“Clarke.”
He looked like he was still alive, by God, he really did. His movement was fluid, his eyes glistened red as the sun went down. But there was nothing, NOTHING in his face. No emotion, no steeliness either. Just nothing.
“Who ordered you to kill me?”
Whittaker swallowed a lump of phlegm. “I won’t ask twice,” Clarke told him. Same voice, same cadence. He couldn’t be undead.
“I don’t know,” Whittaker breathed. “B-Bradshaw handed down the order. I don’t know who told him. But it wasn’t you, Pete! Harmon was the target! You were just in the wrong place!”
“I think you’re lying,” Clarke replied. He took the gun away from Whittaker’s head and slipped it into the waistband of his pants. “I’m going to torture you until you tell me what you know.”
“I don’t—” Whittaker’s words and teeth were blown out of his mouth by the liquor bottle. He felt it shatter against his head, a painless, stunning sensation; then fire spread down the side of his face. He reeled and tried, stupidly, to run. Clarke flattened him on the hood of the car and pressed the jagged remnant of the bottle’s mouth between his upper lip and any teeth that were left. “So you know I mean it,” Clarke said flatly, and he sliced the lip off.
Whittaker howled, beat against his attacker and the car, but Clarke held him down with one rigid arm. That’s when Whittaker knew for certain that yes, he was looking at an afterdead. And his entire face was on fire now, hot blood filling his mouth. He spat and whimpered. “Thlease!” He cried. Red flecks misted Clarke’s face. Clarke stepped back and stomped, once, and this time the pain was instantaneous. Whittaker’s shin splintered like a rotted branch. He was thrown to the desert floor.
Whittaker could only roll from side to side, sobbing and choking, waiting for the next blow. Pain radiating from above his neck and below his waist met in his stomach. He puked his guts out in the dirt, Clarke silent this entire time. “WHY?!” the old soldier bellowed.
“I’m going to kill them before they kill me, again.” Clarke didn’t see the point in explaining himself, but he had to work through Whittaker’s shock to get information. Falling silent once more, he watched his victim paw at the ground.
“How dith you geth here?” Was the next question. “We leth you in Congo!”
“Boat. Stowed away. I’m going to ask you questions now.” Clarke knelt beside Whittaker, making a conspicuous display of the pistol. “This wasn’t your first hit, was it?”
“N-no.”
“You and Bradshaw, you worked together? And you say you don’t know who the orders came from?”
Whittaker shook his head madly. Clarke reached down and touched his ruined cheek; blinding pain shot through Whittaker’s skull, blurring his vision. It was a shard of glass that Clarke was retrieving from Whittaker’s face, and he sucked the blood from it before tossing it aside. “If you don’t know anything else, you’re useless to me.”
Whittaker tried to sit up. He was batted down like a rag doll. He said every prayer he knew and begged for mercy. “Thlease don’t!” Whittaker’s face darkened. “Thith ithn’t about protecting yourselth. It’s about REVENTH! You’re juth like me! Juth like—” He was still screaming when Clarke put a round through his head. It wasn’t a mercy bullet; just easier that way.
Clarke fed, eating around the alcohol-soaked pieces.
* * *
Ryland’s office was located in a nondescript storage building. At least that’s how it appeared on the outside. Inside was one of the most heavily fortified and upscale structures on the base. Passing through its weathered metal door, the young man who had an appointment was surprised to find himself in what looked like an office lobby. The soldier at the metal detector waved him forward. “Cervantes?”
Nodding, the olive-skinned man stepped through the security checkpoint. The soldier spent several silent minutes reviewing Cervantes’ paperwork; he didn’t scrutinize the forms, just stared at them. Stalling. Finally, another soldier entered the lobby from the back with an automatic swinging brazenly in his right hand. “Go with him,” the first soldier muttered, and handed over the papers.
They moved briskly down a quiet corridor, where the soldier rapped on the door marked ADMINISTRATIVE LIAISON. A murmur from inside, then Cervantes entered the office alone.
“I apologize for the cloak-and-dagger bullshit,” was the first thing Nathan Ryland said. Blowing the steam off a cup of coffee, he motioned to a chair on the other side of his desk. He was a stout man in a crisp suit, its soft colors masking the pallor of his tired flesh. “Whenever I bring an appointee onto the base, the brass are especially skeptical. Even the fact that you’re military doesn’t help. They consider you to be my man, cut from the same cloth as me. Just the same,” Ryland smiled, “once you’re out there among the rotters, you make fast friends.”
Ryland liked to read people by making them nervous. Cervantes knew that the moment he came in. The nonchalant gestures, the thin-lipped smile. Eyes like cold marble, though. This little back-and-forth that Ryland did with newcomers, it was just pretext, the sort of behavior expected from men in black. For all this, Cervantes only went into the man’s consciousness for a fraction of a second, and even then, barely dipped his toes in the water. But Ryland knew.
“So, Cervantes, tell me about myself.” He folded his meaty hands on the desk. “Why did I appoint you to this post?”
“You believe I can use my telepathy with the afterdead.”
“We discussed that at Fort Leavenworth. Tell me something that I haven’t said.”
“I prefer not to dig that deep into someone else’s head. Sir.”
“That must take remarkable discipline.” Ryland replied. “Most with your ability don’t make it half as far as you did. I understand that refining one’s own subconscious can be... distressing?” Cervantes only nodded.
“Now then, speak from your own intuition. What do you think you can do here?”
“I know there’s little sense in reading their thought processes—they seek only self-preservation. There’s no motive or intent that isn’t visible on the surface. There’s no community dynamic. They barely acknowledge one another. But they acknowledge the living.”
“And you’ve been able to affect the perception of others so that they don’t see you. Creating a perpetual blind spot.”
“Yes—but only for myself, and only against minds of limited function,” Cervantes replied.
Ryland nodded along. “That’s all we need. See, there are certain areas of the base that are inaccessible, places with high concentrations of afterdead. I’d like to get into these areas and see what they’re doing without disrupting them. Commander St. John doesn’t agree—but I usually get the last word when it comes to government property.”
“You mean the base?”
“I mean the zombies.”
Ryland tapped his keyboard for a few minutes. “We have a soldier named Grimm who’s been living out in the field, in one of the houses in those mock-up suburbs. He’s been sending back a lot of interesting observations about the dead around there. At least he was. It’s been two days since we heard from him. Some grunts drove by the house and didn’t see anything, but the congestion was too great to risk getting out of the truck.”
“You don’t think he’s dead?” Cervantes asked.
Ryland shook his head. “And even if he was, we’d have to verify it and pull out the remains. What I need you to do is get into that house without disturbing the dead. Can you?”
That had been the question. Cervantes still wasn’t entirely sure of the answer, even as he was jostled along in a Humvee on the base’s quiet streets. The descending sun turned the afterdead up ahead into opaque silhouettes. The driver, a Corporal Bradshaw, slowed the Hummer to a stop. “I see a couple dozen at least,” he muttered. “That’s Grimm’s house on the right-hand corner. I have to let you out here.”
Cervantes nodded. For some reason, he expected a few personal words of encourag
ement, maybe a clap on the back... nothing. Bradshaw dropped into reverse and looked at him. Cervantes got out.
He slipped a pair of headphones over his ears, fingering the Walkman in his jacket pocket. White noise crept into his ears, and he cleared his mind, watching the afterdead shuffle about in the street. He reached out to them. Their minds were like hollowed-out gourds, with only tendrils of primitive activity, each easy to manipulate. The hunger was extraordinary. For a moment, Cervantes felt saliva building in his mouth; he shook the hunger off and dug into the subconscious of each rotter in his view. Already shambling towards him was a male in a butcher’s apron. Underneath was a simple boiler suit, but the apron—caked with solid layers of gore, heavy on the afterdead’s shoulders—gave him character. Yet inside each unique mind Cervantes felt the same emptiness. He blotted himself out of their sight, their smell, their hearing. The Butcher stopped in his approach. After a moment, he reversed direction, returning to the horde.
The duplex in which Sergeant Grimm made his home was noticeably different from the rest. The sod had been pulled up and replaced with a generous layer of loam. In the moist clay were planted several large flowers. Each blossom had thick, flesh-toned petals surrounding its red stigma. Cervantes briefly had the impression in his mind of a woman’s flayed sex spread before him; then he was assailed by the smell. Jesus! Worse than that of the rotters at his back was the noxious odor from the plants. He recognized them now as stapelia gigantea, carrion flowers—the odor lured foul insects to ensure pollination. Maybe, he thought, it kept the zombies from smelling Grimm, too.
He tried the front door. Locked. A newly installed lock, at that. Eyeing the undead, Cervantes rapped sharply. “Sergeant!” A couple of them turned at the sound, but were unable to pinpoint its source. They trod aimlessly through the loam. He knocked again, harder. He could try and reach out to Grimm, but it might mean giving himself away outside. Not worth it, he decided, and headed around back. There was a window slightly ajar; easing it upward, he hoisted himself into a hallway. The air in the house was moist, earthy. Cervantes traced his fingertips along the wall, and they came away stained with mold. He advanced, and almost as soon as reached the end of the hall the smell of feces struck his nostrils.
“Never could get the plumbing working,” a voice said from a dark corner, as if reading his mind. “Want a drink?” Cervantes’ eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The man slouched against the wall was haggard, unshaven, malnourished. His uniform was draped over bony shoulders like a tablecloth. Didn’t they feed him... ?
Grimm pushed a box of wine from between his legs. “I don’t know you,” he croaked.
“I’m the new guy.” Cervantes lowered himself to eye level with the man. They had feared for Grimm’s safety, but it appeared that his sanity had wasted away long before the flesh. Grimm used his thumb to wipe out the contents of a plastic cup and tilted the box’s spigot over it.
“Tell them I’m fine. I really am. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I am. I like it here.”
“What do you like about it?” Cervantes asked. He began probing Grimm’s mind. It was an incoherent ruin in there, akin to an attic overtaken by cobwebs. Nightmare images of the undead hordes flashed before him. Bloody meat, grasping fingers. Lips smacking.
Grimm laughed boisterously. “I like the quiet.”
“Why did you stop communicating with the base?”
“Radio’s busted.” Grimm gestured in no particular direction and took a gulp of his cheap wine. “I dropped it outside. They just walked all over it, the pissers. I contemplated smoke signals.” Cervantes pushed deeper... Grimm was hiding something within the rotted walls of that attic. Behind a door in this house. He saw the radio, not dropped but hurled to the street. He saw Grimm greedily scooping meat from the street into his arms, stealing it from the afterdead.
“Sergeant, you know you’ve worried a lot of people. Surely you would have made some effort to contact them if this was all an accident.”
Grimm’s crusty eyes narrowed. “You don’t believe me? You don’t know what it’s like out here, bud. You don’t KNOW. You’re on the outside looking in. I sleep with the dead. I—” Grimm stopped himself suddenly. Cervantes tore through the attic wall and saw the horror.
“Oh my god.” He was on his feet, moving back down the hall.
Grimm leapt up, spilling the box, and cried “NO! Nooooooooo...” Glancing back, Cervantes saw the other soldier wringing his hands like a child who knew his number was up. He pushed open the last door on the left.
It was impossible to tell she was undead, save for the blood caked around her mouth and on her nightgown. She was very healthy, lovely even. Of course she was—Grimm brought meat home for her. Only her wrists and ankles, where she was bound to the bed, showed signs of damage: flesh had been sloughed from bone, most likely in her struggling. Her eyes lit on Cervantes and she began to twist and lurch.
Between her bruised thighs... Cervantes saw carrion flowers and vomited.
“No, no, no.” Grimm paced in the doorway, beating his head with his fists. “It’s not... you don’t KNOW!!”
I don’t want to, Cervantes thought, shaking the stolen memories from his head. He felt Grimm’s hands on his shoulders, pleading, trembling with sobs, then he was thrown violently into the hallway, and Grimm locked himself in the room with a howl. “Sergeant!” Cervantes shouted, his head ringing from the fall. And now he could hear them: outside, pawing at the doors, the windows... he rushed down the hall to slam shut the window through which he’d come. Just as it came down a gnarled hand shot through. An eyeless face smacked against the glass, spraying pus like a sponge. He’d lost contact with them, and now they were being drawn to the tumult inside. Cervantes looked back at the locked door.
Inside, Grimm knelt beside the female and pulled a jackknife from his boot. “Ryland put me out here, he made me stay out here,” he called, sawing through the afterdead’s restraints, “because I KNOW. I know what he did and what he’s going to do. Ryland’s the bad one, not me! Not—”
Cervantes shut his eyes tight and willed away Grimm’s screams, the snapping of bone and the voracious roars of his former lover.
4 / Darker Flames Than This
“Clarke, Harmon, lost in Congo. Grimm, committed suicide right here on the base.” Commander St. John rattled the death list off as if he was reading sports scores. His team had lost.
Behind his great desk, littered with medals and keepsakes from his years in the battlefield, the old hawk loomed like an angry father, white hair meticulously-groomed over steely gray eyes. Those eyes were locked onto Nathan Ryland. He glared silently, expecting something.
“These things happen,” the other man finally said, gloved hands folded.
“‘These things happen’? You’ve been given too much pull around here,” St. John growled. “It was your idea to let Grimm play out there with the rotters, and he cracked. You pushed for an expedition to Congo and two good soldiers are dead as a result. Hell, now Whittaker’s been AWOL for a week. He’s a combat vet, a hero, and lately I’ve seen him following you around like a goddamned puppy. Have any idea where the hell he is?” St. John grasped his temples, wincing: migraine. Suits like Ryland sauntered into military operations from their “classified backgrounds” and fucked up the whole works. Ryland was like the executive branch’s little spy, carrying out the silly whims of armchair warriors and putting St. John’s boys in the dirt. He sighed. “Bradshaw takes Clarke’s place as leader of the field unit. And he selects his new teammates. Not you, Ryland, him.”
“Fair enough,” Ryland replied. His pale, fatty jowls made his smile all the more repulsive. He was soft all over, wasn’t he? St. John just shook his head. “Get out.”
Bradshaw met Ryland outside the administrative building. Ryland clapped a hand on his back. “I didn’t even have to bring it up. He promoted you. Now, I only ask that you put Sergeant Cervantes on the team. His assigned duties aren’t important, I just want him o
ut there.”
Bradshaw nodded, and they walked along the electric fence separating their world from that of the afterdead. A few rotters milled around in the grass, probably in search of overlooked chum from a previous feeding. “Who else will you choose?” Ryland asked.
“Stoddard and Thomas,” Bradshaw replied quickly.
“I see you’ve been thinking about this,” Ryland grinned. “Captain.”
Bradshaw offered an insincere smile in return. He’d just flown up the ranks to a critical leadership position—all because he was a killer, and worse than that, a lackey. He still didn’t know the reason why he’d shot Pete Clarke through the heart. It would have made as much sense at a backyard barbecue as it did in Congo. And Ryland... something was wrong with him. His face was more sunken and pale than usual. He carried his bulk with an awkward gait. Looked like a...”Ryland, I’ve got to get down to the warehouse for a pickup. Talk later?”
“Of course.” The pale man nodded curtly and wandered back to the administrative building.
Joe Stoddard was already stationed at the warehouse. Bradshaw had Cervantes and Thomas meet him there as well. Thomas was an older woman, hard, not a feminine bone in her body. What hadn’t been drilled out of her when she transferred to the base had been washed away at the sight of the lunging rotters (Bradshaw wondered if it was different for a woman, seeing new life created, but from death). She’d stopped wearing her bite jacket long ago, and both her arms bore scars as a result; nonetheless she’d definitely be an asset in field missions. As for Cervantes... Bradshaw hadn’t seen much of him since Grimm’s death. There were murmurs that Cervantes was some sort of psychic, the sort of nonsense the Defense Department had messed with fifty years ago. Maybe they were still messing with it. Hell, Bradshaw had seen stranger things.
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