“I appreciate your choosing me,” Cervantes said.
Bradshaw decided against saying you’re welcome. “We’ve got a truck coming in five minutes.”
Stoddard barked from his post, “It’s already here!” and opened the main loading door to admit the semi’s refrigerated payload. Bradshaw slapped a button to start the conveyor belt that led from the warehouse to the scientists’ underground compound.
“Let me ask you something,” Cervantes said. “What do they do down there? What tests do they run on the afterdead?”
Had he just been reading Bradshaw’s mind? The captain crossed his arms and gave Cervantes a stony look. “It’s not my jurisdiction. I’ve learned not to ask.”
Stoddard slapped Cervantes’ back as the truck opened. A steel box came out on rollers and they guided it onto the conveyor belt. There were five more inside, each coated with ice, electronically sealed; and within each, a fallen soldier who would be inducted into the undead population. Somewhere, Stoddard knew, there were graves with empty coffins upon which grieving mothers placed tiny flags. But these boys were still serving their government, in a way. Whatever helps me sleep at night.
“Seal’s broken!” Thomas snapped, banging on the lid of the next box. Stoddard came around and hoisted the lid up to look inside. Though the body was in a clear bag, he wasn’t able to tell if there was any putrefaction. “You think it matters?” he asked Bradshaw.
“Dead is dead,” came the reply.
Stoddard forced the lid down and pushed the box onto the belt. “Can’t argue with that logic, boss.”
“Don’t call me boss.” Bradshaw tried to grimace, but Stoddard’s expression teased a hint of a smile from the corners of his mouth.
* * *
Ryland locked his office door and sat on the edge of his desk. His breathing was growing more shallow with each passing day. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t uncomfortable; he was just afraid someone might notice. Good thing a yearly physical wasn’t required of him. He dropped into his chair and turned on his computer, entering several encryption keys before he could get into his files. Despite all that security—and a few extra measures he’d added himself—he knew that there was always someone reading his e-mail. That’s why his most precious files were in paper form.
Unlocking the bottom desk drawer to produce those files, Ryland checked the contents. All there. Could never be too careful. A medical report, written up by one A. Harmon, dated seven months prior. Blood work results. Digital photographs of his right hand. Removing his glove, Ryland saw the ugly scars. He tried flexing his fingers. There was stiffness and pain, only the pain seemed strangely distant, and even as the skin cracked and bled he continued closing his hand into a tight fist.
The URC, the energy in the earth that revived the dead, was never intended to be weaponized. Maybe in some horror movie, a corrupt military lab would try to turn URC into a contagion, but the real government understood the possible consequences. Still, factions within were sparring over what to do; and several months ago, Ryland had led a group of private contractors to New England to check out another Source. And... he began to laugh uncontrollably at the memory, the goddamn absurdity of it. “Fucking cat,” he gasped between giggles.
The cat’s love bite shouldn’t have had any effect, but Harmon had discovered an anomaly in Ryland’s blood when he returned to the base for stitches. He knew immediately what had happened. The URC had bonded with some virus lying dormant in the feline’s system. Some thought it possible. Now he knew it was. And just like that, it was a contagion. A cosmic roll of the dice, a sick twist of fate. All these hundreds of thousands of years, and only now had it happened... and to Nathan Ryland.
It took a few months of watching his arm die before he made the decision to transfer Harmon to the field and silence her. Grimm had been another story altogether...
Though the tissue in Ryland’s body was dying, he didn’t feel much discomfort. The infection was turning him undead piece by piece, yet he retained all his mental faculties, even if there was a cold hollow growing inside of him as his soul was forced out. Thus he had reasoned that, like the afterdead, he could maintain a healthy appearance and a clear head if he fed. The afterdead’s chum was trucked in biweekly and stored at the ass-end of the base where the smell wouldn’t offend. So Ryland had gone out to the storage building, walked in, shut the door, and promptly vomited at the sight of the festering meat spread before him. Dropped to his knees, dry heaving, arms shaking until he was prone on the floor in his own puke. “I-I can’t,” he had whispered, fighting the urge to keep retching. He looked at his dead hand. It felt so detached, like it wasn’t really part of him. It was almost surreal to see it scooping up a handful of rancid medical waste. He forced it down, stuffing his fingers into his throat and trying not to taste it. But the smell hit him again. He spewed chum all over his pants.
Then Grimm had walked in. He looked through the visor of his gas mask at Ryland’s bloody mouth and hand and clothing, Ryland sitting on the floor with a blank stare, like a boy caught playing with himself. Two days later, Grimm was living out in the neighborhood with the afterdead. Ryland had figured no one would believe the story if Grimm told them, but why take any chances?
Most of his body felt dead, somehow, and even though he was now able to eat chum and keep it down, there were still signs of it. If he sat in his chair too long he’d get mottled purple spots all over his buttocks, legs and back. Sometimes at night he’d wake up to discover his bladder had emptied itself. Trying to get out of bed, he found himself paralyzed by what seemed like rigor mortis. And Jesus Christ, he farted all the time, expelling the noxious gases of internal decay. He couldn’t eat nearly enough to stave off such things; he couldn’t risk being caught shoveling chum into his mouth again. St. John was already on his ass for three deaths.
Day by day, Ryland was growing accustomed to the spreading infection, and so was his ego. He decided it wasn’t chance, but that he’d been chosen. He would be the first true afterdead—not some soldier who took shrapnel in Lebanon and had his dead body dumped in that accursed swamp. No, Ryland was willingly giving himself over to the other side. There had only been one more test to pass, and that was Cervantes. The telepath hadn’t sensed Ryland’s condition at all. He was now confident that he was not dying, but evolving.
He longed to go out among the afterdead and see how they reacted, if at all. Would they attack him, or consider him one of their own? He chuckled at the thought. They were senseless animals without purpose. The scientists spent all day and night cutting the dead into pieces, burning them, pulling out their organs. They only sought to define the afterdead, to put it all in books and file it away, then they could sit back and relax knowing that humanity was still top dog. Insecure fools. He alone would know death firsthand, experience it in a conscious way.
Chosen.
He dug into the base’s historical archives—information suppressed from the general public—researching the ways that tribal peoples around Sources had explained the phenomenon. Of course, they had decided that dark gods were responsible. The gods were long gone, perhaps dead, but their leavings endured—including strange words that had probably been made up by the savages but were purported to focus and direct the chaotic Source energy.
He had been studying these words. His extensive education gave him a leg up on the military historians who’d catalogued and promptly forgotten these silly fables. He was beginning to understand the lost tongues of the old gods, and he was beginning to believe that he might be able to do greater things with the plague-energy that coursed through him.
Somewhere beyond death, off this mortal coil, lay godhood.
* * *
It was a long drive to Whittaker’s house. The rental car was running on fumes; Clarke had used Whittaker’s credit card to refuel, but it wasn’t long before he exhausted the remaining credit. Holding the dead man’s ID against the steering wheel, checking addresses as he drove, Clarke finally came to a
small frame house with an unkempt yard. The first key he tried opened the front door.
The interior was almost bare. There had been feeble attempts to decorate: a generic print of an elk in the woods hung on the wall. The leather couch had two end tables covered in magazines. Clarke pushed aside the top magazine, a year-old issue of Newsweek. The one below it, and all the ones below that, were porn.
As expected, Whittaker had an impressive gun collection in the bedroom. Some of them were modified arms from the base, illegal to have in the home. Clarke opened the glass doors of the gun case and began pulling weapons out, setting them on the bed for further scrutiny. Opening the closet, he kicked aside a few pairs of jeans lying on the floor and found Whittaker’s Army fatigues neatly folded. Knowing Whittaker’s fondness for his days in combat, he wasn’t surprised to see the uniform in pristine condition. It would be a bit loose on Clarke’s frame but that didn’t matter. He pulled it on over his soiled clothes.
There was a pickup truck in the garage, and for that Clarke also had a key. He pulled out with a satchel of weapons beside him in the passenger seat. A memory was stirred in the recesses of his mind... nearly a decade before, when he’d been a young officer and had just been brought onto the afterdead project.
The first corpse that the government had resurrected was an unpleasant character named Louis Brownlee. In life he had been locked away in a federal prison for fatally shooting two DEA agents during a bust. Small-time hood made notorious by capping a couple of undercover agents. A chain smoker, cancer had claimed him early during his double-life sentence. Brownlee’s body had quietly been shipped to the Louisiana base and seeded in the swamp. The URC infused his tissue, and a group of soldiers watched in horror as he rose from the muck and fixed yellow eyes on their warm living flesh.
The military were eager to explore the possible applications of the undead. Could Brownlee be made to obey the living? Could he fight? Could he infect? Clarke sat in smoky rooms, with celebrated generals and Defense Department officials yelling at each other, as the afterdead began to appear less and less useful. Finally, Brownlee was placed under restraints and brought into one of the meetings. The officials stared blankly at him. He returned the look. A colonel named Richard St. John took a long drag off his cigarette and met the creature’s gaze without fear. Brownlee’s withered lips opened and closed, a weak sound emanating from his throat. “What is it saying? What does it want?” A man asked. Standing up, St. John approached Brownlee. “His file said he was a smoker.” And he placed his cigarette in the zombie’s mouth.
The stiff, pained stature of the afterdead relaxed. Brownlee leaned his head back and exhaled. He was still addicted.
Not long after that, Clarke and a small team were flown to a facility in Puerto Rico, Brownlee brought along in chains. The secret prison there housed a few terrorism suspects, and these prisoners were strong. They didn’t talk under burning lights, they didn’t weep in the face of brutal torture or even sexual humiliation. A religious fervor possessed them and made them more than men, at least in their own minds.
Clarke wheeled Brownlee into an interrogation room on a dolly. An Arab, sitting in a lone chair, narrowed his eyes.
The CIA interrogator was leaning against the rear wall. He spoke in English. “Salim, this gentleman is here to make sure you answer my questions.” Clarke released the straps holding Brownlee down, and the afterdead stepped into the middle of the room. Clarke stood away from him and held up a carton of cigarettes. “Play nice, Brownlee.”
The next hour was a nightmare. Clarke fought to stand still and watch, his knees knocking. Even the interrogator was shaken by the end of it; he could barely issue the order for Brownlee to finally kill Salim. Together they rushed from the room and let the zombie feed in peace. And on closed-circuit monitors in another room, the remaining prisoners watched in terror. They were much more compliant after that.
Brownlee’s addiction to nicotine seemed to be the only leverage that his handlers had. After devouring a captor, he would sit on the floor in a pool of gore and light cig after cig, staining them red with his fingers and lips. He allowed himself to be chained and flown around the world, always with Clarke holding a fresh carton before him. Over time, they noticed that he seemed to become healthier if he ate frequently. His eyes almost began to look human again. Unnerved, they cut back his food supply.
Brownlee’s last assignment took him to Arlington, Virginia, and the interrogation of a CIA officer accused of selling intelligence. Clarke tapped Brownlee’s chest with a carton. “You know what to do.” Brownlee nodded slowly and entered the room where the officer was waiting. They gave him twenty minutes, then went in.
He was only supposed to have bitten off a few fingers, eaten them in front of the subject and sat quietly. But the subject was headless, all four walls covered in her blood. Brownlee tugged strings of muscle from the stump of her neck and stuffed them into his mouth. Clarke drew on him. “Get away from her,” he snapped, trying to mask his fear. Brownlee looked up at him, reached out a crimson claw for the pack of cigs. “Smoke?”
Clarke dropped his gun and pissed himself. Other team members swept past him to lash chains around the afterdead, who sat calmly, his eyes never leaving Clarke’s. They brought him to his feet and pushed him toward the door. His rancid breath was hot on Clarke’s face as he said “I’m a good dog,” in his guttural monotone.
He was never seen again after that. The government discontinued that particular program.
Clarke thought about the role he’d played before his murder. He had been a good dog too. So had Whittaker and Bradshaw. Now it was time to learn who their master was.
5 / The Man Comes Around
He lay quietly and stared upward into nothingness. His legs jostled a bit, as did his sidearms. In his mind he saw a rough schematic of Fort Armstrong’s layout. He’d been on the road for several hours now, not breathing, not smelling the faint decay of his skin nor the freshness of Whittaker’s borrowed fatigues. A bit of plastic was pulled tight across the tip of his nose; he was wrapped in a transparent body bag inside a steel coffin, and the only little bit of light afforded him was from the fracture he’d made in the lid’s lock sometime during the journey.
It was ice cold. Hours had gone by, how many he couldn’t say. He didn’t daydream, nor did look ahead to the tasks that awaited him. This was the idle mind of a dead man.
Most questions had been answered. Ahead was only the goal of self-preservation, self-preservation assured by the execution of his executioner. The endgame lay with he who had turned Whittaker and Bradshaw against him. Clarke still had some of Whittaker’s gristle in his molars. He didn’t wonder what Bradshaw would taste like (right turn, slowing down—Armstrong’s west security gate), nor did he yearn for the man’s dark meat. There would be no particular satisfaction in killing Bradshaw, the one who had slit open his satchel and spilled his manhood onto the dirt. Bradshaw had also shot him through the heart, whispering some apologetic sentiment that Clarke couldn’t recall. He couldn’t recall the words, but was keenly aware of the bullet’s location in his meat. It festered there and corrupted the other meat around it, though Clarke had no use for that anyway (truck coming to a stop—coffins jostling slightly).
There was talk outside. Clarke wondered if he might be recognized; not that they bothered to identify each corpse that came into Armstrong, but he was a former team member. Shouldn’t he have a nice little plot in Arlington, they’d ask? Or maybe it’s better this way, they might say, that he takes his secret knowledge back to its secret grave.
The lid moved. “Another broken seal,” a female snapped. Light entered the coffin, and Clarke stared straight ahead, knowing his pupils might have some small reaction.
The female leaned over him, eyed him through the plastic. Thomas, his mind said.
Would she say “Clarke” to him?
She didn’t say anything. The lid slammed shut. Yelling. Then, rolling. Down, down into the earth, beneath the bas
e where the scientists justify all of this. A seed of curiosity was born in Clarke’s mind; for the genuine corpses, one of whom he’d swapped places with, this was a new birth. Stirring in the womb—shaking off swamp mud, chains buckled about your hands and feet, tethering you to one of the gnarled old trees thick with crud and in the air a thousand million insects humming. An insufferable place, the Source, its ever-womb teeming with abscesses of grubs and vines and God only knew what else. They were bound for the swamp, but first they’d be opened up and picked at by the scientists, who’d pull on their masks and aprons and slave over the new flesh; removing troublesome shrapnel and cancer tissue, setting broken bones. Assigning nicknames. Clarke felt his box clattering down a conveyor belt at breakneck speed and wondered if they made bets on the number of vertebrae broken during this cruel descent.
Then he was being ferried along a vertical belt, and stopped rudely, and the lid was opened once again.
Clarke lay perfectly still, sidearms tucked beneath his thighs. A face cloistered in goggles and antiseptic materials, resembling a giant insect, stared down at him.
“Hello,” said the zombie to the bug.
Clarke kicked himself out of the steel coffin with arms akimbo, squeezing off a volley of bullets before hitting the floor and rolling underneath the conveyor belt that had brought his corpse into this neo-Hell. As he did, he got his first good look at the underground lab: a huge, garishly lit cavern crowded with cables and monitors. And scientists, each one paralyzed with confusion.
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