Do it, he told himself.
“Do it,” he said aloud.
I can’t.
The gun fired. Immediate. Unexpected. Blasting a big red hole in the world.
It was a massive sound because he was bent down close to the baby and because he had no idea his hand was going to fire. The blast punched him in the side of the head and he cried out, reeling, dropped the weapon, grabbed his head. Screamed.
The green corn stalks were painted with bad colors. Red and black. The blood hadn’t yet undergone the full biochemical change from normal to totally infected blood. Even so, he could see tiny threadlike worms wriggling in the droplets as they ran down the cornstalks.
Sam did not remember burying the child.
For the rest of that day and all through a bad night he wasn’t sure he had. But when he went out in the morning the hole was filled in, with a hump of dirt patted neatly above it. And there was a second mound next to that one. Bigger. The boy. Sam understood that he must have dug that grave, too, but there was no shred of memory anywhere in his head.
He knew that he should be worried about that. Really worried.
He went and sat on the porch steps to try and sort out exactly how worried. There was a small cloud—just one—skating across the sky. He watched it, leaning back to track its slow progress. He squinted into the sun, closed his eyes for a moment, and woke to darkness.
Crickets sang in the corn and in the grass. Fireflies danced in the air, and overhead someone had shot holes in the nighttime sky, through which cold light shone. The moon was down and the day was gone.
Gone.
Gone where, though?
Sam sat there, shivering with cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. He got slowly and painfully to his feet. Everything ached. Every muscle and tendon; every inch of his skin. The bones of his ass hurt and he knew that he must have been there all day. How long? Ten hours? Twelve? More.
It terrified him.
Then he heard the sound.
Soft. Furtive. Sneaky. Not close, but out in the cornfield. Near where…
Suddenly he was off the porch and running across the lawn, past the trees and the driveway, past the burned wreck of the pickup truck and the splintered shell of the gas pump. He reached the front wall of corn and plunged into it. The stiff, sharp leaves slashed at him, cutting his face and hands, but Sam bashed at them, slapped them aside as he ran.
There were noises in the field now. Grunts. Whispers. No… not whispers. It was more basic than that. Moans.
Then he burst through one row and collided into someone.
Some-thing.
A man. A farmer in coveralls. The man fell backward and down, landing hard. Sam rebounded and caught his heel on something, and he went down, too, crashing down on his aching buttocks, jarring his tailbone. He cried out as pain punched from his coccyx all the way up his spine.
The farmer grunted, too. But not in pain. It was a strange noise. A duller, less emphatic sound. Air jolted from lungs but absent of pain.
“I’m sorry,” said Sam.
And knew that it was not the thing to say. There was nothing he could say to make this moment work, to fix it. The man sat up and in the darkness his face was etched with blue starlight. His eyes were dull and seemed to look straight through Sam. His lips hung rubbery and slack. There was dirt on his hands from where he’d been digging.
Digging.
For food.
The farmer uttered that same moan. It was a terrible sound of bottomless hunger. Of a need that could never be satisfied. An ugly, awful sound.
“I’m sorry,” said Sam again as he reached for his gun.
Which. Was. Not. There.
No gun. No knife.
The farmer lumbered to his feet and reached for him, moaning louder now. From deep inside the cornfield there were answering sounds. Other moans. Many, many more.
Sam Imura screamed.
Special operator. World-class sniper. DELTA gunslinger. Killer. He screamed because the world was not the world anymore. This was the world. It was all broken and in that moment, beneath the crowds of stars gathered to witness it, Sam realized that he, too, was broken.
So very badly broken. Splintered, fragmented. Torn loose from the things that fastened him to any understanding.
He screamed and the woods erupted with newer, louder moans. The green stalks shivered and shook as pale figures shambled toward him. Reaching and reaching. Farmers and cops, housewives and school kids. A man in a funeral suit. A naked woman with three bullet holes in her stomach. An old lady in a hospital gown. A nurse without eyes. A fireman with no hands. Coming for him.
Sam screamed and screamed, and then something in him broke. Snapped. Shattered.
He was running across the field with no awareness of leaving the cornfield. He was running and yelling. Figures came out of the shadows and he swung at them, chopped at them with the edges of his hands, kicked at them to break knees. They fell but did not die. The broken ones crawled after him. The others walked, lumbered, loped, staggered.
But he ran.
He blinked his eyes and he was in the plastic tree stand, up in the tree. His hands were cut and sore; he had scrapes on his shins. But the rifle was there. His gear bag with the four boxes of shells was there. His other handgun, a Glock 26, was there. Even his canvas bag of beer and food was there.
He was there.
The moon peered over the tops of the trees. More time was missing, but he thought he understood it now. He was going mad, or had gone mad, but some part of him was still on duty, still protecting him. That part of him did not allow Sam to see everything. Not the worst parts. It disallowed him to witness the process of his own collapse, and so it skipped forward, letting the body do what it needed to do and then allowing his consciousness to catch up.
Sure, he thought, that sounds reasonable.
And it was reasonable. Just not to the sane. Not to the unbroken.
Below the tree stand were them. At least forty. Maybe more. When the moon was all the way up he would be able to count better. He had four boxes of rifle ammunition, fifty cartridges to a box. And a hundred rounds of pistol bullets. Sam Imura, broken or not, didn’t need more than one round per target. Not at this range. Not with these slow, shambling targets.
He thought about it. About what the best play was here. He could fight, and maybe clear these things out of his fields—and they were his fields now. Or he could use that handy little Glock and go find his brother and his parents and his friends. After all, if the world was this badly broken, why not simply opt out?
Why not?
This wasn’t the war he trained for. This wasn’t the world he fought for.
Right?
He removed the Glock from the bag, ejected the magazine, held it to the light to make sure it was fully loaded and slapped it back into place. Made sure there was one in the pipe, too. Ready to rock and roll.
The moonlight painted the tops of the corn a lovely silver. He couldn’t see the graves he’d dug, but knew they were there. Two graves. One small, the other smaller. Digging those graves cost him more than he ever wanted to spend. It wasn’t fair that he had to pay that price. It wasn’t fair that those kids had to die like that.
He bent and picked up his radio and fiddled with the dial.
“This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse,” said the voice. As if waiting for Sam to find him. Billy was still there. Sam listened to the reporter give updates on what was going on out there. About battles. About losses. About a convoy of school buses taking kids down south to North Carolina. To Asheville, where the military was making a big stand. Billy talked and talked, and there were tears in his hoarse voice.