by Jason Offutt
Doug wished he knew.
“I told you.” A man, his filth smeared clothes hung loosely on his shoulders, stood outside a tent about ten yards down the row. The Gravelyman. Had he been there the whole time? The Gravelyman coughed from deep down, and used the back of his sleeve to wipe blood from his nose and mouth. “I fucking told you. Our great government has caged us all, now they’re going to kill us.” He took a step toward them, but Doug pulled up his right crutch, and pointed it at the Gravelyman.
“Don’t come closer,” Doug shouted, leaning his weight on his other crutch. “We’re not infected, and don’t intend to be.”
The Gravelyman laughed, a spasm of coughs threw him forward, hands on knees, blood shot from every point of his face, and pooled by his feet. “We’re not infected. We’re not infected,” the Gravelyman mocked, then laughed through the coughs. “It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die.”
“Shit,” Doug hissed. “He’s got the fungus thing they tested us for. They must have known he had it.”
“They knew,” Nikki screamed through tears. “Those fuckers knew, and they sent us all out on that bus together anyway.”
Jenna buried her face into Doug’s chest. “If he has it, we all probably have it.”
Doug held her tight. “We don’t, at least not yet.” He paused. “But most people in here have it. This place, these Communities aren’t to protect us. They’re to protect everybody from us.”
“Corson said we were in here ‘until we get this mess cleaned up,’” Nikki said softly, wiping tears from her face. “We’re the mess. What do you think they’re going to do with us?”
The Gravelyman laughed again. He was down on his knees now, hovering over a pool of blood. “I told you. They’re going to kill us. Sweep us under the rug. They don’t want to cure us; they’re the cure for us. You hear that noise?” The Gravelyman coughed and collapsed into his own blood.
Terry grabbed Doug’s shoulder. “That hum? Yeah. Those are jet engines.”
Doug stood silent for a moment, resting on his crutches. Yes, jet engines, but just one. “Maybe …” Doug started, then stopped himself. The distant pops suddenly stopped and the roar of military jet came softly, then gradually grew louder. “He’s right. They’re going to kill us all.”
Jenna was the first to react to the scream behind them. She pushed Doug to the ground as a man, a line of spittle running from his blood-encrusted face, ran over Doug and stumbled onto the dirt of the Community street. My God, she thought, his eyes. His eyes were crying blood.
“Son of a bitch,” Terry yelled, and grabbed Doug, and pulled him to his good foot, draping Doug’s arm over his shoulder, one crutch clutched in Doug’s hand. “Run. Run.” Nikki and Jenna snapped to action, running next to Terry and Doug, Jenna threw Doug’s other arm over her shoulder. “Head toward Z-14.”
They ran toward the Z-14 spray-painted in green stencil over the metal door of the nearest Quonset hut. Terry’s hand reached the door first; he pulled it open and they limped inside. Terry hammered the door home as the Blood Crying Man slammed into it, his drooling face pressed against the door’s window, red, angry eyes ablaze, his mouth moved like it had a mouthful of gum.
“Now,” Terry said. “That’s a zombie. I’ve trained for this shit since the first ‘Resident Evil’ game, and I don’t even have a fucking shotgun.”
Nikki locked the door and turned toward the interior of the arched, tin building. The jet sound grew closer, shaking the ground under her feet. She turned, and screamed. Mold-covered bodies on Army cots lined both sides of the hut, tall, solid stalks, their bulbs stretched like a ball with too much air, rose from their chests like this was a gardening nursery. The closest ones leaned toward them.
“Guys,” she whispered. “You need to see this.”
“Fuck,” Doug spat as he turned and saw the fungal horror. “We have to get out of here. Now. Now.”
The bleeding man rammed the door again; blood from his face streaked the window next to Terry’s face. “What about Night of the Living out there, boss?”
Doug pushed his metal crutch into Terry’s hand and forced a smile. “It’s your destiny, man.”
Terry grabbed the crutch and shifted Doug’s weight onto Jenna’s shoulder. He smiled, but his was real. “Right, boss.” He turned to Nikki, tears ran from her dark eyes. “I think I love you, Nikki,” he said, and turned her chin upward with gentle fingers. She smiled as he pushed his lips onto hers.
“I think I love you, too. You big idiot,” she said.
Terry nodded and pulled the door open, the fungus man fell into the Quonset hut, arms and legs flying around it like it was running the 100-meter dash. Maybe in its limited mind, it was. Terry raised the crutch like a club and brought it down on the fungus man’s head. Blood shot into the air in a thin ribbon. Terry bashed its head again, and again, until the body stopped moving. Nikki grabbed Terry’s head and kissed his rough cheek.
“Now I know I love you.”
Terry winked at her. “Me, too.”
The ground shook like an earthquake as they spilled from the Quonset hut, Terry and Jenna held Doug between them as well as they could. Black Batman planes appeared on the horizon. The B-2. The B-2 wasn’t there to drop more food, Doug knew. The B-2 was built for one thing – dropping bombs. Corson said there were Communities across Nebraska, Montana, and Wyoming. They were Communities of the infected. Communities of the dead. And the government was destroying them all, today.
“This is a saturation bombing,” Terry said.
“A what?” Jenna looked at him, her face drained of what little color it had, her mouth pinched tight.
“A saturation bombing.” Terry said again. “Thousands of Mk 82 dumb bombs. No nukes, just lots and lots of explosions. The military can wipe this place clean in minutes and leave it ready to farm again. No radiation, no poison, no damage to anything.”
“Except us,” she whispered.
Terry nodded. “Yeah, except us, and they don’t even have to see our faces.”
“How’d you know that?” Doug asked.
Terry forced a grin. “If you play as many video games as me, you learn a few things about military procedure.”
Explosions pounded closer, Terry and Nikki squeezed Doug close before the vibrations brought him to the ground. More black dots began to appear in the morning sky.
“What are we going to do, Doug?” Jenna asked.
Doug looked into her frightened, freckled face and smiled. “I don’t know, baby,” he said.
The first airplane flew overhead. Doug thought he’d heard somewhere they flew out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, that they could fly all over the world without having to land. He didn’t know why that came into his head. Jenna, he should be thinking about Jenna. He reached for her hand, and found someone’s. Doug’s eyes followed the bomber as it traveled over the Community, black spots fell toward them at incredible speed and the B-2 banked to the left and kept moving. This time there was no parachute; the black spots grew larger as they fell to earth.
“Oh, shit,” came from his lips.
An Mk 82 crashed out of sight, but the explosion moved the ground under their feet. Jenna wrapped her arm around Doug’s waist to keep him from spilling onto the dirt. Bomb after bomb rattled the ground. The B-2 looped for another run, joined by a number of other bombers. Weak screams pierced the morning before explosion after explosion drowned them out. Dust and rocks filled the air, and rained down upon them. Wave after wave of Mk 82 dropped from overhead, consuming the Community like a brushfire. The falling bombs grew closer. A shattered board slammed into Gravelyman’s bloody, mindless body, crushing his skull. Doug turned to run, to limp out of the way on his ruined foot, but didn’t know where to go. Jenna looked at him and bit her bottom lip, the pensive flirtatiousness out of place in the destruction. More planes appeared in a formation on the horizon and grew closer, and more bombs lit Community Six on fire. An explosion launched the old metal Quonset
hut into the air, the one full of fungus-riddled bodies ready to turn everyone into fungus monsters; it crashed into a nearby section of fence, and penned it to the ground.
“Fuck this,” Terry tried to scream between the explosions that filled the air, and pulled Nikki toward the tear in the fence.
Jenna grabbed Doug’s arm and tugged him into motion, her face suddenly flush with color. “Come on,” she yelled, but Doug couldn’t hear her. He didn’t know if he’d ever hear anything again. He moved as fast as he could as he held onto Jenna, the ground shifting beneath him. They neared the fence, a place Doug had avoided during his short stay at the Community. He looked out over the vast plain that was Western Nebraska; another Community (Community 5?) lay about a half-mile north, the ground between them painted gray with Ophiocordon mold that grew over the hundreds of thousands of human bodies that lie in the dust. To ensure the survival of not only our country, but our species, my ass.
A bomb struck three rows over and knocked Doug to the ground. He spat dirt as he tried to stand, but arms suddenly wrapped around him. Terry dropped Doug across his shoulder and moved toward the break in the fence. Nikki hopped onto the crushed roof of the Quonset hut and held her hand out to Jenna as a bomb exploded at their feet, and everything went black.
The End
Read on for a free sample of The Long Midnight: A Zombie Novel
Chapter One
It was early afternoon when the sun reaches its zenith, covering the land with its vast blanket of warmth and light, but in a world of darkness, only a dull gray filled the sky above Captain Joshua Drake as he placed the beast’s head in his riflescope. He ignored the biting cold, the moaning wind, and the deathly sky to concentrate on his target. The beast, its face trapped into a perpetual bony smile from the flesh rotting off its cheeks, locked eyes with Drake’s scope. It wore an archaic metal helmet with a pointed top from a war long over and was largely naked except for a few strands of fatigues covering its bony and decaying frame. It opened its mouth to hiss and roar as it raised its own primitive rifle towards Drake.
Then the beast’s head split in half from a high-powered bullet that blasted through it. Purple blood and brain matter flew everywhere, landing on the ground, the bodies of the dead, and Drake’s uniform like a bucket of watery shit thrown against a concrete wall. The zombie’s body went limp and fell onto the dirt with a light thud. Green and yellow body fluids flowed freely from the wound like small rivers and mixed with the parched dirt.
Drake had seen it all before, countless times. The gruesome scene left him feeling nothing. He’d killed thousands of the things since being drafted into the Army at sixteen. There was something odd about this one, however, because he swore he heard it communicating in his tongue to one of the other zombies moments before he shot it.
“Captain Drake! Captain Drake!” a voice yelled frantically behind him.
Drake didn’t respond as he stared at the rotting flesh and blown-out brains of the terminated zombie.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and instantly spun around.
“What, Murph?” he said angrily.
“You okay?”
“Do I look like I’m not, private?”
“No, sir, but you ran off on your own.”
Murphy looked around and saw a dozen extinguished deaders surrounding them. He was amazed.
“Did you kill them all on your own?”
Drake didn’t respond. The answer was obvious.
“Wow!” Murphy said after understanding the stupidity of his question.
Murphy was an eighteen-year-old kid on his first tour. He had never shot at a zombie until his deployment to Forward Operating Base Alpha a month ago.
“How’s Trev?” said Drake.
“The sarge? Well, sir, I’m afraid he’s really bad.”
“Fuck. Take me to him.”
* * *
Trevor Esoog was on his back being attended to by Sergeant Mifune. Things appeared hopeless. There was a bullet wound in Trevor’s chest and his breathing was rapid and hoarse. Blood dribbled out of his mouth.
Drake knelt next to him and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. They were the same age and had been fighting together for the past twenty years. They’d seen a lot of their friends die, yet somehow they always survived. Trevor was Drake’s best man in the platoon, the only man whom he knew he could trust to accomplish anything. Now a zombie sniper had ended all that.
“How are you, bud?” Drake said quietly.
Trevor smiled and his round, deathly pale face struggled to hold the grin. He hoped to reassure his longtime friend Drake that all was well, but they both knew it wasn’t. He was dying.
“You’re a trooper,” said Drake. “You can hack it. We’ll get you back.”
Trevor’s grin was replaced by a frown. Tears appeared around his eyes just as they went blank.
He was gone.
Mifune was still working at stemming the bleeding when Drake grabbed his arm and gently pushed him back.
Mifune sat on his legs and softly wept. The remaining men from the platoon gathered around to look at their fallen comrade one last time.
Drake closed Trevor’s dead eyes.
“Get outta here, all of you,” said Drake. “Set up a perimeter so we don’t get fucking ambushed again.”
Mifune refused to move. Trevor and Mifune were good friends, the two sergeants in the platoon. Trevor was the more aggressive and risky one, Mifune the deliberate and cautious sergeant. Trevor was suave and funny, Mifune serious and emotional. Their personalities were even reflected in their physical appearances: Trevor’s stubbled face and beer gut, Mifune’s neatly shaved face and trim, muscular build. Together, their yin-yang of the platoon was an effective balancing force under Drake’s confident leadership. It was no surprise they were considered the best platoon at Forward Operating Base Alpha.
Now that, too, was over. The platoon would never fully recover with the demise of Sergeant Trevor, Mifune believed.
“Mifune, make sure everyone else is good.”
“All eight of ‘em?” Mifune replied quietly.
“Yes. Go!”
Mifune slowly got up to his feet and walked away.
Drake stood up, pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol, and aimed it at his dead friend’s head as he lit a cigarette placidly. The bright red and orange cherry of his smoke illuminated the creases around his face. His weathered and tired visage was once strikingly handsome before he was drafted twenty years ago into the Army and deployed to the front. Constant war ruins a man’s good looks.
Drake waited. He wanted to make sure Trevor was truly gone. If he was going to reanimate, it should only take a few minutes. Then Trevor’s mouth twitched several times. It was beginning.
Drake moved closer, making sure he had a good shot at his forehead.
Trevor’s eyes opened, the whites horribly bloodshot, and the blue irises now a piercing red. His mouth opened and he let out a snakelike hiss as his eyes fixed on Drake.
Drake spit out his cigarette and fired two rounds into his friend’s head. Then he looked up at the darkness above him. It was the Longest Midnight as his parents called it, a midnight without end. He wondered if anyone would ever see the dawn.
The Longest Midnight is available from Amazon here.