Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  There are no goddamned zombies! This is the real world, this is—”

  Gates flopped some more, then stiffened up so quick, it was like he’d been dead for hours. Scared, but drawn toward him like iron filings to a magnet, I crept forward and touched his corpse.

  Billy Boy was ice-cold. This meat was decidedly not fresh.

  I gagged, then turned aside and vomited. He was blue. His skin was tough, like leather.

  Private Gates was a freaking zombie. Walking dead. They’d killed him, then sucked the life out of his body, so that in just half an hour, he was many days dead.

  Arlene . . . !

  I knew what I had to do next. I was crying while I did it. I hoped I’d find some magazines to go with my new acquisition, a 10mm, M-211 Semiautomatic Gas-Operated Infantry Combat Weapon (Sig-Cow, we called it). Bitch of a way to get one.

  Gates only had a single spare mag, and the one in the rifle was dead. Still shaking, I reloaded the rifle, dropping rounds left and right, and crept on, wondering who would come running at the sound of me murdering my dead chum.

  Leaving Gates’s body, I started walking fast, then a little faster. Suddenly I was running . . . not in fear, but sick rage. The little voice in my head that usually keeps me on track was screaming about discipline and strategy and keeping my cool. The voice wanted me to make a nice, practical analysis of the evidence.

  I had every intention of listening to reason, but my feet and brain stem had other ideas. They were running from the face of a man who used to be a human being; running toward the bastards who reworked him.

  I’ve always had good survival instincts. They’d never abandoned me before, not even in the worst firefights in a career that had seen its fair share of combat. But here and now, in a dull, gray cavern under the craggy surface of Phobos, my body was betraying me. If I could just stop seeing the slack jaw, the dead eyes, I could get control again. But the face wouldn’t go away; even the characteristic twitch of the right eye that used to annoy me when Gates was alive unnerved the hell out of me now. I couldn’t stand to be winked at by a zombie.

  Yeah. Zombie. Putting the word to it helped. At least I was running a little slower and started paying attention to my surroundings. I saw the walls of the corridor instead of a phantom mask of death; and I heard the loud echoing of my footsteps, my labored breathing . . . and the shuffling noises of other feet.

  Four of them were waiting for me around the bend—four zombies. They stared at me with dead, dry eyes . . . and one of the zombies was a woman.

  I didn’t know her; UAC worker. Thank God it wasn’t Arlene. I didn’t even want to think about Arlene with gray flesh and a sour-lemon smell, sneering and pumping bullets at me without any recognition.

  I felt a rage I’d never felt before; my blood was on fire and my skin couldn’t contain the boiling, liquid anger. I shook from hate so deep that military training could never reach it.

  I didn’t want to shoot these travesties of human life. I wanted to rip them apart with my bare hands! They shuffled toward me, fumbling their weapons and pumping shots like their rifles would never run dry. What did I do? I staggered directly toward them, raising my own M-211 and taking one of the walking dead in its shoulder . . . a useless shot.

  It was the girl that broke the spell. Some little piece of who she once was must have been left in her brain, a faint echo or resonance of human thought. She didn’t charge blindly like the other three; she turned and fell behind cover to plink at me.

  My higher brain functions kicked in. I shook my head, then strafed while sidestepping to a pillar; once behind cover, I aimed a shot into Zombie One’s head. It roared, then danced like a headless chicken and collapsed. I got the message: only head shots got me any points. Just like in the movies.

  The citrus stench almost overwhelmed me. I snuck a quick glance at the zombie I’d just smoked . . . something squirmed inside its brain. Swallowing nausea, I took a bead on Zombie Two.

  The zombie-girl chittered, and the other two headed jerkily toward the console behind which she crouched. I caught Zombie Two before it made it halfway; but the other one took a position behind cover, and both it and Zombie Girl returned fire.

  A standoff. I was trapped behind the pillar, two zombies behind an instrument console marked UAC and covered with sticky-pad notes, the three of us separated by no more than twenty meters. Swiveling my head, I stared wildly around, trying to spot something useful.

  Five minutes deep into the Phobos facility, and I was pinned down inside a mortuary in hell. A dozen bodies sprawled on the floor from the open control room in which I stood all the way to a curve in the corridor beyond which I could see no farther. Recognizing a few of them didn’t do my stomach any good. The others were probably UAC workers.

  I thought I’d seen war in Kefiristan.

  The undead and I played a game of tag around the pillar; I popped out to fire off a shot, and they sprayed my position a moment after I abandoned it.

  There wasn’t much time to appreciate the fine details; the third time I popped around for a shot, I slipped on fresh blood. Even as a kid, I was good at turning mishaps into advantages; special training merely augmented my natural instinct for survival.

  I hit the floor on my knees, then dropped to my belly to aim a shot while braced against the floor. The third male zombie rose to fire down on me, and I caught it in the throat, knocking it backward; before it could reacquire its target, Yours Truly, my next shot took Zombie Three in the right eye.

  The female wasn’t wearing a uniform or armor; I realized she must have once been a UAC worker, not a soldier . . . which might account for her bad aim. She fired off a couple of rounds that missed by a wide margin.

  I can fight this war forever, I thought, rage starting to creep back. Then it struck me: I could fight this war forever, at least until I was finally blown away, and never even come close to figuring out what had happened here at Phobos Base.

  I had to take one of bastards “alive,” if that was the right word.

  The plan flickered through my head between one shot and the next; and now that I finally had a plan, I was Light Drop Infantry again!

  Quickly, before she could adjust and acquire me, I bolted around the pillar, head-faked to the left, then cut right and hopped over the console. Zombie Girl swiveled the wrong direction, and before she could turn back, I swung the butt of my Sig-Cow into her temple.

  She dropped like bricks on Jupiter. The rifle sailed from her hands across the floor. I slung my own M-211 across my back, flipped her over and shoved my pistol in her mouth.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I demanded.

  “Mmph hmmph rmmph,” she said. I pulled the gun out of her mouth, but she kept talking as if she had not even noticed it. “—is the key. Gate is the key. Key is the gate. Coming. Kill you all.”

  Zombie Girl’s eyes shifted left and right; she was preternaturally strong . . . but not as strong as big Fly Taggart. My hand drooped as I stared at her, and she snapped at it like a rabid dog, trying to bite me.

  Abruptly, I realized why the zombies’ eyes were so dry and their vision so bad: they never blinked.

  I pushed the pistol against her forehead. “If there’s any piece alive inside of you, you know what this thing will do to your shriveled, little brains. What the hell is coming through the gate?”

  “Great. Ones. Gate ones.” She focused her eyes on me, seeming to see me for the first time. She didn’t answer, but for a moment her face was filled with such torment that I could no longer stand the interrogation.

  I cocked the hammer; her eyes rolled up, looking over my head. “You want this?” I asked.

  Zombie Girl closed her eyes. It was the only kind of prayer left to her by the reworking that made her what she was.

  I closed my own eyes when I squeezed the trigger. The gunshot snapped me awake again; I jumped up, slid the Sig-Cow into ready position, and backed away from the undead dead.

  What the hell was going on? I s
tarted to think I had an answer . . . part of an answer.

  “Who built the Gates?” The question endlessly on everyone’s lips might be about to be answered. Maybe. But were the “Great Ones” coming through the Gates the ones who had built them? Or had the builders already been overrun by some even more powerful, horrific critter, who was now joyfully following Gate after Gate, finding and overpowering all the colonies of the builders’ “empire”?

  Neither thought was pleasant: humans were either trespassers who were about to be run off the property or dessert after a main course of Gate builders.

  I got the shakes, real bad. I backed into a dark corner, M-211 pointed toward the corridor, the unknown, the way I hadn’t been yet. I had not seen a particular body I’d half dreaded, half hoped to find. Christ. Arlene was still Somewhere Out There, one way or the other.

  I prayed she was lying dead on the deck, not stumbling toward me with dry, unblinking eyes and a sour-lemon smell.

  I might soon be the only living human on Phobos, I realized. I had little faith in the guards I’d left back in the mess hall. First contact with zombies, and they’d role over and, to coin a phrase, play dead. I could imagine a rotting corpse that used to be Lieutenant Weems telling them to get with the zombie program; the Rons would salute and “Yes sir!” themselves straight to hell.

  The old survival mechanism was definitely starting to kick in for Yours Truly. I’d never been completely comfortable as a team player. I could see myself doing the job of zombie exterminator until I was the only biped left standing on Phobos. These living dead characters weren’t very good soldiers. Yeah, I could dust them all. Except for one little detail.

  I couldn’t bear coming up against what used to be Arlene Sanders. No, that wasn’t very appealing at all. It’s not like she was my girl; she had her Dodd, and it seemed to satisfy her. Dodd and I didn’t really like each other, but we tolerated for Arlene’s sake.

  Not love, I swear. It’s just that Arlene lived in the same world I did, and I mean a lot more than just wearing the same uniform. She wasn’t like any other girl I’d been . . . I mean, any other girl I’d known.

  Arlene remembered being awakened by a D.I. heaving a trash can down the hall, same as me. She remembered the jarhead getting all over her; “on your face, down-up-down-up-down-up—you keep pumpin’ ’em out until I get tired!” She knew about reveille at 0500, PT (Physical Training), or a dainty, eight-mile run at 0505.

  Arlene knew the smell of disinfectant. She knew all about scraping two years of accumulated crud off a wall with a chisel so the next guy could slap on a quarter-inch-thick splash of anti-corrosion paint.

  She’d spent just as many months as I wrestling a goddamned floor buffer up and down a corridor, while already dog-sacked from hours of PT, obstacle course, combat training, small-arms, endless, mindless instruction on how to break down and reassemble a Sig-Cow while blindfolded, and lectures on the exotic venereal diseases of Kefiristan, Mars, Phobos Base, and Ohio . . . hours that always seemed to add up to twenty-six or twenty-eight per day.

  Arlene figured out a lot about me in record time. She was bright, and just as committed to a military career as any other man in the outfit. She’d become my best buddy in the platoon.

  As I sat there, wiping blood and crud from my face in the eye of an impossible hurricane, it helped to think about Arlene. Recalling her features drove the monsters from my mind. I played a little game with myself, not letting the horror rise up and engulf the picture I was drawing.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better-looking woman than Arlene, objectively considered. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous in the conventional sense. To use an older phrase from a braver age, she was “right handsome.” Five-ten and compactly built, she worked out more than anyone else in the platoon. She had beautiful, well-cut muscles.

  (Once, when for a few days she thought she might be “with child”—not mine—Gates had said, “She’s such a man, I bet she got herself pregnant.” He didn’t say it loudly.)

  I liked how she looked at everyone through slitted eyes, giving her a hooded serpent look. She was not to be trifled with, as one skank found out when he thought it was funny to sneak up behind her and pull down her pants.

  The rest of us were certainly interested in seeing all we could of her well-shaped posterior, but we weren’t idiots. Without turning around, she backhanded him perfectly and broke his nose. At the time all I could think of was how much I enjoyed seeing her move. We’re talking ballet here.

  Of course, there was a lot more to Arlene; she had a brain. Those are in short supply in the service, even in Light Drop, and I hated to see one go to waste. I took her to Corps music concerts, and she dragged me to old sci-fi movies. We got drunk together sometimes. We played poker, too; but my only chance against her was when I was stone-cold sober.

  One night we got so drunk that we fumbled our way into a kiss. It just didn’t feel right. We were buddies, not lovers.

  Arlene and I reached an unspoken agreement where we didn’t talk about that night. As if to prove what a pal she could be, she started setting me up with dates. She had girlfriends who were always first-rate in one way or another, and they liked to oblige her by hanging with her pal. I didn’t kick. I just didn’t seem able to return a commensurate favor.

  Arlene told me once how she wanted to save up some money and go to college someday. I didn’t hold that against her. I wished the best for her.

  The best. That thought shot down my reverie in flames. What could the best be for her now, in this place? Death, I guessed; anything would be better than gray flesh, dry, unblinking eyes, and jerking limbs.

  “No,” I heard myself talking to no one, “she’d never allow herself to be turned into one of those.”

  But what if this reworking took place after death?

  Swallowing hard, I stood up and decided to get back to business. I needed ammo; a wild shot had destroyed the magazine and receiver of one of the Sig-Cows; the only thing a zombie could use it for now would be as a war club, so I left it on the floor. Nobody had a select fire weapon, which was too bad; I sure missed the luxury of launching three or four rounds at a time toward a zombie head . . . much better chance of a bull’s-eye. On the other hand, if they had had one of the two select-fire M-220 Dogchoppers that a squad carried, I might not be alive to pick through the weaponry.

  I shoved some magazines into my ammo pockets and loaded up both weapons. No sense carrying another Sig-Cow. I really wanted to get my hands on the riot gun that Dardier usually carried, though—except it would probably mean ripping it out of her twitching fingers after blowing a hole in her pretty, blond head.

  I followed the trail of corpses another two bends of the corridor, taking as much ammo as I could carry without rattling like a medieval knight. We were all supposed to carry head-talks, so we could communicate . . . but I didn’t find any, which was pretty suspicious. No ELFs or MilDataBuses, either: nothing whatsoever that might be used to communicate what the hell was going on.

  And I always made time to check the faces. So long as one, particular face wasn’t there . . . I knew I could stand it.

  4

  I almost felt relief when I ran into two more zombies. Now that I knew what to do, it was just some sickening sort of exercise. I only “killed” one of them; the other, I just popped its rifle, then shot out its knees and hips; I wanted it alive, maybe to answer some questions before I smashed in the curling mouth with the yellow teeth.

  I didn’t recognize this one; it was a former UAC worker, used to be a man. It didn’t have even as much mind left as had Zombie Girl; but this time, I let it babble for some time:

  “Big, coming through, big, Gate is the key, killing, killing, all the killing, coming through, coming to kill you all, the Gate is the key, the key, hell and damns is the key, coming through the Gate . . .

  “Phobos! Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear!

  “Coming to Phobos, coming from Phobos, crossing the Styx, pickup Styx,
Styx is the key.”

  I waited until it started repeating itself; after a moment, a chill crept down my neck: the thing was repeating itself exactly, like a tape loop. Suddenly more scared than I had been in hours, I put it out of its misery (and mine).

  I backed up into a dark alcove, praying nobody had a light-amp glasses or an infrared sensor. I needed to think this through.

  A single strip of hellishly bright luminescence flickered off and on high in the center of the ceiling; a bare sun bulb was all that was left of the lighting system. The strobe effect made shadows look like monsters, creeping toward me. But I didn’t smell any rotten citrus, and heard none of the characteristic zombie gibbering . . . just a strange clicking sound ahead, like a dolphin with laryngitis. I figured I was safe for the moment.

  Phobos was pretty obvious; they were here, at Phobos Base. They came to Phobos . . . but what did the thing mean saying they were coming from Phobos?

  I started feeling nauseated. My skin began to creep up and down my bones . . . If the zombie didn’t distinguish between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then maybe it was telling me that Phobos was not the final target of the invasion; they were going to cross the River Styx, the river of the dead in Greek mythology.

  And what was on the other side? Well, hell, I supposed. Hades. But wait—if you were starting from hell, then “crossing the Styx” took you to . . .

  I swallowed the nausea back down. Sweat dripped down my forehead, stinging my eyes.

  The target was Earth. Terra mostly firma. Home sweet hovel.

  I accepted the fact that I was a dead man. After four years of Catholic school, run by Father Bartolomeo, Society of Jesus, I had always thought I was pretty much “prayed out.” Certainly, even after four years in the Corps, the last three in Light Drop Infantry, I hadn’t had a word to say to the Big Guy, if He were even listening.