by James Cook
“Come on you pieces of shit,” he said, smiling and clacking his sticks together. “It’s showtime!” The horde obeyed, and I was swept along with them.
Dusk wasn't far off, which meant whatever was going down was happening soon.
*****
Like the grand marshal of the world's worst parade, Gideon marched in front. Less than a mile from the gates, he felt the glorious rush of victory, premature but within his reach.
Steel City was an honest name. The place was built on a trucking depot of some kind, the sort of place lost in a sea of steel shipping containers of every color and shape. Someone had the brilliant idea to build a wall with them, a huge triple-layered circle wide enough to house hundreds.
Casing the place was easy. He just hid in a distant tree on a tall hill and sighted down the scope of his rifle. The front gate was huge and thick, perhaps too much for his stolen arsenal to handle. The possibility would have bothered him but for the smaller, thinner door cut into the heavier gate. He had watched the larger gate close but the smaller one stay open to accommodate foot traffic. Merchants and traders called on the place right up until dark, when the gates were all shut and sealed.
But even closed, that thin, man-sized gate would pose no problem for his rocket.
Once through the main gate, breaching the inner gate behind it would be easy. The bailey between the outer and inner walls was meant to be a killing floor, but the second gate wasn’t meant to stop swarms. During his first observation, the inner gate hadn't been closed at all. A fast enough assault with the element of surprise might net him a straight walk in, his thousand hungry soldiers at his back.
As he approached the town with his horde, the darkening sky was overcast, blocking even the feeble light of the moon. There were only two lookouts, both perched atop the stacked container walls, lazing in lawn chairs. Gideon saw their outlines against the dark gray nighttime clouds as he approached ahead of the swarm. In his dark coat and clothes, ragged hair down around his face, he was all but invisible.
Two hundred yards. One fifty, then a hundred. The lounging guards didn't so much as stir.
Gideon slowed from a sprint to a jog, coming within fifty yards. With a practiced motion, he pulled the rifle around on its strap. Without thought, without hesitance, and utterly without remorse, he raised the weapon and sighted through its scope.
One shot, center mass, then a pivot to the second for a repeat performance. Two cracks rang out into the night, the sharp slap of sound waves beckoning to the swarm behind. Gideon adjusted his sights, checked the targets again, and chuckled wetly. The angle was better than he thought; neither lookout had moved an inch. Now he had to move quickly; if more guards came, he’d have to stop and shoot them too. The monster inside him purred at the thought, which made him smile.
If it liked that little show, it was going to love what came next.
*****
A thousand bodies followed Gideon as he moved toward the target, but I was closest. Constant practice had brought me to a marionette level of control, jerky but mostly functional. It took everything I had and I felt the waves of mental exhaustion building up behind the stone wall of my will, but I was committed.
I was starting to feel alive again. By that I mean the normal sensations of having a body of my own were returning, not just the sensory data. I didn't feel like a helpless passenger any more. My body was beginning to respond on instinct. Little things, but as I stoked the fires of my emotions to maintain control, I felt that same harmony eating away at me. My body reacted to me, took in part of me, but I was experiencing the same. The hunger gnawed at my belly, not at all revolting. The primal urge to tear Gideon apart made my fingers twitch, and bound together with my own desire, it was a force nearly too powerful to control.
Almost.
While it was difficult, the sense of joining with my body was also empowering. Movement came more naturally, I felt stronger, and I was even gaining on Gideon as he slowed down from a full run to a full stop. I stalked closer as I watched him fire his rifle. My enhanced hearing picked up the dark laughter following the kills.
Well … what I thought were kills, anyway.
The noxious scent of burned cordite should have been followed with the rich tang of fresh blood. I couldn't see the victims, but Gideon's reaction could only mean the guards above were dead.
Yet as I approached, I smelled nothing.
The monster ahead of me looked through his sights once more, unaware that the monster behind him moved faster than his brethren. I was fifty feet away, then thirty, then fifteen. Nearly close enough to leap on him, were I capable of it. Close enough to catch every vagrant smell polluting the air around his body. The stink of his unwashed flesh mixed with old death and the rot inside him, probably from the drugs.
Then he moved, hopping to his feet and darting forward another fifty or sixty feet. This time he stopped but stayed standing, reached behind his back, and shouldered the rocket launcher. The sense of glee from my body mirrored itself in my brain as I drew closer.
I would get him this time, no question.
Logic stepped in and turned the knob on my self-preservation instinct up to eleven. A brief struggle for control followed, my weary brain wrestling with my own desires and those of my walking corpse. If we kept moving forward, we would likely catch on fire from the belching gas and flames soon to bathe the area behind Gideon.
In my panicked haste, I defaulted to logic, screaming inside my own head about the danger. My body couldn't have given less of a shit about that. It wanted what I wanted, and didn't understand my frantic sense of alarm.
So I yanked the valve off my fear and blasted the emotion out as loudly as I could, raw and unfiltered. That, combined with the simple direction to go left, now, was just enough to make it happen. As Gideon settled the weapon in place and aimed, I swerved a few feet to one side and stopped. The rest of the swarm would be on us soon, chewing up the yards even now.
Fire, dammit. Before they get here. You're mine, motherfucker.
TWENTY-ONE
Darkness had fallen over Steel City.
For several hours the night before, Hicks and Holland had maintained surveillance. When it became clear the Ragman wasn’t going anywhere, Ethan called them back to town. A few hours’ sleep and a quick meal later, they left again, worried the Ragman might have moved on.
He didn’t.
He lay right where they last saw him, sound asleep.
Around noon, Hicks called in that the Ragman was awake and headed toward Steel City, but had left the horde behind. A couple of hours later, he was less than half a mile away studying the town from a hilltop. Davis and the guards carried on business as usual until they finally got word that the Ragman was going back to retrieve the horde. That was when they put the governor’s plan into motion.
All visitors were turned away with a warning that a horde was inbound. Those with too heavy a load to flee were permitted inside, but kept under watch. The guards closed the main gate, then had a small team of forklift operators move the secondary gate out of the way and replace it with two well-loaded shipping containers. A few more containers were positioned outside the main gate to seal the trap once the horde was in, but the operators didn’t have night vision equipment, so Ethan called Hicks back to coordinate with them. After that, it was a waiting game.
Where the guards normally patrolled on the main gate, Davis had put two mannequins dressed to look like his guards in lawn chairs. It wasn’t the best strategy to fool the Ragman—the ruse wouldn’t have worked for a second during the day—but under cover of darkness, the madman might not notice the difference. If he did, Ethan was the insurance policy.
For long hours, he sat still in his sniper hide on the outer gate, hidden behind a battlement. Through his night vision scope—dropped off via helicopter thanks to Colonel Lanning—Ethan watched the forest at the edge of the concrete lot. Just after midnight, he spotted movement.
Waving, staggering forms
flowed through the forest like a flood in slow motion. At their head, just as he’d hoped, was the man he was looking for.
The Ragman.
In his crosshairs.
“All stations, Echo Lead. I have visual on the Ragman. Repeat, visual on the Ragman. All stations stand by.”
Which is to say, nobody fucking move. In fits and starts, the scrawny, wasted figure approached the main gate while stopping frequently to let the horde catch up before setting off again. Ethan began to hear a few faint, distant moans as the ghouls drew closer. Behind the murderer, he saw a tall, gaunt-looking ghoul in shredded clothes drawing ahead of the horde. It lurched along far faster than the average walker, and seemed to move with greater purpose. Through the scope, he saw its unblinking eyes locked on the back of the Ragman, hands extended, fingers curled into claws. That’s weird.
Finally, the Ragman sprinted ahead, faster this time, and stopped to unsling a canister from his back. LAW. Just like I thought. Ethan watched him fumble with it in the dark for just a moment, and then raise it to his shoulder. There had been a time when he’d thought the designers of such weapons to be geniuses for making them so easy to use, but now he was realizing that rockets didn’t care who they killed. And when they fell into the wrong hands, they were the stuff of nightmares.
He ducked deeper behind cover and keyed his radio. “Brace for impact!”
First came the crack, high and piercing, almost like a firecracker but infinitely louder. Less than a second later came a terrific BOOM, deep and powerful. The shock of it traveled through nearly eighty yards of steel and thumped upward into Ethan’s stomach, rendering him breathless and causing a hollow pounding in his chest.
Fuck me.
He sucked in a deep, painful breath and leveled his scope again. The Ragman had already run through the gate, his gaunt face shining with glee, smiling through broken teeth. The horde swarmed in behind him, filling up the narrow hole where the secondary gate used to be and cutting off his escape. He sprinted a few feet further, no doubt nearly blind in the darkness, and stopped short just before hitting the inner wall. His face transitioned from unbridled joy, to confusion, and finally, to panic. Behind him, one of the ghouls—the same tall, fast one from before—was nearly on top of him.
Ethan grinned. Gotcha motherfucker.
“All stations, Echo Lead. Ragman is in the cage. Repeat, Ragman is in the cage. Perimeter team, hold position and stand by. I want to trap as many of these ghouls as we can. Acknowledge.”
Hicks’ voice spoke in his ear. “Copy, Echo Lead. Perimeter team standing by.”
Ethan sat up, positioned his rifle comfortably on the battlement, and settled in to watch the show.
*****
Gideon stared at the place where the flimsy inner gate should have been.
Not only flimsy, but open. Instead of an easy entry with an army of the dead at his back, before him lay a wall of unforgiving steel. The dust and flickering embers around him from the rocket's explosion were details so minor they were non-events. The gate was gone. That was the only fact that mattered.
Time slowed to a crawl. He tried to wrap his addled brain around the reality before him. He'd seen it, sure enough. Watched men and women move through it. There was no question the gate had existed, but now?
Nothing.
The dim, suppressed part of his brain responsible for rational behavior clamored for his attention, but Gideon paid it no mind. The shock of finding his easy path into Steel City not blocked but gone, vanished as if it had never been, was just too much.
His slack-jawed stare couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but they felt like an eternity. Cold realization hit his veins in a wave of ice water. Things weren't going his way. This was bad. Really bad. Gideon looked around for someone to blame, head swiveling on rusty hinges, but of course, there was only him.
Then something grabbed his back, and Gideon screamed.
Fear invaded him for the first time in ages as the strap across his chest pulled tight and he leapt forward. The gun. His attacker had the rifle. He writhed as he moved away, twisting his torso down to slither out of the rifle's strap. His hand darted to his belt, flashing silver on the return trip, and in less than three seconds, Gideon was free of his attacker, armed with a blade, and facing the enemy.
It was one of his ghouls. The thing stood there staring at him, which by itself was unnerving as hell. It held the rifle in one wasted hand, fingers gnarled tight around the barrel just above the forestock. Behind the ghoul, the rest of the dead moved on ungainly legs toward them. The sight of his own army in front of him rather than at his back sent Gideon into a rage. The blame fell on this fucking thing in front of him, the idiotic corpse holding his gun. Just a lucky snatch at an easy meal by one dead man out of a thousand.
Whatever bonds held the monster in check fell away. Gideon felt the last strained threads of his sanity fray and break.
He stabbed at the dead man. The first thrust caught the rifle, almost as if the dead man moved to intercept. The gun clattered to the pavement as he jammed the knife forward again, a scream of rage spraying flecks of spittle across the dead man's face.
The second time was the charm. Gideon felt the knife slide home, point gouging through flesh and bone, the grind of steel muffled and wet.
In his excitement, he'd forgotten the most important rule—maybe the only important rule—in dealing with the infected.
Always go for the head.
The ghoul's eyes locked on his as the thing wrenched its hand away. Gideon lost his grip on the weapon, which pierced the dead man's hand all the way to the hilt.
He was running before the creature could grab at him again.
*****
Gideon ran from me, but rather than the frustration of losing him again, I felt the thrill of the hunt. He'd stopped as soon as he stepped through the smoldering remains of the front gate as if dumbfounded by what he saw.
Our little tussle had left him weaponless, as far as I knew, and terrified. Grabbing for the rifle gave me a sense of victory that came with a full-body high, but smelling the trail of fear-soaked sweat he left behind topped it.
I wanted to be disturbed by that. Really.
Knife jutting through my hand, I summoned my rage and pushed as hard as I could to follow. The narrow lane between stacks of containers was devoid of people. I heard and smelled the cluster of dead men and women working their way through the shattered gate behind me. There wouldn't be much time; they'd catch Gideon's scent easily.
My body moved in a rolling, awkward run. It wouldn't win any gold medals, but for outpacing the rest of the shambling corpses behind me, it worked. The dank odor of the man grew stronger as I worked my way around the broad curves of the killing floor. The wide circle defined by the path in front of me suddenly stopped. Another shipping container sat astride the way forward, creating a dead end. Gideon had his back to the wrinkled steel wall of the thing, hands spread wide and breathing hard. It wasn't the first good look I'd had at the man, but it was certainly my last. Whatever else happened, the dead moving behind me were a sure bet he wouldn't walk out of here alive.
He turned to face me, whites showing all around his wide pupils, filthy hair plastered to a forehead streaked with clean places in the grime where sweat poured down. I savored the moment. Every strained line of his face was a moment of joy. The crazed tension in his body a spring waiting for the catch to be released.
This was a man who knew he was going to die, and that his dying would be hard.
I approached him at a walk, tasting every fresh breath of terror wafting between us. Away from the majority of the swarm, Gideon's panicked breathing was all I could hear until I got a little closer. My body's attuned senses picked up a sound so low a normal human wouldn't have heard it. Nothing major, just a thin scrape of fabric against metal, weirdly amplified by the steel walls around me.
I knew the direction, of course. I looked toward the man watching us from above and saw him peerin
g at me through the scope of a rifle. Throwing caution to the wind and hoping like hell he wouldn’t pull the trigger, I raised a hand to him in a short wave. The hand in question had six inches of steel jammed through it, but it was the best I could do. Gideon's head jerked to the side, looking for whatever I'd seen, desperate hope written on his face.
Seizing the opportunity, I lunged forward.
His throat parted like a rare steak, salty blood coursing down my face. The ragged beard ripped away as I gnashed again and again, and when the burbling scream rose from his chest, the wind of it blew from a gaping hole in his neck and into my mouth.
All control vanished. I didn't need it anymore, didn't want it. I'd wandered aimlessly for days—weeks—with no hope of ever being more than I was, just a man trapped in a body.
Now, a murderer was dying between my teeth, and I felt a dark satisfaction. I couldn't remember my own name, nor that of my child. My wife was a treasure that kept me going, but as I surrendered to the urges pouring in from my body, I knew it was not enough. Old memories aren't what keeps us going even in the best of times. It's making new ones, truly living, that pushes us forward. I was beyond that. The admission came hard, even if only to myself.
So I gave in. I let go. My mind relaxed like a clenched fist slowly expanding. I felt my body begin to invade, tearing away at the edges of every emotion, and thought, and memory that had made me who I was. The man I had once been. I let it all burn, consumed by the festering infection that had taken my life away. Better oblivion than this constant fight.