Dead Man's Party

by Nathan Robert Brown

  The officer opened his bloodstained mouth. Instead of words, the officer released something between a guttural yell and a moan. The sound caught Jims off guard and stunned him. He recovered as soon as the former officer charged him with a look Jims read as hunger on his face.

  Jims caught the officer at the shoulder and neck. The officer powered forward and pushed Jims to the floor.

  OH SHIT!

  Jims struggled to keep his grip on his attacker's shoulder and neck. His body armor's plates took some of the impact with the floor, but the impact still made his gloved hands slip. Between the weight of the body armor and his attacker, Jims found it hard to take a deep breath. The first one he got reeked of blood, made him regret it.

  He kept pushing up with his hands while the other man kept pushing down and trying to grab his hands. Jims pushed with his feet trying to get some purchase on the slick linoleum floor.

  With the strength of desperation, and perhaps momentary insanity, Jims grabbed the man's shoulders and pulled him down straight into a headbutt. His night vision mount snapped under the impact. The man moved backwards from the force of it. Jims kicked as hard as he could, pushing the man against a bed frame.

  He almost didn't make it to his feet before the man came at him again. Davies dropped into a baseman's slide, taking the attacker's feet from under him. Jims dropped a knee on the back of the man's neck, pinning his face to the floor.

  “Get his hands!” Jims yelled. He shifted his weight so more of it rested on the man's neck and shoulders. “Before he gets up!”

  Davies rolled over and latched on to one arm. He cranked it into a chicken wing position, struggling to hold it at the man's shoulder.

  Jims grabbed the arm below Davies's hands. “Got it. Get the other.” Davies let go. Jims used his position to crank the man's hand until it touched his shoulder while Davies dived across the flailing man's body to grab his other hand.

  Davies bellowed, “Grab the flex cuffs off my back. Quick.”

  The medic jumped up from the injured soldier he was tending to pull the flex cuffs from the MOLLE webbing on Davies's back. He jammed the loops over the crazed officer's hands and pushed the straps as tight as he could.

  Davies relaxed, but Jims still struggled to keep his perch on the man's neck.

  “We need to secure him to something,” Jims said with a rough exhale.

  “Anyone got five-fifty cord?” Davies asked, eying one of the support pillars.

  The other man Jims bowled over when he tackled the officer stood up and pulled a tightly bundled length of cord from his ruck sack.

  “Get on the other side of him,” Davies ordered.

  Davies counted down. At one, Jims stepped behind his captive and pulled him up by the back of his shirt collar while the other two lifted from his shoulders. Jims pulled as hard as he dared so he could control the man once they had him up.

  Predictably, he lunged at the men holding his shoulders. Jims kept a tight hold of him and pulled him toward the pillar. He kept one hand on his prisoner's collar as he stepped into position to pull the man against the pillar so Davies could tie him.

  “You got him?” Davies asked. Jims said he did. “Good. I need you to step in front of him and push his shoulders back. Help Jims keep him against the wall.”

  Jims thought the other man pushed the former officer a bit hard, but he understood. He wanted to do the same thing. Davies made quick work tying the man to the pillar.

  “What set him off anyway?” Davies asked as he finished tying the knot.

  “No idea,” the medic said. “He came in with a minor injury. I controlled the bleeding as well as I could and gave him an IV. He spiked a fever, so I had him lay down. I left the room for a second. When I came back these two were trying to pull him off Staff Sergeant Howard. You saw the rest.” The medic finished, pointing at Jims.

  “What kind of injury did he have?” Davies asked.

  “Looked like a pair of pretty deep bites,” the medic said.

  “Animal?”

  “Human.” The medic looked at the two newly injured men. “I better get dressings on these injuries.”

  Tired and hurting, Jims stripped off his kit and went to find the latrine.

  Jims stood watch two more hours to finish his first shift despite Davies telling him he could take a rest. He felt better wearing his kit, holding his rifle and surrounded by three others who grew bored staring at empty space around their building.

  When the shift ended, Davies held him back in the hallway to talk for a moment.

  “I just want to make sure you're good. That was some fucked up shit in there.”

  “I'm good. Sore. Surprised as hell,” Jims said. “It seemed like pain just didn't register on the guy. I had to have broken his nose with that take down. It made my head hurt through the damn K-pot.”

  “Well you did good,” Davies put his hand on Jims's shoulder. “Try not to let it get to you. I'll buy you a beer when we get to Ireland.”

  Davies stopped smiling and looked past Jims. “What's wrong Doc?”

  Jims turned to see the medic stepping out of the room and softly closing the door. “Those two guys died. One after the other,” the medic said. Jims saw tears starting to pool in the corner of his eyes. “I did everything right, didn't I? How could they die?”

  Davies walked over to the medic. He took him by the shoulders and walked him gently toward the bay SFC Hammer retreated to. Jims nodded and waited in the hall across from the doors the medic closed.

  Someone moved past the windows. The motion caught Jims's eye. He stepped closer to the window and looked in, curious who walked that quickly in a barracks bay. The tied up officer still struggled uselessly against the five-fifty cord.

  He better stop before he cuts himself on that cord.

  The door muffled a scream. Jims saw a man with his back to the door hunched over another man who thrashed in his bed. The tied up man struggled harder, as if he was encouraged by the screams.

  Jims heard footsteps to his left and held up a hand in warning. The steps quieted. He looked over and saw Davies coming back. Jims nodded his head toward the door. Davies joined him at the window.

  After one look, Davies turned away, wanting nothing more to do with it. “For dead men, they move rather well.”

  “We need to go restrain them,” Jims said.

  “Oh hell no! I've seen this horror movie,” Davies shook his head. “We tell Hammer, we get more people. Then we consider going in there.”

  Davies walked back to the bay he took the medic to. He returned a moment later with SFC Hammer and the medic in tow. Hammer and the younger medic looked through the window in time to see one of recently “dead” SSG Howard turn away from his victim coated in blood and pulling the other man's intestines with him.

  “What the fuck?” the medic asked.

  Hammer drew his pistol and looked at Davies and Jims who still had their full kits on. “We're going in there to restrain them. If they resist, shoot them.”

  “Sergeant, we can't just shoot them,” Davies protested.

  “They've already killed one if not two men with their bare hands. Literally tore him open. We absolutely can shoot them to protect ourselves and others,” Hammer said, taking the safety off his pistol. “And I, for one, will protect the others.”

  Hammer led them through the door. As soon as the door opened, both the former soldiers charged the group.

  “Down on the ground! NOW!”

  Hammer fired two rounds into the kill box of the man in front of him. SSG Howard didn't register the gunshots and kept coming, barreling into Hammer, knocking him into Jims and Davies. It saved them. The other man, coming from the trio's right, plowed into his buddy instead of latching on to Jims.

  Davies staggered back under the weight of Jims, Hammer and what used to be SSG Howard but kept his feet.

  “Hey!” he yelled. The man looked up. “Fuck you.” Davies fired two rounds into the man's head.

  The
other former soldier recovered his feet and turned to face the trio. Fresh, thick blood dripped from his lips and teeth. Davies stepped to his right to clear the door frame. The blood faced man charged straight at Davies, mouth wide ready to bite whatever he got hold of. Davies jammed his rifle barrel into the man's open maw and pulled the trigger.

  Blood, bone and brains sprayed from the newly formed crater in the back of the former soldier's head. His weight dropped straight down taking the rifle out of Davies's hands.

  Davies helped the other two men up before jerking the rifle barrel out of the corpse's clenched teeth.

  “Two to the chest and kept coming? What the fuck is going on here?” Hammer demanded retrieving his pistol from the floor.

  “Well, putting one in their heads seemed to work just fine,” Davies said.

  “Yeah well, what the fuck was with them eating those other guys?” Jims asked, visibly shaking.

  “Medic, you give those men anything that would keep them going through getting shot?” Hammer asked, looking at the corpses at his feet and then the officer tied to the wall.

  The medic shook his head then started to move to check the men wounded when they showed up. Davies grabbed his arm.

  “OH, I don't think so,” he said sternly. He looked to Hammer and back at the medic. “The officer bit those two. You said they died. You may not have seen much battlefield trauma, but I'll bet my last dollar you know dead when you see it. We show up, and they're attacking those two. We wait.”

  “Wait for what!” The medic demanded shaking off Davies's hand.

  “To see if those guys get up. I'm pretty sure they're dead,” Davies said calmly.

  In front of them, the man they saw attacked had half his guts hanging over the bed and scattered across the floor. A look of shock froze on his face. His eyes stared vacantly at different points on the ceiling. To their right, another man lay on his side, with one arm clutching the ruin of his throat while the other dangled over the edge of the bed. A pool of blood slowly spread across the bed and floor. Drops of blood dripped from his lifeless fingers.

  SFC Hammer escorted the medic from the room. Jims worried the poor guy stood on the verge of a breakdown. He felt the same way, but before Jims broke down, he wanted to be sure no more monsters lurked in the building.

  Jims and Davies waited barely a minute before the body in front of them sat up.

  “Seen this movie too,” Davies said before he calmly shot his former comrade in the head.

  Jims turned and shot the other body preemptively. “I've seen enough.” He started to line up a shot on the officer still struggling against the five-fifty cord.

  “Don't. We'll need him in a moment.”

  In lieu of sandbags, SFC Hammer ordered bed frames turned on their side and stacked against the two gates. SPC Jims sneaked a quick photo with his phone camera, as much as one can sneak a photo with the flash going off.

  He laughed at the barricades. Laughing kept him from going insane after what he saw in the now closed off bay. Everyone else laughed at the story of the attacks saying no one would buy that story to cover up eight negligent discharges. They stopped laughing when Davies shot the tied up officer three times through the heart from two feet and the man kept struggling. A full minute after shooting the man through the heart and he kept moving, the rest believed. Davies put one through the officer's head before they sealed the room. Word to shoot for the head spread quickly.

  If not for the gunfire and screaming continuing sporadically, Jims thought he would have found the entire situation impossibly laughable and checked himself into mental health. The shots and screams spread and now sounded from every direction.

  At least aircraft are still flying.

  Fighters, “Little Birds” (Kiowa Helicopters), and a Specter circled low overhead every few minutes. Given the likelihood of collateral damage to buildings and friendly forces, the aircraft rarely fired. Heavy cargo planes roared along the runway every so often. Jims and the others found this reassuring and took it to mean the base wasn't in immediate danger of being completely overrun.

  Jims heard a big plane's engines spin up. He tracked the aircraft's lights as it lifted above the buildings.

  He panicked and swallowed a lump in his throat when the lights on the wings inexplicably showed the aircraft in a steep bank. No one missed the sound of the plane crashing into the ground and breaking apart as it cartwheeled across the desert immediately beyond the runway.

  “That's not good.”

  ***

  Joseph woke to the sound of slush sliding off the roof of the store turned camp site. He hissed like a vampire when bright sunlight flooded in as he uncovered the window. Grass and rocks poked through the thinning snow.

  “We can leave today,” Joseph said as Mike stepped next to him, shielding his eyes from the glaring light.

  “Let's strip the store of anything useful and get on the road.” Mike tore the cardboard from the window, letting light flood the store. Groans erupted from Walter and Stacy as light flashed away any hope of sleep.

  Aside from a few canned goods and cases of water, they found nothing useful in the store. Most of the food expired during the off season, and Mike didn't trust some of it to keep. Everything else consisted of fishing tackle, coolers, summer fun stuff and soap. If anyone ever stepped in the store again, they'd find clear evidence someone lived there for a while. Trash piled in a distant corner, shelves emptied, and cardboard laid out in a rough mattress.

  It took an hour to pack and strike their indoor camp. Gravel crunched under the weight of the bus as its wheels found their way through the slushy snow to the road beneath. Joseph eased the bus over the muddy gravel road to the surfaced road outside the Luna Lake Camp Grounds.

  “I hope the road stays this clear all the way out of the mountains,” Joseph said as he turned onto the highway.

  Joseph didn't expect the day to stay quiet all the way through, so far no day of traveling stayed quiet all the way through. None of them expected the day to take its left turn less than thirty miles down the road.

  Quiet reigned on the streets of Alpine. Joseph slowly coasted along the highway, avoiding the few vehicles abandoned on the road. He slowed down as the stalled vehicles grew thicker.

  “How'd such a small town get wiped out?” Joseph asked, trying to shake a growing unease.

  “I don't like it,” Mike said flatly. “Walter, get ready. Stacy, come take the seat behind Joseph.” Mike and Walter readied extra weapons to save on reload time if things got out of hand.

  Walter put several boxes of ammunition in front of Stacy. “Remember your gun safety. We need you to focus on loading for us. Try not to look at them.” He kissed his daughter's forehead. She nodded, clearly disappointed, but remembering what the four of them discussed the night before. Once she regained more strength, they'd let her take a more direct role in things.

  “Shit,” Joseph said, startling Mike who stopped his preparations to look for what set Joseph off. “I have an idea why an out-of-the-way town is dead.”

  “I really don't like the sound of that.” Mike looked over Joseph's shoulder. Parallel lines of cars blocked the left side of the road from shoulder to center center line and stretched toward the far side of town. Fluorescent traffic cones and long spent road flares punctuated by Army hummers and police cruisers formed a kind of cattle run for cars. Wooden barricades and older Army trucks formed a cordon to force lines of cars to turn right.

  Surrounding the blockade, Mike spotted the distinct glint of a pile spent brass spat out by crew-served weapons. “Try to use the edge of the road so you don't run over that brass.”

  Joseph drove slowly, barely creeping, along the far shoulder. Joseph and Mike strained to look past the trucks. Tents and old growth trees dotted a five acre field. Concertina wire surrounded the field, supplementing a barbed wire fence along the Western edge of the field. Some of the closer tents partially collapsed.

  “Stupid question,” Joseph said, l
ooking over his shoulder at Mike, “You wanna stop and look for weapons or supplies?”

  “You're right,” Mike said looking down at Joseph. “That's a pretty stupid question. Roll us right the hell out of here.” he paused for a moment, looking out Joseph's window at the evacuation center. “The real question is, why would there be a rescue station way the hell out here. There's not another town for a hundred miles.”

  “Maybe they were a link between the ones in the big cities and wherever the government thought was safe?” Stacy's simple suggestion stunned Mike for a moment. “I mean, what if they knew the smaller towns and out of the way places would be safer longer? I'd take the refugees there.”

  Mike nodded. “It's possible.”

  Joseph doubted they'd ever know the truth of it. Given the number of abandoned cars, the pile of spent ammo, and what little they could see of the refugee center, the dead clearly owned what remained of Alpine.

  Distracted by the speculative conversation, Joseph nearly ran over an Army soldier that stepped out from between two cars. He jammed the brakes, sending Mike crashing to the floor. Mike recovered his wits and rolled toward the door with his pistol in hand.

  Two more soldiers followed the first one into the road. A fourth emerged further down the line of cars with a rifle dragging behind him, dangling from a single-point sling. Joseph saw all he needed to.

  He let the bus ease forward. The bus bumped against the shoulder of the closest soldier. Without looking up, the soldier let the bus push him as he tried to cross its path. A half second later, the buss bumped him again, pushing him slightly off balance. The third time, the soldier turned and fell under the bus.

  Joseph felt no guilt for running the soldier down. Normal people don't let buses bump them three times without trying to get out of the way.

  The other three soldiers turned slowly to face the creeping bus. Joseph clearly saw the one dragging the rifle missing its left arm, which until it turned had been hidden by its body.