Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

  “What about emergencies?”

  “They still bill people’s accounts. Costs a lot more too. But not for you.”

  “How many emergencies do you think go unreported as a result of that?” he asked.

  “People can afford medical care, it’s not like they’re being paid minimum wage. Hell, minimum wage isn’t even minimum wage anymore. You know full-time parents with multiple kids earn as much as a Senate aide?”

  Voorhees pocketed the medical pass. “Any other perks?”

  “Discounted food and entertainment. All the food in Gaylen is grown or raised on farms. Beef is expensive as hell.”

  “You said entertainment?”

  “Sure. You know the live music in Chicago? They do that in Gaylen too. And he rugby teams are always looking for new players if you think you’re up to it. Plays, too, chosen by the Senate. Our city admin, Senator Cullen, writes some himself. Really fucking boring unless you’re stoned, but that costs an arm and a leg—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Anyway, all the P.Os live in the same building, a refurbished hotel on West Avenue. They’ll put you on the top floor. You think it’s a steal but then you find out the heating is shot. Course, they’ll still dock your pay for it”

  “Yeah, back to the drugs.”

  “C’mon, Voorhees. Everyone needs a break once in a while. It’s just pot.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. Do you smoke on the job?”

  She glared at him. “Of course not.”

  “Good.”

  “Which reminds me, Gaylen’s a dry city. We do still have some moonshiners underground but we usually just let that go. Alcohol’s not as much of a problem when no one drives.”

  “I was about to ask. These buses travel between cities though. And run on ethanol?”

  “Yeah, and so do the generators in town, but the good news is Gaylen’s hydroelectric plant came back online last month. They’ve been working to keep that thing alive for the last fifty years. Not a bad investment. Technology, industry may have stagnated in the last century, but we didn’t. We’re surviving.”

  Surviving. That seemed to be enough for most. Voorhees grimaced. “And is the water as clean as Chicago’s?”

  “Cleaner.” Killian’s smile had returned. It was probably contagious in most circumstances. Voorhees had forgotten what it felt like to smile. Every waking moment since he’d been born had been a losing war against the undead. Every day was the end of the world. And now he was supposed to believe in this walled paradise, this new Eden, established by the same government who’d left everyone in the badlands to die?

  Of course they would say it was one’s own choice to remain in the badlands. But it had been hard to swallow the radio broadcasts about a rotter-free safe zone.

  Well, here it is. Right outside your window.

  Gaylen, on the southern tip of Lake Michigan. His new home. He tried to focus on that, rather than the nightmares of the past with their strange characters and unanswered questions. He especially tried not to think about the cloaked specter of Death, astride a pale horse, charging into the undead hordes.

  Life is normal now, he told himself.

  “We celebrate holidays, too,” said Killian. “Halloween is coming up. You know what that is? On that night...”

  Voorhees shut his eyes and tried to block out the rest of her words. He tried to think about health benefits and utilities and neighbors but he simply hadn’t been bred for such a life. There was no after the apocalypse in his mind. All they had here was the Wall, and he couldn’t wall out his memories.

  Four / Dead Lizards with Bells on Their Feet

  They were dangling by strings from the lowest branches of the trees surrounding the rock quarry. Adam peered into their lifeless dark eyes and saw his own soulless gaze, doll’s-eyes blinking curiously.

  They were alarms to announce the presence of afterdead. Afterdead... he hadn’t called the rotters that since he’d shed his robes. It seemed so long ago. Strange, when he had existed for ages; as Death, every moment had been the same, and time without meaning. A thousand years or a day, it had mattered not to him. But now he marked hours, days, weeks. He rose with the sun and would observe the changing of the seasons. He bore scars on his hands and feet, and in his reflection he saw not a being frozen in time but a man living his life.

  In his reflection, in the lizard’s eyes, he saw torchlight, and spun to meet the young woman climbing out from the sea of shadows that filled the quarry.

  She stopped short, gaped at his face. “Is it you?” she asked, blue eyes shining. “Are you the angel?”

  He frowned and took a step toward her. “I—”

  THWACK! An arrow planted itself in the tree beside him. “Don’t move!” barked a man’s voice.

  Another man, old and frail, stepped out from behind the girl with a bow pulled taut in trembling hands. “Do as the boy says, friend.”

  “Are you alone?” A third voice called.

  “Yes,” Adam replied.

  “Are you Army?”

  “No.”

  “How could you be out here by yourself?” stammered the old man. “Better tell the truth before you get hurt!”

  “It’s the angel,” the girl breathed. What did she mean by that?

  Gravel crunched beneath boots as a man approached, a man with a hard face, shirtless body slick with sweat. He had a camouflage tee tied around his waist. Combat fatigues. Maybe Adam would have been better off saying he was Army.

  The man saw Adam studying his clothing and grinned. “They’re stolen,” he said. “We used to raid Army camps back before the withdrawal. It’s a lot tougher finding something to eat these days, I’m sure you know that—but at least we’re warm.”

  The man extended his hand. “I’m Thackeray,” he said. “You look like you’re an albino. Must be brutal for you out here.”

  Adam nodded quickly, shaking the man’s hand. “Stand down!” Thackeray shouted over his shoulder.

  “Come down into the crater. I don’t want our torches visible up here too long.” Thackeray patted Adam’s back and led him past the old man and girl; she looked woefully disappointed.

  * * *

  “Must’ve taken a lot out of you to get here,” Thackeray said. “How did you hear about us?”

  “I didn’t—I was just passing through.”

  “Now that I find hard to believe.” Thackeray smiled. “I know the welcome wagon was a little rough, but you’re in good hands now. Matter of fact, some people around here call me the boss. Not a title I much care for, but it seems to stick.”

  He pointed toward the top of the quarry and the darkness beyond. “Tons of rotters in the cities around here. They tend not to wander off in our direction, though. If they ever thought to come a-hunting, we might be in trouble. But for now all we have to deal with is the occasional feral.”

  The camp at the bottom of the crater was comprised mainly of Army tents. Small fires burned here and there, but nothing that would attract attention topside. In fact, even as he came down the slope of the quarry Adam hadn’t seen any light at all; the fires were each concealed behind boulders.

  The people there were families of all ages, and mother and child alike tensed when they saw Adam; but relaxed when they saw Thackeray at his side.

  A large rodent turned on a spit in front of Thackeray’s tent. “Hungry?” he asked. Adam shook his head.

  “It’s been overcast the past week,” Thackeray remarked. “Guess it’s a lot harder for you when it isn’t.”

  “Yes.” Adam sat on a rock beside the fire. Thackeray stabbed a fork into the rat. Blood ran, sizzling, into the flames.

  “We always have to make sure they’re not undead before we eat ‘em,” Thackeray said. “What have you been living on?”

  “Uh... mostly berries.” Adam silently begged for the questions to end. He tried to avoid badlanders, and had he not been mesmerized by the lizards with their tiny bells he would have turned and gone in th
e opposite direction. As much as he yearned for companionship—

  (Lily)

  He didn’t expect all people to be as accepting as the child had been. The man who’d helped to get Lily out of Jefferson Harbor, Voorhees—he had regarded the former Death with more than a bit of apprehension. But he’d been a good man. Adam had watched him for a long time to make sure of just that.

  “You’re lost in thought,” Thackeray said. He chewed an ear off of the rat’s blackened head. “I don’t think you heard a word I just said.”

  “I’m sorry. What was it?”

  “I said the berries around here are deadly poisonous.”

  “Oh.” Why was the man telling Adam that? He was forgetting his own lies.

  “Let me try something,” Thackeray said through a mouthful of rat meat, and sank the fork’s tines into Adam’s shoulder.

  They both stared down at the handle of the fork. It had gone clean through the new suit Adam had taken from one of the rotters back in town.

  “This is where you would express some sort of discomfort,” Thackeray said.

  Adam looked across the fire at him. Tentatively, he grasped the fork and pulled it free. “I... it didn’t...”

  “I know who you are,” Thackeray said softly. “Josie was right. You’re the angel. The angel of death.”

  He reached out and took the fork back. “Sorry for the whole ‘stabbing you’ thing. I’m a little eccentric, they say. Maybe that’s why I can sit across from you and keep a straight face. If the others knew...” He shrugged and took another bite of his dinner.

  “How do you know of me?” Adam demanded.

  “Most badlanders in these parts have heard of you. I mean, you’ve saved so many lives, cut the undead down right in front of them—did you really think no one would tell?”

  “I’ve appeared to many in the past,” Adam said. “I didn’t think anyone would believe them.”

  “Well, in a world where the dead walk, nothing seems impossible. I’ve heard old folk say they saw you killing rotters seventy, eighty years ago. Were you?”

  “I have been hunting them since it began,” Adam said. “But things are different now. You have to understand—I’m no longer the Reaper.”

  “I guess that explains the suit. Sorry for ruining your jacket, by the way.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “So what’s been strapped to your back all night?” Thackeray asked.

  Removing his jacket, Adam loosed the ropes securing the scythe blade to his pale torso, and handed the weapon across the flames. “Jesus, that’s heavy,” Thackeray whispered. “So this is it.”

  Adam nodded. “You don’t talk to a lot of people, do you?” Thackeray asked.

  “I’ve not had much need to,” was the reply. “There was one, but...” His face brightened with hope. “Maybe you’ve heard of her. Maybe she told you her story. Her name is Lily.”

  Thackeray shook his head. “Sorry friend.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought so.”

  “Where did you know her?”

  “Somewhere far away. A man took her north. He said she’d be safe there.”

  “Maybe he meant the Great Cities?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “It’s the place where the government’s hoarded away all of our country’s resources.” Thackeray’s expression grew dark, angry. “It’s where they’ve consolidated America—leaving Americans like us here with nothing. And now all the troops are there too. They’re walling themselves up in there and going on as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist, as if the plague doesn’t exist. They’re wrapping themselves up in a blanket of ignorance and trying to sleep through the apocalypse. As for the rest of us—the people who choose to keep fighting for this land, the people who are actually living—we’re condemned along with our homes. But make no mistake, the Great Cities aren’t going to last. Unless something’s done, the bubble is going to burst, and then no one will have any resources to use against the undead.”

  He spoke with a fervor that drew onlookers from the shadows. People murmured in agreement and clenched their fists as his voice rose. “Either we can watch the Great Cities fall to the rotters or we can do something ourselves, to give all of America a fighting chance!”

  He lowered his head. “I’m sorry. The anger is always there—anger and helplessness. The outrage at what they’ve done! That’s what drives me.”

  The people around them had begun to drift away. “I understand,” Adam said.

  “Do you?”

  “I feel the same way about the undead.” Taking the scythe from Thackeray, Adam added, “But not helpless.”

  Thackeray nodded grimly. “There is still hope. We can still... but the rotters, some of them, are getting smarter. I suppose you’ve seen that too.”

  “From time to time.” In his mind’s eye Adam saw the ones Lily’s mad brother had trained, like dogs. Only those dogs nearly behaved like living, breathing humans.

  “The King of the Dead,” Thackeray whispered. “Is he real?”

  “I don’t know of whom you’re speaking.”

  “Oh. Never mind then.”

  “They’re beasts. They have no king,” Adam told the man. “Whatever you’ve heard is likely just a story people tell.”

  “What do you call yourself?”

  “Adam.”

  “Well, Adam, you were just a story people told, not long ago,” said Thackeray, and he disappeared into his tent.

  Five / Freedom

  “I can point you toward the Great Cities, but that’s all I can do,” Thackeray told Adam the next morning. “We’re moving east.”

  Adam had dreamt of Lily again. This time he saw her huddled in shadow, shivering, as thick flakes of snow settled in her long dark hair.

  These were more than just dreams, he was sure. Once, he could have held her life’s flame in his very hands; now he could only guess at what fate had in store for her. He had to reach these Great Cities.

  The girl, Josie, set about drawing Adam a map using charcoal on sackcloth. She paused to whisper something into Thackeray’s ear. He nodded at her, and the girl beamed at Adam.

  The angel. It had been one of many personas he’d adopted over the years in order to deal with mortals. But it was this form, that of the pale man in black, that he was most comfortable in. Perhaps that was why he’d been reborn with this look. Perhaps he himself had willed it. So hard to remember. Day by day he was forgetting the details of his service on the other side.

  “Before you go there,” Thackeray said,

  “let me tell you why we’re not going with you. Let me tell you what I know about the men who built the Wall.

  “A few years ago, I lived there. I trusted in the Senate, and even worked for them—I was an aide to the Senate’s President-for-life. Gillies. God-fearing son of a preacher. He really believed—still does—that it’s his calling to rebuild the world. For who, Man or God or both, I can’t tell ya. But he truly believes that what he’s doing is good, and right—and that’s the problem.

  “When we came out here to try and sway the badlanders, I was on his side. Even when rotters swarmed the convoy in Utah and half of us were left for dead—still I was on his side. I shrugged off the badlanders’ offers of food and shelter and trekked back to the Great Cities with my colleagues. Back to Cleveland, where my mother lived.

  “What happened there is beyond reprehensible. What they’ve done, in the name of what’s good and right, is depraved—and these atrocities are bred by ignorance, not evil.”

  Adam listened, and Josie drew, while Thackeray told him everything.

  “Here we are free,” he said when he was finished. “Here we take the good with the bad and we face our problems. We share grief as well as joy, and it makes us appreciate the joy all the more. I understood that, for when I came back to Utah, back to the badlanders, grieving, they took me in with open arms.”

  He placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “You know what Man is capa
ble of. You’ll see, and then you’ll understand too.”

  Josie handed over the map. It was simple and straightforward: northeast until he hit the fabled Wall.

  “We’re headed for the East Coast if you ever want to look us up. Maybe you’ll join us out there someday. Someday things will be right again. Trust me.”

  Thackeray said those two words with such dead certainty that Adam wondered what he hadn’t been let in on.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, rolling the map up and placing it inside his jacket. “I wish you the best, Thackeray.”

  “Please. Todd.” Thackeray shook Adam’s hand for the last time. “Take care of yourself. And her.”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  Thackeray and a couple other men walked Adam to the edge of the quarry.

  “Listen, I have to ask you something,” Thackeray said. “You probably get this all the time...” He looked expectantly at Adam, who stared blankly back.

  “About... the nature of things. God. Afterlife.”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they real?”

  The other two men stopped, the same yearning in their eyes. It was almost childlike... and what good would it do them, really, to know?

  Adam didn’t have to wrestle with that particular quandary. “I don’t know,” he said. “You have to understand that it was never necessary that I know such things as God’s nature, or where people go... so I never did.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Thackeray pressed.

  Adam forced a smile. “I think it’s all in what you believe. There’s no knowing.”

  He had sensed high beings before. He knew there was something out there, that he’d come from somewhere... but whether or not that something gave a damn about humanity was another story.