by Alan Baxter
SNAFU: BLACK OPS
Publisher’s Note:
This book is a collection of stories from writers all over the world.
For authenticity and voice, we have kept the style of English native to each author’s location, so some stories will be in UK English, and others in US English.
We have, however, changed dashes and dialogue marks to our standard format for ease of understanding.
* * *
This book is a work of fiction.
All people, places, events, zombies, variants, deep ones, various other creatures, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
SNAFU:
BLACK OPS
Edited by Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown
Cohesion Press
Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum
Beechworth , Australia
2015
SNAFU: BLACK OPS
Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown(eds)
Please contact publisher before quoting
ISBN:
ebook - 978-0-9946304-5-2
Anthology © Cohesion Press 2016
Stories © Individual Authors 2016
Cover Art © Dean Samed 2016
Internal Layout by Geoff Brown
Set in Palatino Linotype
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cohesion Press
Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum
Beechworth, Australia
www.cohesionpress.com
Also From Cohesion Press
Horror:
SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror
– eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding
SNAFU: Heroes
– eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding
SNAFU: Wolves at the Door
– eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest
– eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding
SNAFU: Hunters
– eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown
SNAFU: Future Warfare
– eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown
SNAFU: Unnatural Selection
– eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown
Blurring the Line – Marty Young (ed)
American Nocturne – Hank Schwaeble
Jade Gods – Patrick Freivald
The Angel of the Abyss – Hank Schwaeble
Sci-Fi/Thriller:
Valkeryn 2 – Greig Beck
Cry Havoc – Jack Hanson
Forlorn Hope – Jack Hanson
Creature Thrillers
Into the Mist – Lee Murray
Fathomless – Greig Beck
Coming Soon
Primordial – David Wood & Alan Baxter
Congregations of the Dead – James A. Moore & Charles R. Rutledge
A Hell Within – James A. Moore & Charles R. Rutledge
Snaked – Duncan McGeary
The Man with the Iron Heart – Mat Nastos
BACK TO BLACK
Jonathan Maberry and Bryan Thomas Schmidt
—1—
The Soldier and the Samurai
The soldier was a ghost in a dead world.
He made no sound as he moved because noise was suicidal. Noise was how to attract the dead. Noise was how one became dead. The soldier was alive because he had learned those lessons long ago, often from seeing others make mistakes they could not undo. The soldier had buried so many people, even people as skilled as he was. Maybe that meant he was lucky, or maybe it meant that in many ways he was closer to an animal than a man. His instincts were feral, driven by a predatory nature that had let him survive when so many others had fallen. Stronger people, faster ones, better ones. He, though, survived. All of those deaths were lessons, and he was a good student in the school of survival.
Now he was a soldier in memory only. It was how he defined himself because it steadied him, gave him purpose. Gave him a reason to stay alive even when death called so sweetly and so persistently. Death, after all, was the kingdom where everyone he had ever known and loved now lived. Living was a lonely, brutal thing.
He moved up a dry slope past cactus and twisted shrubs, watching the terrain, listening to the wind. When he stopped, he stood still as the ancient trees. That was a skill he had learned when the world was still alive. When you stop you have to become part of the landscape. You can’t do anything to draw the eye.
The trick was to be a ghost so that he did not become a corpse. Before the end of the world that concept made sense to any soldier; since then it was an unbreakable rule.
Even so, being alive often made him feel strange, alone, and freakish. It sometimes made him feel every bit as much of a monster as the things consuming the world.
The living dead. The walking dead. The hungry dead.
Zombies.
Even now, even years after it all fell apart, the soldier sometimes found it hard to accept that zombies were real, that they were pervasive, and that they were the most enduring fact of life. Of everyone’s life. They were as much an unshakable constant as the need to breathe. They were. They were here, and from what little anyone knew of the rest of the world, they were everywhere. The plague had spread incredibly fast because it was designed to be quick-onset and one hundred per cent communicable. Nature could never have created so perfect a monster. No, it had been the cold minds of madmen on both sides of the Cold War who had taken civilization’s noblest advances in science and medicine and twisted them into weapons of mutually-assured destruction. Bioweapons had been officially banned but never actually abandoned. The lie that assured the black budget funding was that they needed to create the weapons so that cures and prophylactic measures could be created.
It was the logic of the shield maker who actually wanted to make and sell swords.
Lucifer 113 had been an actual doomsday weapon and though it had been locked away and chained up, it had slipped its leash and now the world had died, been consumed, and gone quiet.
And through that quiet the soldier moved, silent as the death that defined him and everything else.
He reached a knoll and paused, crouching in the shelter of a crooked pine tree, and surveyed the landscape. Red rocks, barrel cactus, yucca and Joshua trees. Some big horn sheep grazing on the tough grass near the dark mouth of a cenote. Nothing else.
None of them visible. That meant nothing, though. If they had no prey to chase they would stop walking and stand as still as statues, as still as stovepipe cactus. Dangerously easy to miss when scanning an area so wide and vast as Red Rock Canyon in Nevada.
There was movement and the soldier pivoted on the balls of his feet to watch a young man break from the cover of a creosote bush and move along a fault line, keeping to the shadows cast by an up-thrust ledge of ancient rock. The young man moved with an oiled ease that made the soldier long for the lost days of his youth. At fifty-five, the soldier could feel every year, every hour, every injury, every inch of scar tissue that marked his passage through a violent life. The kid had never taken a bad injury. To the heart, sure, but not to the body, and he moved like a dancer.
He moved smart, too, and the soldier nodded his appreciation. The kid was learning. Getting better, sharper, faster. Earning his right to live in a world as thoroughly unforgi
ving as this one.
The young man saw something and came to a complete stop, freezing and blending into the landscape. The soldier squinted as he surveyed the terrain to see what had spooked his apprentice.
He heard it before he saw it.
The dry desert wind brought the soft, low, plaintive moan of an absolutely bottomless hunger. One of them, crying out its need.
Then it stepped into sight, coming out of a shadowed space between two boulders tumbled down that slope by a glacier millennia ago. It was a man, or had been. Tall, heavy in the shoulders, wearing the soiled and sun-faded uniform of a Nevada State Park ranger.
The soldier did not speak, did not rush to help. He watched, instead.
The young man wore khakis and a many-pocketed canvas vest over a long-sleeved cotton knit shirt. He wore a backpack, too, and fitted between the pack and his own back was the lacquered scabbard of a katana, a Japanese sword of the kind the Samurai once used. It was nearly a match to the one the soldier had strung across his own back. The sword’s silk-wrapped handle rose above the young man’s right shoulder. He also wore a pistol in a belt holster and a knife strapped to his thigh.
He waited until he was sure there was only one of the dead shambling toward him, and then he stepped toward the zombie. His hand flashed up and down and there was a glittering arc of silver.
The zombie’s head fell one way, the headless body fell the other.
The soldier rose slowly and walked down the slope to the kid.
“Nice work,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the young man. “I think he was alone and—”
“And you should have used your fucking knife, Tom,” said the soldier.
“What?”
The soldier pointed to the far end of the valley. Three figures were moving toward them. Then a fourth stepped out from behind a tall cactus.
“That sword is pretty, and points for the sweet kesa-giri, kid, but that much polished steel is a big frigging mirror,” said the soldier sourly. “You might as well have rung the damn dinner bell.”
Tom Imura looked crestfallen. “I didn’t stop to consider—”
“Really? No shit.”
“I… I’m sorry, Joe,” he said.
Captain Joe Ledger pulled a pair of sunglasses from the vee of his sleeveless fatigue shirt and put them on.
“Don’t be sorry, kid,” he said. “Do better.”
“Yes,” promised Tom.
Ledger pointed to the four figures staggering toward them. “Now go clean up your mess.” He sat down on a rock, pulled a piece of goat jerky from his pack, and began to chew.
Tom Imura cleaned the black blood from his sword and returned it to its scabbard. Then he drew his knife. It was a double-edge British commando dagger with a matte black finish over the steel. Totally nonreflective. He drew a breath, held it for a moment, exhaled, nodded, and then set off to meet the four zombies.
He didn’t see Joe Ledger grinning at his retreating back.
—2—
Top and Bunny
“This place looks great, you said. We’ll get a lot of rest for once, you said,” growled USMC Staff Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, call sign ‘Bunny’, as he brought up his drum-fed shotgun. He began firing, filling the air with thunder that drowned out the low, hungry moans.
Bunny cut a sour sideways look at his best friend, First Sergeant Bradley ‘Top’ Sims. The dark-skinned, grizzled former Army Ranger held his SIG Sauer in a two-handed shooter’s grip and fired steady, spaced shots at the pale figures closing in on them from all sides. The two men circled slowly, clockwise, finding targets everywhere.
Absolutely everywhere.
They worked this like they’d worked a hundred battles of this kind. Killing the dead. Accepting the insanity of that concept as an unshakeable part of their world.
The front line of the dead went down.
The next line was fifty yards back. The Colorado Rocky Mountain slopes around them fell still as insects and birds alike silenced their calling to hide from the battle threatening their home.
“So tell me, Old Man,” asked Bunny as he lowered his weapon, “do I look well rested?”
Top shrugged, eyeing Bunny with a creased brow. “You look alive. Say thanks and stop being so damn high maintenance.”
“High maintenance my ass,” Bunny replied as he readied himself for the next wave. He aimed his shotgun at another zombie and shot it point blank in the forehead. “As far as I can tell, it’s a miracle either of us can walk without a cane at this point.”
“The miracle,” Top said, dropping a walker with a double-tap, “is that either of us still have all our limbs. That we’re even alive, Farm Boy.”
In truth, Top had been the farm boy, having spent his boyhood summers in his uncle’s Georgia peach grove. He’d gone off to the Rangers and fought in battlefields all over the world, then retired to see if he could be a farmer. But he had come out of retirement after his son was killed and his daughter crippled in the early days of the Iraq War. He’d volunteered for the newly-formed Department of Military Sciences, hoping to lead a team into combat in the new War on Terrorism. Instead he became the strong right hand of Captain Joe Ledger’s Echo Team. That was where he and Bunny had met and become best friends and teammates.
“Won’t be for long if I keep letting you pick our campsites, Old Man,” Bunny complained, and then they both went back to work. Firing, stopping only to reload, as zombies continued to advance – some limping on partial legs, others with partially eaten heads or faces or missing arms. Bunny was a six-foot-seven-inch, powerful, blond, former SoCal pro-volleyball player who’d joined the Marines and went from Force Recon to the DMS. Bunny, Top and Ledger had served together, side by side, their whole time at the agency.
Until things fell apart.
“The survivors we rescued yesterday said it was clear,” Top snapped, motioning downslope toward the old log cabin where they’d tried to spend the night – an abandoned escape for some unknown city dwellers that might never return.
“Well, clearly they were full of shit!” Bunny snapped. “Maybe we should go back and kick their asses. Just as a way of saying thanks.”
The last two zombies fell, their heads blown apart.
Top and Bunny panned around in a circle, looking for any signs of movement or further targets. The stink of rotting blood and flesh mixed with the sweet smell of pine needles and moss filling the cool mountain air as it breezed gently around them.
“Clear,” said Bunny, his voice too loud in the sudden quiet.
“Clear,” agreed Top. “Won’t last, though. All that shooting will bring more of them out of the woods. Won’t take ‘em long to get here, either.”
Top swapped out his magazine and holstered the SIG, then dragged a sleeve across the sweat on his face. “Hot as balls today.”
“Cover my six,” Bunny said. “This time, I think I’ll pick our shelter.”
“Hooah,” muttered Top, and they moved out in tight formation, covering each other as they followed a trail through a copse of ponderosa pines leading up a nearby slope.
Ever since the world fell apart under Lucifer 113, or The Plague as the public usually called the outbreak, Top and Bunny found themselves as soldiers without an official mission. There was no government, no DMS, no active military. The world had fallen completely off its hinges, and what was left of America – and maybe the world – was an all-you-can eat buffet for the hungry dead, with pockets of humans trying to survive here and there.
In the absence of official orders, Top and Bunny had assigned themselves a mission. The rules were simple. Keep moving. Save whom they could save. Kill as many zombies as was practical. Rinse. Repeat.
They’d become successful enough to earn a reputation as ‘the garbage men’, as one group of survivors had dubbed them. They'd once met a salvage
team out in the wasteland who’d heard of them and repeated what he’d been told. ‘Call them in and they’ll haul your ass out and empty the garbage you leave behind.’
Not something you could put on a tattoo, but it worked well enough.
As for the nickname of ‘The Garbage Men’, Bunny hated it, but Top thought it was hilarious.
“Yeah,” Bunny protested after they’d left the salvage man, “But we’re not a pair of fucking janitors. We’re saving lives. Where’s the respect?”
Top just said, “People use humor to keep their spirits up in impossible life situations. They don’t mean disrespect. It’s a joke.”
Bunny didn’t see how there was anything to joke about. The world was for shit and it might never recover. Millions, maybe billions of people were dead. More were dying, and everyone who died, no matter how, reanimated and joined the flesh-eating horde. No matter how many they shot, more kept coming. Top somehow managed to stay optimistic, but all Bunny could do was keep thinking how fucked they were.
FUBAR.
Fucked up beyond all repair.
Yeah.
—3—
The Soldier and the Samurai
Joe Ledger and Tom Imura scaled a tall rock as twilight began filling the canyons with shadows. In another kind of world they would have used the darkness as a time to travel quickly without being seen and without the oppressive desert heat. But the dead did not rest and they hunted at night. Actually they hunted all the time, but at night the lifeless bastards were harder to see coming, driven by smell and hearing when it was too dark to see. No one Ledger had talked to during the fall knew how the zombies stayed alive, or why they didn’t rot past a certain point, or how they could use any of their senses. It seemed to make no scientific logic, but for Ledger it meant he simply did not have sufficient information. Everything made sense in the end. Everything, and he had encountered some of the most bizarre threats any Special Operator had ever encountered. Even when it looked like it was something supernatural, there was always some kind of weird goddam science to explain it.