Empire's End (28 page)

Seemed like it’d be so easy right now to
snatch the burlap purse with its pound of dirt and to riddle Samuel
with bullets, throwing the table in his face, cutting him to
ribbons with automatic fire. To finally storm the catacombs. As
Ryland felt his own fingers jumping anxiously in his lap, hr forced
himself to picture his predecessor, dying on the earthen floor
beside this very chair, dying on his back in a shitty paste of dirt
and blood.

Ryland was jarred back to reality as Samuel
pushed the sack across the table. His sightless, metallic
jack-o’-lantern visage turned slowly from side to side, as if
surveying the firing squad flanked by klieg lights. Ryland, never
certain whether the afterdead could still hear, mumbled thanks and
took the sack. For the first time he addressed his team. “Fall
back.”

They did, except for Goldhammer who came
forward with a hazmat container the size of a lunchbox. Samuel sat
quietly as Ryland took a handful of soil from the sack and, like a
drug buyer testing the product, sprinkled the dirt over the dark
mass in the container. “What’s his name?” He asked Goldhammer, who
replied through his bug helmet, “Pancake.” Ryland smiled wryly and
stroked the ball of black fur. Now he felt a rhythmic movement
beneath his fingertips; the kitten shuddered, shifted. It was in an
advanced state of decay and broken beyond repair by a callous
parade of freeway traffic, so there was little for it do now but
purr.

“Dirt’s good.” Goldhammer called back to the
others. Another container was brought forth to receive the sack’s
contents. Ryland closed the first over the cat. It muttered weakly
with dead vocal cords. He smiled again. The sack was returned to
the table beside the briefcase, both for Samuel to keep. Taking one
in each metal fist, the zombie stood up.

The lunchbox in Ryland’s hands jerked, and
even before the black blur flew past his face and down the tunnel,
he knew; even as his legs pumped against his will, sending him past
the table and over that invisible line in futile pursuit, he knew.
Goddamned crippled cat! Ryland’s mind snapped as a clutch of
mechanical fingers took root in the center of his chest.

Pulled off his feet by Grinning Samuel and
out of reality by the numbing terror in his veins, Ryland head
dimly the patter of bullets against Samuel’s back. Goldhammer, like
a double-jointed ballet dancer, pirouetted off the table and drove
a boot into the afterdead’s defunct groin. While his legs
jackknifed through the air, he planted his M4 against Samuel’s
temple and got off a good quarter-second burst of fire before the
zombie punched through his body armor and yanked out a streaming
handful of guts. A spurting, slopping mess that cushioned the
soldier’s fall immediately followed it.

Ryland had been thrown clear of the battle
and crashed into the dirt; having been tossed deeper into the
catacombs he saw Samuel as a hulking silhouette against the lights,
swaying under a barrage of gunfire. Ryland felt bullets zipping
overhead and pressed his face into the earth, tasting that accursed
dirt which Goldhammer had just died for.

Died... Christ.

The government had accumulated a half-ton of
soil from the parish over the past three decades, and they run a
battery of test, burying bodies and clocking their resurrection,
administering strength, endurance and aptitude tests. What little
intelligence Samuel exhibited was rare in afterdead (except those
who stayed near their Source, of course); they usually came up
sputtering the last of their blood & bile and clamoring for the
nearest warm body, abandoning all higher faculties in the lust for
living flesh. Indeed, such was the case with Sergeant Goldhammer,
who sat up beside the besieged Samuel and fixed his bug-like gaze
on Ryland. His exposed viscera were caked with soil, his back to
the other men—but surely they realized what he’d become...

Goldhammer made a wet noise inside his
helmet. Ryland heard it over the gunfire.

Pawing through his own innards, the dead
soldier came at his former commander. Former as of thirty seconds
ago—yes, he was fresh undead, and there was still some basic
military protocol embedded in that brain of his, wasn’t there, so
Ryland threw his out (wrist broken, he felt) and screamed
“STOP!!”

Goldhammer did, crouching on all fours with a
rope of intestine dragging between his legs. He cocked his head and
was the perfect picture of a sick dog. He was trying to recognize
the word and why it had halted him in his tracks. Ryland could see
the gears turning, like the gears in Grinning Samuel’s jaw, and at
that moment Samuel ripped into the firing squad and the hail of
bullets was reduced to a drizzle. Goldhammer pounced.

Ryland pivoted on his broken wrist with a
blinding snap of pain and caught the other between his glassy
bug-eyes with a bootheel. Goldhammer grunted, batted the leg aside.
They wrestled there on the ground with Ryland kicking himself
further and further down the tunnel, all the while aware that soon
Samuel would be finished with the others. Backpedaling on his hands
and hindquarters, he disturbed a pile of pebbles—no, gears, the
strewn contents of the briefcase! Ryland closed his good hand
around a fistful of them and, with a half-hearted cry befitting the
last act of a dead man, hurled them into Goldhammer’s face.
Relatively pointless but still an amusing precursor to Samuel’s
hand sweeping down like a wrecking ball and crushing Goldhammer’s
skull against the wall. The soldier crumpled to clear a path for
the grinning afterdead. His steel maw was painted with rust from
the insides of Ryland’s men. The zombie knew right where his prey
was, and Ryland’s situation hit rock bottom as the damaged klieg
lights faded out.

“STOP!! STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!” he shrieked. He now
knew for certain that Samuel could still hear by the way that his
pace quickened. A barely discernable silhouette in the faint
remnants of light, Grinning Samuel’s grasping fingers squealed as
he drew closer. Ryland’s back struck a wall. He waited for those
fingers to find his heart.

His broken wrist was jerked into the air. He
screamed, imagining his entire arm to be gone. But it wasn’t, and
Samuel wasn’t even moving now. With his breath caught in his
throat, Ryland just sat and listened in the dark.

And then he heard it...

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

His wrist twisted a little. He bit into his
lip while Samuel traced the band of his gold wristwatch. The pair
remained motionless in the shadows for what seemed like an
eternity, but Ryland counted the ticks and tocks and knew it was
less then a minute. Finally, in spite of both terror and logic, he
stammered, “it’s a Rolex.”

The watch left his wrist, and intact arm
dropped into moist lap. Samuel could be heard shuffling off into
the catacombs, going down beneath the parish churchyard where the
mystery of his unlife dwelled. The tick-tock, tick-tock gradually
ceased.

Ryland sucked icy air into his lungs and sat
there for what really did seem an eternity. There were a few dull
spots of light visible down the tunnel. There, he’d have to
confront the remains of his slaughtered team; but Samuel did quite
the number on them, and none would be getting back up. He pushed
his ankles through the dirt until the circulation returned to them
and tried to stand. Still a bit shaky, wrist throbbing like mad.
And goddamn it was getting colder by the second. He took another
breath, sat back down, and listened to the silence.

Then he heard it...

Meow
.

Ryland smiled just a little, as much as his
strength would allow, and reached a blind hand into the
darkness.

Hell, from a scientific perspective: the Big
Bang spit sub-atomic particles in every direction through the
nether. This newborn fabric of existence was torn asunder and sewn
back together with every passing nanosecond—a ceaseless quantum
storm. Chaos was, in fact, the seed of Order; and even now the
matter both inside and out of our bodies is subject to this
frenetic cosmic turmoil.

In the very beginning, through an
infinitesimal rip that closed almost as soon as it opened—something
struck through. Dark matter spewed across the infant universe at a
speed beyond that of light, a speed reserved for the supernatural
whose laws contradict all nature. Some of these tendrils of
darkness were snagged in cooling gas clouds. Some of their dark
energy was trapped within stars and planets.

This is a story about one world with this
strange energy coiled about its core, leaking through fissures in
the crust here and there to manifest chaos. It’s a story
insignificant in the whole of time; nevertheless, the great
architects record these events.

It begins with hot lead punching through the
left ventricle of Pete Clarke’s heart. The bullet corkscrews
through his meat, bounces off vertebrae and chews into bone. He
feels its wake in him, a burning tongue lancing his torso, and he
falls heavily.

Democratic Republic of Congo—2 hours
earlier

Another coup, another civil war, another
quiet genocide. Guerillas and tribes were clashing in the
rainforests, senseless slaughter in which neither side understood
the other’s agenda. Clarke’s team had touched down in the midst of
it with mock UN seals adorning both their uniforms and their
chopper. Whittaker skirted the makeshift encampment and snuffed a
couple of colobus monkeys that had watched their descent from the
trees. A veteran of jungle warfare and extreme survival alike,
Whittaker took pride in securing the perimeter. His grizzled face
was flushed with exuberance uncommon for a man his age. Bagging the
monkeys, he slung his rifle over one shoulder and headed back to
Clarke’s position. The team leader was hunched over a satellite
phone setup. “Uplink’s not working,” he said softly, perhaps not
even aware of the other’s presence. Whittaker clued him in by
dropping the bag into the dirt.

“I said we wouldn’t need kickers.” Clarke
muttered without looking up. “You don’t know this region any better
than I do,” Whittaker replied. “Why not play it safe?”

“You just like plugging the little guys.”
Clarke smacked the side of the console.

Whittaker grinned. “I don’t have any
subordinates of my own to abuse, Captain.”

Clarke smiled back. He enjoyed the
camaraderie among his men, but at the same time felt a twinge of
discomfort over their complacency. Bradshaw was coming over now,
lugging a few clear plastic cylinders; he guffawed at the sight of
the monkey bag. He had a raucous belly laugh befitting an imposing
black man, and Clarke had to silence him with a stern look. “Ken,”
he said to Bradshaw, “see what you can do with the sat phone. I’m
gonna go break Harmon in.”

Whittaker snorted as Bradshaw took Clarke’s
place at the console. “Radio’s as good as any of this shit.”
Punching keys, Bradshaw shook his head. “Time isn’t gonna wait for
you to catch up, Whittaker.” He produced a few tiny plastic bags
from his vest and tossed them. “Take care of the lanterns while I
do this?”

Catching the baggies, Whittaker nodded
gruffly and scooped up the plastic cylinders. The old man was
efficient, good at following orders, but he longed to be the one
giving them, didn’t he? Bradshaw watched him tromp away. No one had
the heart to tell him that, at fifty-six years, with three decades
of service under his belt, he was still a grunt doing busy
work.

Harmon, on the other hand, had been charged
with prepping the arsenal, a critical task. She didn’t view it that
way, but no one ever did when it was their first time in the field.
At least that’s what Clarke was telling her. “Widowmaker’s your
best friend,” he said, perched in the side hatch of the chopper. He
was referring to a cleaver-like blade with a molded grip and
knuckle guard, a simple yet intimidating piece of weaponry. One was
laid out for each team member. “That leads us to Rule One—no
headshots. Your firearm is meant as a last resort. Bullet to the
brain only kills what little impulse control still exists in
afterdead. So if you shoot, aim for the limbs.” Taking up a
widowmaker, Clarke slipped it into a sheath on his back. “Decaps
will render them harmless. You’ve been trained in close-quarters
combat—rely on your widowmaker.”

Harmon nodded absently; she’d heard it all
before. He felt it bore repeating. Clarke eyed her uncomfortable
stance, subtle curves concealed by a defensive posture and eyes
shielded behind red hair. She was clearly conditioned to play it
low-key and go unnoticed, and seemed quite attuned to it. “Rule
Two—bites don’t infect. You’ve been told a dozen times, now believe
it.” He took the opportunity to roll down the sleeves of his bite
jacket: nylon-covered chain mail reaching over the wrists. “Too
many assumptions and too little understanding about bites has
caused men—and women—to lose it and get killed over a minor flesh
wound. Romero-itis,” he finished with a smirk.

She frowned at the term. “You mean like the
movies? Never seen them.”

“Really? Oh, you should. Romero’s are the
best. Just remember the Devil had different ideas when he made
his.

“Three,” Clarke concluded, “watch your dead.”
Harmon looked up at that one. It never made sense until it was too
late... she’d know what it meant soon enough.

* * *

Slitting open the tiny baggies, Whittaker
emptied freeze-dried bugs into the plastic cylinders. He was
setting them up around the perimeter, twelve in all, turning the
rotors of the chopper into the hands of a clock face. Pausing at
twelve o’clock, he winced. Back was going again. “Goddamn,” he
whispered. This wasn’t a glamorous job—especially these little
mop-up exercises—but at least he used to enjoy being in the field.
Now he could only try to take his mind off his aching back by
thinking about the grueling paperwork that waited back at the base.
Bureaucratic horseshit had taken the wind out of his sails and the
joy out of his work... no, it was age, and he damn well knew it.
The night before, at a debriefing in Zaire, he’d excused himself
twice to shake out a few drops of piss. The memory alone made his
bladder start fidgeting right now.