Meyer gnawed on a bit of rock candy, surveying the market. “Poor girl over there. I think they were going to be married.”
“I’m sure you’re real sorry,” Voorhees said in a low growl. “I’m sure you never planned on Blake getting killed. What do you call that? Collateral damage?”
“Are you accusing me of being involved with this tragedy?” Meyer appeared taken aback. “Officer Voorhees, there’s a very tenuous balance between my people and your people. Why would I risk upsetting that?”
“Because you think you’re untouchable. You think you run this town.” Voorhees leaned in close. “Like you said, you’re God here.”
Meyer winked at him with a sly grin. “I did say that, didn’t I? Well, I suppose you’ve got a point there.” Sucking his candy, he continued, “But just because I could pull it of doesn’t mean I did. I meant what I said about that balance, Voorhees, ever so delicate. And I don’t think you’d want to upset it either.”
“Meaning... ?”
“Imagine Gaylen without ol’ Finn Meyer. Think of what these streets would look like. Think of just how difficult your job would be. My God, what a sad picture.”
Meyer had smuggled guns and drugs into Gaylen. He could have gotten his hands on infected bone.
Voorhees’ gaze narrowed. “You’re nothing new, Meyer. There are men like you everywhere. And if you were taken out, any one of them could replace you—so don’t go thinking you’re too precious to be locked away and forgotten.”
“What do you mean, prison?” Meyer laughed. “There’s no prison here! They wouldn’t even send me to Cleveland. You know why? Because I’d get back in, and then I’d have all their fucking heads on pikes!”
He stepped in close to Voorhees and snarled, “Just try to bring me in. Do it now! Slap the cuffs on me and march me out of here. You won’t even make it to the street.”
Voorhees nodded. “I see. Looks like I’ve gotten under your skin a bit, Meyer. You know that’s not good. That’s a sign of weakness—and among your people, that could get you in real trouble. Know what I mean? The slightest sign of weakness and all that loyalty you command is gone. Get a hold of yourself, Meyer.”
Voorhees turned away before the man could reply. He strode out into the street with nary a glance over his shoulder.
* * *
Meyer called Casey on his radio.
“Did you get things taken care of with the girl?” he demanded.
“I’ve got one of my best working on it,” Casey responded. “We’ll find her.”
“Haven’t had one run on me in a long while,” Meyer muttered. “I’ll need to make an example of her.”
“But before you do... ?” Casey said, an edge of desperation in his voice. That slightest sign of weakness.
“Sure, you can have a go at her,” Meyer replied. “You’ll really like this one, Casey.”
* * *
Dr. Zane sat before a small cage, his expression dark. He watched the rats inside; one was lying on its side, and the other was sniffing it timidly. Little white rats, pink-eyed and trembling, blissfully unaware of their world.
The rat lying down twitched. Its eyes opened. Tiny appendages grasped at the air.
It sat up and tore the other rat’s throat out.
Zane had ground up part of the bone and fed it to the rat. Without the benefit of an actual lab and scientific equipment, this was all he could do to test the sample—but it was enough. He shook his head in sadness as tiny carnage unfolded before him.
Twenty / Strange People
Adam was lying in a bed in a small white room. Blankets were tucked in around his arms and legs, and he could feel the soothing moisture of wet wraps around his burns.
The woman entered. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen
Adam had not known the meaning of beauty in his former life, but he had admired (envied) Man’s creativity and often was taken by simple architecture. He had spent many long hours wandering the streets of great cities where buildings more than a century old stood beside new works, contrasting the minds of then and now, structures complimenting one another and holding the Reaper in sheer awe. He loved the geometry of it. Masons had once thought geometry to be the language of God. Certain angles and curves seemed to please him more than others, perhaps appealing to his supernatural essence, and he grew to favor specific artists.
In this woman’s face he saw a masterwork in flesh. Every angle and shade was exquisite in itself, and when it all came together, smooth angles framing the dark pools of her eyes... it was overwhelming.
“Stay still,” she said, moving to adjust the pillows behind his head. “I don’t know if I can heal you, but I’ll try. It will take time.”
“I... I’m not a man,” he croaked.
“I know,” she replied. “I’m not a woman.” And she smiled at him then, and he knew that she had once borne the Reaper’s burden.
He knew there had been others before him, but never had the slightest notion of what had become of them when they left their station. He’d wondered what had made them quit. He’d wondered what they looked like, which mortal myths each embraced as their guise—but he’d never imagined that someone like the woman in white could be one of them.
“It’s snowing,” she said. “You’ve been here a day and a night. For a time, I thought you were gone. What did this to you? Surely not the undead. Were they living?”
“No, no,” he coughed. “It was an undead. A strange one. There’s something else driving him.”
“Do you have a guess what it was?” she asked.
“No.” He studied her face. She just looked too... too human. Too real. And yet—”You were a Reaper,” he said.
She nodded. “A long, long time ago. You are probably the one that took it on after me. It’s been ages since I’ve met another. Tell me—why did you leave your post? I’m always curious.”
“I’m just as curious about you,” Adam said.
“Tell me yours,” she said, “and I’ll tell you mine.”
“It was a child,” he said. “I couldn’t let her die. Not like that. But there was nothing I could do... then it came to me. Quit. Just quit. And all I had to do was do it, to exercise this will. That was it.”
“Did you save her?”
“I think so.”
“I’m glad.” She pulled over a small hand-carved chair and sat beside him. “Relax your body. I’m going to try to relieve your pain.”
“What about your story?”
“Patience,” the woman cooed. She gently laid her hands on his belly. He gasped in pain... then it was gone.
“Civilization was young when I fell,” the woman said. “And civilization, which I thought would save Man, only led to more reasons for war and greater means by which to shed blood.” She massaged his legs as she spoke. “Early men fought for basic needs. Now they fought for status, influence, pride. I wept for humanity as I realized that they would only get better at harming one another.”
The way she laid her hands on him was almost sedative. He forced himself to sit up straight and asked, “You said you fell... ?”
“We are all fallen,” she answered. “Those of us who are born into our stations, as we are, never to grow or change—when we do change, we fall and become like men. It’s not as bad as it sounds.
“There was a time when I thought civilization and faith heralded the dawn of a new peace, but I was so wrong... so inhuman then. I didn’t know Man as I do now.”
Adam nodded. “The American government actually made the plague... I believe the power existed long before that, in some form, but they willfully created afterdead. That was when I first became aware of them. It’s how I became aware of them, I suppose.”
A small, sad smile crossed the woman’s face as she looked at him.
“Adam,” he said, unsure what she was searching for.
She laughed. “I didn’t know you had a name.”
“Don’t you?”
“I could
never settle on one. Sometimes I wish God had named me the way parents name their children. But we’re not His children, are we?”
“You speak as if you know Him.”
“I do, in my way. There was a time when I had memories of being in His presence—I think—but they’ve long since faded. Now I can only pray, and imagine, as they do.”
Adam clasped her hand. “What of the afterdead?”
She told him. She told him about gods long dead and about humanity’s rotten luck.
He didn’t take it well.
“Not even God knows what it is or what to do about it? Then how are we to stop it? Do you even try to fight them?”
“When I must,” the woman said. “I concentrate on healing. I have a hope, silly as it may seem, that one day I might heal the undead.”
“It does sound silly,” Adam muttered. “Ridiculous. You were the one who said the plague was without reason. That even Creation is random in nature. So how... ?”
She turned over her left hand and opened her palm. There, right in the center of her soft flesh, a seedling sprouted, green and healthy. Alive. Life from nothing.
“We are potential, you and I,” she told him. “We’re not just clay. There is still power within us, such as what you used to make your scythe... it’s just a matter of channeling it.
“Once, we were simply bookkeepers, watching life come and go, observing the random. Now we are part of it.”
“Remarkable.” Adam touched the seedling. It curled away from his fingers, withering to dust.
“You’ll learn,” the woman in white said, still smiling. “You have eternity.”
* * *
The Omega had returned to the hillside to find Adam gone. He broke north, drawing on all his energy until he was starving once again.
Now he crouched on a snowy ridge, watching a pack of rotters below. More than a pack—an army. Hundreds. Following a dead man who hurled brilliant flames high into the air. The Omega nearly started after him, but the voices interrupted his rapture.
We need to eat!
Yes, eat... then find the Reaper!
The Omega slipped down from the ridge.
There were several stragglers at the rear of the pack, undead with broken legs or limbs nearly rotted off. The slowest was a female walking on what looked like sticks. Sweeping through the night, the Omega swung the shovel and cleanly decapitated her.
He tore a handful of ragged meat from the stump of her neck and stuffed it in his mouth. A few of the shambling rotters glanced back, then continued on their way.
* * *
“Sleep now,” the woman in white said to Adam. “Dream,”
“Of Lily,” he whispered, closing his eyes.
The woman paused in the doorway to watch him sleep. It was something she couldn’t do. He seemed to find happiness there, though, there in the dark.
She wondered if he’d been replaced yet.
Twenty-One / The Pack
Nickel, who had handled the rotters in Eviscerato’s circus, stayed close to the pack leader at all times. He had faithfully followed Eviscerato into undeath, and his loyalty was unchanged on the other side. The King of the Dead had no queen, of course, nor any friends among his court; but Nickel was something close to a companion. The beta zombie.
As such, he was sometimes one of the few allowed to feed alongside Eviscerato when the scraps were few. There were long periods roaming the badlands where they didn’t encounter any fresh meat—only more rotters to join the ranks and increase the need for food.
Despite that frequent shortage of flesh, the pack continued to grow. Eviscerato was fiercely territorial, and he wanted every undead under his reign; he also wanted enough troops for the Great Feast, when they reached the end of the road and found all the humans in their nest up north.
His sole drive was still self-preservation, as was the case with any undead, but unlike the others, he saw past his next meal. He knew his family would outlast the ferals who survived alone.
It was true that, in the beginning, they had traveled in wagons as the old circus. It was easy so long as he could contain his minions until they had gathered the meat beneath the tent. But word spread quickly from community to community. The living told stories.
So the badlanders grew to dread the sight of Eviscerato’s caravan. They would be prepared when he came. The King adapted. The element of deceit was traded for the element of surprise. The pack was growing far too large for even that now. Now they would have to rely on sheer numbers.
Eviscerato thought about these things, in his simple way, and he led his pack accordingly. Nickel always at his side, the Strongman at his back, then the rest of his freaks.
In life the Strongman had been called Jordan. An artist, he had designed all of the elaborate tattoos that adorned his massive bulk. His hammer still served the same purpose it always had—to pulverize flesh into a slick slurry—and sometimes after a meal he would sit and draw strange images in the blood that had pooled at his feet.
Claud and Chevis, the Siamese twins. They had been born into circus life. There wasn’t a surgeon that could separate them, not in the badlands, and they didn’t want to be apart anyway. In death they found that two mouths for one stomach was a luxury.
Thom, the many-limbed Geek, used to bite the heads off of infected animals. It was a wonder he hadn’t been infected himself until Eviscerato turned him. He still liked to pull the heads off things.
Walsh had been the name of the horned Dwarf. The runt of the litter, so to speak, he was able to squeeze himself past the others in a feeding frenzy and get what little he needed. Sometimes he was able to get into a barricaded building when the others couldn’t, slipping through a duct or crawlspace to ignite chaos among the living huddled inside.
Lee had juggled the fiery torches. In life, when he could spare it, he’d fill his mouth with grain alcohol and blow fireballs into the air. Now his belly was always saturated with fuel. It bled from all his orifices. He could produce a fireball at any time; it always captivated the crowd, living or dead.
The Petrified Man had been a reluctant performer, forced into the life by poverty and loneliness. A genetic defect caused his connective tissue to ossify when damaged, and the fusion of joints had led to his moniker in life. Undeath’s never-ceasing dance of decay and regeneration had now resulted in ossification beyond anything seen in the living world. Murphy had been the given name of this strange man of bone; he, however, had never known it.
The Fakir had never known his name either. He was little more than a cheap imitation of the traditional Sufi mystics, but he had graduated from firewalking to feats of suffering. A human pincushion, aroused by the needles he threaded through his skin, he was also a “blockhead” with a hollow cavity in his skull that allowed him to hammer nails into his head. He’d spent his life in a haze of drugs and pain; he awoke once to find “Regret cuts deepest” tattooed into his flesh. Apparently he’d entreated the Strongman to ink the words in his skin. Angry at himself, he’d tried unsuccessfully to carve it out with a razor... only later would he learn the Strongman had used an infected needle. He was to become part of Eviscerato’s undead family. And he held on to bitter regret until the very end. The words endured still in gray scar tissue.
This motley crew had progressed from the mindless state of the feral rotter to shrew animal intellect. But even they did not compare to the Omega, who at this moment was mingling with the rear of the pack and selecting his next victim.
Soon he would need to resume his search for the Reaper. This time, he would not walk away until the deed was done; this time he would have the strength necessary to simply tear the ghoul limb from limb. To Hell with prolonging the demon’s suffering.
Twenty-Two / Out of the Night
Voorhees was posted at the front entrance of the Gaylen City Administration Building. Halstead was in back. Two of the other officers, Ernie and Gulager, were upstairs with Senator Jeff Cullen.
“Voorhees.” Halstead
’s voice came over the radio. “You asleep yet?”
“Nope, just freezing.”
“Just you and me on this channel. Wanna talk dirty?”
He smiled and answered, “If you don’t mind my chattering teeth.”
“Kinky,” Halstead laughed. “You’re what, Voorhees, sixty?”
That was a mood killer. “Somewhere up there. I forget,” he cracked. “I suppose it’s still a crime to ask a woman’s age.”
“You’ve got about fifteen years on me, old timer. Be glad—you’re that much closer to retirement.”
“I plan to die on the job,” he said. “Where would I retire to?”
“I used to live in a town called Tucson. A little hot, but beautiful.”
“I’ve seen about enough of this great land of ours, thanks.”
“But you’re not happy here, are you?”
“Where else is there but here?”
“I’d like to go back to Tucson someday. See if my house is still there. It’s not that far-fetched.”
“Government’s given up. If Tucson wasn’t already a wasteland, it will be.”
“I thought you had more fire in you, Voorhees. I thought you were gonna shake things up.”
“I’m tired,” he sighed. It was true. He’d planned to work himself to death, and that didn’t seem too far off these days.
“How far back do you remember?” Halstead asked. “What’s your earliest memory of the rotters?”
“My dad killed one on the front lawn when I was six. Chopped it up with an ax. Then he brought me out to help him build a fire for it. I cut my teeth early. That’s how Dad wanted it, and frankly I’m grateful. That’s why I don’t understand the people around here—how they can act so nonchalant. Everyone has come face to face with it at some point. Everyone gets it.”
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