“All right,” he said, addressing them both. Nikki lifted her head from her hands and looked at him with bleary eyes. “You are in the hands of the United States Army. If you are United States citizens or can pass a simple citizenship test, you are entitled to all of the rights and protection of United States citizenship. At this time, the unit that I represent is in a state of high alert due to the fact that we are currently without communication or correspondence with the central government of the United States. As such, we have necessarily assumed a temporary sovereignty in regards to executive, legislative, and judicial governance and exercise whatever measures and/or precautions including the precaution of the gathering of evidence supporting citizenship or the eligibility thereto deemed necessary to protect and enforce said sovereignty in full accordance and compliance with United States constitutional law insofar as such measures and/or precautions have not altered, added, or removed said United States constitutional law such as persists in material and/or immaterial form at this location and/or vis a vis persons possessed of such knowledge. My name is Lieutenant Dennis Wheeler, and I will be guiding you through the process.”
He extended his hand first to Danny. Danny returned the gesture and Lieutenant Wheeler shook it abruptly and then turned to Nikki. Nikki also returned the gesture, holding out her thin white hand, which Lieutenant Wheeler shook as though it were a fish that he had just caught and were attempting to subdue.
“Now, then,” he said. “Do you have your social security card, driver’s license, and/or birth certificate, or some other form of identification with which I can confirm your identities as citizens of the United States?”
They looked at each other blankly. Nikki shook her head, and Danny shook his.
“All right then, not to worry, not to worry,” the lieutenant said. “I have here a simple test with which you can still identify that you are eligible for citizenship. If passed successfully, you will still be provided with all of the support and protection provided to citizens of the United States as part of the emergency measures lawfully adopted and amended to constitutional law by the unit that I represent.”
“Okay,” said Danny. Nikki nodded.
“Okay,” echoed Lieutenant Wheeler, handing one of the papers to each of them, along with a pencil. “No cheating!” he added with a smile.
Danny and Nikki exchanged another glance and then set to work. Danny placed the paper on his lap and examined the questions. The first few were easy enough: he knew that the declaration of independence declared the states’ independence from Britain; that freedom of religion means that you can practice any religion or none at all; that separation of church and state means that the state will not force its beliefs on anyone; and that all citizens have the same rights because of the belief that all men are created equal. But there were others that were more difficult: he could not name his state’s senator or one of its representatives; he did not know how many amendments the constitution had; and he did not know the date of the last day when he could send in his federal income tax return. After several of these kinds of questions, he gave up and handed the paper back to Lieutenant Wheeler with a sneer of disgust. The lieutenant smiled an automatic smile and took it from him. Nikki was deep in thought over hers, cradling her head with one hand, and tapping the pencil against her mouth with the other.
Danny was overcome with fatigue and his hunger had subsided, so he leaned into one of the sides of his chair and let his eyes fall shut. The instant his eyes closed, the world seemed to spin away from him, and he was lost in a gray velvet ether of non-vision. The hum of the lights and the soft reverberations of the room seemed to lull him instantly to sleep.
He had not slept long when he was awakened by the scuffle of Nikki returning her test to the lieutenant. Danny opened his eyes and looked up. The lieutenant was running his eyes back and forth between each of them, checking the answers of each at the same time. He held his hand down at one point on Danny’s, and continued on with Nikki’s alone. Then he stopped at a point on hers as well and looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m afraid you do not meet the qualifications that would entitle you to protection from the United States Army.” He looked at Danny. “The last day to return your federal income tax return is… the fifteenth of April.” Danny shrugged and tipped his head back. Lieutenant Wheeler looked at Nikki. “There are twenty-nine amendments to the constitution.”
Nikki’s face twisted in shock. “What?” she exclaimed.
“Twenty-nine.”
“No, there aren’t—there are twenty-seven!” she said, sitting forward in her chair and staring at the man.
“Since this unit has necessarily assumed a temporary sovereignty in regards to executive, legislative, and judicial governance and exercises whatever measures and/or precautions deemed necessary to protect said sovereignty, this unit has accordingly amended the constitution as it has seen fit in pursuance of this goal.”
“But—how was I supposed to know that? And, can you even do that?”
“I’m sorry. Everyone is given an equal opportunity. All of the amendments and legislation enacted by this unit have been instated only through constitutionally lawful and democratic processes. Now, although we cannot afford you the protection, service, and amenities that we would to United States citizens or those otherwise eligible, we have arranged for a provisional holding space where you can stay with others in a similar situation. I can present your case to the commander of the unit, General Reepus, if you would like. The general is—” Lieutenant Wheeler broke off and his eyes wandered upward in thought. His previous speech had rolled out of him with almost machine-like automaticity, so this break of silence had the effect of a gunshot. “Well, you will simply have to meet him. The general is the general. He has… well, for my part, he has enlarged my mind. You will have to meet him. In any case, I can speak to him on your behalf, if you wish.”
Nikki’s eyes were red-rimmed and clouded with tears. Her face was dark and sunken with fatigue. “Yes, please,” she replied weakly.
The lieutenant rose. “Then I will leave you with Sergeant Taylor.” Then he turned and left them alone with the woman who had initially escorted them in. Danny let his eyes close again. Nikki looked at the woman, Sergeant Taylor.
“How many of you are here?” Nikki asked her.
Taylor looked at her with unflinching eyes, clutching her rifle at attention, and did not respond.
“Why are those—those things outside? On the crosses?”
Taylor sighed as though reluctant to answer, but said, “They fear the smell of their own dead. General Reepus made the discovery. It’s how we’ve survived.”
“How did he discover that?” Nikki asked.
Taylor tilted her head and glared. “He’s a great man,” she hissed, her words issuing like flames from her mouth.
Lieutenant Wheeler appeared from around the same corner and approached Danny and Nikki.
“He won’t see you,” he said, “but he’s instructed me to lead you to the holding room.”
Danny lifted his head and opened his eyes. Nikki looked relieved, but the lieutenant’s voice had sounded tired—as though he didn’t really believe the good news he had relayed.
“If you’ll follow me, please,” he said.
Nikki rose from her chair. Danny shook himself awake and rose slowly from the chair. He reached down and picked up his guitar, slung the strap over his shoulder, and walked lazily after the other two. Taylor cast a wicked glare at them as though she intended to spit on them as they passed. Danny wondered what the reason was for such ire—perhaps it was because they hadn’t met the requirements for citizenship. Perhaps she hated them because she felt that they had taken advantage of, or had not truly understood, the privileges they had previously enjoyed as citizens. In any case, he felt that an unfair barrier had been set up between them, that she was acting irrationally.
Lieutenant Wheeler led them out of the furniture store back into the main
walkway of the mall, which was now dark with night. He turned on a flashlight which cast a dim, ominous glow before them, a glow which, when cast far ahead into the depth of the hallway, disappeared into the darkness. Their footsteps echoed loudly through the building, the whispering returns of sound playing at their ears, suggesting the sounds of others—perhaps the other citizens, or those eligible for the same protection—or perhaps something else altogether, hiding in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
After they had walked for some length, the beam of the flashlight grew dim, and flickered.
“Fuck,” muttered the lieutenant, shaking the light in his hand. The light flickered at his shaking it, eventually giving out and plunging them into darkness. “Oh, well,” he said. “We’re nearly there. Stick close to me. Here—let’s hold hands.”
Danny stretched out his hand in the dark and waved it about, eventually making contact with Nikki’s, and then after another brief waving about of hands, they were all three connected. They walked forward in a chain, as though in a dance, and in the pitch darkness, although there were only the three of them, Danny felt as if he may as well have been at the end of a chain made up of the entire remnant of humanity, interminably long and led forward through total darkness toward a destination of deep, unfathomable gloom by a distant, unseen master.
“Going down,” said the lieutenant. Danny braced himself for the stairs but stumbled anyway, nearly tumbling forward and losing his grip on Nikki, onto which he held as though her hand were a lifeline.
They came to a landing, and in the distance there was a narrow, horizontal slit of light—the crack at the bottom of a door. They walked toward this, bringing themselves up to it and then standing in waiting. In the dim light, Danny could begin to make out the vague forms of his other companions. The lieutenant undid a chain and a latch on the door that sounded almost as extensive as those that had guarded entry through the main door of the building. Then, with a creak of metal hinges, the heavy door swung open.
The room was dimly lit from a single overhead bulb that cast a harsh beam downward. The floor was littered with indeterminate debris and in the middle of this was a naked man sitting on the floor directly below the light. His head hung down so that all but the top of the crown and the backs of his bare shoulders were in shadow. Cords or strands of something fell from bracelets at his wrists. At their entrance, the head lifted up slowly to look at them, the face still in shadow.
Danny took in these surroundings, acclimating himself to the idea of this as his new place of habitation, but following this, the man’s head lifted a little more, and the light fell on it, and Danny’s perception changed as if a curtain had been lifted from his eyes.
The face was not human, but inhuman—pale, sickly, ravaged by decay, one eye sunken in and blind, the other staring out from the face with a cold, almost glowing intensity. The dark pieces of debris scattering the floor were human remains—bones and fragments of bones, brown with rot and old dry flesh.
Almost at the same moment of Danny’s realization, Lieutenant Wheeler threw Nikki forward savagely by the neck. She flew toward the creature, landing on her hands and knees, clattering among the bones.
Then, before Danny had a chance to react, the lieutenant hit him in the side with a blow so sharp that it sent him to the floor doubled over in pain. The lieutenant knelt over Danny, removing the strap to the guitar case and flinging it aside. He pulled Danny’s hands behind his back and bound them with a nylon cable.
At Nikki’s collapse, the creature leapt up, the chains attached to its bracelets clattering, and it rushed at Nikki’s fallen form. Nikki was too tired and hungry to move quickly, and the creature was upon her while she was still struggling to get up from her knees. It seized her head with its hands and gripped it with terrifying strength. Nikki screamed in agony. The creature tightened its grip and cracked her skull with the pressure. A circle of blood resembling a crown had formed around her head where the skin had broken and ran down into her eyes and stung them. Her body writhed and her fingers clutched wildly at the creature. Her motion intensified, gradually becoming spasmodic as the creature tore away the skull from her brain and plunged its ravenous mouth into the bowl of it, and then she suddenly stopped, and her body fell limp.
The lieutenant hoisted the bound Danny back up to his feet. Danny looked toward the creature and watched as it finished devouring the last of Nikki’s brains and moved on to the meat of her. It ate ravenously, as they always did, although watching it from this vantage—like watching a creature in a zoo—made it seem almost natural; it ate as he expected a starved animal might eat. It huddled over the body of its prey, back arched and head bent down, the arms hanging low and the skeletal hands grasping at flesh as only a secondary means of tearing it from the bone and rending it apart, the primary being the teeth and jaws bathed with thick swaths of blood. With its unnaturally strong arms, it worked the joints of Nikki’s limbs backwards, cracking the weaker bones and snapping the ligaments so that the limbs came apart and separated from the body. It held them high above with its hands and sucked the blood that drained onto its face, and then consumed the skin and muscle. It took no great care to avoid the clothing in its haste, only removing it when it presented an obstacle that could not be otherwise overcome. It became especially zealous over the intestines, which it pulled out of the body like cord and attempted to stuff into its mouth all at once even though the slippery tubes resisted it. Danny watched the fiend finish her off to the bone until, at the end, it scooped out her eyes with its fingers and ate them pensively and almost reluctantly, popping and crunching them deliberately between its teeth and slowly sucking them down.
Then Danny felt at his back a firm pressure—the lieutenant’s hand, urging him forward.
The creature looked up languidly, its one good eye a little slower, less alert than it had been earlier.
Danny resisted the push and scrambled to move backwards, but slipped on a bone and fell.
“Don’t make this difficult,” said the lieutenant.
Danny was too weak to do much, and the lieutenant dragged him forward. The creature stood, stooped over like a vulture, arms hanging limply, hands lifted slightly in expectation.
The lieutenant threw Danny forward, nearly onto the remains of Nikki. The creature, moving more slowly now, bent over him. Danny could smell the metallic aroma of blood and the rank stench of the half-rotting thing and the pollution of its breath.
It lowered its head, and Danny was closer to it than he had ever been to one before. He observed the ruggedness of its desiccated, leathery skin, the blue-green areas of the skin where moisture still remained, and the black cavity of the nose where the flesh was missing, either rotted off or torn off at some point during its rough existence. The one good eye looked at him coldly and without movement, seeming to glow from some sort of lurid inner illumination, and at the same time, to draw light into itself, as though it were glowing with darkness itself. It spread its thin, taut lips up and over blackening teeth and dark, shrunken gums to reveal its horrid jaws, and it dipped its head toward him. Then it sank its rotten teeth into his shoulder. Danny’s vision blurred and once again the world felt as though it were spinning away from him, and he had the vague sensation of being pulled backward, dragged away from the creature, and then he sank into fatigue, delirium, and despair, and all was dark.
#
Out of the darkness, there was a voice—a pulsating stream of sound that formed words that were as yet beyond comprehension. Gradually, other senses came, the sense of darkness, the sense of the weight of a body, and then awareness of the self—awareness that it was he who sensed. He felt trapped in the body, in the weight of it, unable to send its muscles into motion, or to throw open his eyes.
Then the voice stopped, and he heard another, a smaller, weaker voice, the voice of something more like a human. It seemed very close to him, and he caught at last some snatches of words:
“This one is fat…last a long
time…”
Then there was a sharp pain at his wrists as of pressure or burning. At this, he managed to send movement coursing through his body, although it was weak—he doubted if he had actually effected any real movement, or if he had merely produced in himself the sensation of it.
The voice came again, and in Danny’s emerging consciousness, he caught bits of the words and phrases that it uttered.
But it was not so much the words and phrases that mattered, but the darkness behind them, darkness that permeated the voice as it spoke, and the words that were spoken by it.
“We must defend…” it said, the voice echoing deeply in the darkness. “We must defend the supreme law of the land. Every law that is ever written implies the value of its own defense. We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
The sense of a dim light came to Danny, and he struggled to open his eyes. At great length, he was able to do so, and found himself looking up at an unfinished warehouse ceiling. The lights directly above him were not on, but there was a distant hum, and he guessed himself to be in another part of the furniture warehouse, not far from where he and Nikki had been earlier.
“In war, a commander must always determine an acceptable loss. A tree…must be pruned, or else it grows too large. Weeds must be removed if all plants are to flourish. In the garden, sacrifices must be made. To create an Eden, one must introduce a Fall.”
Danny struggled once more to move, and felt the resistance of his body on some surface underneath him which sent sharp pangs of discomfort through his back. His wrists, tied behind him, burned and restricted his movement. He relaxed in his effort to move and fell back, and then was overcome with a wave of nausea. His neck and shoulder ached.
And then in a flood of sensation, the memory of what had happened came to him—the death of Nikki, and the horrible creature leaning down for him—had he been saved? He was alive; his own sense told him that. Where was he? What had happened?
The Imminent Scourge: A Zombie Novel Page 13