by Tim Curran
There was only the sound of the engine then. He sat up quickly and realised the truck was already moving, rolling slowly over the ridge and gathering momentum. He gave the accelerator a squeeze and pulled down hard on the steering wheel to swing it around. As soon as he was bumping down the track he gave it more gas and knocked it into second. He needed to get to the cover of the farmhouse as fast as possible, but somehow had the odd feeling that he was going the wrong way; that he needed to be heading upwards. Cold air rushing through the cab made his eyes water. In the rear-view mirror he saw the creature wheel as if one of its wingtips had momentarily been nailed to the sky. Then it was diving after him again.
Murray whimpered, pressed his foot down and moved into third. He saw the needle rise to fifty miles per hour but the creature was already upon him, folding its wings and dropping into the bed of the truck with a heavy slam, as though someone had just dumped an anvil in there. He heard the awful scrape and tap of its talons, looked directly into intelligent, compassionless eyes that were circled by tiny squirming white worms. It stabbed its head forward to smash through the cab’s back window.
Murray screamed again as the creature easily sliced his left shoulder wide open with the hooked end of its beak. It was so quick and deep he felt no pain, and could hardly believe it when he looked down and saw bright red blood spraying from his severed brachial artery. The truck lurched to the right and jumped as it crashed into a bank at the edge of the track. The giant bird opened its wings and pounced up into the sky. He began to mumble the Hail Mary again, and by some miracle started the stalled engine once more. He got into fourth this time, and could at last see the farmhouse below as the vehicle rocked and threw him about. The passenger door was dripping, the window coated with his blood. Murray was quickly becoming dizzy but at least this time he was moving away from the horror: he could see the bird perusing him in the rear-view mirror, but was leaving it behind as he reached the relative safety of sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour. He watched the needle and risked a little laugh of hope. Yet still there was that lurking instinct telling him to get up out of the valley, up into the sky’s untainted air. He didn’t see the gatepost in time and the right corner of the bonnet folded like a concertina.
Murray regained his senses and realised the truck had spun ninety degrees and stopped. Losing hope and energy, he swore before trying to start the engine yet again. He heard the call of the eagle behind him and another call answering it from further up the valley. Great: that meant there were two of these things. It was then he remembered the hunting rifle chained in its polished mahogany rack above the fireplace. The key to the padlock was on his key ring in the hip pocket of his jeans. When the engine fired into life he whooped with joy and understood that he now felt more alive than he ever had before. To die this way would not only be unfair – it would be completely absurd. Pride and grim determination were the only things fuelling his movements as he tugged on the wheel, pointed the truck at the glass patio doors of his lounge and squashed the accelerator against the now-sticky floor of the cab.
The front of the truck was too wide. Murray had forgotten to apply his seatbelt and was launched through the space where the windscreen had been. He crashed through the plate glass of the sliding door and landed on his back in the centre of the room. His tartan jacket was in ribbons now and there was a deep laceration across the front of his right thigh. He could see the gun on its rack. Raising his head, he saw the truck roll slowly back from the ruined side of the house, dragging the front bumper as it seemed to limp sadly away, shedding a hubcap. One of the eagles landed outside in the yard. The shadow of the second grew bigger on the ground until it too alighted. They both hopped across the lawn to investigate. He could smell their putrid flesh already. By the time they were cautiously sticking their decaying balding heads through the hole in the wall, Murray had dragged himself up to the level of the mantelpiece. I can at least save Martha, he thought, his fingers closing tight around the chain of the rack. But then he saw her. She was lying in a heap on the other side of the couch, thrown there by his impact, a cleaver-sized piece of glass stuck through her pale tender neck.
Murray opened his mouth and a primal roar came out. The two birds instinctively ducked their heads and retreated into the garden before carefully beginning their advance again. He gripped the chain and allowed himself to fall. The gun rack came away from the wall and landed on top of him; Murray landed on top of the overturned coffee table; there was a dreadful shredding noise – his sight momentarily fading and a pain-induced hissing in his ears.
It took a full three seconds for him to realise he was impaled on the coffee table’s metal leg. Lying on his back, he looked down at the tubular iron shaft emerging from his right side. The wound seeped black like the truck’s wrecked sump. He knew he’d probably pierced his liver and could never survive it on top of everything else. Snot bubbled from his nostrils as he wept out of pity for himself. He dug in his hip pocket and pulled out the key, fumbled and got the padlock open.
Murray recalled how beautiful the valley had looked from the top of the ridge just moments before any of this had occurred. Now he really was finished – but God would surely grant him the mercy of being able to end the lives of these monsters before it was time to leave his valley forever. He raised the rifle with a blood-flecked grin. The chain slid free of the trigger guard like a bright silver viper, and the two birds watched it fall as if mesmerised.
“Go to hell,” Murray whispered, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. In spite of all the years he’d been around rifles, this time he’d somehow managed to forget about shells, which were in the locked draw of the cabinet behind him.
Sharp talons stabbed into his legs and he gasped from the fresh new pain of it. A slimy beak darted forward and opened his steaming stomach; a second rummaged inside and Murray’s head swam as it finally emerged again, pulling his entrails with it like a knotted string of pink-purple handkerchiefs. The stern, compassionless eyes were the last things he saw. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Farming inspectors found the bodies of Murray and his wife the following morning. They found Bess alive and well, her tail between her legs as she emerged from the crawlspace under the farmhouse and ran for the hills, for the last uncorrupted air of the mountains.
SWAT
by Brian Pinkerton
Sergeant Koska held his breath, remaining perfectly still except for the movement of his eyes, which slid across their sockets, searching the dank living room with piercing intensity. He held out one arm, palm facing his four colleagues, signaling for them to stay motionless and on alert.
Koska could see the pale horror draped across their faces. It didn’t matter that they were trained officers of the Louisiana State Police Special Weapons and Tactics team, an elite force equipped to perform high-risk operations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement. It offered no comfort that they were heavily armed with assault rifles, submachine guns and explosives.
The enemy they faced defied practical warfare methods and promised a swift and certain fate.
“We’re doomed,” muttered Jake, a SWAT agent of 16 years and the best sniper on the force.
Koska ignored the remark. As their leader, he needed to demonstrate courage, even if his own confidence was slipping. “We’ve secured every window and door,” Koska said. “This house is sealed tighter than a drum.”
“It won’t help,” responded Hank, a veteran of the first Gulf War and the team’s specialist at dealing with barricaded gunmen. “They’ll get in. You know they will.”
“You told us we’d be fighting zombies,” growled Anders, a six-foot-six African American of solid muscle, finely toned from his glory days playing college football at Tulane University. “Nobody prepared us for this. It’s bullshit!”
“Shut up all of you!” shouted Tara, the toughest female SWAT member in the state of Louisiana. Her voice boomed off the walls and the four men stopped talking, returning the room to silence�
��
… except for the most terrifying sound of all.
A tiny, almost imperceptible zzt.
***
In the beginning, the assignment was entirely bizarre yet manageable: stop an outbreak of cannibalism that had overtaken a small, backwoods town. In a 24-hour period, the community of Clarkson, located on a flood plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, had erupted into widespread violence. Ordinary citizens began attacking – biting – eating one another in random assaults. Once bitten, victims joined the ranks of their attackers, slipping into a semi-conscious “zombie” state, losing all rational behavior to a hunger for human flesh.
Clarkson’s zombie population quickly grew and the state’s SWAT force was flown to the scene with strict orders to rescue the uninfected and destroy the infected. Anyone bitten by a zombie was deemed dangerous and subject to immediate execution.
The National Guard sealed Clarkson’s borders to prevent the disease from spreading to neighboring communities while SWAT operators infiltrated the town, going door-to-door to sort the living from the undead. Survivors were whisked away in school buses. The less fortunate were put down permanently.
Koska marveled over the slowness and stupidity of the enemy. “its target practice,” he declared, dropping the shuffling, slack-jawed zombies with ease with his M16. A bullet to the head finished them off and they made no effort to run or hide. In fact, the zombies barely put up a decent fight, even the bigger ones and the sneaky sonsofbitches who popped out of the shadows without warning. That’s where the SWAT unit’s training and weaponry came into play, years of drills simulating hostage rescues and counter-terrorism operations. The zombies were comparatively lame, like shooting fish in a barrel. Koska felt confident his squad would complete its mission without suffering a single casualty.
But then he received a special assignment that changed everything. As Koska’s team made good progress, blasting through a leafy, residential street, dispatching close to two dozen zombies and rescuing nearly a hundred of the living, an urgent call crackled over the radio from Central Command.
A potential location for “Patient Zero” had been identified, a likely source for the zombie outbreak. Several townspeople spoke of a deranged family named Leery who lived in a decrepit southern mansion on the outskirts of town, tucked away in the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Delta. The Leery family practiced voodoo, obsessed with finding a way to “call up the dead” through black magic and animal sacrifices. For years, the Leary’s were dismissed as a hapless clan of mentally unfit, inbred hillbilly freaks. No one ever took them seriously…until now.
Bert, a long-haired cousin of the Leary’s, had fled the mansion and told the sheriff’s police a harrowing tale about witnessing the resurrection of a corpse. He claimed family members performed a voodoo ritual to bring a beloved uncle back to life. The endeavor proved successful with alarming side effects: the revived corpse displayed a total lack of memory, exhibited minimal brain activity, and manifested a fierce appetite for human flesh. The dead-alive uncle promptly began chomping on relatives, sending his victims into an equally zombified state. Cousin Bert escaped in his pick-up truck with the rest of the family literally nipping at his heels.
In the beginning, the sheriff’s police howled with laughter at Bert’s story and threatened to jail him for smoking funny cigarettes. However, the next day, when zombies staggered into town and began spreading an unthinkable plague, the laughter stopped.
Bert’s story immediately gained credibility and he underwent intense interrogation by officials while SWAT troops stormed the town. Realizing the need to raid the Leery home, Central Command selected Koska’s team for the mission. Koska received his marching orders: “Go inside that mansion, destroy every zombie you find and see if there are any survivors.”
“No problem,” Koska responded. After all, it was just another house to storm, a few more heads to plug with bullets. He gathered his platoon into an armored vehicle and headed for the deep reaches of the Louisiana marshlands.
Driving through the tall, wet grass, Koska could barely make out the fading roadways that twisted and turned toward their destination. The sun had started its descent and Koska did not want this house call to extend into nightfall. While his unit was well-equipped with flashlights and night goggles, he really didn’t want to give the enemy a fighting – or biting – chance.
“Yo, see it!” cried Anders, pointing to a steeply pitched roof poking out of a dense thicket of oak trees. As the van advanced closer, the entire structure came into view across the windshield: a once-elegant Victorian mansion, church-like in appearance with arches, pointed windows and a long front porch populated with empty rocking chairs nodding in the breeze, as if they held ghosts.
Koska parked along the edge of a wild, sprawling garden. “Grab your weapons. We’re going to see some action. We don’t know how many … could be a few, could be a whole nest of ‘em.”
“We have a greeter!” hollered Garth, the youngest and most trigger-happy member of Koska’s unit. The spiky-haired blond hopped out of the van and dropped to one knee. He aimed his rifle at a slow-walking, whiskered man in a flannel shirt who staggered through the weeds. “Stop where you are and identify yourself!”
The whiskered man continued to approach the van with a vacant expression. Identifying zombies was no mystery – you just checked for the dead look in their eyes. This one stared right through them, indifferent to the gun pointed at his face.
Garth fired.
His target promptly crumpled to the grass as if someone had flipped an “off” switch in his back.
“Here comes Grandpa Zombie,” announced Tara, and sure enough, a lumpy old man in a sleeveless t-shirt and vintage straw hat shuffled out of the house, arms extended, groping at nothing, sleepy-faced. “This one’s mine.”
She delivered a clean shot to the center of Grandpa Zombie’s forehead and he tumbled down the porch steps to the red brick walkway.
“Let’s go ‘round back and check the exterior before we go in,” said Koska.
“I get dibs on the next one,” declared Anders.
They circled the mansion and discovered two zombie children in the backyard, mouths wet with blood from a recent feeding. Anders blasted them without remorse. The children’s meal, a plump older woman with her innards exposed, sat propped on a bench in a broken down gazebo, staring at the SWAT agents with little interest. A bullet fired from Tara’s rifle struck the woman between the eyes, a sudden red hole, and her body slumped sideways and eyelids drooped shut.
Finding no other zombies, Koska and his unit returned to the front of the mansion. Koska studied the grand, double-door entrance and sighed. “Let’s do it.”
The officers slammed open the doors and proceeded inside with caution, guns drawn. The floorboards creaked under the weight of their weapons and gear. Koska called out for survivors and no one shouted back. Instead, more zombies wandered into view, sporting blood-encrusted bite marks and colorless skin.
“Goodnight, dopey,” said Garth, just prior to plugging a buck-toothed, middle-aged zombie in his balding head.
When a woman in a blood-stained apron staggered out of the kitchen, Hank called out, “I got it,” and sent her right back in, blowing her brains across the front of the refrigerator.
“This is creepy,” said Hank, staring down at the woman’s body, dressed in a cheerful, flowery dress. “We just shot somebody’s mom. Heck, this could’ve been one of our moms.”
“Don’t think about it,” said Tara. “She was already dead. Her soul was gone, this is just the shell. We did her a favor.”
“Can the chatter,” said Koska. “Let’s split up so we can get the hell out of here. Jake, Anders and Garth, take the upstairs. Tara and Hank, you come with me. We’ll finish searching the ground floor.”
Koska’s trio moved across the first floor, kicking open doors with weapons in the ready position. In the library, they discovered a long-haired male with a shaggy bear
d and red teeth, sitting on an antique loveseat and chewing a severed arm pulled from a female torso that writhed limbless on the floor.
Koska shot them both.
“Holy shit, check this out!” exclaimed Hank, several steps down the corridor, standing in the doorway to the next room. Koska and Tara hurried to his side and looked into a large, pink-walled parlor.
“This must be where it all started,” said Koska, taking in the scene.
The room held an elaborate voodoo temple with an altar populated with candle stubs, bottles of murky liquid, and collections of colored beads. Patterns of cornmeal dusted the wood floor. A narrow table in the center of the room held a collection of bells, rattles and small drums.
Rotted animal carcasses rested in heaps in front of the altar. Koska gagged. The sight for the eyes was bad enough, but the stink to the nostrils was overwhelming. The room’s windows had been boarded up to keep out the daylight and any voyeurs.
“So this is it,” said Tara.”Voodoo Central.”
“Let’s burn this shit down,” said Hank.
“No. We need to leave it,” responded Koska. “It needs to be analyzed. That’s not our job. We’re here to wipe out the zombies and stop the infections. Let’s keep moving.”
A shot rang out in one of the rooms above them, followed by muffled shouts and a door slam.