David Dunwoody - Empire's End

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.

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…”