by Joshua Guess
And man, it was the fucking worst.
The ramp was long and not all that steep since the land on that side of the fort was much higher. The zombies were easy to see as they worked their way up it, and many of them moved faster than they should have. It took until they were closer to see why; these were fresh. Brand new, in fact. They still looked mostly alive and their speed only reinforced the illusion.
That quarter mile of slope was fairly quick work for them. In the time it took the swarm to come up, another twenty people joined the ranks. These two squads wore armor and carried riot shields, forming up like a Spartan phalanx across the opening in the wall two rows deep. Others began to arrive carrying bundles of heavy lengths of wood resembling skinny clubs. They were clearly meant to reach over the men and women bearing shields and smash in the skulls of the dead. These people knew their business.
“What are you doing here?” a voice asked from behind me. “And where did you get that weapon?”
I turned to see an older man who looked carved from wood standing with a one of the long clubs in his hands. He was probably sixty and looked like the uniform he wore was a part of who he was. It just looked absolutely correct on him. Unlike the others, he had name tape on his breast: Phillips. He also wore rank. Colonel Phillips. The man himself.
“Stole it,” I said. “Bitch me out later, yeah? Kinda got some business to deal with here.”
His weathered face showed nothing, but his eyes did dance over to the baton for a moment. “Fine. But you stay back here and help pick off any strays that get through. That’ll happen once we start putting the truck in place, no way around it. If you attempt to harm any of my people, I will shoot you in the spine and let the dead ones eat you. Are we clear?”
I didn’t doubt his sincerity in the least. He might have been telling me he’d go out grocery shopping or that his day at work was just another punch of the clock. The words were utterly without emphasis or even anger. The worst and most believable threats are the ones presented with the kind of factual blandness Phillips had used to deliver his.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Don’t call me sir,” he replied instantly. “You’re a civilian.”
I nodded and gripped the baton a little harder, watching the zombies crest the hill and reach the soldiers braced behind their shields to receive them. I bit my tongue to suppress the incipient attack of Shivers. I had no urge to endure that again any time soon if it could be avoided.
A wave of flesh crashed against them and I knew something was very wrong. The zombies were uniformly nude from the waist up, each with a line of mangled skin across their necks as if they’d been restrained by them. Which they must have been, because each body had something carved into its torso in jagged letters so large they could be read even from fifteen feet away.
Release the prisoners.
12
I didn’t have a lot of time to think about the message other than deciding it was the worst telegram ever. There was too much happening.
Soldiers beat back the first wave—literally—but while the fallen bodies tripped up some of those who followed, they also provided a handy step up for others. A few toppled over shields, movements too unpredictable to make a precise strike to the head possible. And people being people first and foremost, hundreds of pounds of dead, hungry cannibal has a way of parting a crowd. The holes in the defense were small and quickly corrected, but while they existed everyone nearby was vulnerable.
I launched forward and struck hard at one such zombie before he had a chance to get to his knees. The soldiers on either side recovered fast, but the length of their weapons and the close quarters made swift attacks impossible for them.
So I played whack-a-mole with zombie skulls. Fun times.
The melee normalized—as much as it could—when the front row of shield-bearers reacted to a shouted order and pushed back as one against the tide of bodies. The zombies, without the same kind of group coordination, were shoved into each other and fell into brief but serious chaos and confusion.
While they did, the bodies littering the ground were shoved and kicked forward. Not a lot. Just enough to create a little room and trip up those who hadn’t yet fallen.
The coordination and control was impressive. That might be too weak a word. It was superb. These people had clearly spent a lot of time working together, thinking through the many problems they’d face, and practicing to ensure those problems never became fatal.
“Coming through!” shouted a loud female voice from somewhere behind me. I didn’t look back; I knew it was Garcia. The chugging whine of the truck’s engine following the words told me everything I needed to know.
She’d picked the truck I took the baton from and was easing along the inner edge of the wall toward the gate. The problem was obvious; covering the space where the door should have been would require the people holding the line to move. I expected it to be something like sticking your finger over the end of a hose. A burst of uncontrollable mess followed by the cleanup before finally arriving back at calm.
Instead I watched the truck inch forward, its bed taken up by a collection of the modular cells used to house captured Reavers. As it moved across the gate with glacial slowness, the shield wall moved with it. They kept themselves together with incredible precision, tiny steps keeping any more zombies from getting through.
When it came to the last few feet, however, the zombies began attacking the small gap in a clump. Rather than face certain, pointless death, the soldiers retreated with another shouted order and ran backward to create a gap.
Five zombies got through, a sixth pinned between the edge of the gap and the truck. Garcia goosed the engine a bit and I had to glance away. I saw the beginning of it but still heard the rest as the zombie was sheared in half at the waist.
When I looked back, there was no more need for me to fight. The handful of dead people who had run the gap were already being handled by the soldiers. There was no way for them to get in under the truck, what with it having steel guards on the gaps between wheels. The cages on the bed were an excellent barrier up top.
It was a brilliantly efficient system they had obviously had to use before. Not surprising given the sorry state of the gate mechanism.
Colonel Phillips walked over to me, hand extended. My first instinct was to either slap him some skin or shake the hand—because I’m apparently suicidally dedicated to comedy—but instead I handed over the baton and put my wrists out as if waiting for cuffs. He looked at them as if seriously considering it.
“Next time just ask for a weapon,” he said. “In an emergency, every hand is needed.”
Garcia was stomping over to me, clearly not her happiest self. “I told you to get inside, Ran. What the shit?”
“You did, and I ignored you,” I replied, raising my wrists again, this time toward her. “You’re gonna have to lock me up again to keep me from doing my part.”
“Such a fucking drama queen,” Garcia muttered, rolling her eyes. “Sir, I take responsibility for this.”
“The hell you do,” I said. “You were doing your job. I—”
“Quiet,” Phillips said, the word perfectly calm but drenched with the sort of real authority I could never manage. “The sergeant isn’t at fault here, and I wouldn’t hold it against anyone to want to stay and fight, but you two arguing which of you is to blame is ego and nothing else, and I can’t stand that shit. Garcia, take her to my office. Both of you wait there for me. I’ll be along shortly.”
The other woman saluted, something she looked a bit out of practice doing, and put a hand on my shoulder. “This way.”
We went through a door with a keypad she had to open, presumably the main building where most of the soldiers lived. Most of the rooms we passed were packed with bunk beds, and every single space not needed for travel was stacked with supplies. Mostly MREs, but literally tons of canned food and other non-perishables.
We worked our way through the narrow stacks a
nd came to a door standing open just a crack.
“Here we are,” Garcia said. Somehow those three words sounded like a dirge.
It was twenty minutes before the colonel joined us. When he did, he was carrying a dead body.
“You didn’t have to bring me a present,” I joked. “Why, I don’t even know your first name. Unless your parents had amazing foresight and it’s actually Colonel.”
Garcia put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a hard, warning squeeze. I shrugged it away.
“Thank you, sergeant,” Phillips said. “That’ll be all. Shut the door on your way out.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, then vanished with a last glance at me.
Phillips lowered the body to the floor. It was the first zombie I’d killed with the baton. Phillips rolled the thing over onto its back and crouched next to it, studying the words carved into the chest and stomach. “Do you know anything about this?”
I stared at him uncomprehending for several seconds. “Me? How would I? I’ve been here for weeks. I don’t even know what state we’re in. Also I don’t generally condone cutting messages into people, even dead ones.”
Phillips rose to his feet, perhaps a little more stiffly than a man half his age, but spry all the same. He sat behind the desk, which was clean but for a small pile of legal pads and a few pens. “I believe you, for what it’s worth. But this presents an enormous problem.”
“And you’re sharing it with me because I have a trustworthy face,” I mused.
The tiniest hint of a smile cracked the corner of his mouth. “No, I’m telling you because you’re smart, apparently have an encyclopedic knowledge of weirdly useful shit, and aren’t afraid of…well, anything. And because those things make you an enormous problem.”
A wave of cold swept through my body. “Is that so? More dangerous that some enemy knowing your location? Our location? Because I’m not a fan of that, either.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “I couldn’t give less of a shit if someone knows we’re here, so long as that’s all they know. We have more than just rifles for defense. Anything short of a full military assault can kiss my ass. I’m worried because this message implies they know what’s going on here, and that means we’re compromised. My inclination in that scenario is to pull up stakes and relocate.”
While I’m admittedly not an expert at war, my first thought was that his thinking was very much a soldier’s thinking. That is, a modern soldier. Phillips had probably considered everything from frontal assault with heavy weapons to chemical attacks. Yet I’d spent the last few weeks thinking through every creative solution to this place I could imagine. It was impossible to plan for more than a few handfuls of possibilities, and I came up with some ways of taking the fort that no amount of preparation or force could overcome.
The only problem being that I was in here rather than out there. It was also possible my theories were just wishful thinking.
“Why am I such a problem, then?”
Phillips raised his eyebrows. “You do whatever you want, including but not limited to trying to kill the head researcher.”
“Eh, that’s fair,” I said. “That dick had it coming.”
“Oh? Other than your circumstances, why do you say that?”
I scoffed at him. “Glazing over a big one there, aren’t you? Fine; even ignoring being forced to come here, the guy either doesn’t know what he’s doing or nothing he’s doing is working. He’s escalating his research to the point of torture. The only reason the others haven’t come to you first is a lack of proof.”
Though all of this was still relatively new to me, I felt pretty damn good saying it out loud. There’s always a hesitation to say something you know someone else might not like or believe, and the longer you hold it in, the more you want to say it and the harder it gets to say. It’s a vicious cycle represented in books and movies by what looks like lethally stupid inability to communicate by otherwise intelligent characters.
“Yes,” Phillips said. “I’ve suspected that for a while now. I almost wish you’d managed to kill him. Then I could have picked up the pieces and done something more useful than running this show just to protect a few scientists and doctors.”
I felt my face heat up as anger flared to life in me. “Then why the hell don’t you just drop him off the cliff and leave? Or just leave him here? You’re letting him basically torture people, keep them prisoner, and for what?”
Phillips leaned on the desk, fingers laced together. “For my soldiers, Miss Lawson. Let me ask you: that community you founded, Bastion, is it? Did you start out planning to do so, or did it just happen? Did you know what you were going to do from the start, or learn what worked along the way?”
I thought about an answer, but he only gave me a few seconds before steamrolling any reply I might have come up with.
“Because thirty years in the military never prepared me for this,” he said, dark eyes drilling into me. “Those first few days, we lost hundreds of men and women. Killed and ripped apart by our own dead. The first few weeks, thousands on bases around the country ran home to their families. Some went crazy. The soldier in me wants to hold it against them, to blame them for that. But how the fuck could I? I’ve consoled men and women with PTSD countless times, told them it wasn’t a weakness and if it was, not one they should ever feel shamed for. We know better than anyone what looking into hell can do to you. And we all saw the world end right in front of us.”
I got it, then. “This is what keeps them together. The ones you have left. Even you. This mission is everything to them.”
Phillips nodded. “Honestly? I’m in touch with two other research bases who are way ahead of Captain Pickles. Luckily he has no way to contact them directly. Everything goes through me. I haven’t told him because I’m worried he’ll finally go over the edge. He’s not a well man, Miss Lawson. He hides it, but he’s near the breaking point. And if that happens, if my soldiers lose their mission, I don’t know that I can keep them together long enough to get a new one in front of them. They’re only human. Much as I might want this to be over, it keeps my people going.”
I’ve always been good at reading subtext, and obviously that combined with my interesting childhood led to a lot of research into human psychology. Study can take you a long way, but I’ve always been a believer in the idea that simple observation and logic will give you more insight than a book ever could.
Fact: most people, no matter their training or experience, function according to the same basic principles. Look at any history book and you’ll see great conquerors and brilliant philosophers all sharing the same traits and flaws.
So while it seemed odd at first to be granted such honesty and frankness, as soon as my habit of seeing everyone as a person kicked in, I looked past the uniform and the tightly controlled manner to consider the man beneath.
Phillips was at the top. He had no one to vent to, no one to talk to. His worries were for him alone, a weight he could not put down or even share upon the shoulders of another.
He just needed to talk. He also needed a solution.
And for once, I had nothing to offer.
13
The others in the group had varying opinions about my meeting with the colonel. Samantha stridently believed Phillips was hinting that I should go ahead and kill the doctor. Julia, who was older and wiser—not that the two necessarily correlated—sided with me. She understood the pressure of responsibility the man must haul around at all times.
I talked about it with the other prisoners, but never with the soldiers. On a basic level this was a matter of practicality. Introducing doubt that way would erode their spirit and, if word spread, could cause the command structure and shared determination to fracture. Since they were keeping us safe from outside forces, that was less than ideal.
But beyond that, I wouldn’t do it because the thought of dropping a despair bomb on so many people all at once depressed me beyond imagination. It would have been easier to see
them as an easily-caricatured enemy, but that was self-delusion and I try not to engage in it.
Two days after the assault, several announcements were made over a public address system I didn’t even know we had.
“The gate has been fixed,” said the first. The colonel left out the part where I spent six grueling hours inside the wall with Jones as we beat the damn thing back into shape.
“We have located the camp used by the people who sent the attack our way, and we will be mobilizing our counterattack tomorrow morning,” said the second. No surprise there. I got the sense that Phillips would do everything in his power to maintain the status quo, so hitting back as hard as possible was logical. Destroy the threat and nothing needed to change.
“We’ll be leaving a skeleton crew behind,” said the third. “For the safety of our guests and those staying here, all tests and procedures will be suspended and all guests confined to the dorms until we return.”
I was sitting in the common room with Julia and Anthony when that news came down. We all looked at each other in alarm.
“What happens if they don’t come back?” Anthony asked. “You think the doctor will let us go?”
Julia, usually the very soul of compassion and kindness, laughed bitterly. “You know he won’t kiddo. He’d run us to death. Literally. That’s if he doesn’t decide to dissect us alive or something first.”
Anthony twitched. Julia, whose status as an active carrier meant she could vector different strains of Nero without catching them, wore a bandage covering all of her forearm. Doctor John was wise enough to lay off the Triggers for a while, what with one of them trying to tear his head off, so he’d removed an enormous flap of skin from Julia’s arm with the stated intent of seeing whether it would reanimate on its own.