Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

He cried out her name. His head was going to be pulped any second, the Petrified Man digging his heel into the base of it.

  Then the pressure eased off. The zombie stepped back. Adam was able, painfully, to turn his head ninety degrees and look up. And he saw the Petrified Man standing there, a dull stare on its face, the point of the scythe protruding from its groin.

  Lily released the blade and stumbled back. The zombie turned toward her, stiffly, hands grasping at the blade in the small of its back. Then it teetered and came down like a redwood.

  Eviscerato spread his arms and roared. He ran at the girl.

  Adam caught his ankle and brought him crashing down. Adam leapt onto the King of the Dead’s back and locked his arms like a vise around the rotter’s neck.

  He pressed his lips to the hollow of Eviscerato’s ear. “Never again,” he growled. And he wrenched with all his might.

  The zombie’s spitting head separated from his shoulders, and a geyser of foul waste spewed forth from the stump of his neck. His eyes turned white and lolled in his skull, and his mouth dropped open, as if to utter final words. But there were none. He would die, this time, without ceremony.

  Adam stood, clutching the head, and gripped it in both hands. He stared into Eviscerato’s hateful face. “Never again.”

  And he knelt over the Petrified Man’s corpse and staked the head on the end of the scythe. A grating howl sounded as whatever was inside of the King took leave of his corrupt crown.

  Adam fell on his back. Lily threw herself on him. “No!”

  “I’m all right,” he whispered. “I just need... a moment...”

  A pillar of flame passed through the entrance and into the station. Lily shook Adam. “Get up! Hurry!”

  Adam rolled over onto his elbows and saw the Omega shuffling toward them, reduced nearly to a skeleton by the fire covering it but still coming, the rage of a thousand million forcing its withered limbs to move.

  Adam rose, clutching Lily to his breast.

  The Omega stopped a few yards from them. Its head rolled uncertainly on a brittle neck, and a cry of despair emanated from the center of the thing—a thousand million wicked souls consumed by their cosmic failure.

  The Omega exploded.

  Adam covered Lily in his cloak and closed his eyes to the hail of burning bones. They rained over him, tinkling on the floor; then it was over.

  He hustled her out of the station and into the street. Neither saying a word, they made their way back to the Hummer.

  Adam opened the back door, and Lily cradled Voorhees’ head. “We can go now,” she said.

  “Are they all dead?” he rasped.

  “Those that aren’t soon will be,” Adam said.

  “The people? All the people?”

  Adam didn’t answer.

  “Rome is ash, then.” Voorhees’ words whistled through bloody teeth.

  Adam didn’t reply to that either. Something more pressing had suddenly dawned on him.

  He was supposed to appoint a replacement, wasn’t he? A new sentinel, to keep the order. That the thought hadn’t crossed his mind until now told him what he needed to do. He looked at the detective—what was left of him. This world had worn Voorhees down, reduced him to a shade. There was nothing more he could do while bound to this coil.

  Adam placed his hand on Voorhees’ shoulder. “I have an offer for you. A job, if you’re interested.”

  Voorhees shook his head. “I think I’d rather just die, friend.”

  A tiny cloud of breath escaped the cop’s pale lips. Then no more.

  “But...” Adam shook his head. “You were the one. I chose you.”

  Lily hugged his back. “I chose you,” she said softly.

  He turned to her. “What?”

  She was glowing.

  A soft aura—like a cloak of white—covered her figure. She smiled up at him, then looked down at her hands in wonder.

  “You?” Adam stammered. “But you’re—you’re—a child.”

  “You were too, once,” Lily said. And it all came back to him.

  A kingdom in the east... he a young boy, working in his grandfather’s fields. He’d seen her there, the woman in white, and had known she was Death. Terrified at first, he’d told his grandfather and fled to the city. And that was where she awaited him.

  And she’d told him, and made him understand why it was him, and he now knew what it was that had stirred deep in his soul, had made him restless all throughout his young life. Now he knew why he stared every night at the stars. They had beckoned, as she had; no longer afraid, he had taken her hands in his and accepted.

  “A child,” Adam whispered. Lily took his hands in hers.

  “I’ll always be here,” she said, “whenever you need me. Just call me.”

  “Lilith,” he breathed. She nodded with a smile.

  He knew she wouldn’t remember. Not at first. Perhaps later, with the passing of these strange aeons, they would find each other again, and he would tell her the story—her story.

  Then she stepped through him, through space, and went to the place from whence he’d come.

  Gaylen crumbled to the earth.

  Epilogue / Afterlife

  As dawn broke, Jeff Cullen breathed in the cloying scent of death and coughed loudly. Perched in the back of a Jeep, he called to the nearest soldier on the city perimeter. “How long do you suppose we need to stay out here?”

  “You can go anytime you want,” the soldier muttered. “Your job’s done.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cullen snapped. “May I remind you that I am—”

  He was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground. The tip of a blade carved from bone pressed into his throat.

  A charred man in soot-stained robes knelt over the senator. “You did this?”

  Cullen started to scream and felt the point of the blade bite into his flesh. “Oh God. Lower your weapons!” he called to the soldiers around him. “Stay back! Lower your weapons!” But not a single one of them had raised his or her gun anyway.

  “How many people did you kill today?” Adam snarled.

  “I—we had to do it! We did it for the other cities! My job is to serve the greater good! That’s what I did!”

  Adam came close enough for Cullen to smell his burnt flesh. He turned the blade as if readying to strike. Cullen’s rhetoric broke down into senseless babble.

  “Resign your post,” Adam rasped. “No more. Never again.”

  The senator nodded quickly. “Yes. Yes! Of course I will. I should. I’m sorry, so sorry...

  Adam rose and was gone.

  Soldiers looked down at Cullen with contempt. Surely they didn’t take what he’d said seriously, about resigning... but they were walking away from him now, and ignoring his pitiful cries.

  Others glanced around in confusion at the man in white’s departure. One pointed toward the horizon.

  The man in white sat on a pale horse. He raised his scythe into the air, a salute—then rode out of sight.

  There was much work to be done.

  AFTERDEAD: A.D. 2007

  0 / Grinning Samuel

  The air was musty and stale, choking Ryland with every ragged breath. Seated on a rickety old chair before a table coated with dust, he imagined he was in the waiting room of a mausoleum. He’d been here two hours. Seemed the Reaper was overbooked today.

  Before him yawned the mouth of a maze: a series of catacombs cut deep into the earth. A bitter cold whispered at him from the blackness, further constricting his lungs. In contrast was the warmth of klieg lights on his back; his long face was made longer in shadows cast sharply upon the table. On second thought, this seemed less a mausoleum than a television studio. Backlit like a late-night host, Ryland crossed one leg over the other and tapped his gold wristwatch, waited on his guest. Flanked by the klieg lights at Ryland’s rear were his audience, a huddled contingency wearing insect-like night vision helmet, hugging their M4 carbines which would punctuate his words like a lau
gh track if the guest wasn’t being cooperative.

  The hush in the entrance of the catacombs was palpable as the mold in the air. His men’s breath, filtered through their helmets, was inaudible. Ryland coughed on a mote of dust. The sound cracked and echoed like a rifle report. Then the hush returned.

  The hush was anticipation.

  Something shifted in the catacombs. Ryland straightened up a bit, as a formality; although what was shuffling through the dirt towards the klieg lights likely couldn’t see him, not because of the lighting but because its eyes had long crumbled from their sockets.

  Still Samuel always found his way to the table. Sometimes Samuel found his way to other things.

  He was attired in a soiled and worn shirt from the colonial era that had once been white, but was now a dingy brown; same with his loose-fitting trousers. Samuel never requested new clothing. He probably only wore these threadbare threads out of habit. If they finally fell from his shoulders, revealing his emaciated husk of a frame, he’d likely not react.

  Everyone always noticed his hands first. Ryland’s gunmen heard the rusty creaking of Samuel’s metal fingers, crude constructs tethered to his wrists with wire; fitted over what remained of his original appendages with an intricate system of antique clock parts housed within the palms. The mechanical hands flexed continuously as Samuel plodded along.

  Once interest in the fidgety hands had waned, there was nowhere else to look but at his face: brown flesh-paper so fragile thin, stretched over an angular skull; the holes were eyes and nose had once been to serve purposes now fulfilled by other means; and the jaws. Another mechanism, screwed into the bone and affixed with steel teeth. Ryland stared in wonder, imagining the blind afterdead seated somewhere deep in the catacombs, working with hands that were not his own in order to build his razorblade smile.

  “Grinning Samuel” was his full moniker (Samuel not being his real name, no one knew what that was). He settled in a chair opposite from Ryland and placed a small burlap sack in front of him. Stared, eyeless, at the living.

  He was uncommonly picky and any transaction with him came with certain rules of conduct. Some had been established from the get-go while others were learned at great cost. Most important was the invisible line running down the middle of the table, separating Ryland from Samuel, a line of principle as effective as an electric fence. No one crossed that line. This cardinal rule was established when Ryland’s predecessor had reached out to grab that little burlap sack. In the ensuing melee, all the gunmen had swarmed past the now-screaming-and-bleeding liaison with every intention of dismembering Samuel.

  And he’d killed every single one of them. Every one. The liaison had watched and died as blood jetted from the stump of his wrist. Watched and died while blind, smiling Samuel stuffed the gunmen’s remains into his stainless-steel maw. He didn’t feed often, yet he still thrived down here, in these catacombs beneath a defunct Protestant parish; a walking testament to the potency of the earth around him... the earth contained in that burlap sack.

  Opening a briefcase, Ryland turned it towards Samuel. This was the transaction. He slid the case to the center of the table, just shy of that invisible line, and the zombie’s mechanical fingers rummaged through its contents. Watch gears, springs, miniature coils and screws. Although whatever it was that infused this accursed earth had kept Samuel from rotting away entirely—he still needed to maintain his most-used joints, his limbs, his appendages, those terrible jaws. They creaked as he fingered a brass cog.

  Seemed like it’d be so easy right now to snatch the burlap purse with its pound of dirt and to riddle Samuel with bullets, throwing the table in his face, cutting him to ribbons with automatic fire. To finally storm the catacombs. As Ryland felt his own fingers jumping anxiously in his lap, hr forced himself to picture his predecessor, dying on the earthen floor beside this very chair, dying on his back in a shitty paste of dirt and blood.

  Ryland was jarred back to reality as Samuel pushed the sack across the table. His sightless, metallic jack-o’-lantern visage turned slowly from side to side, as if surveying the firing squad flanked by klieg lights. Ryland, never certain whether the afterdead could still hear, mumbled thanks and took the sack. For the first time he addressed his team. “Fall back.”

  They did, except for Goldhammer who came forward with a hazmat container the size of a lunchbox. Samuel sat quietly as Ryland took a handful of soil from the sack and, like a drug buyer testing the product, sprinkled the dirt over the dark mass in the container. “What’s his name?” He asked Goldhammer, who replied through his bug helmet, “Pancake.” Ryland smiled wryly and stroked the ball of black fur. Now he felt a rhythmic movement beneath his fingertips; the kitten shuddered, shifted. It was in an advanced state of decay and broken beyond repair by a callous parade of freeway traffic, so there was little for it do now but purr.

  “Dirt’s good.” Goldhammer called back to the others. Another container was brought forth to receive the sack’s contents. Ryland closed the first over the cat. It muttered weakly with dead vocal cords. He smiled again. The sack was returned to the table beside the briefcase, both for Samuel to keep. Taking one in each metal fist, the zombie stood up.

  The lunchbox in Ryland’s hands jerked, and even before the black blur flew past his face and down the tunnel, he knew; even as his legs pumped against his will, sending him past the table and over that invisible line in futile pursuit, he knew. Goddamned crippled cat! Ryland’s mind snapped as a clutch of mechanical fingers took root in the center of his chest.

  Pulled off his feet by Grinning Samuel and out of reality by the numbing terror in his veins, Ryland head dimly the patter of bullets against Samuel’s back. Goldhammer, like a double-jointed ballet dancer, pirouetted off the table and drove a boot into the afterdead’s defunct groin. While his legs jackknifed through the air, he planted his M4 against Samuel’s temple and got off a good quarter-second burst of fire before the zombie punched through his body armor and yanked out a streaming handful of guts. A spurting, slopping mess that cushioned the soldier’s fall immediately followed it.

  Ryland had been thrown clear of the battle and crashed into the dirt; having been tossed deeper into the catacombs he saw Samuel as a hulking silhouette against the lights, swaying under a barrage of gunfire. Ryland felt bullets zipping overhead and pressed his face into the earth, tasting that accursed dirt which Goldhammer had just died for.

  Died... Christ.

  The government had accumulated a half-ton of soil from the parish over the past three decades, and they run a battery of test, burying bodies and clocking their resurrection, administering strength, endurance and aptitude tests. What little intelligence Samuel exhibited was rare in afterdead (except those who stayed near their Source, of course); they usually came up sputtering the last of their blood & bile and clamoring for the nearest warm body, abandoning all higher faculties in the lust for living flesh. Indeed, such was the case with Sergeant Goldhammer, who sat up beside the besieged Samuel and fixed his bug-like gaze on Ryland. His exposed viscera were caked with soil, his back to the other men—but surely they realized what he’d become...

  Goldhammer made a wet noise inside his helmet. Ryland heard it over the gunfire.

  Pawing through his own innards, the dead soldier came at his former commander. Former as of thirty seconds ago—yes, he was fresh undead, and there was still some basic military protocol embedded in that brain of his, wasn’t there, so Ryland threw his out (wrist broken, he felt) and screamed “STOP!!”

  Goldhammer did, crouching on all fours with a rope of intestine dragging between his legs. He cocked his head and was the perfect picture of a sick dog. He was trying to recognize the word and why it had halted him in his tracks. Ryland could see the gears turning, like the gears in Grinning Samuel’s jaw, and at that moment Samuel ripped into the firing squad and the hail of bullets was reduced to a drizzle. Goldhammer pounced.

  Ryland pivoted on his broken wrist with a blinding snap of pain and
caught the other between his glassy bug-eyes with a bootheel. Goldhammer grunted, batted the leg aside. They wrestled there on the ground with Ryland kicking himself further and further down the tunnel, all the while aware that soon Samuel would be finished with the others. Backpedaling on his hands and hindquarters, he disturbed a pile of pebbles—no, gears, the strewn contents of the briefcase! Ryland closed his good hand around a fistful of them and, with a half-hearted cry befitting the last act of a dead man, hurled them into Goldhammer’s face. Relatively pointless but still an amusing precursor to Samuel’s hand sweeping down like a wrecking ball and crushing Goldhammer’s skull against the wall. The soldier crumpled to clear a path for the grinning afterdead. His steel maw was painted with rust from the insides of Ryland’s men. The zombie knew right where his prey was, and Ryland’s situation hit rock bottom as the damaged klieg lights faded out.

  “STOP!! STOOOOOOOOOOP!!!” he shrieked. He now knew for certain that Samuel could still hear by the way that his pace quickened. A barely discernable silhouette in the faint remnants of light, Grinning Samuel’s grasping fingers squealed as he drew closer. Ryland’s back struck a wall. He waited for those fingers to find his heart.

  His broken wrist was jerked into the air. He screamed, imagining his entire arm to be gone. But it wasn’t, and Samuel wasn’t even moving now. With his breath caught in his throat, Ryland just sat and listened in the dark.

  And then he heard it...

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  His wrist twisted a little. He bit into his lip while Samuel traced the band of his gold wristwatch. The pair remained motionless in the shadows for what seemed like an eternity, but Ryland counted the ticks and tocks and knew it was less then a minute. Finally, in spite of both terror and logic, he stammered, “it’s a Rolex.”

  The watch left his wrist, and intact arm dropped into moist lap. Samuel could be heard shuffling off into the catacombs, going down beneath the parish churchyard where the mystery of his unlife dwelled. The tick-tock, tick-tock gradually ceased.