Empire's End (29 page)

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.

“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.”