into opaque silhouettes. The driver, a Corporal Bradshaw, slowed the Hummer to a stop. “I see a couple dozen at least,” he muttered. “That’s Grimm’s house on the right-hand corner. I have to let you out here.”

Cervantes nodded. For some reason, he expected a few personal words of encouragement, maybe a clap on the back… nothing. Bradshaw dropped into reverse and looked at him. Cervantes got out.

He slipped a pair of headphones over his ears, fingering the Walkman in his jacket pocket. White noise crept into his ears, and he cleared his mind, watching the afterdead shuffle about in the street. He reached out to them. Their minds were like hollowed-out gourds, with only tendrils of primitive activity, each easy to manipulate. The hunger was extraordinary. For a moment, Cervantes felt saliva building in his mouth; he shook the hunger off and dug into the subconscious of each rotter in his view. Already shambling towards him was a male in a butcher’s apron. Underneath was a simple boiler suit, but the apron — caked with solid layers of gore, heavy on the afterdead’s shoulders — gave him character. Yet inside each unique mind Cervantes felt the same emptiness. He blotted himself out of their sight, their smell, their hearing. The Butcher stopped in his approach. After a moment, he reversed direction, returning to the horde.

The duplex in which Sergeant Grimm made his home was noticeably different from the rest. The sod had been pulled up and replaced with a generous layer of loam. In the moist clay were planted several large flowers. Each blossom had thick, flesh-toned petals surrounding its red stigma. Cervantes briefly had the impression in his mind of a woman’s flayed sex spread before him; then he was assailed by the smell. Jesus! Worse than that of the rotters at his back was the noxious odor from the plants. He recognized them now as stapelia gigantea, carrion flowers — the odor lured foul insects to ensure pollination. Maybe, he thought, it kept the zombies from smelling Grimm, too.

He tried the front door. Locked. A newly installed lock, at that. Eyeing the undead, Cervantes rapped sharply. “Sergeant!” A couple of them turned at the sound, but were unable to pinpoint its source. They trod aimlessly through the loam. He knocked again, harder. He could try and reach out to Grimm, but it might mean giving himself away outside. Not worth it, he decided, and headed around back. There was a window slightly ajar; easing it upward, he hoisted himself into a hallway. The air in the house was moist, earthy. Cervantes traced his fingertips along the wall, and they came away stained with mold. He advanced, and almost as soon as reached the end of the hall the smell of feces struck his nostrils.

“Never could get the plumbing working,” a voice said from a dark corner, as if reading his mind. “Want a drink?” Cervantes’ eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The man slouched against the wall was haggard, unshaven, malnourished. His uniform was draped over bony shoulders like a tablecloth. Didn’t they feed him…?

Grimm pushed a box of wine from between his legs. “I don’t know you,” he croaked.

“I’m the new guy.” Cervantes lowered himself to eye level with the man. They had feared for Grimm’s safety, but it appeared that his sanity had wasted away long before the flesh. Grimm used his thumb to wipe out the contents of a plastic cup and tilted the box’s spigot over it.

“Tell them I’m fine. I really am. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I am. I like it here.”

“What do you like about it?” Cervantes asked. He began probing Grimm’s mind. It was an incoherent ruin in there, akin to an attic overtaken by cobwebs. Nightmare images of the undead hordes flashed before him. Bloody meat, grasping fingers. Lips smacking.

Grimm laughed boisterously. “I like the quiet.”

“Why did you stop communicating with the base?”

“Radio’s busted.” Grimm gestured in no particular direction and took a gulp of his cheap wine. “I dropped it outside. They just walked all over it, the pissers. I contemplated smoke signals.” Cervantes pushed deeper… Grimm was hiding something within the rotted walls of that attic. Behind a door in this house. He saw the radio, not dropped but hurled to the street. He saw Grimm greedily scooping meat from the street into his arms, stealing it from the afterdead.

“Sergeant, you know you’ve worried a lot of people. Surely you would have made some effort to contact them if this was all an accident.”

Grimm’s crusty eyes narrowed. “You don’t believe me? You don’t know what it’s like out here, bud. You don’t KNOW. You’re on the outside looking in. I sleep with the dead. I—” Grimm stopped himself suddenly. Cervantes tore through the attic wall and saw the horror.

“Oh my god.” He was on his feet, moving back down the hall.

Grimm leapt up, spilling the box, and cried “NO! Nooooooooo…” Glancing back, Cervantes saw the other soldier wringing his hands like a child who knew his number was up. He pushed open the last door on the left.

It was impossible to tell she was undead, save for the blood caked around her mouth and on her nightgown. She was very healthy, lovely even. Of course she was — Grimm brought meat home for her. Only her wrists and ankles, where she was bound to the bed, showed signs of damage: flesh had been sloughed from bone, most likely in her struggling. Her eyes lit on Cervantes and she began to twist and lurch.

Between her bruised thighs… Cervantes saw carrion flowers and vomited.

“No, no, no.” Grimm paced in the doorway, beating his head with his fists. “It’s not… you don’t KNOW!!”

I don’t want to, Cervantes thought, shaking the stolen memories from his head. He felt Grimm’s hands on his shoulders, pleading, trembling with sobs, then he was thrown violently into the hallway, and Grimm locked himself in the room with a howl. “Sergeant!” Cervantes shouted, his head ringing from the fall. And now he could hear them: outside, pawing at the doors, the windows… he rushed down the hall to slam shut the window through which he’d come. Just as it came down a gnarled hand shot through. An eyeless face smacked against the glass, spraying pus like a sponge. He’d lost contact with them, and now they were being drawn to the tumult inside. Cervantes looked back at the locked door.

Inside, Grimm knelt beside the female and pulled a jackknife from his boot. “Ryland put me out here, he made me stay out here,” he called, sawing through the afterdead’s restraints, “because I KNOW. I know what he did and what he’s going to do. Ryland’s the bad one, not me! Not—”

Cervantes shut his eyes tight and willed away Grimm’s screams, the snapping of bone and the voracious roars of his former lover.

4 / Darker Flames Than This

“Clarke, Harmon, lost in Congo. Grimm, committed suicide right here on the base.” Commander St. John rattled the death list off as if he was reading sports scores. His team had lost.

Behind his great desk, littered with medals and keepsakes from his years in the battlefield, the old hawk loomed like an angry father, white hair meticulously-groomed over steely gray eyes. Those eyes were locked onto Nathan Ryland. He glared silently, expecting something.

“These things happen,” the other man finally said, gloved hands folded.

“‘These things happen’? You’ve been given too much pull around here,” St. John growled. “It was your idea to let Grimm play out there with the rotters, and he cracked. You pushed for an expedition to Congo and two good soldiers are dead as a result. Hell, now Whittaker’s been AWOL for a week. He’s a combat vet, a hero, and lately I’ve seen him following you around like a goddamned puppy. Have any idea where the hell he is?” St. John grasped his temples, wincing: migraine. Suits like Ryland sauntered into military operations from their “classified backgrounds” and fucked up the whole works. Ryland was like the executive branch’s little spy, carrying out the silly whims of armchair warriors and putting St. John’s boys in the dirt. He sighed. “Bradshaw takes Clarke’s place as leader of the field unit. And he selects his new teammates. Not you, Ryland, him.”

“Fair enough,” Ryland replied. His pale, fatty jowls made his smile all the more repulsive. He was soft all over, wasn’t he? St. John just shook his head. “Get out.”

Bradshaw met Ryland outside the administrative building. Ryland clapped a hand on his back. “I didn’t even have to bring it up. He promoted you. Now, I only ask that you put Sergeant Cervantes on the team. His assigned duties aren’t important, I just want him out there.”

Bradshaw nodded, and they walked along the electric fence separating their world from that of the afterdead. A few rotters milled around in the grass, probably in search of overlooked chum from a previous feeding. “Who else will you choose?” Ryland asked.

“Stoddard and Thomas,” Bradshaw replied quickly.

“I see you’ve been thinking about this,” Ryland grinned. “Captain.”

Bradshaw offered an insincere smile in return. He’d just flown up the ranks to a critical leadership position — all because he was a killer, and worse than that, a lackey. He still didn’t know the reason why he’d shot Pete Clarke through the heart. It would have made as much sense at a backyard barbecue as it did in Congo. And Ryland… something was wrong with him. His face was more sunken and pale than usual. He carried his bulk with an awkward gait. Looked like a…”Ryland, I’ve got to get down to the warehouse for a pickup. Talk later?”

“Of course.” The pale man nodded curtly and wandered back to the administrative building.

Joe Stoddard was already stationed at the warehouse. Bradshaw had Cervantes and Thomas meet him there as well. Thomas was an older woman, hard, not a feminine bone in her body. What hadn’t been drilled out of her when she transferred to the base had been washed away at the sight of the lunging rotters (Bradshaw wondered if it was different for a woman, seeing new life created, but from death). She’d stopped wearing her bite jacket long ago, and both her arms bore scars as a result; nonetheless she’d definitely be an asset in field missions. As for Cervantes… Bradshaw hadn’t seen much of him since Grimm’s death. There were murmurs that Cervantes was some sort of psychic, the sort of nonsense the Defense Department had messed with fifty years ago. Maybe they were still messing with it. Hell, Bradshaw had seen stranger things.

“I appreciate your choosing me,” Cervantes said.

Bradshaw decided against saying you’re welcome. “We’ve got a truck coming in five minutes.”

Stoddard barked from his post, “It’s already here!” and opened the main loading door to admit the semi’s refrigerated payload. Bradshaw slapped a button to start the conveyor belt that led from the warehouse to the scientists’ underground compound.

“Let me ask you something,” Cervantes said. “What do they do down there? What tests do they run on the afterdead?”

Had he just been reading Bradshaw’s mind? The captain crossed his arms and gave Cervantes a stony look. “It’s not my jurisdiction. I’ve learned not to ask.”

Stoddard slapped Cervantes’ back as the truck opened. A steel box came out on rollers and they guided it onto the conveyor belt. There were five more inside, each coated with ice, electronically sealed; and within each, a fallen soldier who would be inducted into the undead population. Somewhere, Stoddard knew, there were graves with empty coffins upon which grieving mothers placed tiny flags. But these boys were still serving their government, in a way. Whatever helps me sleep at night.

“Seal’s broken!” Thomas snapped, banging on the lid of the next box. Stoddard came around and hoisted the lid up to look inside. Though the body was in a clear bag, he wasn’t able to tell if there was any putrefaction. “You think it matters?” he asked Bradshaw.

“Dead is dead,” came the reply.

Stoddard forced the lid down and pushed the box onto the belt. “Can’t argue with that logic, boss.”

“Don’t call me boss.” Bradshaw tried to grimace, but Stoddard’s expression teased a hint of a smile from the corners of his mouth.

Ryland locked his office door and sat on the edge of his desk. His breathing was growing more shallow with each passing day. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t uncomfortable; he was just afraid someone might notice. Good thing a yearly physical wasn’t required of him. He dropped into his chair and turned on his computer, entering several encryption keys before he could get into his files. Despite all that security — and a few extra measures he’d added himself — he knew that there was always someone reading his e-mail. That’s why his most precious files were in paper form.

Unlocking the bottom desk drawer to produce those files, Ryland checked the contents. All there. Could never be too careful. A medical report, written up by one A. Harmon, dated seven months prior. Blood work results. Digital photographs of his right hand. Removing his glove, Ryland saw the ugly scars. He tried flexing his fingers. There was stiffness and pain, only the pain seemed strangely distant, and even as the skin cracked and bled he continued closing his hand into a tight fist.

The URC, the energy in the earth that revived the dead, was never intended to be weaponized. Maybe in some horror movie, a corrupt military lab would try to turn URC into a contagion, but the real government understood the possible consequences. Still, factions within were sparring over what to do; and several months ago, Ryland had led a group of private contractors to New England to check out another Source. And… he began to laugh uncontrollably at the memory, the goddamn absurdity of it. “Fucking cat,” he gasped between giggles.

The cat’s love bite shouldn’t have had any effect, but Harmon had discovered an anomaly in Ryland’s blood when he returned to the base for stitches. He knew immediately what had happened. The URC had bonded with some virus lying dormant in the feline’s system. Some thought it possible. Now he knew it was. And just like that, it was a contagion. A cosmic roll of the dice, a sick twist of fate. All these hundreds of thousands of years, and only now had it happened… and to Nathan Ryland.

It took a few months of watching his arm die before he made the decision to transfer Harmon to the field and silence her. Grimm had been another story altogether…

Though the tissue in Ryland’s body was dying, he didn’t feel much discomfort. The infection was turning him undead piece by piece, yet he retained all his mental faculties, even if there was a cold hollow growing inside of him as his soul was forced out. Thus he had reasoned that, like the afterdead, he could maintain a healthy appearance and a clear head if he fed. The afterdead’s chum was trucked in biweekly and stored at the ass-end of the base where the smell wouldn’t offend. So Ryland had gone out to the storage building, walked in, shut the door, and promptly vomited at the sight of the festering meat spread before him. Dropped to his knees, dry heaving, arms shaking until he was prone on the floor in his own puke. “I–I can’t,” he had whispered, fighting the urge to keep retching. He looked at his dead hand. It felt so detached, like it wasn’t really part of him. It was almost surreal to see it scooping up a handful of rancid medical waste. He forced it down, stuffing his fingers into his throat and trying not to taste it. But the smell hit him again. He spewed chum all over his pants.

Then Grimm had walked in. He looked through the visor of his gas mask at Ryland’s bloody mouth and hand and clothing, Ryland sitting on the floor with a blank stare, like a boy caught playing with himself. Two days later, Grimm was living out in the neighborhood with the afterdead. Ryland had figured no one would believe the story if Grimm told them, but why take any chances?

Most of his body felt dead, somehow, and even though he was now able to eat chum and keep it down, there were still signs of it. If he sat in his chair too long he’d get mottled purple spots all over his buttocks, legs and back. Sometimes at night he’d wake up to discover his bladder had emptied itself. Trying to get out of bed, he found himself paralyzed by what seemed like rigor mortis. And Jesus Christ, he farted all the time, expelling the noxious gases of internal decay. He couldn’t eat nearly enough to stave off such things; he couldn’t risk being caught shoveling chum into his mouth again. St. John was already on his ass for three deaths.

Day by day, Ryland was growing accustomed to the spreading infection, and so was his ego. He decided it wasn’t chance, but that he’d been chosen. He would be the first true afterdead — not some soldier who took shrapnel in Lebanon and had his dead body dumped in that accursed swamp. No, Ryland was willingly giving himself over to the other side. There had only been one more test to pass, and that was Cervantes. The telepath hadn’t sensed Ryland’s condition at all. He was now confident that he was not dying, but evolving.

He longed to go out among the afterdead and see how they reacted, if at all. Would they attack him, or consider him one of their own? He chuckled at the thought. They were senseless animals without purpose. The scientists spent all day and night cutting the dead into pieces, burning them, pulling out their organs. They only sought to define the afterdead, to put it all in books and file it away, then they could sit back and relax knowing that humanity was still top dog. Insecure fools. He alone would know death firsthand, experience it in a conscious way.

Chosen.

He dug into the base’s historical archives — information suppressed from the general public — researching the ways that tribal peoples around Sources had explained the phenomenon. Of course, they had decided that dark gods were responsible. The gods were long gone, perhaps dead, but their leavings endured — including strange words that had probably been made up by the savages but were purported to focus and direct the chaotic Source energy.

He had been studying these words. His extensive education gave him a leg up on the military historians who’d catalogued and promptly forgotten these silly fables. He was beginning to understand the lost tongues of the old gods, and he was beginning to believe that he might be able to do greater things with the plague-energy that coursed through him.

Somewhere beyond death, off this mortal coil, lay godhood.

It was a long drive to Whittaker’s house. The rental car was running on fumes; Clarke had used Whittaker’s credit card to refuel, but it wasn’t long before he exhausted the remaining credit. Holding the dead man’s ID against the steering wheel, checking addresses as he drove, Clarke finally came to a small frame house with an unkempt yard. The first key he tried opened the front door.

The interior was almost bare. There had been feeble attempts to decorate: a generic print of an elk in the woods hung on the wall. The leather couch had two end tables covered in magazines. Clarke pushed aside the top magazine, a year-old issue of Newsweek. The one below it, and all the ones below that, were porn.

As expected, Whittaker had an impressive gun collection in the bedroom. Some of them were modified arms from the base, illegal to have in the home. Clarke opened the glass doors of the gun case and began pulling weapons out, setting them on the bed for further scrutiny. Opening the closet, he kicked aside a few pairs of jeans lying on the floor and found Whittaker’s Army fatigues neatly folded. Knowing Whittaker’s fondness for his days in combat, he wasn’t surprised to see the uniform in pristine condition. It would be a bit loose on Clarke’s frame but that didn’t matter. He pulled it on over his soiled clothes.

There was a pickup truck in the garage, and for that Clarke also had a key. He pulled out with a satchel of weapons beside him in the passenger seat. A memory was stirred in the recesses of his mind… nearly a decade before, when he’d been a young officer and had just been brought onto the afterdead project.

The first corpse that the government had resurrected was an unpleasant character named Louis Brownlee. In life he had been locked away in a federal prison for fatally shooting two DEA agents during a bust. Small-time hood made notorious by capping a couple of undercover agents. A chain smoker, cancer had claimed him early during his double-life sentence. Brownlee’s body had quietly been shipped to the Louisiana base and seeded in the swamp. The URC infused his tissue, and a group of soldiers watched in horror as he rose from the muck and fixed yellow eyes on their warm living flesh.

The military were eager to explore the possible applications of the undead. Could Brownlee be made to obey the living? Could he fight? Could he infect? Clarke sat in smoky rooms, with celebrated generals and Defense Department officials yelling at each other, as the afterdead began to appear less and less useful. Finally, Brownlee was placed under restraints and brought into one of the meetings. The officials stared blankly at him. He returned the look. A colonel named Richard St. John took a long drag off his cigarette and met the creature’s gaze without fear. Brownlee’s withered lips opened and closed, a weak sound emanating from his throat. “What is it saying? What does it want?” A man asked. Standing up, St. John approached Brownlee. “His file said he was a smoker.” And he placed his cigarette in the zombie’s mouth.

The stiff, pained stature of the afterdead relaxed. Brownlee leaned his head back and exhaled. He was still addicted.

Not long after that, Clarke and a small team were flown to a facility in Puerto Rico, Brownlee brought along in chains. The secret prison there housed a few terrorism suspects, and these prisoners were strong. They didn’t talk under burning lights, they didn’t weep in the face of brutal torture or even sexual humiliation. A religious fervor possessed them and made them more than men, at least in their own minds.

Clarke wheeled Brownlee into an interrogation room on a dolly. An Arab, sitting in a lone chair, narrowed his eyes.

The CIA interrogator was leaning against the rear wall. He spoke in English. “Salim, this gentleman is here to make sure you answer my questions.” Clarke released the straps holding Brownlee down, and the afterdead stepped into the middle of the room. Clarke stood away from him and held up a carton of cigarettes. “Play nice, Brownlee.”

The next hour was a nightmare. Clarke fought to stand still and watch, his knees knocking. Even the interrogator was shaken by the end of it; he could barely issue the order for Brownlee to finally kill Salim. Together they rushed from the room and let the zombie feed in peace. And on closed-circuit monitors in another room, the remaining prisoners watched in terror. They were much more compliant after that.

Brownlee’s addiction to nicotine seemed to be the only leverage that his handlers had. After devouring a captor, he would sit on the floor in a pool of gore and light cig after cig, staining them red with his fingers and lips. He allowed himself to be chained and flown around the world, always with Clarke holding a fresh carton before him. Over time, they noticed that he seemed to become healthier if he ate frequently. His eyes almost began to look human again. Unnerved, they cut back his food supply.

Brownlee’s last assignment took him to Arlington, Virginia, and the interrogation of a CIA officer accused of selling intelligence. Clarke tapped Brownlee’s chest with a carton. “You know what to do.” Brownlee nodded slowly and entered the room where the officer was waiting. They gave him twenty minutes, then went in.

He was only supposed to have bitten off a few fingers, eaten them in front of the subject and sat quietly. But the subject was headless, all four walls covered in her blood. Brownlee tugged strings of muscle from the stump of her neck and stuffed them into his mouth. Clarke drew on him. “Get away from her,” he snapped, trying to mask his fear. Brownlee looked up at him, reached out a crimson claw for the pack of cigs. “Smoke?”

Clarke dropped his gun and pissed himself. Other team members swept past him to lash chains around the afterdead, who sat calmly, his eyes never leaving Clarke’s. They brought him to his feet and pushed him toward the door. His rancid breath was hot on Clarke’s face as he said “I’m a good dog,” in his guttural monotone.

He was never seen again after that. The government discontinued that particular program.

Clarke thought about the role he’d played before his murder. He had been a good dog too. So had Whittaker and Bradshaw. Now it was time to learn who their master was.

5 / The Man Comes Around

He lay quietly and stared upward into nothingness. His legs jostled a bit, as did his sidearms. In his mind he saw a rough schematic of Fort Armstrong’s layout. He’d been on the road for several hours now, not breathing, not smelling the faint decay of his skin nor the freshness of Whittaker’s borrowed fatigues. A bit of plastic was pulled tight across the tip of his nose; he was wrapped in a transparent body bag inside a steel coffin, and the only little bit of light afforded him was from the fracture he’d made in the lid’s lock sometime during the journey.

It was ice cold. Hours had gone by, how many he couldn’t say. He didn’t daydream, nor did look ahead to the tasks that awaited him. This was the idle mind of a dead man.

Most questions had been answered. Ahead was only the goal of self-preservation, self-preservation assured by the execution of his executioner. The endgame lay with he who had turned Whittaker and Bradshaw against him. Clarke still had some of Whittaker’s gristle in his molars. He didn’t wonder what Bradshaw would taste like (right turn, slowing down — Armstrong’s west security gate), nor did he yearn for the man’s dark meat. There would be no particular satisfaction in killing Bradshaw, the one who had slit open his satchel and spilled his manhood onto the dirt. Bradshaw had also shot him through the heart, whispering some apologetic sentiment that Clarke couldn’t recall. He couldn’t recall the words, but was keenly aware of the bullet’s location in his meat. It festered there and corrupted the other meat around it, though Clarke had no use for that anyway (truck coming to a stop — coffins jostling slightly).

There was talk outside. Clarke wondered if he might be recognized; not that they bothered to identify each corpse that came into Armstrong, but he was a former team member. Shouldn’t he have a nice little plot in Arlington, they’d ask? Or maybe it’s better this way, they might say, that he takes his secret knowledge back to its secret grave.

The lid moved. “Another broken seal,” a female snapped. Light entered the coffin, and Clarke stared straight ahead, knowing his pupils might have some small reaction.

The female leaned over him, eyed him through the plastic. Thomas, his mind said.

Would she say “Clarke” to him?

She didn’t say anything. The lid slammed shut. Yelling. Then, rolling. Down, down into the earth, beneath the base where the scientists justify all of this. A seed of curiosity was born in Clarke’s mind; for the genuine corpses, one of whom he’d swapped places with, this was a new birth. Stirring in the womb — shaking off swamp mud, chains buckled about your hands and feet, tethering you to one of the gnarled old trees thick with crud and in the air a thousand million insects humming. An insufferable place, the Source, its ever-womb teeming with abscesses of grubs and vines and God only knew what else. They were bound for the swamp, but first they’d be opened up and picked at by the scientists, who’d pull on their masks and aprons and slave over the new flesh; removing troublesome shrapnel and cancer tissue, setting broken bones. Assigning nicknames. Clarke felt his box clattering down a conveyor belt at breakneck speed and wondered if they made bets on the number of vertebrae broken during this cruel descent.

Then he was being ferried along a vertical belt, and stopped rudely, and the lid was opened once again.

Clarke lay perfectly still, sidearms tucked beneath his thighs. A face cloistered in goggles and antiseptic materials, resembling a giant insect, stared down at him.

“Hello,” said the zombie to the bug.

Clarke kicked himself out of the steel coffin with arms akimbo, squeezing off a volley of bullets before hitting the floor and rolling underneath the conveyor belt that had brought his corpse into this neo-Hell. As he did, he got his first good look at the underground lab: a huge, garishly lit cavern crowded with cables and monitors. And scientists, each one paralyzed with confusion.

Clarke rose and let fly a hail of bullets that sent a storm of sparks into the air as monitor after monitor exploded. He saw the scientists diving for cover and screaming for the soldiers to come down.

The bug-like doctor lay at Clarke’s feet, trembling. Clarke slurred his words: “I want Bradshaw. Sergeant Bradshaw.”

“It’s Captain now,” came the voice at his back.

Bradshaw vaulted over the conveyor belt and hacked into Clarke’s kneecap with a widowmaker, sliding out of harm’s way just as the afterdead put the soldier in his sights. Gunfire peppered a computer console and sent another fountain of sparks toward the rock ceiling.

Clarke felt his knee coming apart. It had been a clean shot from Bradshaw, always the master with the blade. The bug-like doctor was crawling away, sobbing. Clarke dropped down and caught his ankle. Raising him up as a shield, the zombie rounded the sputtering console in search of Bradshaw…

Who was racing up the service tunnel to the receiving warehouse, his mind outpacing his feet as he panicked: the gunman’s an afterdead. The afterdead is Clarke. Bradshaw, who had understood little about his covert assignment under Ryland, was now certain that he understood nothing at all.

Above ground, every available serviceman was speeding toward the warehouse. Waves of Jeeps whisked past fences where the base’s afterdead lingered, curious.

And Nathan Ryland, sitting in his office, heard the alarms sounding and his heart began to palpitate… and then it stopped. He shuddered in his chair, slipping forward just slightly so that his gut nudged the edge of his desk, and he died.

The soul departed the body. Ryland jolted in his chair, this time sending the computer monitor crashing to the floor, and he sat up undead. The tissue in his head and hands and haunches was suffused with a dark, creeping energy, and he stood.

A soldier opened his door and leaned in. “Sir, there’s an emergency in the research facility. I’ve been instructed to remove you from the base in the event—”

Ryland, nodding, came around the desk and tore the soldier’s throat open. He eased the young man’s automatic to the floor and took in great, gluttonous mouthfuls of flesh.

Clarke threw the bug-like doctor to the floor of the concrete tunnel. “Enner ashess code…”

“A-access code?” the terrified scientist asked. Clarke nodded. The doctor opened the door allowing Clarke into the receiving warehouse.

A spurt of gunfire threw the doctor back. Cries of surprise and outrage were heard from the other side of the door: “What the fuck are we dealing with?!”

“It’s Clarke.” Bradshaw said grimly, watching the door from behind the massive wheel of a dump truck. Stoddard just stared at him. On the other side of the captain, Thomas was reloading her M-16 and cursing herself for shooting the doctor.

“Explain,” Stoddard said. “Ken?”

“I fucked up.” Bradshaw counted the beads of sweat rolling down the side of his head. “Me and Whittaker, we fucked up. We killed Clarke and Harmon.”

“Wait a minute…” Thomas started to back away.

Bradshaw turned and said, “You’re not part of this. Go.” And she did.

“I’m staying,” Stoddard whispered.

“Joe, this isn’t your fight.”

“If it’s your fight then it’s my fight, brother.”

“No time for this bullshit!” Bradshaw hissed. Stoddard just shrugged.

Thomas edged toward the receiving bay, where she’d be able to leave the warehouse and join the soldiers scrambling outside. A cold hand closed over her throat.

“No sound.”

She cocked her head a quarter-inch to the right and saw her dead comrade, Pete Clarke. He wasn’t a zombie horror; the only indication of his lifelessness was the empty look in his eyes and that raspy monotone. He stared at her, through her — then she smelled the gas.

She spun away from him, finger on the trigger, and he popped her through the head before she got off one shot. Pulling himself onto the receiving bay, he fired a second round into the spilled gasoline he’d liberated from the trucks.

The warehouse exploded. Soldiers heading for the entrance were thrown back.

Stoddard rose from the grass outside, coughing violently. He and Bradshaw had each gone through a window. Before he could orient himself, soldiers poured through the clouds of smoke to grab him. “Wait! Ken! Ken!” He bellowed.

Bradshaw staggered through a column of darkness into Clarke’s arms. He shoved the afterdead off, and turned to see no escape route, only piles of flaming debris surrounding them; he’d chosen the wrong window and the wall had simply come down around him.

“Whooo?” moaned the afterdead.

“Ryland,” Bradshaw answered, drawing his twin widowmakers. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why it had to happen, and I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry Pete.”

He leapt at Clarke, going straight for that wasted knee — the afterdead buckled, and Bradshaw scissored off an ear and most of one cheek. He hit the ground ready to pivot, sending his other blade into the meat of Clarke’s waist.

Clarke whirled to face him; Bradshaw knew that the damage dealt to his opponent meant nothing — there was no pain, no shock — quickly, he planted a widowmaker between Clarke’s eyes and jerked his head sharply downward. The neck broke. Clarke’s eyes rolled in their bloody sockets and he pawed at Bradshaw’s uniform. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Bradshaw was whispering, as he freed his blades, stepped back and prepared to decapitate the undead.

Clarke could not offer the same sentiment. He felt nothing as he shook the pistol from his pants leg and shot Bradshaw through the heart.

For the first time in a long time, things made sense for Ken Bradshaw, including his own demise, and as he fell forward he thought that, maybe now, all things would return to their proper state and the corruption he’d helped sow would wash away. It was a foolish notion, but comforting in death.

Base Commander St. John beat his knuckles against his desk as he listened to radio reports of the havoc on the other side of the base. All they knew at this point was that a shooter had breached the labs, and the receiving warehouse was in flames.

Stoddard’s voice came over the radio. “He’s an afterdead! Bullets won’t stop him!” How was one miserable rotter causing such a panic? It was the men on the ground, they needed to pull themselves together and assess the situation with level heads. He grabbed his radio to issue just such a decree when the intercom on his desk squawked. “Commander! It’s Ryland — he’s coming up, he’s — he’s attacking everyone! Just about took my finger off!”

“What in the Christ.” St. John yanked open the drawer at his right hand and roused his Desert Eagle from its foam bedding. He walked out of his office and into the hall.

Ryland was tugging on a staffer’s arm, teeth gnashing scant inches from her ear. St. John fired a shot into the ceiling. Ryland released the terror-stricken girl, and then he was alone with the commander.

“Somehow I sense, Nathan Goddamn Ryland, that you’re the one responsible for all of this. Am I wrong?”

Ryland said nothing. As his eyes adjusted in the hallway, St. John became aware of how blood-soaked the liaison’s suit was. He also became aware of a repugnant, gagging odor. Decaying tissue. “You’re… you’re dead. Undead. You’re the rotter? What have you done?” St. John roared.

Ryland spat a mouthful of someone else’s blood onto the floor.

St. John fired two rounds into Ryland’s chest, kicking him to the end of the hall where he crumpled. The base commander took no chances as he approached the body; standing at arm’s length, he emptied the Desert Eagle into Ryland’s bloated corpse.

This was the end for Fort Armstrong, St. John realized. The entire base, like the files stored within, like the bodies lying on the floor — it would all have to be razed and the ashes scattered to the winds. And all because of this miserable snake in the grass—

Ryland bit into St. John’s palm. The commander kicked him away with a snarl and watched blood swell in the wound. “You’re dead! Son of a bitch!” St. John clasped his hand to the belly of his uniform and staggered away. At least there wasn’t any risk of some sort of infection.

Clarke slipped behind the wheel of a Humvee. Full tank of gas. He knew that Ryland was likely to be just across the base, though it wasn’t so simple as a straight line from point A to point B.

He decided to simplify, and drove through the electrified fences separating the living from the dead.

Soldiers scrambled to put up a roadblock, but the fencing came down like a curtain, folding into the dirt, the afterdead walking right over it even as their toes burst into flames. Every soldier in Fort Armstrong was sure they couldn’t become infected, each was sure that they were dealing with little more than sedated dogs, each saw the afterdead converging with renewed speed on the fallen fences.

Some of them fired, but they all ran.

Esteban Cervantes awoke from a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was alone on a desert road. An old man dressed in black approached him. “A causa de los gatos, ya en Egipto,” the man rasped. His eyes were not human and boiled with shapeless larvae. But it was the sound of the man’s leathery tongue over his rotten teeth that drove Cervantes from sleep. Then he heard the alarms.

A flurry of panicked thoughts and prayers assailed him. He was generally able to phase out others’ thoughts, but this crisis had put everyone’s psyche into overdrive. Between all the nervous breakdowns and the bottled-up rages looking for something to shoot, Cervantes wasn’t sure where he’d be of most use.

As he jogged out of his quarters, a Hummer ran up the curb and stopped. “In!”

He complied without hesitation, and paid no mind to the faint small of rot — but then his mind’s eye saw into the other and there was NOTHING.

“I can’t..not… drive good,” Clarke muttered, motioning to his ruined knee. “Take me to Ryland and I will… won’t..not shoot you.”

“All right.” Cervantes slipped into the driver’s seat, probing Clarke’s skull with telepathic tendrils. There were only patches of memory, a few pages from a book… but he saw enough to know why Clarke had come back. As for Ryland’s involvement…”I don’t know why I’m saying this,” Cervantes began; he figured the zombie’s promise not to shoot him was the closest thing to honesty he’d ever heard, as the undead were incapable of lying, and wanted to return the favor. “Something’s wrong with Ryland. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something unnatural about him. And if that has to do with you, Captain, then maybe you already know, but—”

An arm smashed through the window and grabbed at the wheel, followed by a head. Cervantes knocked both away, but he felt the bite, teeth raking through his flesh, and as he jerked the wheel to the side, caught a glimpse of Ryland’s face—

Stoddard led the charge against the loosed afterdead. They were run down with dump trucks, then those left standing faced the blades of standard-issue widowmakers. Stoddard let out an “OOH-RAH!!” as he dashed a rotter’s head against the side of a truck. He tried not to think about the Clarke situation — the mere fact that there was a Clarke situation—

One of the administrative staffers came hurtling toward him. Stoddard chopped away groping hands and tripping limbs and escorted the woman over to an idle dump truck.

“God, you got bit.” He rummaged through his uniform, as if he still carried a First Aid Kit on his person. “Nathan Ryland bit me!” The woman exclaimed. “Then all these others — I’m bleeding everywhere — feel faint —”

“Wait, Ryland?”

The woman slumped to the ground. No pulse.

“Oh my God,” Stoddard yelled, “could somebody — AYYEAAGGHH!!”

He kicked the woman’s teeth away from his thigh and drew his pistol. “Are you alive? Say something!”

She rose, pushing out her breasts, licking Stoddard’s blood from her lips—

Giving the gun and its owner one last look, she took off. Self-preservation before hunger.

“FUCK!!!” Stoddard sat down, waited for his pulse rate to drop a little, then looked at his wound. Well, this was bad. A new bad. Someone would come up with a better name for it later. All Joe knew was that he was going to turn into a zombie.

That’s when one of the base’s rotters lunged around the truck and tore his throat out, and he was spared that last pain in the ass.

6 / An end; and, a beginning

Ryland stared curiously at Clarke as they circled one another on the roadway. Cervantes stayed down in the Humvee, not bothering to peer out the window; instead he reached out to their minds and mapped out their movements in his own, translating the simple impulses of their zombified brains.

Ryland stopped. His mouth struggled to form words. The memory was there, in his nerves and muscles, and if he could just get the thoughts from his brain to his lips…”Clarke,” he said finally, and something resembling a smile crossed his face.

“Is thish why?” Clarke couldn’t help his slurred speech now, with his cheek mangled, but he got the point across. “Is thish why you killed me?”

“Yes,” Ryland answered. “I am not like you. I am a new afterdead. I am the birth of a plague.”

He gestured towards an older zombie, one of the base’s experimental subjects, as it staggered across a field a few hundred yards off. “I have spread it to many, living and dead. They all carry the plague now.”

“Why?” Clarke asked. There was no bitterness or longing in the question; he asked only because that was his mission, to know why he had been killed. To understand, so that he would not be killed again.

“Because,” Ryland answered, “I wanted to see what would happen.”

An unsatisfying answer, perhaps, to the living beings that were now being infected with this new plague, but good enough for Clarke.

Ryland came at him then, and despite Clarke’s condition, it was easy to fend off the inexperienced fighter’s attacks. Clarke smashed a bony fist through Ryland’s teeth, and the other made to swallow the fist, seizing Clarke’s arm with both hands and gnashing the jagged nubs of his teeth on Clarke’s dead skin. Clarke felt tendon and muscle being torn away and, planting a boot on Ryland’s groin, jerked his hand free.

Ryland staggered back, snapping his jaws like a mad dog, ragged sheets of gray flesh dangling from his broken teeth. “No good. Dead meat.” Though undead, he seemed to be somehow relishing every new experience of his afterlife, the proud parent of the contagion and a new flesh. In the Humvee, Cervantes felt disgust for Ryland, disgust that boiled in his throat and threatened to make him retch; meanwhile Clarke, who felt nothing, raised his shredded fist and rejoined the fight.

He stabbed two fingers through Ryland’s eye socket, pulping the orb as if it were nothing and sinking knuckle-deep into the cold jelly of the dead brain. Ryland grunted, then made a sound like a laugh. He swatted at Clarke’s various wounds without effect.

Clarke hurled Ryland to the asphalt and knelt on his neck. There was a snap, and Clarke grabbed Ryland’s hair and jerked his head to one side. Another satisfying snap.

Ryland gurgled, tried to speak, but Clarke put all his weight on the man’s throat, and wrenched at his head as hard as he could, and before long there were no more words left to say.

Ryland’s head, a chattering, pulpy mess, rolled to the curb and was forgotten. Clarke stood up, looked back at the Humvee.

Within, Cervantes’ mind was suddenly assaulted by a crushing force that blinded his inner eye.

“My lucidity is… different from yours,” Ryland’s head whispered. Clarke whirled to see Ryland’s body writhing, churning in time with the words of the disembodied head. His chest rose and fell with something that wasn’t breath; ribs and flesh snapped apart. There was something inside of him.

“I used every resource at my disposal to try and understand what was growing inside of me. What I was becoming. And I found the words of the old gods who left their dark energy here on our little insect-world… I found that I could be much more than just the plague…”

Tentacles erupted from Ryland’s body and snaked across the street to caress his head. Ryland moaned; Clarke watched as his brains were pulled out through the bottom of his skull, watched as the tentacles withdrew with their prize and settled in the cavity of Ryland’s headless torso, cradling his brain there.

Clarke heard Ryland in his head now, as if the man had become pure thought. The brain pulsated as Ryland spoke.

Ia! Ia!

Ryland’s body rose with the brain nestled in a bed of throbbing tentacles. He began stalking toward Clarke.

I am more than a new flesh… I am a new being… a new god…

Cervantes rolled out of the Humvee, clutching his head, blood streaming from his open eyes. He rose to his knees and saw the horror Ryland had transformed into.

He raised an M16 and let loose.

A hail of bullets shredded Ryland’s body, sending him staggering back, his exposed brain jolting about as the tentacles exploded outward in an effort to contain it.

No! NO! You can’t kill me! I am—

I—

A trio of bullets sailed through the night and punched into the meat of Ryland’s brain. It flew apart like so much refuse.

I…

Ryland crumpled, tentacles flopping weakly on the asphalt. Cervantes’ head cleared, and he was able to think again: so much for the gods. He knew they had no place in this terrifying new world.

Clarke turned. Cervantes aimed the M16 at him.

Clarke considered this situation for a moment; here was meat, meat that had helped him in his mission but meat nonetheless. Yet, that meat had a gun. And something else was curious about that meat, something special about him that Clarke’s bruised mind couldn’t pin down.

He turned from the soldier and walked away.

Cervantes looked at the bite mark on his wrist. He could sense that something was wrong, very wrong, that this wasn’t a typical bite. Just as Ryland, whose disembodied head continued to gnash its teeth, was not a typical zombie. Something coursed through his veins and took hold of the cells in his blood.

God… I’m infected.

He turned away as well, away from the fight, from Ryland’s remains, and walked. He would need to tell others, on the outside. He’d need to tell the world that its end had finally come.