Jim leant against the window; the cool night air leaked around the broken frame and cooled his reddened, drunken face as he sipped at the whiskey trying to garner some resolve.  His eyes refocused on his own reflection, as grey, wan, and lined as the skin of any Zombie. He thought about the last sixteen years running from the knowledge he had lost everything in The Fall, the same as everyone else. He had a memory of that black time, of biting teeth and running in the dark from the moans. Times of black grief and reckless mourning that weren’t to be talked about.

The weight of the experience formed a cross too heavy to bear. Everyone in Greater London yearned to share the stories of that time and gain some solace, yet few could, because the cross was carried by everyone. The memory of the Zombie apocalypse was too dark and personal to be borne by others.  Jim wondered if he was the only one with that recognition. Then, as he poured himself another glass of rough whiskey, he thought about Shayna and the kids, three little gems of life, and although he had a picture on his desk he realised he hadn’t thought about them in a long time. He had hidden from the pain using responsibility. He realised, that after sixteen years of fighting the enemy and building this city, he hadn’t grieved for them. He knew that was probably the longest time for anyone in the city, but it was too late now to grieve, no tears came, and he wasn’t even sure any more of the name of the youngest one.

He tried to gain the will to face his men and tell them it would be OK, that it wouldn’t be like The Fall. He knew this to be a lie. It would be worse than The Fall, and they would all die, no one would escape that hadn’t left the city already.  He knew this because The Minister had phoned him and told him so.

Eight days ago it had started as a curiosity, a lone Zombie shambling slowly down Knightsbridge, wearing a smart suit and carrying a sign, the last protester at an Undead rally. It was picked up on CCTV and tracked by a tired, laconic, operator who reported it to the Gate Patrol. They acknowledged with a casual grunt and watched it move onwards in its own quietly determined way past the husks of cars and overgrown verges piled with detritus. It was an ‘Ancient’ with sunken eyes and wiry limbs.

Eventually one of the guards folded his poker hand, shrugged at his friends around him, took his winnings and climbed the ladder up the wall of broken concrete and cars. As he struggled upwards he passed the hanging drapes that warned those who left that they would receive no more safety once through the steel and aluminium gate.

The wall stretched along Piccadilly in one direction and along Grosvenor Place in the other, encompassing Buckingham Palace and the gardens within the walls of ‘Greater London’. He climbed the forty feet to the top of the gate, constructed at the end of Constitution Hill, sat on the little chair in the rain rusted corrugated structure, took the binoculars from the hook, and looked out towards the lone figure ahead in the cracked and dusty streets. Once he had a bead, he focussed in. It didn’t look too fresh, but strangely the suit did. It shambled past the remains of shopping carts pushed to the side, and over shrubs that grew from the rain filled drains. The sign, clutched in its white knuckles, wobbled about as the grey Zombie lurched inexorably left to right like a metronome. It read;

The End is Nigh.

The guard finished his tea. Rifled in his bags for some bullets, found some and with them a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and carefully loaded the rifle. Looking up, the Zombie was a little closer, so he finished the cigarette and waited. Finally the guard raised the rifle, cocked it, settled it into his shoulder, and shot the Zombie through the head. It flopped dustily to the floor. The guard leant the rifle against the chair, rested his head in his hands and sighed.

An hour later to the second, Control rang through. Two more had been spotted coming down Knightsbridge, both carrying signs. He told the operator in the Department of Control about the sign the first one was carrying, and she asked him to tell her what was on the signs these two were waving.

The end is nigh

The Minister is coming!

Ten hours later, the guard was flanked by snipers, dressed in black fatigues and dark polarised glasses, their protection from the morning glare. They settled on the walls like Gothic crows, kneeling, crouching and lying with eyes pressed up to the sights. The minigun stations were manned, as were the flamethrower apertures at ground level. Behind him troops ran, frantically ferrying ammo from supply vans to the individual guns. He could hear orders being barked, men and women sweating as they threw case after case of ammo into position. An alarm sounded. Everyone fell silent and over public address system, an announcement was made.

“Here they come. Wait until the order to fire.” The tinny, disembodied voice said.

They number of Zombies had doubled every hour until this wave held over a thousand.  The signs they carried repeating the same mantra.

The end is nigh

The Minister is coming!

Prepare yourself

For confession

In one week

He will come

As soon as the mobs of Zombies were in range, and the order was given, the miniguns fired up to speed with a spinning whine. There were four of them around the gate and as one they roared in defiance at the mob. The bullets ripped through the flesh of the Dead, into those behind. Those who were not shot in the head rose to fight again. The guns trained in on them and cut them down with efficiency. A few minutes later, it was over and the guns spun down. The acrid smell of hot metal pierced the senses of the soldiers around. They relaxed, flexed wrists, cricked necks, smoked, and waited

For an hour more ammo was ferried to the gunning posts, and Engineers tended the hot old guns with cooling oils and pastes in readiness for the doubling of the Zombies again. Jim had wondered at that time how many Zombies The Minister controlled, or could control, maybe it was about a thousand, as many as had been sent in the last wave. If that was the case, of course The Minister would be better using subterfuge, so why announce his arrival? Jim realised this was the psychological component. The attack had been broadcast all over the city on the BBC. Everyone knew the Minster was coming, everyone knew that something was about to happen.

After an hour the next wave never came, nor an hour after that, and there was nothing for a few days. Even the reconnaissance missions reported very few or no Zombies around. It was as quiet as ever in the City of the Dead.

Jim remembered sitting in his office three days ago. It was late afternoon and he was reading a very dry report about estimated repair times for the wind farm system when his phone rang.  He flicked the receiver up to his ear and held it there with his chin.

“Bramer.” He said curtly. There was a shuffle and a click on the end of the line. Jim was just about to repeat his name.

“Ahh Jim. I kent I would just leave ya a wee message.”

Jim’s legs went weak. He recognised the voice from the MP3 he had played to Paul Jollie all those months ago. It was flat, hollow, threatening even in the quiet between words.

“Dunnae try talking to me, I’m just a recording…..I just wanted to let you know that its time for you to stop fightin’ and ready yersel. I’ll come and hear yer confession. I want you to kneel afore me and admit your sins. I say this, Jim, because when you see me for the first time, in three days time, i’ll walk straight intae yer city an’ you’ll weep an’ realise that there is nothing you can dae. Nothing you can dae to stop this happening.  Make yer peace with God, Jim, and I’ll gladly welcome you intae my arms. See you soon big man. See you soon”

Jim held the phone long after The Minister rang off.  He felt as vulnerable as the first time he had hidden unarmed from the Dead. The Minister had told him that he wasn’t safe. All the mechanisms and safeguards they had built against the Zombie horde meant nothing when there was a mind behind it.

The call was traced to a payphone on the Isle of Dogs. CCTV found the person who made the call and held the Dictaphone to the receiver. His name was Charlie Willoughby, and he had entered Greater London through the North gate claiming he had come to trade, in his Land Rover, from one of the isolated communities to the north.  He had been admitted after screening, then made the call after travelling right across the six miles of walled city. Charlie was easily picked up, and under robust interrogation had admitted that the Minister had taken a thousand Zombies through his community and taken his family hostage, Charlie begged them not to tell the Minister when he arrived for the sake of his family. They reminded him they were more than likely already dead. According the Charlie the Minister was alive and well and on his way. They locked Charlie up and waited.

Then, on the morning of the seventh day the city of London awoke, turned on their TV’s and saw. Pictures were beamed live from a helicopter as it flew down Knightsbridge and into a sea of the Dead. They stood in a line starting a quarter of a mile from the gate. In between the buildings, they filled the car parks, streets, the shopping precincts, and sports fields, in every open space for mile after mile. The helicopter flew over not an army of the Dead, but a Nation of the Dead. Millions of zombies had appeared over night at the Gates of London and now stood facing the city in silence, evenly spaced and unmoving, muting all sound with their collective mass.  The BBC reporter was trying frantically to describe the vastness of the scene whilst concealing the fear evident in his own voice.

At that moment Jim knew that the Minister was right, there was nothing they could do. They couldn’t evacuate the city, but they would try, and in the end the nation of the Dead would roll over the city like a tsunami. Jim reached for the whiskey bottle. The Dead stood there as the city fell into chaos. The army stood resolute. They had been trained well, but the population fled to the east of Greater London and into any ships, planes and even rafts that would carry them. Now, as Jim watched the last hopefuls file towards Westminster Bridge, a wave of tiredness fell over him. The empty whiskey bottle fell to the floor and spun.  Jim lurched over and kept his balance against the desk. He was more drunk than he realised. He reached over to grab the faded photo of his long dead family and knocked it over. He scrambled to pick it up and looked at the smiling faces within. He had been wrong, there were tears left to grieve.  He flopped into the leather backed chair and stared at the picture cradled in his hands weeping until the alcohol took hold and he passed out.

…..

Little Paul Jollie sat up in bed and screamed.

“Mummy! Mummy!” He started to cry and although he knew he was safe at home he could still feel them all around him.

“Mummy turn the light on. Pleeeaaase” He wailed.

The door flew open  and the light came on, not to show the crowded dining room of his dream, crammed with dead and rotting figures with little Paul cowering in the middle, but to his little bedroom. It was blue and had all his toys and little boxes and all his Bob the Builder posters just as they should be. His Mum ran in and swept him up. He sobbed, terrified into her shoulder.

“Oh my darling what’s wrong?” She soothed as she hugged him close. Between sobs Paul blurted out.

“It was the dream again Mummy. I…I was not walking. I was just standing this time. They were all around me all stinky and ill”

“Oh my baby. My Darling. It was just a bad dream.” She whispered. Paul began to calm down after a time and slowly she lowered him back into bed, with words of love and gentle kisses.

“Mummy.” Said Paul. “Leave the light on.”

“I will babe.” She tucked the duvet round his shoulders. It was cool and welcome.

“Do you want me to stay for a while?” She said.

Paul nodded. So she sat there and gently stroked his head.

Finally as he drifted off into the grey of sleep he could feel the weight of his Mum on the bed. He could hear her gentle breathing, the warm smell of her in her bed clothes, then, just as the grey of sleep drifted over his mind, just for a second, they were all around him again.

There in the grey, the space that existed between sleep and consciousness, surrounded by tiny eyes of darkness, a speck of light hid from the enormous black hole that spun silently before it.

…..

Jim woke with the early summer sun full in his face. It streamed through the window and made his face sweat precious water. He groaned and tried to get up, but his old stiffened neck complained loudly with a crack. He rubbed at the loosened flesh. The war of flesh was coming. The memory shocked Jim awake. He grabbed a half empty glass of water from his desk and drained it. He staggered to the toilet in the other room, drained himself, washed quickly, and just as he straightened his hair while returning to his office there was a knock at the door.

“Come” Shouted Jim.

The door opened and in stepped Miss Mitchell, who was a short woman, in her late forties and fiercely efficient. She has short black hair and a faded but smart twin set.

“Good morning Sir. I have Control on the line. They want to give you a sit rep but couldn’t get hold of you, probably because your phone is off the hook.” She strode over and replaced it, shaking her head slightly. It rang immediately. She picked up the receiver.

“Mr Bramer’s office?…..He’s here…Yes….No, I’ll have him call you in five minutes…….Have the Zombies moved?……In that case, Sir, I will have him call you in five minutes.” She said tersely and plonked the phone down with just enough force to indicate to the caller on the other line they had been hung up on.

Jim sat at his desk, and Miss Mitchell wrinkled her nose at him.

“By the smell of you you’ll need coffee and water. All non-military staff have left the building so there’s no breakfast but I’ll see what I can do about toast. That was General Jones.”

Without saying another word she strode out of the office.  Jim had employed her simply because to her the Zombies were another obstacle to be overcome, like not having milk in your tea. He put his head in his hands and pulled his hair back. He picked up the phone and dialled.

“Control. General Jones speaking.”

“Jonesy. It’s Jim. What’s the situation?” There were too few Generals to not be on first name terms.

“No different. They haven’t moved all night, but while you have been incommunicado we’ve pretty much got everything ready. I have a Division of troops at the gate, minigun and flamer crews ready. Everyone else is lined up on top of the wall or barricaded on the top of buildings along Birdcage Walk, the Mall and Buckingham Gate. We’ve also managed to get twenty choppers on the go, but no armour.” Tanks, like most military tech too big to be carried, hadn’t been used since The Fall.

“Any luck with the TIC Snipers?” The TIC snipers were Jim’s best hope. The Minister was the only one alive amongst the crowd, and with Thermal Imaging Cameras, a sniper would be able to pick out the heat signature and take him out. Needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe the task.

“None so far and the BBC helicopter we outfitted hasn’t seen anything either.” Said General Jones.

“Keep looking. Remember the TIC snipers can fire at will, but only at a signature. I don’t want that bastard walking up to the gate only to find they are out of ammo.”

“Righto. There are no reports of Z activity from the other gates too, so we’ve pulled a couple of Divisions over to the West Gate.”

“Good idea. Any luck with the heavy ordnance? “Jim said.

“None. All the tridents were made safe years ago, and we know from The Fall what nukes would do to the Undead, even if we had any.”

“Radioactive Undead? Not Good”

“No. All the bombs, tanks and heavy stuff were dismantled for parts years ago.” Jonesy said.

“Its ironic. There hasn’t been a war between humans for sixteen years. Peace at last eh?”

Jonesy didn’t know what to say to that.

“Also the situation at the Docks is getting worse, we estimate two hundred thousand trying to get out, we can’t contain the situation much longer.” Jonesy continued.

“Where the hell are they gonna go, Jonesy?”

“Everything’s that’s got an engine, wings or sails has already left.”

“Pull your men out. Get them deployed this side of the river. If the people want out the gate then let them go. It’s their choice.”

“You think they’ll think twice and calm down if we play ball?”

“It doesn’t matter either way, if we can’t stop him they might stand a better chance on their own, and all his forces are this side of the river”

“Fair enough, but we’ll get him Jim.”

“I bloody hope so. Call me if there is any change.”

“Will do.”

Jim put the phone down and picked up the remotes. He turned on the CCTV system and logged onto the Control network. Several different sized TV’s fixed to the opposite side of the office flickered into life. He could see what the commanders on the ground could see. The might not have armour but they had information, nothing moved in Greater London without it being picked up. Jim flicked on the BBC as well and watched the footage of the reconnaissance flyover again. He couldn’t comprehend the scale. He had hoped to feel more positive after he woke but in the face of these odds, how could he? The gate might hold until they ran out of ammo. The gauntlet that the Zombies needed to run to get to Westminster and Westminster Bridge might thin them down enough. With a stroke of luck one of the TIC crews might pick up The Minister and they were then into a straight fight, but Jim was a realist more than anything else, and he knew that battles throughout history were won by the army with the most troops. He didn’t expect this to be any different, and as Miss Mitchell arrived with his coffee and toast, he swung into action. He picked up the phone, and made some calls.

…..

Paul knew that part of him was here, in the dorm of the orphanage set up in the compound of Windsor Castle. He couldn’t move but he could feel the warm sheets, he could smell the dirty pillow beneath his head. Part of him was here, in the now, but part of him was in the dream. The same dream he always had. He was walking at night, surrounded by Zombies, through broken streets and overgrown fields, endlessly walking. He had no control over his movements but could see his hands, and they were as dead as those around him. He screamed and sat up in bed. One of the other kids told him to shut the fuck up. Paul was eleven and his Mum was long dead. He laid his head back on the pillow and sobbed quietly until he fell asleep into the grey.

…..

“They’re moving. Yes they’ve started walking towards the gate. I’ve never seen anything like it. God help us. God help us all.” The reporter commentated, but Jim wasn’t listening.

The whole nation of the Dead, moving as one, started to walk towards the gate, their footfalls a low rumble through the concrete and stone of the cities’ foundation. Slowly, inexorably, they came. The images from the BBC helicopter showed them moving like an oily tide through the city, meandering over broken glass and rubble, around toppled streetlights and rotting furniture, the discarded remnants of history.

In the helicopter the camera span round to show a line of twenty helicopters heading out from the city towards the massed crowd.  It was a rag tag collection of machinery, converted civilian and military helicopters, older than the end of The Fall as the parts were easier to find or convert. They stopped over the front line and waited for the order. Cannons exploded simultaneously at the crowd, flicking bodies into the air and splitting the concrete below into a fine dust that rose from the army, mixed with their black blood in an oily mist.

The BBC helicopter lurched sideways and the camera focussed in to see a covered arctic trailer. It was being pulled by a line of Zombies, roped together like slaves moving a sandstone block for their Pharaoh. Suddenly the covered side of the trailer fell away and inside you could see a row of Zombies holding tubes. The cameraman tried to focus in on what they were doing as they raised the green tubes to the sky, it zoomed in frantically to see that all the Zombies in the trailer had stinger missile systems crudely duct taped to their hands, and as Jim realised what was happening, they fired simultaneously. Missiles streaked into the sky trailing ragged fingers of smoke. The helicopters had either had their chaff systems removed for parts, or the pilots were too young to have been trained in this pointless defence against Zombies. In the case of the two remaining military Lynx machines, their old Pilots fired the chaff but in their surprise fired too late and, with a searing light and concussive blast that knocked the crowd below off its feet, it showered the Zombie army with fiery helicopter parts. The humans’ air defence was removed with one stroke, along with the BBC helicopter as the screen in Jims office turned to static for a moment.

The phone rang.

“Jim, its Jonesy. Did you see that?”

“He’s rolled through every military base in the country, picked up equipment and tools. You better expect more surprises.” Jim said, coolly. He realised now they had underestimated the Ministers power and cunning.

“Is there any news from the TIC snipers?”

“No.” Said Jonesy

“Stick to the plan, Jonesy.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The Nation of the Dead approached the gate. Miniguns and rifles exploded at the crowd as they came within range. Thick cordite smoke rose lazily past banners on the gate pronouncing ‘Work Hard: Live Safe’ and into the summer sky as the miniguns and ten thousand rifles picked at the crowd below. Like pushing oil on a table, the fingers of each miniguns probed and prodded the mass only to be replaced by more dead as they surged forward towards the narrow opening.

The gate was sheet aluminium and steel, thick enough to protect against a multitude of banging fists, but not thick enough to protect against the thousand Rocket Propelled Grenades that streaked haphazardly toward the gate, loosely aimed by their Undead troops.

The Minister relied on quantity, not quality of each shot. They slammed into the gate and the surrounding area with such a ripple of explosions that it shook the windows in Jim’s office. He looked towards the gate, past the ramshackle city, and saw the flash of light past Buckingham Palace.  Some of the RPG’s flew ineffectually over the barrier and some hit the crowd of Zombies in front of the shooter, flicking them up like plastic soldiers duct taped to a firecracker, but most hit the gate or surrounding wall.  It shattered like glass sending shrapnel down Constitution Hill, shredding the home made polytunnels that housed some of Greater London’s food source, with a ripping sound.  The blast knocked over home made ploughs and farm equipment like a winter gale.

There was a calm after the explosion at the gate, as blackened shards of metal clanged and clattered to the ground, then the sound of injured troops crying out in pain, victims of the RPG’s or shrapnel blast that followed. This was followed by the sound of tramping feet as the Zombies breached the gate. The CCTV’s in Jim’s office switched to show the gate itself and as the smoke cleared the first line of Zombies shambled casually through the breach. They marched round the ruined Portacabins and markets used to process those coming into the city and provide them with food and water when they got there.

…..

The grey was nothing. Neither warm nor cold, neither dark nor light, it just existed as a distance between two unspecified points. Yet it had character, Paul could see this now. There were areas of grey thicker than others, clouds of etherea that he could use to hide from the black disc that spun in the centre of millions of black eyes. They watched it slowly rotate in rapture, these dead eyes, these soulless wells. All this time Paul hid from the dark. Then he could feel it, the road beneath his feet with the dead walking with him and the buildings that flanked them like broken monoliths. Ahead, he could see a gate explode as a thousand fingers of fire stretched from the dark hole in the grey to envelope it.

Paul juddered awake and could feel the warmth of Sarah against him in the cramped single camp bed and he wanted to stay here with her more than anything. They were young and in lust. He wasn’t dead, and it was just that dream again. He drank in her scent as she snored like a purring kitten. The fear finally left him, but he couldn’t sleep so he thought about passing his basic training in two weeks time and he rested his cheek against her soft warm ribs as they lay together in the darkness.

…..

Inside the gate lay Constitution Hill and the fields of Buckingham Palace gardens. Between that and the gate lay the semi circular ring of five bunkers, each equidistant to the gate. Inside, the guns spat rounds at the aperture where the gate used to be, tearing at the dead and those injured from the blast, without prejudice. The bunkers were constructed from rubble left over from the buildings demolished to make the wall but had never been used, as the wall had never been breached. The mound of corpses grew, unable to pass the weaving aim of the gunners.  Each gun was taken out in turn to cool, and for a while it held back the Zombies until, pushing through from behind, scrambling past their older slower colleagues, the runners came. They shoved their way through from the back like commuters hurrying for a train, each desperate to get to the front line.

These were the freshly dead. To run as fast as they did they must have been turned within the last forty eight hours, before they started to slow and become as unstable as their more ancient brethren. Jim realised that they must have been pillaged from the myriad small communities that had lasted since The Fall, or recently formed strongholds as humanity pushed back. They had been kept alive by The Minister until the day before the Nation of the Dead appeared. They had been turned into his shock troops, undead suicide bombers in The Ministers’ Jihad.

Figures sprinted through the thickening crowd, dodging and weaving towards the bunkers. Jim could see these were the young and fit dead, children and teenagers who had never known the world before The Fall, marched to the point of exhaustion and then turned to be moulded by the will of The Minister.

They closed on the bunkers and Jim could recognise the belt of grenades each wore, swinging wildly as they ran. The miniguns couldn’t track them all with the crowd of normal Zombies moving in behind past the gate. While The gunners concentrated on the runners, a solitary girl reached bunker number four to where the gun couldn’t reach. She ran behind the bunker and detonated. The steel door was blown off its hinges as a second runner, a thin teenage boy dressed in a dark blue shell suit, reached the entrance and disappeared inside. There was a crimson flash from the bunker and the minigun span down as smoke poured from the slotted window. One by one the bunkers fell and the mass of dead climbed over their comrades without a word, expanding out inside the city itself. Small groups closed in on the injured and dying, not to devour them but just to place a single bite so in a few hours they would join The Minister on his crusade.

Jim’s phone rang. It was General Jones.

“Jim. I want you to get out. Get on the last Evac and go. We didn’t last a fraction of the time we expected, shit we expected to run out of ammo first.”

“Don’t talk crap Jonesy. He’s after me, its my face on the posters. I’m ‘Uncle Jim’.” He said, quoting the posters all over the City. “He wants to make an example out of me and to prove no-one is safe”

“That’s why you should go.” Jonesy’s voice was cool and level.

“I’m not going. Full stop. Now give me an update.”

“Update is we’ve got a lot more Z’s left than we wanted, and we’ve lost everyone at the gate and along that section of the wall. At least ten thousand men if you include the support crews behind the gate.”

“Any TIC snipers left?”

“I’ve kept some in the city but most were on the wall.”

“And they saw nothing?”

“No.”

“Bollocks!”  Jim shouted. He banged the table in frustration. They had to find him to end this. They had to find the one lone heat signature.

“Pull back into the city for phase two, let’s hope the gardens thin them down a bit until they get into the streets.”

“Ok, Jim…and good luck.”

“You too, Jonesy.” Jim said replacing the phone gently on the desk.

The Zombies fanned out inside the gate and moved towards the converted gardens. They formed a rough front line before striding towards the Palace. They trampled across fields of corn, potatoes and lettuce, showing no regard for anything that was not human meat. They marched across the poly tunnels of tomatoes and strawberries. Jim watched as all his work was crushed into dirt.

Then there was an explosion as one of the hastily planted landmines exploded, showering dirt and body parts, flicking buckets and pots up into the sky to fall and smash to the ground. The Zombie Nation didn’t need fields or irrigation to survive, all it needed was time and meat. Greater London had the latter, The Minister the former. Further down the line a pipe bomb exploded flicking a Zombie above it into the air where it spun like a ragdoll before falling to the ground. Explosions ripped down the line as they advanced and the frequency increased until it was an immense firecracker celebrating the revolution. Corpses piled deep as the Dead marched on with most of the force still cramming towards the gate from the outside.

Jim and Jonesy had scant few hours from when the dead miraculously appeared to prepare. Every landmine and explosive had been used to make the killing fields the Zombie army now moved straight through. This was the perfect army. No fear, no morale, unswerving loyalty, invulnerable to pain and fatigue. It would not stop until it achieved the dark purpose The Minister set for it. The carefully ploughed fields and well stocked greenhouses were destroyed by both sides in their desperation to win this, the largest land battle the world had ever seen.

Eventually the firecracker died and the army rumbled on past the ruins of Buckingham Palace and the Victoria memorial. It was still covered with notes to the lost, little stories of those trying to find friends and families in the apocalypse. Left for all this time just in case, and now ignored by those who could be the object of the note, as they walked on into the city itself.

…..

For months the grey had been a static place, but now the black hole rotated furiously, casting its gaze left and right as the tiny pairs of black eyes winked out of existence around it, and yet the disappeared ones were just a drop in the ocean for the cloud of Zombie minds was seemingly endless.  The millions of empty vessels stared in rapture at the Undead Godhead.

Beyond, he could see the same familiar scene from all his dreams. He walked left, right, left, right endlessly walking with the thirst and hunger nagging him on, and then in daytime hiding in sewers and houses, in ruined sports halls and crumbling churches from the Helicopters that infrequently flew overhead.

As he lay in the hospital ward, numb from morphine with a memory of pain shooting through his temple and eye, he drifted in and out of the grey. He wondered, for the first time, just why the dream ran contiguously and yet he couldn’t remember a day between waking up and shouting for his mother, and waking up screaming in the orphanage. Yet the dream was changing and, rather than the endless monotony of walking and hiding, now the dream was a dream of carnage and horror as he joined his red armoured cohort and walked with the throng through the gate. He stumbled over corpses and rubble with the smell of death in his nostrils and the ripple of explosives and gunfire ahead in the distance. Then as he walked he realised that the black suited man in the centre of the cohort was a priest or Minister. Yet how he knew this and exactly who The Minister was escaped him.

…..

Jim and the personnel in Control saw it first. Moving through the gate, like Astronauts to the flight, sauntered The Minister surrounded by his personal guard. Six of Jim’s Special Forces troops, symbols of Greater London, England and humanity itself, murdered so their loyalty turned, with their black armour spray painted the colour of blood. It was aimed, like the phone call, at Jim personally, but with a psychological component recognised by anyone who hadn’t already fled the city. He was using the army to clear his route and allow him to walk straight into the heart of Greater London.

Just over half a mile ahead, the forefront of the Zombie Army entered The Mall, Birdcage walk and the treeless St James Park. The wide streets where covered in multi coloured lines of drying washing, and cabling criss crossed the street providing the city’s jury rigged power supplies. Old buses and lorries had been moved and converted into cafes and shops, and on every street corner there were posters and banners reminding you of your responsibility to the collective, and the rewards of safety and growth for you and your family for that work. The banners were red lettering on a black background with a portrait of Jim Bramer himself watching over those under his protection. Prince William was still the titular Heads of State, but Jim was the power in Greater London and everyone knew this city wouldn’t function without Uncle Jim. On every building along the route, on top of the once opulent buildings that lined the route to Westminster lay the bulk of the British Army. They hid between windmills and rain water collectors for the advancing horde.

The front line came within range, and over the comms Jim heard Jonesy give the order to fire. The CCTV operators changed the screens to show the route through to Westminster and Jim watched as the troops opened up on the Zombies below. Jim expected it to be more frantic than it was. The troops were confident that the entrances to their individual buildings had been sealed by steel doors and rubble. They took their time, drew a good bead, and fired when they were confident of a headshot.

From the window of his office Jim could see the rising gun smoke in the distance as the troops engaged the enemy, the rumble of gunfire punctuated by grenades tossed from rooftops into the crowd below, bangs and flashes echoing through the ruined canyons of London. The troops settled into a steady rhythm of fire, reload, shoot. Once again the tide was slowed and once again the humans had underestimated the time and thought Minister had put into the invasion, and the resources he had gathered on his drive through the ruined countryside.

Gun smoke burnt the nostrils of the troops and made vision difficult in the windless summer. On the streets below, Zombies wandered aimlessly up to the barricaded doors of the buildings in which lay the soldiers.  They meandered as close to the building walls as possible to make them difficult to hit by the soldiers above. In turn the soldiers picked numerous easier targets still making their way down the centre of the street. The dust and gun smoke obscured the Zombies close to the walls so they could not be seen to pull the pin on the grenade, or clamp the landmine in each hand, that many of them carried. The troops on the building rooftops could feel their barricades crumble and the slow tramp of feet up the stairs before they engaged the Dead that made their way slowly up to their position. Using time and numbers the first building fell, then the second, then the third. Then as the afternoon wore on and the troops began to run out of ammo the buildings fell more frequently, and still the mass crowded through the gate, with many more awaiting their turn outside in ruined London.

The Undead Army weaved its way through the streets, denser now and filled with the colour and life of the rebuilt city now abandoned for the second time. They made their way circuitously towards Westminster. Jim could smell the gun smoke now and see figures running through the streets as the troops backed from building to building in a running retreat, picking away at the masses as they went.

Jim and everyone in control heard the voice, it was quiet but authoritative, and in the background you could hear the moans of the Dead were very close to his position.

“Control? This is James Rogers. TIC crew seventeen. I have the target but no thermal signature. I repeat I have the target but no signature. Do I take the shot?”

The Minister and his red armoured cohort had entered the city; the start of the Mall was quieter now as the front line moved inexorably on a few hundred yards ahead. James was hidden on the roof of an already overrun building, near the entrance to The Mall, but they hadn’t seen him and he had waited for the opportunity that now presented itself. The CCTV showed the Minister walking down the street looking up at his troops on the rooftops above, but the smoke made an outline of Minister and Jim couldn’t put his finger on it but there was something wrong. Why was there no thermal signature?

Jonesy didn’t hesitate.

“Rogers. Take the shot!” There was a loud crack over the radio and the The Ministers head flicked back, his back arched and he fell to his knees before collapsing flat on his face. The comms went silent, no-one, including Jim, knew what to expect. Nothing changed as the cohort moved on leaving the black suited corpse behind, and then, in the crowd of Zombies behind the personal guard, one pushed through to resume The Ministers position. With a flourish he removed his thick overcoat to reveal the white dog collar and black suit within.

Over the open comms Jim could hear James Rogers fight his last desperate battle as the rooftop Zombies tracked in on his position from the crack of the shot. There was a scream before the operators cut the comms.

“It’s a decoy, any TIC crews remaining keep scanning the crowd for as long as you can. Standing orders remain. Only take the shot if you have a signature,” Jonesy said, dourly. Jim was sure he could hear “Goddamn it!” as he cut the connection.

Jim picked up the phone on his desk, hesitated slightly, and dialled the number.

“Miss Mitchell, could you come in here please?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The door opened and she stepped in.

“Its time for you to go, Miss Mitchell. You and the rest of the troops downstairs.”

“Are you leaving?” She asked, hand on hip.

“No.”

“I took the liberty of asking the men their opinion, and if you are staying so are we.”

Jim was dumbfounded. She walked over to his desk drawer, took a fresh bottle of whisky and two glasses from inside, poured two generous shots, took a glass and sat down on the cracked leather sofa on the other side of the room. She sipped half the glass straight off the bat.

Jim raised the glass at her, without a word, and drained it in one and she raised her glass in response.

It was nearing the endgame now. Jim stood slowly and looked out of the window. In the distance he could see the rooftop troops firing at the mass below. He could hear the distant rumble of continuous gunfire and he could see squads of troops directed by Control retreating from buildings to take up defensive positions closer to the Houses of Parliament. Jim sipped the whiskey and waited. Miss Mitchell watched the CCTV screens as the Zombies continued to pile through the gate in a never ending flow.

“How many do you think there are?” She said finally.

“It doesn’t matter.” Said Jim flatly.

…..

Paul couldn’t sleep. He had spent the day practicing the Z Kata on live targets in the new armour Jim Bramer had provided. The cage had been set up in the courtyard with troops positioned to take the captured Zombies down if Paul let his concentration slip for just a moment. Paul was young and strong, intelligent and quick witted, and had known the Z all his life; he worked hard to perfect his skills.

However, even with the Zombies’ nails and teeth removed the fear of fighting them was still omnipresent. It was their stench and that ungodly moan they made. He lay in bed unable to sleep because of the adrenaline pumping through his system. He thought about the day’s exertions and what he would say when asked about the effectiveness of the armour and the Union Jack sword. Suddenly Paul thought he heard a noise like an explosion and a scream, he stood up quickly, his pumped muscles sore from the lactic acid of the day’s work. He looked out of the window to the courtyard and cage below but saw nothing. Then he had the strangest sensation that he was walking, slowly and steadily, and he could hear the screams again. He lay back down in the bed and confusion clouded his mind. What had he done yesterday? What had he eaten this morning? He couldn’t remember yet he could remember dreams from years gone by. What did it mean? Finally, as tiredness overtook him, he questioned what was the dream was and what was the reality.

…..

Jim watched as the Zombies overran the entrance to the building below, slowly taking the gunners and their crew, falling and being replaced as if nothing had happened. The troops fought well and took many of the Dead with them, but the never ending well of Zombies replaced them immediately. The smell of blood and meat, both fresh and rotten drifted through the ill fitting window into Jim’s office and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. He watched The Ministers’ troops skilfully injure a stricken soldier by holding him down and biting his arm, ripping great ribbons of sinew from the bone. The blood ran in rivulets from the exposed artery. Then they wandered off in search of new prey leaving the man to stumble in shock and horror as the realisation of his fate overwhelmed him. More than one troop immediately raised the gun to his chin and pulled the trigger before the enormity of their fate could be realised.

Jim marvelled at the control The Minister had over his troops. He had expected a force of Zombies, thirty, forty, at the limit a thousand strong. This perfect army under the tacit control of The Minister was unimaginable. Each troop acting as they had since The Fall, yet operating within the boundaries set by The Ministers’. Working as the individual hunger drove them on, yet reined in by the power of the will of The Minister to mobilise the biggest army the world had ever seen.

Now they were in the building, and the roar of gunfire shook the ancient door on its hinges. Shouts and screams echoed through the home of a government overrun a second time. Then as Jim looked lazily through the window, and Miss Mitchell clinked bottle to glass on her mission to numb the forthcoming pain, he saw the battle move away from the window and towards Westminster bridge. Then through the smoke, and surrounded by the crowd he saw the red armour and the black suit. They walked purposefully down St Margerets street, and a rising panic took Jims’ drunken legs as the disconnect between the CCTV cameras and the reality outside his window was removed.

The Minister is coming

The end is nigh.

Jim chided himself and sat down in his chair. He straightened his tie and flatted back his hair. Suddenly he wished he had a gun, but at that moment he didn’t know who he would use it on when The Minister arrived. In the end he was glad he didn’t. He waited.

Then he could hear the shots die down to a sporadic pop and the screams fade to a panic filled gabble. The moans of the Dead rose in response and then there was the singing. It rose in volume pausing only to ask one of the dying troops the location of Jims’ office.

“All things bright and beautiful. All creatures great and small. All things wise and wonderful. The Lord God made them all.” It rang out triumphantly as it approached the door.

Three knocks, widely spaced.

Jim looked at Miss Mitchell.

“Come!” He bellowed with as much gravitas as he could muster, and the alcohol helped. He would stand up to the Minister. If it was a psychological battle The Minister wanted, it was a psychological battle he would get, and Jim would not fold nor confess his sins. At that moment Jim would be everything he guessed The Minister despised in humanity. He would not fold; he would be the very essence of courage in the face of overwhelming odds. Good God, he would be the essence of England itself. Jim reached across his desk to the comms unit, turned down the volume and opened the mic. Everyone based over at the Department of Control, safely tucked away high up on Canary wharf, would hear his last stand. Miss Mitchell shifted nervously in her seat.

The door opened.

In shuffled a number of old Zombies. Their torn and shredded suits and dresses hung from their emaciated frames. Pockmarked and grey-faced they moved silently into position around Jim and Miss Mitchell. Jim had never been so close to a Zombie without running or shooting wildly, but they were here now standing within grasp. They swayed and moaned slightly, and involuntarily, as they waited for their Master. In came the red armoured personal guard. Jim recognised them all, each sent after The Minister, each never to return.  The plastic segmented armour looked scratched and bitten, the suit below ripped and torn with all the military insignia removed, but they still carried their weapons, including the short sword in the scabbard at their back. Looking through the open door, Zombies crowded in the hallway behind. The two nearest Jim leant down towards him and clumsily opened his suit to look inside. Satisfied they opened the drawers in his desk and rifled inside, finding nothing they pulled them out until they fell on the ground. Jim was glad he hadn’t had a gun after all.

“Hur, Hur ,Hur” Chuckled a voice in the corridor. The crowd parted and Jim could see a small figure in a ruined hooded leather cloak enter the room slowly chuckling to itself. Head bowed, it flicked the hood back. Jim was shocked to see a Zombie raise its head. All the reports he had received, and the MP3 where Joe Wyndham had described The Minister, had said he was human. It unclasped the cloak and let it crumple to the floor.

The Minister cut a small thin figure in front of him, tattered black suit and bloodstained dog collar hung limply from his ectomorphic frame. One shoulder was hunched higher than the other through choice or disfigurement.  Jim realised this was why the TIC snipers hadn’t found him, he was already dead. What had been a needle in a haystack search had become an impossibility.

The Minister looked around the room and saw Miss Mitchell. His brow furrowed and he waved his hand gently in her direction. The three Zombies nearest her turned slowly in her direction. She looked up at them and finished her whiskey in a long swig. The Minister let his subjects go and they fell on her with all the fury of their hunger unleashed. She tried to fight them off as they ripped at her clothes and flesh but she wouldn’t scream. One grappled with her arm and gnawed on it like a chicken leg, another peeled at her torso to reveal the red morsels inside, and the third buried his face in her neck until a torrent of blood pooled on the floor around them. They slavered and chewed at her loudly until she stopped twitching and hung limply like a concubine pleasured by her hungry suitors. Jim watched in terror but would not let it show on his face. He was angry now, there was no need for this other than a demonstration of power. More psychological warfare. All the time, The Minister watched Jim’s face, until he had had enough and the murderers stood back up to attention. Blood covered their tattered clothes and dripped lazily from their stained teeth. They were passive again, all trace of their fury gone.

The Minister sat slowly in the chair opposite Jim and his black eyes gazed into his. Jim hesitated and wanted to run, his legs were weak, but he would not let it show.

“Ye looked taller in yer posters, Jim.” The Minister said finally. He spoke in a low cracked voice that still rang with a resonance around the room. Jim ignored the comment.

“So, are you another decoy or the real thing, because I’m done pissing about with this shit” Jim spat. The Minister raised his eyebrows, and smiled a thin, wan smile.

“I walk straight into your city, just tae come and see you and this is the welcome I get. Nae way to treat a man of God, a pilgrim, is it now?” He said cheerily, crossing his hands in his lap.

Jim felt stronger. Dead or not, this was just a man. He paused, knowing the calm would make his enemy speak first.

“Well.” The Minister said. “I’m ready to hear yer confession. Time to make peace Jim.”

“I’ve nothing to confess to you, you murdering scum.” Jim said with just the right amount of control and contempt.

The Minister feigned a hurt expression.

“Murderer? Me?” The Ministers’ Scots brogue rolling the R’s in the word.

“Well. Only the once. I believe you know Paul here.” Jim saw the Zombie Paul Jollie step forward. He had known Paul since he was a lad and now he was just another puppet in The Ministers’ Army. Another victim in a world full of victims.

“It turns out I havnae really got the stomach fer it. Paul and I have a special relationship. He killed me and I killed him. Mutually assured destruction, they used to call it.”

“Shame he didn’t finish the job.”

“Jim. This antagonistic attitude won’t win you a place in heaven, now will it?”

“Then I’ll see you in hell.” The Jim smiled sweetly.

…..

Paul walked into Jim Bramers’ office full of trepidation about his latest mission.

“At ease, Paul” Said Bramer

“Sir.”  Said Paul, relaxing.

Bramer motioned towards a chair.

“Whiskey?”

“No thank you, Sir.” said Paul taking a seat in the red leather high back in front of the old mahogany desk.

“The reason I have called you here is, unfortunately, not a social one” Said Bramer

“It never is, Sir.” Said Paul, smiling

“No… No” chuckled Bramer.

“I want you to listen to this recording and tell me what you think”

Paul looked around, his brow furrowed. He was confused. He had been here before. He remembered this conversation. Jim leant forward to push the button on the Sony Vaio and Paul stretched and grabbed his hand. Jim just looked at him. There were two Jim Bramers. The real one he could see reaching forward with his hand and the ghostly image behind leaning back with a furious look on his face talking silently.

There were others around him too, dark shadows in the grey stood in the room with him, and, on the leather sofa over there, a ruined corpse. Paul could smell the fresh meat and a hunger rose in him. He wanted to grab Jim and consume him. He pushed the impulse away.

This didn’t make sense, why had he come here? What was the mission? How had he got here? The last thing he remembered was being in the hospital in a morphine fugue. What was the reality and what was the dream? Paul didn’t know anymore, but behind this all he could feel the grey envelop him as he shone like a bright star, close, but behind the gaze of the black hole that stared intently at Jim Bramer.

…..

Jim saw something from the corner of his eye as Minister talked. Pauls’ slack expression changed for a moment. It looked confused.

“Well, if I must confess to you, then at least answer me a question.” Jim said. “How did you do it? How did you make your Army appear from nowhere, and how did an army this massive move through the country unseen by the helicopter patrols?”

The Minister laughed his hollow laugh.

“You mean you hadn’t even worked that oot?”

Jim shrugged, and stared into the obsidian black eyes of The Minister, sunk in his graying, ancient face.

“James. James. In the day I hid them. Simple as that. In town halls and cinemas, in sewers and houses, away frae the prying eyes o’ your whirlybirds. That wus the easy part. The hard part was training them to use the missiles tae take them whirlybirds oot. Hae you any idea how long it takes tae train a Zombie to fire a stinger. Bloody months, and it has tae be the right Zombies tae. An if they failed at that, they could use they RPG’s. The real brainwave wus the runners, did yer see that one coming, eh Jim? What yer real question should be was how did I outsmart you and walk straight into yer city and intae yer office to sit here.”

“I already know the answer to that.”

It was The Ministers’ turn to smile.

“Don’t flatter yourself. Your tactics, if you can call them that, were juvenile. Cheap parlour tricks from your marionettes. You won through numbers and nothing else.  Your armies aren’t brave or noble or have any of the qualities that a great army has. You aren’t God or the Messiah, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. You are just a freak. In fact you haven’t been granted this ability; it’s just fallen to you through random chance. Maybe there are others in this world with your ability that haven’t realised it yet, or they were killed before they knew they had the gift. No. You were just lucky.” Said Jim, calmly. He paused, but didn’t give The Minister a chance to speak. He could see the doubt in his eyes now and pushed on.

“Each one of my men has given a good account of themselves and fought bravely until the end, each one of them is a hero, and given enough time and resources we would have whittled your army down to nothing, found you and put a bullet through your ugly head. Look at the piles of corpses you left in your wake. My troops must have taken a hundred of yours to every one of my heroes. Every single one of my men would die for his brothers in an instant, and every single one would die for his country to have things back as they were. Your troops aren’t loyal, they aren’t brave or heroic, they don’t recoil at the horror of war as they walk over their fallen comrades, they just are. You think God wants this? You think God wants his flock to die in screaming torment or turn into these monstrosities? No Minister whatever-your-fucking-name-is. God is on our side and one day God will grant one human the chance to put you down once and for all. Then we will rebuild this world without you or your army. Just as God intended.” Jim leant back in his chair and relaxed, smiling and in control of the situation. He had said what he wanted to say, let the bastard take him now.

This was a speech for the personnel in Control, not The Minister.

Anger flashed through Ministers’ face. He tried to reply but fury robbed him of the words.

…..

Thoughts rushed through Pauls’ mind, and try as he might, he couldn’t remember the days between the dreams, yet the dreams ran on, longer than his waking hours. It didn’t make sense. In the dreams he was Dead, in his memories he was alive.

What if.

What if he really was dead, and the dream the reality, and the reality the dream? Why would he think this? Why would his mind think this way?

Then it came to him. His mind had protected itself from the unimaginable horror of this reality the only way it could. Its living soul had retreated into the recesses of this dead brain so it could learn and come to terms with its new reality. He was dead. He had died with a sword in his belly in a kitchen in Edinburgh. Whatever The Minister had within him had mingled with the fake Ministers’ Zombie blood and Paul’s human blood, on the black and white tiled floor. This forced evolution created something new.

With an almost audible lurch, Paul was in the room with the Minister and Jim Bramer as they argued back and forth. The Jim stretching forward to start the MP3 was gone and Paul was there surrounded by the Dead in Jim’s office so many months after he had first received his orders to go to Edinburgh.

In the grey, Paul shone like a thousand stars in the murk, light poured from him like sunshine eating away at the edges of the black hole that raged at Jim Bramer, like bright dawn through skeletal winter trees.

…..

The Minister sat forward in the chair and ranted incoherently at Jim, while Jim sat back and watched impassively. The Minister spat insults and threats at him, promised tortures and pain to him and everyone who lived in the city or had fled in fear. Each sentence was unfinished, each threat worse than the last. Jim had hit all The Ministers buttons and he was giving it to Jim with both barrels. Jim’s failure to react did nothing to pacify him; in fact, it made the dead priest angrier.

Out of his peripheral vision he saw Pauls’ arm move. Instinctively he wanted to look, but knew The Minister would notice. Paul raised his arm slowly towards the Union Jack sword in the scabbard on his back, the look on Pauls’  face was grim and determined, yet filled with emotion. Jim was convinced this wasn’t The Minister in control, but Paul.

…..

Paul reached slowly towards the sword on his back. He couldn’t afford for the Minister to see him. He had one chance to do this and he wouldn’t waste it. In the end it wasn’t Paul’s movement that alerted The Minister but his proximity in the grey. The light was close enough to eat away at the black of the Minister and black hole span round to stare at the tiny star in front of it.

…..

The Minister spun and looked at Paul’s arm halfway to the sword on his back. He reached out and grabbed Pauls’ arm, pulling it down again.

…..

In the grey, the full force of Ministers darkness was brought to bear against the tiny spark of Pauls’ light. For a second it threatened to consume him totally. It overwhelmed Paul and he could feel himself fading against its might.

Paul pushed back, igniting his soul against the blackness. Paul raged in the grey. He would not be consumed.  The hunger and rage of a Zombie starved, combined with the anger and fury of a man who could avenge his own murder, created a firestorm of light that burned at the shadow. The black hole was fixated on Paul yet it seemed to struggle to turn away from him like a man forced to stare too long at the sun.

…..

The Minister held onto Pauls’ arm but couldn’t look him in the face, his head flicked frantically about and a gurgled cry escaped his lips.

Paul had one chance, and the firestorm of emotion filled his every point of being. He lunged forward and tipped The Minister’s chair over, spilling the skinny old man to the ground. Paul tried to scream in rage but air rushed from his dead lungs through his torn throat which hissed and gurgled ineffectually. He leapt over the chair and onto The Ministers’ chest. There was no Zombie or man here now, Paul was a being of pure fury.

The Minister struggled, turning his head furiously away from the light as the grey and reality became one. Paul plunged his fist through the brittle bones into The Ministers chest and grabbed at anything it could find. He ripped a lung from the old Zombies body and held it in his teeth, his other hand around the old mans throat. He bit at the lung like an animal and ripped it away with his hand, shredding it. He discarded it like a rag and ripped at The Ministers’ throat. Skin and sinew came free and he held the bits of flesh in the air like a caveman glorying in the hunt. He plunged his ichor blackened hands into the chest again and ripped out bone and decaying arteries that spat black fluid over the green carpet of the office.

Finally he grabbed the Minister’s flailing head with both hands, and ripped his gargling screaming skull from his body, twisting it, pulling it as the vertebrae snapped and the ligaments tore until it was free in his hands, attached only by a few sinewy cords. He flung the head over against the wall where it lay blinking until its black eyes faded milky white and its jaw hung limply from its pivot.

In the city the Zombies stopped and gazed blankly into the distance. Those humans still fighting hand to hand or firing from rooftops continued the battle, all caught in their own bloodlust.

In the grey, the final vestiges of black dissipated like wisps of smoke and Pauls’ soul shone like the sun in the gloom of a foggy morning. All the tiny twinkling eyes gazed unthinking at the new Godhead that spun slowly before them.

Paul crouched over the headless torso. Jim noticed he was panting with exertion, his Zombie lungs needlessly pumping air into his dead blood. It was a thoroughly human autonomic response.

Paul turned his head slowly to look at Jim, but there was no vestige of humanity there and for a moment Jim thought the creature would turn on him, but it lowered its head to stare at the headless torso below and it stayed crouched over the corpse.

Finally, slowly, its breathing, slowed and gradually it stood, head crouched with clenched fists. Its eyes still focussed on its prey below.  Then it turned its dark head, black fluid dripping from its chin and looked at Jim’s desk.

Jim stared aghast.

The Zombie Paul, its long dank hair hung over its face, raised its hand and stupidly shuffled the papers around until it found what it was looking for. It grasped the pen in its fist like a small child and raised its other hand to hold the paper in place. It raised the pen like a knife and tried to scrawl on the slippery page. The pen ripped the paper, so with its other hand it cast that paper to the floor and tried again. Slowly it drew on the paper and Jim noticed that its tongue was sticking out and Pauls’ face was screwed in concentration, like a small child.

Then it cast the pen to the ground, raised its head and lifted the paper to its chest. Jim stared in amazement as the creature raised its black, obsidian eyes to stare at him smiled a wide, twisted, scarecrow smile. Jim found himself, despite everything, smiling back at the monster before him.

Paul rustled the paper in front of his chest to get Jims attention. Jim stared at the crumpled form that it held to its chest and struggled to make out the words. In the city, and all around Jim’s office, the Zombies stood stock still and smiled a big, twisted scarecrow smile.

Finally Jim realised what the note said.

hElLO Jim

The End

We tend to drive slowly when we’re traveling with the kids. As they’ve gotten older, traveling has gotten easier, but we still take our time driving. Besides, it wasn’t like we were in a hurry. We stopped for the night in Wichita, just off the Kansas Turnpike. The match had ended at about 2:30 in the afternoon, so we drove for a few hours and pulled into a Holiday Inn to get a good night’s sleep.

We woke up at about 8 a.m. Well, my wife and kids did. I woke up at about 6:30 and went for a short run. Old habits die hard, you know? We had a somewhat leisurely breakfast and got on the road. We decided to wait to stop for gas in Emporia, hoping the price had held over the weekend. It was about five cents cheaper. Since I hadn’t started drawing a paycheck from my teaching gig yet, every little bit helped.

I was pumping gas and my wife and kids were getting in a bathroom break and grabbing a pop. I figured we’d probably stop to grab some food while we were in the suburbs of Emporia, so I was going to wait. I hate warm pop.

I was scanning the parking lot. It’s a habit my wife has learned to tolerate over the years. She still gets annoyed that I can have conversations with some of my friends and never make eye contact with them, because we’re both too busy scanning the area for threats. As long as I can remember, I’ve lived in what I later learned was called “Condition Yellow.”

Colonel Jeff Cooper, US Marines, had come up with what later became known as the “Cooper Colors” decades before I read about them. The theory is that our awareness is in varying states, depicted by the colors white, yellow, red, and black. White is something akin to a complete oblivion to your surroundings. Most people are like that when they’re either asleep or watching television. You just kind of let your mind wander. Yellow is a somewhat heightened awareness. You still concentrate on the task at hand, but you’re also aware of your surroundings. Red is when you’re concentrating solely on the task at hand. It’s often characterized by being incompletely aware of your surroundings. You generally get this in situations of extreme stress—car accidents, self-defense shootings. Things like that get you tunnel vision and compromised fine motor skills. Condition Black is when your mind is overloaded and nothing works right. In the words of a pot-bellied instructor I once had in the Air Force, it’s when “you need to take a tactical timeout.” But I digress.

I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was the only person at the pumps at that time. No other cars in the pump area and just a couple of cars in front of the store. Everyone was inside. Not even a lot of traffic on the road near the station. It was late summer, so I was dressed in khaki shorts, one of my Under Armor polos, with my Woolrich vest. Tucked away near my strong hand side hip was my Springfield XD45. I’ve carried that gun whenever I could for the last eight years. The vest was designed to conceal the fact I was carrying it. It came in handy, because I could carry my cell phone, a flashlight, and an extra magazine in the vest. It was comfortable, and many people who don’t carry a concealed weapon just wonder whether your fashion sense is a bit out of whack. For gun people, it was a great conversation starter.

I registered the fact that a somewhat disheveled man in his mid- to late-thirties was kind of shuffling toward me. He was about 80 yards away when I noticed him. His clothes were a bit ragged and he seemed to have a bad limp. Clubfoot or badly healed broken bone in his lower left leg, I guessed. White male, messy salt-and-pepper hair, flannel shirt, gray t-shirt, jeans, white sneakers. It aggravated my wife how I could get all of that from a single glance.

He also seemed to have something wrong with his face. His lower lip was bloody, like he’d been belted on the jaw in a fight. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, but the short hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Well, they would have, had I not shaved them off that morning. I had gone with the bald look about nine or ten years before. I shifted my stance so that I was a little more square with this guy, shifting into a heightened state of Condition Yellow. My hands went to my hips, my right hand ready to sweep the vest out of my way to execute my draw.

He was about 40 yards away now. Still shambling toward me. He let out a guttural moan. That kind of freaked me out. I mean, c’mon, a moan? It was like a bad horror movie or something.

“Sir,” it never hurt to be polite, “are you alright?” He didn’t answer, just kind of grunted. “Sir, I want you to stop right where you are.” My hand moved to my gun, and I checked the area behind him to make sure of my backstop. His hands went out in front of him like a bad parody of Frankenstein. Another moan. This one was deeper. Louder. I glanced behind me and saw Amy and the boys coming out of the store. I checked his position. Thirty yards, still moving slowly.

“Amy, keep the kids inside the store until I come and get you!” “What? Why?” “Dammit, don’t argue with me. Get back in the store and get out your cell phone! Call 911!”

I saw her hustle the kids back inside. I turned to the man. Twenty yards. I put my weak hand in front of me, tightened my grip on the gun.

“Sir, I’m warning you, don’t come any closer. I want you to turn around and walk away.”

Absolutely no response. I’d never seen anything like this before. Not even in the movies. Kept right on coming with that slow shuffle. The gas pump clicked off. A car slowed in the drive into the gas station. Fifteen yards.

I drew the gun and put my weak hand on my strong hand, getting my grip. I was in high-ready, looking over the sights at my target.

“SIR, IF YOU DON’T STOP RIGHT FUCKING NOW, I WILL SHOOT YOU!” I don’t cuss a lot. When I do, people usually realize I’m serious. Ten yards.

“MOTHERFUCKER, FREEZE!” Five yards.

It’s funny, the things that flash through your mind when you’re under stress. I was fast approaching Condition Red. In my mind, I heard my friend Candace telling me a story about her father the cop. When the gun comes out, negotiation is over.

The gun moved up just an inch or so. I made the triangle with my SureSights and put the tip over the center of his chest and squeezed the trigger twice at three yards. To this day, I don’t remember hearing either shot. The man stumbled backward and fell onto his backside. I knew both shots hit him in the middle of his chest. I brought the gun down just a hair. The car that had pulled into the lot panic-stopped and a man got out.

I threw my support hand out in his direction, while I watched the man I’d just killed.

“Sir, please call the police and tell them there’s been a self-defense situation.” I began to rehearse what I needed to do when they arrived. I’d read a lot of Massad Ayoob’s columns and had seen him on TV. I needed to keep people out of the scene, call my lawyer, preserve evidence, and keep my family safe.

A woman screamed. I looked back at the body.

The man I’d just shot got back up and started toward me again, mouth open, eyes blank, moaning for all he was worth. He was also not bleeding. I could see the holes in his shirt. I could see the holes in his chest. He should have lost about a third of his total blood volume by this point. The holes were right through the sternum, about an inch apart. Guess I rushed the second shot.

He started to grab for my arm. I felt his grip. His fingers were ice cold. And he seemed intent on drawing my arm toward his mouth.

Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him bite me, so I let him have rounds three and four out of my magazine. This time I aimed for his head.

Both rounds exited with a spray of brownish liquid and chunks of skull and brain. He collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I noticed there was no blood. Brownish-black ooze, brain matter, bits of skull. No blood.

Weird. A siren in the distance tore my eyes away from the corpse. Two cop cars. Great. Felony response. This should be fun.

Two Hours Later, Emporia Police Department Headquarters, Emporia, Kansas

“Mind telling me why you shot the guy?”

Again. I’d been over this with the cop for more than an hour.

“Look,” I said, “I told you this three times already. The guy was acting weird. He kept coming toward me after I told him to stop. He kept coming after I drew my gun. He was moaning at me. I had no idea what his intentions were.”

“So you had to shoot him?” The cop was in his late 40s. Off-the-rack JC Penney’s shirts, lots of polyester. Balding, pot belly. Coffee stain on his shirt. Stained teeth. Brown fingers from too many cigarettes.

“Yeah. I did. I felt I was in danger, man. He didn’t respond like people normally do when you draw down on them. He looked like he had been in a fight or something. His behavior was way out of norms, so I drew down on him. He kept coming. He was inside of seven yards when I shot him the first time. Then he got up. He was an imminent threat to me.”

“So why didn’t you run?”

“I don’t have to, first of all. Second, I didn’t have any place to run to. I was between my car and the pump. I was blocked in. By the time I turned and ran, he could have been on top of me.”

“But you said that he, what was that word? ‘Shuffled’ toward you.”

“How long you been a cop?”

“Fifteen years.”

“In fifteen years, you’ve never seen a guy who wasn’t moving so great suddenly attack when he had the advantage?”

He gave me a dirty look. I knew they didn’t have anything to hold me. They were trying to get me to crack. This was a clean shoot. I gave the guy more than ample opportunity to get away from me. I warned him multiple times. The convenience store footage bore that out.

“You going to cut me loose or what?”

Another dirty look.

“Gotta talk to the DA. Sit tight.”

With a grunt, he heaved himself to his feet and walked out the door. As I waited, I thought about the shooting. It was weird, just like the story Lee had told me at the match. The guy tried to bite me, John tried to bite someone. Were these things related? Why no blood? How did he get up from the pavement after I put two 230-grain slugs into his chest? What the hell was the brown stuff that came out of his head? What was the deal with his mouth? Why was he moaning? Lots of questions ran through my mind. I didn’t have answers for any of them. Yet. I was going to do my damnedest to find some, though.

About fifteen minutes later, the detective and a short, skinny guy in a bad suit walked in the door. He had “public defender” written all over him.

“Sorry, not interested in legal advice. I have a lawyer. I don’t need you.”

“Sir, you need legal representation. I’m from the . . .”

“Public Defender’s Office,” I finished for him. “Yeah, I know. Still not interested. I decide I need a lawyer, I’ll call mine. You may go now.”

His shoulders slumped. He gave the detective a look, and walked out the door. “That was stupid, Mac. You’re gonna need his help.”

“Upgraded to giving legal advice, did you? Like I said, I’ve got a lawyer. I need her, I’ll call her. You talk to the DA yet?”

“Yeah, he’s still lookin’ at stuff. It’ll be awhile. Want anything?”

“Nope. I’ll wait. Tell my wife to get us a room. I’ll see her in a couple of hours.”

“You seem pretty sure of that.”

“Yeah, I am. You know it was a righteous shoot.” I pointed at the one-way glass. “He knows it was a righteous shoot. You’re just going through the motions. You might mention to him that I know Mas Ayoob. I need him, I’ll call him. Your DA doesn’t want to face him in court.”

He paled a bit. Massad Ayoob was one of the best defense witnesses in the country, when self-defense shootings were the subject. I had met him. I didn’t know him. I wasn’t completely convinced he would take the case, but I was reasonably sure he would. If nothing else, it would be interesting to him.

“I’ll be back.”

“OK, Ahnuld.” I grinned at him.

He gave me a sour look and walked out the door.

Thirty minutes later, he walked back in. A tall fat guy with slicked back hair walked in a few steps behind him.

“Sir, I’m Jack Larson, the Assistant DA. We’re letting you go. We haven’t completed the formal inquest, so make sure you leave your address and phone number with us.”

“Can I have my pistol back?”

“We should impound it as evidence, but we won’t. What we’ve seen so far, coupled with your service record, makes us believe that you’re not a threat to society.”

I hid an inward smile. I had had a pretty decent security clearance when I was on active duty. I was in intelligence. I no longer had access to classified material, but still had the clearance. They screen pretty well for those. There were no blemishes in my past. Certainly nothing to make people believe I was a threat to them.

I looked at the detective. “Told you.” I grinned at him.

He gave me a glare. “You better not get in any more trouble in Emporia, tough guy. We’ll be watching you.”

“Watch away, tough guy. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll be leaving in the morning.”

Thirty minutes later, I was walking out of the police station with my gun on my hip. I got into the truck, drove to the hotel where we’d spend the night. I laid awake for the better part of two hours replaying the shooting in my mind.

Couldn’t get past the fact that there was no blood.

“Look,” Kathryn said, “this one has the keys in it.”

“It’s probably out of gas,” Maureen acknowledged, “most of the ones with the keys left in them are out of gas.”

“Well,” Kathryn stripped off her business suit jacket and searched the mercifully empty streets, “we’re gonna have to give it a try.” She climbed behind the wheel and unlocked the passenger door so that Maureen could climb in the other side.

“I never thought that I’d be caught dead in a Hyundai,” Maureen said as she shut herself in.

“Yeah,” Kathryn commented, “but I’d rather be caught dead in a Hyundai then caught by the living dead.” She tried to turn the ignition over but the car coughed like a sick old woman.

“See,” Maureen said, looking around cautiously, “the piece of shit’s dead. Now let’s get the hell out of here, we’re makin’ way too much noise.”

Instead of answering, Kathryn tried to turn it over again, and this time the car sputtered to life.

“Hot damn!” Maureen said and squeezed Kathryn’s arm. “Let’s cruise.” Maureen was a huge woman; bordering on morbidly obese. Her thin, patchy, gossamer strands of blonde hair framed her red face and the blotches of psoriasis which traveled up and down her exposed arms were shaped like small countries on an oceanographic map. Kathryn was glad that they had found a car, not for her sake, but for Maureen’s. She was not sure that the heavily breathing fat woman could escape quickly enough in the dreaded event that they should become cornered.

But now that Kathryn had the compact car started, she was faced with a new problem. This model was equipped with a stick shift; a four on the floor.

“You know how to drive one of these?” She asked Maureen. ”

Maureen looked at her confused. “Put it in drive,” she said.

“Well hell, I’ve never driv…” Halfway through Kathryn’s sentence the passenger side window shattered and a white arm roughly grabbed Maureen by the hair. The big woman screamed, scratched and pushed at the chest of an attacker who’s face could not yet be seen. “GO! GO! GO! GO!” she shouted. Kathryn threw her arms up in vexation and scanned the car’s controls. But she may as well have been staring at the console of an airplane and her panic was giving her even less chance of figuring it out.

“GO KATHY GO!” Maureen continued to buck and kick at the form which was trying to enter the cab.

“I’M TRYING! I’M…” As she pawed the gear shift the clutch inexplicably popped and the little car scooted a few feet, momentarily shedding the assaulter whose gruesome white face then came into view as it stumbled: one eye gone from a rifle shot which must have missed the brain. But the car soon stalled and the abomination was on them again. Maureen scooted across the seat in an effort to avoid the cold white hands of the monster but this move only squashed Kathryn up against the driver’s door; making it impossible for her to try the ignition again. For several seconds all she could do was try and catch her breath as her friend fought for her life against one of the living dead. She couldn’t even reach the door handle. But then, just as she was contemplating what it would be like to roam the city as a shuffling corpse, the sound of a gunshot reverberated off of the high buildings. And she heard Maureen’s voice go from high pitched wails of terror to sobs of relief. A second later she felt the considerable bulk of her robust friend ease up and off of her. Maureen was shivering as if she were wearing soaking wet clothes in sub zero temperatures. “OH Jesus, OH Jesus, OH Jesus.” She kept repeating.

When Kathryn could turn around again she saw that the back window of the Hyundai was smeared with bright red flecks of rose colored blood. As Maureen recovered enough to climb out of the car, Kathryn leaned over across the upholstery and inspected the slumped over body of the dead-dead man. His second eye now shot out also. She tried to start the Hyundai again, but it was as dead as the felled ghoul; out of gas after all. Kathryn got out of the driver’s side and looked back over the roof of the car towards the source of the snipe.

“Just in the nick of time,” an approaching voice said and Kathryn locked eyes with a man in a plain green soldier’s uniform with a matching helmet. A long rifle hung from a strap around his neck. This was obviously the marksman who had re-executed their deathly pale stalker. The man’s round and puffy face seemed much too swollen for his trained and trim body.

“OH, Thank you, thank you sir!” Maureen gushed as she took two uneven steps over trash and rubble towards her savior. Kathryn suspiciously brushed her long brown hair off of her alabaster cheek. “How will we ever be able to make it up to you.?” Maureen continued.

“Well,” said the man, “I’m not sure that you can.” And Kathryn was wary of his weird grin and the facetiousness which she sensed in his tone. She walked around the deceased car and stood at her friend’s side; her taut yet curvy body evident even under the business skirt and long sleeve white blouse. “But I might be able to think of something your friend here can do.” The man quipped. Kathryn understood what he was getting at perfectly, but Maureen didn’t seem to get the gist of it. She took another step towards the man and was now standing no more than four feet from him.

“Well,” she smiled, “if there’s anything that we can do, I’m sure… I mean, you saved our life. We really don’t know how to thank you.”

“Hey,” the man held his palms out innocently and continued through an earnest smile, “don’t mention it.” He then quickly raised the rifle and shot Maureen in the throat. She didn’t fall at once, but could only stand back and cover the wound in shock. Then she took her hands away from it for some desperate reason and a straight line of blood shot fifteen feet across the asphalt every time that her heart beat. Kathryn rushed to her friend’s side and dropped to her knees, almost catching her as she collapsed onto the cluttered street. Oblivious to the gunman, she tore off a strip of her blouse and pressed it against the wound; but Maureen only gaped for air, her mouth opening and closing like a manatee out of water. Kathryn heard a second loud boom; as if she were an inch from two cars colliding and now there was a hole in Maureen’s forehead to match the one in her throat. The big woman’s eyes grayed over and stared into the distance of the next world.

Kathryn scooted away from the body and stared up at the murderer from the seat of her skirt. He was chuckling, yet his weapon was pointed at the ground.

“You’re not going to kill me?” she asked.

“Why would would I shoot a smokin’ hot fox like you?” the man answered.

“But um… But I… you shot you… killed her. Why did you kill her?” Kathryn stuttered through the shock.

“I was doin’ her a favor.”

Kathryn mulled this over for a few seconds. “And you won’t do me the same favor?”

“No,” the man answered, “I’m not going to shoot you.” A gleam twinkled in his eye that must have been similar to the one Adam and Eve saw with as they bit into the apple. “But don’t worry,” he finished, “there will certainly be favors involved. Now March!” He raised the gun again.

“No!” Kathryn resisted defiantly, “kill me here but I’m not going with you.” She meant it. She did not want to see what this violent cretin had in store for her.

“Look bitch,” he began, “there are worse things than gettin’ shot: now get up and make that nice ass a yours march before I show you what those things are.” Kathryn didn’t move.

“MARCH!!!” This mean bellow frightened her enough to where she got up and began marching in the general direction of where he had his gun sight pointed. They walked for perhaps ten blocks without speaking, around stalled cars, crude makeshift sandbag forts and fire blackened barricades. Finally they rounded a corner and Kathryn found herself staring at a huge edifice of crushed cars. They stretched in between two buildings to create an impressive blockade. There was a doorway sized opening which had probably been left there intentionally by the crane operator. A second soldier stood in this entrance, listlessly smoking a cigarette. The men nodded at each other as they passed. On the other side of the junker wall there was a long segmented vehicle painted camouflage and covered with nets of black mesh. It reminded Kathryn of a mechanical caterpillar. Reacting to a shuffling sound off to her left Kathryn caught sight of a dead MAN IN A SUIT AND TIE as he stumbled out of an office building. He did not have to push the exit lever since all the glass doors had been busted or shot out. Before Kathryn could even cry out, yet another boom raped the silence and the zombie jumped as a head shot met with its scalp. A JFK sized flap jutted out from the side of its exposed skull right before it fell. There was a sniper atop the caterpillar which Kathryn had failed to notice and he had skillfully lopped the dead man’s brain off.

There was a wrought iron door in the center of the long bus which opened down like a draw bridge. The soldier softly tapped Kathryn in the small of the back with the tip of the powerful gun. Feeling that she had little choice she climbed inside. There were several other women within the capsule/cell. They laid haphazard under freckled spots of sunlight which circled in through small, perfectly round holes in the wall, as if coin blanks had been knocked out of them. None of them spoke to Kathryn or offered up any theories in the way of explanation. Some of them wore clothes which were dirty and disheveled, others still looked halfway presentable. The soldiers were obviously on patrol to collect prisoners and this made Kathryn wonder why Maureen had not also been spared? The draw bridge like door clanged closed behind her.

Then as she looked around the cab the similarities began to hit her: even with their tatted hair and torn clothes; even with their grimy skin and wept away mascara; even with their stinking underarms and chipped nails: all of the women confined within the car were at least fairly attractive.

2.

“Well it has to be better than wandering around out there,” a pale girl with tired, purple chevrons underneath her pretty hazel eyes was saying, “I mean, at least we’re away from those dead things.” Some of the women shook their heads yes, but most were too exhausted to answer. Kathryn and the others had been led into a brightly lit room where they sat at small exam desks like school children or collage students. There was a blackboard on the wall but there wasn’t anything written on it and no chalk could be found on its built in shelf. There was no apple nor was there a teacher’s desk to set one on. The room had no windows but there were two doors: one which they had been led through after exiting the caterpillar and a second door which was in the complete opposite corner. On each desk a glass of ice water had been placed and most of the women drank greedily.

After about fifteen minutes, the door which they had been led through opened and a man sauntered in. He wore a similar uniform to the one sported by the men who had captured Kathryn, only he had a baseball cap on rather than a helmet and there were two silver bars on the shoulder of his long sleeve shirt. His polished boots were free of dust and grit and tufts of thick black hair sprouted out from underneath the hat at wild intervals. He looked the ladies over with maddening turquoise eyes and even though his movements were controlled and strict, Kathryn sensed that he was deranged inside his mind.

“Hello Ladies,” he began, “my name is Captain Enervy.” The women straightened up and cocked their heads to listen even though he was speaking at a drill sergeant’s pitch. “I have some very good news for all of you: we are now inside a guarded and heavily armed compound. You are completely safe from the monstrous creatures which have, unfortunately, taken over a large part of our city. This is a situation that our forces are working hard to rectify. In the meantime you will be given food, lodging and you will be able to wash whenever you wish. You will also sleep in a warm bed.” He paused here and some of the women began to rejoice; clutching each other’s hands, cheering and even crying. But Kathryn, who had watched her friend executed, did not join in the celebration. “All that we ask in compensation is that you women comply with our orders which includes supplying companionship to and satisfying the needs of our troops.” The joyful chatter ebbed quickly and the happiness decelerated down into a bleak silence. Captain Enervy proudly surveyed the scene, ready to gauge the women’s reactions and field objections. After a few confusing seconds one woman stood up.

She wore nothing but a grungy tank top and a pair of tattered Levi’s. Her hair was cropped into an extremely short crew cut. But even in this unflattering apparel she was a breathtaking beauty: boson brown eyes large atop chiseled cheekbones.

“You mean,” she said, “that you want us to have sex with them.” Captain Enervy looked the woman right in the face and Kathryn saw a flash of the temper which he was making an effort to conceal.

“Yes,” he answered simply, “we want you to have sex with them.”

“Jesus,” the standing woman said, “you guys are unbelievable. Instead of using your weapons to help people you want to turn the world into one big brothel.” Kathryn felt like telling the dissident to pipe down; she was sure that the girl did not realize how hot the fire she was playing with could scorch. Perhaps her introduction to this army had been kinder than Kathryn’s violent, murder splattered initiation. Oblivious to these grave dangers however, the girl continued. “Well I won’t do it. I refuse! I will not! I will not! I’d rather take my chances with the walking dead than have some sweaty grunt rape me every night. At least the dead are honest and up front about their intentions.”

Captain Enervy slowly strolled around the room, addressing everyone except the short haired woman. “I strongly suggest to all of you that you stay here with us in comfort and safety. I’m sure that, at some point, some of you may have to perform acts which you might find distasteful or immoral, but I assure you! There will be no rough stuff and you will be treated with respect as brides of the regiment. And I implore you…” Here he paused for effect, “I implore you to consider the heinous alternative.” The room fell silent as the women’s troubled, overloaded minds contemplated this difficult choice. The defiant woman continued to stand but she didn’t shatter the break. Finally, after about half a minute, Captain Enervy seemed to be speaking for her.

“Of course, if anyone feels that they have a better chance out there, with those shuffling ghouls, then they are free to go. Private Gliet!” He called out to a man at the back of the room. Kathryn hadn’t noticed the man before and she wondered how long he’d been standing there. She even supposed that it was possible that he’d been there for the duration of Enervy’s announcement, but she didn’t think so. He was a tall soldier: perhaps six foot two or three, in marvelous physical condition. Although his features seemed tainted by a trace of mental retardation; almost as if he were a mongoloid.

“Show this nice young lady the way out.” Captain Enervy said as Kathryn shivered and trepidation traveled up her delicate spine. Private Gleit nodded and gestured towards the standing woman like a waiter ready to show someone to their table. He held his arm out towards the second door; the one located on the opposite side of the room from which they had entered. The woman took a few timid steps, perhaps starting to sense what Kathryn already knew: that this seemingly carefree release from the regiment was too good to be true. And so it was.

As the woman approached the threshold, Private Gliet simultaneously accosted her while swinging open the door. The sunshine which flooded in was even brighter than the room’s white lights. There was no floor or stairway beyond the frame: just the thin air floating invisible over a twenty five foot drop. Before the short haired women even had a chance to scream Private Gliet hurled her out head first. When she did scream, it sounded as if her voice were floating up and out from an elevator shaft. At the bottom of her drop were the dead; hundreds of them crawling and falling over each other like salamanders in the mud. They did not even have the sense to catch her or break her fall. So when her vivacious frame met with the hard, packed down sand something could be heard snapping: perhaps an arm or a leg. They converged upon her quickly however; pulling her apart like lions raking at a bison carcass. Mercifully the screams didn’t last long as they soon pulled out her voice box. Her clothes quickly disappeared along with her skin. The carnage ended as someone who had once been someone ate her beautiful face.

Back up in the room panic ensued. Private Gliet, his mission accomplished, stood at attention with his back to the wall. The women roared and screamed and cried and several of them stood up on their chairs. They stomped their feet on the seats like cartoon wives in white aprons afraid of a kitchen mouse; as if trying to put as much distance between themselves and the dead pit as possible. Kathryn did not get up, but she buried her face in her hands and tears sizzled out from in between her fingers. Captain Enervy stood upright with his hands still clasped behind the back. The mad violence which always seemed to be spinning in his eyes momentarily quelled.

“Now!” He shouted spiritedly, “if there are no more conscientious objectors, I suggest that you all get some sleep.” He paused here to salute the moaning women. “Report for makeovers at 0900.”

3.

The salty smell of the nearby sea tickled their nostrils and billowy strips of evaporating clouds dissolved in front of the unbridled sun. The group rode on the back of a flatbed wagon; much like a hayride only devoid of any leisure or fun. They were being pulled along by a tractor which was driven by a heavy set, thick legged matron who was also wearing the now familiar uniform of the regiment. Only this version came with a skirt instead of pants. She had no holster for a gun, but a long truncheon hung from a loop on her accessory belt. The words: PENIS ENVY had been carved neatly down its shaft.

All of the women had gotten a chance to shower and they were furnished with toothbrushes, deodorants and other sundries. Not having a fresh change of duds however, they had had to put their soiled clothes back on. They did not see any soldiers along this path save for the matron and talk among the passengers soon turned to crude escape plots.

“I wouldn’t,” said Kathryn. Then she pointed to a distant tree line. Barely visible in the rising haze was a tall chain link fence with looping scribbles of razor wire and spikes at its highest point. As they got a little closer to that spot and rounded a bend, the dead could be seen clinging to its tiny octagons in between crawls of climbing vines; like grotesque butterflies on a screen door.

“We’re still inside the compound,” she whispered, “they must have gunners perched atop the perimeter: not so much to keep us in as to keep the dead out, but I’m sure they’d shoot anything that moved.” As if on cue a distant spit of machine gun fire crackled in the morning air and the peering dead peeled off of the fence. It was 8:45 AM.

Finally, the tractor ground to a halt in front of what had been a department store. Mannequins stood naked in front of the shattered out display windows and fallen clothes littered the aisles. Some of the panels were missing from the ceiling and sunlight made its way through the voids, taking over the job of the snuffed electricity. Otherwise, it looked basically alright. The heavy set woman who had been driving hopped down from the tractor seat.

“My name is Sergeant Marge,” she shouted, “what I need for your ladies to do is go inside there and pick yourself out some clothes. If I were you I would select something short, bright and sexy. You will also find a large assortment of cosmetics inside. I suggest that you paint those pretty faces up bright and rosy; the more the soldiers like you the faster they’ll be finished with you and you can go on back to your barracks. Do not use any hairspray as the men don’t like the way it feels and DO NOT select any outfits with pants: DRESSES only! Don’t worry about the living dead as this sector has long been cleared and you are behind friendly lines.”

Here one of the women, a thirty something brunette with thick, preened eyebrows, scoffed and whispered to her friend: “Yeah, real friendly.” This prompted Sergeant Marge to stop her instructional speech and walk through the crowd where she met the brunette. She put her chin one centimeter from the woman’s cheek and spat at the side of her face, “DO NOT interrupt me!” The woman froze and stood at attention. The big woman turned as if to walk away, before quickly spinning around, drawing her club and bringing it around in a three quarter circle onto the back of the woman’s leg. The brunette hit the street and cried out in agony as she tried to massage life back into her throbbing calve. Satisfied, the sergeant continued.

“So,” she picked up her lost thought. “You will be safe at all times. You’re all welcome to try and escape, although I can assure you that it is impossible and even if you did manage to breach our security you would still be without food, water or shelter. Not to mention that you would be at the mercy of the living dead, who, as we all know, are not capable of mercy.” She paused here, and looked around, waiting for her words to sink in. “While, on the other hand, if you’re smart and go along with our curriculum: you will be well fed, comfortable and in no danger. Hell,” before finishing this sentence, she even had to scoff at herself, “you might even find that, after a while, you’re startin’ to enjoy it.” The women said nothing, although the way most of them shuffled in place clearly indicated that they had their doubts. “Alright! I need you little whores to make yourselves beautiful. I’ll expect to see you back here and lookin’ like super models at eleven hundred.”

4.

When the sun was at its pinnacle, Sergeant Marge led Kathryn and the others down towards the beach on foot. It was a little treacherous walking on the sands since some girls had selected high heels or pumps. As they approached a sentry post which led onto the dunes two guards looked Kathryn and the others over lustfully. A wolf whistle was heard as one of the men feigned masturbation and leered like a chimp. Some of the girls had a little trouble climbing a high sand cliff in their prissy shoes. But the ground leveled off at the top and they all looked out over the omniscient ocean. A chubby cloud suddenly blocked off the sun’s rays and the waves whipped a dark blue like an endless dream of troubling shadows.

The soft and salty squalls teased the teased hair of the forced prostitutes as they were led towards several tents. The structures were small and circular, lavishly draped in velvet like a knight’s quarters. Triangular flags, tugged straight out by the ample winds, flapped atop each bungalow. As they approached the initial doorway, the first woman was ordered inside. She put up no opposition and disappeared behind the curtain. It did not take much imagination on the part of the group to know what was going to happen to her next, and even if it would have, they would soon be experiencing similar treatment themselves and would have no need to vex their imaginations. After three more stops it was soon Kathryn’s turn and she was ushered into one of the tents.

A black man sat at the edge of a wide cot; wearing only an army green t-shirt, dog tags and loose fitting boxing shorts. He was slowly breathing through a cigarette and made no more movement then a waiting spider. There was no floor save for the sand of the beach as Kathryn demurely stepped inside. There was a bottle of Crown Royal Whiskey sitting on a nearby backpack and two collapsible director’s chairs across from and facing the cot. At last he moved a little.

“Sit down,” he said, “you want a drink?”

Kathryn thought about this for a beat, decided that she’d never wanted anything more, and shook her head yes. Although the man had yet to look at her, he somehow caught her nod and poured her a sip in a plain plastic glass. She sat down across from him in one of the chairs. “Stuff’ll be gone pretty soon,” he said, “be a real shame to never drink Crown Royal again. Who knows what kinda shit we be resortin’ to drinkin’ after that; mother fuckers be goin blind and shit.” Kathryn didn’t answer or react in any way. After a few seconds, she did take a sip of the hard brown liquid. When she commenced coughing the man spoke again: “Yeah, I know you scared, but you got to ask yourself: who worse? ME!? Or them hordes out there? Any sane individual know the answer. If there are any sane people left that is. Hell, I ain’t that scary.”

In the pause, the man poured himself another. “What’s your name?” He asked.

“Kathryn,” she answered blandly.

“Hmmm, how you feelin’ Kathryn?”

It was an odd question, and after mulling it over for a couple of seconds, Kathryn just felt compelled to answer honestly. “I feel a little under it,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he half laughed, “no wonder, me too.”

He got up and walked over to a basin of water; bending over to splash some onto his tough and leathery features. As he toweled off he said: “Well, we best be gettin’ on with it. Climb up on that cot over there.”

Without much vigor, yet resolved to her fate, Kathryn walked over and laid down on her back. She didn’t even have a chance to settle in before the man was on her; his service revolver pressed up against her temple and his breath on her cheek. She gasped in shock.

“What you think huh?” he raved, “you think I’m like these animals roun’ here HUH! You think I force myself on some poor girl ain’t willin’ HUH!” Kathryn’s only defense from this offbeat attack was to close her eyes tight, forcing a hot tear to leak out and streak across her cheek. “What I want with you white bread? Me I gots… I mean I had… a wife and baby a my own. I know they out there somewhere,” He waved his arm in a gesture which represented everywhere. “I know they…” He stopped talking and jumped up suddenly. Kathryn rose up to a sitting position as he knelt down in the corner of the hut and began to weep roughly. When he had quieted some, she got up from the cot and walked over to where he was doubled over. Putting her petite hand in between his muscular shoulder blades she softly spoke.

“It’s okay,” she said, “We have all lost someone that we loved.”

After a couple of more minutes of sobbing, he slowly picked himself up and walked back over to sit on the cot. Kathryn stayed where she was, her knees in the sand. He swallowed the final gulp of whisky and began speaking on a new subject:

“Enervy is a monster,” he said, “not just a close minded grunt, but a dangerous killer. When he picks you, and sooner or later he will ’cause he always picks the pretty ones, you as good as dead.” Kathryn could only stare at him. “He like to make porno and snuff films; force chicks to fuck the dead, evil shit like that. I only wish that there was somethin’ that I could do for ya.”

Kathryn shrugged and smiled faintly. “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly as if a thought had just occurred to him, “wait a minute.” He leaned over and reached into his backpack; retrieving a handsome military issue buck knife complete inside a camouflage sheath. He got up quickly and offered it to Kathryn. “Hide this, don’t show it to that dyke Marge, don’t show it to any of the bitches in your barracks, don’t show it to no one. When Enervy picks you, wait until you get him by himself. When he turn around you bury this spike in his black heart ya hear me? It’s your only chance.”

Kathryn looked at the knife. It was long and intimidating, but she supposed that she could hide it inside her bottoms. She smiled gratefully and took the bracketed blade. “Thank you,” she said.

“Yeah alright,” He sauntered back over and reclined onto the cot. His relaxed posture a sharp contrast to the madness he had demonstrated throughout their rendezvous. “By the way Kathryn, my name is Granderson. Pleased to meet ya.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“When that dyke Marge comes back you tell her everything was cool; you had a good time.”

5.

Several days passed inside the stainless steel barracks which may have been more accurately described as a cell. Kathryn didn’t do much of anything during this interlude aside from lying forlornly in her bunk and praying that she wouldn’t be selected for a second and surely more intimate date. Now and then the dull, mirrored door would roll open and Sergeant Marge would call out the name of the next unfortunate escort.

Kathryn didn’t make many friends throughout this period, nor did she want to. Sporadic spurts of conversation floated past her ears intermittently, but the topics were limited to such small talk as the good condition of the food, the affable temperature of the cell and the crisp and clean sheets. No one seemed eager to touch upon the subject of their forced sexual encounters or the horrific encounters they’d had with the dead which had led to their imprisonment here. Kathryn didn’t much want to talk either, even though she’d been fortunate enough to avoid being blackmailed into intercourse; at least so far.

She hid the buck knife underneath her mattress since that was the only place to hide anything. At times when she felt the most dread, she would finger the blade which Granderson had loaned her, praying that she would have the courage to use it when the crucial moment came. Then she closed her eyes and drifted into a rash phantasm:

She was trapped inside a burning mobile home which had been surrounded by the dead. She could see the tops of their squash colored heads moving past the small, weak, roll out windows. She fled into the hallway bathroom and closed herself off inside a cramped closet. But the moaning marauders were relentless. They shredded their hands and forearms, even bashing their soft heads against the aluminum siding until she could sense that the panels were starting to give. Then they were walking inside the blaze; becoming the fire, awash in flames, willing to endure any Hellish barrage to get at her. Until they wrapped their cold burning arms around her and the last sound she would ever hear were chained up dogs howling in the distance. She awoke to Sergeant Marge calling out her name, in the same gruff pitch as the pit bulls from her nightmare.

She rolled over on her side before rising and slid the knife down inside her pink underwear.

Once outside she discovered that it hadn’t been night after all as the hot sun blushed in an endlessly clear sky. There was no clock or fixed schedule inside the barracks, making it impossible to tell the time of day. They did not return to the tents, but rather walked for a short stretch along the shore until they came to a lavish beach house. Its picturesque balustrade affording any onlooker a scenic view of the tumultuous pacific.

As Kathryn climbed the wooden stairs which led up from the beach, she recognized Captain Enervy sitting leisurely on a deck chair. His tan and muscular body covered only by a pair of oak green army issue swimming trunks. “Hello,” he said with surprising friendliness, and then as he looked past Kathryn, “that will be all Marge.”

The Sergeant saluted and said, “I’ll be at the bottom of the stairs if you need me Captain,” with that she turned and exited. Enervy studied Kathryn for several seconds before sipping an icy drink in a tall glass. His gaze did not seem as disquieting in this relaxing setting although he did not ask her to sit down or offer her a beverage. Finally he said, “Do you know why you’ve been brought here?”

Kathryn’s mouth turned up at the corners, “for sex,” she said bluntly.

Enervy chuckled petulantly, “because there are some things going on here at the base that I think you should know about.”

“Why tell me about them?”

Enervy got up then and began to pace. This reminded Kathryn of the military manner which he had displayed in the classroom and of his potential for being gravely dangerous.

“Because I like you. I’ve liked you from the first time that I saw you.”

“That’s nice,” Kathryn said sarcastically. He seemed to get a little peeved at this.

“You don’t understand, there are dangers everywhere. My offer to you could save your life.”

“Offer?”

“You could become an exclusive. An officer’s mate if you will. A position which would give you a chance to get out of the barracks; living in an officer’s quarters with only one man. In a monogamous relationship. Yet before I can offer up these luxuries, I need to have a sense of your attitude towards this promotion. Not everyone gets a chance to avoid the camp’s pitfalls.”

“You mean like the pit that women fell into when you ordered her murdered.”

Enervy grimaced again, he seemed to be getting annoyed at the way that she kept shooting him down.

“That was very unfortunate,” he said, “but she was trying to instigate a riot. We cannot have anybody stirring up controversy or inciting rebellion. DISCIPLINE!” He shouted with such force that Kathryn was taken aback as he began raving, “We must have order here or else every women in that room, including you, would have had to die. Every woman in that room would have to be sacrificed to preserve order and… wouldn’t that be a shame to waste all that beauty?” Here he smiled slyly and with a wave of his hand finished, “one bad apple, you see.” He sat back down and took a sip of the drink. His anger having passed as quickly as it came about. This gave Kathryn the courage to say:

“So you’re a good guy, is that it?”

He hatched a peevish grin, “There are no good guys or bad guys, only survivors.” He got up from the chair and stepped towards her. “It’s a difficult call, I understand. But I’m afraid that it’s one you’ll have to make rather quickly.” He was standing right in front of her now and she tried not to step back from him or seem intimidated. “I’m afraid that humanity no longer has any time for courting. And I personally have many responsibilities here at the base, so I won’t be able to wine and dine you.” He took her firmly by the shoulders and kissed her softly on the mouth. Her heart began to beat as if she were searching for a bomb in a maze of industrial pipes. She could feel the knife pressing against her abdomen as his hands traced down the small of her back and squeezed her buttocks. She knew that the time for action was now; it would only be a few seconds before he pressed against her and discovered the knife. But she was frozen by fear and stress. She leaned back, almost feinted and then was righted by his strong arm. When she went limp however her muscles contracted and the knife slipped and dislodged from her underwear. It hit the wooden deck with an audible thud. It then bounced under the railing and onto the sands below.

“What was that?” He shouted, “You bitch you… who sent you here to kill me?”

Kathryn couldn’t answer, the scene was too much for her nerves and she was going in and out of consciousness. He let her go and she collapsed onto the deck. Enervy abandoned her felled frame and walked over to the railing.

“Sergeant!” He shouted. Marge walked out from under the deck into view and looked up at them. “Fetch me that weapon.” She looked at where he was pointing and walked towards the knife. Enervy stormed back over and lifted Kathryn’s dizzy head off the wood planks. “Now bitch,” he began, “you’re going to tell me what you’re doing here or I’m going to cut your fucking eyes out!”

Marge stomped up the stairs then. “Hold her down Captain,” she said, “I’m going to teach this little hussy a lesson.”

He did so. “Don’t kill her Sergeant,” he said, “I need to find out some information from her.”

“Oh don’t worry Captain, don’t worry about anything.”

What happened next flabbergasted Kathryn to the point where she didn’t know if it was real or imagined: Sergeant Marge stepped around Captain Enervy and, in one swift motion, plunged the buck knife into his unprotected eye. He wavered, wavered and a stream of yellow liquid shot out from his retina. Sergeant Marge quickly reached over and extracted the knife before plunging it back in again as if she were hacking through a watermelon. This time the Captain fell; the blade still protruding from his eye; its handle covered by a wash of blood and other internal fluids which dripped down onto the deck and Kathryn’s fair forehead. She could feel his heavy body pinning her down and before her mind revolved into blackness, she heard Sergeant Marge say:

“Get up murderer, you’re going to have to answer for killing the captain.”

6.

When Kathryn awoke she was being marched down the beach. Sergeant Marge had her arm twisted behind her back; tangled in with the club like a splint.

“March whore! March whore!” She kept shouting and finally Kathryn’s feet began to walk for themselves, even though she had lost her shoes at some point and the grains of sand felt like miniscule shards of glass. They soon abandoned the beach however and Kathryn’s brown toes burned on the hot asphalt. Before long they came to a block building with the anagram Y CA hanging from the second story bricks. The second letter in the abbreviation was obviously missing with two bare, rusted prongs sticking out between the Y and the C. As Kathryn was being marched through a locker room she began to hear the moans. Like the cries of the prisoners of Dante’s Inferno themselves. She tried to run but Marge tightened the splint. “Don’t even think about it bitch.”

They came to the room which was the source of the ungodly noises. There had once been an Olympic pool at its center but the water had long been drained. Now the dead were crawling around on the hard floor; trying to climb out; sliding back down the walls and falling over each other; writhing like fat snakes. Marge marched Kathryn right to the edge of the pool. The dead made no reaction aside from continuing to try to escape. Kathryn braced her self for the cruelest of deaths but before she could be thrown in, she heard the sound of applause or rather; one man clapping.

Sergeant Marge whirled around as Granderson walked out of the shadows laughing heartily.

“Captain Granderson,” she said, “this woman murdered Captain Enervy and then she tried to attack me. I was taking her to the pool.” Kathryn stared at Granderson, desperation in her eyes. He shot her a reaffirming look that gave her hope.

“How was he killed?” He asked Marge.

“With this sir, she must have stolen it from one of the officers.”

Granderson nodded and retrieved his own gore splattered knife from the Sergeant. “Yes,” he said.

“Captain Granderson, this may be an inopportune time to bring this up. But you’ll be needing a replacement for Captain Enervy. I’d like to respectfully submit my name for serious consideration.”

“Don’t worry Sergeant Marge,” he answered, “you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

“I’m glad to hear that sir, I have done my best for the regiment.”

“Mmm hmm, mmm hmm,” Granderson was staring at the knife and seemed to be thinking about something else.

“What about this wretched underhanded bitch sir? Do you want me to toss her into the pit?”

Kathryn stiffened in terror.

“Well,” he said while hatching a smile, “why don’t you let me worry about her?”

Marge looked around slightly confused and then, perhaps not wanting to defy the Captain, she released Kathryn from the wrestle hold.

“Will there be anything else captain?”

“I don’t think so,” he said before quickly pulling out his service revolver, “at ease Sergeant.” He pointed the gun and shot the thick bodied soldier right between the eyes. The back of her head exploded before she blinked once in shock and fell onto the tiles like a folded up lawn chair. Kathryn stepped back agape; this was the third time in less than a week that she’d watched someone executed at point blank range before her very eyes and the impact which the shock had upon her did not lesson with repetition. Granderson casually strolled up to them and nudged her body over the edge of the pool with his boot. She hit the pond of dead and bounced around like a dingy in a hurricane; before her body went under their solid surface and disappeared in a violent whirlpool of gore. He then looked at Kathryn and smiled wide.

“Ah, thank you, thank you so very much Kathryn for doing what I could not: I’ve wanted Enervy out of the way for some time now. But the sycophants within his faction never would have stood for it. I would have been tried for it and well… the trials around here usually end the same.” He gestured towards the pool. “But this: this senseless self defense at the hands of a whore. Why it’s practically perfect and I even get rid of that dyke Marge to boot. Too ambitious that one. Now I’ll follow you, through those doors.” He said before sticking the revolver in between her two shoulder blades. As she’d done so many times in the last few days, Kathryn began to march. He continued: “And with Enervy out of the picture my faction will take over the entire compound with me as commander in chief. Tantamount to a king nowadays.” Kathryn noticed for the first time that the colloquial street lingo he’d been using back in the tent was gone and he was now talking with the brio of a college professor. They crossed through a tiled opening which had no door and into a shower room. “Now as a reward for so bravely assassinating my biggest political rival I’m prepared to make you a star.” Kathryn rounded another corner and standing in front of a row of shower stalls she saw a video camcorder perched atop a tripod.

“A porn star maybe, but a star none the less.” Kathryn could hear an awful gurgling sound coming from one of the stalls which was obscured by a curtain, like a dog which had been run over by a milk truck whimpering and wounded on the road. She slowed down as she approached the source but Granderson urged her on with the gun. “I’d like to introduce you to someone.” He quipped. Grabbing her mane tightly so that she could not run. Granderson pulled back the shower curtain revealing a monstrous spectacle.

There was a purple faced dead man standing in the shower stall. He was held in place by an intricate web of barbed wires which made deep laceration in his beige skin. There was no blood flowing from these fresh cuts however and his upper lip had been either been lopped off or had disintegrated from decay. There was no teeth in his mouth and both of his arms had been surgically amputated at the forearm. He looked up at them with a savage longing in his bright teal eyes.

” This is Corporal John,” Granderson said, “he may be dead, but he does have one attribute that not every zombie has;” here Granderson paused and pulled a toga off of the hideous creature’s midsection. “You see old John here still has the fire down below.” Kathryn tried to bolt, but this only tightened the grip that Granderson had on her long hair. He continued as if she had not even tried to escape: “That’s right: John here, long lost buddy of ours, will respond to sexual stimulation.” Kathryn struggled and cried, but the Captain was much too strong for her. “So what I want from my actress is very simple Kathryn,” he reached up over his head and switched on a boom box which had been sitting atop the block divider wall. The familiar riffs of the Rolling Stones ‘Start Me Up’ strummed out. “You just listen to old Mick Jagger here, where ever he may be. Because he’s got some good advice for you and we’re goanna find out if your hot enough:” He switched on the camcorder. “We’re gonna see if you can make a dead man cum.”

7.

Private First Class John Wilkes Scooter Benson was glad that he’d joined the army. God knows where the hell he would have ended up if he’d went to college with his pencil necked high school buddies; probably roaming the streets like some possessed puppet, looking for some poor bastard’s entrails to munch on. Whew, he shivered. As it were he was situated inside a safe compound. He slept in a firm but comfortable bed inside a five star barracks. Chowed down on a hot breakfast, before reporting to his cushy duty. And while there were still poor bastards out there somewhere, scavenging for their very lives, he pulled on clean, laundered and starched socks every morning. Hell, next week it was going to be his company’s turn with the women. They… His thoughts were interrupted by a flash of motion on the far right of his peripheral and a quarter of a second later he emptied a clip into a walking corpse who had once been a very attractive woman in a yellow sun dress. Not long after the big slender bullets ripped her apart his two way crackled out a garbled spiel.

“What’s goin’ on over there tower sixteen? Over.”

Scooter picked up the two way. “What the hell da you think’s goin’ on? I got a walker two blocks northwest and I just took her head off. Over.”

There was a brief pause and then the radio barked again, “10-4. Over.”

Scooter had seen them riding by on the back of the flat wagon. Jesus they had looked good; some of those dresses didn’t cover much more than a napkin would have. They must have sent a rescue squad over to the Playboy Mansion to come up with those bitches. One more work week and he would get to sample the goods: if you could even call this work that is. Sitting in an armored tower shooting at these slow, stupid, mothers like they were clay ducks. He’d played video games which were ten times harder. Hell, some of the guys were even bringing twelve packs up into the towers with them. May as well drink as many cold ones as possible before the supply was gone forever. Sniper command knew about it but they didn’t give a shit. Hell some of the guys aim was even a little sharper with a couple beers in em, took the edge off. And the… His thoughts were boggled again by a stir of dust a great distance away; out past the old fish hatchery, which was barely visible on the farthest rim of the firmament. It looked like a dust storm kicking up or fog maybe.

“What the hell,” scooter muttered and picked up his binoculars. But he wasn’t really prepared for the sight he beheld once he lifted the field glasses to his eyes: THE DEAD! Hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them marching across the exposed prairies down past the old dilapidated foundries towards the outskirts of the town. Like maggots on the carcass of a deceased world; shaking and squirming and deathly white. Ready to attach themselves to any living or dying population. Scooter lowered the field glasses.

“Holy fucking shit!” he said.

8.

In her bare feet Kathryn scrambled across a high asphalt parking ramp. She could not see the beach, but she could hear the roar of the ocean splashing up against the concrete barriers and continuing on up underneath the beams which held the structure she was standing on in place. The drum like pop of automatic gunfire came from every direction; challenged in pitch only by the locust like drone of the moaning dead.

Back inside the Y CA from where she had just fled, Kathryn had stood up straight in front of Captain Granderson and told him to shoot her in the chest rather than force her to copulate with the grotesquely disfigured and demonized Corporal John. The officer looked out from behind the camcorder and grinned like a hyena, but just as he was preparing a fresh wisecrack, an invisible force slammed into his shoulder. He screamed in agony as a small geyser of blood leaped from the new wound in a vivid splash. Before he could even collect himself a second projectile struck him in the opposite shoulder, causing him to fold down onto his knees. Kathryn took a step forward towards the front of the stall as the shooter came into view; With his one eye twisted into a cruel taffy like laceration, which resembled a mass of egg yokes mixed with ketchup and tarter sauce, Captain Enervy approached them. Thick spiraled designs of dried blood on his bare chest. His good eye shining as blue as a whirlpool whipped by a cyclone; relishing the prospect of retribution and vengeance.

“Hello Granderson,” he said, “didn’t think you were going to get rid of a soldier of my caliber that easily did you?” Granderson didn’t answer but only writhed in agony on the hard shower floor. a huge circumference of gore widening around him. “You think I don’t know the people who want me out of the way around here? Your coup is through asshole and another bullet’s too good for you. Now get up and march to the pit.” Kathryn would have backed into the stall and hid, but with Corporal John zoned into the booth she had little choice but to stand her ground. Finally Enervy noticed her and turned towards her.

“Ahh, the little cunt.” he said, “still think you’re an assassin? I ought to throw you in the pits.” Kathryn said nothing, but could only stand dumbfounded by the awful sight of the maimed soldier. “Nah,” he said after a few seconds. “I think I’ll just blow your fucking head off.” But even as he pointed the gun at her to carry out this threat, Granderson sprang up from the floor. The two men locked onto each other as the gun went off again. The bullet ricocheted throughout the block partitions before hitting Corporal John in the head. His brain exploded like a stink bomb full of thick black ink and his horrid body collapsed only to be held up by the web of wires. This sight drove Kathryn into a near frenzy of fear and she shot around the two struggling men to escape down the hallway. She heard several more gunshots as she exited the building but would never know who shot whom.

Now she was crossing over from the asphalt and back onto the beach; grains of sand digging into the balls of her red feet like metal shavings. Wasps sang around her and she slapped at her head dizzily, before realizing with a rising sense of terror that it was gunfire in the air which was making the buzzing noise; gunfire which was narrowly missing her pretty head. She dropped onto her stomach to avoid the bullets, but a lump in the sand brushed up against her: It was a severed head with a hole the size of a grapefruit underneath its blood soaked hair line. She screamed and rose again. Running down the beach in an aimless panic.

She ran for a great while without reason or direction, zigzagging through a field of the living dead. But they were slow and cadaverous and she managed to avoid most of them easily. Periodically, some of them exploded and were hurled fifteen feet into the air; their frail bodies cracking apart like wooden figures on a firing range. Although Kathryn, in her distress, did not even realize that she was running through a mind field.

Ultimately, she came along to a line of soldiers. Slowly retreating as a massive front of the dead converged upon them. They fired their impressive weapons continuously; the large pellets seeming to evaporate in the cold flesh of the creatures like snow melting onto a hillside; only the occasional shot finding its target and obliterating an evil brain. They also coated the creatures with the incinerating spittle from a squadron of flame throwers. But, just as in the dream which Kathryn was now recalling in a deja vu, the wall of flames had a minor effect.

After Kathryn ran around and then past the battle, the soldiers began to be overcome. The sheer numbers of their maggot ridden opponents defeating their ample firepower. And the dead covered them over like the tide washing out the sands; their screams piercing the air like a bite pinching through flesh.

She continued on at a full sprint; darting in a line concurrent with the fence; the dead clinging to the links like fancy colorful insects pinned to a cloth; an endless mass of their decaying brethren swelling against the ramparts behind them. Hundreds of thousands of white ghouls as far as the eye could encompass. Kathryn fell for the second time, filling her eyes up with the coarse sand. For a few seconds she could only crawl slowly before she sensed a great violence around her and rose to run down the beach blindly. She bounced off of mysterious forms now and then but had no way of knowing whether or not it was one of the soldiers or one of the dead. After a few frightful seconds of this she could feel the warm ankle deep waters of the Pacific sloshing through her toes. She dropped to her knees and frantically washed the sand out of her eyes. When she could open them again, she saw the flags of the tents; the knight’s quarters where she had first encountered Granderson and the girls in her group had first encountered the lust of the regiment. The fabric was being ripped apart by the dead; who were perhaps hoping to find even more quarry inside the makeshift huts.

Instinctively, she began slowly backing into the waves until the warm waters were at her waist. Thankfully, the flesh eaters did not seem to be following her into the depths. Most of the soldiers gamely fought on against long odds rather than flee into the ocean. Perhaps the instincts instilled in them during their training spurred them on to make a stand or maybe they just did not want to get their precious guns wet. Now the water was at Kathryn’s neck as the fence collapsed in many sections under the great push of the lifeless yet living throng. The creatures crawled across the hot sands as if blind and hungry like a million infant crabs searching for a slimy meal in the wet dirt. The death shouts of the regiment were somehow louder and more painful than the steady moan of the cold crowd; as if the souls of the soldiers were suffering more misery than even the tortured, solid ghosts who confronted them. But even if they could defeat the dead in terms of agony, they could not defeat them in battle. The last pocket of the regiment was cornered and torn apart like strips of red rags. Kathryn sighed, nearly cried, turned from the horrid scene and began to swim.

END.

[ I look down on the city of LA, from my perch on a balcony in the hills above the city. The sounds of reconstruction and clean up still echo even 10 years after the war. I'm waiting for the owner of this large, walled in compoud. It is definately a post war consturction. Part House, part shooting range, part bunker and storage facility. It's owner, a very successful business man, gives lessons in shooting, and most importantly, the art of killing the undead. I'm here to get his story of what had happened when the day came, when the dead walked the Earth. ]

My name is Jack. It had been four months since my inactive reserve status had expired, from my tenure in the Marine Corps. I had joined back in 02′, right out of high school. My grandfather had his war, in Europe, my father had his war in Indochina, back before it was even Vietnam, and now I was going to have my war, in the Middle East. I busted my ass to be the top of everything I did, and it paid off. I was noticed by a Gunnery Sergeant who was looking for people to take the “indoc” as they called it for Force Recon. Those guys were the best of the best. I jumped at the chance. I nearly killed myself trying to pass that thing, and nearly drowned during the swimming portion. I eventually made it. I was pipe lined through all the appropriate schools, and a few months later, was part of a 4 man team kicking in insurgents doors in Iraq, and later Afghanistan. Five years…Four deployments in all, and I’d had enough. After my extension was up, me and the Corps parted ways.

Four and a half years later I wondered if I was any better off. I was going to school, working a part time job, barely scraping by. I kept hearing on the news about this African Rabies thing going around. African Rabies? Christ. Every year it was something new. SARS, Bird Flu, that damn thing the mosquitos give you now. Whatever. Not like I thought it’d ever bother me.

I was always the prepared type though, you know?

How so?

Well. Coming from a Spec Op background, you’re always trained to expect the worst, hope for the best. I had some MREs stashed in the garage, a few cases of water. You know. In case something happens. Earthquake, Riots…I don’t know.. Aliens? Hell. I even always joked with my girlfriend about the zombies coming. I loved zombie movies. [he laughs] I guess that paid off in the long run. Anyway. I was a firearms collector too. It was a pain in California, prewar anyway. I also kept a lot of stuff when I left the Corps. Combat losses, you know? I must have had 3 or 4 sets of body armor alone. I had some nice toys too. My buddy snagged me this beauty of a scope from the Armory when we left Afghanistan. Said it was lost in transport. That came in handy when it…happened.

Where were you when you realized something was wrong?

It was a Friday night. I don’t remember the date exactly. My roommate was a big party person. He’d go out clubbing, and I’d have the place to myself. So me and my girl would stay in and watch movies. We weren’t really the go out type ya know? Anyway. It was like two in the morning, when my roommate came in. I had just gotten back from taking Justina, that’s my girl’s name, home when he asked if we had any hydrogen peroxide. Some crazy homeless guy had bitten him when he threw him some change. He was bleeding pretty good, so I took him into the bathroom, and checked it out. It didn’t look like it needed any stitches, so we cleaned it out, wrapped it, and gave him a shot of vodka for good measure. He said he wasn’t feeling too hot, so he went to bed. I must have crashed out on the couch not too long after that, because the next thing i know, its early in the morning, and I hear this loud banging from his room.

What did you think it was?

I didn’t know. Sounded like he was wrestling a bear. I thought maybe someone had broken in through his window, woke him up, and was fighting them off. I slipped into my room, and grabbed my Kimber. I had bought a matching set of them for me and my girl. Both the 4inch SIS models, we have had our names engraved on both sides of the slide. How romantic, right? Anyway, I always had it with me…

Wasn’t that illegal?

Depends. It wasn’t for me, because I had a concealed weapons permit at the time. Prior military service made that easy to get, oddly enough in California.

Sorry, go ahead.

Where was I? Oh right. I slipped into my room, and grabbed it out of the holster, still attached to the jeans I was wearing the night before. I only had one mag loaded, with those nice 235 grain hydra shock hollow points. I locked and loaded, and headed to his door, and put my ear on it. The banging was gone, but I could hear this raspy breathing sound. Sounded like someone breathing when they have a real bad cold, you know. That mucus sound? We had shaggy carpet, so I couldn’t peek under the door, so I quietly tried the door knob. Locked. I considered asking if he was ok, but if there was someone else in there, they’d get the drop on me. I cringed at the thought of what the apartment manager was going to say when I showed him the kicked in door that needed to be fixed, but I did it anyway. The door flew open, taking a chunk of the frame with it, and I Immediately covered the room. It was just Chris, my roomie, standing by the window. “Chris dude, are you alright? What the fuck was all that noise?” The only answer I ever got this blood curdling moan, and he slowly turned. He was a dark gray color.. His eyes were glassy and unfocused..kind of blood shot too. He started slowly shuffling at me. Stupid me. I’m still standing there asking questions. Whats wrong? Why is your skin like that? Too long in the shower? Not talking to me? Then he lunged at me. Teeth snapping. “What the fuck?!” I side stepped him, causing him to miss and fall flat on his face. He kept trying to bite at me and grab me the whole time.

What did you do?

I was really freaked out. This is what they were saying on the news that happened with the whole African rabies thing. I didn’t know what to do at first. I didn’t know if it could be cured, or whatever. I decided on a middle road. Our bathrooms connected, between our rooms. I led him into his, ran through to mine, and closed the door, running back around through his room, and closing the door behind him. I stood there for a few seconds, waiting for him to just turn the door knob, but he didn’t. Just banged on the door. The doors were pretty flimsy, so I knew I didn’t have much time. I ran back into my room, grabbed my pants, my boots, my keys, and my cell phone. I about left the room when I noticed the four empty magazines on my desk. I ripped open the drawer, grabbed the box of .45 ammo I kept there, and the mags and ran for the garage. On my way, I looked into my neighbors window, and saw him feasting on his wife on the floor. I’d seen some fucked up things in my time in Iraq, but never anything like that. I probably turned white.

So what happened when you got to the garage?

I opened the door, ran in, and closed it behind me. It gave me a little zone where I felt safe, and I could think out my plan. I turned on the radio in my car, and listened in. It was absolute chaos. I guess Chris wasn’t the only one who was bitten. There were cases of it exploding in LA, all the way down to San Diego. The freeways were a mess, and they were telling everyone to get out of the populated areas. Great I thought. How the hell are you supposed to get out of this place when the freeways are jammed? I remember glaring at my car when I heard someone in the complex rocket out on their motorcycle. I felt stupid, as I looked over the car at my bike. It might have been jammed for cars, but bikes are always skimming by on the narrow edges. I thought I was going to be okay. But then it hit me.

What did?

Justina. I was so panicked, I almost forgot. I dug around my pockets for my phone, and called. No answer. I tried again. Nothing. Shit. That’s when my all that hard wired training I got kicked in. First things first. Equipment check. You remember when I said I “borrowed” a lot of stuff from the Corps when I left?

Yeah..

You have no idea.. [ he laughs ] I still had my exact kit that I used when I was kicking in doors. Hell, I still had the flex cuffs still dangling from the back of the vest. We had a safe in the garage. That’s where I kept my 2 rifles. I had to drive all the way to Yuma to get these guns, because they were illegal back then. God. Everything was illegal back then. It took me a good fifteen minutes to get that safe open. I couldn’t get my mind and hands to function together to get the combination right. Eventually, I got it. I tried calling Justina every 2 or 3 minutes, with no answer. It was nerve wracking. I was trying to hard to focus on that I was doing, and not what could be happening, or have happened to her. I grabbed my FN FAL first, checked the action, and jammed the 4 magazines I had for it, and threw another 140 rounds in a backpack. I could remember arguing with myself over which gun to take. The FAL had the range, and knock down power, but was heavy, and the ammo was heavy as hell, but it had a folding stock. The SIG 556 I just bought was much lighter, and had more ammo. I opted for both, and told myself I’d need them both. I jammed all 32 magazines I had for that Sig, again all from my old kit in the Marine Corps, and threw another 600 rounds in the backpack. I did the same with my Kimber. Some people might have thought I was crazy, and a little paranoid, but I tell you this. That day I was prepared. I was fucking prepared.

So what did you do next?

I topped off the bag with the main meals, and crackers from the MREs, and a few bottles of water. I tried Justina again, and finally there was an answer. She didn’t say anything, and hung up. Before I could call back I got a text from her. It simply said “Alive”. So I sent her one back asking if she was okay. She said she wasn’t hurt. Her parents attacked her. She had shot her mother 7 times in the chest with her Kimber, and she got right back up. She panicked, ran back to her room, blocked the door, and was hiding in the closet. It had taken her all that time to work up the courage to leave the closet long enough to grab her phone. She said they were beating on the door trying to get to her. I told her to be absolutely quiet, and not to move. I was on my way.

How far did you have to go?

Fifteen miles. Through little Mexico as I liked to call it. If this bug had hit there, I was going to need a tank to drive through the hordes of crazy gray biting people. I jumped on my bike, and popped the garage door open. It was chaos outside. Helicopters were flying all over, I could hear screams, and even gunshots. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. I checked myself. Made sure everything was secure. I had my FAL zip tied to the back of my vest, my Sig slung along my side, and my Kimber in a drop thigh holster that I also took. I must have had close to 70 pounds of stuff on.

Why did you have all of those bullets, and why the body armor?

There was a gun show a few months before it all happened. I always went and bought surplus ammo. The more you bought, the cheaper it was. I’d always go out to the desert and just blow off rounds at targets. Some was to keep my training muscle memory, some was stress relief. I was even trying to teach Justina how to fire the rifles. She was just too small. A 100 pound Vietnamese girl, with a 7.62 NATO assault rifle? [he chuckles to himself] She was always better with the Kimber. Good enough to make me not want to get on her bad side. As for the body armor? People have guns. When stuff starts getting crazy, they shoot people. I didn’t want to get shot. I figured I’d rather wear it just in case, than get shot, regretting not taking it in the first place.

You obviously survived the trip. What happened?

Our street was pretty quiet. I could hear screams further down the street. I slowly made my way down to the main avenue. To the right, was the I-5 Freeway. Jam packed. I could see people running across the bridge, with those things chasing behind them. On the Ave, the street was clogged with empty cars. People had left them, opting to go on foot. I slipped between two cars, and rode down the sidewalks. I made it a good half way to Justina’s place before I ran into trouble. Not from those things. From the living. There were a pair of Mexican guys trying to wave me down. I knew they were going to try and take my bike. The one had a knife clearly visible in his hand. I slowed down trying to find a way around then, when one of the gray bastards came running from a house, and tackled one of the Mexicans. The other ran, so I zipped right past. I wanted to help, but I had to get to Justina before I stopped for anyone else. I came across several scenes like that, with people fighting for their lives, or simply running away. I used it all to my advantage to get by. I was lucky. Most of the streets were fairly clear. Most of the congestion was near the freeways.

What happened when you got to Justina’s place?

She lives in this gated apartment complex. I parked the bike next door. It was one of those storage space places. I hid the bike behind a dumpster, and went in on foot. It’s weird now that I think back on it. Three weeks before the outbreak, I had just bought a red dot scope for my Sig. And a Week after, took it out to the desert to zero it. Fate? I don’t know. Maybe. But it saved my life. I Poked my head around the wall, through the gate. From what I could see, it was all clear. I entered the code for the gate, and it started opening. Opening in its loud, squeely, creakyness. I heard half a dozen moans before it opened all the way. I cursed it, and went through, rifle at the ready. Thankfully, they were pretty arthritic, and slow moving. I Took two shots at the closest one, perfect shots, center mass. Dropped like a rock. I quickly changed targets to the next one back, and again. It dropped. As I swung my sights on the third, to my horror, the first one stood back up. My mouth must have hit the ground. I remember thinking to my self very clearly…”What…The…Fuck…” I sighted in on the first one again. Two more shots. Got right back up. The last time, I went for the head. There was a splat sound, and it dropped, and stayed down. Carefully this time, I took careful aim and dispatched them. The whole thing took maybe 30 seconds. It felt like a life time.

I knew my shots were going to draw more attention, so I headed for her apartment. I quickly cleared the immediate area. I grabbed my phone and sent her a text. I’ll never forget it. “standby…breaching”. For the second time that day, I kicked down someone’s door. Both her parents turned, and shambled at me. Her mother was a mess. All seven of her shots were dead center. Almost key holed. That made me proud for a split second, before I had to drop them both. It looked like her father was bitten first, since there was steak knife coming out of his shoulder. I guess he went on to bite her mother, judging by the large chunk missing from her arm.

I remember yelling at her to let me in, and after a few minutes the door opened. She was a mess. Absolutely cried out. I spent a few minutes trying to calm her down and to get herself together, when they started coming through the door I kicked down. We ran into her room, and blocked up the door again. Her door was pretty solid, so we had a few minutes to plan. She grabbed some clothes, reloaded, got dressed, and discussed our options. I’m still surprised by how strong of a person she turned out to be. Her parents just tried to eat her, her neighbors were now trying to, and we were trapped in a room.

She was pretty damn calm, and collected for all of that just happening. We ended up making the decision to go to the Costco that was only 2 miles down the road. It was a good place to hole up. Plenty of food, water, and very defensible. I peeked out the window, it looked clear. Apparently most of the things went through the front door, and were trying to get into the room that way. We crawled out the window, and made a run for the gate before the bastards noticed us from inside the house. We made it out just in time. As soon as I cleared the window, the door shattered. We made it back to the bike without incident.

Did you think that anyone else would be headed there?

I considered that. It was a chance we were willing to take. We made it to the parking lot of the Costco. To our horror, there was a giant mass of the things in front of the door. I could see movement on the roof. They were people. They started waving to us, I waved back. One of the men on the roof was pointing at the door. I didn’t know what he wanted me to do. There had to be at least a thousand of them in front of that door. Two more men appeared on the roof. They started yelling and banging on the edge of the building. They were drawing them all off to the side. I was just getting ready to make a bee line to the door when one of those things made a grab at me. We were thrown off balance, and fell off the bike. We were lucky. That gave us a precious few seconds to react. We were able to get a few shots off to kill the thing. Its flesh was ripped and torn. There was no blood. Only this Thick. Black fluid that seeped out of the holes in its chest neck and head.

Unfortunately, our shots also attracted the attention of some in the crowd. They let out one of those moans, and like a flock of birds, they all turned on us. We were nearly surrounded. They were coming from the crowd, coming from the houses behind us, from down the street, the way we just came. We only had one choice. Run for the building. We sprinted like we never sprinted before. They had opened the door just enough for us to crawl under. Justina went first, as I covered, and as I went under, my vest caught on the door. I struggled to get free, and eventually someone grabbed my arm and pulled me through. When I got through, I checked myself. No bites… Not entirely [Jack holds up his foot, and turns it to the side, revealing a large gouge taken from the heel] My lucky boots. One of those things almost had my leg for dinner. Instead, it got a mouth full of rubber. [he laughs] My lucky boots. I still wear them.

Once we calmed down, we finally got a good look around. There were about 50 people in there. Some men, some women, and a few children. Two police officers came forward from the back of the crowd. They introduced themselves, and looked me up and down. “Military?” the one asked. Former, I told him. The younger of the two cops. I guess he just got his badge. You know he actually had the nerve to ask if I knew that my rifles were illegal? [he shakes his head] I told him if he wanted to walk me to the police station, and arrest me, that I’d be right behind him. That got a laugh out of the crowd.

We spent the next few days trying to use out phones, but they became useless after all the circuits got clogged, and eventually shut down. There was a computer in the office, with internet access. We were able to keep tabs on what was happening, the plans for evacuation, and what people were saying. But eventually servers started going down, and even the internet didn’t work. We also had the TV, and radios, but after about a week, the power went out.

We had enough food to hold out for months maybe even a year or two. Thank god for Costco. Over the next few weeks we were able to get some survivors inside. Some weren’t so lucky. We had to watch a few people get eaten in the parking lot. Eaten, then turn into one of the the crowd outside trying to get us. We spent a lot of time on the roof, trying to get helicopters to notice us. The first few weeks, there was a lot of air traffic. We watched civilian helicopters, military transports, and even gunships on the hunt.

After about a month, the metal rolling door was pretty well banged up, from all those damn ghouls banging on it day and night. There was concrete mix in the building, and we spent our time fashioning a wall around the door frame, to reinforce it. We turned part of the store into a barracks of sort, giving everyone their own privacy. We ended up with close to 150 people. I spent a lot of my time either listening to the radio, listening to what was happening in the outside world. We heard about Yonkers, the incidents in China, and the whole Pakistan/Iran incident. It was a mess.

When did help finally come?

It must have been about 3 months into the siege. A civilian pilot had noticed us, and came our way. We figured that one of the corners of the building might be able to support the weight of his helicopter. He filled us in on the establishment of safe zones, and that he was picking up survivors where he could. We told him how many we had, and I remember that cringe he made. We knew he couldn’t take us all. We brought up the kids, and he took as many as the youngest ones he could. He promised that he would let the military know about us. A few days later, a trio of Marine Corps CH-43 helicopters appeared on the horizon headed right for us. We crammed as many people as we could onto those birds, and as I, and the two officers went to board, we were blocked. All the birds were at max weight, and couldn’t take us. They said we’d have to wait another few days. We figured no big deal. We had waited months already. So we thought.

The weight of the helicopters landing on the corner of the building had weakened the walls. They gave out. The whole corner of the building sagged, and collapsed. That giant mob now had access to the roof, and the inside of the building. We retreated to the back corner of the building, by the emergency exit. We kept all of our weapons, and ammunition, along with our “survival packs” crammed with food, water, and ammo, should they get in and we had to run. It paid off. We hunkered down, and fought them off for a good forty five minutes. There was actually a wall of dead bodies. Well. Dead, dead bodies seeing as how they were undead. It was nothing like the images I saw after the war of the great eastern push.

Eventually, we just couldn’t sustain enough fire to keep them away from us. We each grabbed a bag, and opened the door. We were lucky. None of the ghouls were in the back of the building. They all seemed content trying to follow us through the front door so many weeks before. There was a bank across the parking lot. It had one of those self contained indoor ATMs, where you had to swipe your card to get inside. The two officers knew it was a good place to go. They had those thick shatter proof windows. We’d be safe for the time being. We just had to get there. It was a long parking lot. And there were a lot of ghouls between us. We had made it to about three quarters of the way there, were we decided to use a car in the lot as a firing point. We started taking out any of the zombies in the way of us and the doors when one of those little crawling bastards struck. You know? The ones where their legs are gone, or they don’t work? Well. One of those little bastards crawled under the car, and bit one of the cops. He screamed in agony, and we all turned to give it a lead bath. Before we could even say anything else, he threw his bag to his partner, and yelled go, and turned his sidearm on himself. I cant blame him. Better than turning into one of those things.

We eventually made it to the bank, and pulled the door. Locked. We thought we were done for. As I turned to look for another place for us to go, Hal, the older of the two cops was digging in my bag. He pulled out my wallet. He threw it in there a long time ago when we made those bags, just out of habit. It saved our life. The bank must have been running on some kind of emergency battery power, because the card reader still worked. I swiped my ATM card, and it unlocked. We made it just as the first of the swarm made it to the doors. We were safe for the time being, but right as we were about to rest, I heard the distinctive “whump whump whump” sound of a Huey. It was circling the Costco. Hal mentioned there had to be some kind of roof access. We shot out the glass doors that lead into the inside of the bank, and there it was, in the back office. The ladder to the roof. We made it up, and had to figure out a way to signal the helicopter. What better way to do that, than firing every weapon we had into the air? It did the trick, and the pilot noticed us.

The pilot had told us we were lucky. They were already at bingo fuel, and were getting ready to leave. They didn’t think anyone was left alive when they saw the zombies crawling all over the building. We eventually made it out to Ft Irwin, out in the high desert, far away from the cities. The outbreak was much more easily contained out there, and the base had been set up as a rally point for refugees and the military.

What happened after you made it there?

First thing? I had to hunt down Justina. We were reunited. It turned out to be a pretty good day considering the world was ending. I eventually joined up with the base security team, and helped them conduct perimeter patrols, all the way to the end of the war.

What are you doing now?

I give shooting lessons. Ever since the whole incident, its been almost encouraged that everyone carry a sidearm these days. They think that it’ll eventually help prevent another outbreak. There are always little ones, every spring when the ice thaws, and those damn things come down from the north. It makes sense. Enough people with guns on them, can take down any individual zombies they come across. Who knows? I’m just here to teach people how to shoot now. The first 3 days, you’re on a range shooting a paper target. The fourth day, is your pre qualification. You have 20 rounds, and you have to get 15 of the 20 as head shots. The final day is the pit. Its you, one of the instructors, and 3 ghouls. You have 10 seconds to drop all three.

What happens if they miss?

Well. That’s what the instructor is for. He doesn’t miss. We cant have our customers getting eaten. We want them to come back again. And pay again of course.

Where are you getting the zombies?

From up north. They use a ground penetrating radar to find them, and dig them up. They ship them down south to us, and others like us. We keep them frozen until we need them. It works out pretty good. Anyway, I hate to cut our interview short, but Duty calls. Care for a free lesson?

As far as General Jamieson was concerned, 2012 represented the lowest point in the history of the once great United States of America. Things happened that year that he wouldn’t have believed possible.

Where the fuck could you even start?

In mid-January, there were coordinated uprisings against the U.S. and coalition forces occupying Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.

On January 16th, CNN’s viewers saw the U.S.-appointed Interim President of Iran lynched on camera, dragged through the streets by a Tehran crowd. That same night, those tuned in to CBS got the first sight of hordes of Iraqi Shiites swarming through the streets of Baghdad’s Green Zone, burning down office buildings and engaging startled soldiers in close-range gunfire. By the end of the night, all four networks were replaying Al Jazeera’s footage of Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President of Afghanistan, being shot in the head after a forty-five minute trial by an Islamic Revolutionary Tribunal.

Those first news reports compared it to Hugo’s Friday in Venezuela in 2009 or even to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. The General hadn’t been around for the Tet Offensive, but he’d studied it at West Pointe, and he knew the comparison was ridiculous. Before he went to bed for the night on 1/16/12, he was well aware that the events of that day made the Tet Offensive look like a college football riot by comparison.

If the Tet analogy was ridiculous, the analogy with Hugo’s Friday was absurd. This was bigger by orders of magnitude than a few cities being seized by the last die-hard Chavez loyalists in the Venezuelan countryside.

No one quite knew how 1/16 happened all at once like that, since everyone took credit for setting the wheels into motion. Every piddling little terrorist group, “national liberation movement” or fire-breathing Islamic cleric in the Middle East issued some kind of statement, denying each other’s claims to have orchestrated 1/16 and asserting their own eternal glory. Even Bin Laden put out one last tape, but for once it got lost in the noise of declarations and manifestos and communiques.

None of that mattered.

Like the Tet Offensive, it was easier for the rebels to take the cities than it was for them to hold them. After a couple of months of carpet bombing and guided missile fire, the terrorist sons of bitches had been routed and the stars and stripes were flying from military headquarters in Baghdad and Tehran, Damascus and Kabul, like nothing had ever happened.

The problem was, something had happened. In the last eleven years since the Global War on Terror had brought Uncle Same to extended combat operations first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and then in quick succession in Venezuela, Iran, Syria and Cuba, the military had tried everything humanly possible to boost enlistment.

“Everything humanly possible” just wasn’t good enough. By two months after the 1/16 uprisings, U.S. Forces, already spread dangerously thin, were sustaining their worst casualties since World War II. There was nothing for it but to activate the Selective Service rolls and get warm bodies, any warm bodies, into those uniforms as fast as at all possible.

The warm bodies, however, were having none of it. When 1/16 should have brought Americans together like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and Hugo’s Friday all rolled into one, General Jameison and everyone else got to see just how degenerate the civilian youth had become.

A week after 1/16, anti-war demonstrations in the streets of D.C., New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco had a combined attendance of ten million people. It wasn’t just the largest protest in U.S. History, it dwarfed everything that came before.

That was bad, the General thought bitterly, but that was just the beginning. It was like everything worst in the national psyche, all the yellow-bellied cowardice and commie bullshit utopianism left over from the 60s, all came bubbling to the surface.

The unions organized general strikes from sea to shining sea, demanding a repeal of the Domestic Security Act, an end to the emergency labor measures and about a million other impossible things. The college kids were babbling about the kind of “civil liberties” that anyone with their head screwed on straight knew would mean victory for the terrorists.

And those were the moderates. The worst of the worst, the kids who didn’t go to college, the ones with the mohawks and the piercings, the ones who carried really crazy signs at the protest marches, were openly talking revolution.

Then, on the first day of the draft lottery in March, the worst ten thousand or so of those degenerate shits had turned in their protest signs and banners for Molotov cocktails and barricades. By the end of the summer, no one could deny that the United States of America was experiencing was amounted to a long-simmering, low-tech civil war, an intifada on American soil.

When the President resigned in October to “help the nation heal,” General Jameison decided that enough was enough. Another month of economic chaos and the country he had dedicated his life to was going to become another little third world shithole begging for loans from the IMF. The General read the polls, and he knew that the American public was far too demoralized and confused to be trusted to vote in any responsible way in November.

It wasn’t their fault, not really. They had grown insolent and short-sighted because their leaders had ceased to be firm and decisive. The people needed leadership, purpose and vision.

Those were all things that General Jameison possessed in abundance.

On October 15th, the General issued his Declaration of Supremacy. Within a week, when it was clear that there was no other choice, even the Secret Service was on his side. He walked into the White House with some of his best boys from the Special Forces, and they didn’t even have to fire a single shot.

Even the New York Times had the sense to recognize that the choices had narrowed down to General Jameison or the anarchist scum in the streets. When he took command as the Chief Protector, their editorial added up to one long sigh of relief, including only the most cursory note, for the sake of balance, on how important it was that the General keep his promise to return power to the elected government as soon as the people were ready.

His first night in the White House Situation Room as Commander-in-Chief, General Jameison was briefed by CIA, NSA, State and Defense. He didn’t know how the President did these things, but the General was damn well going to put everything on the table and he said so. If he had to carpet bomb New York City to restore order, he’d do it.

Slowly, hesitantly, the men sitting around the table explained to their new Protector that it might not come to that. There were other options. There was a machine, built in a CIA laboratory, that might suppress the uprising all by itself.

People were calling it the Hoffman-Reifen Device, or HRD, after the CIA team that had drawn up the design schematics. It could be used, the Director of Central Intelligence explained, to imprison the entire population of the most troublesome cities without killing anyone or even putting any soldiers on the ground.

General Jameison’s eyes lit up in wonder and confusion. “How the fuck is that possible?”

“As I understand it,” the DCI explained, “once the device is embedded on the ground near a target area, it automatically begins to power itself. Within an hour, it sends out waves of…” The General didn’t even pretend to follow the technical jargon, but he understood the next part just fine. “The upshot of all of this is that everyone in the affected area will be totally physically paralyzed. Better yet, we may be able to use electric stimulation to the joints and tissue of the paralyzed population to propel them in involuntary motion during the period before the effects wear off.”

The DCI leaned in, his face alive with excitement. “In practical terms, if it works out how we hope, we may be able to use the HRDs to direct entire population centers affected by the disturbances into temporary detention facilities. The possibilities boggle the mind.”

General Jameison shook his head in amazement. “You have got to be shitting me, son. You had something that could do all that and you didn’t use it? When they burned down the San Francisco Stock Exchange last week, you could have dropped one of these HRDs and stopped the whole thing?”

The DCI took a deep breath. “That has been, and is, my view, sir, but there are concerns.”

The General gestured impatiently for the DCI to continue. “You have to understand, we only constructed a working prototype three weeks ago. Fifty more have been manufactured as a contingency should a decision be made to put them into immediate use, but we haven’t had time to perform any tests. The effects I just described are highly probable given the simulations we’ve been running, but there’s no way to know for sure what will happen without extensive tests on human subjects. That could take two months, maybe three.

“When a range of scientific opinions were presented to him, President Frist was worried, in particular, by the possibility that the detainees might be accidentally maimed or even killed by the process. On that scale, entire cities…”

“Fuck that,” the General said, simply and firmly. “We all know what’s at stake here. I’m not going to sacrifice the future of this country to a bunch of union gangsters and purple-haired, commie faggot drop outs and the…”

This was boilerplate stuff for General Jameison, but he could work himself into a fury ten or twenty times a day on the subject. Some of the people around the table looked bored and uncomfortable, but at least a few heads nodded in genuine appreciation.

“…because there might be casualties while we round ‘em up and restore law and order. This is an order. I want all fifty of those devices in planes by midnight tonight.”

And that was that.

After the humiliations of 1/16 and the total collapse of civil order over the summer, the General’s heart stirred with joy over the speed and efficiency with which the targets were selected, the devices were prepped and they were dropped from the planes. It was, he thought proudly, the most efficient campaign of one of the worst years of American military history.

If those devices had worked the way they were supposed to, the operation really would have been something to be proud of.

Unfortunately, they did not. Oh, to be sure, they did provide all sorts of interesting electric stimulation to the joints and tissue of the affected population. The CIA boys weren’t wrong about that.

There were, however, all kinds of implementation issues.

For one thing, it was damn near impossible to control the damn things, and there were side effects that no one could have predicted. Even the former President’s concern about accidental deaths seemed trivial by comparison.

The other, far more serious problem was that subjects with functioning nervous systems and good EEG readings seemed to be immune from the devices’ effects. The HRD-waves couldn’t override those normal systems. There were a lot of reports of itching and burning sensations that came and went, but that was it. As a method of detaining rioters, they were a complete bust.

The effect of the HRDs was dramatic, however, when it came to stimulating the joints and tissue of other subjects not characterized by functioning nervous systems or any sort of EEG readings at all.

Put bluntly, they raised the dead.

#

2. The Anarchist

In 1999, the World Trade Organization met in Seattle and was greeted with massive protests.

Steve Godwin was sixteen years old. Knowing that his parents would never let him go, he simply snuck out of their East Lansing house in the morning and jumped on a Greyhound bus to Seattle. His family was frantic with worry by the time he called, and he felt bad about that, but it was worth it.

As he marched through the streets of Seattle, Steve was elated by the knowledge that he was part of something larger than himself, something that mattered. He breathed in the cool, crisp air of a Seattle evening and marveled in the variety of people he was marching with, the colorful signs and banners and giant puppets people were holding to represent the laundry list of complaints about the WTO’s environmental, labor and human rights record.

“Whose streets?” a girl who looked even younger than Steve screamed into a bullhorn.

“Our streets!” everyone screamed back.

It was like he was part of the great unstoppable wave of humanity demanding justice. It was incredible.

That feeling lasted for about fifteen minutes. Then the teargas canisters were released and the batons came out.

A bunch of protesters were rounded up all at once, quickly searched and shoved in the back of a police van. Everyone was practicing “prison solidarity” that week, not carrying identification and refusing to identify himself or herself, except as “John Seattle” or “Jane Seattle,” to try to force the cops to spring them all in order to avoid the headaches.

Steve exchanged a quietly murmured conversation in the van with a girl about his age, who turned out to be named Shawna Swart. Incredibly, she was from East Lansing too, but they went to different schools and he had never seen her before.

When they got to the jail, the lot of them were shoved into a holding cell so crowded and hastily improvised that the cops didn’t even bother to separate out the John Seattles from the Janes.

Shawna had two tabs of acid that she wanted to get rid of before the cops found them. She took one and gave one to Steve.

He’d never been straight-edged, but if he’d been thinking more clearly he might have thought twice about taking it. Jail plus tripping should, by all conventional wisdom on the subject, equal “bad trip.”

It didn’t. It was beautiful. The long hours of imprisonment flew by. Steve remembered about ten Johns and Janes staring at him as he laughed in helpless wonder and awe, waving his hand in front of him and watching it seem to leave a ghostly trail through the air front of him. For almost thirty seconds, a couple of the prison guards morphed into Darth Vaders with the heads of raccoons. Steve had no idea where that come from, but he loved it. Later that night, he spent forty-five minutes–Shawna clocked him–sitting cross-legged on the floor watching the bars in the window of the jail cell shift back and forth from horizontal to vertical arrangements.

Even coming down, the part that was supposed to suck, was wonderful. The granola bar someone offered him around two in the morning tasted like ashes, and he couldn’t swallow it, but that was the only negative symptom. He felt great.

Granted, that could have something to do with sitting up all night as the stuff wore off, talking and talking with the most beautiful and interesting girl that he had ever met.

Steve, that night in Seattle, was still dressed like a fairly normal kid from Lansing Catholic Central High School, but Shawna…

Shawna was wearing her political buttons and white-on-black anarchy patches over a skin-tight black outfit that looked like it had been painted over her slim figure. Every once in a while, when she really wanted to make a point, she tossed her long blond hair back and Steve’s mind would go blank as it settled back over her shoulders. He would have to ask her to repeat what she had just said, and with a half-smile tugging at the ends of her lips, she would repeat it.

They didn’t stop talking until the sun came up in the morning and the cops decided to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare of identifying and prosecuting them all. Everyone got off with a warning.

An hour later, they were out on the streets, having coffee at a nearby Starbucks. It seemed to be doing pretty good business despite a hole in the window left by a stray rock someone had thrown in the previous night’s fracas.

Steve and Shawna’s conversation ranged over music and movies and LSD, both in the abstract and in terms of last night’s trip, but for the last couple of hours they had been talking about politics.

Steve had shown up to Seattle full of vaguely left-wing ideas, but he’d had relatively little exposure to this kind of thing. He’d been following the lead up to the WTO protest on the web for months before he decided to hop that bus to Seattle. He could rattle off a list of grievances about democracy and labor rights and the environment, but he hadn’t bothered to put anything in a larger context. Before he came to Seattle, he’d never even met anyone who called themselves an “anarchist,” or used the term “anarchy” as anything but a synonym for “chaos.”

Shawna kept on trying to tell him about an anarchist collective she and her friends were trying to start in East Lansing, but he was having none of it. “How can you have an anarchist organization?”

He was honestly confused, but he was also trying to pull her leg. As he waited for her answer, he sipped his coffee. He’d been trying very hard to switch to drinking his coffee black, but it still tasted bitter to him. At least it didn’t taste like ashes like everything had before the acid effects wore off.

“Look,” he went on, “doesn’t having an anarchist organization go against the whole idea of anarchy?”

Shawna shook her head vigorously, her green eyes blazing with enthusiasm as if she hadn’t been awake for two days. “Anarchy isn’t the absence of order. It’s the absence of coercion. Anarchism is about replacing coercive and hierarchical forms of social organization with voluntary cooperation and mutual aid.”

As she went on, Steve sipped his coffee and shook his head in wonder. He wasn’t stupid, and he read plenty. He was a straight-A student, and he’d been reading Stephen King novels under his desk in classes that bored him since freshman year. He got into political arguments all the time, and he was always looking stuff up on the internet.

This girl, though, made him feel like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. As he peppered her with questions, she kept on referring him to books that she seemed to have practically memorized, everything from Kropotkin to Chomsky, Emma Goldman to Abbie Hoffman. Later on, Steve would meet plenty of anarchists who fulfilled every stereotype of the stupid kid who spouted off whatever rhetoric sounded most radical without really thinking it through. Not Shawna.

By the time he got on his bus back to East Lansing and the wrath of his parents, he was a convinced anarchist. Beyond convinced.

Not that it had much impact on his life. Shawna went to East Lansing High, not Lansing Catholic, and their paths only crossed a couple of times in the next two years. His parents kept him on a tighter leash than ever after his “little Seattle adventure,” so he wasn’t exactly running down to campus to hang out with radicals at the student union building. By and by he slipped back into old routines.

By the time he graduated from high school, got out of his parents house and had the leeway to be more active, there wasn’t much left to be active in. By two years after the glory days of Seattle, the anti-globalization movement had lost steam. Then, the first month of Steve’s first semester going to Michigan State, the planes hit the towers in New York and the movement disappeared off the political map entirely for a while.

Steve accommodated, and he focused on other things. When there was a protest, he might show up, if he didn’t have anything going on with his music or his friends or his part-time under-the-counter job making fake ID’s to sell to underage frat boys. When asked, he compared his anarchism to the Catholicism of people who only showed up to Mass on Christmas and Easter.

Then, during the second semester of his sophomore year, the United States invaded Iraq and protests filled the streets. Somebody handed him a flyer at a demonstration for a meeting of something called the “Nighthawk Revolutionary Anarchist Collective” and he showed up.

Shawna was there. She had been kicked out of some college in California, and she was taking a second shot at the whole college thing at Michigan State. That night they renewed old acquaintance, reminiscing about Seattle and catching up on the last four years. That night, they went out clubbing Lansing with a couple of Steve’s handcrafted fake ID’s. They fell into bed together, spontaneously and gloriously, at the end of an unbelievable night.

After that, they were inseparable. Steve never thought of her as his “girlfriend” exactly, and he doubted that she thought of him as her boyfriend. What they had was both more and less than that.

Over the course of the next nine years, they never moved in together, and they never made dinner plans days in advance or anything, but not a day went by when they didn’t see each other for some length of time. The political and the personal, sex and friendship, comradeship and mentorship and play, were all fused into something almost incomprehensible, something that Steve had never wanted to analyze too closely, afraid that it would dissolve into air at the slightest touch.

#

On October 22nd, 2012, the Nighthawk Revolutionary Anarchist Collective, whose membership now numbered in the several hundred, sponsored a demonstration against General Jameison’s seizure of power. The National Guard tried to disperse it by force, like everyone knew they would, but the NRAC was prepared.

As afternoon darkened into evening, Steve crouched behind a barricade of upturned cars and debris, hand-in-hand with Shawna as he listened to the National Guard commander make an announcement on his bullhorn. They were on the front of the march. At their side was a large, carefully stacked pile of Molotov cocktails their affinity group had made the night before.

“All participants in this illegal demonstration are ordered to disperse immediately, by the order of Chief Protector William Jameison. This is your last warning. Failure to comply with this order will result in execution.”

The wording was much more blood-and-iron than usual, no doubt a sign of the long reach of that Texan clown who had just marched into the White House, but the gist was nothing new. Political demonstrations had been “temporarily” illegal since the Domestic Security Act passed in February, and these bastards never got tired of trying to enforce it.

The Guard barely waited until the warning had been issued. Shots rang out across the barricade. Someone screamed in pain. Steve didn’t even turn around.

He grabbed a Molotov cocktail from the pile. He took out his Zippo lighter. In one motion, he lit up the rag and tossed it across the barricade. Within seconds, he was rewarded with a satisfying bang.

The air filled with smoke. Steve couldn’t see further than Shawna on his right or Andy on his left. It didn’t matter. He lit, aimed, and tossed another Molotov cocktail on instinct.

It took almost three minutes for the National Guard to stop fucking around.

The first grenade went off ten feet from where Steve was standing. There was a hole in their barricade big enough to drive a tank through. Round after round was fired. Screams rent the air. Someone’s blood splashed onto Steve’s face. He didn’t even notice.

Shawna was standing next to him. Steve never saw the bullet. He heard her scream.

When Steve turned around, it was all over. Blood streamed out of a hole in her forehead. Steve saw pieces of what might have been brain.

She was still alive when he turned around. Her lips started to form a word.

He never got to find out what it was. She collapsed onto the ground.

She wasn’t breathing.

People were still shooting at him. In a few seconds, he was going to have to run for cover or die where he stood.

He ran.

Thirteen years after they met on the streets of Seattle, he left Shawna to live out the last seconds of her life on pavement smeared with blood.

#

After he found a place to hide, the back room of an abandoned record store downtown, Steve let himself have his breakdown.

He sobbed. He screamed. He broke everything that was handy, CDs and shelves and glass bottles. He rocked back and forth on the floor for almost an hour, letting everything out in an ecstasy of grief and rage.

When he left, he didn’t feel grief or rage or much of anything else. He felt numb, empty. He had itching, burning sensations in his arms and chest, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except for what he was going to do.

He was going to go kill someone.

Like most big anarchist collectives, Nighthawk was divided into “affinity groups,” core groups of five to ten people who trusted each other absolutely, worked together constantly and made all decisions by consensus. With Shawna dead, there might still be as many as five or six members of their affinity group left alive.

Steve made no effort to find out. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to think about tactics, or being smart or figuring out how anything fit into a larger strategy. Right at the moment, he didn’t care whether he was alive or dead when the sun rose the next day.

Steve might have already killed people. Probably, even. Most of the scattered street fighting since the feds had gotten violent was pretty low level, but even a brick lobbed with sufficient force at the wrong spot can kill someone just as dead as a bullet.

Steve didn’t like that, but he tried not to let it bother him. He was a participant in an uprising that was both justified and necessary, and he did what he had to.

The people whose power and privileges were under attack fought to defend that power. To the limited extent that thought about such things, Steve regarded that last fact as something akin to a law of nature. It was certainly nothing he would have taken personally, and he never would have taken pleasure in the idea of killing someone on the other side.

Now he did.

Shawna was dead, and he was going to kill one of the people who did it. Two or three of them, if he could manage it before they killed him. Just this second, even that last part didn’t bother him.

He never got a chance.

He spent an hour walking up and down Grand River Avenue. He had gotten as far as the old abandoned “Denny’s” on the edge of East Lansing and Okemos before he saw another human being, a guy in a green-and-white MSU sweatshirt walking down the street in the other direction.

Steve grabbed the guy’s shoulders. “What the hell happened?”

“W-what do you mean?” The guy looked confused but not really scared.

“The military? Where are they?”

The guy shook his head slowly. “They left. There was still fighting going on, all over the place, but they just left.”

Steve stared at him in incomprehension. “Why would hey do that?”

The guy shrugged. “I have no idea, but they were in a hell of a hurry.”

Steve let the guy go. Feeling absolutely defeated, he went into the Denny’s. It looked like no one had been in there for a long while, but the door was unlocked.

He went inside, and sat down in a booth by the window. The lights were off. The sun was going down. It didn’t matter. Steve sat in the darkened booth, with his hands folded on the table, thinking about nothing at all.

After a while, the darkness was total. At some point in the night, he must have fallen asleep.

#

When Steve woke up, the sun had been up for a while.

The only thought in his mind was that he wasn’t dead. He felt somehow that he was supposed to die last night, and he hadn’t. He didn’t feel overjoyed or even relieved, but he didn’t feel sorry about it either. It was just interesting.

He was hungry and he had to piss. The second part was easy enough, since the bathrooms were unlocked, but the first part was trickier.

And those itching, burning sensations had gotten even worse.

A quick check of the kitchen bore out Steve’s initial assumption that the place had been looted clean, probably months ago. Lots, maybe most, of the cafes and restaurants around town had shut their doors in recent months, but there were several that were still in operation, having re-opened as worker-owned cooperatives when their owners left town. Steve wondered if any of those places might actually be up and running again, so soon after the military cleared out.

It was possible. He remembered how much he loved the blueberry muffins at Espresso Royale. If by some miracle they had re-opened, he might stop by and get one, and maybe a cup of black coffee to go with.

As a known hero of the revolution, seen on the front lines in last night’s battle, he might even get his muffin for free.

He smiled, shook his head and laughed for the first time in what felt like years. Still laughing, he went outside and started walking back towards downtown East Lansing.

Lost in his own thoughts, he almost bumped into the woman walking down the street in the other direction. When he saw who it was, he stopped in his tracks and stared.

It was Shawna.

One of her arms was missing. Dried blood clotted around a huge hole in the center of her forehead. She was, however, very much alive.

#

“Shawna?”

Time seemed to stop. Steve’s mind went perfectly blank. Then Shawna’s lips opened a crack, and sound came out.

She wasn’t saying anything. She was moaning. It was a primal sound, not pain and not pleasure, just air being pushed through the vocal chords.

She shuffled and stumbled toward him. Thinking she was going to fall, Steve put his arms around her shoulders. Shawna leaned in, looking like she was going to hug him.

Searing pain tore through Steve’s shoulder. Instinctively, Steve pushed away from her with one arm, grabbing his shoulder with the other, rocking back and forth with the pain. When he looked up, he was that Shawna had torn a bloody strip of skin from his flesh. She stuffed it in her mouth. A little trickle of Steve’s blood flowed down her chin as she swallowed.

Steve felt vomit rise up in his throat. He didn’t have a chance to wretch.

“Get the hell away from her, Steve!”

It was Andy. His black beard was uncombed. His eyes were wild. He was pointing a shotgun at the spot where Steve and Shawna were standing. For a second, even as he moved to comply, Steve was in such a daze that he felt a little sore about the shotgun. Dammit, Andy, if you had a shotgun, why didn’t you bring it yesterday?

Andy shot Shawna in the side of her head.

She didn’t fall down. She didn’t cry out in pain. It didn’t even seem to bother her. She turned around and shuffled toward Andy.

Steve stared, his jaw gaping. “What the fuck…?”

Andy reloaded and shot again. Shawna kept coming. Andy fired again.

Andy grabbed Steve, and ran. Still not letting himself process any conscious thoughts, Steve focused on running.

Time passed. Steve had no idea how much. It didn’t matter. They stopped running, and crouched together in an alley. Andy opened up his backpack and started rooting around. He brought out two empty glass bottles, two rags and a sealed plastic jug.

Without needing to be told what to do, Steve assembled one of the Molotov cocktails. That much he could do on instinct. When he was done, he peered out of the alley. Shawna was coming toward them in the distance, but she had a ways to go.

“What is she?”

Andy spared Steve a worried glance, but when he answered, his voice was all business. “She’s a zombie.”

Steve stared at his comrade, his confusion and disconnect finally starting to tie him down to the concrete reality of the situation. “What? What the hell do you mean, a zombie?”

Andy shrugged. “You saw what I saw. I’ve been seeing that for the last seven hours, since a couple of them ate Jake and Linda.” Andy’s voice got ragged, then he focused on his explanation with visible effort. “Last night around three in the morning, everyone who died last night started to come back. It was just a few hours after the army left. They must have known it was coming, but I don’t know how that’s…well, like I said. We haven’t really had time to talk about it. Where the hell have you been?”

“Denny’s,” Steve said, feeling no desire whatever to elaborate. “Is anyone else from our affinity group alive?”

“No.” Andy spared him another glance to gage his reaction. “Look, in about forty-five seconds, Shawna is going to be about the right distance away. Bullets slow them down, but the only thing that seems to kill them is fire.”

He gave Steve a hard look before continuing. “If we both throw at the same time, there’s a good chance we can stop her.”

Steve nodded. He was pretty sure that in a few minutes he would be telling Shawna about this horrible, surreal nightmare he had, but the part of his mind that believed that all of this was really happening was working on autopilot.

Shawna stumbled back into view. Andy gestured at Steve, counting off three fingers. When he hit “one,” they both tossed their Molotov cocktails.

Steve’s hit. Shawna’s hair lit on fire, but she kept moving. The flames spread to the rest of her body. She kept on moving. As her skin turned black, she finally stopped.

Steve looked on, past fear and past heartbreak, as the only woman he had ever loved was reduced to ashes on the street.

#

For the next six hours, Steve fought like a machine. His only thoughts were thoughts of logistics. How close did a zombie need to get to be within range? Where was the next hiding place? Where could he and Andy get materials to make explosives?

Not fifteen minutes passed in the whole time without another zombie coming into view. Wherever they went, it didn’t matter. He didn’t know what they thought, or if zombies were capable of anything even approximating conscious thought, but they seemed to be drawn to living human beings.

Some of them had died last night. Some of them had died earlier that morning, at the hands of other zombies.

The two zombies coming into range now, a man and a woman, had probably died months ago. Both of their faces had already rotted beyond recognition.

Unlike the rest of the zombies Steve and Andy had been seeing, these ones didn’t even moan. Steve guessed that there wasn’t enough left of their vocal chords. From the looks of them, they’d both had open casket funerals. They looked like they were dressed for church.

If not for those nice clothes they were wearing, Steve would have no way of telling the man from the woman.

Calmly, dispassionately, Steve measured the time it would take until they came into range. They didn’t have any Molotov cocktails left. The shotgun was long since out of ammunition, even if would have done any good.

Steve found a long wooden plank. He demonstrated to Andy, gesturing, his plan to light the tip of it on fire and use it to immolate the old couple once they were close enough.

Of course, he could have used words. It didn’t matter. None of the dozens of zombies they had killed in the last six hours had made any effort to defend themselves. Tey just kept on coming, even if meant they were going to die.

If they cared, there was no way to tell.

Steve took out his Zippo lighter and tried to light up the end of the wooden plank.

The flame never came. The lighter was out of fluid. Andy, standing further back, tossed Steve his own lighter. Steve tried that one, and finally got the flame. The plank wasn’t nearly as dry as Steve had hoped. For a few frantic seconds, he thought it wasn’t going to light. Finally, it did.

It was just too late.

The zombie in the dress grabbed Steve’s arm. The wooden plank fell to the floor. The zombie in the suit grabbed Steve’s neck. It bit down hard, and emerged with some of the flesh from Steve’s neck stuck between its teeth.

For a second, Steve’s world swam in and out of focus. He wondered if he was going to pass out. Some part of him wondered if he was going to wake up again, and if he still cared.

He didn’t pass out. Andy grabbed the wooden plank and used it to pummel the zombie in the suit. It released its grip, and Steve fell to the floor. The zombie in the suit slowly turned toward Andy.

Steve crawled over the floor. It seemed like long minutes were going by. It was probably just seconds. Steve grabbed the lighter he had dropped, and after a few frantic seconds of messing with it, he had a flame.

He brought it up to the head of the zombie in the dress. It took the opportunity to tear another strip of flesh from Steve’s arm. He dropped the lighter, but it had already made contact.

Flames spread throughout the zombie’s body. It let Steve go, and he crashed to the floor.

The zombie in the suit turned its back on Andy, stumbling toward Steve. Andy took the opportunity to bash in its head with what was left of the flaming wooden plank.

It got the job done. In less than a minute, the zombies were both dead.

Soon, Steve would be too. He just wouldn’t stay dead for very long.

He didn’t feel any pain. He was way past that, but he could see the blood rushing out of his neck and arm and pooling on the floor. When he spoke, all he could manage was a distant rasp. He had to fight to stay awake, to keep off the void that wanted to take him.

“Andy, man, how long do you think I have left?”

Andy’s mouth opened and closed. He started to say something, but then thought better of it.

“The truth,” Steve rasped, slowly and clearly. “Thirty seconds? Maybe a minute?”

Andy nodded mutely.

Steve let his eyes wander to the Zippo lighter at his side. Andy’s eyes followed him there, and he shook his head.

“Please.” Steve wasn’t going to beg. Just one word. Please.

Andy nodded again, and picked it up. He lit it with shaking hands.

That was the last thing Steve ever saw.

#

3. The Historian

The 2162 annual meeting of the Northern Zone Historical Association had record attendance. Thousands of people crammed into the lecture hall in Chicago for the keynote address.

Dr. Fitzgerald counted at least two hundred holograms in the back of the hall, representing colonists in the Outer Rim attending from their vidspheres. She smiled with bitter satisfaction, reflecting that at least half of those colonists were likely to be Djanist partisans, exiled to the colonies after the last parliamentary elections. They were there out of masochism, or boredom, or out of a simple desire to see what she was up to.

Many of them, she knew, suspected that Dr. Fitzgerald’s interests ran beyond academic history, that she was being courted by Alzajantist political bosses, perhaps even that she was planning on running for her old seat in the Hemispheric parliament this fall.

They weren’t wrong about that.

Well, her written address was actually pretty dry, most of it, but once she realized how many people would be attending the meeting she had re-written the opening section, sticking in a bit of political red meat. One might as well give the Djantists something to be outraged about as they sucked on their wretched ration packets out there on the ice.

Dr. Alfonz’s long-winded introduction finally drew to a close, and he gestured for her to approach the podium. Thunderous applause greeted her as she organized her notes, fiddled with her glasses and prepared to speak. A few non-historians in the back, wearing purple and black vests, were clearly only there to cheer for an old political icon. They were already whipping their arms back and forth in the Alzajantist Salute.

That made her want to smile, but she didn’t. This was serious.

When she spoke, it was in measured tones, nothing like the fiery tones of her old parliamentary speeches. She was a historian, and she was here to speak to her colleagues.

Mostly.

“The title on your programs is ‘A Historical Note on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse.’ That wasn’t the title of my paper–I will always regard the word ‘apocalypse’ as unnecessarily melodramatic for the purposes of historical research–but it does at least bring us to the area of contention.

“This year’s conference marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Zombie War. No historical event of the last five hundred years has shaped the consciousness of our society as much as that war, and that is as it should be.

“Almost a third of the population of our hemisphere was wiped out in six months time. The annals of history record nothing like it. Analogies are usually made to the Black Plague, or the Nazi Holocaust or even the decimation of the Native Americans. None of these events, however, comes close to capturing the horror of those months.

“No one alive today has not heard, many times and in many different forms, the story of how the zombies spread over North and South America, or of how the armies of Protector Jameison ultimately defeated them. The story is commemorated in thousands of learntapes, in monuments and memorials, academic studies and popular novels. It is one of those stories that tells us things, important things, about who we are and what our species is capable of when our backs are up against the wall.

“Given this level of documentation, however, it is nothing short of incredible that historical revisionism about these events persists to this day. There are those who would like to paint the Protector as the villain of the piece, in opposition to reason and evidence, the memory of the martyred dead and the demands of common sense. They paint the most lurid conspiracy theories according to which the anarchists were innocent victims and the Protector unleashed a zombie plague over his own country for–well–no one has been able to quite supply a motive, have they?

“We all understand, I think, why this nonsense has persisted.” Dr. Fitzgerald leaned into the podium, looking as if she was imparting a secret to a close friend. “From the perspective of a certain party–I won’t say who, mind you–the anarchist rebels who unleashed the zombies don’t look so bad, do they?

“To those who, let us say, do not admire the current Protector, the anarchists seem a trifle misguided, but not entirely wrong.” She shrugged benevolently, as if forgiving such fools with infinite compassion. “What is it, after all, that Overseer Djan advocated, if not that the Protectorate be abolished, and something very much like anarchy be instituted. Oh, they don’t call it that, but when they call for the abolition of the institution that has kept order for one hundred and fifty years, let us fool ourselves about what would result.

“Well,” she went on, finally raising her voice to that old parliamentary pitch, “I think in the last election, we made perfectly clear what the rest of us think about that. Perhaps,” she concluded, staring directly at the rows of holograms in the back of the hall, “certain people should be pleased that we are very–she almost caressed the word–“compassionate these days, and we do not deal with them in the manner favored by Protector Jameison one hundred and fifty years ago.”

Many of the holograms were waving their arms and shouting, although of course they could make no sound. The rest of the hall erupted into cheers. As one, the audience rose in a standing ovation. Even many of the professional historians in their suits and ties joined the purple-shirts in several rounds of enthusiastic Alzajantist Salutes. For at least five minutes, Dr. Fitzgerald could hear nothing but applause and the chanting of “Al-Al-Alzajan, Al-Al-Alzajan” as the cheering and saluting continued. Finally, graciously, she gestured for everyone to sit down.

When the hall was finally quiet, she continued in a more subdued tone. “Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen. I won’t waste your time with tiresome, step-by-step refutations of long-discredited theories. Suffice to say that the rest of this address will be focused on issues of genuine scholarly debate, addressed to those who live in the real world.

“In that world, the United States came under systematic attack for an entire year by anarchist rebels who hated their country enough to build machines that raised the dead, unleashing horrors on the entire hemisphere the likes of which the world had not seen. Protector Jameison defeated the anarchists, and their zombies, and united this hemisphere in a new union. History is grateful to him for that.

“With these preliminaries out of the way, let us move on to slightly more serious matters.”

-END-

[Before the Zombie War, mediums were considered con artists by the majority of society. Men and women who were the hosts of flashy Reality T.V. shows, playing up to an audience who tuned in for a quick thrill; sometimes the subject of television or film dramas, mediums have not earned much more than open skepticism and derision. I am speaking with a medium on a dirt patch somewhere in the heart of what used to be America’s bread basket in the state known as Kansas. In the days before the Panic, she was known as Tshilaba, a Romani name meaning “seeker of knowledge.” These days, she is known by something simpler: Mercy.]

You remember that movie, with that kid who said that hokey little line “I see dead people?” Yeah, everyone born before the Panic does. I can’t tell you how often I heard that from the critics, the skeptics, the jokesters, the media. I still hear it these days, but not as much, and not with the sneer that used to accompany those words.

You’re saying you get more respect?

Yeah, because too many people have admitted they saw similar things as I did. The mind-docs have tried to explain it all away – “Communicable mass hysteria” and other big-word bullshit like that. They’re saying the sightings worked the same way… Okay, lemme try again. Y’know, there used to be cases, back in the pre-zombie days, of the legal system screwing people over because some jerk would commit a crime and other people who looked close enough like ‘em would catch the brunt of it. The cops would show the witnesses a selection of photos of people similar to the person they saw do whatever. They’d really push one guy they thought they had a lead on. Y’know what happens next?

The eyewitnesses superimposed the photographed person’s image over the memories in their minds.

Yuh-huh. The mind-docs are saying that the same thing happened with the sightings. That the people who said they saw ghosts were all repeating something they’d heard from somebody else, and nobody could convince the doctors that they hadn’t spoken with anybody – that they were just seeing things, or hearing them.

You saw ghosts? Or heard them?

[Mercy shakes her head, gives a bitter laugh.] The screwy, karmic ass-kick about all this…? When I was “Tshilaba”, I couldn’t sense a damned thing! I really was one of those smoke-and-mirrors show biz entertainers putting on a show for a bunch of people who liked a really good ghost story.

What happened to change all that?

[Mercy gives me a sarcastic look.] A little something called the Zombie War. Perhaps you’ve heard of it…? [Sighs.] Look out there; what do you see?

[I look out over the flat earth ahead of us – flat to the horizon. There’s a lot of dirt, but some weeds are coming back up through the soil. Here and there are signs of charring. A corn field once stood here, but had been burned once all the food had been stripped from the stalks. I mention all this to Mercy, who nods.]

It was here where I first saw them. Y’know… them. I’d seen zombies a-plenty – God Almighty, I’d seen more than I ever wanted to! Had a few close scrapes, but somehow I’d managed to do jus the right thing at the right time and I survived long enough to join a group that was trekkin’ along behind the Army, movin’ west. Westward Ho!, and all that rot. We marched here and found that the Army had largely ignored the corn fields, taking only the outer edges of food to supply their kits. We all knew why; we all knew there were bound to be dead folk in those stalks that grew thick and close to make perfect ambush cover for the zombies. Why the Army hadn’t just torched the fields, we didn’t know. Some figured it was ‘cause they were leavin’ the food, lettin’ us make the choice as to whether or not it was worth risking infection. Some figured it was because of the risk of fire spreading out of control. Others figured the Army just couldn’t be bothered. Whatever the reason, there were acres upon acres of corn waiting for us. Ripe. Perfect. There were roughly forty of us in the group. We figured everyone could carry rucksacks of corn, including the kids. The only real problem was how to get the zombies out of the fields so we could go in and get the corn.

Weren’t the zombies already on their way?

[Mercy laughs.] Oh, sure. We could hear faint moans, but you know what that sound does to live humans. All of us stood there, shaking and shivering like we were in the middle of deep winter instead of the dog days of August. We were all trained by then: Don’t make a lot of noise. The kids just stood closer to their guardians, white-faced and wide-eyed and resigned while we discussed the best way of luring the dead out of the corn. Eventually, we figured it out and got set so that those of us who were going to be doing the demolishing were covering each other’s backs. I remember standing there, cold-sweating with that instinctive fear and revulsion, but angry, too.

Angry?

Mm-hmm. I was pissed. Before the zombies came shambling in to eat everything to the bone, I was a television star. I was somebody. I had a nice home, a nice car, enough money that I didn’t have to worry about anything. I made sure I paid my taxes on time and I was largely left alone to spend my money how I wanted to. [Mercy gives me a little smirk.] Did you ever catch an episode of “Tshilaba?” No? Well, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I was a bit overweight. [She laughs.] A lot overweight, actually. By California standards, anyway, where every tanned bitch out there was a size two or less because God forbid they look real – and real people had blotchy skin and cellulite and size eighteen pants and natural boobs. Me…? I was definitely not a size two. I was swarthy and my teeth were crooked [She flashes a smile at me to show they still are.] and I was loud and flashy. But, damn it all, I was somebody. The zombies took all that away. My house burned down, my car was stolen from me by a pack of desperate refugees… I had only the clothes on my back. I had to worry about things, now. Worry about keeping out of the reach of those ugly things, worry about finding other survivors, worry about finding some authority figure to protect me, worry about finding my next meal. Oh, yeah… I was fucking angry at the zombies for reducing me to that level.

[We stand on the flat Kansas earth and watch an approaching front of dark clouds. The wind picks up a little and it is cooler; much cooler than the almost-summer warmth we’d been feeling. The sight is awesome and frightening as the sky becomes marbled with light and gray and dark that shifts and moves constantly as it bears down on us.]

[Mercy makes a soft grunt of sound and resumes her tale.] So, yeah… I was standing there, waiting for the rotten bastards to show their ugly, patty-melt faces. We could hear ‘em approaching on all sides; the corn stalks were waving, we could hear the stalks shushing against each other… could hear that Goddamned moan. That infernal, horrible “I need” sound zombies make. The shaking increased and all I wanted to do was run, as far and as fast as I could. Zombies move at the speed of snail – I’d have been in the next state probably before they managed to make it ten feet down the road. But, we needed that corn. So we waited, and so they came.

And that’s when you saw…?

Them. The ghosts. Yeah. But the thing is… I didn’t realize what I was lookin’ at. Not at first. My first thought was that the corn fields were on fire; that what I was seeing was smoke. Then, I thought it was just the zombies that were on fire, but… the smoke… changed.

They looked like smoke, the ghosts?

[Mercy nods.] They were this wispy gray mass that was pulled along behind each zombie and there were plenty of the bastards. That’s why I thought it was smoke, y’see. Thought it was a whole bunch of ‘em on fire, so close together… but then I got a good look at the “smoke” and I thought I was either going to crap myself or die of a heart attack right then and there. Maybe both.

What did you see, exactly?

[Mercy grimaces.] I saw them – copied. For every ripped up, rotten, pockmarked, solid, gray-toned face comin’ outta the corn, there was an unblemished, gray-toned, wispy face following it. And the faces were… they were anguished. Each “smoke” was open-mouthed, saying something, and straining backwards, tugging at the dead copies lurching towards us with arms raised and moans ringing high. There was this… this… NO sensation. It rolled over me like a wave and left me crying buckets even as I raised my gun. I could see the tethers of gray mist or whatever the hell it is that was keeping the soul tied to the body that forced the previous owner of said body to watch him or herself commit horrific acts against the living.

[I can’t help it; I feel a chill shiver through me and up my spine at the throb of grief and helplessness in Mercy’s voice. If she is putting on another “show,” telling another “ghost story” for an audience of one, she is doing a superb job of getting me hooked.]

One zombie lurched directly toward me. It was a woman; a housewife, I’d guess. She wore the remains of a housecoat and slippers, and what was left of her hair was still in the curlers that clung to the decayed strands. I don’t want to go into more detail than that; she was really messed up, probably because she couldn’t have been able to run fast enough to get away from the zombies. She was a large woman. But, behind her… I could see her face. She’d have been crying if she could have, I think. Her mouth was moving, going “No, no, no, no!” just constantly. I couldn’t hear her, but… there’s different “psychic senses,” y’know. Clairvoyance is one of ‘em; that’s when you see the spirits. There’s others, like clairaudience – hearing – and clairsentience, which is when the medium receives the impression, the sense, of what the spirit is trying to get across. That’s what I had: Clairvoyance and clairsentience. Shocked the shit right out of me, let me tell you. Remember when I said I was either gonna crap my pants or die of heart failure…? Guess which one happened.

[Mercy and I share a grin, but hers fades quickly enough as she looks back out over the ruined farmland.]

Yeah… there I was, with this dead fat housewife lumbering at me with her ghost being dragged along for the ride unwillingly. She was doing everything she could to make her body stop. That ghost was straining to keep her body back, but it was all for nothing. Then, she looked right at me, and I could tell that she knew I knew. She started yelling at me and I got the sense of “Run! Run! Please, run!”

But you didn’t.

[Mercy shakes her head.] I was crying, snotting all over myself, even as I aimed between her eyes. I fired and the fat old thing toppled backwards immediately and rolled away a little.

And the ghost…?

Stood there. Just stood there. She hadn’t been dragged along with her body – not that time. Because as soon as I killed the body for good, the connection between them snapped. [She snaps her fingers to illustrate the point.] Just like that. She stared at her body, then at me, and reached out for me even as her mouth moved. I couldn’t hear, but I knew she was saying “Thank you.” Then, I shot through her because another zombie was coming at me, this one in better shape. A boy of about fourteen or so, only one bite visible. He’d been bit, but he’d run and later died of his wound. Anyway, the ghost lady kinda looked surprised, but then just… poofed away. Wisped away, I guess. Dissolved…? Yeah; that. She gave me a smile and she had the sweetest look of peace on her face as she went away. I dunno where to – only that she was gone. The boy, he gave me the same look, the same “Thank you” and then he was gone, too. I could see it happening around me to the others, only they couldn’t see the ghosts. But I could see them. With every killing shot, the ghosts got this look of “Oh, thank you, Jesus!” on their faces and dissolved away. I shot more of my own zombies – hah; my zombies – and each time, I sensed gratitude. Then, the killing was done. We’d been at it for hours, but by the time it was done, the fields were emptied and we had about two hundred dead bodies to deal with.

What happened next? You told everyone about the ghosts?

Hah! Are you kidding? I needed those people! Safety in numbers and all that rot. They needed me, too. I was an extra hand to protect the kids. But, if I’d said something loony about how I could “see dead people,” they’d have run me out lickety-split. Nobody had time for anyone going mental. Anybody perceived as being a liability to the safety of the group was quickly encouraged to leave, and I still needed them to get me west to the mountains. No… what happened next is that we went in and harvested as much corn as we could carry without hindering us. Then, we rolled the dead bodies into the picked areas and set ‘em on fire.

You set fire to the rest of the corn?

We couldn’t take it with us and it was close to dying on the stalk as it was. There wasn’t any point in trying to save it for anybody who might come after us; it would have been as dead and rotten as the bodies lying in the soil.

I see.

Yeah… me, too. [She smirks at her own little joke.] So, we loaded up the corn, packed up our gear, and hiked to the nearby town and gathered up every scrap of ammunition we could find. Traded old clothes for new clothes, right down to the shoes, and took any medicine and contained drinking water we could find that was needed. Traded out anything old for anything new that was still good. Took only a few cans of food to add variety that wouldn’t be a weight drag on us. Y’know… only the basics. Then, once we were out of town, runners went back and set the fields and the bodies alight. We didn’t stay to watch the burning; we had to keep moving, just in case. Plus, the west was still a long, long way away and the days would be getting shorter very, very soon.

You eventually told someone about the ghosts, though. That’s why you’re known as Mercy, now, yes?

[She smirks again.] Yeah, but only after we’d made it over the mountains. We managed to get there just before they began “border patrol” that would start turning people away to the north and south; anywhere but into the crowded safe zone. Once we were in, we were “processed” and given places to live and assignments… and I told folks about the ghosts, about how killing the zombie set the souls free. I was quickly escorted to the mind-docs and they tried their level best to counsel me out of what was clearly a coping mechanism. I finally had all I could stand, especially as more reports of “smoke” kept coming in – total strangers who’d never spoken with anyone else about ghosts had the same, or nearly the same, descriptions, which lead to prescriptions. I got the hell out before somebody could drug me into a coma for being “different.”

What did you do?

I jumped the gun, basically. Before the president could issue his speech about taking back our land and freeing us from the fear of something lurching out of the dark at us, I decided I couldn’t leave those poor souls to be dragged all over the country while their bodies ate every live thing they could catch. So, I took self-defense classes, self-survival classes – everything I would need to be able to survive on my own. Then, I packed up my kit and hiked the hell on out of there, back over the mountains, back into the greater part of America.

Nobody tried to stop you?

Oh, hell, yeah! Plenty of people! “Barbie, be reasonable.” “Barbara, think of the good you can do here!” “Babs, you know nobody’s taking your ghost stories seriously. Don’t you think it’s time to grow up?” Assholes; they were only concerned about what I could for them. How my working hands and legs and body could help to make things comfortable for them. In the meantime, their dead friends, family, neighbors were out there, howling in anguish as they were forced to watch their bodies commit atrocity after atrocity. Can you imagine how that must hurt? To be forcibly evicted from your body but still chained to it and forced to watch the solid part of you mutilate and terrify and consume people. Living people, who fought and thrashed and screamed and died in horrible ways brought to them by your hands.

[Mercy’s rhetoric is so infused with pathos that I cannot help but respond with the horror such words are designed to provoke from me. She doesn’t even seem to notice my unease.]

But, I wouldn’t be dissuaded from what I felt was my duty to the tormented souls out there. Nobody could convince me to stop, to stay, to not go. The joke began going around about my self-imposed mission of mercy. Soon, people began calling me the “Mercy Lady.” After that, I was just “Mercy.”

[The dark clouds that had been roiling over us choose that moment to rip themselves open, sending cold rain down on us. I make the suggestion that we go to my car, but Mercy is hardened to such antics of the elements and ignores me. I sense she has more to say, so I pull my jacket collar up around my neck and cover my voice recorder with my baseball cap to keep it from shorting out.]

I came in handy, though, on my mission. [Her face is almost indifferent, but her brown eyes seem heavy and dark with memory of experience.] I plotted out my route on a map and made copies for various people. I took a radio with me and notebooks and writing tools. Everywhere I went, I left a written account of what I’d found and done. Let whoever came after me know where – if any – the valuables I’d scavenged could be found. But, whenever I had radio contact, I would relay back to the safe zone what I’d found. It helped the Army to prepare for their own efforts.

Why not just join the Army and go with them?

[She shakes her head.] I’d already been out in the country for almost two years by the time they caught up with me. Ironically, it was in this state, somewhere south of here. But, yeah… two years. Two years in which the souls of the dead would have been in agony. I couldn’t… I just couldn’t leave them like that. Not when I knew and had the skills to do something about it.

[She turns abruptly and begins walking towards my car and I follow quickly, grateful to be getting out of the rain. It soon becomes apparent that she was only escorting me to my vehicle, having said all she intended to say. It’s just as I’m getting ready to drive away that she delivers her parting words.]

Y’know that other hokey, oft-quoted line…? [She smiles at my confusion.] “With great power comes great responsibility.”

[I watch as she walks away from me, into the rain, into the storm. She’s a hazy speck in the distance by the time I put the car in gear and drive away.]

Those words haunt me even today, I mean, as if anything could haunt me worse than watching Zack annihilate city after city, and town after town. I can’t get over the feeling of when it actually hit me. When the infected were already in the adjacent towns, the whole thing really slammed the bolt home. We’d get to thinking every so often, the both of us, about how the whole thing started. If we were informed of what this thing was earlier, then we probably could have controlled it. It’s not as if it was fucking airborne, they had to bite you, and they moved slower than dog shit melting the sun. Instead of being told that it was a form of rabies, it would have been great to know how to kill them. Most of us had to figure that out on own accords.

Paul and I were in the shit nonstop from when it all began until World War Z ended. We managed to observe the 1^st Norfolk Militia in southwestern Pennsylvania about four weeks after the infection spread from DC into Alexandria, Virginia, eventually routing their men north of the border. We had been humping across the mountainous areas of the Appalachians for a while when we saw them. It was a patrol slaughtering a group of Quisling nut-jobs getting devoured by their undead counterparts. I would have to say that despite the fact we were seeing a group of people taking charge and killing the infected, we were both apprehensive about making contact with them. Seeing as the first Quislings were popping up everywhere and these were still in the early days of the outbreak; it was somewhat like a totally paranoid anarchy. I was expecting to receive a bullet to the face if we approached them outright, even with my rucksack full of ammunition carrying an M1 Carbine, and Paul with his Ruger .22 from Wal-Mart.

When their gunshots had finally stopped, I stood up from the prone and announced our names and purpose. I do look back on this and laugh a little, because it felt as if I was trying to communicate with aliens at first. From their five-ton truck, they dispatched a group to escort us back to the vehicle, and check us for bites. Paul and I had done a great job at avoiding Zack back in those days. The only time we fired our rifles was if we absolutely had to. We knew after watching wave after wave storm in on screaming people, that sound was definitely not something you wanted to make, especially if you were looking to survive longer than a day. Hell, I remember one evening just before nightfall we couldn’t find any suitable houses to occupy, so we got up on the roof this old Victorian place. The house was still in decent condition from what I could see in glow of the sunset. The inside had been torn to pieces though, and probably in the due course of the initial panic.

We had run into a few deserted Mom and Pop hardware stores along the way while we were foraging for more of our necessary supplies, and managed to pick up a box of thick nails, a decent hammer, and some sturdy nylon rope used for towing light stuff with lawn tractors. I don’t know why we got those things, but it looked like something we might need later. Maybe we thought we could board up a house or something; it beats me to be honest.

We used what we had and nailed a length of rope to the roof, and used more rope to secure our equipment and ourselves to the makeshift anchor. We slept against the relentless distant moaning of Zack atop the roof that night. The air and sky was full of smoke from the burning cities, so the stars and moon were masked in our area. With the exception of the occasional white flash cascading across the dim clouds, and the eventual thud that followed it, the power was out and we couldn’t see two feet in front of us. Zack was on to us all right, we knew that for a fact. We could both hear a few of them moaning desperately down below, and this made me wonder if they could just smell us up here, or if maybe the hammer falls for the anchor gave away our position. I can’t be entirely sure of which.

When my eyes opened the following morning, I swear it was as if the whole region had already been infected. It seemed like hundreds had flocked to stand below us in the morning rays of the summer sun, with hands grabbing at the sky, and mouths wide open. It made me think of those Pentecostal churchgoers from back in the day, only these ones were hell bound, and wanted nothing more than to eat us alive. I can’t say I wasn’t shocked because most likely I was, but I suppose in retrospect I had almost expected something like this to occur sooner or later. I shook Paul awake, and told him not to look down. Though by the time I had finished my sentence, he was already peering over the edge of the roof into an abyss of the undead. The tether around his waist and legs pulled tight against him, and if he had not been wearing it, he probably could have fallen off. I can understand that, I mean I was somewhat weak in the knees when I first saw it too.

He shot back with surprised gasp after a few moments, as his brain took a long look at what he just saw, and had to take it all in before he could react. I can remember him looking like he was about to throw up the contents of his stomach. It took me a second to try to calm myself down. I think I was almost panting with fright at the time once everything had registered with me too. Eventually I stopped, and this allowed me time to try to calm him down as well. We still had enough food and water in our supplies to last another week, so I assured him that we were going to make it out of this fucked up situation. This was definitely around the time that we realized we could hear rustling below from inside the house. I will never know exactly how many were in there, because neither of us wanted to find out. I can only imagine the scores of them aimlessly wondering right beneath us, probably in the same awkward hands-held-high position as their friends outside. Personally, I don’t think to think about it. When you’re that close to them, the images can get burned into the back of your mind; as if your eyes were a big screen projector left on the same picture for too long.

This was when we realized that the infestation had grown out of the scope of controlling it. He said to me on many occasions in the weeks before finding the militia that he wasn’t sure we were going to survive. At times, I had found myself agreeing with him, but I would always tell him that if we’re going to go down, we were going down with a fight, guns-a-blazing, as I liked to put it to him. Anyway, the rope that we took earlier in the week ended up saving our lives as you can see, because Zack’s stupid ass was only out in front of the house. There were a few stragglers in the distance to the rear when we came down off the roof, at least half a mile away, probably coming over to join in the festivities.

Back then, they still looked semi-normal before all of the eventual walking decomposition started to set in, and sometimes we would find ourselves feeling sorry for them in the beginning. Of course, that is if you could get past the glassy grey eyes, pale bloodless skin, stained clothing, and the non-stop moaning; they could have been your neighbors about two months before that point. It was times like that we really had to stop and look at what they really were. It was hard sometimes, but the best way of looking at it for us was, at least we’re not the Quislings. I always thought they deserved to be shot anyway, and a lot of the time, we couldn’t tell if they were actually infected, so they’d get a bullet to forehead just like the rest of ‘em. We’d take bets every so often in the heat of the battles that came later on, despite the fear, we’d be laughing our sick bellows, our faces covered in carbon residue from the rifle chambers, and wondering about which ones were the Quislings. Only in the latter half of the war did we start rule out thinking the Quislings could even still exist. Zack attacked them regardless of their mentally retarded disposition trying to act like the real deal, so by the end of everything I think the Quislings were just as extinct as the zombies themselves were.

In the 1^st Norfolk, “No Prisoners” militia the setting truly did resemble the Regular Army. We wore woodland BDUs, the chow lines were long, the food tasted like cardboard sometimes, and people still occasionally acted like morons despite our situation. We used the same rank system as the Army too, although people gained rank due to corrupt leadership a lot of the time. Everybody in 2^nd Squad knew it, but there was nowhere else for us to go, so we just dealt with it. Occasionally we would lose an officer to a bite, or a First Sergeant, and that meant someone needed to be put into that position to fill the slot. The both of us started our undead extermination careers as Privates, and inherently so. Some years later, we had our own squads, and we both watched many of our friends get bit, and sometimes we were the ones to finish them.

Paul and I had a game that we played sometimes in the unit once we were settled in. We called it “First to Forty”, and whoever could shoot forty of Zack would get a little extra sleep the next morning. In other words, you had no guard shift during the night. It never really made much of a difference who won anyway. Hell, because after a while Zack would come to you in your dreams, and the recurring nightmares were never a highlight of my nightlife. The longer you were asleep it seemed, the worse some of the dreams would get, so if you won the game it wasn’t exactly your lucky day more often than not. One time this person John Collins, a tall administrative assistant from Fairfax, Virginia won and he told us to go fuck ourselves. I let out a bit of real laughter to that one, not the battle laughter I was talking about earlier. Jokes were not as funny as they used to be back in those days, because laughter usually leads to Zack creeping up on you in the middle of the night, so jokes were rather forbidden in the beginning. Silence wasn’t bliss in the night, but it was the best we could do to keep down the night attacks.

When we were not fighting off the masses of undead, we were stacking them into gruesome barricading walls, on each side of our twenty-five foot tall wooden palisade built around the original missile silo structure our command center was based. For a bunch of backwoods people, I was surprised to see the marvel of engineering that went into the design we had setup. The silo, having been abandoned by the US Army back in the early 90’s, or at least that’s what the higher ups said, was surrounded by a wooded area with maybe three-hundred meters of open land in each direction. To our luck, an existing three layer chain-linked fence with razor wire lined the perimeter and was still intact. It provided some protection from the hordes in the beginning. This little bit of help gave us the ability to send out detachments to deforest portions of the area, in which the logs later became our inner perimeter fortress walls.

The deforesting teams were only dispatched outside of the fort during daylight conditions. When the rest of the companies were keeping Zack busy on the other side of the compound, was usually the best time. We did lose many of our men on those details over the years, but once the construction of the palisade was completed, everything was all right for the most part. At least you didn’t have to worry about being selected to go “outside” to chop down massive oak trees. The methods they used to get the wood back into the place were a completely different deal, and I had nothing to do with it. They had taken some old construction equipment from somewhere in town and made it all come together. Of course, they had to spend time using our slim resources, welding plates on to the frames of the huge vehicles so that they could not be attacked outright. That was smart on our part, because those machines were crawling with undead fucks by the time they made it back into the perimeter.

For about six months during my third tour, I spent my time in the supply section. The unit had taken in so many refugees and trained them to fight, that we were running a little thin on rifles for a while. It was my job to go outside of the perimeter with a medium sized detachment from 1^st Platoon and 2^nd Platoons of Alpha Company to go into surrounding towns to gather non-perishable food items, medicines, gasoline for the generators, weapons, and ammunition. The systems worked like this. At the inner palisade, there were two sets of massive thick wooden doors to pass through to get to the outer perimeter. Guard towers were at the main gate section, and were powered by some strange motorized contraption one of the engineers devised. If the motors failed, the contingency was that the guards could still close the doors by hand from the mid-level of the tower by pulling on a set of large wooden beams. The beams were connected to the center mass of the door, and were on rollers to there was as little resistance as possible.

The hinges were special, so the outer perimeter doors swung very quickly outward, and only to the width of our biggest trucks, maybe give or take a few feet. This way, the moment the trucks passed through, the doors could be closed with a minimal amount of the infected getting in. A gun team in either guard tower would kill off the ones that managed to squeeze by the vehicles. On the return trips, we would use our CB radios to notify the teams that we were inbound, and they would be waiting to open the doors back up for us. Usually on the way back in, Zack would be plowed through by the trucks and get into the perimeter; however, it really wasn’t much of a big deal, because most of them were liquefied on impact anyway.

The surrounding cities were infested pretty badly in some parts, so we had maps with us showing the areas that were heavily populated with the undead. Sometimes the intelligence would be wrong, and we would have to haul ass to another town with the Zacks hot on our shit. There were more than a few times we were almost overrun on missions. Paul requested to ride along with me on the mission. I remember it was into the heart of Leechburg. Everything was going as planned, and we met very little resistance from Zack on the way out there. We were all off the trucks getting supplies when the security teams started to report movement from all directions. Our first stop had been the Lucky Shot gun store, which to our amazement hadn’t been looted by anyone previously. It seemed kind of odd altogether, especially given the zombie infestation and all, but I suppose it was our lucky day; pun very intended.

I remember that by this time we had fully automatic weapons, because some self-proclaimed geniuses with rifles or more like eccentric ex-Special Forces types would spend time modifying our weaponry to be more effective. AR-15 rifles and civilian versions of the M4A1 were their favorite ones to tinker with if I recall. There were plenty of them in PA it seemed, and were common to find once you got past the infected hordes.

The CB radio on my chest clip was going wild with chatter as I was filling our big plastic totes with boxes of bullets. Range reports were coming in from 1^st, and 2^nd squads at less than six-hundred meters. 3^rd and Weapons squad were reporting multiple flocks in the distance east of our position at about eight-hundred meters. Considering the speed that Zack trudges along at, it really doesn’t matter until they get within two-hundred fifty meters; then it’s time to book it out of there. What we didn’t know is that a separate flock of more than three-hundred was coming at us through the town’s alleyways from a few blocks over. 1^st squad spotted them and began frantically requesting permission to fall back. I heard Sergeant Billings’ from 2^nd come over the CB authorizing the order.

By the time our foraging teams gathered up as much as they could from various places on the block of Morgan Street, the infected were on top of us in full force. We lost an entire squad that day, because as 1^st was retreating into the path of the oncoming flock. They didn’t realize that what they saw was only the back end of it all, because the road leading to the trucks was curved; the fuckers were waiting for them when they came into the bend. The rest of the elements managed to make it back without too much skirmishing. Some of the men were shouting to 1^st squad as they watched them get torn apart. From the back of the trucks I’m sure to them it was like watching a horrific real-life movie that got smaller and smaller until it faded out of sight. I’m not saying that we didn’t lose a lot of good men that day, but we all knew the risks that went along with the supply missions.

You just had to assume, as most of us did anyway that if you were overrun, there was no chance of being rescued. The unit doesn’t like to send its detachments into the same stretch of area any more than three times a month. That’s once a week or so, and if you think you’re going to survive out there for that long with Zack breaking down your door, you’re dead fucking wrong. The plan we had for any such occasion was to kill as many as you could, then turn your rifle on yourself before they got to you. At the very least, this way, you wouldn’t become one of them. I suppose in some kind of grim way it was the honorable thing to do. If you became Zack, then you were just another mindless zombie the unit would eventually have to fight off, so you’d really be doing it out of respect more than anything would.

Missions were never expected to succeed outside of the palisade, so even if you came home with less than half of what you left with, you still came out on top. The infected were everywhere, and it was only a matter of chance a mission lead to anything other than total failure. On many other occasions, some teams were never as lucky we were. Men that I had known since Paul and I had enlisted were killed off on these supply detachments all the time, well after I was taken off the ready list and switched to the roving perimeter guard element. Eventually after this, we both stopped making friends and just concentrated on the job at hand. We found that it wasn’t as hard to deal with the loss of our men whenever they got bitten if we didn’t care about them in the first place.

The worst thing that I saw the men do was become complacent with their surroundings. Some of them would go right up to the outer perimeter line and talk shit to the zombies. I don’t think we ever lost anyone that way, but just because they were willing to stand face to face with them, spit on them, and occasionally waste a few of them for fun, as they used to say it, often made me feel sick. If I saw it though, I would tear into their asses for doing it, because the last thing we need is people who are comfortable being surrounded by hungry dead people. I remember that we did lose a person who flung himself right into a flock outside the gates from the guard tower. Why he did it, we’ll never know. He left his weapon and ammo behind on the floor before he Zacked himself. I suppose that his idea of suicide was different from the rest of ours, but at least he did the honorable thing by leaving his rifle for another able body.

Life inside the palisade reminded me of seeing pictures of old world civilizations. In the beginning, before all of the refugees poured into the gates we didn’t have very many women. I’d say that our numbers were substantial toward the end of the war. You would think that rape would have happened more often than it did, because the man to woman ratio was still awfully skewed. I mean, the rule was if you committed murder, rape, or any like acts we would throw your ass over the walls so you could get eaten alive. For the most part this deterred the men from getting stupid, but someone always has to be that guy. When our interesting version of the Military Police caught Private Adler with Maria Lanning’s fourteen year old daughter Trisha, after some of the townspeople (which is what they pretty much were) heard screaming from inside one of our little tents, he was less than enthused.

Adler was crying for forgiveness, pleading with the MPs in an incoherent blather. Justice was swift inside the fort, because within a few hours after Trisha testified to Colonel Everett that Adler had raped her, his ass was over the wall. I remember hearing him scream blood murder, especially when he was in mid-air. You could hear his hollering for a mile, which wasn’t so great, because later on that day we had one of the worst firefights in our history go down. From that point on, any subsequent offenders had their mouths taped shut and their arms tied behind their backs before they were tossed. This definitely cut down the repercussions having a screaming maniac outside the wall can cause. Shit, even if it’s a few minutes, it’s still enough to get the attention of every infected fuck in a four-hundred meter radius.

When the Army showed up on our doorstep near the end, people didn’t really know what to think. For the past however long we all kind of lived in our little society, doing what we had to do, living our lives hour by hour. The Army seemed kind of like a relief, because at least they had machine-guns, tanks, and a lot of food. If they hadn’t offered rations outright, I’m sure most of the townspeople would have been rather pissed off, however the Army did is right when they came to us. In some way, they didn’t rescue us, because in another way it seemed like all they did was help us wipe out the Zacks faster than ever before. For the most part, after years of supply parties being sent out further and further, our ammunition, food, and medical supplies weren’t top-notch, but we had plenty of everything we needed.

For ten and a half long years, Paul and I served side-by-side, waging what felt like an endless war against Zack. I’m sure that it was endless to just about everybody anyway, even after the declaration of victory in the states. It still felt like the war was raging along even though it had finally ended. We continued to serve in the 1^st by patrolling the car-laden streets with grabbers and our surrounding bodies of water. Occasionally Water Zacks, at least that’s what we call them, would show up on the banks of the Crooked Creek trying to gnaw on some poor kid’s ankles when they’re trying to fetch wash water for their family. Sometimes we still get dispatches from the local CDC Outbreak Prevention Center in Old Ford City. My blood runs cold when those calls come in, because it reminds me of when it all started. It still feels like it will never be over, even though it essentially is, but at least we do a good job disposing of them. We have to be on the money with that kind of stuff, I mean, who wouldn’t be? Do you think I want to go through all of that shit over again? I don’t think anyone does; and I have my doubts that WWZ II is on anyone’s Christmas wish list.

One of the biggest problems I have had since everything has calmed down a little, and the paranoia around me isn’t as great; is the thought of my family. I know haven’t mentioned them all throughout this account, because I have a tendency to forget that they even existed in the first place. I don’t know, the memories come and go. I don’t even have a picture of them to remind me of what they looked like. When the outbreaks started the panic was so widespread, and so immediate, that the phone relay systems were reserved for military, local law enforcement, and emergency calls. The cell phone providers were so bogged down back then that it was pointless. So essentially, because I was staying with Paul in northern Maryland at the time, I saw no reason to risk everything to try to round them up. I guess I figured that everything would pan out for the best, and there was no reason to go crazy about the outbreak. After all, it was so far away, and it didn’t seem real when it went down.

My family lived in Baltimore, which turned into a Zack factory in less than two months after the first reported cases in the state. I really just assume that they were turned before they knew what these things really were. The panic was widespread, but I have a feeling they tried to make a stand against the things. The city fell rather quickly and I haven’t been back to Maryland in thirteen years. I miss them, but I can’t let it destroy me, because a lot of people just like me were put into the same situation so long ago. I go to the “MemorieZ” talk group here once a week in the city to talk about all of this shit, but the best coping mechanism so far is telling myself that its okay that I made it through, and they did not. You can’t live your life dwelling on the past.

Also, one last thing before I have to go to my evening formation. Since the war ended, our original numbers have dramatically decreased. Most of the vets decided to settle down after the war, but right now Paul’s on deployment in Virginia doing sweep and burial detail. The National Guard has recognized us as full unit of the United States Army, and we are getting new men every day that want to help with the cleanup efforts and about 35% of the main body consists of them now. I will probably be joining him down there in a few weeks. When you contacted me, I got permission from Colonel Everett to stick around up here so that I could tell you about my experiences. Sometimes I think it’s important that people get a good taste of history from all walks of life. If the kids being born today aren’t going to know what a CD player is, they might as well be taught why they don’t.