Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

  Clarke rose and let fly a hail of bullets that sent a storm of sparks into the air as monitor after monitor exploded. He saw the scientists diving for cover and screaming for the soldiers to come down.

  The bug-like doctor lay at Clarke’s feet, trembling. Clarke slurred his words: “I want Bradshaw. Sergeant Bradshaw.”

  “It’s Captain now,” came the voice at his back.

  Bradshaw vaulted over the conveyor belt and hacked into Clarke’s kneecap with a widowmaker, sliding out of harm’s way just as the afterdead put the soldier in his sights. Gunfire peppered a computer console and sent another fountain of sparks toward the rock ceiling.

  Clarke felt his knee coming apart. It had been a clean shot from Bradshaw, always the master with the blade. The bug-like doctor was crawling away, sobbing. Clarke dropped down and caught his ankle. Raising him up as a shield, the zombie rounded the sputtering console in search of Bradshaw...

  Who was racing up the service tunnel to the receiving warehouse, his mind outpacing his feet as he panicked: the gunman’s an afterdead. The afterdead is Clarke. Bradshaw, who had understood little about his covert assignment under Ryland, was now certain that he understood nothing at all.

  * * *

  Above ground, every available serviceman was speeding toward the warehouse. Waves of Jeeps whisked past fences where the base’s afterdead lingered, curious.

  And Nathan Ryland, sitting in his office, heard the alarms sounding and his heart began to palpitate... and then it stopped. He shuddered in his chair, slipping forward just slightly so that his gut nudged the edge of his desk, and he died.

  The soul departed the body. Ryland jolted in his chair, this time sending the computer monitor crashing to the floor, and he sat up undead. The tissue in his head and hands and haunches was suffused with a dark, creeping energy, and he stood.

  A soldier opened his door and leaned in. “Sir, there’s an emergency in the research facility. I’ve been instructed to remove you from the base in the event—”

  Ryland, nodding, came around the desk and tore the soldier’s throat open. He eased the young man’s automatic to the floor and took in great, gluttonous mouthfuls of flesh.

  * * *

  Clarke threw the bug-like doctor to the floor of the concrete tunnel. “Enner ashess code...”

  “A-access code?” the terrified scientist asked. Clarke nodded. The doctor opened the door allowing Clarke into the receiving warehouse.

  A spurt of gunfire threw the doctor back. Cries of surprise and outrage were heard from the other side of the door: “What the fuck are we dealing with?!”

  “It’s Clarke.” Bradshaw said grimly, watching the door from behind the massive wheel of a dump truck. Stoddard just stared at him. On the other side of the captain, Thomas was reloading her M-16 and cursing herself for shooting the doctor.

  “Explain,” Stoddard said. “Ken?”

  “I fucked up.” Bradshaw counted the beads of sweat rolling down the side of his head. “Me and Whittaker, we fucked up. We killed Clarke and Harmon.”

  “Wait a minute...” Thomas started to back away.

  Bradshaw turned and said, “You’re not part of this. Go.” And she did.

  “I’m staying,” Stoddard whispered.

  “Joe, this isn’t your fight.”

  “If it’s your fight then it’s my fight, brother.”

  “No time for this bullshit!” Bradshaw hissed. Stoddard just shrugged.

  Thomas edged toward the receiving bay, where she’d be able to leave the warehouse and join the soldiers scrambling outside. A cold hand closed over her throat.

  “No sound.”

  She cocked her head a quarter-inch to the right and saw her dead comrade, Pete Clarke. He wasn’t a zombie horror; the only indication of his lifelessness was the empty look in his eyes and that raspy monotone. He stared at her, through her—then she smelled the gas.

  She spun away from him, finger on the trigger, and he popped her through the head before she got off one shot. Pulling himself onto the receiving bay, he fired a second round into the spilled gasoline he’d liberated from the trucks.

  * * *

  The warehouse exploded. Soldiers heading for the entrance were thrown back.

  Stoddard rose from the grass outside, coughing violently. He and Bradshaw had each gone through a window. Before he could orient himself, soldiers poured through the clouds of smoke to grab him. “Wait! Ken! Ken!” He bellowed.

  Bradshaw staggered through a column of darkness into Clarke’s arms. He shoved the afterdead off, and turned to see no escape route, only piles of flaming debris surrounding them; he’d chosen the wrong window and the wall had simply come down around him.

  “Whooo?” moaned the afterdead.

  “Ryland,” Bradshaw answered, drawing his twin widowmakers. “I don’t know why. I don’t know why it had to happen, and I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry Pete.”

  He leapt at Clarke, going straight for that wasted knee—the afterdead buckled, and Bradshaw scissored off an ear and most of one cheek. He hit the ground ready to pivot, sending his other blade into the meat of Clarke’s waist.

  Clarke whirled to face him; Bradshaw knew that the damage dealt to his opponent meant nothing—there was no pain, no shock—quickly, he planted a widowmaker between Clarke’s eyes and jerked his head sharply downward. The neck broke. Clarke’s eyes rolled in their bloody sockets and he pawed at Bradshaw’s uniform. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Bradshaw was whispering, as he freed his blades, stepped back and prepared to decapitate the undead.

  Clarke could not offer the same sentiment. He felt nothing as he shook the pistol from his pants leg and shot Bradshaw through the heart.

  For the first time in a long time, things made sense for Ken Bradshaw, including his own demise, and as he fell forward he thought that, maybe now, all things would return to their proper state and the corruption he’d helped sow would wash away. It was a foolish notion, but comforting in death.

  * * *

  Base Commander St. John beat his knuckles against his desk as he listened to radio reports of the havoc on the other side of the base. All they knew at this point was that a shooter had breached the labs, and the receiving warehouse was in flames.

  Stoddard’s voice came over the radio. “He’s an afterdead! Bullets won’t stop him!” How was one miserable rotter causing such a panic? It was the men on the ground, they needed to pull themselves together and assess the situation with level heads. He grabbed his radio to issue just such a decree when the intercom on his desk squawked. “Commander! It’s Ryland—he’s coming up, he’s—he’s attacking everyone! Just about took my finger off!”

  “What in the Christ.” St. John yanked open the drawer at his right hand and roused his Desert Eagle from its foam bedding. He walked out of his office and into the hall.

  Ryland was tugging on a staffer’s arm, teeth gnashing scant inches from her ear. St. John fired a shot into the ceiling. Ryland released the terror-stricken girl, and then he was alone with the commander.

  “Somehow I sense, Nathan Goddamn Ryland, that you’re the one responsible for all of this. Am I wrong?”

  Ryland said nothing. As his eyes adjusted in the hallway, St. John became aware of how blood-soaked the liaison’s suit was. He also became aware of a repugnant, gagging odor. Decaying tissue. “You’re... you’re dead. Undead. You’re the rotter? What have you done?” St. John roared.

  Ryland spat a mouthful of someone else’s blood onto the floor.

  St. John fired two rounds into Ryland’s chest, kicking him to the end of the hall where he crumpled. The base commander took no chances as he approached the body; standing at arm’s length, he emptied the Desert Eagle into Ryland’s bloated corpse.

  This was the end for Fort Armstrong, St. John realized. The entire base, like the files stored within, like the bodies lying on the floor—it would all have to be razed and the ashes scattered to the winds. And all because of this miserable snake in th
e grass—

  Ryland bit into St. John’s palm. The commander kicked him away with a snarl and watched blood swell in the wound. “You’re dead! Son of a bitch!” St. John clasped his hand to the belly of his uniform and staggered away. At least there wasn’t any risk of some sort of infection.

  * * *

  Clarke slipped behind the wheel of a Humvee. Full tank of gas. He knew that Ryland was likely to be just across the base, though it wasn’t so simple as a straight line from point A to point B.

  He decided to simplify, and drove through the electrified fences separating the living from the dead.

  Soldiers scrambled to put up a roadblock, but the fencing came down like a curtain, folding into the dirt, the afterdead walking right over it even as their toes burst into flames. Every soldier in Fort Armstrong was sure they couldn’t become infected, each was sure that they were dealing with little more than sedated dogs, each saw the afterdead converging with renewed speed on the fallen fences.

  Some of them fired, but they all ran.

  * * *

  Esteban Cervantes awoke from a nightmare. In the nightmare, he was alone on a desert road. An old man dressed in black approached him. “A causa de los gatos, ya en Egipto,” the man rasped. His eyes were not human and boiled with shapeless larvae. But it was the sound of the man’s leathery tongue over his rotten teeth that drove Cervantes from sleep. Then he heard the alarms.

  A flurry of panicked thoughts and prayers assailed him. He was generally able to phase out others’ thoughts, but this crisis had put everyone’s psyche into overdrive. Between all the nervous breakdowns and the bottled-up rages looking for something to shoot, Cervantes wasn’t sure where he’d be of most use.

  As he jogged out of his quarters, a Hummer ran up the curb and stopped. “In!”

  He complied without hesitation, and paid no mind to the faint small of rot—but then his mind’s eye saw into the other and there was NOTHING.

  “I can’t..not... drive good,” Clarke muttered, motioning to his ruined knee. “Take me to Ryland and I will... won’t..not shoot you.”

  “All right.” Cervantes slipped into the driver’s seat, probing Clarke’s skull with telepathic tendrils. There were only patches of memory, a few pages from a book... but he saw enough to know why Clarke had come back. As for Ryland’s involvement...”I don’t know why I’m saying this,” Cervantes began; he figured the zombie’s promise not to shoot him was the closest thing to honesty he’d ever heard, as the undead were incapable of lying, and wanted to return the favor. “Something’s wrong with Ryland. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something unnatural about him. And if that has to do with you, Captain, then maybe you already know, but—”

  An arm smashed through the window and grabbed at the wheel, followed by a head. Cervantes knocked both away, but he felt the bite, teeth raking through his flesh, and as he jerked the wheel to the side, caught a glimpse of Ryland’s face—

  * * *

  Stoddard led the charge against the loosed afterdead. They were run down with dump trucks, then those left standing faced the blades of standard-issue widowmakers. Stoddard let out an “OOH-RAH!!” as he dashed a rotter’s head against the side of a truck. He tried not to think about the Clarke situation—the mere fact that there was a Clarke situation—

  One of the administrative staffers came hurtling toward him. Stoddard chopped away groping hands and tripping limbs and escorted the woman over to an idle dump truck.

  “God, you got bit.” He rummaged through his uniform, as if he still carried a First Aid Kit on his person. “Nathan Ryland bit me!” The woman exclaimed. “Then all these others—I’m bleeding everywhere—feel faint –”

  “Wait, Ryland?”

  The woman slumped to the ground. No pulse.

  “Oh my God,” Stoddard yelled, “could somebody —AYYEAAGGHH!!”

  He kicked the woman’s teeth away from his thigh and drew his pistol. “Are you alive? Say something!”

  She rose, pushing out her breasts, licking Stoddard’s blood from her lips—

  Giving the gun and its owner one last look, she took off. Self-preservation before hunger.

  “FUCK!!!” Stoddard sat down, waited for his pulse rate to drop a little, then looked at his wound. Well, this was bad. A new bad. Someone would come up with a better name for it later. All Joe knew was that he was going to turn into a zombie.

  That’s when one of the base’s rotters lunged around the truck and tore his throat out, and he was spared that last pain in the ass.

  6 / An end; and, a beginning

  Ryland stared curiously at Clarke as they circled one another on the roadway. Cervantes stayed down in the Humvee, not bothering to peer out the window; instead he reached out to their minds and mapped out their movements in his own, translating the simple impulses of their zombified brains.

  Ryland stopped. His mouth struggled to form words. The memory was there, in his nerves and muscles, and if he could just get the thoughts from his brain to his lips...”Clarke,” he said finally, and something resembling a smile crossed his face.

  “Is thish why?” Clarke couldn’t help his slurred speech now, with his cheek mangled, but he got the point across. “Is thish why you killed me?”

  “Yes,” Ryland answered. “I am not like you. I am a new afterdead. I am the birth of a plague.”

  He gestured towards an older zombie, one of the base’s experimental subjects, as it staggered across a field a few hundred yards off. “I have spread it to many, living and dead. They all carry the plague now.”

  “Why?” Clarke asked. There was no bitterness or longing in the question; he asked only because that was his mission, to know why he had been killed. To understand, so that he would not be killed again.

  “Because,” Ryland answered, “I wanted to see what would happen.”

  An unsatisfying answer, perhaps, to the living beings that were now being infected with this new plague, but good enough for Clarke.

  Ryland came at him then, and despite Clarke’s condition, it was easy to fend off the inexperienced fighter’s attacks. Clarke smashed a bony fist through Ryland’s teeth, and the other made to swallow the fist, seizing Clarke’s arm with both hands and gnashing the jagged nubs of his teeth on Clarke’s dead skin. Clarke felt tendon and muscle being torn away and, planting a boot on Ryland’s groin, jerked his hand free.

  Ryland staggered back, snapping his jaws like a mad dog, ragged sheets of gray flesh dangling from his broken teeth. “No good. Dead meat.” Though undead, he seemed to be somehow relishing every new experience of his afterlife, the proud parent of the contagion and a new flesh. In the Humvee, Cervantes felt disgust for Ryland, disgust that boiled in his throat and threatened to make him retch; meanwhile Clarke, who felt nothing, raised his shredded fist and rejoined the fight.

  He stabbed two fingers through Ryland’s eye socket, pulping the orb as if it were nothing and sinking knuckle-deep into the cold jelly of the dead brain. Ryland grunted, then made a sound like a laugh. He swatted at Clarke’s various wounds without effect.

  Clarke hurled Ryland to the asphalt and knelt on his neck. There was a snap, and Clarke grabbed Ryland’s hair and jerked his head to one side. Another satisfying snap.

  Ryland gurgled, tried to speak, but Clarke put all his weight on the man’s throat, and wrenched at his head as hard as he could, and before long there were no more words left to say.

  Ryland’s head, a chattering, pulpy mess, rolled to the curb and was forgotten. Clarke stood up, looked back at the Humvee.

  Within, Cervantes’ mind was suddenly assaulted by a crushing force that blinded his inner eye.

  “My lucidity is... different from yours,” Ryland’s head whispered. Clarke whirled to see Ryland’s body writhing, churning in time with the words of the disembodied head. His chest rose and fell with something that wasn’t breath; ribs and flesh snapped apart. There was something inside of him.

  “I used every resource at my disposal to try
and understand what was growing inside of me. What I was becoming. And I found the words of the old gods who left their dark energy here on our little insect-world... I found that I could be much more than just the plague...”

  Tentacles erupted from Ryland’s body and snaked across the street to caress his head. Ryland moaned; Clarke watched as his brains were pulled out through the bottom of his skull, watched as the tentacles withdrew with their prize and settled in the cavity of Ryland’s headless torso, cradling his brain there.

  Clarke heard Ryland in his head now, as if the man had become pure thought. The brain pulsated as Ryland spoke.

  Ia! Ia!

  Ryland’s body rose with the brain nestled in a bed of throbbing tentacles. He began stalking toward Clarke.

  I am more than a new flesh... I am a new being... a new god...

  Cervantes rolled out of the Humvee, clutching his head, blood streaming from his open eyes. He rose to his knees and saw the horror Ryland had transformed into.

  He raised an M16 and let loose.

  A hail of bullets shredded Ryland’s body, sending him staggering back, his exposed brain jolting about as the tentacles exploded outward in an effort to contain it.

  No! NO! You can’t kill me! I am—

  I—

  A trio of bullets sailed through the night and punched into the meat of Ryland’s brain. It flew apart like so much refuse.

  I...

  Ryland crumpled, tentacles flopping weakly on the asphalt. Cervantes’ head cleared, and he was able to think again: so much for the gods. He knew they had no place in this terrifying new world.

  Clarke turned. Cervantes aimed the M16 at him.