by Sean Deville
But if he was evil, it was because God wanted him that way. He represented everything Abraham ever said about the human race. He was the truth of it all. Their ability for good was a charade, used to mask their true nature. Humanity was capable of unspeakable cruelty to their own kind, and their empathy and their delusions of spirituality were nothing but a smoke screen. When the thin thread of civility was removed, mankind wouldn’t think twice at raping and killing and tormenting those that, even weeks ago would have been called friends. Mankind was after all made in God’s own image, and who was more cruel than God when his children disappointed?
That had been the essence of Abraham’s message. God demanded total devotion, and was worthy of such. And whilst God expected mankind to control its basic instincts and actions, it also expected humans to kill in the Lord’s name whenever God asked. Man was his to do with as he wished, his plaything. God made the rules, and only the righteous understood his true nature. If there was evil in the world, it was put there by God to show us the way to enlightenment. But even knowing all that, even knowing that Brother Abraham wouldn’t have even blinked at Owen’s deeds over the past few days, he still struggled with the truth of it all. The one thing that consoled him was that, no matter what Owen did, no matter what perversions he displayed, it was all in God’s plan. Just because Fabrice didn’t understand it, didn’t mean there wasn’t a plan. Why should he even think to understand the thoughts and actions of the supreme being?
“We should move further south. The radiation may be a threat to you.”
“Yeah? Shit, I never thought about that.” Owen stood up from where he had been sitting. He threw away the virtually empty wine bottle that he had consumed over the last half hour, still in two minds about the lack of effect alcohol now had on his body. Was it good that he could not get inebriated? He reckoned so. The infected were becoming more and more difficult to control, and he had been forced to start giving them more and more freedoms. He let them roam more, and let them feed more, because when he didn’t, the pressure seemed to develop in his skull. An insistent chatter demanding, complaining. Oh, he could shut them up with one psychic word, but this seemed to be the limits of his army. About a hundred thousand. Any more than that, and it was too much for him.
It had been easier at first, and now he saw why he no longer slept. But as the days had progressed, the numbers had started to wear him down. He’d even tried to cut some of them from his power at the peripheries, but the first time he’d tried that with, those he had banished from his army had turned on him, running into the central mass to try and reach him, murder in their minds. He’d had to set their own on them, letting his Praetorians feed. They did not complain; in fact, they seemed to relish infected flesh as much as human. So now he kept the numbers in check, culling dozens at a time, rotating those who could feed. It was a monumental task to keep it all in order, but what other choice did he have? If he lost control now, the only thing that could stop them was Fabrice. That was the other reason he kept the religious nutter around, although he suspected, that when it came down to it, Fabrice would stand aside without lifting a finger to help him.
18.13PM GMT, 18th September 2015, Normandy, France
It was a brisk evening, and the sky was clear of clouds, the light just starting to fade as the sun began its inevitable descent into oblivion. Xavier knew it was going to be a cold night, and he watched from his position on the bluff as he had done the day before. Never had a vigil been more important for the safety of a country. Down on the beach below, soldiers from his detachment were laying the last of the razor wire at the high-water mark. Tonight, the beach would be lit up by the dozens of floodlights that had been installed in haste, so that anything moving would be easily visible. They knew the infected were coming, it was just a matter of when.
Nobody had any illusion that the razor wire would stop any infected who came ashore. It was merely to slow them down if they did come charging onto the beach, to give those watching the coasts time to react, to send warning. Seventy years ago, thousands of men had stormed these very beaches, and had faced a rain of death from artillery and machine gun fire. If only those defences still existed; if only the Atlantic Wall that Rommel had once tried to install had been completed and was today intact. There was no way the infected would be a threat to France then. But now instead of trenches, mines, and concrete bunkers, all they had was wire and hope and luck.
Xavier brought the binoculars up to his eyes again and scanned the shoreline. Although he was a sniper, there was no need for stealth here. He could watch from the relative comfort of the camping chair he sat in, the thermos of coffee still half-full. He moved his head right, and saw his friend a hundred metres further up the bluff. A fellow sniper, they would both be relieved early in the morning. He hoped that tonight would be as uneventful as last night, nobody really knowing for sure if the infected could actually make it across the English Channel. And even if they did, if they emerged anywhere, it would surely be at the Pas-de-Calais, the thinnest part of the Channel and the shortest distance for those bastard plague carriers to swim. There was a whole battalion fortifying the beaches and the coast there. Of course, hadn’t the Germans thought the same about where the Allies would hit them?
The French did not forget the lessons of history. It would be too ironic if the infected came ashore on the beaches that saw the liberators arrive on D-Day without any form of resistance. No, every possible defence would be constructed; they just needed time. Even now, the French Parliament was considering reinstating conscription, and the northern half of the country was under Martial Law and was being evacuated. The excuse was the virus, but the real reason was the fact that the slums of Paris were burning. For whatever reason, a mini uprising had occurred amongst the parts of Paris that were populated mainly by the underemployed and disenfranchised immigrant community. Xavier had no idea what had started the riots and the fires, but the government’s response had been brutal. There were some in Xavier’s division who espoused the notion that the riots were started by undercover agents of France’s own intelligence agencies, to give the government the excuse they needed at the time that was right. If the rumours were true, then Xavier approved, as did most of those spreading the rumours. The more those Islamic bastards were brought to heel, the better his country would be was his opinion. He still remembered the stories his father had told him about the hell witnessed in Algiers all those years ago, a hell left-leaning politicians had allowed to walk into Xavier’s beloved country. Next year would be different though. Next year, he would vote for the far right, and then the Muslims would see what happened when the might of France was roused.
The fact that the man he had just been looking at through his binoculars was Muslim didn’t seem to register. He was still young and naïve, and it would take many years for life and experience to teach him that just because some foreigners were a threat, it didn’t mean they all were. Of course, to get that experience, to learn those valuable life lessons, he would have to carry on living, and life was starting to become a precious commodity.
As he looked out at the water, he saw movement in the surf. A body washed itself up with the waves, lying face down in the water. He wasn’t too alarmed; this had happened twice yesterday. Two days ago, the Royal Navy had been forced to sink a ferry that had tried to break quarantine. There were hundreds of people on board, and the captain of the ferry had pleaded that they were not infected. Nobody had listened. The explosion had flung bodies into the sea, a dozen of which had washed ashore along the French coast. He picked up his radio to let the men down below know there were more bodies to dispose of. And then the body moved.
Xavier watched mesmerised as the torso pushed itself up by shaking arms, and then the figure found itself kneeling in the sand, the surf buffeting it, almost knocking it back down. But it resisted, and looked around. Xavier couldn’t make out enough detail, and he moved the radio to his lips. He uttered the words he hoped he would never have to say.
“Infected. Possible infected on the beach.” He heard the panic in his own voice, was momentarily ashamed by it. And then a shot rang out, and the head of the person he was looking at exploded. Looking back to his right, he saw his friend with his rifle resting on a low wall. He saw the man fire again, the sound hitting him a fraction of a second later. Turning back to the beach, he saw more figures emerging from the water. These hadn’t been washed up; they were walking out of the sea.
“Merde.” He dropped his binoculars and picked up his gun. A third shot sounded off, this time from the beach below. Would there be any infected left for him to kill? He soon learned there was no problem in that regard. The invasion of France had begun.
He floated several hundred metres off the coast, the sea moving him with its caressing rhythm. He jerked slightly as he felt the pain of those who died on the beach. He had nearly died several times, swallowed up by the cold waters of the English Channel, but he had resurfaced to take the precious air and had continued his desperate and frantic swim. And thousands swam with him, and they too waited and watched and learned as their brethren martyred themselves to test the human’s defences.
Those who had landed first had done so out of sacrifice. There was no regret and no fear; there was just the hunger and the desire for the greater good. A whole country was theirs, but what about a continent? There were so many fresh minds to join with their consciousness, so much flesh to consume, that there really had been no option but to throw themselves in the water and swim for a coastline they couldn’t even see. So the soul who had once been called David looked around him, saw the thousands of his kind paused in their assault on the beach, many of them looking to him as their default leader. It would be dark soon, and then they would storm the beaches. The flesh would take many of them with their guns and their bombs, but through sheer weight of will and numbers they would take the beach head and begin the inevitable.
But there was a sense of unease within him, within all his kind. They shared one voice, but now there was another voice whispering softly in the background. This was different to the power they felt back in the UK, for it held no control, had no power over them, and never would. But it was there, and it beckoned seductively, tainting them. They could feel its evil, its desire to take them and join them to it. As an individual infected, David had no notion of what it meant, but collectively, the infected were filled with doubt. Humans they did not fear, but they feared this. Because it was growing strong, and it wanted them for itself.
18.31PM, 18th September 2015, Hounslow, London
She had indeed eaten him slow, dining on Kirk for almost thirty minutes. She’d started on his fingers, then on his face, every bite she chewed filling her mouth to the point that it fell out from between her lips. For she could not swallow, the mechanism for her gullet not part of her that the virus now controlled. Still, she ate, the hunger that scorched her insides abated somewhat.
Rasheed for his part fed as well, tearing off chunks of Kirk’s face, starting with the most accessible to him, the ears. He avoided the neck, for some reason Rachel wanting this one to stay alive as long as possible.
“Taste good,” she had said over the screams and pleadings of the man whose mind had snapped. She almost casually ripped at his clothing, exposing his chest, and she worked her teeth into the meat of his shoulders and breast, leaving angry bleeding gouges in the skin and muscle beneath. It was during this stage that the body of Kirk had begun to convulse, the virus now changing him. Even as he began to vomit and defecate, the pair continued to consume chunks of him. By the time she took his left nipple, Kirk was hissing at them violently, his strength increasing by the minute. It wasn’t anything that Rasheed couldn’t handle. In fact, it was better this way, because the infected were more resilient, able to survive more easily the grievous wounds that were being inflicted.
And then her feeding was over. She stepped back from the still-struggling man, and her bloodied lips seemed to smile.
“They feed now.” Kirk’s mind was now almost gone, but despite that, he actually understood what she said, even though her words were slurred because her mouth was still filled with his flesh. Then he felt himself lifted by the monstrosity behind him, and he was turned to face where he had previously been standing. The infected Kirk thrashed harder, almost breaking free of Rasheed’s vice like grip. Almost. It took three steps to get him to the edge of the roof, and the zombie clutching his arms took one final bite, this time from over his left clavicle, and then cast Kirk off the roof. Deep within the infected mind, there was a semblance of human sanity that still dwelled within in. It was the last vestiges of his humanity, the part of him that hadn’t been crushed by the virus and the trauma. It prayed that this was the end. It took less than two seconds for him to fall to the ground below, two seconds to realise this wasn’t it. Because the undead had massed there, and he landed on them rather than the cold hard killer concrete, and they buffered his descent as he fell amongst them. Then the feeding began again, only this time it was a frenzied, multi-mouth affair, every part of him torn at and rended. In complete hell, it took him another three minutes to finally bleed out, the virus unable to counter the damage being done. He didn’t resurrect, for there was nothing left of him to make the trip back from Hades.
Rachel stared down at her kin. They had to go south now, south to the coast. It would be a long trip, the shuffling ever more uncoordinated shambling of the undead a poor way to travel. But the same thing that had warned her of the nuclear blast now insisted she was needed south. Where the other Horsemen were, where the voices in her head would be. She would follow them, to where she knew not. She would take her army and they would sweep down through the towns and villages, infecting and killing everything in their path, turning as many as they could. She would leave nothing alive, for unlike Owen, she had no constraints over those she could control. Those limits were imposed on the human mind, not the mind recreated by the virus upon brain death. All the barriers to her power had been destroyed. She was now limitless in that regard.
19.47PM GMT, 18th September 2015, Dallas, Texas
Fiona looked down at the motionless body of her brother and felt the weight of the world rest upon her. The doctors and fellow FBI had left the room so she could be alone with a man who was only being kept alive by tubes, drips, and machines. The doctors had put it as kindly as they could. Whilst Mitch had survived eating a bullet, it had been by pure fluke. The speed with which the paramedics had arrived had been enough to stabilise him to a degree that he was still technically alive by the time he reached the hospital. But as she had feared, the doctors confirmed that the parts of his brain that separate him from the beasts in the field were effectively dead. There were only enough sparks from it to keep basic functions going. None of the doctors present had envisaged any way back for him.
She sat by his bed holding his hand, tears trying to form but strangely absent. Soon, one of the doctors would join her, take her into a side room, and lay out the reality of the situation. She remembered, years ago, being in a similar hospital room with the family of a fellow agent who had caught a round in the head during a firefight. Same thing, same grief, same hopelessness. Would they come to her and tell her the same thing? That it was hopeless, that he would never wake up, that even if he did, his quality of life would be negligible. Would they, in empathetic tones, advise her to authorise the switching off of the life support? Would she resist as that family had resisted, insisting that anything that could be done should be done? Or would she just give up? That agent had still died, a year later when the family had finally relented. If she kept him alive, would it be for him, or for her?
She squeezed his hand, hoping for some sort of a sign, but the fingers she grasped were cold and unmoving. There was a medical symphony in the room. The gentle hum of the overhead halogens, the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor and the measured movement of the artificial respirator. It was almost hypnotic, but none of this represented life. It was f
ake, illusionary. It was almost intoxicating, the potential that it represented. Mitch was gone though, she had no doubt of that, had seen the X-ray and the position of the bullet that was still lodged in there. It was inoperable she was told, to get the bullet out would just create more damage with no benefit.
“Oh, Mitch. Why? Why didn’t you fucking talk to me?” And at that moment, she despised everything. Life, the system that allowed a man like this to drop through the cracks without the help and support he needed. The system that needed people like them to keep the majority safe from the scum. But Mitch hadn’t been arresting scum, had he? His unit had apprehended a fucking radio talk show host. Not a terrorist, not a murderer. A bloke who believed in UFOs, government conspiracies and the fact that the world was run by pan-dimensional blood-drinking space lizards. That wasn’t what she or her brother had signed up for. And all because the president said he wanted to keep the Homeland safe. But she knew the truth of the man half the country had elected. This wasn’t about safety; it was about control, a decimation of their republic. And it was only able to happen because people like Fiona sat back and let it. She knew then that she was done with it all.