David Dunwoody - Empire's End

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…