by Anthology
Sarah said, "Maybe even a bigger problem than that. Milton said it can't be turned off without maybe destroying the city."
"Yeah," Dash said, looking kind of excited. "He said it'd go boooom!" And he made big explodey-gestures with his hands.
Weirdo. I raised my eyebrow as everyone else's jaw dropped. "Well, let's go. We have to do something. We should at least talk to this nerd."
* * * *
"Greg," Mandy said, running to catch up to me. I nodded to acknowledge her being there. "That house is past the college. Won't that be Zombie Land USA? Why are we walking?"
"Do you have a better idea?" I asked. "You wrecked your car, there's too many of us now to fit in it anyway, and---"
Just then we came to her house. Her dad was in the yard. Her zombie dad. Eating somebody's poodle. She nearly screamed, but got it back together, and I even took her hand to help hurry her by.
"That was my dad," she said, tears creeping into her voice.
"Yeah."
"He always hated that dog."
"Cool."
She sniffed, wiped her eyes and seemed to stuff it all down. "What are we going to do about Jake?"
I looked at her, surprised. "What?"
She did a big eye roll. "Today's his birthday, you know. His birthday?"
"What? You mean Jake's birthday is today? His eighteenth birthday?"
Mandy nodded.
"Great," I said. "Guess we have to kill him."
"But he's still okay, isn't he? He's maybe been in a snottier-than-usual mood for the past couple days . . ."
"Like the teachers and everybody," I said.
There was a gate ahead of us. The college campus. Someone had closed and locked it. Zombie students tried to reach through, groaning at us, but couldn't get out. I could see the hill behind the campus. The house up there had green smoke coming out of the chimney, spreading into a cloud.
* * * *
Milton frowned as he looked out his window. There were crowds of zombies gathered in front of his house, and more kept coming. It was like they were being drawn to the Machine, like it called them.
"Go away!" he said. "I was trying to make you all stop bothering me and leave me alone! Now it's worse than ever!"
* * * *
"Crudpickles," Jake muttered.
We were at the bottom of the hill and could see the house. We could also see all the zombies between us and it. They kept trying to climb the hill, tripping up it, rolling down it.
"Crudpickles?" we all said.
"I don't want to know," I added. "What now? Fight our way through?"
"What do they want?" Mandy asked.
"They must be focused in on the device that changed them," Sarah said.
"The Machine," Dash corrected.
"Or they want revenge on the one who did this," she said, elbowing him to shut up. "We have to save Milton."
Mandy grabbed my hand again. She was scared. Almost crying. I sighed and actually hugged her, something I never did. Touching was over-rated. Sometimes I smacked people for it.
"So we charge in like suicide bombers and probably die," Edgar said. He had his little brother on him piggy-back style. Bobby was next to him.
"We could leave," Dakota said.
"And probably die later when the zombies get us," Edgar said.
"No, we should go in," Jake said. "We need to go in."
Something in his voice really creeped me out. It was different than the usual way his voice normally creeped me out. I looked at Mandy and she looked like she had noticed it, too.
Jake started moving forward, toward the house and the crowd of zombies. As he went, he dropped his gun.
"Dude," Dakota and Dash said together. "Are you nuts?"
"Quit it, Jake," I said, shoving him back. "Don't go zombie on us yet."
Edgar said a couple of words that would have gotten him in trouble at school. "His birthday. I forgot."
When I shoved him, Jake stopped moving. Then he turned around and punched me. In the face.
He never punched me before, not during any of the times he's bullied me. It surprised me more than it hurt. One of my teeth felt loose. I fell to the ground, grabbing my face.
Jake laughed, but then his eyes kind of rolled back into his head. He didn't fall over but swayed instead. Then he groaned. He came at me, reaching and groaning.
Everyone else stood there, stunned and scared. I pulled out the pistol I'd taken from Bobby. My hand shook as I pulled the trigger. It shook so bad I totally missed. I fired again. The bullet hit him in the shoulder and knocked him sideways. Blood flew out all over Mandy and she freaked. Jake kept coming for me. He grabbed the front of my trench coat. His mouth opened wide for a big bite.
I shoved the gun past his teeth and pulled the trigger again. There was a muffled bang and the back of Jake's head exploded.
I turned to the group. They were scared and shocked by what just happened, but even more shocked by the look of sorrow that was probably on my face. We stood there staring at each other, until more of the zombies noticed us.
"We ready to charge?" I finally said.
* * * *
Milton was still at the window when he saw something going on at the edge of the yard.
It looked like a fight, a group of people trying to force their way uphill to the house. Kids and teenagers. Some with guns, some with baseball bats, a girl whacking away with a machete.
Sarah and Dash were in that group. His friends. His best friends. His only friends. They were trying to get to him.
They all charged into the crowd of zombies, fighting away. Then Milton saw his parents. They hobbled over to Sarah and Dash, and killed them.
Killed them. Killed his friends. They died. His parents killed them. All because of him.
The others that were in the group were dying, too. People he didn't know were dying trying to stop his plan. He must have done something wrong.
Milton ran to the lab then to the Machine. The Machine he worked so hard on. The Machine he was so proud of. The Machine that killed everyone close to him. It was still humming, the lights flashing, the green smoke coming out.
He scanned the controls and found the button he was looking for: the self-destruct. The big red button he was forced to add to his creation. Sarah always made him promise to add one to anything he made, in case something went wrong.
Something like destroying the whole world and everyone he knew.
He lifted up the glass box that protected the button.
Milton gave one last look outside. The zombies appeared to be the only things out there that were still moving.
He looked back down at the button, sighed, and said, "I've ended the lives of this town, my friends, and . . . myself."
He pressed the button.
* * * *
The Decay of Unknown Particles
by
Mark Onspaugh
Celia, there's a chance you will never receive this. If you are unable to, it will pass either to my brother Dex in Florida or my cousin John Bell in Munich.
If neither of them are able to receive it, then chances are everything is lost.
* * * *
It's funny, in a way. Today's the day everything went to hell, but it actually started off as one of the best days of my life.
Of course, that's because I asked you the big question. I had planned to do it at a big romantic dinner at our favorite spot on the wharf, but you looked at me with those large blue eyes, the hair falling across your face as you smiled sleepily, and I caved.
"Marry me," I said, and I realized it wasn't a question, but a plea.
You giggled, your sleepiness and our tangle in the sheets making you think it was a joke. I looked at you again, and you knew I wasn't kidding. I brought out the jewelry box from beneath the underwear in my dresser drawer and your beautiful blue eyes grew wide.
It wasn't a big ring. I'm only a captain and substantial pay grades are a couple of rungs up the ladder.
; You never said "yes," just covered me with kisses and sent me out the door whistling.
I guess that's the last time in my life I was really happy.
Celia . . . . Baby, I told you I worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs outside of Oakland. I'm sorry, baby, I lied. The truth is, I've been working at Site 64, which the U.S. Army has code-named "Ouroboros," after the mythological snake eating its own tail. Those of us a bit less pretentious, what the Army called "wise-asses," christened it "The Big Worm." Others who took certain things way too seriously would sniff, push their thick glasses up the bridge of their nose, and inform me that Plato stated that Ouroboros was supposed to be a perfect, immortal creature.
Typical military hubris.
We're in a large complex underground beneath Fort Ord. The base above-ground was decommissioned back in the 90s, but Site 64 has continued on in secret. I am not ashamed to say I got the job from contacts through my dad and my Uncle Bill. The brass used me as an "LCD Liaison." LCD stands for Lowest Common Denominator. It meant that the brains here at Site 64 had to make sure I understood what was going on, and then put that into a report. The rationale was, if I understood, the brass probably would, too. Hey, I never pretended to be a genius, and I was perfectly happy to work a job where I wasn't in hostile territory and got home every night about dinner time. God bless the U.S. Army.
Our facility contained the most advanced hadron super collider in the world. The French-Swiss collider failed to yield evidence of a Higgs boson, the so-called "god particle," and the brass had been on our butts to get results before the Illinois collider went on-line in 2012.
Out of that deadline came two truths that the military should tattoo on the foreheads of every bird colonel and multi-star general: six months is not a lot of time and people get careless when you rush them.
I headed to the base that day feeling great. You were going to be my wife and life was going to be beautiful. I pulled into an abandoned carwash a quarter mile from the front gate of Ord and drove into the wash area. A switch box for the carwash contained a concealed optical scanner that read my retina pattern. An aperture large enough for my car slid open ahead, and I drove down into the parking structure for Site 64.
Doctor Hadley was agitated as usual when I arrived. He was a short man, barely five feet. He weighed next to nothing and had just a few strands of white hair combed over his shiny, bald head. He had thick glasses and large, white teeth. He kinda looked like a cross between a rabbit and Elmer Fudd.
"Morning, Doctor Hadley," I said, sipping the last of my coffee.
"It's time, Lewis. Are your people ready?"
My "people" consisted of a graph plotter and a file clerk. Hadley was nervous so he was being more of a pain than usual. I replied with my usual measure of reverence.
"They've been ready for days, Doc. Let's make that Worm dance!"
Hadley winced. He always hated it when I talked casually about his baby. Screw him. In light of what happened, he's---well, I guess none of us are lucky, are we?
You know, Ce, in the hours since The Incident, I've been wishing I had just called in sick after you said "yes," baby. It wouldn't have changed any final outcomes, but it would have given us a few more precious hours together.
I've been looking at your picture as I record this, baby. Man, you're beautiful.
Ouroboros had performed perfectly in all the preliminary tests. We had launched our streams of bound quarks, or hadrons, in either direction and that had been successful.
Everyone, Hadley included, was sure the Big Worm would exceed expectations.
I guess it did, at that.
I digress here a moment, baby, to talk about what went wrong. If they are able to clean up the mess here, there may be inquiries, investigations. If there are, some are going to bring up the concept of sabotage, which is just nonsense. Everybody on this project is carefully screened. This is both for security and our safety. Someone who is either unbalanced or hostile would wreak havoc with the research. But the brass is probably going to say that somehow the religious nuts infiltrated a secret government installation because they were ticked off we were trying to find "the god particle."
Don't buy it. I know the people here, and everyone was excited to be involved in something that might change the course of human history.
(Man, I say something like that and the irony is just too much.)
Personally, I think it was a two-part problem. The main fault lay in the brass rushing to get Ouroboros built. You rush them, and even the best people tend to cut corners to make deadlines and budgets, and something vital somewhere suffers.
In this case, the shielding around the collision chamber.
No one in the military is going to admit that. I also have a feeling that any investigative committee is also going to find the brass blameless.
And so it goes.
The other problem was Ordinaries.
As I had said, Fort Ord itself was decommissioned some time ago. Members of Monterey's homeless population were always trying to crash on the base. Some of them were such regulars they took to calling themselves "Ord-inaries." It was up to the Ouroboros MPs to sweep the base and send the Ord-inaries off to less restricted pastures. I know it's not an easy gig because they had to perform said duties without revealing the existence of an underground facility beneath the abandoned base.
How many times had I seen their commander, Major Peary, grabbing a cig or chowing down on donuts in the mess hall when his people were supposed to be on a sweep? How many times was he flirting with that pretty new captain from Alabama?
What a tool.
We estimate there were seven Ord-inaries sleeping in the sun when we "woke the Worm."
Peary's staff now swears they did a sweep, and that Peary himself monitored the cameras giving a complete view of the base.
Yeah, right.
In light of everything, of course, Peary might be one of the lucky ones.
Hadley had fired up Ouroboros, and hadrons were sent in opposite directions to meet in the collision chamber at speeds some thought would excel the speed of light.
Of course, there were also those who said our collider would create a black hole that would swallow the Earth and surrounding planets, or that the resultant particle might tear a hole in the fabric of space and let something through. It was like all the hysteria back before the atomic bomb tests, panicked bleating that the explosion of such a device would ignite and burn off the atmosphere, killing all life instantly.
Scientists then had done the same as Hadley did now: calmly gone on with their research.
I don't know what kind of energy we unleashed that day. I mean, does it really matter?
As soon as the collision took place, a klaxon sounded, indicating a radiation leak in the collision chamber. Such an alarm was a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse was gone. The sensors couldn't even indicate where the leak had occurred. The contractor responsible for the substandard shielding had probably installed the sensors, too.
Hadley was miffed because there seemed to be no results at all to his grand experiment. This was the same complaint of the team working on the Swiss-French collider. I wonder now if there actually were results, but their rig was up to code and the resultant particle/energy had been absorbed and dissipated, undetected.
Hadley's boys were going over the data on the test, trying to coax more luminosity out of the Cray-Omegas that had recorded the hadron collision when there was a scream in the corridor.
I had run out into the corridor with Hadley and his techies to see what was wrong.
That pretty captain from Alabama was cowering in the corridor, and the object of her fear was Private Geeting, who most everyone called "Gopie" because he seemed like a cross between Gomer Pyle and Andy Griffith's son Opie. Gopie was a nice enough kid, big and rawboned, his skin almost orange with freckles, his hair a red thatch that never laid down. He had been given a mop and bucket and told to clean the corridors on the far side of the Wor
m. Gopie always took orders with good cheer and a big, goofy smile.
He wasn't smiling now.
Slack-jawed and drooling, he shambled down the corridor, dragging the wet mop behind him and leaving a trail like a giant snail might make.
Sergeant Mendoza bulled past us to give Gopie the D.I.'s version of a good old-fashioned butt-kicking.
"Geeting! What the Sam Hill you doin', boy?" Mendoza yelled.
Gopie stopped and stared at Mendoza as if he had never seen him before. He stared like he had never seen another person before.
Gopie swayed, and Mendoza moved in, his face about an inch from the private's.
"Did you hear me, you sorry sack of . . ."
Baby, at that moment, Gopie's eyes lit up. I don't mean figuratively, I mean they began to flicker like a dang jack-o-lantern. They began to grow brighter, and Mendoza hesitated.
That's when Gopie bit into Sergeant Mendoza's face, and tore away much of the man's nose and his upper lip.
Blood began to pour from Mendoza's face as he screamed, and Gopie answered with an unholy wail. He was chewing on the flesh he had torn off Mendoza, and his eyes were flickering even brighter. He backhanded Mendoza and the sergeant's head rocked back and hit the wall with a crack. Mendoza hit the ground, unconscious. Gopie fell to his knees and grabbed Mendoza's skull. He smashed it against the tiles until it cracked open like a coconut, and then he began to devour what was left of Mendoza's brain.
One of the techies puked, then, and the sound of that, so normal under the circumstances, roused the rest of us. I was reaching for my radio to call the MPs when Peary showed up, brandishing his sidearm like he was freaking Dirty Harry.
Peary pointed at Gopie's chest and fired. A hole appeared in Gopie's chest like a mouth had opened and the private was propelled back a dozen feet or more.
One of the medical personnel, a short guy named Saunders, ran over to Mendoza with a med kit. It was a pretty useless exercise: anyone could see Mendoza wouldn't be barking at any more non-coms. Not on Earth, anyway.
