This Rotten World | Book 1 | This Rotten World

by Morris, Jacy

  Private Bryant shook his head.

  "Good." The man held out his hand. "The name is Zeke."

  Private Bryant shook the man's hand in a firm handshake.

  "This is going to sting a bit," he said.

  "Huh?"

  Bryant blinked his eyes, waiting for them to clear, then he heard the sound of duct tape and felt the man wrapping his wrists. When his vision finally cleared, the man stood over him with the tape in his hand. "Sorry about the punch, but I figured you might want to mess that face up a little more before you went to that Colonel and told him you got overrun in the booth."

  "It's alright. I was kind of expecting it."

  "What are you going to tell them when they find you?" Zeke asked.

  "Men in masks came, jumped me, and destroyed all of the evidence."

  "Good. We'll see you around..."

  Zeke left the words hanging there, so he filled them in, "Private Hugh Bryant."

  The man smiled. "We'll see you around, Hugh."

  The group filed out of the room. The black man nodded at him, and gave him a salute. Hugh Bryant closed his eyes and took a nap.

  ****

  When he awoke, the Colonel was there, squatting over him. The Colonel's jaw muscles pulsed with fury as Hugh told his story. He was furious, and for his negligence, Hugh Bryant pulled extra duty on the fences. He didn't complain. Lives were saved, including his own. Sometimes the army had to protect itself from itself, and Hugh figured that's what he had done.

  Chapter 31: On the Fence

  The refugees of the Coliseum were issued bayonets. They were not issued the rifles to attach them to. The Major made sure of that. When the sun came up, the refugees lined up outside, dry-heaving amid the stench. Rudy was in the first batch of refugees to take a shift. With the handle of the bayonet in his soft paw, he was marched out to the fence and was ordered to dispatch the enemy.

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  The soldier that he was talking to was mean-looking, and the last thing he wanted to do was piss the man off. He had suffered enough embarrassment in the last few days, but his cooperation didn't matter because this soldier in particular seemed to be taking the death of another soldier as a personal affront to his honor. He stepped up to Rudy, towering half a foot over him. With Rudy's face in his chest, the soldier leered down at him and said, "Are you fucking retarded? Kill the motherfuckers. Take that fucking knife, and stab it into their heads. A little exercise might do a lump of shit like you some good."

  The soldier shoved him and pushed him toward the fences, where the stench of rot was even riper. He didn't want to do it, but he gagged and then threw up on the ground. He heard the soldiers and some of the refugees laughing behind him. In the morning sun, he straightened his back and slowly drew his eyes up from the puddle of vomit between his shoes to see the dead on the other side of the fence. He had seen them before, but now he was inches from them, and the decaying process had progressed quickly in the hot sun. He locked eyes with the dead woman across from him. Her hair was long, black, and crusted with dry blood. Her eyes were cloudy, and her skin had turned a sickly gray shade. The skin of her fingertips was gone, and all that was left was the bones, sharp and white. Her fingers protruded through the chain link fence, and Rudy stepped closer to her.

  Behind him, the soldier urged him on like some sort of deranged cheerleader. "Go on, boy. Kill that Annie."

  Annies. The name made his skin crawl. Rudy reached back and plunged the knife at the creatures head, putting all of his weight behind it. The bayonet glanced off of the creature's forehead, skittering sideways, and a flap of filleted forehead flopped over the creature's eyes. It pawed at the air blindly.

  The soldier behind him laughed. "Don't blind them, fat boy. Kill 'em!" More soldiers joined in. They were sitting in the sun, cleaning their weapons and smoking cigarettes, while the refugees of the Coliseum sat behind them in rows, waiting for their shift at the fence.

  Rudy took a few shallow breaths and pumped himself up to try again. This time he aimed for the creature's eyes. He plunged the bayonet into the lady's eyes, and a cloudy liquid erupted from it. He drove the knife deeper until he hit something hard. He put his weight behind it, and the bone behind the woman's eye broke, the knife plunging into something softer. The creature twitched, then dropped, falling off the end of the bayonet. Another creature took its place. Behind him, he heard applause.

  He knew it was mocking, but inside, Rudy was thinking, Hell yeah. I can kill these things! He killed another, and then another. By the fourth one his exuberance was gone, his arms were tired, and sweat was running down his pink face. Killing people was a lot more work than it was in Call of Duty, that was for sure.

  After his fifth kill, Rudy stepped back and looked at his handiwork. The fence ran for a good two hundred yards. It was level thanks to the concrete apron that ran around the courtyard of the Coliseum. The dead still lined the fence, eagerly stepping into the spots that were vacated by the dead that Rudy and the other refugees had killed. Beneath their mechanical movements, the truly dead were now being trampled into jelly and bone dust. On the ground, blood and pus were beginning to leak under the fence. They had no such concept as respect for the dead.

  "What's the hold-up, darlin'?" the asshole soldier said behind him.

  Rudy killed his sixth creature.

  ****

  Amanda watched Rudy for an hour. When the hour was up, the soldiers called time, and the forty refugees that had been sent to the fence, dropped their arms wearily to their side. They handed over their bayonets, and then the soldiers picked out forty more lucky volunteers. She had just enough time to look at Rudy's blistered hands before the soldier that had been heckling Rudy for the last hour plopped a bayonet in her hands and told her to get to work. Chloe was up on the line with her, and they set about the work of dispatching the dead.

  For Amanda, the experience was terrifying. She couldn't see through the mass of dead before her. For every one that dropped, another appeared, and still there was no glimpse of daylight on the other side of the fence. Amanda was too short to reach some of the taller creatures, so she picked and chose which ones she would kill until a tiny creature showed up. It used to be a little girl. Now it was a snarling abomination, shoving its diminutive fingers through the fence to try and reach Amanda.

  She hesitated, and then her arm dropped to her side. "What the fuck are we doing?"

  "You say something, sweetheart?" a soldier asked behind her.

  Amanda did not reply. She just stared at the faded eyes of the creature in front of her and kept the bayonet at her side.

  She heard the boots of the soldier walking briskly over to her. "Go on, girl. Kill it. If that thing was on this side of the fence, it would sure as hell try to kill you."

  She said nothing.

  Her silence infuriated the soldier. She could sense that. From her left, Chloe spoke calmly to her, "Just do it, Amanda."

  Amanda's voice caught in her throat, and she could barely get the words out. "It's wrong."

  The soldier spun her around roughly and looked her in the eyes. "It's wrong?" he asked in a mocking voice. "Girl, I'll tell you what's wrong. What's wrong is having to guard a bunch of spoiled civilians who don't give two shits about you while your family is on the other side of the continent. Shit, I bet on the East Coast, there's an asshole just like me yelling at an asshole just like you right now. You know what I'd want him to say?"

  Amanda looked at the ground.

  "I'd want him to say 'Kill that son of a bitch, before it kills someone else.' That someone else could be my kids, my wife. And this little shit in front of us, well, you kill it and maybe you help out one of my brothers, keep their kids safe... keep their wives safe."

  Amanda said nothing.

  "You don't care about my wife? My kids?" the soldier asked, his hands on his knees, bent over to look her in the face.

  "You can do it, Amanda. Just pretend it's him," Chloe said.


  The soldier laughed and looked up at Chloe. "Barbie doll, you best mind your own damn business."

  Amanda spun and drove the bayonet home. The ex-little girl shuddered and fell, and then Amanda did the same, screaming at the top of her lungs. The mass of the dead became excited, drawn by her rage.

  Chloe smiled. "Atta girl, Amanda. You can do it."

  Time disappeared, and when the soldier called in the next shift, Amanda fell to the ground, the bayonet sliding out of her hand and clattering on the concrete. Chloe and Rudy lifted her up by her shoulders, and took her away from the fence.

  ****

  Brian left his kids with Zeke and stumbled to the fence with a bayonet in hand. His mind was clouded with grief. Sadness seemed to be a part of him, every bit as important as his hand or his wife or his children.

  Thoughts of Sarah clouded his mind as he felt the rough rubber handle of the bayonet in his hand. He could see her in her dress, her brown eyes shining in the sunlight. They had been married for ten years, ten great fucking years. The number loomed large in his mind as he stepped up to the fence.

  He turned and looked over his shoulder to see his babies with their backs to him. Zeke was drawing their attention away from the proceedings at the fence. They had seen too much already. Zeke nodded at him, reassuring Brian that everything would be alright. Zeke was a blessing.

  Brian felt guilty for being as useless as he had been. The father part of his heart struggled with the broken part, battling back and forth. He knew he needed to step it up, reassert himself as a normal, chipper presence in the girls' lives, but knowing and actually being able to pull it off were two different things. It was as if he were a drowning swimmer, stuck underneath the weight of an ocean whose waters were composed of his own sadness. He could see the sun shining down through that ocean, but he couldn't get there. It would just take time.

  In front of him, a dead man smashed its face against the fence. Brian hefted the bayonet in his hand, and then drove it into the creature's head, content that his babies weren't watching. The blade sunk into the soft flesh of the dead man's eyes. The creature stiffened and jittered around, and the sensation of the bayonet stabbing through flesh and bone left Brian repulsed. He wondered what Sarah would have said.

  They had always been pacifists. Their children weren't allowed to watch any movies with guns or extreme violence. They had never raised a hand to their children, though their friends always insisted that discipline was the way to raise responsible, well-adjusted children. Sarah always countered these arguments with, "Violence is a path that leads to dehumanization." And their approach to child-rearing had been acceptable in a world where the government kept them relatively safe... but now, in this world, Brian wondered if they had made a mistake.

  Brian watched as the dead man fell to the ground, the knife dripping gore onto the concrete. His shoes stuck momentarily in the blood that had begun to seep under the fence guarding the Coliseum. He stepped up to the next dead person and delivered a blow that jarred his elbow and shoulder with the force.

  It felt good, this violence. With every blow that he struck, he could feel the ocean of sadness around him shrinking. Killing, it was like therapy. He took his emotions, bundled them into a little ball and shot them down his arm and into the blade in his hand. Then he took the blade and deposited those emotions into the brains of the living dead. The sun was closer now; he could see the surface through the murky water.

  Dozens of the creatures died at his hand, and he kept working, slaying with no care for time or his own energy. Brian disappeared, replaced by a being of pure emotion, sweat running down its face, its hands sticky with blood, its mind locked away in the task of killing. On the fence, Brian grew to knew the joys of violence, the pleasure of killing and taking on problems with a physical approach. He was reborn... and then he died.

  The soldiers called an end to the shift, yelling and signaling for everyone to stop, but Brian didn't want to stop. Brian turned around to look at the soldier behind him, and for the first time since Sarah had been murdered, because that's what he thought of her death as, he smiled. Then he spun on his heel, eager to remove one last member of the dead army from the face of the planet. He plunged the knife into the eye of a man in a leather jacket. The force of the blow caused the man's eye to erupt, spraying cloudy liquid into Brian's own eye.

  Brian stepped back, rubbing at his eye, trying to get the liquid out. It was a reflex reaction, and in his haste, he forgot that his own hands were covered in the blood of the dead and with a single swipe of his face, he ensured that he would never reach the top of that ocean of sadness. In fact, he was down deeper than ever.

  ****

  The day continued, refugees taking their turn at the fence, hour after hour. Still the dead congregated, and a new problem arose. The fence was tall, but not tall enough. As the bodies piled, up the dead continued to climb them, trampling over the corpses beneath them. And it wasn't long before the tallest of the dead, could reach over the top of the fences.

  Major Miller appeared from inside the arena, short, with a bulbous red face. If he grew a beard, he would look like an alcoholic Santa Claus, but his face was clean-shaven. He took a look at the situation and called a halt to the proceedings. To dispatch any more of the dead would allow them to crest the fence. Everyone saw it, as did the Major.

  The refugees knelt and sat on the concrete apron that was the Coliseum's courtyard. The Major pulled a bullhorn out and flicked it on, holding it up to his thick pink lips. "You did a good job today. There will be food; you will eat. But know this. If another one of my soldiers is hurt, I will return the favor to you. We are here to protect you, but if we must protect ourselves from you, then we will do what we have to."

  The refugees filed into the arena, silent and worried. The lights on the concourse flickered.

  Chapter 32: Wanted

  They were locked in the booth, Murph and the Chief. The dead roamed the power plant, their numbers growing. Shambling corpses from the city trickled in through the downed gate, stumbling over the twisted metal and old, cracked pavement. Murph had no idea of what was drawing them to the power plant, but their numbers had grown considerably.

  The town of Boardman was a small town, never more than 3,500 people living there at any given moment. How many of those people were dead now? How many of those dead were making their way to the power plant, drawn by some impulse that Murph was too dim to understand?

  Murph had watched the gauges dwindle over the last hour. The power plant was not putting out the amount of energy that it had been. They knew the reason why. One look at the conveyor belt was answer enough. The coal wasn't coming in consistently. Out in the yard, mountains of raw coal stood under covered sheds. The hoppers that fed the conveyor belt relied on this mountain for fuel, but the hoppers had to be manually filled to keep the boiler burning. Every other aspect of the power plant was automated. The coal was crushed before it was fed into the boiler. The heat from the burning coal super-heated the water flowing in industrial pipes, transforming it into steam that turned turbines. The turning of the turbines created electricity, all the electricity that Portland would need. But the hoppers were running dry. Someone would have to go outside and use the mini-dozer to push more coal into the hoppers.

  They both knew it, but still they sat there, watching as the power plant's output dwindled. When it had reached a critical level, the Chief stood up and looked at the door. "Well, we can't wait any longer."

  This was the moment that Murph was dreading, the moment where the Chief sent him out among the dead to refill the hoppers. He would do it too... or at least try to. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

  "You want to go out there?" the Chief asked him.

  Murph shook his head.

  "Yeah, I didn't think so." The Chief stood up and looked around the office. He reached into the front shirt pocket of his power plant overalls, and produced a pack of cigarettes, a soft pack, the foil torn apart. He shook the p
ack, peering inside, and said, "Hell, I'm almost out of cigarettes anyway. I'll go."

  Relief washed over Murph, followed by a withering dose of shame. He wished he could be like the Chief, brave... calm. But he wasn't. Murph would never admit it to the Chief, but he was scared, more scared than he had ever been in his life. Death was not something that he spent of lot of his time thinking about, but now it was here, and it was literally knocking on the door.

  The Chief held the pack of cigarettes out to Murph. "You want one of these before I go?"

  "But what about the rules?"

  The Chief smiled, a fatherly smile, and said, "Son, the moment the dead began getting up and walking around the world, I think all of the rules went right out the window. Go on. Do it."

  Murph reached into the pack with a trembling hand, and as they smoked underneath the florescent lights of the control room, amid all of the twitching dials and glowing lights of the console, the Chief told him his plan. Murph nodded and shook his head, focusing on the task at hand. He would be important; he would serve as the Chief's eyes, watching his back every step along the way.

  When the time was right, and their cigarettes had been ground to ash on the floor of the control room, the Chief moved to the door. He turned the lock with a trembling hand, and then yanked the door open. On the other side of the door, a familiar face greeted them. It was one of the men that had left earlier, presumably to save his family. Apparently, all he had succeeded in doing was becoming a meal for the dead. His right arm hung at his side, tendons and bone exposed where the flesh had been chewed off.

  The Chief lowered his shoulder and bulldozed the man off of the metal stairs that led up to the door. Murph moved to the door, slammed it shut, and locked it. Before he closed the door all the way, he saw the Chief in full flight, dodging through the handful of dead that had gathered in the cooling tower room. He shivered with fear.