Empire's End (31 page)

“I never win,” Whittaker grumbled into his
Captain & Coke. The Captain was being an unsympathetic prick
this fine evening; Whittaker could barely feel the warmth of the
liquor in his belly, not with the knot of anxiety that grew tighter
with every spin of the roulette wheel.

Spending a furlough in Vegas was always an
exercise in pain. Every dollar that came out of his pocket went
straight into the casino’s, or into his liver—he knew it and
everyone around him knew it. They encouraged it. Whittaker was used
to rolling with the punches, though. He’d return to the base next
week with a few bruises, take some ribbing from his comrades, then
it was back to work. In the end, he figured, this yearly gouging in
Vegas was better than sitting at home alone getting wasted
(although the booze there was a hell of a lot cheaper).

Whittaker watched the last of his chips jump
from his hands like he was a leper, then he left the casino-hotel,
crossing the street to a strip joint. Ah, warm ten-dollar beer and
the plastic smiles of girls whose age was anyone’s best guess in
the garish crimson lighting. He took a table near the back of the
room. Immediately there was a girl striding toward him. “Hi,” she
said in a half-pert tone. It was early evening; Whittaker wasn’t
big money. She hadn’t even brought along a bottle of champagne to
hock. “What’re you in the mood for?”

“I...” He scratched his beard, leaned back,
looked at the shadowy girl in the red lights. “I don’t know. I’m
all right. Thanks.” She was gone before he knew it. He wiped a
layer of sweat from his brow, opened his jacket, and wondered what
the fuck was keeping him from putting a gun in his mouth. Christ,
his sidearm was in the rental. Right across the street. He could do
himself there in the car, no point in going up to his room.
There’s a story for the fellas back at work. Whittaker finally
cashed out. What took him so long?
He winced at imagined
eulogies punctuated by hollow laughter. Fuck that. He knew why he
always came out here.

Leaving the bar without a drink or a dance,
Whittaker got into the rental car. Like the casino and the strip
joint, it smelled of stale cigarettes, and the A/C blew a hot wind
across his eyes. He pulled out of the lot and headed north. A/C
never got any better; he shut it off and rolled down the windows,
cradling his pistol in his lap.

Away from everything, he got off the highway
and felt out a spot that seemed right; he stopped and inhaled the
air. It was just beginning to grow dark. He reached under the
passenger seat for the bottle of Myers Dark he’d kept there. He
didn’t need it in order to go through with this. It would just be
nice. Getting out of the car, he sat himself on the hood. The door
popped behind him—he turned, certain he’d shut it, and a dark blur
snatched the gun from his hand. He felt it against his temple and
that feeling was suddenly the last thing in the world he
wanted.

“
Clarke
.”

He looked like he was still alive, by God, he
really did. His movement was fluid, his eyes glistened red as the
sun went down. But there was nothing, NOTHING in his face. No
emotion, no steeliness either. Just nothing.

“Who ordered you to kill me?”

Whittaker swallowed a lump of phlegm. “I
won’t ask twice,” Clarke told him. Same voice, same cadence. He
couldn’t be undead.

“I don’t know,” Whittaker breathed.
“B-Bradshaw handed down the order. I don’t know who told him. But
it wasn’t you, Pete! Harmon was the target! You were just in the
wrong place!”

“I think you’re lying,” Clarke replied. He
took the gun away from Whittaker’s head and slipped it into the
waistband of his pants. “I’m going to torture you until you tell me
what you know.”

“I don’t—” Whittaker’s words and teeth were
blown out of his mouth by the liquor bottle. He felt it shatter
against his head, a painless, stunning sensation; then fire spread
down the side of his face. He reeled and tried, stupidly, to run.
Clarke flattened him on the hood of the car and pressed the jagged
remnant of the bottle’s mouth between his upper lip and any teeth
that were left. “So you know I mean it,” Clarke said flatly, and he
sliced the lip off.

Whittaker howled, beat against his attacker
and the car, but Clarke held him down with one rigid arm. That’s
when Whittaker knew for certain that yes, he was looking at an
afterdead. And his entire face was on fire now, hot blood filling
his mouth. He spat and whimpered. “Thlease!” He cried. Red flecks
misted Clarke’s face. Clarke stepped back and stomped, once, and
this time the pain was instantaneous. Whittaker’s shin splintered
like a rotted branch. He was thrown to the desert floor.

Whittaker could only roll from side to side,
sobbing and choking, waiting for the next blow. Pain radiating from
above his neck and below his waist met in his stomach. He puked his
guts out in the dirt, Clarke silent this entire time. “WHY?!” the
old soldier bellowed.

“I’m going to kill them before they kill me,
again.” Clarke didn’t see the point in explaining himself, but he
had to work through Whittaker’s shock to get information. Falling
silent once more, he watched his victim paw at the ground.

“How dith you geth here?” Was the next
question. “We leth you in Congo!”

“Boat. Stowed away. I’m going to ask you
questions now.” Clarke knelt beside Whittaker, making a conspicuous
display of the pistol. “This wasn’t your first hit, was it?”

“N-no.”

“You and Bradshaw, you worked together? And
you say you don’t know who the orders came from?”

Whittaker shook his head madly. Clarke
reached down and touched his ruined cheek; blinding pain shot
through Whittaker’s skull, blurring his vision. It was a shard of
glass that Clarke was retrieving from Whittaker’s face, and he
sucked the blood from it before tossing it aside. “If you don’t
know anything else, you’re useless to me.”

Whittaker tried to sit up. He was batted down
like a rag doll. He said every prayer he knew and begged for mercy.
“Thlease don’t!” Whittaker’s face darkened. “Thith ithn’t about
protecting yourselth. It’s about REVENTH! You’re juth like me! Juth
like—” He was still screaming when Clarke put a round through his
head. It wasn’t a mercy bullet; just easier that way.

Clarke fed, eating around the alcohol-soaked
pieces.

* * *

Ryland’s office was located in a nondescript
storage building. At least that’s how it appeared on the outside.
Inside was one of the most heavily fortified and upscale structures
on the base. Passing through its weathered metal door, the young
man who had an appointment was surprised to find himself in what
looked like an office lobby. The soldier at the metal detector
waved him forward. “Cervantes?”

Nodding, the olive-skinned man stepped
through the security checkpoint. The soldier spent several silent
minutes reviewing Cervantes’ paperwork; he didn’t scrutinize the
forms, just stared at them. Stalling. Finally, another soldier
entered the lobby from the back with an automatic swinging brazenly
in his right hand. “Go with him,” the first soldier muttered, and
handed over the papers.

They moved briskly down a quiet corridor,
where the soldier rapped on the door marked ADMINISTRATIVE LIAISON.
A murmur from inside, then Cervantes entered the office alone.

“I apologize for the cloak-and-dagger
bullshit,” was the first thing Nathan Ryland said. Blowing the
steam off a cup of coffee, he motioned to a chair on the other side
of his desk. He was a stout man in a crisp suit, its soft colors
masking the pallor of his tired flesh. “Whenever I bring an
appointee onto the base, the brass are especially skeptical. Even
the fact that you’re military doesn’t help. They consider you to be
my man, cut from the same cloth as me. Just the same,” Ryland
smiled, “once you’re out there among the rotters, you make fast
friends.”

Ryland liked to read people by making them
nervous. Cervantes knew that the moment he came in. The nonchalant
gestures, the thin-lipped smile. Eyes like cold marble, though.
This little back-and-forth that Ryland did with newcomers, it was
just pretext, the sort of behavior expected from men in black. For
all this, Cervantes only went into the man’s consciousness for a
fraction of a second, and even then, barely dipped his toes in the
water. But Ryland knew.

“So, Cervantes, tell me about myself.” He
folded his meaty hands on the desk. “Why did I appoint you to this
post?”

“You believe I can use my telepathy with the
afterdead.”

“We discussed that at Fort Leavenworth. Tell
me something that I haven’t
said
.”

“I prefer not to dig that deep into someone
else’s head. Sir.”

“That must take remarkable discipline.”
Ryland replied. “Most with your ability don’t make it half as far
as you did. I understand that refining one’s own subconscious can
be... distressing?” Cervantes only nodded.

“Now then, speak from your own intuition.
What do you think you can do here?”

“I know there’s little sense in reading their
thought processes—they seek only self-preservation. There’s no
motive or intent that isn’t visible on the surface. There’s no
community dynamic. They barely acknowledge one another. But they
acknowledge the living.”

“And you’ve been able to affect the
perception of others so that they don’t see you. Creating a
perpetual blind spot.”

“Yes—but only for myself, and only against
minds of limited function,” Cervantes replied.

Ryland nodded along. “That’s all we need.
See, there are certain areas of the base that are inaccessible,
places with high concentrations of afterdead. I’d like to get into
these areas and see what they’re doing without disrupting them.
Commander St. John doesn’t agree—but I usually get the last word
when it comes to government property.”

“You mean the base?”

“I mean the zombies.”

Ryland tapped his keyboard for a few minutes.
“We have a soldier named Grimm who’s been living out in the field,
in one of the houses in those mock-up suburbs. He’s been sending
back a lot of interesting observations about the dead around there.
At least he was. It’s been two days since we heard from him. Some
grunts drove by the house and didn’t see anything, but the
congestion was too great to risk getting out of the truck.”

“You don’t think he’s dead?” Cervantes
asked.

Ryland shook his head. “And even if he was,
we’d have to verify it and pull out the remains. What I need you to
do is get into that house without disturbing the dead. Can
you?”

That had been the question. Cervantes still
wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, even as he was jostled along in
a Humvee on the base’s quiet streets. The descending sun turned the
afterdead up ahead into opaque silhouettes. The driver, a Corporal
Bradshaw, slowed the Hummer to a stop. “I see a couple dozen at
least,” he muttered. “That’s Grimm’s house on the right-hand
corner. I have to let you out here.”

Cervantes nodded. For some reason, he
expected a few personal words of encouragement, maybe a clap on the
back... nothing. Bradshaw dropped into reverse and looked at him.
Cervantes got out.

He slipped a pair of headphones over his
ears, fingering the Walkman in his jacket pocket. White noise crept
into his ears, and he cleared his mind, watching the afterdead
shuffle about in the street. He reached out to them. Their minds
were like hollowed-out gourds, with only tendrils of primitive
activity, each easy to manipulate. The hunger was extraordinary.
For a moment, Cervantes felt saliva building in his mouth; he shook
the hunger off and dug into the subconscious of each rotter in his
view. Already shambling towards him was a male in a butcher’s
apron. Underneath was a simple boiler suit, but the apron—caked
with solid layers of gore, heavy on the afterdead’s shoulders—gave
him character. Yet inside each unique mind Cervantes felt the same
emptiness. He blotted himself out of their sight, their smell,
their hearing. The Butcher stopped in his approach. After a moment,
he reversed direction, returning to the horde.

The duplex in which Sergeant Grimm made his
home was noticeably different from the rest. The sod had been
pulled up and replaced with a generous layer of loam. In the moist
clay were planted several large flowers. Each blossom had thick,
flesh-toned petals surrounding its red stigma. Cervantes briefly
had the impression in his mind of a woman’s flayed sex spread
before him; then he was assailed by the smell. Jesus! Worse than
that of the rotters at his back was the noxious odor from the
plants. He recognized them now as
stapelia gigantea
, carrion
flowers—the odor lured foul insects to ensure pollination. Maybe,
he thought, it kept the zombies from smelling Grimm, too.

He tried the front door. Locked. A newly
installed lock, at that. Eyeing the undead, Cervantes rapped
sharply. “Sergeant!” A couple of them turned at the sound, but were
unable to pinpoint its source. They trod aimlessly through the
loam. He knocked again, harder. He could try and reach out to
Grimm, but it might mean giving himself away outside. Not worth it,
he decided, and headed around back. There was a window slightly
ajar; easing it upward, he hoisted himself into a hallway. The air
in the house was moist, earthy. Cervantes traced his fingertips
along the wall, and they came away stained with mold. He advanced,
and almost as soon as reached the end of the hall the smell of
feces struck his nostrils.

“Never could get the plumbing working,” a
voice said from a dark corner, as if reading
his
mind. “Want
a drink?” Cervantes’ eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The man
slouched against the wall was haggard, unshaven, malnourished. His
uniform was draped over bony shoulders like a tablecloth. Didn’t
they feed him... ?