Empire's End (34 page)

A soldier opened his door and leaned in.
“Sir, there’s an emergency in the research facility. I’ve been
instructed to remove you from the base in the event—”

Ryland, nodding, came around the desk and
tore the soldier’s throat open. He eased the young man’s automatic
to the floor and took in great, gluttonous mouthfuls of flesh.

* * *

Clarke threw the bug-like doctor to the floor
of the concrete tunnel. “Enner ashess code...”

“A-access code?” the terrified scientist
asked. Clarke nodded. The doctor opened the door allowing Clarke
into the receiving warehouse.

A spurt of gunfire threw the doctor back.
Cries of surprise and outrage were heard from the other side of the
door: “What the fuck are we dealing with?!”

“It’s Clarke.” Bradshaw said grimly, watching
the door from behind the massive wheel of a dump truck. Stoddard
just stared at him. On the other side of the captain, Thomas was
reloading her M-16 and cursing herself for shooting the doctor.

“Explain,” Stoddard said. “Ken?”

“I fucked up.” Bradshaw counted the beads of
sweat rolling down the side of his head. “Me and Whittaker, we
fucked up. We killed Clarke and Harmon.”

“Wait a minute...” Thomas started to back
away.

Bradshaw turned and said, “You’re not part of
this. Go.” And she did.

“I’m staying,” Stoddard whispered.

“Joe, this isn’t your fight.”

“If it’s your fight then it’s my fight,
brother.”

“No time for this bullshit!” Bradshaw hissed.
Stoddard just shrugged.

Thomas edged toward the receiving bay, where
she’d be able to leave the warehouse and join the soldiers
scrambling outside. A cold hand closed over her throat.

“No sound.”

She cocked her head a quarter-inch to the
right and saw her dead comrade, Pete Clarke. He wasn’t a zombie
horror; the only indication of his lifelessness was the empty look
in his eyes and that raspy monotone. He stared at her, through
her—then she smelled the gas.

She spun away from him, finger on the
trigger, and he popped her through the head before she got off one
shot. Pulling himself onto the receiving bay, he fired a second
round into the spilled gasoline he’d liberated from the trucks.

* * *

The warehouse exploded. Soldiers heading for
the entrance were thrown back.

Stoddard rose from the grass outside,
coughing violently. He and Bradshaw had each gone through a window.
Before he could orient himself, soldiers poured through the clouds
of smoke to grab him. “Wait! Ken! Ken!” He bellowed.

Bradshaw staggered through a column of
darkness into Clarke’s arms. He shoved the afterdead off, and
turned to see no escape route, only piles of flaming debris
surrounding them; he’d chosen the wrong window and the wall had
simply come down around him.

“Whooo?” moaned the afterdead.

“Ryland,” Bradshaw answered, drawing his twin
widowmakers. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why it had to happen,
and I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry Pete.”

He leapt at Clarke, going straight for that
wasted knee—the afterdead buckled, and Bradshaw scissored off an
ear and most of one cheek. He hit the ground ready to pivot,
sending his other blade into the meat of Clarke’s waist.

Clarke whirled to face him; Bradshaw knew
that the damage dealt to his opponent meant nothing—there was no
pain, no shock—quickly, he planted a widowmaker between Clarke’s
eyes and jerked his head sharply downward. The neck broke. Clarke’s
eyes rolled in their bloody sockets and he pawed at Bradshaw’s
uniform. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Bradshaw was whispering, as he
freed his blades, stepped back and prepared to decapitate the
undead.

Clarke could not offer the same sentiment. He
felt nothing as he shook the pistol from his pants leg and shot
Bradshaw through the heart.

For the first time in a long time, things
made sense for Ken Bradshaw, including his own demise, and as he
fell forward he thought that, maybe now, all things would return to
their proper state and the corruption he’d helped sow would wash
away. It was a foolish notion, but comforting in death.

* * *

Base Commander St. John beat his knuckles
against his desk as he listened to radio reports of the havoc on
the other side of the base. All they knew at this point was that a
shooter had breached the labs, and the receiving warehouse was in
flames.

Stoddard’s voice came over the radio.
“
He’s an afterdead! Bullets won’t stop him!
” How was one
miserable rotter causing such a panic? It was the men on the
ground, they needed to pull themselves together and assess the
situation with level heads. He grabbed his radio to issue just such
a decree when the intercom on his desk squawked. “Commander! It’s
Ryland—he’s coming up, he’s—he’s attacking everyone! Just about
took my finger off!”

“What in the Christ.” St. John yanked open
the drawer at his right hand and roused his Desert Eagle from its
foam bedding. He walked out of his office and into the hall.

Ryland was tugging on a staffer’s arm, teeth
gnashing scant inches from her ear. St. John fired a shot into the
ceiling. Ryland released the terror-stricken girl, and then he was
alone with the commander.

“Somehow I sense, Nathan Goddamn Ryland, that
you’re the one responsible for all of this. Am I wrong?”

Ryland said nothing. As his eyes adjusted in
the hallway, St. John became aware of how blood-soaked the
liaison’s suit was. He also became aware of a repugnant, gagging
odor. Decaying tissue. “You’re... you’re dead. Undead.
You’re
the rotter? What have you done?” St. John roared.

Ryland spat a mouthful of someone else’s
blood onto the floor.

St. John fired two rounds into Ryland’s
chest, kicking him to the end of the hall where he crumpled. The
base commander took no chances as he approached the body; standing
at arm’s length, he emptied the Desert Eagle into Ryland’s bloated
corpse.

This was the end for Fort Armstrong, St. John
realized. The entire base, like the files stored within, like the
bodies lying on the floor—it would all have to be razed and the
ashes scattered to the winds. And all because of this miserable
snake in the grass—

Ryland bit into St. John’s palm. The
commander kicked him away with a snarl and watched blood swell in
the wound. “You’re dead! Son of a bitch!” St. John clasped his hand
to the belly of his uniform and staggered away. At least there
wasn’t any risk of some sort of infection.

* * *

Clarke slipped behind the wheel of a Humvee.
Full tank of gas. He knew that Ryland was likely to be just across
the base, though it wasn’t so simple as a straight line from point
A to point B.

He decided to simplify, and drove through the
electrified fences separating the living from the dead.

Soldiers scrambled to put up a roadblock, but
the fencing came down like a curtain, folding into the dirt, the
afterdead walking right over it even as their toes burst into
flames. Every soldier in Fort Armstrong was sure they couldn’t
become infected, each was sure that they were dealing with little
more than sedated dogs, each saw the afterdead converging with
renewed speed on the fallen fences.

Some of them fired, but they all ran.

* * *

Esteban Cervantes awoke from a nightmare. In
the nightmare, he was alone on a desert road. An old man dressed in
black approached him. “
A causa de los gatos, ya en Egipto,
”
the man rasped. His eyes were not human and boiled with shapeless
larvae. But it was the sound of the man’s leathery tongue over his
rotten teeth that drove Cervantes from sleep. Then he heard the
alarms.

A flurry of panicked thoughts and prayers
assailed him. He was generally able to phase out others’ thoughts,
but this crisis had put everyone’s psyche into overdrive. Between
all the nervous breakdowns and the bottled-up rages looking for
something to shoot, Cervantes wasn’t sure where he’d be of most
use.

As he jogged out of his quarters, a Hummer
ran up the curb and stopped. “In!”

He complied without hesitation, and paid no
mind to the faint small of rot—but then his mind’s eye saw into the
other and there was NOTHING.

“I can’t..not... drive good,” Clarke
muttered, motioning to his ruined knee. “Take me to Ryland and I
will... won’t..not shoot you.”

“All right.” Cervantes slipped into the
driver’s seat, probing Clarke’s skull with telepathic tendrils.
There were only patches of memory, a few pages from a book... but
he saw enough to know why Clarke had come back. As for Ryland’s
involvement...”I don’t know why I’m saying this,” Cervantes began;
he figured the zombie’s promise not to shoot him was the closest
thing to honesty he’d ever heard, as the undead were incapable of
lying, and wanted to return the favor. “Something’s wrong with
Ryland. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something unnatural
about him. And if that has to do with you, Captain, then maybe you
already know, but—”

An arm smashed through the window and grabbed
at the wheel, followed by a head. Cervantes knocked both away, but
he felt the bite, teeth raking through his flesh, and as he jerked
the wheel to the side, caught a glimpse of Ryland’s face—

* * *

Stoddard led the charge against the loosed
afterdead. They were run down with dump trucks, then those left
standing faced the blades of standard-issue widowmakers. Stoddard
let out an “
OOH-RAH!!
” as he dashed a rotter’s head against
the side of a truck. He tried not to think about the Clarke
situation—the mere fact that there
was
a Clarke
situation—

One of the administrative staffers came
hurtling toward him. Stoddard chopped away groping hands and
tripping limbs and escorted the woman over to an idle dump
truck.

“God, you got bit.” He rummaged through his
uniform, as if he still carried a First Aid Kit on his person.
“Nathan Ryland bit me!” The woman exclaimed. “Then all these
others—I’m bleeding everywhere—feel faint –”

“Wait,
Ryland?
”

The woman slumped to the ground. No
pulse.

“Oh my God,” Stoddard yelled, “could somebody
—AYYEAAGGHH!!”

He kicked the woman’s teeth away from his
thigh and drew his pistol. “Are you alive? Say something!”

She rose, pushing out her breasts, licking
Stoddard’s blood from her lips—

Giving the gun and its owner one last look,
she took off. Self-preservation before hunger.

“FUCK!!!” Stoddard sat down, waited for his
pulse rate to drop a little, then looked at his wound. Well, this
was bad. A new bad. Someone would come up with a better name for it
later. All Joe knew was that he was going to turn into a
zombie.

That’s when one of the base’s rotters lunged
around the truck and tore his throat out, and he was spared that
last pain in the ass.

Ryland stared curiously at Clarke as they
circled one another on the roadway. Cervantes stayed down in the
Humvee, not bothering to peer out the window; instead he reached
out to their minds and mapped out their movements in his own,
translating the simple impulses of their zombified brains.

Ryland stopped. His mouth struggled to form
words. The memory was there, in his nerves and muscles, and if he
could just get the thoughts from his brain to his lips...”Clarke,”
he said finally, and something resembling a smile crossed his
face.

“Is thish why?” Clarke couldn’t help his
slurred speech now, with his cheek mangled, but he got the point
across. “Is thish why you killed me?”

“Yes,” Ryland answered. “I am not like you. I
am a new afterdead. I am the birth of a plague.”

He gestured towards an older zombie, one of
the base’s experimental subjects, as it staggered across a field a
few hundred yards off. “I have spread it to many, living and dead.
They all carry the plague now.”

“Why?” Clarke asked. There was no bitterness
or longing in the question; he asked only because that was his
mission, to know why he had been killed. To understand, so that he
would not be killed again.

“Because,” Ryland answered, “I wanted to see
what would happen.”

An unsatisfying answer, perhaps, to the
living beings that were now being infected with this new plague,
but good enough for Clarke.

Ryland came at him then, and despite Clarke’s
condition, it was easy to fend off the inexperienced fighter’s
attacks. Clarke smashed a bony fist through Ryland’s teeth, and the
other made to swallow the fist, seizing Clarke’s arm with both
hands and gnashing the jagged nubs of his teeth on Clarke’s dead
skin. Clarke felt tendon and muscle being torn away and, planting a
boot on Ryland’s groin, jerked his hand free.

Ryland staggered back, snapping his jaws like
a mad dog, ragged sheets of gray flesh dangling from his broken
teeth. “No good. Dead meat.” Though undead, he seemed to be somehow
relishing every new experience of his afterlife, the proud parent
of the contagion and a new flesh. In the Humvee, Cervantes felt
disgust for Ryland, disgust that boiled in his throat and
threatened to make him retch; meanwhile Clarke, who felt nothing,
raised his shredded fist and rejoined the fight.

He stabbed two fingers through Ryland’s eye
socket, pulping the orb as if it were nothing and sinking
knuckle-deep into the cold jelly of the dead brain. Ryland grunted,
then made a sound like a laugh. He swatted at Clarke’s various
wounds without effect.

Clarke hurled Ryland to the asphalt and knelt
on his neck. There was a snap, and Clarke grabbed Ryland’s hair and
jerked his head to one side. Another satisfying snap.