World of Ashes

by J. K. Robinson

  The green clad Cavalrymen spread out in an old style line from the riverside to the valley cliffs. It was dangerous, a hidden sniper or gunner could mow them down like it was a charge across No Man’s Land in the War to End All Wars: Part I. Zombies were almost the least of anyone’s worries anymore. If a Zim had spent any time in the water at all it had frozen and then rotten away when the thaw came. The others were weather beaten and nearly hapless to attack people on the move.

  Lee checked his watch. 2145. He wanted to be able to clear the main dance hall in the largest cavern by 2215. As he planned it they would seal off the cave in case a zombie had wandered inside, or in case one ever tried. Someone could clear it later when things were safer.

  “Sergeant Woods, take First Squad and clear the docks. Sergeant Ford, push into the gift shop and restaurant through the service entrance. The rest of us will move into the main cavern hall.” The NCOs who had gathered around Lee nodded and adjusted their helmets so that they sat correctly when the NVG’s were mounted. Heavy and awkward, nothing could make walking while looking through the depthless green screen easy. Whoever had designed the system didn’t think very far ahead on how much night vision goggles weigh. Lots of people tripped over logs no one had cleaned up in years, others walked into trees or got tangled in old tents, dry rotted with age and neglect. Luckily there weren’t any dormant Zims in those tangled messes.

  Lee watched the first elements of his unit pick the lock on the doors to the motel built next to the cliff. It was completely empty, the beds made and the toilet paper and towels stocked. Second Squad moved up to clear peripheral rooms while the others moved on to the attractions at ground level. Snipers cleared the zipline tower just as the familiar odor of death began to creep through the seams in the walls of the main building. The smell stopped most of the men in their tracks. Because of the nature of the virus that reanimated the dead, a large number of bacteria normally associated with decomposition didn’t attack the flesh and insects found the corpses unsuitable for digestion and reproduction or larvae. Therefore the undead didn’t always smell really bad, just sorta moldy.

  A team cleared several of the smaller buildings including the fudge factory while others poured into the building through the employee entrances. Those who entered the main building were immediately pushed back by a wall of stench, air that was nigh unbreathable it was so thick. This wasn’t the smell of Zims, not even a horde of them or the food they consumed could create this… This breathable death… No, this was the smell of rot that had never been touched by the plague. The odor, almost visible on the stream of gases it rode, blew out into the line of soldiers and many, including Lee, uncontrollably vomited all down one another’s backs. They all backed out and sucked down as much fresh air as they could, reeling from what was nothing short of biological warfare. Lee was glad his men knew better than to be smoking during an op, the built up methane and nitrogen could explode if left unvented.

  “Wha… What the flying fuck was that!?” Lee wiped his mouth off, sure the smell would permeate his nose forever. “Mass suicide?”

  Corporal Skarine, who hadn’t vomited yet, finally gave in and let loose over the railing of the ramp to the front door. “There’s so many…” Was all he could say, his eyes wide while spittle dripped down his beard. “It’s just like that mall we found… They’re all true-dead and the rot had nowhere to go.” There was no voice behind his whisper, just the empty facts.

  Lee grabbed the cloth medical mask he and all soldiers carried in their lower torso pocket and put it on. It wouldn’t stop the smell, but it would at least make it bearable long enough to see what was beyond the wall of stench. Braving the odor again he went back inside, those who felt they had the constitution to handle it followed with recording equipment mounted on their guns. Something was wrong and Lee wanted a definitive record of the event…

  Another car pulled up to the Japan Outpost. Ethan, who’d been reading a really crappy vampire novel geared toward semi-illiterate teenage girls looked up and smiled as Mary opened the door and Bogey jumped out. The beagle ran to Ethan, jumping in his lap and kicking the book aside with slobbery wetness and loose fur. “Okay, good to see you too. I’ve lost my place now. I hope you’re happy.” Bogey licked Ethan’s face. He had dog breath, but his joy was infectious.

  “I brought dinner.” Mary smiled. She was really starting to show at eight months. Soon, very soon, Ethan’s demon spawn would be upon this Earth, and no prophecies shall be fulfilled... “I brought you some too, Sam.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. My wife packed my dinner for me.” Sam replied, returning to reading his own book. There wasn’t much else to do at the outpost, and Wigg was still running laps around the building in his underwear so he wouldn’t require anything to eat until Ethan got tired of doling out punishment for the kid’s misconduct.

  “So where’d Lee and his boys get to?” Sam asked. He heard the radio chatter of the Cavalry leaving the gates.

  “Meramec Caverns. Lee’s conducting a training mission I think.” Ethan unwrapped the potato salad. He smiled wide when he saw the bag of Skittles at the bottom the bag. “Sweet!”

  “Those are for desert. I’m a shitty cook, so don’t expect any home-made goodies.” Mary leaned to alleviate pressure on her lower back.

  “You need a massage, babe?” Ethan asked with his mouth full. Mary had grown rather fond of having her back and feet rubbed. Ethan claimed it was the least he could do while she ‘carried his alien seed.’

  “Na. I’m okay. I saw Mr. Carne today, the high school teacher. He wasn’t happy.”

  “I’d imagine not.” Ethan couldn’t help but smile. “Kenly… Is Kenly.”

  “Carne ranted at me for a good two hours about it, but I wasn’t the most sympathetic ear so I think he got tired of getting nowhere with me.”

  “Well, what did they expect?” Ethan went back to the potato salad, but couldn’t keep silent for long. “I hated our schools from the moment I set foot in one. They were a nightmare of politically correct nonsense, arbitrary and damaging zero responsibility policies all under the unimpeachable protection of the Teacher’s Union, a communist organiz-” Ethan was cut off when the radio crackled. It was only nine fifty, the ten o’clock check-in wasn’t due.

  “Break Break Break. Ghostrider Six this is Alamo Six, answer the Goddamned radio, Ethan!” Lee’s voice was horse and he was panting as if he had been running. That he could barely remember proper radio procedures was a reason to be alarmed already.

  Ethan fell forward out of his chair and grabbed the radio off the stool he’d set it on. “Go ahead.”

  “Get your ass out here. Get Kenly too. It’s a real mess. Don’t need anymore men, just a fucking coroner and anyone who knows how to take a forensics report… Just… Get out here now.” Ethan almost shoved Bogey into Mary’s hands as he raced for the newer model Ford Taurus patrol car he’d found several towns over. It’s supercharged V6 was a monumental improvement to the ghetto-rigged Ford Escort he’d been putting around in. He’d driven this speed demon tonight for this very reason. Well, not specifically this reason, Ethan didn’t even know what the problem was, but he did as Lee asked.

  “I’ll stay here.” Mary gave Ethen a thumbs up as he jumped into the car and poured on the speed. Wigg stopped running laps and asked where the Sheriff was going in such a hurry. Mary raised an eyebrow and pointed to the shack. “No one said stop.”

  Once at the truck stop Ethan ordered two more men back to Japan outpost, one to stay and another to bring Mary back. He found a phone and called Kenly and Keith. Kenly wasn’t happy and hung the phone up, but he’d be there. Paula answered the phone and Ethan tried his best to be civil in arguing with her to wake Keith up. She finally did so and seconds later Keith was out the door.

  They all piled into the patrol car, Kenly without his precious Irish coffee, and took off with Keith driving while Ethan prepped the gear. If Keith hadn’t had the brights on they might have plowed headlong into a pa
rked 5-ton at the bottom of a dangerously steep hill with a curve at the end. They skidded to a halt just feet from it and were out of the car before the engine fully shut off.

  “Report!” Ethan whispered sharply, a tone of voice that would carry in the immediate area, but not go too far in case an enemy of some kind were still there.

  “You gotta see it, Sheriff. Or maybe you shouldn’t.” Was all the soldier said, his face pail, even at night his thousand yard stare broke right through Ethan, he recognized the face of tragedy right away. Without another word they followed the smell to the visitor’s center. The other soldiers were just sitting there, no one made a sound. The smell had become as omnipresent as the flies. It reminded Ethan uncomfortably of Iraq, where you were reminded every second of every day that everything around you was either dead, dying, or wishing it was dead.

  “What’s in there?” Kenly asked as Lee came around the corner from behind the building, “A group of survivors lock themselves in and starve again?”

  “No.” Lee’s face was expressionless. Whatever he’d seen was more than he’d been prepared to handle. “I think you need to get Labadie on the line, Sir. They’re gonna need to see this too. Some of the victims are their men.”

  “Can you please tell me-” Lee blocked Kenly’s path to the storage area where the smell had been coming from. The main lobby and gift shops were just as they’d been when the attraction shut down during Martial Law. The gift shop was stocked with toys and trinkets, the echoes of their boots a stark contrast to the happy voices of tourists Ethan remembered as a child.

  “It’s Newton, Sir. He’s a… a monster. He’s the one who killed the people in Hillsboro, and…” Lee motioned to the narrow hallway, “He didn’t just kill them all either…” Kenly, Keith and Ethan were stunned into silence as Lee wept, not giving a damn if his men saw. Most looked equally upset or melancholy in expression. “We found his badge, some of his police gear in the upper levels of the building where he’d been storing… hording the bodies of the children.”

  “…no…” Kenly said softly.

  “It gets worse.” Lee handed them all a chemical mask. It wouldn’t filter out the smell for long, but it worked better than their paper masks. They followed him beyond the kitchen to a scene that wasn’t unlike a true life House of a Thousand Corpses. From the front door to the restaurant tables a blood trail of boot prints led to the eviscerated, poorly dissected, tortured bodies of hundreds of people. There were body parts stacked in corners, whole bodies putrefied inside body bags. The blood and rot was sticky, making it hard to walk, the flies were as thick as smoke and the feces and urine of the voided bowels of the dead made the stench so overpowering the masks seemed only to trap the smell, but somewhat kept out the flies. Kenly vomited inside his mask and had to be led out before he passed out. He would need to rest before his heart quit.

  There was no rhyme or reason to the demographics of the victims, Ethan noted, sorry he’d eaten at all. Newton was an equal opportunity killer, but did manage to stack the corpses according to age, sex and race. The pile of children was almost unapproachable in its horror, but only just. Newton didn’t spend much time on them, probably because there wasn’t as much to play with. There was evidence he had molested some of the children as well, those rotting in closets in catacombs were rarely wearing clothing. Ethan felt his heart shudder, blinking away the image of Nicole and Mary’s faces on each of the bloated, sometimes skeletal remains of girls in the same clothes the women he loved would have worn.

  “Is anyone alive?” Keith asked, his voice muffled, he was unwilling to take a single step towards the upper level as point man.

  “No.” Lee said flatly. “We’ve cleared all the way back to the two cave entrances. We haven’t gone inside them yet, didn’t see a reason to. We toppled over the pile of chairs to block them off, so it’s safe enough to post guards.”

  “When do you think was the last time he was here?”

  “Two days ago.” Lee held up a book. “It’s the sick fuck’s log book… For this site.”

  “…what…?” Ethan turned in horror, almost slipping on the death rot.

  “Yeah. There’s at least three sites he uses regularly. This, a building at Jefferson College and a funeral home near Cedar Hill.”

  Ethan had seen enough. He stepped outside and tore the mask off, sure he’d have to burn his clothes and never let Mary smell them. Everyone around must have felt similarly as some were changing into their spare uniforms already. Kenly had regained his composure and was leaning against an abandoned car. His face said it all. At first light they went in with cameras and documented everything wearing biohazard suits from the fire department. Even though Newton had been pretty thorough about documenting his own crimes, the detail in which he described his tortures, rapes and cannibalism was almost unimaginably graphic, and clinical. Most read like medical reports from the Devil himself. Every victim’s ID, or a written index card, or in the case of at least two Texan Marines - their dogtags, was carefully documented and sealed in a photo album beneath clear film. Newton was under no illusion that “Old Society,” as he put it, would see what he was doing as somehow wrong, but he believed that he was finishing what the Undead had failed to do when they had the “momentum of Nature’s Will” behind them. Apparently there was a reason the stream of refugees had thinned in recent months, unfortunately it wasn’t just because they were avoiding the river like Juan had suggested. Newton was systematically hunting Refugees, using his uniform to disarm them, drugging them, and then dissecting them alive in every case. There was no mention in the log if any of the victims had woken up during their gruesome death, but the smears in the blood didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  “We have to go after him.” Lee decided as light finally filled the valley.

  9

  “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

  ~Ernest Hemingway

  “We need to be out there in force and look for that bastard!” Lieutenant Reynolds demanded.

  “We can’t. He’ll slip right past us and just start all over somewhere else and then more people are going to die.” Kenly’s unnaturally soft words silenced Reynolds, who’s voice could carry over the British Parliament on any given day.

  “Mayor’s right.” Ethan seethed. “We have to trap him. Maybe catch him in the act as sick as that sounds. This guy is smart, smarter than we were giving him credit for. He’s counting on the chaos to mask his crimes. We can’t underestimate him. It’s his world out there, not ours.”

  “Why can’t we just stake out the caverns?” Rowe asked. She hadn’t taken lightly the news that her close friend and colleague was capable of such pure, unadulterated evil. She was still letting tears fall into a handkerchief as she looked at the pictures the men had taken. The folder that held the images of the children was separately labeled. No one had opened it, the orange tape sealing it still in place, probably never to be opened again.

  “We are, but he just left that site according to his journal. His last entry was just a couple of fucking days ago… While he was killing an elderly woman and her great grandson… Either he’s out hunting, in which case he may or may not be back any time soon, or he’s at another site. There are lapses in the journal several weeks long. He seems to move in a triangle, his main hunting routes are I-44 and I-30, sometimes even Highway 47 between St. Clair and Union late at night.” Lee’s voice shook as he paced in front of the dry erase board, barely able to compose himself. “There’s no discernible pattern to who he takes, but he segregates them later, maybe even before death. Chances are he just picks them up in his patrol car and drives them to his...” There wasn’t a word for the places they’d found. “They probably just walked right in, most of them, none the wiser until it was too late.”

  “So we still need to get out there. We need to put an observer with a radio at each of his sites and-”
The door swung open, interrupting Reynolds. In the door stood three reasonably pissed off looking Texans, none below the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but only one was a Marine, the other two were Army Regulars.

  Everyone in the room stood as the man in the center spoke, “Forgive our late arrival Gentlemen, but we were conducting an inspection of the Labadie outpost and were most unreachable when your call came in. My name is Brigadier General Martin, Texas Marine Corps Reserve. I hear you’ve discovered the remains of two of Major Donovan’s missing boys.”

  “Yes.” Kenly made his way to the front of the group. He held out the dangling tags and set them in the general’s hands. The gray haired man looked down and read them, clenching them in his fist tightly. “I take the death of every man under my command very seriously, Mr. Mayor. What do you plan to do about your rogue?”

  “We’re going to corner him, and then we’re going to kill him.” Ethan made no effort to stand, or even turn his head as he wasn’t facing the door. The only officer he had any reason to tolerate anymore was his brother, and that alliance was based solely on them being brothers.

  The General took note that someone wasn’t kissing his ass to his satisfaction and seemed ready to say something, but Lee got in the way, “Sir, my name is Captain Lee Cally, Commander of Sullivan’s First Cavalry Company. We have a plan formulated to snare former Officer John Newton and bring him to justice. We can have a written plan submitted to-”

  “I like the Sheriff’s plan better.” General Martin pointed at Ethan. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, replacing the empty space with the dogtags for their return trip to wherever those Marines had called home. “This is a list of authentication codes for fire-missions. If you find him and are unable to bring him to justice, I want your word you’ll rain hell. We’ll have an artillery platoon locked and loaded on twenty-four hour standby until this matter is resolved.”