“Tell them I’m fine. I really am. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I am. I like it here.”
“What do you like about it?” Cervantes asked. He began probing Grimm’s mind. It was an incoherent ruin in there, akin to an attic overtaken by cobwebs. Nightmare images of the undead hordes flashed before him. Bloody meat, grasping fingers. Lips smacking.
Grimm laughed boisterously. “I like the quiet.”
“Why did you stop communicating with the base?”
“Radio’s busted.” Grimm gestured in no particular direction and took a gulp of his cheap wine. “I dropped it outside. They just walked all over it, the pissers. I contemplated smoke signals.” Cervantes pushed deeper… Grimm was hiding something within the rotted walls of that attic. Behind a door in this house. He saw the radio, not dropped but hurled to the street. He saw Grimm greedily scooping meat from the street into his arms, stealing it from the afterdead.
“Sergeant, you know you’ve worried a lot of people. Surely you would have made some effort to contact them if this was all an accident.”
Grimm’s crusty eyes narrowed. “You don’t believe me? You don’t know what it’s like out here, bud. You don’t KNOW. You’re on the outside looking in. I sleep with the dead. I—” Grimm stopped himself suddenly. Cervantes tore through the attic wall and saw the horror.
“Oh my god.” He was on his feet, moving back down the hall.
Grimm leapt up, spilling the box, and cried “NO! Nooooooooo…” Glancing back, Cervantes saw the other soldier wringing his hands like a child who knew his number was up. He pushed open the last door on the left.
It was impossible to tell she was undead, save for the blood caked around her mouth and on her nightgown. She was very healthy, lovely even. Of course she was — Grimm brought meat home for her. Only her wrists and ankles, where she was bound to the bed, showed signs of damage: flesh had been sloughed from bone, most likely in her struggling. Her eyes lit on Cervantes and she began to twist and lurch.
Between her bruised thighs… Cervantes saw carrion flowers and vomited.
“No, no, no.” Grimm paced in the doorway, beating his head with his fists. “It’s not… you don’t KNOW!!”
I don’t want to, Cervantes thought, shaking the stolen memories from his head. He felt Grimm’s hands on his shoulders, pleading, trembling with sobs, then he was thrown violently into the hallway, and Grimm locked himself in the room with a howl. “Sergeant!” Cervantes shouted, his head ringing from the fall. And now he could hear them: outside, pawing at the doors, the windows… he rushed down the hall to slam shut the window through which he’d come. Just as it came down a gnarled hand shot through. An eyeless face smacked against the glass, spraying pus like a sponge. He’d lost contact with them, and now they were being drawn to the tumult inside. Cervantes looked back at the locked door.
Inside, Grimm knelt beside the female and pulled a jackknife from his boot. “Ryland put me out here, he made me stay out here,” he called, sawing through the afterdead’s restraints, “because I KNOW. I know what he did and what he’s going to do. Ryland’s the bad one, not me! Not—”
Cervantes shut his eyes tight and willed away Grimm’s screams, the snapping of bone and the voracious roars of his former lover.
4 / Darker Flames Than This
“Clarke, Harmon, lost in Congo. Grimm, committed suicide right here on the base.” Commander St. John rattled the death list off as if he was reading sports scores. His team had lost.
Behind his great desk, littered with medals and keepsakes from his years in the battlefield, the old hawk loomed like an angry father, white hair meticulously-groomed over steely gray eyes. Those eyes were locked onto Nathan Ryland. He glared silently, expecting something.
“These things happen,” the other man finally said, gloved hands folded.
“‘These things happen’? You’ve been given too much pull around here,” St. John growled. “It was your idea to let Grimm play out there with the rotters, and he cracked. You pushed for an expedition to Congo and two good soldiers are dead as a result. Hell, now Whittaker’s been AWOL for a week. He’s a combat vet, a hero, and lately I’ve seen him following you around like a goddamned puppy. Have any idea where the hell he is?” St. John grasped his temples, wincing: migraine. Suits like Ryland sauntered into military operations from their “classified backgrounds” and fucked up the whole works. Ryland was like the executive branch’s little spy, carrying out the silly whims of armchair warriors and putting St. John’s boys in the dirt. He sighed. “Bradshaw takes Clarke’s place as leader of the field unit. And he selects his new teammates. Not you, Ryland, him.”
“Fair enough,” Ryland replied. His pale, fatty jowls made his smile all the more repulsive. He was soft all over, wasn’t he? St. John just shook his head. “Get out.”
Bradshaw met Ryland outside the administrative building. Ryland clapped a hand on his back. “I didn’t even have to bring it up. He promoted you. Now, I only ask that you put Sergeant Cervantes on the team. His assigned duties aren’t important, I just want him out there.”
Bradshaw nodded, and they walked along the electric fence separating their world from that of the afterdead. A few rotters milled around in the grass, probably in search of overlooked chum from a previous feeding. “Who else will you choose?” Ryland asked.
“Stoddard and Thomas,” Bradshaw replied quickly.
“I see you’ve been thinking about this,” Ryland grinned. “Captain.”
Bradshaw offered an insincere smile in return. He’d just flown up the ranks to a critical leadership position — all because he was a killer, and worse than that, a lackey. He still didn’t know the reason why he’d shot Pete Clarke through the heart. It would have made as much sense at a backyard barbecue as it did in Congo. And Ryland… something was wrong with him. His face was more sunken and pale than usual. He carried his bulk with an awkward gait. Looked like a…”Ryland, I’ve got to get down to the warehouse for a pickup. Talk later?”
“Of course.” The pale man nodded curtly and wandered back to the administrative building.
Joe Stoddard was already stationed at the warehouse. Bradshaw had Cervantes and Thomas meet him there as well. Thomas was an older woman, hard, not a feminine bone in her body. What hadn’t been drilled out of her when she transferred to the base had been washed away at the sight of the lunging rotters (Bradshaw wondered if it was different for a woman, seeing new life created, but from death). She’d stopped wearing her bite jacket long ago, and both her arms bore scars as a result; nonetheless she’d definitely be an asset in field missions. As for Cervantes… Bradshaw hadn’t seen much of him since Grimm’s death. There were murmurs that Cervantes was some sort of psychic, the sort of nonsense the Defense Department had messed with fifty years ago. Maybe they were still messing with it. Hell, Bradshaw had seen stranger things.
“I appreciate your choosing me,” Cervantes said.
Bradshaw decided against saying you’re welcome. “We’ve got a truck coming in five minutes.”
Stoddard barked from his post, “It’s already here!” and opened the main loading door to admit the semi’s refrigerated payload. Bradshaw slapped a button to start the conveyor belt that led from the warehouse to the scientists’ underground compound.
“Let me ask you something,” Cervantes said. “What do they do down there? What tests do they run on the afterdead?”