And I am not a man of flesh. They could not consume me. Although some have tried…
He climbed the barricade of vehicles at the end of the street and ran onto the municipal plaza to make his last stand against the horde.
When they came at him he spun right into their midst, cutting a crimson swath through the center of the mob, ripping it apart at the seams and scattering the shell-shocked remnants across the plaza; he then flew at those stumbling about the edge of the plaza and slew them with surgical precision. A pair of rotters attacked from behind. He turned on his heels and skewered them both. Their guts churned as they struggled, fluids spilling down their threadbare jeans, and then both fell still. Adam yanked the blade free and watched them drop. They were the last. It was done.
His own clothes were soaked through with gore. He’d taken this nondescript suit off of a corpse after shedding his reaper’s robes. A spongy mold was beginning to grow inside the jacket, feeding on the blood that suffused it. He figured it was time to trade up. Maybe this time he could find a pair of pants that felt less awkward, since he didn’t have a—
Movement to the left. He spun and saw a shadow disappeared into the old town hall.
Uncommon for a rotter to run; then again, this one had just seen dozens of its contemporaries mowed down by a single man. Maybe they were getting a little smarter. Adam wasn’t really interested in the reason for it, though. It only made his mission more complicated.
Stealthily he crept up the steps of the town hall building and peered through the open doors. He saw a lobby, littered with debris and dimly lit by the sunlight spilling through a fractured ceiling high overhead. As he entered, the floor creaked loudly beneath his bare feet. It felt like the whole thing might come down on his head at any moment.
Somewhere in the building, footsteps creaked in response to his. From upstairs. Up the grand staircase, past the soiled American flag and the faded photos of city councilmen. Adam padded across the floor like a tiger after its next meal. Another creak led him down a narrow hallway lined with empty offices. The windows were all shuttered, allowing only a few slits of light into the corridor. Any moment now he’d find his prey cornered in one of these rooms, and he’d pounce.
He passed a doorway, just barely registered a silhouette standing in the room, and stopped short.
It might’ve had its back to the doorway. Maybe not. He had to strike.
Adam leapt into the room, and the rotter swung something at the shutters and they came crashing down, flooding the room with light, temporarily blinding him—
But he saw enough.
It was a thin-haired, stocky rotter in coveralls. He was holding a shovel. He was the one from Jefferson Harbor, Lily’s town. The one with the shovel who had separated him from the girl — and who was supposed to be dead — but now he was here and he was bearing down on Adam with the shovel pointed at him like a spear.
No time to think. Adam deflected the shovel with the scythe and threw an elbow into the side of the rotter’s head. It stumbled right into a wall — through it — and into the next room. Adam followed through a shower of sawdust.
The floor groaned as the rotter rose to face him. Shovel met blade again, and this time it was Adam who was knocked off balance. He fell on his back and rolled aside just in time to avoid being impaled. The rotter caught his ankle and hurled him across the room with inhuman strength.
This was much more than just a zombie. Something had changed, and Adam knew why. When the bastard had ambushed him in Jefferson Harbor, he’d done something that defied all undead instinct: he’d tasted of the Reaper’s flesh, swallowing a pound of Adam’s otherworldly constitution before collapsing on the ground. Adam had revived to find the rotter lying inert and assumed he was finished. Wrong.
What had his false flesh done to the rotter? And had he actually followed Adam all the way here from Louisiana?
Again, no time to think, and Adam paid the price for his hesitation. The shovel bit into his side and he felt himself propelled through the air like a rag doll, crashing through a paper-thin wall and into a railing and nearly toppling over it to the lobby below.
He turned, ducking as he did so, and the shovel whistled over his head. He thrust the scythe at the rotter. No purchase. He had to get closer. But that damn shovel was beating him back with every effort, and he felt the railing pressing into his back, then he heard a sharp crack and suddenly there was nothing at all supporting him.
Adam dropped through space, through beams of light and dust motes, down down down to the floor where he landed on the shattered railing and felt a sort of pain he’d never felt before. It knifed through his spine, from his neck to his buttocks, and he arched his back with a cry of pure agony.
He had no bones, was only God’s clay, but his new life had blessed him with a knowledge of suffering, and he felt now as if he’d been snapped in half by the fall. And the rotter was thundering down the stairs.
Thunder. The entire chamber was rumbling. It was all going to come down.
As the rotter crossed the lobby toward him, Adam forced himself into a kneeling position and swung his blade into a nearby column. It bowed and exploded outward, and a balcony dropped from the upper levels with a boom that shook the foundations of the town hall.
Adam rolled out of the way of falling plaster and wood, landing right at the rotter’s feet. He swept the undead’s legs out from under him.
The rotter hit the floor with a solid thud. He was all meat, wasn’t he? Healthy as a living man but with the appearance of a cadaver. Bloodshot eyes glared at Adam from skeletal sockets. The thing fumbled for its shovel, but Adam got it first and he brought it down on the rotter’s face with a wet crunch.
The staircase crumbled. The roof was sagging. Time to go.
Adam dove out the front doors and was followed by an eruption of debris as the building fell in on itself. Dust blanketed the plaza, and Adam pressed his face into the ground and covered his head while hunks of wood and marble skipped across the concrete like wayward missiles.
At last the world settled. Adam looked up and took in the scene. A work of classic architecture, centuries old, a testament to Man’s spirit, now dust; for the sake of one rotter. And Man would not rebuild. Not today. Such was the plague.
By twilight, the man with the scythe was gone. There were only the voices.
You feel him in your bones. You taste him in your mouth — quickly now, before he’s gone too far and you lose him!
Get up! Get after him!
You are the end of him. You are the Omega. It is what you must do.
Aren’t you aching for his flesh? Isn’t your black blood on fire? What’s keeping you? GET UP!
A cacophony of disembodied voices crowding out the rotter’s own animal thoughts. These voices, spitting and howling, arguing with him and with one another — they were his conscience, or had at least taken its place. Voices young and old, speaking in all tongues yet perfectly understandable to him. It was their rage that made it all so clear, more so than any of their pleas or threats. He felt their collective rage in his rotten core, like flames rising to warm the walls of a broken-down furnace. It was the rage that drove him, and the lingering taste of the Reaper’s flesh — the memory of it sending chills through his bones even as his black heart fluttered to life.
The Omega clawed his way out of the rubble where the town hall had stood. Using the recovered shovel to pry his legs free, he climbed down from the ruins and surveyed the plaza.