Ryland was jarred back to reality as Samuel pushed the sack across the table. His sightless, metallic jack-o’-lantern visage turned slowly from side to side, as if surveying the firing squad flanked by klieg lights. Ryland, never certain whether the afterdead could still hear, mumbled thanks and took the sack. For the first time he addressed his team. “Fall back.”
They did, except for Goldhammer who came forward with a hazmat container the size of a lunchbox. Samuel sat quietly as Ryland took a handful of soil from the sack and, like a drug buyer testing the product, sprinkled the dirt over the dark mass in the container. “What’s his name?” He asked Goldhammer, who replied through his bug helmet, “Pancake.” Ryland smiled wryly and stroked the ball of black fur. Now he felt a rhythmic movement beneath his fingertips; the kitten shuddered, shifted. It was in an advanced state of decay and broken beyond repair by a callous parade of freeway traffic, so there was little for it do now but purr.
“Dirt’s good.” Goldhammer called back to the others. Another container was brought forth to receive the sack’s contents. Ryland closed the first over the cat. It muttered weakly with dead vocal cords. He smiled again. The sack was returned to the table beside the briefcase, both for Samuel to keep. Taking one in each metal fist, the zombie stood up.
The lunchbox in Ryland’s hands jerked, and even before the black blur flew past his face and down the tunnel, he knew; even as his legs pumped against his will, sending him past the table and over that invisible line in futile pursuit, he knew. Goddamned crippled cat! Ryland’s mind snapped as a clutch of mechanical fingers took root in the center of his chest.
Pulled off his feet by Grinning Samuel and out of reality by the numbing terror in his veins, Ryland head dimly the patter of bullets against Samuel’s back. Goldhammer, like a double-jointed ballet dancer, pirouetted off the table and drove a boot into the afterdead’s defunct groin. While his legs jackknifed through the air, he planted his M4 against Samuel’s temple and got off a good quarter-second burst of fire before the zombie punched through his body armor and yanked out a streaming handful of guts. A spurting, slopping mess that cushioned the soldier’s fall immediately followed it.
Ryland had been thrown clear of the battle and crashed into the dirt; having been tossed deeper into the catacombs he saw Samuel as a hulking silhouette against the lights, swaying under a barrage of gunfire. Ryland felt bullets zipping overhead and pressed his face into the earth, tasting that accursed dirt which Goldhammer had just died for.
Died… Christ.
The government had accumulated a half-ton of soil from the parish over the past three decades, and they run a battery of test, burying bodies and clocking their resurrection, administering strength, endurance and aptitude tests. What little intelligence Samuel exhibited was rare in afterdead (except those who stayed near their Source, of course); they usually came up sputtering the last of their blood & bile and clamoring for the nearest warm body, abandoning all higher faculties in the lust for living flesh. Indeed, such was the case with Sergeant Goldhammer, who sat up beside the besieged Samuel and fixed his bug-like gaze on Ryland. His exposed viscera were caked with soil, his back to the other men — but surely they realized what he’d become…
Goldhammer made a wet noise inside his helmet. Ryland heard it over the gunfire.
Pawing through his own innards, the dead soldier came at his former commander. Former as of thirty seconds ago — yes, he was fresh undead, and there was still some basic military protocol embedded in that brain of his, wasn’t there, so Ryland threw his out (wrist broken, he felt) and screamed “STOP!!”
Goldhammer did, crouching on all fours with a rope of intestine dragging between his legs. He cocked his head and was the perfect picture of a sick dog. He was trying to recognize the word and why it had halted him in his tracks. Ryland could see the gears turning, like the gears in Grinning Samuel’s jaw, and at that moment Samuel ripped into the firing squad and the hail of bullets was reduced to a drizzle. Goldhammer pounced.
Ryland pivoted on his broken wrist with a blinding snap of pain and caught the other between his glassy bug-eyes with a bootheel. Goldhammer grunted, batted the leg aside. They wrestled there on the ground with Ryland kicking himself further and further down the tunnel, all the while aware that soon Samuel would be finished with the others. Backpedaling on his hands and hindquarters, he disturbed a pile of pebbles — no, gears, the strewn contents of the briefcase! Ryland closed his good hand around a fistful of them and, with a half-hearted cry befitting the last act of a dead man, hurled them into Goldhammer’s face. Relatively pointless but still an amusing precursor to Samuel’s hand sweeping down like a wrecking ball and crushing Goldhammer’s skull against the wall. The soldier crumpled to clear a path for the grinning afterdead. His steel maw was painted with rust from the insides of Ryland’s men. The zombie knew right where his prey was, and Ryland’s situation hit rock bottom as the damaged klieg lights faded out.
“STOP!! STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!” he shrieked. He now knew for certain that Samuel could still hear by the way that his pace quickened. A barely discernable silhouette in the faint remnants of light, Grinning Samuel’s grasping fingers squealed as he drew closer. Ryland’s back struck a wall. He waited for those fingers to find his heart.
His broken wrist was jerked into the air. He screamed, imagining his entire arm to be gone. But it wasn’t, and Samuel wasn’t even moving now. With his breath caught in his throat, Ryland just sat and listened in the dark.
And then he heard it…
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
His wrist twisted a little. He bit into his lip while Samuel traced the band of his gold wristwatch. The pair remained motionless in the shadows for what seemed like an eternity, but Ryland counted the ticks and tocks and knew it was less then a minute. Finally, in spite of both terror and logic, he stammered, “it’s a Rolex.”
The watch left his wrist, and intact arm dropped into moist lap. Samuel could be heard shuffling off into the catacombs, going down beneath the parish churchyard where the mystery of his unlife dwelled. The tick-tock, tick-tock gradually ceased.
Ryland sucked icy air into his lungs and sat there for what really did seem an eternity. There were a few dull spots of light visible down the tunnel. There, he’d have to confront the remains of his slaughtered team; but Samuel did quite the number on them, and none would be getting back up. He pushed his ankles through the dirt until the circulation returned to them and tried to stand. Still a bit shaky, wrist throbbing like mad. And goddamn it was getting colder by the second. He took another breath, sat back down, and listened to the silence.
Then he heard it…
Meow.
Ryland smiled just a little, as much as his strength would allow, and reached a blind hand into the darkness.
1 / Rebirth
Hell, from a scientific perspective: the Big Bang spit sub-atomic particles in every direction through the nether. This newborn fabric of existence was torn asunder and sewn back together with every passing nanosecond — a ceaseless quantum storm. Chaos was, in fact, the seed of Order; and even now the matter both inside and out of our bodies is subject to this frenetic cosmic turmoil.
In the very beginning, through an infinitesimal rip that closed almost as soon as it opened — something struck through. Dark matter spewed across the infant universe at a speed beyond that of light, a speed reserved for the supernatural whose laws contradict all nature. Some of these tendrils of darkness were snagged in cooling gas clouds. Some of their dark energy was trapped within stars and planets.