At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  Which is why the Captain had us drill for the battle with the pirates over and over again. So that the plan and its rhythms wouldn’t get drowned out by the blood pounding in your ears while you’re trying to kill the other guy before he can kill you. So that, even when we did lose the rhythm and the plan started going sideways—as the Captain had assured us it would—the basic beat was still there and we riffed our way back to the finale. Which is the key to winning any battle, he said. And he was right.

  That’s why it was so hard to write down everything that happened when we fought the zombies at the crossroads, or how it felt while it was happening. We don’t remember a battle or crisis as one, smooth story; we remember snatches and moments. Like waking up from a nightmare, you recall some things really clearly and other things just barely or not at all.

  Maybe it’s different for real soldiers. Maybe they get so accustomed to the chaos that they are able to remember more. Or maybe they just stop caring that they can’t.

  I also wonder if it’s especially hard to remember the details of fighting the infected (and the ocean) because, unlike us, they’re not following any plan. It’s not like they’re opponents in some game of chess, whose moves and counter-moves help us recall what happened and in what order. With stalkers, or the wind, or the sea, there’s nothing to figure out, no logical sequence to reconstruct.

  Sure, maybe if you were watching from a distance, you could perceive how all the forces come together with a kind of inevitability, like physics. But not when you’re in the middle of waves so high that you can’t see over them. Or trying to manage sails in a wind that runs halfway around the compass in less time than it took me to write that sentence. Or fighting swarms of stalkers on open ground. In each of those cases, you’re not trying to defeat an enemy; you’re striving against a force of nature.

  Maybe writing all this has tired me out enough. Maybe I found the words for what I’ve been feeling since we came through that storm and since we came back from the intersection. Maybe I’ve just bored myself blurry.

  Whichever it is, I’ll take it and whatever sleep it brings.

  October 20

  When you’re a poor kid who lived in big cities all his life, you do get some things that kids from the ’burbs don’t have. Like having a nonstop bullshit detector running in the back of your mind, street smarts, and familiarity with violence—particularly of the senseless and deadly kind. But there’s a ton of things the kids from the ’burbs know how to do that you don’t. And one of those things is driving.

  So when it came to getting to the Golf Ball, I was totally fucking useless. Which was even worse because as the guy in charge, and also the one who pretty much sold the idea to everyone else, I couldn’t help with the very first phase of it.

  Yeah, sure, I was the lookout, riding shotgun—literally—in the lead Rover. But Chloe was going to do the driving because (once she got used to the steering wheel being on the right) she was by far the best at it and had already logged a lot of hours in four-wheel drive monsters like the DeRanged Rover. Jeeza followed with Rod, ready to steer the newer, less tricked-out Rover to follow in our tire tracks.

  It was pre-dawn, just enough natural light to drive, so we went very, very slowly. I had an eighteen-inch Rexio at the ready but kept my eyes on the handheld radio we’d stuck in the dashboard cup holder. Steve and Prospero had left fifteen minutes before and we were waiting for a single squelch break from them. That signal meant that they’d reached the southernmost gate and that there hadn’t been any sign of stalkers. None had ever been spotted on the ocean side of the fence, but we weren’t assuming anything, this time.

  But a few minutes after we thought they might get to the fence, the radio crackled and squeaked: squelch break.

  It was one of those rides when you realize just how relative time and distance are. Following along the fence—no shortcuts—was just over a mile. In L.A., at any time other than rush hour, that meant sixty seconds of cruising just north of sixty mph.

  On Ascension Island, driving a four-by-four zombie buster in the goose-grey post-apocalyptic predawn, it took twelve minutes. Which seemed more like two hours. Because if we were attacked by even a single stalker, all the dominoes would go down in the wrong direction. We’d have to shoot it, which would be like sounding reveille for any others that might be nearby. So we’d have to abort. And of course, that whole time, Steve and Prospero had to be standing ready with the bolt cutters: to use them quickly if we showed up, or if we didn’t, to jump back on their ATVs and return to Georgetown’s little tank farm. Because it was stupid to cut the padlocks away until the Rovers made it there. Otherwise, if we had to abort, we’d also have been inviting the stalkers to take a stroll on the ocean side of the fence, which would seriously compromise any subsequent attempts to commence Operation Wizard’s Tower.

  But no stalkers jumped out at the Rovers. Chloe and Jeeza kept their engine noise to a muted growl, and when we arrived at the south gate, Steve already had the bolt cutters in the loop of the padlock. Prospero was covering him with the fifteen-inch Rexio. Not a gun he liked, but given the low visibility, if a stalker popped up, you wouldn’t see it until it was really close. And the super short Rexio was really good at tagging really close targets.

  Steve clipped the loop, stowed the cutters, and pushed that half of the double-gate toward us.

  Nothing.

  He pulled it toward himself.

  More nothing.

  “Shit,” Steve hissed, forgetting noise discipline.

  “Bollocks,” Prospero muttered, not much more quietly. “Bugger is stuck.”

  Why is it that in life-and-death situations, it’s never the big things that get you? It’s something as small and stupid and unpredictable as a jammed gate, with dawn coming on and the nearest stalkers curled up in their scat-littered warrens only a hundred yards away.

  Prospero slung the Rexio, came over to help. Neither of them were big guys, and the gate was not impressed by their combined efforts.

  “Bollocks,” Prospero panted again.

  Chloe leaned out the window. “Hssstt!!!”

  Prospero looked up. “Not now. We’re working on it.”

  Chloe’s ironic, raised eyebrow was probably lost on them. “Yeah, sure. But just stand back.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to let it argue with the Rover.”

  “Chloe, if you haven’t noticed, the gate does not open towards us, but towards you.”

  “Yeah, but if you haven’t noticed, there’s nothing actually blocking it. It’s probably just rust and grit. Lemme run the front bumper up against it and push. That should unjam it.”

  Prospero stood for a moment. It looked like he was trying to find some snappy comeback. But then he stepped away, motioning for Steve to do the same.

  Chloe rolled the Rover up until the bumper kissed the place where the two halves of the gate came together. She tapped the gas pedal.

  The upright bars groaned softly; the chain link stretched like it might break.

  She backed off the gas, shifted into neutral. As the Rover rolled back, she muttered, “Try it now.”

  This time it budged, but not all the way. She waved them away, repeated the process.

  This time, when Steve and Prospero gave a heave-ho and pushed, the right side of the gate groaned and swung toward us. They waved us through, pulling the gate shut after us and securing it with a new padlock just as the leaves of the bushes started glinting pink and copper. The sun would be up in fifteen minutes. At most.

  We spent most of that time driving a grand total of three hundred yards. On this side of the fence, the only thing resembling a road was a tangle of paths that tracked construction vehicles had bashed through the brush when they built the Golf Ball. But that was half a century ago and those vehicles had just been moving crap around. So it wasn’t like there had ever been a direct path; for us, it was a set of ungraded switchbacks.

  Navigating those really put Chloe’s dr
iving skills to the test. But after fifteen minutes of bumping and jouncing over roots, low bushes, and rocks that looked like half-buried buffalos, we slid down onto the Golf Ball’s rear access road. Chloe kept the Rover in first as we almost idled our way along one hundred and fifty yards of left-curving road that followed the base of Cat Hill. When we came abreast of the paved double-lane that led up to the crest, she swung into it slowly—no sudden, loud movements—and accelerated smoothly up to the rear gate. Which was a lot flimsier than we had thought. Steve rolled past us on the ATV, made with the bolt cutters again, and we were in.

  Or I should say, we followed Prospero in. Which had not been part of the plan. To be fair, it wasn’t not part of the plan, either. What I mean is this:

  If we found Golf Ball’s back gate locked, Prospero had assured us that the site would be secure. Operational protocols, he explained. Since his life would be on the line, just like the rest of ours, we didn’t question him.

  But the moment the gate was open and Steve was pulling out a new padlock, Prospero juiced his ATV. He zipped up the last rise to the two-story building on the west, unslung his Rexio, and went in. Using a key.

  “What the fu—?” began Chloe.

  Before she could get the Rover going, I bailed out; I could run after him faster than waiting for her to drive into the small parking lot.

  I found the door to the building ajar. I snapped my own Rexio off safety and slipped in.

  It didn’t take long to find Prospero; it’s not a big building and since it’s a prefab government structure, it creaks whenever you move.

  I found him staring into a maintenance closet, shotgun hanging loosely in his hand. “Percival,” I said, keeping my tone low and completely non-ironic.

  “He was my best mate,” Prospero said in a strange voice, both sad and wistful. “Never had a lot of mates, you know.”

  I stepped closer, looked around him.

  A corpse in a U.S. Airman’s uniform was propped in a splay-legged sitting position against the far wall. Its left arm was handcuffed to a water pipe; its right arm lay loose, an M-9 half-slipped from that hand. The faded brown splatter behind the now husklike head finished the story.

  “You knew…knew that he’d be here,” I ventured.

  Prospero didn’t look over, but he nodded. “He was the one who called me when the Security Forces lost control of the base. Secured the documents, the machines, the mainframe…well, whatever the leftenant didn’t destroy. He was dying and he still carried out all the protocols for shuttering a compromised station.”

  As if I knew what the hell all that really meant. But he was mostly speaking to himself, now, anyway.

  “Poor sod knew he’d been infected but didn’t tell the rest. He made the others leave first, locked himself in, shut everything down. And then shackled himself here. Which is where he called me from.”

  “To say goodbye?”

  Prospero nodded. “That, and to tell me the steps he’d taken. And that he’d sent a final communique to Kourou.”

  Kourou? The thing about having a photographic memory is that it really is a visual phenomenon. I remember conversations pretty well, too, but words on a page are what kick my recall into high gear. But when I read a word I’ve never heard pronounced, it can take a while for that circuit to close. It took about three seconds, this time. “You mean, Kourou in French Guiana? The ESA launch facility?”

  He turned and looked at me as if I’d just revealed I was a Nobel laureate. “Yes. That one. He came up here hoping to relay the final data they needed, but the leftenant had knocked us off-line. So all he could do was preserve the data we’d received and to make sure he himself couldn’t undo any of the good he’d done. The last thing he said to me was that he hoped he’d find the courage not to let the disease take him.” He looked at the brown stain on the wall, and his head drooped. “Apparently he did.” He turned abruptly and walked past me. “No time to mope about. I’ll show you the facilities, and then get Chloe set up in the best overwatch position. She’ll have a clear field of fire on almost the entire base.”

  * * *

  According to several faded plaques, the Golf Ball was a NASA and Air Force Target Tracking Radar Station that was completed in 1961. The two-story building in which we set up had been built later for some U.S.-Brit collaboration called the NSA-GCHQ. All I know about that alphabet soup label is that NSA stands for exactly what you think it stands for, and the new array and facilities were for U.S. spooks and their British pals to snoop on communications from South America to Africa.

  Now it was serving as a staging area and sniper’s roost for a bunch of teenaged zombie-hunters. I never read any Greek philosophers, but I think one of them said that change is the only constant. Dude knew what he was talking about.

  Anyway, we finished our set up pretty quickly. Rod and I lugged in the ammo, water, and food (in that order) and then carried ready rounds for Chloe up to the roof. Jeeza carried up a couple of sandbag-rests for the scoped .308 but stayed put; she was working spotter again and began surveying the base for movement. Prospero and Steve checked out the ground-level perimeter fence with binoculars, and then walked the thinner one lining the crest of Cat Hill. Both were intact. No surprise. The stalkers on Ascension never had the numbers, let alone any reason, to crowd against and push down fences.

  Weapons were distributed, along with a two-way radio for each person. The radios didn’t have much operating life; their rechargeable batteries barely deserved the name. So we kept our one real radio on, next to Jeeza and hooked up to a goofy power-source built from a car battery. That way, anyone could switch on their own handset and make a report to Jeeza on top of the Wizard’s Tower. Equipped with a megaphone, she, in turn, could spread the word to everyone else.

  And yes, we did all start referring to the main building as the Wizard’s Tower. It was partially as a nod to Rod, but it was also a lame attempt at dark humor. Back when such things still mattered, the NSA had been memed as the real world’s equivalent of the Dark Lords of the Sith, Sauron’s minions, etc., etc.

  Hey, making bad jokes is better than obsessing about the possibility of being surrounded by stalkers for days.

  As Rod lugged his last load to the roof—a sound system that was guaranteed to attract the stalkers—he was smiling like an asylum inmate who’d missed meds three days in a row. I figured it was some private wizard joke, but when I asked, he just shook his head and grinned even more wildly. “You’ll see—eh, hear—soon enough.” I shrugged, snagged my FAL, and went outside to join Steve and Prospero while I waited for him to come back down.

  It wasn’t my intent to keep the guys on the ground and put the gals up on the roof. Hell, there was no margin of error to allow for chivalry when assigning tasks. We just put the right people in the right jobs. In this case, our best sniper and spotter were the two women. Three of us four guys would stand a rotating watch at three equidistant points on the crest of Cat Hill, the last one held as a ready reserve at the center. Our job: to watch for any stalkers that attempted to climb or knock down the fence. And if they tried—well, that’s why we had the FALs. It was, depending upon the angle, anywhere from seventy-five to one hundred yards from our patrol positions to the base of the hill. We were good enough shots to weed out any stationary cluster of stalkers. Eventually I looked back at the second story. “Hey, Rod: you coming?”

  “Right now!” he whooped. Loud enough to wake stalkers, but that hardly mattered, given that was why he was up there in the first place. “So, are you ready for it?”

  “For what?”

  “For this!”

  The speakers on the roof crackled, and then sent a wave of sound out over the dilapidated military housing units: a single bell-toll, followed by an abrupt surge of marching music. The kind they used to play back in Victorian times. “What the hell—?” I started.

  But Prospero groaned. “Oh no. Not that.”

  “Not what?”

  But Jeeza was damn near squea
ling with laughter. “Perfect!” I heard her shout after Rod, who had started down toward us.

  I repeated—and this time, completed—my question: “What the hell is that?”

  “That,” said Ron as he came down the stairs of the Wizard’s Tower, “is the Monty Python theme song!”

  “Okay”—I vaguely recognized it from the old TV show—“but why?”

  Rod stopped in mid-step. “Remember what I said about taunting the stalkers? Like, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?” I guess I looked as confused as I felt. “You know, the French knights on the castle wall?”

  “Yeah, Rod, I remember you saying that, but it’s—it’s been a long time since I saw that movie. And I might have been high.”

  “But I thought you—? Well, whatever.” He jogged toward his watch post on the south side of the hilltop, trying not to look disappointed.

  Prospero looked after him, smiled at me. “Clearly, you are not a True Fan.”

  “Clearly,” I agreed, and went to my post.

  * * *

  Fans or not, the stalkers sure did respond to that music. They came stumbling from various buildings around the base, looking like they’d just awakened. Which was probably the case for a lot of them; they were pretty gaunt.

  Chloe let the first one get to one hundred twenty yards before putting the hammer down. The rifle barked; the stalker fell. Tried to get up. I heard the distant clatter of Chloe working the bolt and then, two seconds later, a second bark. The stalker, just rising, went back and was still.

  We were all equally still. This was the moment of truth: how would they react when one of their number went down? More energetic? More aggressive? More likely to gather and come as a mass?

  A few started moving a little faster and with a little more focus. They zeroed in on the sound of the rifle, ran toward that. If you could call what they were doing running. I mean, they were going through the motions now, but it was like they had ten-pound weights on every limb. But other than that, no change.

  Even if you wanted to know how every one of the stalkers was shot that morning, I couldn’t tell you. On two occasions, several got to the same stretch of fence at roughly the same time. Those of us with FALs took our time and took them down. After only three hours, fifty-two dead stalkers were scattered along the various approaches between the buildings below us. Chloe spent a little over eighty rounds achieving that feat, not because she missed a bunch, but because one of the things we were learning about the infected is that they don’t stop coming. Even when they can’t really run anymore. It’s not determination or anything like that. They just aren’t wired to do anything else.