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.