Ledger pointed to the four figures staggering toward them. “Now go clean up your mess.” He sat down on a rock, pulled a piece of goat jerky from his pack, and began to chew.
Tom Imura cleaned the black blood from his sword and returned it to its scabbard. Then he drew his knife. It was a double-edge British commando dagger with a matte black finish over the steel. Totally nonreflective. He drew a breath, held it for a moment, exhaled, nodded, and then set off to meet the four zombies.
He didn’t see Joe Ledger grinning at his retreating back.
—2—
Top and Bunny
“This place looks great, you said. We’ll get a lot of rest for once, you said,” growled USMC Staff Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, call sign ‘Bunny’, as he brought up his drum-fed shotgun. He began firing, filling the air with thunder that drowned out the low, hungry moans.
Bunny cut a sour sideways look at his best friend, First Sergeant Bradley ‘Top’ Sims. The dark-skinned, grizzled former Army Ranger held his SIG Sauer in a two-handed shooter’s grip and fired steady, spaced shots at the pale figures closing in on them from all sides. The two men circled slowly, clockwise, finding targets everywhere.
Absolutely everywhere.
They worked this like they’d worked a hundred battles of this kind. Killing the dead. Accepting the insanity of that concept as an unshakeable part of their world.
The front line of the dead went down.
The next line was fifty yards back. The Colorado Rocky Mountain slopes around them fell still as insects and birds alike silenced their calling to hide from the battle threatening their home.
“So tell me, Old Man,” asked Bunny as he lowered his weapon, “do I look well rested?”
Top shrugged, eyeing Bunny with a creased brow. “You look alive. Say thanks and stop being so damn high maintenance.”
“High maintenance my ass,” Bunny replied as he readied himself for the next wave. He aimed his shotgun at another zombie and shot it point blank in the forehead. “As far as I can tell, it’s a miracle either of us can walk without a cane at this point.”
“The miracle,” Top said, dropping a walker with a double-tap, “is that either of us still have all our limbs. That we’re even alive, Farm Boy.”
In truth, Top had been the farm boy, having spent his boyhood summers in his uncle’s Georgia peach grove. He’d gone off to the Rangers and fought in battlefields all over the world, then retired to see if he could be a farmer. But he had come out of retirement after his son was killed and his daughter crippled in the early days of the Iraq War. He’d volunteered for the newly-formed Department of Military Sciences, hoping to lead a team into combat in the new War on Terrorism. Instead he became the strong right hand of Captain Joe Ledger’s Echo Team. That was where he and Bunny had met and become best friends and teammates.
“Won’t be for long if I keep letting you pick our campsites, Old Man,” Bunny complained, and then they both went back to work. Firing, stopping only to reload, as zombies continued to advance — some limping on partial legs, others with partially eaten heads or faces or missing arms. Bunny was a six-foot-seven-inch, powerful, blond, former SoCal pro-volleyball player who’d joined the Marines and went from Force Recon to the DMS. Bunny, Top and Ledger had served together, side by side, their whole time at the agency.
Until things fell apart.
“The survivors we rescued yesterday said it was clear,” Top snapped, motioning downslope toward the old log cabin where they’d tried to spend the night — an abandoned escape for some unknown city dwellers that might never return.
“Well, clearly they were full of shit!” Bunny snapped. “Maybe we should go back and kick their asses. Just as a way of saying thanks.”
The last two zombies fell, their heads blown apart.
Top and Bunny panned around in a circle, looking for any signs of movement or further targets. The stink of rotting blood and flesh mixed with the sweet smell of pine needles and moss filling the cool mountain air as it breezed gently around them.
“Clear,” said Bunny, his voice too loud in the sudden quiet.
“Clear,” agreed Top. “Won’t last, though. All that shooting will bring more of them out of the woods. Won’t take ‘em long to get here, either.”
Top swapped out his magazine and holstered the SIG, then dragged a sleeve across the sweat on his face. “Hot as balls today.”
“Cover my six,” Bunny said. “This time, I think I’ll pick our shelter.”
“Hooah,” muttered Top, and they moved out in tight formation, covering each other as they followed a trail through a copse of ponderosa pines leading up a nearby slope.
Ever since the world fell apart under Lucifer 113, or The Plague as the public usually called the outbreak, Top and Bunny found themselves as soldiers without an official mission. There was no government, no DMS, no active military. The world had fallen completely off its hinges, and what was left of America — and maybe the world — was an all-you-can eat buffet for the hungry dead, with pockets of humans trying to survive here and there.
In the absence of official orders, Top and Bunny had assigned themselves a mission. The rules were simple. Keep moving. Save whom they could save. Kill as many zombies as was practical. Rinse. Repeat.
They’d become successful enough to earn a reputation as ‘the garbage men’, as one group of survivors had dubbed them. They'd once met a salvage team out in the wasteland who’d heard of them and repeated what he’d been told. ‘Call them in and they’ll haul your ass out and empty the garbage you leave behind.’
Not something you could put on a tattoo, but it worked well enough.
As for the nickname of ‘The Garbage Men’, Bunny hated it, but Top thought it was hilarious.
“Yeah,” Bunny protested after they’d left the salvage man, “But we’re not a pair of fucking janitors. We’re saving lives. Where’s the respect?”
Top just said, “People use humor to keep their spirits up in impossible life situations. They don’t mean disrespect. It’s a joke.”
Bunny didn’t see how there was anything to joke about. The world was for shit and it might never recover. Millions, maybe billions of people were dead. More were dying, and everyone who died, no matter how, reanimated and joined the flesh-eating horde. No matter how many they shot, more kept coming. Top somehow managed to stay optimistic, but all Bunny could do was keep thinking how fucked they were.
FUBAR.
Fucked up beyond all repair.
Yeah.
—3—
The Soldier and the Samurai
Joe Ledger and Tom Imura scaled a tall rock as twilight began filling the canyons with shadows. In another kind of world they would have used the darkness as a time to travel quickly without being seen and without the oppressive desert heat. But the dead did not rest and they hunted at night. Actually they hunted all the time, but at night the lifeless bastards were harder to see coming, driven by smell and hearing when it was too dark to see. No one Ledger had talked to during the fall knew how the zombies stayed alive, or why they didn’t rot past a certain point, or how they could use any of their senses. It seemed to make no scientific logic, but for Ledger it meant he simply did not have sufficient information. Everything made sense in the end. Everything, and he had encountered some of the most bizarre threats any Special Operator had ever encountered. Even when it looked like it was something supernatural, there was always some kind of weird goddam science to explain it.
The fact that all of the scientists he knew were also dead skewed the math. It meant he might never get the right answers.