David Dunwoody - Empire's End

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.