Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

  Ryland sucked icy air into his lungs and sat there for what really did seem an eternity. There were a few dull spots of light visible down the tunnel. There, he’d have to confront the remains of his slaughtered team; but Samuel did quite the number on them, and none would be getting back up. He pushed his ankles through the dirt until the circulation returned to them and tried to stand. Still a bit shaky, wrist throbbing like mad. And goddamn it was getting colder by the second. He took another breath, sat back down, and listened to the silence.

  Then he heard it...

  Meow.

  Ryland smiled just a little, as much as his strength would allow, and reached a blind hand into the darkness.

  1 / Rebirth

  Hell, from a scientific perspective: the Big Bang spit sub-atomic particles in every direction through the nether. This newborn fabric of existence was torn asunder and sewn back together with every passing nanosecond—a ceaseless quantum storm. Chaos was, in fact, the seed of Order; and even now the matter both inside and out of our bodies is subject to this frenetic cosmic turmoil.

  In the very beginning, through an infinitesimal rip that closed almost as soon as it opened—something struck through. Dark matter spewed across the infant universe at a speed beyond that of light, a speed reserved for the supernatural whose laws contradict all nature. Some of these tendrils of darkness were snagged in cooling gas clouds. Some of their dark energy was trapped within stars and planets.

  This is a story about one world with this strange energy coiled about its core, leaking through fissures in the crust here and there to manifest chaos. It’s a story insignificant in the whole of time; nevertheless, the great architects record these events.

  It begins with hot lead punching through the left ventricle of Pete Clarke’s heart. The bullet corkscrews through his meat, bounces off vertebrae and chews into bone. He feels its wake in him, a burning tongue lancing his torso, and he falls heavily.

  Democratic Republic of Congo—2 hours earlier

  Another coup, another civil war, another quiet genocide. Guerillas and tribes were clashing in the rainforests, senseless slaughter in which neither side understood the other’s agenda. Clarke’s team had touched down in the midst of it with mock UN seals adorning both their uniforms and their chopper. Whittaker skirted the makeshift encampment and snuffed a couple of colobus monkeys that had watched their descent from the trees. A veteran of jungle warfare and extreme survival alike, Whittaker took pride in securing the perimeter. His grizzled face was flushed with exuberance uncommon for a man his age. Bagging the monkeys, he slung his rifle over one shoulder and headed back to Clarke’s position. The team leader was hunched over a satellite phone setup. “Uplink’s not working,” he said softly, perhaps not even aware of the other’s presence. Whittaker clued him in by dropping the bag into the dirt.

  “I said we wouldn’t need kickers.” Clarke muttered without looking up. “You don’t know this region any better than I do,” Whittaker replied. “Why not play it safe?”

  “You just like plugging the little guys.” Clarke smacked the side of the console.

  Whittaker grinned. “I don’t have any subordinates of my own to abuse, Captain.”

  Clarke smiled back. He enjoyed the camaraderie among his men, but at the same time felt a twinge of discomfort over their complacency. Bradshaw was coming over now, lugging a few clear plastic cylinders; he guffawed at the sight of the monkey bag. He had a raucous belly laugh befitting an imposing black man, and Clarke had to silence him with a stern look. “Ken,” he said to Bradshaw, “see what you can do with the sat phone. I’m gonna go break Harmon in.”

  Whittaker snorted as Bradshaw took Clarke’s place at the console. “Radio’s as good as any of this shit.” Punching keys, Bradshaw shook his head. “Time isn’t gonna wait for you to catch up, Whittaker.” He produced a few tiny plastic bags from his vest and tossed them. “Take care of the lanterns while I do this?”

  Catching the baggies, Whittaker nodded gruffly and scooped up the plastic cylinders. The old man was efficient, good at following orders, but he longed to be the one giving them, didn’t he? Bradshaw watched him tromp away. No one had the heart to tell him that, at fifty-six years, with three decades of service under his belt, he was still a grunt doing busy work.

  Harmon, on the other hand, had been charged with prepping the arsenal, a critical task. She didn’t view it that way, but no one ever did when it was their first time in the field. At least that’s what Clarke was telling her. “Widowmaker’s your best friend,” he said, perched in the side hatch of the chopper. He was referring to a cleaver-like blade with a molded grip and knuckle guard, a simple yet intimidating piece of weaponry. One was laid out for each team member. “That leads us to Rule One—no headshots. Your firearm is meant as a last resort. Bullet to the brain only kills what little impulse control still exists in afterdead. So if you shoot, aim for the limbs.” Taking up a widowmaker, Clarke slipped it into a sheath on his back. “Decaps will render them harmless. You’ve been trained in close-quarters combat—rely on your widowmaker.”

  Harmon nodded absently; she’d heard it all before. He felt it bore repeating. Clarke eyed her uncomfortable stance, subtle curves concealed by a defensive posture and eyes shielded behind red hair. She was clearly conditioned to play it low-key and go unnoticed, and seemed quite attuned to it. “Rule Two—bites don’t infect. You’ve been told a dozen times, now believe it.” He took the opportunity to roll down the sleeves of his bite jacket: nylon-covered chain mail reaching over the wrists. “Too many assumptions and too little understanding about bites has caused men—and women—to lose it and get killed over a minor flesh wound. Romero-itis,” he finished with a smirk.

  She frowned at the term. “You mean like the movies? Never seen them.”

  “Really? Oh, you should. Romero’s are the best. Just remember the Devil had different ideas when he made his.

  “Three,” Clarke concluded, “watch your dead.” Harmon looked up at that one. It never made sense until it was too late... she’d know what it meant soon enough.

  * * *

  Slitting open the tiny baggies, Whittaker emptied freeze-dried bugs into the plastic cylinders. He was setting them up around the perimeter, twelve in all, turning the rotors of the chopper into the hands of a clock face. Pausing at twelve o’clock, he winced. Back was going again. “Goddamn,” he whispered. This wasn’t a glamorous job—especially these little mop-up exercises—but at least he used to enjoy being in the field. Now he could only try to take his mind off his aching back by thinking about the grueling paperwork that waited back at the base. Bureaucratic horseshit had taken the wind out of his sails and the joy out of his work... no, it was age, and he damn well knew it. The night before, at a debriefing in Zaire, he’d excused himself twice to shake out a few drops of piss. The memory alone made his bladder start fidgeting right now.

  The sun dropped below the tree canopy and he hustled to hang the bag of monkeys from a low branch. Done, he glanced over at Bradshaw, still fighting with that sat phone. Bradshaw was a dedicated soldier, one of the developers of widowmaker combat and a tireless jack of all trades. Whittaker liked to think of him as a friend, or at the very least, a good man who rose above his pedigree.

  Clarke sat beside the chopper and watched daylight fade. They’d landed a good distance from the local skirmishes; most likely because the guerillas had been scared off by the brutal slayings of their comrades. This forest was rife with afterdead: walking corpses, dead tissue infused with the undefined catalyst that sprang forth from some Source deep in the earth. Clarke was most concerned about the stealth and speed of the reported killings. These afterdead had a pack mentality, which meant a couple of things. First, they had eaten enough living tissue to restore some primitive brain function, and second, they had also probably eaten enough to regenerate their rotted flesh—giving them the appearance of mortal men. It was another case of Romero-itis to assume that afterdead were all decaying relics of
past life. The soul had been replaced with a new vitality. And it hungered. In his years leading these outings, Clarke had seen everything from near-skeletons to fully restored men, some of whom among the latter had developed chilling characteristics. The previous summer he’d caught one that had actually relearned speech, slurring something it’d probably heard from its many meals...”Please!”

  Please. Did please mean anything to something that existed only to sustain itself? If so—did it understand that same sentiment when uttered by a mutilated victim, only to ignore their shared will to survive? Had the thing truly been begging for release so that it could go on killing?

  No point in asking those sorts of questions. There were others assigned to figure them out. He just exterminated them.

  Bradshaw called to him from the sat phone and shrugged in silhouette. “No uplink.” Harmon sat at the edge of the camp; she hadn’t yet forgiven Clarke for weapons prep. She probably thought the new girl had been stuck in the kitchen when in fact he trusted her more than anyone else. Because she wasn’t his friend.

  Little things had been going wrong since they touched down, but it hadn’t yet seemed suspicious to Captain Clarke. Nor did it when the kickers, those dead monkeys dangling in a sack, begin shrieking.

  “FUCK!” Bradshaw shouted, leaping up off the ground as his widowmaker leapt into his hand. He glided across the camp and sliced cleanly through both the bag and the monkeys’ skulls. “Whittaker!” He snapped. “You’re supposed to cut their fucking throats!”

  The old man grunted. He was in a fighting stance, eyeing the trees. “See Clarke, the kickers went off before the—”

  Four of the twelve cylinders, the ones on the same side of the perimeter as the kickers, bloomed with light. The fireflies inside had resurrected—embraced by the aura coming off of what was likely to be a large number of afterdead. They could be heard now in the trees: shuffling, sniffing, unaware they’d been made. Clarke glanced at Harmon. She had one hand on her widowmaker and the other on her Beretta. “No,” he whispered sharply, pointing at the gun.

  Like the stage lights coming up on Act Three of a tragic spectacle, the rest of the bug-lanterns bloomed. “Christ.” Whittaker backed up. “They’re surrounding us.” Bradshaw reached into his chain mail for a second widowmaker.

  Hell offered a moment of bemused silence before opening its maw. In that second, Harmon discerned a man standing no more than two feet from her, edging through the trees and then accelerating upon eye contact. She fell back, her heels rooted to the ground where she stood, the rest of her body fighting gravity while she tried to raise her pistol toward the naked ghoul.

  Its face split like a ripe fruit as Clarke’s widowmaker carved into its cheek. He swiped the pistol from Harmon’s grasp; his face, gaunt in the lantern light, looked coldly at her, through her, then he finished the afterdead with a decap before spinning to open another’s neck.

  They attacked all at once, two dozen of them. Bradshaw scissored one’s head off, ducking its flailing limb, planted his elbow in the gnashing jaws of another and shattered its neck with a cruel jerk before delivering the killing blow. Whittaker was hacking through them like a madman, mighty swings halving skulls left and right. He whooped when they tore vainly at his bite jacket; bellowed while cleaving into one pinned under his boot. He wasn’t the artist Bradshaw was. Dead was dead and technique meant jack when the bodies were all laid out. And they were going down fast, the pack mentality long abandoned. It was only hunger that mattered now. In a way, Whittaker understood them (decapped another), but he understood dogs too. Stifled a laugh as one of them shook his arm in its teeth. Decapped it.

  Harmon had backpedaled to the center of the camp and gotten her bearings. The afterdead were native tribesmen, their nude forms almost pitiful as they came at the soldiers. The one thing that reduced her pity and brought her back to reality was their bellies: glistening, trembling, fat with meat. They ate well.

  “Harmon!” Barked Clarke. “Secure the bird!” She pivoted towards the chopper and saw an afterdead climbing in. Its back was to her. Easy kill. Widowmaker in hand. With legs equal parts rubber and cement, she ran. The zombie paused in the hatch; she quickened her pace, raised the blade and made a grand arc down toward the base of its neck.

  Corporal Bradshaw danced. He danced through the milling undead, taking a new partner with every second step. Pirouette, kick, surprise decap of the one at his rear. Split the chin of the female coming from the side. Her face was young and beautiful. He dashed it to pieces. Thankless work, all of it; the rest of humanity didn’t know about afterdead, but he did, and he danced only for them, designed a terrible new death for each of their kind. Spinning in the dirt, he drew closer and closer to the chopper. Cutting a swath toward Harmon.

  Clarke turned to see Bradshaw lop her leg off at the knee.

  Harmon’s blade had been a few inches from the afterdead in the chopper; she frowned as her balance shifted and the blade took its ear off. She kept going forward, into its back, and the two collapsed in a heap on the ground. It tried to roll over beneath her. She tried to get up. Couldn’t. Legs numb. She looked down and saw. Then came pain.

  Clarke wasn’t sure what in Christ was happening until Bradshaw took her arm, the one that might have grabbed her gun had Clarke not slapped it away. And Whittaker, Whittaker was suddenly in the cockpit. The rotors began moving against the stars. Harmon screamed, writhing on top of the afterdead. Bradshaw peppered the ones on the perimeter with bullets. Clarke charged at him, not knowing what he should or could do, only feeling the certainty of the widowmaker in his right hand.

  Bradshaw knew his captain was coming and met Clarke’s blade with one of his own. The other opened Clarke’s groin. The captain’s face flushed. He gaped at his friend. “You weren’t supposed to see,” Bradshaw said quietly, and shot him through the heart.

  * * *

  Harmon slung her remaining arm over the chopper’s landing gear. The thunderous din of the rotors almost drowned out the pain of teeth on her leg’s stump. More overpowering was her fear; fear of being left behind. They were lifting off now and her leg was tugged free of the afterdead’s mouth.

  Bradshaw leaned out the side, steadying himself. He placed his pistol against her ear. “WHY,” she shrieked. He didn’t reply before firing, and by then it didn’t matter anyway.

  * * *

  The light and sound of the helicopter receded into the distance. Civilization left the Congo, reason left the Congo, and Clarke stirred at the footfalls of the surviving afterdead. They moved slowly toward him, eight left, although he couldn’t be sure of his count because his mind was screaming gibberish and images of Harmon’s dismemberment clouded every thought.

  Struggling to his feet in a thick paste of dirt and blood, he trained his gun on the first comer’s kneecap. Wet copper filled his mouth; he choked, stumbled and missed the fucker by a good three feet. They shuffled onward. Feeling one at his back, he spun with the widowmaker at neck level. It bit into the afterdead’s jawbone; he wrenched the blade downward, took the head.

  Sudden movement on the left. He fired twice. A startled corpse shook its pulped eyeballs from the sockets and staggered aside. Clarke’s legs buckled and he actually sagged against one of them. It embraced him hungrily. And now he wasn’t breathing right. Too much blood in his throat. Jamming his pistol into the hugger’s chin, he emptied the clip. No head left to deal with.

  How many remained now—five? Three? How many were there to begin with? Another one caught his wrist. He lopped its hand and head off. They had all closed in around him, even the blind one. Good, he thought, ‘cause I can’t walk. Bracing himself on the sightless fiend, he decapped its neighbor. Then fingers from behind sank into the bloody ruin of his groin. Pain washed over him like rebirth, reaffirming everything alive in his body, and with endorphins spilling through his tired veins Clarke sawed into the horde.

  It was seconds, maybe minutes later when he stopped, realizing he was chopping at the gro
und. The afterdead were all quartered and lying in their juices. So was he, he saw, tracing with bone-white fingers the flowering gash in his lap. And now he wasn’t breathing at all. Clarke accepted it. What else could he do?

  A wet sound drew his attention to an armless torso lying nearby. The head was mostly intact, but its throat was cut from ear to ear, opening and closing along with its mouth. Smack, smack, smack went the ragged flesh. The thing wouldn’t accept death, even as it starved and fell apart here; instead it stared intently at the fresh meat scant inches away.

  Clarke laughed and died.

  * * *

  A day later, he woke up.

  2 / Chums

  “Are you hearing anything I’m saying?” Stoddard barked through his mask. Bradshaw realized he’d been staring blankly into a pile of entrails and blinked. “Nope, not a thing.”

  “Where’s your mind at lately?” Stoddard asked. He steadied himself on his shovel, presumably was scrutinizing his friend’s face; Bradshaw couldn’t tell thanks to that bug-like filtration mask. Stoddard had never gotten used to the smell, the stench of rot that blanketed the streets and permeated this truck. He used to puke all the time but had started taking caffeine pills to suppress his appetite (along with excessive amounts of Dramamine), and no longer ate while on the job. The glassy visor of the mask hid his eyes. It was unnerving, and Bradshaw was reluctant to talk anything other than shop under such circumstances. He looked back down at the entrails.

  They were standing knee-deep in guts in the rear of a refurbished dump truck. The gleaming casings of intestines quivered as they jostled along. Bradshaw worked his shovel beneath a pile of cadaverous tissue. “This whole mope thing,” Stoddard called, “it got anything to do with why you’re on slop duty?”