by Jack Hamlyn
I dropped him into the grass.
I put a couple fingers against his neck. He was still alive, but with the mutants and zombies, who could say for how long? I picked up his rifle and gas mask, making my way towards the womens’ cages, stalking low so as to break up my silhouette the way I had been trained at Fort Benning. I came upon a dirt road that I knew wound back towards the cages. I saw a couple soldiers running, ARM troopers. A zombie came at me out of the shadows. It was a large man dressed in Russian-style fatigues. I shot him through the head and continued on.
I made a big mistake when I got within visual distance of the cages. I walked right up on an ARM puke. Luckily, he saw me about the same time I saw him. I moved first while he fumbled with his rifle. I gave him the butt of my M-16 right in the face. He saw it coming and twisted away, only partially avoiding it. As it was, I caught him with a glancing blow and he made a yelping sound. As he went down, I gave him the butt full force in the back of the head and put his lights out. I took his H & K MP-5 machine pistol and ammo bag, slinging them over my shoulder.
A pale moon came up. Not much of one, but enough so that I could see exactly where I had to go. Now that I was away from the fires and fighting, there wasn’t much to see by. I followed the moonlight down the road. Behind me, there were a series of roaring explosions that lit up the night like high noon. One of the Quonsets had been hit by incendiaries. There must have been some fuel tanks there because the explosions went up one after the other, rolling clouds of fire rising into the sky.
A couple ARM troopers came running in my direction.
They didn’t even see me until I rose up with my M-16 and opened up on them, full auto. The slugs ripped into them, pulverizing their chests. One of them went down silently. Maybe I clipped his heart. The other guy fell back, popping a few rounds into the sky. By the time I reached him, he was dead, too. I saw a few other forms moving and they were ARM boys. I fired on them. They fired back. I emptied the rest of the magazine in their direction and they fled.
I inserted a fresh mag and moved on.
A pack of zombies came out of the darkness. They sighted me and moved slowly in my direction. I started busting rounds at them. I dropped two of them with headshots and then someone started firing on me. More than one person. They were using AKs, just ripping apart the real estate all around me. I jumped away and crawled behind some bushes.
The zombies followed me.
I didn’t want to fire on them and draw the mutants down on me. About the time I figured I had no chance, the AKs opened up again and dropped the other three zombies. I watched the mutants moving out, low to the ground, looking for me no doubt.
When they passed, I made my way to the cages.
I saw no armed combatants around. The cages were all opened. There were no women in any of them. I checked them all out twice. What the hell? I heard movement behind me.
“Drop it or your dead,” a voice said.
I smiled and let the rifle fall from my fingers. “Do I get a last cigarette or anything, Robin?”
“Steve? Is that you behind the Halloween mask?”
“It is,” I said, my voice sounding funny coming through the voicemitter of the mask.
“No shit, man! I was just going to look for you!” she said, throwing herself into my arms. “What the fuck are the chances? God, will you take that mask off. You’re freaking me out. You look like those…things.”
I held onto her, feeling calmer than I had in days.
“Just because you were holding onto me, it don’t mean—”
“That you’ll spread your legs for me,” I said, sighing.
She laughed. “I guess I need a new line.” Then she stopped laughing. “You feeling any…ah…symptoms?”
“Nothing. Zombpox either didn’t take or—”
“You’re vaccinated from eating that woman,” she said. “Lucky girl.”
I shook my head. “You gotta put this on,” I told her, handing her the extra mask.
“No way, man. I’ll suffocate.”
“You have to. Those things…the mutants…they’re using poison gas. Nerve agents, blister agents…if you breathe that shit in, you’re done.”
We moved off into the deeper shadows between two of the cages. I helped her with the mask despite her bitching and complaining. It took a few minutes, but I felt better when she had it on. Much better.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
She was silent for a moment. “Mutants got ‘em. They dragged ‘em off. Some of the girls, man, they were in real rough shape. Some were sick, some were crazy. When they opened our cage, a bunch of the girls attacked them. They went nuts, totally psycho. With all that going on, I ducked away. I took this pistol off an ARM puke. They chopped him up.” She swallowed. “One of the girls…she ripped the mask off a mutant…”
“And?”
Robin shook her head. “They ain’t got faces, Steve.”
“No faces?”
“Not like ours.”
After the mutant corpse I’d seen, I believed it.
We exchanged stories. We’d both been through pretty much the same shit, save she’d been spared a dance with Spider. But that had been coming and I knew it. I didn’t tell her that, though. She told me a story of a woman that was tapped every night until she died.
“It was sickening, Steve,” she told me. “After a few days of that shit, she couldn’t even stand up.”
I debated telling her about the PHOBIC business or what I knew of the Bloodlords, but I decided there was no time.
The first thing we needed to do, I told her, was to get away from this place. A vehicle would have been nice, but either way, we had to get gone. Robin wasn’t sure exactly where the compound was. She’d never seen it before. She figured that once she got out in the country and could see some roads, she would know where we were.
“Then, you and me, we’ll get naked somewhere,” she said. She pressed the canister of her gas mask against mine. It was so utterly ridiculous that we both started laughing. Kissing gas masks. The image stayed in my head. It was like something from a surreal anti-war painting.
“What are you thinking, Steve?” she asked, when I’d gone silent.
“My son, my friends. I can’t rest, I can’t do anything until I know one way or another about them,” I told her. “I hope you can understand that.”
She took hold of my hand and squeezed it. “Sure. That’s what I like about you, Steve. Outside, you act tough as nails. Inside, you’re like fucking butter.”
“Real butter?”
“Sure, slow-churned, sweet cream, all that good shit. Not margarine.” She laughed. “There was a nun at the orphanage. This old bird, looked like she was maybe three-hundred years old. She tried to teach me to cook, but I couldn’t get into that chizz. Why cook when you can drive through the golden arches? But she tried, Steve. She was okay. She was pretty tight for an old lady. She had patience with me, like you do. I like that. Of course, she called butter oleo, a couch was a davenport, and the fridge was the icebox. I got the feeling that when she was my age, you had to start your car with a crank.”
Robin kept going on and on, whispering right next to my ear and pouring out bits and pieces of her life and it seemed to me to be a hell of a time for midnight confessions. Just beneath her voice there was something terribly vulnerable. Then I got it. I figured it out: she was scared. More so, she was petrified. I’d been like that so many times myself since The Awakening, seized up with fear, unable to move, unable to do anything. And if anybody happened to be with me, well I started talking in an endless nervous chatter. I understood what she was going through and it was the end result of what she had been through.
“It’s okay,” I finally said. “I’m scared, too.”
“Scared?” she said, her hackles rising. “What side of the pool did you spawn in, Steve? I ain’t scared. I ain’t nothing.” Her eye ports shined in the moonlight. “Who’s scared, right?”
But she was
and I knew it. You don’t internalize all that stress and fear like she had been doing for months, mostly alone, without it needing to get out sooner or later.
“Relax,” I told her. “Things’ll be okay now.”
That was like a slap in the face. “You know what, Steve? As a therapist, you suck. I’ve had lots of ‘em and they all fucking sucked, man, but you’re the worst. Even the ones that made me want to put a fucking razor across my wrists were better than you. You’re a real fucking pissbag. You’re a fucking zero—”
I took hold of her and held her, pressed her against me. She fought and swore and called me names that would have made a sailor blush, but she finally settled down and curled into me, shaking and sobbing. It went on for about five minutes and then she pulled away.
“Don’t get some stupid fucking idea that I was crying because I wasn’t,” she told me. “I’m just tired.”
“Sure you are.”
“You prick.”
“Okay, enough.”
“You asshole.”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. She called me a few more names, then she started to laugh, too, with her hoarse chuckling. She wasn’t mad at me really, she was mad at herself for coming apart in front of me. She was a street kid. Such a thing was unacceptable. But she was better now. She had gotten it out and she needed that.
“Maybe I should go out there alone,” I said. “Scout out a vehicle, a safe route.”
“Fuck that, hero. You’re not getting out of my sight. Who knows what you’ll get yourself into?”
“Okay.”
“Well?” she said, getting to her feet. “What’re you waiting for? Jesus Christ, what am I supposed to do with a guy like you?”
Together we moved off into the darkness. Robin held my hand. She said it was for my own good so I didn’t fall apart on her. I thought she was right.
NIGHT TERRORS
The battle was dying down.
That was a good thing, I thought. It might make it easier to slip away if the mutants had done their thing and retreated. But it wasn’t over. There was a period of quiet followed by more fighting. I still heard machine guns and the chain gun from one of the LAV-25s pounding away from time to time. And screaming, because men were still dying horribly out there. Some from exposure to chemical weapons and some from battle wounds and worse things. The front gate was beyond the cage where I’d been held. But to go through there would have meant going through the worst of the fighting and carnage. I decided against that. We cut back through the field beyond to climb over the fence on the other side. It was the logical thing to do.
We started off.
I gave Robin the M-16 and I kept the MP-5. We moved off quietly around the cages, across a dirt road and into the field. There were a few more explosions behind us and they saved our lives. As we came over a low hill, the explosions went off, throwing strobing lights over the compound and into the field of grass before us.
“Shit,” Robin said. “Did you see that?”
I did. Several waves of Mutants were creeping through the field. They were spread out in a long killing line. With the shadows settling back in, I could see their eye lenses shining silver.
There was no way we were going back that way. What I saw of them, they were converging from the west, north, and south, which meant the only way out was to the east, which would bring us to the main gate and right through the worst fighting and activity. We were bottled up. We didn’t have a choice.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Back across the road, around the cages, and into the compound we went. We not only had mutants and zombies to worry about, but trigger-happy ARM troopers…and gas. We were safe for the most part against nerve gas, but blister agents like chlorine and phosgene and the like could inflict horrendous damage against exposed skin. But, like I said, we didn’t have a choice. The mutants were at our backs and there was no way in hell we could hope to fight our way through them.
For five minutes, maybe ten, we saw nothing.
It grew very quiet.
The silence began to really get under my skin. I knew we had to move, to get to safety as soon as possible, but the thing was I just couldn’t seem to go on. As we moved out and started coming upon all the remains of the ARM pukes with zombies spread out in every direction feeding upon them, I just wanted to run. I’d been through this shit too many times and each time it made my heart feel weaker. Although it was all in my imagination, I almost felt like the dead were watching us, baiting us in so they could devour us.
That was crazy thinking.
The only time the zombies weren’t particularly aggressive was when they had something else to eat. I knew that from experience. There were plenty of corpses, and parts thereof, spread about. The zombies had plenty to feed upon. Our best bet was to slip right through them before the battle was completely over, because from what I was hearing, it pretty much was. I heard a few shots fired now and then but that was about it.
“Let’s just go already,” Robin said.
I nodded.
The thing to do with the zombies when they were feeding, I had learned, was not to stalk about slowly but to move through their ranks as quickly as possible. A few would notice you, most wouldn’t.
“Just so you know,” Robin said, “I’m not crazy about this.”
We weren’t holding hands now. We had weapons in our fists and we were ready to bust at any moment. We moved out, ignoring the sounds around us—chewing and snapping noises, slurping sounds and gulping sounds. It was grisly and hideous, but on we went. The moonlight hid most of it, but with rising dread we saw enough: zombies squatting over corpses, gnawing on entrails and organs, chewing on stray limbs. In my mind a voice was saying: They’ll let you get deep into their numbers and then they’ll toss aside what they’ve been eating…they’ll begin to move…they’ll come from every direction…marching forward with shuffling feet, hands reaching out to take you down.
But that was just fear talking.
We moved through them and they paid little attention to us. Once, a man saw us and came in our direction, but we moved quickly away before he could close the gap. I was sweating and shaking. My breath was hot inside my mask. The sour smell of fear came off us but the dead didn’t seem to care. We kept going, moving forward like it was perfectly ordinary and we belonged there, both very aware of the fact that even if we made it through the cordon of the living dead, the mutants might waste us at any moment.
As we approached one of the wrecked, burning Quonsets, the flickering firelight showed us things we would rather not have seen. I saw a little girl gnawing on the head of a man. Two women tearing away at a man’s throat. A little boy with his head thrust right into the cleaved-open body cavity of an ARM soldier. Two women used rocks to shatter the head of another corpse, ripping out globs of brains with their fingers. A large naked man stripped the skin from a leg. It was disgusting. Hell, it was beyond disgusting. And that was always the most appalling thing about the risen dead: their hunger, their insatiable hunger. If there was meat to be had, they’d keep coming and coming until you put a bullet in their heads.
We made it through that horror and a couple more equally gruesome scenes.
We kept moving.
Like wind-up soldiers, we pressed ever forward.
We saw mutants moving about, but they didn’t see us. Many of them were employed in mutilating the corpses of the ARM troopers with knives. Some of the ARM guys weren’t dead and the mutants were torturing them, making them scream. I had no love for ARM, but to see such a thing…I just wanted to start shooting.
We stepped around the sprawled and ravaged corpses of ARM boys that hadn’t gotten their gas masks on in time. Their faces and hands were ruptured open from blister agents that had burned holes into them like acid. We didn’t linger. The only good thing we had going for us was that there was a breeze at our backs that was blowing the low hanging clouds of gas away from us. But hollows and bomb craters still held pockets of i
t that were like green-yellow ground fog. I figured it was either phosgene or chlorine. Primitive stuff, but deadly.
We climbed over a ridge and there were bodies all over the downward slope. Maybe twenty or more. It looked like they’d staged a human wave attack and had been mowed down by machine gun fire and grenades. They were outfitted for gas attacks in hoods, facemasks, NBC suits, chemical gloves and boots. That hadn’t saved them from gunshot, of course. I knew the cages were just ahead and on the other side, the main gate and fence line. The only problem was, the ridge was blocking the breeze. And in front of us was a wide hollow and it was filled with gas as thick as sea mist.
We had to go right through it.
I could hear gunfire and exploding grenades somewhere behind us. The mutants were pushing in on a mop-up operation. We were most definitely in the shit.
“Help me,” I told Robin stripping the gas gloves off corpses.
“Hell you doing?”
“We need their protective equipment or we’re in trouble,” I said. “You see that stuff down there? That ain’t fog. Clouds of blister agents. They’ll burn our skin right off.”
She needed no further prompting.
We put on the chem gloves so we didn’t contact any agents while we stripped the bodies. I felt like a ghoul as we plundered the dead in the pale moonlight. At any moment, we might have zombies or mutants to deal with. I helped Robin pull on bib trousers and a smock, tightening the Velcro cinches at the wrists and ankles. I pulled a hood over her head and got the rubber chemical boot covers over her shoes. Lastly, I had her put the rubber chemical gloves back on that went up past the elbows. Then I did the same myself. The only problem were the bullet holes in the smocks, but we selected the ones that were the least damaged. The bloodstains and assorted gore smears we just had to ignore.