For the first time in a long time, things made sense for Ken Bradshaw, including his own demise, and as he fell forward he thought that, maybe now, all things would return to their proper state and the corruption he’d helped sow would wash away. It was a foolish notion, but comforting in death.
Base Commander St. John beat his knuckles against his desk as he listened to radio reports of the havoc on the other side of the base. All they knew at this point was that a shooter had breached the labs, and the receiving warehouse was in flames.
Stoddard’s voice came over the radio. “He’s an afterdead! Bullets won’t stop him!” How was one miserable rotter causing such a panic? It was the men on the ground, they needed to pull themselves together and assess the situation with level heads. He grabbed his radio to issue just such a decree when the intercom on his desk squawked. “Commander! It’s Ryland — he’s coming up, he’s — he’s attacking everyone! Just about took my finger off!”
“What in the Christ.” St. John yanked open the drawer at his right hand and roused his Desert Eagle from its foam bedding. He walked out of his office and into the hall.
Ryland was tugging on a staffer’s arm, teeth gnashing scant inches from her ear. St. John fired a shot into the ceiling. Ryland released the terror-stricken girl, and then he was alone with the commander.
“Somehow I sense, Nathan Goddamn Ryland, that you’re the one responsible for all of this. Am I wrong?”
Ryland said nothing. As his eyes adjusted in the hallway, St. John became aware of how blood-soaked the liaison’s suit was. He also became aware of a repugnant, gagging odor. Decaying tissue. “You’re… you’re dead. Undead. You’re the rotter? What have you done?” St. John roared.
Ryland spat a mouthful of someone else’s blood onto the floor.
St. John fired two rounds into Ryland’s chest, kicking him to the end of the hall where he crumpled. The base commander took no chances as he approached the body; standing at arm’s length, he emptied the Desert Eagle into Ryland’s bloated corpse.
This was the end for Fort Armstrong, St. John realized. The entire base, like the files stored within, like the bodies lying on the floor — it would all have to be razed and the ashes scattered to the winds. And all because of this miserable snake in the grass—
Ryland bit into St. John’s palm. The commander kicked him away with a snarl and watched blood swell in the wound. “You’re dead! Son of a bitch!” St. John clasped his hand to the belly of his uniform and staggered away. At least there wasn’t any risk of some sort of infection.
Clarke slipped behind the wheel of a Humvee. Full tank of gas. He knew that Ryland was likely to be just across the base, though it wasn’t so simple as a straight line from point A to point B.
He decided to simplify, and drove through the electrified fences separating the living from the dead.
Soldiers scrambled to put up a roadblock, but the fencing came down like a curtain, folding into the dirt, the afterdead walking right over it even as their toes burst into flames. Every soldier in Fort Armstrong was sure they couldn’t become infected, each was sure that they were dealing with little more than sedated dogs, each saw the afterdead converging with renewed speed on the fallen fences.
Some of them fired, but they all ran.
Esteban Cervantes awoke from a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was alone on a desert road. An old man dressed in black approached him. “A causa de los gatos, ya en Egipto,” the man rasped. His eyes were not human and boiled with shapeless larvae. But it was the sound of the man’s leathery tongue over his rotten teeth that drove Cervantes from sleep. Then he heard the alarms.
A flurry of panicked thoughts and prayers assailed him. He was generally able to phase out others’ thoughts, but this crisis had put everyone’s psyche into overdrive. Between all the nervous breakdowns and the bottled-up rages looking for something to shoot, Cervantes wasn’t sure where he’d be of most use.
As he jogged out of his quarters, a Hummer ran up the curb and stopped. “In!”
He complied without hesitation, and paid no mind to the faint small of rot — but then his mind’s eye saw into the other and there was NOTHING.
“I can’t..not… drive good,” Clarke muttered, motioning to his ruined knee. “Take me to Ryland and I will… won’t..not shoot you.”
“All right.” Cervantes slipped into the driver’s seat, probing Clarke’s skull with telepathic tendrils. There were only patches of memory, a few pages from a book… but he saw enough to know why Clarke had come back. As for Ryland’s involvement…”I don’t know why I’m saying this,” Cervantes began; he figured the zombie’s promise not to shoot him was the closest thing to honesty he’d ever heard, as the undead were incapable of lying, and wanted to return the favor. “Something’s wrong with Ryland. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something unnatural about him. And if that has to do with you, Captain, then maybe you already know, but—”
An arm smashed through the window and grabbed at the wheel, followed by a head. Cervantes knocked both away, but he felt the bite, teeth raking through his flesh, and as he jerked the wheel to the side, caught a glimpse of Ryland’s face—
Stoddard led the charge against the loosed afterdead. They were run down with dump trucks, then those left standing faced the blades of standard-issue widowmakers. Stoddard let out an “OOH-RAH!!” as he dashed a rotter’s head against the side of a truck. He tried not to think about the Clarke situation — the mere fact that there was a Clarke situation—
One of the administrative staffers came hurtling toward him. Stoddard chopped away groping hands and tripping limbs and escorted the woman over to an idle dump truck.
“God, you got bit.” He rummaged through his uniform, as if he still carried a First Aid Kit on his person. “Nathan Ryland bit me!” The woman exclaimed. “Then all these others — I’m bleeding everywhere — feel faint —”
“Wait, Ryland?”
The woman slumped to the ground. No pulse.
“Oh my God,” Stoddard yelled, “could somebody — AYYEAAGGHH!!”
He kicked the woman’s teeth away from his thigh and drew his pistol. “Are you alive? Say something!”
She rose, pushing out her breasts, licking Stoddard’s blood from her lips—
Giving the gun and its owner one last look, she took off. Self-preservation before hunger.
“FUCK!!!” Stoddard sat down, waited for his pulse rate to drop a little, then looked at his wound. Well, this was bad. A new bad. Someone would come up with a better name for it later. All Joe knew was that he was going to turn into a zombie.
That’s when one of the base’s rotters lunged around the truck and tore his throat out, and he was spared that last pain in the ass.
6 / An end; and, a beginning
Ryland stared curiously at Clarke as they circled one another on the roadway. Cervantes stayed down in the Humvee, not bothering to peer out the window; instead he reached out to their minds and mapped out their movements in his own, translating the simple impulses of their zombified brains.
Ryland stopped. His mouth struggled to form words. The memory was there, in his nerves and muscles, and if he could just get the thoughts from his brain to his lips…”Clarke,” he said finally, and something resembling a smile crossed his face.
“Is thish why?” Clarke couldn’t help his slurred speech now, with his cheek mangled, but he got the point across. “Is thish why you killed me?”