Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

  “Rat king,” Jarrett said, “could fit through there. Big enough for a rat king.”

  “Rat kings aren’t real.” Alex shot a stern look at Keane, who just rolled his eyes. “But there are almost certainly rats in there infected with the Plague or something else and I don’t want to mess with ‘em.”

  “So we’re not going in there?” Keane pouted.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “What’d we come down here for? What’d I rip apart that door for?”

  “It’s just a sewer! There isn’t any gold down here, man! Do you see anything but a little river of shit water? There aren’t any other tunnels or doors or anything. It’s just a big-ass sewer, that’s all. I’m sorry,” Alex sighed. “I wish there was something down here. It would’ve made this day worthwhile. But there’s not.”

  They all felt the rumble.

  “What do you think that was?” Keane asked.

  “Maybe...” Alex leaned through the doorway into the tunnel, feeling the slight breeze. “Maybe there’s water down here. Maybe there’s like some sort of river system that still exists, and it shifts things around. Could be natural caverns underneath all this.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something to see,” Keane said, smiling at Jarrett.

  “We’re not sight-seeing, though, we’re—” And then Alex fell.

  It was a jarring drop, not lethal, not frightening, just jarring. Painful and shitty and wet. He landed in a fetid slop and knew his ankle had turned. “GOD! FUCK!” It probably was just a sprain. Just a sprain, Keane could haul him up if he could just grab that ladder. Alex looked at his hands, looked for cuts in the dying light of the thrown torch. He couldn’t see shit for shit.

  “Keane, gimme a hand. I’m okay.”

  Jarrett’s head shot into the tunnel. “Are you all right?”

  “I just said I’m fine,” Alex grumbled. He sat up and scooted his butt forward a little, sloshing in the muck. He was going to stink for days. The group hadn’t come across fresh water in a week, and it would probably be another damn week before they did. Alex saw the coming days going to hell; saw himself sitting alone in a dirty tent and just when he’d gotten up the nerve to ask Tru if she wanted to lay with him.

  “Need more than a hand, looks like,” Keane said, clambering down the ladder.

  “No, I can get myself up there, I just need—”

  “Man, forget it. I’ve got you.” Keane clapped Alex’s back and coughed. “You smell like shit.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was another rumble.

  “I know you felt that.”

  It didn’t stop.

  Then the thing came around the bend, filling the tunnel, all of it, claiming every inch of space in its insane locomotion.

  Torsos, heads, limbs, all desiccated, all human, all undead, all packed together with mud and blood and everything else and wound tight with threads of bone and flesh and fungus. A gnashing moaning rumbling thing that pawed at the walls with skeletal hands, feeling old grooves, having run this track a thousand times like a polished marble. Broken teeth and watery eyes and bloody gums all searching for the least bit of meat. Plunging through the tunnel, the rumble now a crescendo of wails and grunts and other things going on inside the wet pulsing core of the rat king.

  Jarrett’s head snapped back as the thing came by, and he saw a split-second flash of faces and feet and skulls and things he never wanted to see, ever, ever again. The thing swept by and rolled up Alex and Keane into it and swallowed them and it continued its terrible progress through the bowels of the city, searching for every last warm morsel to sustain itself.

  * * *

  Jarrett never explained the rat king to the others, to anyone. He didn’t tell them just how the rotters had taken Alex and Keane. He didn’t think they would understand. Only nature would. Nature, who, he now knew, was a goddess in Hell.

  Ten / The Politics of Madness

  “I’ll pick up the tab,” Blake said, sipping from a terrible cup of coffee. He motioned across the diner to the waitress.

  Voorhees had barely touched his sandwich. It was ice-cold now, two and a half hours after it was dropped in front of him, two and a half hours of trying to wrap his head around what Blake had been telling him.

  “There are some elements that can only be contained, not cut out.”

  Crime was an inevitability, and in today’s world, there were greater priorities than the futile pursuit of trying to eliminate wrongdoing.

  The answer? Government-sanctioned organized crime. Finn Meyer’s boys ran protection rackets, prostitution, smuggled illicit goods like alcohol into the city. But they pledged not to commit acts of violence. No sexual assault, no homicide, noting that violated their “honor code” and nullified their standing with the city administration.

  Of course, there was the occasional slip-up. Unavoidable. But wasn’t that occasional fall from grace better than a robbery spree or, God forbid, a serial rapist?

  So what was the role of the Peace Officer, if not to fight crime?

  “We keep an eye on Meyer, sure, but mostly we’re just a presence on the street for people’s peace of mind,” Blake had told him. “Our hands are tied a bit, but so are his. There’s a balance maintained and the people of Gaylen are better off for it. Don’t get me wrong = every so often a domestic spat or something escalates, or one of Meyers’ goons crosses the line, and we get some actual police work. But for the most part, street crime stays within the honor code.”

  “Honor code,” Voorhees growled. “Bullshit.”

  “I know it sounds wrong, I know it does. But this is a new system, and so far it works.”

  “How long do you think Meyer can be contained? Are you really so naïve as to think he doesn’t already have other rackets going on right under your nose? That prick thinks he owns the cops. Far as I can tell he’s right.”

  “The city can’t pour all its resources into a war on petty crime, Voorhees! Meyer may be a bastard but the fact is that the thugs under his umbrella are kept in line. So they take credits from local businesses and use them to buy booze. So they pimp—don’t you think a streetwalker is safer with a pimp watching her back? I know it sounds wrong, Voorhees, I know we’re supposed to cling to this ideal that says no crime can go unpunished, but for God’s sake that’s not the reality we live in!”

  “We’re supposed to try and make it that way!” Voorhees yelled, pounding the table. Neighboring patrons tried not to stare. “So we can’t bring crime down to zero. Does that mean we sit on our hands or, worse yet, help them? This is fucking depraved.”

  “But like he said, it works.”

  A middle-aged woman with light brown hair and a sash around her overcoat slid into the booth beside Blake, flashing her P.O. badge. “Emily Halstead. Hey there, partner.”

  So now it was going to be two against one. Voorhees threw his hands in the air. “Forget it. I’ve gotta put in my resignation. This funny farm can find another fake cop.”

  “Blake, would you mind letting us get acquainted? That is, unless you two are already joined at the hip.” Halstead winked at Blake, who sighed and got up.

  “Like I said, I’ll get the check. Think before you walk, Voorhees.”

  Halstead took Voorhees’ plate and looked the sandwich over. “You gonna eat this?”

  “I don’t have an appetite.”

  She nodded and took a bite. “Mustard. Pricey.”

  “So you want to preach to me, too?” he muttered.

  She shook her head, chewing. “The system’s been broken from the beginning. Nothing makes sense inside these walls.”

  So she wasn’t nuts. Voorhees leaned forward, taking up his coffee. “Don’t drink that,” Halstead advised.

  “Why do you do the job, then?” he asked.

  “In hopes that things will start to change. This is still America, right? You read the history books, you know change is possible. If not here, not anywhere.”

  “What’re we gonna do? Go
on strike? Let Finn Meyer put his own cops on the beat? Or do we lobby the Senate to shake up their precious sandbox?”

  “How long have you been inside the Wall, Voorhees?”

  “About five months.”

  “You catch on pretty quick, you know that? I’m guessing you tend to resist this whole notion that the world out there no longer exists.”

  “Of course.” He picked a wet French fry off the plate. “I’m thinking about enlisting. I’d rather deal with rotters than this.”

  “You’d still have to live here,” she said. “Why not fight the system from the inside? You may feel helpless right now, but believe me, you’re in a position to make a difference.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I do. It just means pissing Casey off now and then. Maybe he’ll dock your pay, maybe Meyer’s boys won’t want to be your buddies anymore. I’ve been threatened more than once and I’m still here.

  “Like Blake said, think before you walk.”

  * * *

  Voorhees made the mistake of visiting Casey’s office and trying to be rational.

  “If you’d rather live in the badlands, get your shit and go,” the S.P.O. snapped. He wheeled himself out from behind his desk and asked, “Did they tell you how I lost my legs yet?”

  Voorhees shook his head. Another mistake.

  “I came north early on to help with construction. On my way up here—didn’t have a military convoy flanking me like the later ones—my friends and I were held up by badlanders. Highwaymen. They shot me. You can’t see it, it’s above me hairline, but yeah, they shot me and left me for dead.

  “Then they came back.”

  He kneaded the stumps of his knees, sweat running down his brow. “They came back that night and took my body to their camp. They were sure I was dead, you see. And they were hungry.”

  He narrowed his eyes to fiery slits. “They’re just like the rotters, those people—lawless, godless animals. Take society away and that’s what you’re left with. The human animal.

  “It was my screams that alerted a nearby Army patrol. They’d begun sawing off my legs.”

  He took a deep breath and massaged his temples. “Oh, Voorhees. Don’t you see, that’s the alternative? If we didn’t have Meyer and his honor code, there would be animals running loose in the streets. And we wouldn’t have the strength to stop them. Everything would fall apart—the Great Cities are in their infancy and we have to safeguard their development.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  And Meyer will set it ablaze when you’re halfway across, Voorhees thought.

  Eleven / Best-Laid Plans

  Ian Gregory sat in on his first Senate morning meeting, positioned behind and to the left of Gillies as the Senate President spoke to his fellow statesmen.

  “I spoke with Britain by radio last night. They’re still being difficult, but I think they’re beginning to come around, at least as far as the airfield is concerned. I assured them that it would be finished by November.”

  “Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” asked Senator Georgia Manning.

  “If you need more manpower, Georgia, then get it. You’ve got a whole damn city at your disposal.”

  “Enough people already know about the airfield,” she retorted.

  “Then lie,” came the exasperated reply. “Go outside of that construction company for volunteers—I don’t trust those people anymore. Tell the volunteers that they’re working on the site for a new hospital. They don’t have to know anything!”

  Gregory had tuned out the conversation and was studying each Senator’s face. He tried to separate the loyal ones from the opportunists. It was always visible in the face. As a man of God—and Hand of God’s leader—he had honed his ability to sniff out sin.

  Maybe that was why Gillies made him just a little uncomfortable.

  But everyone had their flaws, their secrets; and, though he fought it, his mind drifted again to Barry.

  The final days of the Wall’s construction... the burn pits, trenches twenty feet deep and piled with crippled, decapitated and paralyzed rotters. The foul stench of death, so thick and pervasive that all the soldiers standing guard had to wear gas masks. And the moaning. The moaning and gurgling as the undead flailed about in a slurry of leaking fluids and decaying meat. The burn team hadn’t come by in days and trucks were bringing in all of the ferals that had been picked off along the Wall’s perimeter. They said it would be more efficient this way. It was madness. Weird, otherworldly groans filled the sky day and night.

  Finally the burn team arrived. The dead in the pits were liquefying beneath the summer sun, and a fog of putrefaction had settled over the place; seeping into clothing and skin, staining every man and woman on-site.

  When the burn team pointed their flamethrowers into the pits, the things erupted like volcanoes. Instead of ash and lava it was gore and thrashing, living limbs that rained down on everyone. Suddenly all was chaos, and the insanity that had been building for a week finally screamed to life. Everyone was in a panic, including Sergeant Ian Gregory. He was frantically searching through the smoke and slaughter for Kendra Barry. He pulled off his mask and screamed her name, then the stench of roasting flesh filled his nose and eyes and throat and he fell to his knees vomiting.

  Somewhere in there, in the madness, she had fallen. Perhaps shoved, perhaps tripped, or maybe she’d just run blindly into the flaming pit and been caught in the blackened claws of the undead.

  They did manage to recover her body a few days later during the cleanup; official cause of death was smoke inhalation. But Gregory, identifying her body, had seen the marks around her throat where they had choked the life from her.

  * * *

  “Has Finn Meyer been extorting credits from you?”

  Voorhees leaned on the counter and looked Becks hard in the eye. She gave him a what’re-you-gonna-do shrug and said, “It keeps people from stealing. He polices the market more often than the cops.”

  “But he is stealing from you, don’t you see that?” Voorhees sighed.

  “It could be worse,” was her reply.

  “How, exactly?”

  “I have a business here, Officer, and a home. I have a normal life. I was the only one from my hometown to reach the Great Cities. We were being followed by rotters. We had to try to swim across this lake—then suddenly there were rotters all over the shore, on all sides, surrounding u. Fourteen went in. By the time an Army convoy happened by, I was the only one still treading water.”

  “I’m sorry,” Voorhees said. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But how does that make this all right?”

  “It makes this tolerable,” she said. “I spent two days in that water. I watched as people sank, one by one, around me. I ran out of tears. I couldn’t scream anymore. I could only fight to stay afloat. And their eyes—the rotters, every pair of eyes was on me. Those soldiers could have just passed me by but they fought those bastards for hours just to get to me. They brought me here. I’m grateful.”

  “Don’t be grateful to Meyer,” Voorhees told her. “His days are numbered.”

  “What are you trying to do?” she asked softly, sadness in her eyes, pleading eyes. “Life is okay now. Please.”

  Someone nudged Voorhees’ back. Remembering that he was blocking the checkout, he stepped back. A hard-faced woman in a long coat offered her hand. “Pat Morgan.”

  “P.O. Voorhees.” He gave her a firm shake. “Are you another officer?”

  “No, air,” she said, with the slightest twinkle in her eye. “I work for Mister Meyer. He’d like to buy you lunch.”

  Twelve / Candy

  Meyer had a handful of colorful rock candy, probably homemade, that he munched obnoxiously as he and Pat Morgan walked Voorhees down to the shore of Lake Michigan.

  “I thought this was an invitation to lunch,” said Voorhees. Meyer shrugged. “Not hungry.”

  “Crooked
and cheap. But I’ll bet your whores are top dollar.”

  “Interested in a lay, Officer?” Meyer grinned. “I can get you a special deal. You ever fucked an Asian girl? I do mean girl, by the way.”

  A quiet chill settled in Voorhees’ gut. “What do you want? If this is about either bribes or threats you’d best just save your breath. I don’t care.”

  “I have a lot of little girls,” Meyer continued, as if Voorhees hadn’t spoken. “In basements all over Gaylen. They’re quite willing, too—”

  Voorhees seized Meyer by the collar of his coat. Morgan whipped out a .45 and stuck it against his temple.

  “I didn’t think guns were allowed in Gaylen,” Voorhees said through gritted teeth. He didn’t let Meyer go.

  “Oh, they’re not,” Meyer replied, his breath sickly sweet. “Neither are booze or hash or meth, but there seems to be a steady demand and, well, why send people away empty-handed? I don’t believe in that. The government doesn’t believe in that.”

  “You’re trash. If this were my city I’d—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard how you did things back in Louisiana. So trusted, so admired that nearly every citizen and all your cops bailed on you when the military withdrew? Leaving you with what, a handful of bums? What else happened down there, Voorhees? I’ve heard lots of strange talk about weird things in the southern badlands.

  “You know what they say?” Meyer asked, delicately extracting Voorhees’ hands from the folds of his coat. “People say that there are ghosts and gods roaming about out there. They call these days the Last Days. But I don’t subscribe to that, and I’m sure you don’t either, being a rational man. Just the same—”

  He slugged Voorhees in the stomach, doubling the old man over, and shouted in his ear “In here, I am God!”

  Morgan clipped Voorhees in the back of the head with the butt of her gun. He fell to his knees, vision swimming, the voice of Finn Meyer fading in and out and then gone altogether.