David Dunwoody - Empire's End

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.”