DAVID DUNWOODY
EMPIRE
WEB SERIAL
Prologue
Letter Dated Sept. 20, 2007
To whom it may concern,
To anyone that's still alive, anyhow. If you're holding this letter, presumably you've looted the Pointe Bank in Jefferson Harbor. No hard feelings, though I am curious as to how valuable - if at all - the dollar is in your day. I guess there will always be those who stake their well-being on green pieces of paper, even when society lies in ruins around them.
So what do I need to tell you? You must have already gotten the jist of what's happening. Yes, they're undead. No, they're not your friends or loved ones anymore. The soul has left the building and been replaced with...well, something.
Let's go back to the beginning. I mean the beginning of everything.
When the universe erupted into existence, spitting cosmic detritus across infinity, tears were made in the fabric of space. Now, the universe is constantly opening and healing wounds on a quantum level, but these were unintentional rifts. Big ones. And though they were sealed off in a nanosecond, things still managed to pour through.
Tendrils of dark energy, unlike anything in our reality, stretched out and were snarled in the cooling masses that would become planets, moons, asteroids. One of these tendrils got caught up in our planet, Earth.
There are a handful of places on the surface where the dark energy breaks through. We called them Sources. By "we" I mean the United States government. I assume it's still called the United States? After all, a bank doesn't go unburglarized for centuries. Anyway, these Sources had a singular, horrifying property. Any dead animal - from dogs to humans - lying in the vicinity of a Source would return to life.
Most Sources are located in places that Man left long ago. That's why you never heard accounts of the dead getting up and walking around - at least not enough accounts to make anyone believe it. But the government still looked into it. You'd be surprised at the ridiculous bullshit that we spent taxpayer money investigating.
Now see, those first undead - or "afterdead" as we classified them - weren't contagious. They fed on the flesh of the living, of course, but they couldn't pass the reanimation catalyst into their victims. There was no epidemic, no plague.
Until we made it.
You won't believe me, but it was an accident. We weren't so stupid as to think we should engineer and weaponize a "zombie virus". It just happened. Evolution, perhaps. Judgement, maybe.
So here we are. At the time of this writing, the infection is spreading at a maddening rate. It's strictly blood-borne but it's already gotten overseas. We're well into the "martial law & religious panic" phase of the apocalypse. The public are learning about the afterdead's abilities. Things you probably already know. If you don't, here's the cardinal rule: headshots don't kill them. HEADSHOTS DON'T KILL THEM. Burn them to ash. Always.
It won't be long before most countries have collapsed beneath the ever-increasing weight of the zombie threat. I personally believe we're already outnumbered. I can only wonder what sort of world you live in.
Now you know where it came from. I know that, somehow, understanding your end makes it easier to accept. I've accepted it. The bite doesn't even hurt anymore...admittedly, I'm a little curious about what happens next.
Sergeant First Class Esteban Cervantes
United States Army
1.
Still Life, Blood on Assphalt
May 1, 2112
Atherton was dying and he knew it. With every weak beat of his heart he felt his life ebbing out onto the road. He wasn't sure where he was wounded, or how. Didn't really matter.
He was lying a few hundred yards from the overturned towncar, which itself rested against a smoldering military Humvee. The road was supposed to be secure but they'd gotten an escort anyway. And it was the escort that had flipped up ahead of them, and Atherton had swerved the towncar, but not quick enough to avoid the collision.
He angled his head towards the wreck and looked for signs of life. None. Was he the only one ejected? It figured. Thirty-four, in his prime, handsome swatches of gray just starting to show in his hair. At least he would be prepared for death, could breathe his last words as he felt it coming over him.
A pale horse walked around the wreck and towards him. Upon it was a rider and Atherton knew his name was Death.
He wondered if Death looked alike to every soul he claimed. For Atherton, at least, it was the traditional black robes, with a hood casting a shadow over the spectre's face. As he drew closer and dismounted, Atherton saw his white face and black eyes, like marbles set in clay. "Have I already died?" He asked.
"Not yet." Death answered dispassionately. He stood over Atherton, blocking out the noonday sun, and surveyed the landscape. The silence was unbearable. Would Death just wait there until Atherton bled out? "I work for the Senator," he coughed.
"The Senator?" Death frowned. "He was in the towncar." Atherton explained. "I am - was - his aide."
"The Senator isn't dead." The spectre murmured.
"The others...?"
"They are."
"I don't understand." Atherton could taste blood on his lips and gums. His head was swimming from the heat, and he forced himself to concentrate on speaking. "You just got here. But they're already dead?"
"I don't normally collect souls myself." Death replied. "I merely mark their passing. Only in extraordinary circumstances..." His monotone voice trailed off. He was eyeing the wreck. All the while his ghostly steed stood silently.
"Why did we crash?" Atherton croaked. Fate? Was there such a thing? Did Death have a contemporary who wrote the endings of human lives in a great book? Or was it just an accident, a fucking accident? He wasn't sure which possibility offended him more: for some emotionless sentinel to decide that he should be torn open and dumped onto burning asphalt in the middle of nowhere; or for shitty driving to be his undoing.
"There was a body in the road," Death said. "The soldiers drove over it, believing it was dead. It wasn't." Death's gaze was fixed on the wreck, and he reached a chalk-white hand into the folds of his robes.
"It was an undead?"
Ignoring the question, Death pulled his hand out, and with it a massive scythe, far too long to have been concealed on his person, the curved blade catching the sunlight and throwing it into Atherton's eyes. He groaned and rolled his head to the side. That's when he saw it.
The lone undead shambled around the towncar and stopped. It could see them both, Atherton realized. Its hands and face were caked with blood, not its own. Must have been in the Hummer, feeding. It had caused the crash so it could eat. Atherton felt blood and bile rise in his throat. Wait...was that how he'd die? Was Death here to watch as this undead dug out his guts?
Then, the spectre took two steps forward and swung the scythe out in a horizontal arc, passing cleanly through the belly of the zombie.
He rested the scythe at his side and stood still with the patience of eternity.
The undead didn't move. There was no cut across its midsection, as if it had been struck by a phantom blade. Then, like a paper cut, the line bled into view, and the zombie's torso fell to the ground, sputtering brown viscera.
Atherton tried to process what he'd just seen, lying on a deserted road in his own blood with the Grim Reaper leaning against his dreaded scythe. The zombie...it wasn't just cut in half, it was dead. Really dead.
"You came to kill it."
Death nodded without looking down at him. "It, and others."
Atherton tried to speak again but couldn't. His vision was failing. Death turned now, and Atherton trembled at the sight of the blade. Without a word, it was slipped back into the dark robes and out of sight. Death knelt beside him. "Your life is like a flame." He again r
eached into his robes, this time pulling out a burning candle. Despite the blinding sunlight, the flame seemed to cast its own luminescence. It didn't hurt Atherton's eyes at all. It was calming. Familiar.
Death poised his thumb and forefinger around it. "When you die, the flame merely ceases." And the tiny, pulsing light did grow smaller, then faded altogether.
Atherton was dead. Death crushed the candle's wick out and returned it to its place.
The spectre gathered his robes and climbed back onto the pale horse. They continued for a while down the road at a lazy gait, down to the gates of Jefferson Harbor.
2.
AfterBirth
The Jefferson Harbor Landfill was located at the end of town, near the swamp that defined the western perimeter. Concrete slabs had been erected in a crude wall at the edge of the swamp, with wire fencing used to cover any gaps. The whole mess was threaded with equal parts barbed wire and overgrowth. The west wall was a worthless measure if ever there was one, nothing like the well-built barriers on the north and eastern perimeters. To the south, the Gulf of Mexico.
Gene Pastore stood atop a mountain of filth and stared at the dense swamp. What was the point of putting that eyesore inside the perimeter? It wasn't even worth dumping in. The landfill's girth was expanding south, onto the beach. He'd have to burn another ton of this shit before it hit the water.
There was a P.O. boat just off the shoreline. Gene waved to the two patrol officers standing on it. They stared through him. "Didn't see me, I guess." He muttered. They were local boys, weren't they? No reason not to be polite, unlike the stone-faced Army fellas that had just pulled out of town. The radio said that military support was being withdrawn from all coastal cities. The Senate wanted people to move inland. Why? So the Senators and their families could take all the country's provisions? "Beats me," Gene said to himself. As far as he was concerned, moving everyone into the heartland was like building the rotters a triple cheeseburger.
God, it was hot. Boiling inside his ratty old uniform, Gene mopped his brow with an old handkerchief and dropped it into the garbage. His back was killing him too. At the age of sixty, he had hoped someone else would take his place, give the old man a break. But there was no retirement in his future. Just rats.
Rats, rats, rats. Most of them were undead, too. Only Gene could tell the living from the dead. They just had a look about them, a cold, solitary look. And the dead rats were fatter than the other ones. They fed on their own kind, and their kind were plentiful.
He was wearing waders and thick work gloves. The bastards wouldn't try to eat him but they'd probably bite if he wasn't careful. Gene carried a shovel to pin the vermin down and hack them up. Kicking them into a fire was easier, but garbage burns had to be controlled, small. The smoke rising into the sky brought undead. Not only that, but while Gene was used to the stench of the landfill, burns were another story. Maybe it was the charred, half-rotted flesh of the rats; the smell of death after death. Gene spat and wiped his mouth with a gloved hand.
"How does a starving town make this much fucking garbage?" He asked an undead rat. It was perched atop a broken chair, watching him intently. Part of its face had been gnawed off. A tiny red eye still rolled around inside the bony eye socket.
"You and me both." Gene said. He swung the shovel and smashed the rat down through the chair. These little buggers had actually given him a respect for the living rodents that still dared enter the landfill. It wasn't man versus animal anymore - it was the living against the undead. Gene brushed a fly off his cheek and wondered if they were undead too. Gone from eating shit to eating each other.
There was a sharp crack from the ocean, then another. Gene saw one of the P.O.s pointing a sniper rifle past him, toward the swamp. Must've seen something. What good did shooting at it do? Those boys were too scared to come ashore and nail the rotters. Gene hefted his shovel in one hand. He'd take care of any unwelcome visitors.
Speaking of which, another rat was lumbering over piles of soggy cardboard, distended belly dragging along. Gene aimed the blade of the shovel at its dark face and thrust downward. The rat skittered aside with surprising speed, just in time to avoid the strike, and the shovel sank into the refuse.
Gene shook the crap off the shovel. There was something bloody underneath the cardboard, too big to be a rat. It was partially wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket with smiling dinosaurs in bright colors. He considered this for a half-second before a terrible thought came to him.
"Oh my God."
He gingerly worked the shovel underneath the blanket and peeled it away. The underside was crimson, yellow dinosaurs obscured by gore. It was difficult to loosen; someone had lovingly bundled the misshapen form, tiny and frail and barely recognizable for what it was.
Gene stumbled back with a cry, dropping the shovel. His foot struck the ruin of the broken chair, and he fell flat on his back. A foul wetness seeped through his uniform and he found himself sliding helplessly down an incline. He pawed at the garbage around him; a glove came off and his bare hand sank into some curdled mess. "Shit! God!" He tried to orient himself so he could see where he was going, but only managed to go elbow-deep into the garbage, all the while still sliding.
He nicked his ungloved hand on something. Yanking it free, he saw the ragged little bite, and he saw the rat's head as it struggled in the garbage. It was dead.
He plowed headfirst into an array of discarded plumbing. Gene felt the surreal but distinct sensation of metal slicing through his cheek before he fell unconscious.
3.
Off to Market
Fred R. Moorecourt, Senator from the great states of Illinois and Indiana, beat on the gates of Jefferson Harbor and hollered until his already-pounding head threatened to erupt. There was no scaling the gates, with loops of barbed wire welded to each pole. The walls were fifteen feet high and perfectly smooth. He stumbled along the perimeter in desperate search of a handhold. Senator Moorecourt cursed the wall and kicked it. That's when he learned that two toes on his right foot were broken. Moorecourt fell to the ground in a ball.
Walls, borders, bullshit. The imaginary lines that defined the United States were eroding every day. Already representing the combined territory of two states, Moorecourt expected more to fall under his jurisdiction as Americans moved inland. Maybe that's why he had risked coming out here: to expand his rule. It was a miserable thought, but it rang truer than any of the noble rhetoric that he & his colleagues broadcast from the north.
Goddamn coastal refugees. Anarchists. Of course, when they ran out of supplies, when troops stopped patrolling their perimeters, then they blamed the Senate. The Senate told survivors to migrate away from the oceans, to consolidate aid and resources; men like Moorecourt put their lives on the line on these goodwill missions. Still this stubborn distrust. And now, two broken toes, a concussion and this goddamn wall.
He looked back down the road; the wreck was a blot on the horizon. He should have gotten into the Hummer and grabbed a gun. Too tired to go back, though. Too risky. The badlands were crawling with hungry undead.
"Oh, Jesus." Turning northeast, he saw two shapes moving through blighted grass. Their stiff movements and emaciated bodies gave them away immediately as dead. God willing, their eyes had shriveled and fallen out of their heads, and they weren't really ambling straight toward him.
Or maybe they were.
Using the wall for support, he limped along as quickly as he could. He thought about Atherton, whom he'd seen gasping for breath in the middle of the road, and whispered a silent prayer that the undead would catch his scent. Maybe they'd even eat the fresh corpses in the vehicles. Moorecourt's sister and her husband remained in the towncar. Why Amanda had insisted on coming along, he didn't know. Husband Doug had represented the P.O. Union and was supposed to talk to local law enforcement about withdrawing. But Amanda loathed politics almost as much as she loathed Moorecourt...
"It's going to play real well with the Harbor residents when you show up esco
rted by soldiers." She'd said, sitting directly across from Moorecourt, the sun bringing out deep, cruel lines in her smirking countenance.
Moorecourt massaged his hand and smiled thinly in return. "It'll serve as a reminder of the security they're losing if they stay out here. Believe it or not, I did think this through."
Doug, as usual, was reticent while the siblings sparred. He buried his face in some paperwork, thumbing through the same pages again and again. Moorecourt stared at him until he turned to look out the window. Doug was a strong lobbyist; he fought tirelessly for the rights of others. It seemed, however, that he left in himself no fire to defend his own interests. Over the course of the car trip he'd slowly shrank into his corner, hunched over like a child begging to wake up somewhere else. Boyishly handsome, his behavior only made him more enticing to the senator.
(Did she know?)
Moorecourt applied skin cream to his hand, frowning at veins visible through papery flesh. Amanda pursed her lips and started to coo something witty. He didn't hear it, because the sun outside seemed suddenly to roll violently across the sky, and Atherton cried out from the front seat, and metal groaned before Moorecourt's head cracked against the bulletproof window.
Empire Page 1
