Empire's End (33 page)

He longed to go out among the afterdead and
see how they reacted, if at all. Would they attack him, or consider
him one of their own? He chuckled at the thought. They were
senseless animals without purpose. The scientists spent all day and
night cutting the dead into pieces, burning them, pulling out their
organs. They only sought to define the afterdead, to put it all in
books and file it away, then they could sit back and relax knowing
that humanity was still top dog. Insecure fools. He alone would
know death firsthand, experience it in a conscious way.

Chosen
.

He dug into the base’s historical
archives—information suppressed from the general public—researching
the ways that tribal peoples around Sources had explained the
phenomenon. Of course, they had decided that dark gods were
responsible. The gods were long gone, perhaps dead, but their
leavings endured—including strange words that had probably been
made up by the savages but were purported to focus and direct the
chaotic Source energy.

He had been studying these words. His
extensive education gave him a leg up on the military historians
who’d catalogued and promptly forgotten these silly fables. He was
beginning to understand the lost tongues of the old gods, and he
was beginning to believe that he might be able to do greater things
with the plague-energy that coursed through him.

Somewhere beyond death, off this mortal coil,
lay godhood.

* * *

It was a long drive to Whittaker’s house. The
rental car was running on fumes; Clarke had used Whittaker’s credit
card to refuel, but it wasn’t long before he exhausted the
remaining credit. Holding the dead man’s ID against the steering
wheel, checking addresses as he drove, Clarke finally came to a
small frame house with an unkempt yard. The first key he tried
opened the front door.

The interior was almost bare. There had been
feeble attempts to decorate: a generic print of an elk in the woods
hung on the wall. The leather couch had two end tables covered in
magazines. Clarke pushed aside the top magazine, a year-old issue
of
Newsweek
. The one below it, and all the ones below that,
were porn.

As expected, Whittaker had an impressive gun
collection in the bedroom. Some of them were modified arms from the
base, illegal to have in the home. Clarke opened the glass doors of
the gun case and began pulling weapons out, setting them on the bed
for further scrutiny. Opening the closet, he kicked aside a few
pairs of jeans lying on the floor and found Whittaker’s Army
fatigues neatly folded. Knowing Whittaker’s fondness for his days
in combat, he wasn’t surprised to see the uniform in pristine
condition. It would be a bit loose on Clarke’s frame but that
didn’t matter. He pulled it on over his soiled clothes.

There was a pickup truck in the garage, and
for that Clarke also had a key. He pulled out with a satchel of
weapons beside him in the passenger seat. A memory was stirred in
the recesses of his mind... nearly a decade before, when he’d been
a young officer and had just been brought onto the afterdead
project.

The first corpse that the government had
resurrected was an unpleasant character named Louis Brownlee. In
life he had been locked away in a federal prison for fatally
shooting two DEA agents during a bust. Small-time hood made
notorious by capping a couple of undercover agents. A chain smoker,
cancer had claimed him early during his double-life sentence.
Brownlee’s body had quietly been shipped to the Louisiana base and
seeded in the swamp. The URC infused his tissue, and a group of
soldiers watched in horror as he rose from the muck and fixed
yellow eyes on their warm living flesh.

The military were eager to explore the
possible applications of the undead. Could Brownlee be made to obey
the living? Could he fight? Could he infect? Clarke sat in smoky
rooms, with celebrated generals and Defense Department officials
yelling at each other, as the afterdead began to appear less and
less useful. Finally, Brownlee was placed under restraints and
brought into one of the meetings. The officials stared blankly at
him. He returned the look. A colonel named Richard St. John took a
long drag off his cigarette and met the creature’s gaze without
fear. Brownlee’s withered lips opened and closed, a weak sound
emanating from his throat. “What is it saying? What does it want?”
A man asked. Standing up, St. John approached Brownlee. “His file
said he was a smoker.” And he placed his cigarette in the zombie’s
mouth.

The stiff, pained stature of the afterdead
relaxed. Brownlee leaned his head back and exhaled. He was still
addicted.

Not long after that, Clarke and a small team
were flown to a facility in Puerto Rico, Brownlee brought along in
chains. The secret prison there housed a few terrorism suspects,
and these prisoners were strong. They didn’t talk under burning
lights, they didn’t weep in the face of brutal torture or even
sexual humiliation. A religious fervor possessed them and made them
more than men, at least in their own minds.

Clarke wheeled Brownlee into an interrogation
room on a dolly. An Arab, sitting in a lone chair, narrowed his
eyes.

The CIA interrogator was leaning against the
rear wall. He spoke in English. “Salim, this gentleman is here to
make sure you answer my questions.” Clarke released the straps
holding Brownlee down, and the afterdead stepped into the middle of
the room. Clarke stood away from him and held up a carton of
cigarettes. “Play nice, Brownlee.”

The next hour was a nightmare. Clarke fought
to stand still and watch, his knees knocking. Even the interrogator
was shaken by the end of it; he could barely issue the order for
Brownlee to finally kill Salim. Together they rushed from the room
and let the zombie feed in peace. And on closed-circuit monitors in
another room, the remaining prisoners watched in terror. They were
much more compliant after that.

Brownlee’s addiction to nicotine seemed to be
the only leverage that his handlers had. After devouring a captor,
he would sit on the floor in a pool of gore and light cig after
cig, staining them red with his fingers and lips. He allowed
himself to be chained and flown around the world, always with
Clarke holding a fresh carton before him. Over time, they noticed
that he seemed to become healthier if he ate frequently. His eyes
almost began to look human again. Unnerved, they cut back his food
supply.

Brownlee’s last assignment took him to
Arlington, Virginia, and the interrogation of a CIA officer accused
of selling intelligence. Clarke tapped Brownlee’s chest with a
carton. “You know what to do.” Brownlee nodded slowly and entered
the room where the officer was waiting. They gave him twenty
minutes, then went in.

He was only supposed to have bitten off a few
fingers, eaten them in front of the subject and sat quietly. But
the subject was headless, all four walls covered in her blood.
Brownlee tugged strings of muscle from the stump of her neck and
stuffed them into his mouth. Clarke drew on him. “Get away from
her,” he snapped, trying to mask his fear. Brownlee looked up at
him, reached out a crimson claw for the pack of cigs. “Smoke?”

Clarke dropped his gun and pissed himself.
Other team members swept past him to lash chains around the
afterdead, who sat calmly, his eyes never leaving Clarke’s. They
brought him to his feet and pushed him toward the door. His rancid
breath was hot on Clarke’s face as he said “I’m a good dog,” in his
guttural monotone.

He was never seen again after that. The
government discontinued that particular program.

Clarke thought about the role he’d played
before his murder. He had been a good dog too. So had Whittaker and
Bradshaw. Now it was time to learn who their master was.

He lay quietly and stared upward into
nothingness. His legs jostled a bit, as did his sidearms. In his
mind he saw a rough schematic of Fort Armstrong’s layout. He’d been
on the road for several hours now, not breathing, not smelling the
faint decay of his skin nor the freshness of Whittaker’s borrowed
fatigues. A bit of plastic was pulled tight across the tip of his
nose; he was wrapped in a transparent body bag inside a steel
coffin, and the only little bit of light afforded him was from the
fracture he’d made in the lid’s lock sometime during the
journey.

It was ice cold. Hours had gone by, how many
he couldn’t say. He didn’t daydream, nor did look ahead to the
tasks that awaited him. This was the idle mind of a dead man.

Most questions had been answered. Ahead was
only the goal of self-preservation, self-preservation assured by
the execution of his executioner. The endgame lay with he who had
turned Whittaker and Bradshaw against him. Clarke still had some of
Whittaker’s gristle in his molars. He didn’t wonder what Bradshaw
would taste like (
right turn, slowing down—Armstrong’s west
security gate
), nor did he yearn for the man’s dark meat. There
would be no particular satisfaction in killing Bradshaw, the one
who had slit open his satchel and spilled his manhood onto the
dirt. Bradshaw had also shot him through the heart, whispering some
apologetic sentiment that Clarke couldn’t recall. He couldn’t
recall the words, but was keenly aware of the bullet’s location in
his meat. It festered there and corrupted the other meat around it,
though Clarke had no use for that anyway (
truck coming to a
stop—coffins jostling slightly
).

There was talk outside. Clarke wondered if he
might be recognized; not that they bothered to identify each corpse
that came into Armstrong, but he was a former team member.
Shouldn’t he have a nice little plot in Arlington, they’d ask? Or
maybe it’s better this way, they might say, that he takes his
secret knowledge back to its secret grave.

The lid moved. “Another broken seal,” a
female snapped. Light entered the coffin, and Clarke stared
straight ahead, knowing his pupils might have some small
reaction.

The female leaned over him, eyed him through
the plastic.
Thomas
, his mind said.

Would she say “Clarke” to him?

She didn’t say anything. The lid slammed
shut. Yelling. Then, rolling. Down, down into the earth, beneath
the base where the scientists justify all of this. A seed of
curiosity was born in Clarke’s mind; for the genuine corpses, one
of whom he’d swapped places with, this was a new birth. Stirring in
the womb—shaking off swamp mud, chains buckled about your hands and
feet, tethering you to one of the gnarled old trees thick with crud
and in the air a thousand million insects humming. An insufferable
place, the Source, its ever-womb teeming with abscesses of grubs
and vines and God only knew what else. They were bound for the
swamp, but first they’d be opened up and picked at by the
scientists, who’d pull on their masks and aprons and slave over the
new flesh; removing troublesome shrapnel and cancer tissue, setting
broken bones. Assigning nicknames. Clarke felt his box clattering
down a conveyor belt at breakneck speed and wondered if they made
bets on the number of vertebrae broken during this cruel
descent.

Then he was being ferried along a vertical
belt, and stopped rudely, and the lid was opened once again.

Clarke lay perfectly still, sidearms tucked
beneath his thighs. A face cloistered in goggles and antiseptic
materials, resembling a giant insect, stared down at him.

“Hello,” said the zombie to the bug.

Clarke kicked himself out of the steel coffin
with arms akimbo, squeezing off a volley of bullets before hitting
the floor and rolling underneath the conveyor belt that had brought
his corpse into this neo-Hell. As he did, he got his first good
look at the underground lab: a huge, garishly lit cavern crowded
with cables and monitors. And scientists, each one paralyzed with
confusion.

Clarke rose and let fly a hail of bullets
that sent a storm of sparks into the air as monitor after monitor
exploded. He saw the scientists diving for cover and screaming for
the soldiers to come down.

The bug-like doctor lay at Clarke’s feet,
trembling. Clarke slurred his words: “I want Bradshaw. Sergeant
Bradshaw.”

“It’s Captain now,” came the voice at his
back.

Bradshaw vaulted over the conveyor belt and
hacked into Clarke’s kneecap with a widowmaker, sliding out of
harm’s way just as the afterdead put the soldier in his sights.
Gunfire peppered a computer console and sent another fountain of
sparks toward the rock ceiling.

Clarke felt his knee coming apart. It had
been a clean shot from Bradshaw, always the master with the blade.
The bug-like doctor was crawling away, sobbing. Clarke dropped down
and caught his ankle. Raising him up as a shield, the zombie
rounded the sputtering console in search of Bradshaw...

Who was racing up the service tunnel to the
receiving warehouse, his mind outpacing his feet as he panicked:
the gunman’s an afterdead. The afterdead is Clarke
.
Bradshaw, who had understood little about his covert assignment
under Ryland, was now certain that he understood nothing at
all.

* * *

Above ground, every available serviceman was
speeding toward the warehouse. Waves of Jeeps whisked past fences
where the base’s afterdead lingered, curious.

And Nathan Ryland, sitting in his office,
heard the alarms sounding and his heart began to palpitate... and
then it stopped. He shuddered in his chair, slipping forward just
slightly so that his gut nudged the edge of his desk, and he
died.

The soul departed the body. Ryland jolted in
his chair, this time sending the computer monitor crashing to the
floor, and he sat up undead. The tissue in his head and hands and
haunches was suffused with a dark, creeping energy, and he
stood.