Empire's End (30 page)

“It’s not funny, it’s Darwin.” Bradshaw
ignored the putrid rot in his nostrils, ignored the stumbling
parade reaching toward him. “Before long those runners are going to
be too healthy. We’ll have to take them out.”

“I look forward to it.” Stoddard replied. He
reached behind his back to pat the sheath where his widowmaker was
stowed. “Have you seen Postman lately?” He tossed another wave of
slop. It hit a woman head-on. She collapsed, and Stoddard’s hand
flew to his mask in shock; after a second, he started to laugh.
Several other afterdead knelt to pick the gore off of her thrashing
body. “Kinky!”

“Anyway,” Bradshaw muttered, “no, I haven’t
seen Postman. Why?” Postman was one of the oldest specimens on the
base. In the beginning, the scientists had suited corpses up in
uniforms, to better identify them regardless of physical condition.
So you had Postman, Electrician, Nurse (Stoddard’s favorite) and
the like. After a while it was determined that specimens weren’t
around long enough to require such measures. But a few of these
veteran afterdead still existed on the base, and Postman was one.
He—it, rather—endured because it didn’t feed often, which made it
one of the weaker and less desirable subjects. The scientists said
that Postman had learned to pace himself in order to avoid being
targeted. But how the hell would he—no, IT, dammit—know to do such
a thing?

“Postman took a headshot last week,” Stoddard
said. “He tried climbing into Grimm’s slop truck, bought himself a
lobotomy. Anyway, after Grimm came back and filled out the report,
we had to go find Postman and verify it. So we go to the school,
and he’s in there, but not wandering the halls like usual. He’s
sitting on the floor with a stick.”

“This is one hell of a story.” Bradshaw
flicked a string of meat off his waders. “Let me finish,” Stoddard
scowled. “Anyway, Postman’s got this stick and he’s fishing around
in the bullethole. He’s trying to get the bullet out.”

“How do you know he was after the bullet?
Maybe he was just poking around.”

“Yeah, sure. They don’t get bored, Ken.
Anything they do, it’s for a reason.”

Not true, Bradshaw thought. All they really
needed to do was eat. Didn’t breathe, didn’t fuck. They barely
qualified as animals, yet some rotter sticking a twig in his brain
justified a twelve-page report in triplicate. More paperwork than
he’d had to fill out after two field operatives died. Behind the
truck, two males bent and bloated by decay played tug-of-war over a
rope of tissue. Bradshaw heaved more chum at them, and the conflict
ended abruptly. As more and more feed littered the street in the
truck’s wake, the afterdead were falling to their knees like
supplicants. There was something familiar and troubling about it...
Reminded him of Sunday worship as a kid. He’d grown up in a Texas
border town, his mother a black homemaker, Dad a Venezuelan
preacher. Their very own little white church seemed to absorb the
dry heat, and every week Bradshaw would stand in silent awe as Dad
cried from the pulpit, sweat running in rivers from his face and
fists. Looking back, it wasn’t any spiritual rapture that overcame
so many in the congregation—it was heat exhaustion. But to the
young boy it was a power radiating from his father. Even the walls
ran with moisture. It was a local phenomenon, those glistening
tearstains that seemed to appear out of nowhere on the walls.
Especially on Sunday: as the worshippers swayed in praise, the
entire room had seemed to vibrate. Bradshaw would grip his mother’s
hand, head hot and swimming, the buzzing in his ears swelling to a
crescendo, and the walls wept. They wept.

In lieu of a life-size crucifix there was a
stained-glass image of the Savior behind the altar, and Dad
meticulously polished it every other day. Bradshaw would sit in the
pews sometimes and watch. Whenever his father’s back was to him,
the boy reached out and touched the tearstains. He pressed his
fingertips to his nostrils; the smell was sweet, like something
from his mother’s kitchen. It made perfect sense to a child that
Christ’s teardrops were of sugar and syrup. His wouldn’t be bitter
or salty. Lot’s wife turned to salt because she disobeyed the Lord,
Dad said.

One day, when it reached 110 degrees and
dusty winds battered the church, and Dad was cleaning the
stained-glass window, Bradshaw had felt the room vibrate again. The
walls murmured to him. He pressed his hand to them, felt it. Then
he looked up and saw his father’s fear-filled eyes fixated on
him.

At the joint of the west wall and the
ceiling there was a hole and it was from there that the bees
poured. Bradshaw made it out, Dad didn’t. They said he was
allergic. They said that thousands of bees had been nesting in the
walls, so many that their honey seeped through when it got hot
enough. That day,
Nature
had delivered a judgment against
God
, and that was the day Bradshaw realized He was just a
snake-oil salesman, manipulating forces that were already
there.

* * *

The lingering odors of slop duty hadn’t yet
begun to fade when Bradshaw and Stoddard were sent into the bayou
to harvest. The corpses seeded the previous day were reviving.
There were a finite number of these Sources in the world—places
where this strange energy, like honey, seeped through the soil and
reanimated the dead—one was here in Louisiana, and so the base had
been established. And despite the fact that fresh specimens were
returning to life at that very moment, Stoddard was going on in a
loud voice about the tattoo he always talked about and never got:
“Death From Above” between his shoulder blades with an image of
Christ behind the lettering. It was nothing but ironic to Bradshaw
considering their occupation. Slogging through a stretch of mud
filled with gnarled roots (nothing ever died out here, just kept
growing), he ran that by Stoddard. His companion shrugged. “We
didn’t make the URC, brother, we just plug them into it.”
URC—Undefined Reanimation Catalyst. Scientific term for “we have no
fucking idea.”

The first afterdead of the night was chained
to a gnarled monster of a tree at the edge of the mud. It stared at
them, perplexed. It was male, early thirties, saliva running from
its lips and a rank odor coming off its soiled jeans. “He shit
himself,” Stoddard spat. “Way to go, partner!” He clapped the
undead on the shoulder and detached a thick chain leash from the
tree. Bradshaw trudged on to the next rotter. “I’m thinking of
getting a dog.” He told Stoddard as they hauled the lot out of the
bayou, through a manned gate and onto a fenced pathway. “Retriever
or something.”

“You’d keep it on-base?” Stoddard raised an
eyebrow. “Why not?” Bradshaw replied. “You know they don’t mess
with animals. Watchdog’s not a bad idea, anyhow.” He yanked one of
his chains to get a straggler moving. It lurched at him; Bradshaw
was ready with the stun gun and knocked it on its ass. He jerked
impatiently until the wide-eyed corpse staggered to its feet.
“Maybe I’m a little lonely. That’s not a crime, right?” Stoddard
nodded in understanding. They were forced to make their home next
door to these things—and the kicker was, the afterdead had better
digs. It was almost maddening to plod through their rosy
faux-neighborhoods, to look at that all day and then go back to an
8x8 room in a bunker. Grimm, one of the base’s certified lunatics,
had decided to “move out to the suburbs” and seize a home from the
afterdead. He’d done it, too. Cleaned out a house near the bayou,
changed the locks and brought in what little furniture he could
scrounge up. He actually slept every night with afterdead pawing at
his bedroom windows—but still he slept in an honest-to-God bed, in
a real house. Base Commander St. John normally wouldn’t have
allowed such a stunt but Ryland wanted to see the outcome.

Ryland... shit. Bradshaw realized he was late
for a meeting. “Let’s pick it up Joe.”

After depositing the afterdead in a holding
pen and bidding Stoddard good night, Bradshaw walked to the truck
yard. His path was protected by a low-voltage electric fence from
which most afterdead had learned to stay away. Halogen street lamps
cast the deserted streets beyond the fence in a garish light; that
light ended at the yard’s gate, where he eased himself inside. “I’m
late, I know.”

“Are you?” Seated on the front bumper of a
slop truck, Ryland shrugged. “I lost my watch. How’re you holding
up? You look exhausted.” It was a funny remark coming from him.
Bradshaw sometimes thought that maybe, when God was putting Adam
together, He wasn’t happy with some of the bones He’d rendered from
the earth. Some were too angular, too odd, too cruel in appearance
alone. So He threw them out, and someone else double-bagged ‘em in
flesh and here you had Nathan Ryland. Cancerous jowls hung from
sharply jutting cheekbones, above which sunken eyes were pitted
into an oblong skull. And his face bore a greenish pallor, maybe
that was just the lighting. Fish, the guys called him, though not
to his face because he was frequently off-base as government
liaison, and also because he’d have them castrated. Kneading his
gloved hands, Ryland shivered. “So? How are you?” Bradshaw said he
was fine and gave his report. The debriefing upon returning from
Congo had been short and sweet; he’d been taken off field duty for
a month; then ordered into counseling. “Hugs and hand puppets,”
cracked Ryland with a lipless smile. “I’ve already spoken with
Whittaker. So it was you who shot Clarke?”

Bradshaw raised an eyebrow, but nodded. “I’m
sure you had no choice,” Ryland told the eyebrow. “Collateral
damage. It’s a popular phrase with my friends in Washington. It
means no more questions. You’ve got nothing to worry about,
Ken.”

Bradshaw grimaced in the shadows. “I know
that. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about Clarke.”

“No one said you had to be happy.” Ryland
replied. “I’m sorry it took so long for me to get together with
you. It’s a bad month. I’m flying to D.C. every other day and St.
John’s on my ass to put in for a budget increase. He thinks I’m a
lobbyist just because I don’t wear the uniform. But enough about my
problems.” Standing up, he patted Bradshaw’s shoulder. “We’re good,
okay?”

Bradshaw knew asking would be fruitless, but
he did it anyway. “Clarke was a good... a good leader... why him?
He didn’t need to be out there.”

“There’s always collateral damage. Remember
that.” Ryland answered. His presence left the yard, and Bradshaw
stood silent in his wake, a puppet without his puppeteer. After a
few moments, he gathered up his strings and trudged toward the
bunkers. On the other side of the electric fence, a silhouette
peeled away from the night: a female, with papery gray flesh and
hollowed-out knees giving her a strange falling-forward gait. She
stopped a few feet from the fence, the muscles in her face working
at something resembling a frown. Bradshaw ignored the thing and
kept walking.

* * *

7,270 miles away, the relief organization Our
World, based out of Brisbane, had set up a triage in Congo. They
were dangerously close to the most recent clashes in the republic’s
civil war, but Matt Hinzman knew that the needy tribal peoples
would stay in their rainforest home—even if it meant running afoul
of guerillas. As chief supervisor of the Congo effort, his decision
went unchallenged, and even now, lying under a crumpled tent with
his right arm gone, he didn’t regret making the call.

Sara Lister, a colleague of fourteen years,
lay a few yards off. Her eye was pulled from its socket and rested
in the hollow of a flayed cheek. Matthew heard feet shuffling at
his back, but couldn’t turn over. He stayed motionless and hoped
they couldn’t sniff him out.

The canvas tent pulled away from his body. He
was turned to face a man wearing some sort of paramilitary uniform.
Thank God! “The tribesmen,” Matt gasped hoarsely. “They tore us
apart.”

The soldier traced Matthew’s jaw line with
his fingertips. There was a nasty gash just below his chin. The
soldier dug his fingernails in and pulled, paying no mind to the
terrible screaming, which eventually stopped.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the
camp, Clarke ate quietly. He eyed his surroundings in search of
more meat. There was a half-devoured woman nearby clutching
something in her hand. He recognized it: a pistol. He had one too,
he thought, and fumbled around his waistline until he found it. The
familiarity of it in his hand released a flood of memories, all
clouded fragments. But recalling that he himself had been shot made
him aware of the dull pain in his chest. Looking down, Clarke
prodded the bullet hole. It hurt but wouldn’t keep him from moving.
The hole between his legs was another story. He picked idly at the
gashed tissue hanging out of his pants; more fragments came to him,
the lingering memories of sensations for which he no longer had any
use. Clarke tugged Hinzman’s upper lip off and chewed it for a
while.

His brain shuffled his memories into some
sort of order. Someone he trusted had shot him. Rules had been
broken. He couldn’t recall every point of protocol, but he knew it
was a mistake to leave him for dead instead of finishing the job.
He never would have done that himself. Bradshaw—that was his name,
Bradshaw—wouldn’t normally have done that, either. Confusing. His
mind kept working while he ate. Good soldiers wouldn’t leave
something like this to chance. They’d come back for him. Staying
here to feed would be a risk, but then feeding anywhere would soon
become a risk. He’d have to kill them all.

It was a simple decision made in the basest
region of his mind. Self-preservation was his sole purpose. Clarke
pulled Hinzman’s esophagus out with slick fingers. He knew he had
to keep feeding in order to stay alert and heal these wounds. He
knew a lot of things other afterdead didn’t.