The lid moved. “Another broken seal,” a female snapped. Light entered the coffin, and Clarke stared straight ahead, knowing his pupils might have some small reaction.
The female leaned over him, eyed him through the plastic. Thomas, his mind said.
Would she say “Clarke” to him?
She didn’t say anything. The lid slammed shut. Yelling. Then, rolling. Down, down into the earth, beneath the base where the scientists justify all of this. A seed of curiosity was born in Clarke’s mind; for the genuine corpses, one of whom he’d swapped places with, this was a new birth. Stirring in the womb — shaking off swamp mud, chains buckled about your hands and feet, tethering you to one of the gnarled old trees thick with crud and in the air a thousand million insects humming. An insufferable place, the Source, its ever-womb teeming with abscesses of grubs and vines and God only knew what else. They were bound for the swamp, but first they’d be opened up and picked at by the scientists, who’d pull on their masks and aprons and slave over the new flesh; removing troublesome shrapnel and cancer tissue, setting broken bones. Assigning nicknames. Clarke felt his box clattering down a conveyor belt at breakneck speed and wondered if they made bets on the number of vertebrae broken during this cruel descent.
Then he was being ferried along a vertical belt, and stopped rudely, and the lid was opened once again.
Clarke lay perfectly still, sidearms tucked beneath his thighs. A face cloistered in goggles and antiseptic materials, resembling a giant insect, stared down at him.
“Hello,” said the zombie to the bug.
Clarke kicked himself out of the steel coffin with arms akimbo, squeezing off a volley of bullets before hitting the floor and rolling underneath the conveyor belt that had brought his corpse into this neo-Hell. As he did, he got his first good look at the underground lab: a huge, garishly lit cavern crowded with cables and monitors. And scientists, each one paralyzed with confusion.
Clarke rose and let fly a hail of bullets that sent a storm of sparks into the air as monitor after monitor exploded. He saw the scientists diving for cover and screaming for the soldiers to come down.
The bug-like doctor lay at Clarke’s feet, trembling. Clarke slurred his words: “I want Bradshaw. Sergeant Bradshaw.”
“It’s Captain now,” came the voice at his back.
Bradshaw vaulted over the conveyor belt and hacked into Clarke’s kneecap with a widowmaker, sliding out of harm’s way just as the afterdead put the soldier in his sights. Gunfire peppered a computer console and sent another fountain of sparks toward the rock ceiling.
Clarke felt his knee coming apart. It had been a clean shot from Bradshaw, always the master with the blade. The bug-like doctor was crawling away, sobbing. Clarke dropped down and caught his ankle. Raising him up as a shield, the zombie rounded the sputtering console in search of Bradshaw…
Who was racing up the service tunnel to the receiving warehouse, his mind outpacing his feet as he panicked: the gunman’s an afterdead. The afterdead is Clarke. Bradshaw, who had understood little about his covert assignment under Ryland, was now certain that he understood nothing at all.
Above ground, every available serviceman was speeding toward the warehouse. Waves of Jeeps whisked past fences where the base’s afterdead lingered, curious.
And Nathan Ryland, sitting in his office, heard the alarms sounding and his heart began to palpitate… and then it stopped. He shuddered in his chair, slipping forward just slightly so that his gut nudged the edge of his desk, and he died.
The soul departed the body. Ryland jolted in his chair, this time sending the computer monitor crashing to the floor, and he sat up undead. The tissue in his head and hands and haunches was suffused with a dark, creeping energy, and he stood.
A soldier opened his door and leaned in. “Sir, there’s an emergency in the research facility. I’ve been instructed to remove you from the base in the event—”
Ryland, nodding, came around the desk and tore the soldier’s throat open. He eased the young man’s automatic to the floor and took in great, gluttonous mouthfuls of flesh.
Clarke threw the bug-like doctor to the floor of the concrete tunnel. “Enner ashess code…”
“A-access code?” the terrified scientist asked. Clarke nodded. The doctor opened the door allowing Clarke into the receiving warehouse.
A spurt of gunfire threw the doctor back. Cries of surprise and outrage were heard from the other side of the door: “What the fuck are we dealing with?!”
“It’s Clarke.” Bradshaw said grimly, watching the door from behind the massive wheel of a dump truck. Stoddard just stared at him. On the other side of the captain, Thomas was reloading her M-16 and cursing herself for shooting the doctor.
“Explain,” Stoddard said. “Ken?”
“I fucked up.” Bradshaw counted the beads of sweat rolling down the side of his head. “Me and Whittaker, we fucked up. We killed Clarke and Harmon.”
“Wait a minute…” Thomas started to back away.
Bradshaw turned and said, “You’re not part of this. Go.” And she did.
“I’m staying,” Stoddard whispered.
“Joe, this isn’t your fight.”
“If it’s your fight then it’s my fight, brother.”
“No time for this bullshit!” Bradshaw hissed. Stoddard just shrugged.
Thomas edged toward the receiving bay, where she’d be able to leave the warehouse and join the soldiers scrambling outside. A cold hand closed over her throat.
“No sound.”
She cocked her head a quarter-inch to the right and saw her dead comrade, Pete Clarke. He wasn’t a zombie horror; the only indication of his lifelessness was the empty look in his eyes and that raspy monotone. He stared at her, through her — then she smelled the gas.
She spun away from him, finger on the trigger, and he popped her through the head before she got off one shot. Pulling himself onto the receiving bay, he fired a second round into the spilled gasoline he’d liberated from the trucks.
The warehouse exploded. Soldiers heading for the entrance were thrown back.
Stoddard rose from the grass outside, coughing violently. He and Bradshaw had each gone through a window. Before he could orient himself, soldiers poured through the clouds of smoke to grab him. “Wait! Ken! Ken!” He bellowed.
Bradshaw staggered through a column of darkness into Clarke’s arms. He shoved the afterdead off, and turned to see no escape route, only piles of flaming debris surrounding them; he’d chosen the wrong window and the wall had simply come down around him.
“Whooo?” moaned the afterdead.
“Ryland,” Bradshaw answered, drawing his twin widowmakers. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why it had to happen, and I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry Pete.”
He leapt at Clarke, going straight for that wasted knee — the afterdead buckled, and Bradshaw scissored off an ear and most of one cheek. He hit the ground ready to pivot, sending his other blade into the meat of Clarke’s waist.
Clarke whirled to face him; Bradshaw knew that the damage dealt to his opponent meant nothing — there was no pain, no shock — quickly, he planted a widowmaker between Clarke’s eyes and jerked his head sharply downward. The neck broke. Clarke’s eyes rolled in their bloody sockets and he pawed at Bradshaw’s uniform. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Bradshaw was whispering, as he freed his blades, stepped back and prepared to decapitate the undead.
Clarke could not offer the same sentiment. He felt nothing as he shook the pistol from his pants leg and shot Bradshaw through the heart.