You always hear the stories about the shooters, how they won the war by stacking zack up til he stopped coming. I think they even have a movie coming out about it.  I give um credit, they did do that but that ain’t the whole story, that’s for damn sure. About the time those pansy assed shooters was high fivin’ each other and heading to the rear for cold beer and hot showers our job was just starting. Them piles of corpses just wasn’t gonna disappear on their own. It wasn’t pretty but shifting them corpses is what we did.

I was a raker for my whole time in. Some of the older hands use to tell stories about how early on everyone did a little of everything but by the time I joined up they pretty much had a system in place. Rakers, Scoops, Dumpers, and those poor bastards working the fire pits.

Man, those fire pits were their own little slice of hell. Dig a trench twenty or so feet deep, line it with thermite and coal, and when the dumper trucks come along and dump the bodies you wet um down with JP8 or diesel or whatever you got to keep um cooking until they are nothing but ashes. You just keep digging the trench until the dumper trucks stop coming. I remember one guy told me that one trench outside of Topeka was over two and a half miles long. They say that most of the guys on the fire pit turn vegetarian…Ha… they can’t stand the smell of cooked meat … Ha, Ha! Well that’s just something I heard anyway.

When you’re a raker they give you a ten foot steel pole with a little pitchfork looking thing and a hook on the end. You use that to pull the piles apart. One corpse at a time. Then the guys from the scoops come and put them in the front end loaders. Scoops to the dumper trucks and dumpers to the fire pits …as simple as that. You just keep on going till there ain’t none left.

You gotta rake um out because the shooters don’t get um all. Sometimes zack will fall down and get buried. Then you come along, rake out the corpses, and up pops zack hungry as ever. That’s why you gotta work in two man teams. It’s all close in work and we used .22 carbines instead of the long rifles that the shooters got. When zack pops up you pin him with the rake if you can and let your buddy put um down. My last buddy was so quick I hardly ever had time to get um with the rake before he had a couple of rounds into zack’s head.

You only see a full up zack once in a while, sometimes you get the crawlers, you know, the ones that don’t have legs or the legs don’t work. One time we got four midgets right in a row, boing, boing, boing, boing. We laughed about that for a week. Zack midgets…Ha, Ha! Usually though it’s the kids we get. Not the older ones…the younger ones, six, seven year-olds. Sometimes we get them allot younger. They just get buried in the corpses until we rake them out. They pop up and let out that moan, but it ain’t the same as grown up zack. It’s …you know… higher pitched…like kids playing at being a monster…but these are the real deal. Kid or not they are still zack and you gotta put um down. And we did. We put down allot of kids. Zack kids, I mean. Allot of them.

I knew this one guy, he had been with us for a while, his buddy raked up three kids. His buddy said he just stood there with his carbine and let them come at him. They crawled all over him before his buddy could put um down. Course we had to put him down too but I remember he said that he just could not pull the trigger. He said he just couldn’t shoot any more kids. Funny thing was this guy never had any kids of his own … from before, you know. Maybe I could understand if he had kids of his own that …well…that didn’t make it, but this guy didn’t have any at all. He just stood there and let them get at him. I, uh … I don’t, uh … Well, that’s all I want to say about that.

We had some great parties in the G,R,&D. When we finally got finished the decon trucks would come and spray the area down with that sweet smelling stuff they said killed everything. That was the best smell in the world … that smell meant we could clean up our gear and head to the rear. They would lay on one hell of a feed for us. All the beer and whiskey you could drink and we would get hammered for a couple of days before we had to report back and get ready for another job.

We had a hell of a party when they cut us loose for good too. I don’t remember most of it so it must have been good. They sent us through all the shrinks when they demobed us but I only wanted to get out and get hammered. I remember the shrinks sayin’ that I might have some nightmares but that they will go away after a while. Ha … I never had nightmares even when I was in like some of the guys did. I guess I am just lucky.

I don’t much like to be around little ones though. I went to see my sister right after I got out … her and her kids. I couldn’t stand to be around them, the kids, I mean. I just had to get away from them. Pissed my sister off something fierce but I just could not stand to be around them. I don’t like being around any kids … you know, they just bother me. But I got a clean bill of health from the docs… so I’m OK. Not like the stories you hear about some of the guys. I’m doing OK…just fine That is all I got to say. You can turn that thing off…I’m done here.

I meet the interviewee, ‘John’, in an interstate diner. John had tracked me down a week previous, after hearing about my report ‘from some friends’, and requested to be interviewed.

John’s a lean, rangy man and he’s wearing mirrored aviators. He drinks his coffee and explains his request for confidentiality.

The stuff I’m about to tell you, you won’t find any other way, but it’s our story and I think it needs told. Most of is still technically classified. Not that it matters much now… the government, hell, even the army who set our mission, aren’t around anymore. But I survived ten years of hell, I’m not gonna risk jail just because some bureaucrat’s following the letter. Besides which… we did some stuff in the early days which I’m not proud of.

I’d been in Delta for three years when they selected me to join the new unit. 5th Special Forces Operational Detachment-Alpha.I’d seen the tail end of Gulf Two and Afghanistan, and when they told me it was a covert homeland security gig, I jumped at the chance. Nothing in America could be as bad as hunting insurgents in crowded streets and stinking caves, in countries where even the people you’re supposed to be helping don’t want you. I know, I know, but this was way before everything kicked off, and this new rabies was just the next swine flu.

The 5th were based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There we had access to the 160th ‘Nightstalkers’ SOAR and rapid transport across the continent. We also bunkered with the 101st Airborne, so I knew a few of the guys who fought in the battle of Portsmouth. Brave guys, they knew what they were getting themselves into.

We didn’t, but that changed fast. My first day at Fort Campbell, I met the rest of my team. Our teams were four man units, for speed, stealth and flexibility. The guys on my first team, ‘Mike’, ‘Jack’ and ‘Joe’, were a mix of SEALS and Green Berets. I’d worked with Mike, in Afghanistan, and knew him to be a solid fighter. It was also good to have a familiar face. There were about twenty other Delta or ex-Delta in the twenty five teams that made up the 5th initial field elements, but none that I knew too well.

They sat us down, me, my team and about fifty other new arrivals in a briefing room and told us the score. To their credit, no one cried bullshit. I had the sneaking suspicion this was some PsyOps evaluation nonsense. I’d seen worse. The suspicion was still there when they showed us the images, the police reports, the details of the skirmishes in border towns and local hospitals. All covered up, of course, wouldn’t do to panic the American public, not with the economy the way it was.

I was still sceptical right up until the moment the took us through to the holding cells in the warehouse next door and put several large calibre rounds through a zed, and it kept on trying to get at us. Never forget your first Z, right? This one had been a cop, and was missing a crescent shaped chunk of flesh from its forearm. Apart from the five large holes in its chest, and the five massive exit wounds in its back, that was the only injury we could see. It just kept on reaching through the bars of its holding cell, even whilst missing a good portion of its torso. The officer who had given us the briefing put a final round through its head. They had our attention.

That was it; that was our selection process. I guess we’d already proved ourselves in a regular fight, so they just wanted to know if we could take what we were going up against. Still, none of this ‘locking us overnight in a room with a bunch of biting heads’, like I keep hearing. Thank Christ for that! The later recruits had it different, but with us, the first wave, no one really knew what they were doing.

We got to work training to put down the dead. A lot of that training was focussed on headshots. All the Alpha operators had seen action in one arena or another, but fighting armed, fast human opponents encourages that centre-of-mass aiming that does absolutely no good against a walking corpse. We took time to ensure that habit didn’t crop up in high-stress combat situations, and time to get acquainted with the range of weapons and tactics the programme was proposing. It wasn’t the dark ages, but it wasn’t quite the New Model Army either.

They kitted us out over the course of the first week. We carried lightweight recce body armour, little more than advanced skating protection, but enough to stop some bites and bullet ricochets. We had access to pretty much any weapon we could ask for, but generally stuck to MP5 ‘shorts’ for covert actions, and FN SCARs for anything heavier. Sidearms were a matter of preference, I kept the .45 M1911 that I’d brought from Fort Bragg. Some of the teams were specialised into heavy or exotic weaponry: Barretts, flamethrowers, SAWs, M60s, foam guns and slip guns. We’d use these teams as support if things started to go south. Talking of which, do you have any idea what I’m saying? I could just call big guns and small guns, if you’d prefer?

Things were pretty quiet in the states for that first month. There were isolated incidents across the country, but they were all met by local law enforcement and put down before they got out of control. Our ready teams would scramble and comb the area, just to be sure, whilst the spooks took care of the publicity.

Our prime objective was to prevent the spread of infection. We would go into an area, sweep through and report. If it was an after action assay, we’d generally wear civvies. No need to scare the populace more by having a town crawling with ninjas in the wake of a shooting incident. In the beginning, we had spooks to accompany us and determine the vector, interviewing the local police and civilians. When we’d declared the area clear, we might move onto the next town, backtracking a patient zero, say, or investigating suspicious police reports. We didn’t find much that first month, a lot of the P zeros had just gone to sleep and woke up dead. That was worrying, no obvious vector. It took a couple of weeks for the spooks to work out lots of them had received infected organ donations from abroad. Some of our teams were deployed to bring in suspected cases, but by that time things had started to heat up, both at home and in the rest of the world.

Our first major incident came a month and a half after I started. Our team had come together well, especially for guys picked up and thrown in at the deep end of a war. I guess the small team numbers and prior experience were to thank for that, it minimised selection and training time.

We were one of the ready teams that day. The call came to haul ass to the flight hangers and we’d be briefed when airborne. The Nightstalkers busted us across the country double time and took us in by Blackhawks for the final stage. Details were sketchy, but it seemed like a an escalating outbreak centred around the local hospital. The town was small and spread out, about five thousand people, but the hospital served a larger area and was five stories tall. The outbreak had spread overnight through the wards, and the small police force hadn’t been able to handle it. Our intel guys had caught the radio chatter and is sounded bad.

We got there six hours after the scramble order. Six active teams, with two heavy weapon teams in reserve, a squadron of attack helicopters, and a pair of F22s over the horizon. The spooks had cut the landlines and an airforce bird was jamming all civilian radio traffic across that part of the state.  We made a pass over the hospital at dawn, but couldn’t see anything obvious apart from the abandoned emergency vehicles in the lot. The lights were still on but we couldn’t see movement in the corridors. The hospital lay in its own open campus, set away from the town proper, so three of our teams landed at road entrances and swept the grounds towards the main building whilst we rappelled onto its roof.

The roof access was locked, so team 3 made a forced entry with breaching charges. The moment the door popped, the dead were on us. We figured later that they must have followed some poor soul who’d been trying to escape to the roof, and got them when they couldn’t make it through the door. Whatever, there were about sixty of them in the stairwell, all freshly dead with little rigor, against our twelve guns and a hundred square feet of fighting roof space. Team 3 went under straight off, just ripped apart. That, and the logjam in the stairwell, saved us. We opened up with everything we had six magazines of 9mm each, grenades, swearing. All that stuff I said about the finest soldiers in the world drilling for headshots? That went out the window when we suddenly found ourselves ten feet from all that blood and snapping teeth. We fired until there was nothing moving in the doorway, and then threw a few more frag grenades in for luck.

The rest of the hospital was pretty much a clean sweep, though I was scared shitless the whole time. We resupplied from the helo and went in through the top story windows: there was no way I was going down that stairwell. The vector turned out to be a woman who had recently returned from South Africa. Hers was the only room in the place without any blood in it.

That was our first real action, our first casualties. We blew the hospital. Gas explosion. Those excuses became common as time went on.

After that, things got busy. We got another two hundred operators. Two incidents a week, then six, then ten. Hospitals were always the worst for me, and there were far too many of them. Apartment blocks, airfields, goddamn funeral homes, small towns…

When I said we did stuff I not proud of, one particular incident sticks in my mind. It was just our team, doing a routine clean sweep of small outbreak. The town’s sheriff had shot a vagrant who had ‘tried to eat’ him and a few of the townsfolk. Our intel system was sensitive to reports like that.

We were dropped at the nearest airfield and picked up a federal vehicle. Prevent infection, avoid exposure. We got to the town at sunset, nearly half a day after the sheriff filed his report, but like I said, it was a routine sweep, we even wore civvies. It was a small town in forest country. Two thousand, three hundred and sixty five people in new builds, a few shops, a police station and a mini-mall. No hospital, but a clinic. It lay on an island, mid river, with a road bridge at either side.

Things began to go wrong shortly before we got there. First, control radioed us to say that the police frequencies had gone dead. Next, we noticed flickering lights silhouetting the forested rise that separated us from the road down towards the town. I had Mike gun the car and we crested the rise a minute later.

The situation was all fucked up. From our position, we could see both sides of the town. Most of the lights were off, but the fires from burning cars and houses gave us enough illumination. The town crawled. From a distance, we couldn’t tell infected from uninfected, but there were a lot of them. Gunfire was concentrated in the main street, semi-automatic but uncontrolled, filling streets with lead but mostly not hitting anything important. Both roads out across the river were blocked, three to four car pile ups. The bridge on the far side burned, but the one on our side still held, and some of the townsfolk were trying to get across the wreckage. A horde was following them.

I radioed this into Command and while we awaited their response we broke out the weapons. We were only carrying MP5s for this mission, Quiet but relatively short ranged. If we were to sweep the town we’d have to go over the bridge and get up close and personal. No pleasant at the best of times but we’d also be contending with the wild fire of the town’s defenders. And there were only four of us.

The order from command came through, and it took us a few moments to process it. We deployed to the end of the bridge and took up a firing arc around it. Then we shot everything that came into range. Everything. We kept the fire slow and steady. We used headshots on infected and uninfected alike, because if you can’t tell who’s been bitten, there’s no point wasting ammo once they’ve turned. Our targets were backlit by the fires in the town, and it was all far too easy. Man, woman, child, corpse, all just paper cut-outs; silhouettes.

The civvies soon stopped trying the bridge, and a few tried to swim for it. We put them down, too.. We must’ve killed a couple of hundred targets before the wave stopped. The advantage of the MP5 is that it’s integrally suppressed, and so much quieter than the civilian rifles which were tearing up the middle of the town. With their fleeing human prey exhausted, the zeds were all attracted to the gunfire along the main street.

The two minute warning came through, and we pulled back to the drainage ditch along the treeline, putting the road between us and the bridge but still within weapon range for anything that came over it. Nothing did.

When the bombs hit, the town just ceased to exist. The buildings blew apart, the bridge shattered and fell into the river, and then the napalm munitions hit and incinerated anything still moving. We were picked up and smashed into the muddy water at the bottom of the ditch, but otherwise we got off lightly.

Two thousand, three hundred and sixty five people. All dead because we were too late and too few. I don’t know how many had been turned by the time we got there, but we weren’t just shooting the walking dead on that bridge. It’s not something you think about at the time… it’s not something I thought about, but afterwards it weighs deep.

A collapsed dam was the explanation for that one.

I remembered wondering at the time how the public could keep buying these excuses: forest fire, flash flood, earthquake, gas explosion, serial killer, armed gangs, terrorists. It says something when natural disasters and major terrorist attacks are considered less destabilising to society than the truth. But the truth was that we were under attack from walking corpses, and even for a public coming to terms with the global spread of African rabies, that was not an easy truth to accept.

The winter wore on with more and more separate outbreaks, but the cold up North kept them slow whilst we piled operators into the Southern ones. The 5th received reinforcements, and eventually reached regiment strength with a thousand field teams; four thousand operators all in. Even then were stretched thin, taking casualties every single day. After our near-miss, there was no such thing as a ‘routine sweep’. That meant supersonic transport and either airdrop or stealth helo infiltration into outbreaks. We’d be on the ground no more than two hours after receiving a call. There were far fewer false alarms than we’d hoped for.

Joe once compared our situation to the Spitfire pilots fighting the Battle of Britain. “Never in the field of human conflict”, and all that. Except I’ll bet those ‘few’ were never forced to gun down unarmed civilians.

Things like that happened more often towards spring. The teams were never triggerhappy, but there’s only so much a four man team or even a platoon could do. It was never a case of shooting people to keep things quiet, but sometimes we were outnumbered and there was no way to police civilians to screen for bites. In those cases, where one infected slipping the net could bring devastation to a much larger area, the rules of engagement were clear.

Then spring came and the net just… broke.  Suddenly there were class 2 and 3 outbreaks everywhere. All those zeds that we’d missed, one that had wandered off and frozen in rivers and forests, just woke up and started tearing up everything in their path. Now every incident required at least three teams and maybe aerial drone support. Covert went out the window. We were fighting in small towns and big cities, coast to coast.

And then the story broke. The new rabies wasn’t rabies at all, and the vaccine was a piece of shit. The dead were coming to eat you.

For us, it was actually a relief. Battling monsters isn’t easy on your own. We were allowed to work with the national guard units that up until then had just been background support in our bigger operations. We still did most of the wetwork, but at least we had help cleaning up. We were still stretched though. Teams were screwing up through sheer exhaustion after dropping into five or six outbreaks a week. We’d been fighting solidly for nearly a year at this point, and things were not getting better.

Then New York happened. We’d fought in large cities before, but the high population densities actually worked for us and we’d be able to react quickly. A lot of people screaming is easy to here. But when the Osaka Express came aground at Manhattan, it created an instant class 3 outbreak, spilling ten thousand zeds onto the West Side. I think I read later that some billionaire philanthropist had chartered the cargo ship to help take refugees from Cape Town. Asshole.

The terminal was lost within minutes, and the surrounding area was crawling by the time we arrived. An airforce strike had turned the Express into a flaming hulk, and thick clouds of smoke rolled through the New York streets. We overshot the planned landing area because it was stinking with the dead, and defaulted to Central Park. There were nine hundred operators on the ground before the local guys at Fort Hamilton had even managed to muster. It was the largest operation the 5th had undertaken up to this point in the war. It also nearly got us all killed.

We deployed in a defensive perimeter around the LZ, then the helos that brought us in took off to provide air support. The Colonel in charge left a dozen teams to secure the LZ, and split the rest of us into detachments to sweep the hostile streets, West 46th through 60th. We took about a companies worth of men down each street, with enough firepower to end a war.

It was, smoke, gunshots and screams aside, a pleasant summer’s day. The roads were gridlocked, as normal, but no one was in the cars. Our detachment swept down West 54th street. Many people had barricaded themselves in the apartment and offices, and they called to us for help, but we had to ignore them and push on.

The smoke thickened as we closed on Dewitt Park. We could tell that the detachments on the others streets had already come into contact by the crackle of the comms and the sound of the military grade weaponry in play. The thick smoke cut our effective combat range down to less than six hundred feet. Infra red systems were useless against even the freshly turned, as the smoke and fires had raised the ambient temperature to above that of a cooling corpse. We dug in on the corner of 10th avenue and turned the street into a kill zone.

Our support helos buzzed overhead, churning up the smoke and throwing down grenades and streams of tracer fire into the horde. We could hear the moans even over the explosions and gunfire. There were panicked faces in the windows above us, shouting stuff we couldn’t hear and pointing frantically towards the smoke. A few teams had deployed to the roofs of the buildings, and their shooting was nearly as frantic. Contact reports were flooding the net.

When they came out of the smoke, we were only four hundred feet away.  There were thousands of them. They packed the whole width of the street, flowing around abandoned cars like a river. We opened up at once, no orders needed. The front line wet down in a red mist, and then the next and the next. Tracer bullets found fuel tanks, and cars exploded. The horde kept coming, a fiery, blood soaked wave of carrion.

It was a numbers game. Our detachment could, theoretically, put down around a hundred and sixty enemy in a second, though the real number was probably closer to a hundred, what with duplicate fire and no chance to communicate targets. They would take two or three minutes to cross the kill zone, meaning, theoretically, we should’ve been able to hold off twelve to eighteen thousand of them. Magazine changes and jammed weapons reduced that number, but all things being equal, we should still have been able to perform a fighting withdrawal.

All things were not equal. Our left flank got hit whist we were concentrating on the horror approaching us from the front. The detachment holding 53rd street had made contact and withdrawn before us, and the corpses following them had spilled up 10th avenue. There were hundreds of them, and they tore the left flank to pieces.

My team were holding the right flank, so we were spared the brunt of the assault. We poured suppressing fire down 10th and tried to retreat down 54th street, but the smoke was now billowing down and both waves were on us. I had Joe blow the door of an apartment block and we held it whilst the survivors retreated in. The streets were crawling with zed, stumbling at us out of the smoke. Jack was taken as the last men got past. Mike and I bought Joe enough time to rig a demolition charge out of grenades, then we ran hell for leather up the stairs with a hundred of the bloodsoaked bastards on our heels.

The charge took out the first two flights of stairs and knocked us flat. When I looked down, the stairwell was a burning, blackened wreck, but the zeds were still pouring in, trying to reach us, climbing over shattered bodies and rubble. The stairs we were on were threatening to give as well, so we quickly decamped to the roof.

Sixty, seventy feet up, and all we could see was carnage. The ten thousand zeds from the cargo ship had already turned five or six times their number, and the streets were choked with the dead. The fighting receded away from us as the wave pushed the rest of the 5th back towards Central Park. Street fires burned out of control to the west of us, and several buildings were ablaze, too. Much of the Hudson river was obscured by a mile high pillar of smoke from the passenger terminal.

We sat the next four hours out on that roof, the thirty of us who’d made it. We took potshots when the smoke cleared enough for us to see, but there wasn’t much else we could do. Army units were being flown in to reinforce the LZ, but the heavy equipment couldn’t move through the streets because of all the fleeing traffic. Spectre gunships and attack helos poured down fire, but probably did more damage to the ground than to their targets.

Central Park was abandoned shortly before the horde reached it, dozens of helicopters lifting off in staggered waves. Another flight of helos came in shortly after that to extract us and the other survivors from the rooftops. The last I saw of New York was smoke and fire as the sun went down. We’d lost the city.

People say what happened outside of New York, a few weeks later, was the first major military engagement of the war. That’s not true, though it had much more publicity and far more casualties. Of the twelve hundred operators that went into New York that day, we lost five hundred and two. That seems trifling on the scale of the war, and of the thousands lost on that day, but it crippled us. And for no gain; we learned no lessons, saved no lives. We fought reactively, as we’d always done, but on a scale we not been part of before, and we died for it.

The 5th was disbanded shortly after. The teams were split and sent as advisors to different regiments, or to guard high value installations. I never saw Joe or Mike again, though I heard Joe was still at Fort Campbell when a megaswarm hit it.

As for myself, I spent the rest of the war firstly guarding VIPs in Hawaii, and then leading a Border company in the Rockies. I transferred back to the regular army for the Push, and spent the next few years slogging across the bible belt. You know the rest.

I still hate hospitals.

“To me, it didn’t sound too bad, honestly. The offer seemed solid: relative freedom, ‘for the duration of hostilities’, in exchange for wearing their little harness-and-bit, sent out into the boondocks and told what to do. We all weren’t allowed to speak to each other, back at the cells, but the word got around; we’re good at doing that kind of thing.”

**A pause, as he lights a newly-produced “Pelican Blue”-brand cigarette; one of the many goods produced at this facility.**

“We were sent in groups of three; the radio guy, the medic, and then someone like me, the butcher. We had clever pirate nicknames for our jobs, but it all boiled down to those three; the one who could pass the word, the one with the L Pills and then the meanest thing moving that they could harass, connive or just flat-out blackmail into joining. It sure beat working in the laundry, the mess hall, the gardens, whatever. You got some open air, decent chow, and if you could play it straight long enough, a date who didn’t have a mustache. That, believe me – that put many of us on the straight and righteous path.”

**A slight smirk, shaking his head.**

“That craziness aside, let me tell you a thing or two about how we handled a day at ‘the office’.. We get up at two hours to dawn; neat little silent alarms built into the harness made sure we all got up at the same time, if some jackass fell asleep early or on guard detail. So, we roll out of wherever we were camped or holed up, find some high ground, take our morning pictures. They use some kind of infrared camera for those, called a ‘forward-looking infrared’, or ‘FLIR’. We’re looking, at first, for heat sources: parked cars, trucks, trains, boats, whatever. Things with motors. We’re also supposed to keep an eye on moving groups of heat sources; people, herd animals, that kind of thing. Once in a while, you get a steam vent, and its letting out air in the eight-five  to ninety-degree range, so you got to check it out.”

** I ask: “Were there many sources of heat, after the panic had disabled most power plants?” **

“Oh, Hell, yes! Plenty. Fires burning underground, in the sewers, even tectonic activity.” **A smile.** “When we hit Los Angeles, I’d never seen an open tar pit before. But, in infrared? A thing of absolute beauty. A swirl of purple, green, blue, red, yellows, oh, man..” **He sighs, chuckling.** “We moved on up into the Valley, then got ordered into, of all places, Death Valley. We’d gotten our hands on some dune buggies and a pickup truck, so we made decent time; didn’t lose anybody, except one idiot who tried to catch a big-ass scorpion for some reason. He had some kind of allergic reaction to it, we figured, but he just dropped dead, right then and there.” **A shrug.** “We make it into and out of Los Angeles, alive and intact, and this guy dies of a scorpion bite. Funny world, huh?”

**Offers a cigarette; I accept, if to be polite. It is delicious, reminiscent of old-world tobacco.**

“We make those here, you know?” **A gesture behind him.** “All that aside, we were mostly over thirty, not well-educated and very, very motivated. Just what they wanted out of us; survivors, bred and born, raised in our own private little Hells and determined to hold up our end of the deal. We told ‘em, straight-out, in the beginning: ‘You screw us over, you will have grief in every corner of the world. You’re watching us, but we’re watching *YOU*.’ They took us seriously, after what happened at the Miami-Dade thing.  So, we all knew the score. We do good, we set an example; they do us dirty, we make them into an example.

I guess what made it all seem so surreal was how we were treated; we were among the first people who went into the sewers, to determine if the rat population was high enough to merit exploration by those crazy Diver Dan guys. Not many rats? Then, its got a Z-boy problem. Plenty of rats? You might have some survivors. No rats?”

**A pause, staring at me, unblinking.**

“Then you send in three Canaries. We go in, low and hard, armed with no guns, for a couple of reasons. You set off a spark, you’re a fireball waiting to happen. You pop off a round, you’ve gone deaf for a while; long enough to become a mobile buffet for one or more of them down there. You draw the wrong attention from some itchy-trigger-fingered LaMoE, you’re a goner. So, down we went. We’d have these neat little claw hammers, pipe wrenches, our trailing radio wire, our sledgehammers, all of it, drenched to the bones, chilled marrow-deep, going down into the bottom of the world. We find a store’s basement door, we give it a few kicks, mark it when its open, move on; this way, the Diver Dans had access safe, dry spots, once in a while. A few doors had friends on the other side, which is another good reason to move as a group; easier to play head-bashie.”

**”Head bashie?”**

“Yeah. Kind of a quick, dirty way to get through a bunch of people in a hurry. You got one guy who just grabs someone by the throat, pins them against a wall, then drops the body away. Another guy, he stabs or slams their brains out with a screwdriver, hammer, brick, whatever. The third guy, he’s alternating spots with the other two. You rotate the positions, and with enough practice, you can off twenty or so guys in a minute. We wore butchers’ aprons and these leather jackets; you regret it in the heat or the damp, but down in the dark, believe me, you loved it. Throw on some thick-ass gloves and a set of cleated boots, and you’re ass-kicking from the get-go.”

**He rolls his left arm, palm up, towards me, nodding at the twin crescent-shaped scars.**

“Bet you never met a guy who got bit by a Z-boy and lived, huh?” **He chuckles.** “One of them basement doors, it lead to a nursing home. Some old guy in a plaid robe bit me, and I put the boot to his ass so fast and hard, you’d think it was Prom Night.” **He grins.** “I’m about to eat my own knife when the radio guy, he smiles and points to the Z-boy’s mouth, shows me the dentures. Man, I swear, I nearly killed that thing again, just on general principles.”

**”What other tasks did your unit get assigned?”**

“We got a lot of fun ones, some fucked-up ones, too. Like, clearing out the biocontainment labs at the Center for Disease Control, down in Atlanta. We did some job for USAMRIID, too. They suited us up, gave us the basic instruction, then had us act as the ‘eyes and hands’ of the Army Dr. Frankensteins they could round up. We totally killed smallpox. Like, forever.”

**”Wasn’t smallpox eradicated before the Collapse?”**

“Sure, dude. You go on thinkin’ about that bein’ true, and I’ll just be sittin’ here, remembering how I felt pouring Clorox into the freezer.”

**”Please, continue.”**

“Anyways, we got the word we were shipping out, going off to [undisclosed location]. We were freaked. We’d heard about it, from other Canaries. We’d heard that [government agency] was doing some really weird shit out there, shit involving [undisclosed technical terms] and [undisclosed transportation technology]. So, we got suited up in these weird-ass spacesuits, and sent off on a US C-130, then proceeded into [redacted for security purposes] where we found at least five hundred of them [redacted] in purple paint [redacted] on fire. By the time any of it made any degree of sense, [undisclosed military unit] shipped us back out to headquarters, had us sign [undisclosed amount] inches thick. Man, I’m actually glad I’m back. I get conjugal visits from a friend’s widow; all the smokes I want; a commisary account which looks like the old national defense budget and my own private cell.”

**He gestures to the surrounding prison facility.**

“Not a bad gig, all told. Its weird, but I went from axe murderer to axe murderer, and the only thing that changed was being told it was okay again.”

**He stares at me, unblinking.**

“If that starts to make sense to you, you let me know. I’ve got room in the cell next door.”

**I exit the Pelican Bay Supermaximum Security Penal Facility, taking note of the thirty cars in the parking lot with Department of Defense tags on the bumpers. Two days after my interview, I am told my subject, Inmate #341229-E, hung himself in his cell, leaving only a single word as his note: “Clorox”.**

– Bryce H. is a Licensed Practical Nurse, 35 years old. We met at his home in (name withheld), NY for this interview, in a typical post-war living room, free from clutter. At the time, just before the mass infection took hold and society as was known collapsed, he had worked at the county nursing home for under two years. The facility he’d worked for housed 240 residents and employed 180 staff members. This account is of his last day at the nursing home, which was the same day as the well-known, live-televised massacre at Ardsley, which claimed approximately 2700 military personnel and caused a mass evacuation to the north.

I got the call at about 9:00am, from a supervisor I never liked much. I nearly told her to go f’ herself when she told me I needed to get in to the Home but after some quick thinking I decided it would be a good move. My motives were selfish at first: try to steal as many medical supplies as I could — I had a feeling that things were about to get a lot worse — But it ended up becoming much more than that. I still sometimes feel guilt because my first thought went to helping my own ass before even considering that 240 elderly people — some residents I’d known closely for two years — were all going to be dead by this time the next morning.

The hardest part at the time was convincing my wife that I needed to leave. We’d been glued to the news since the big outbreak in New York City, and in between quick sprints to get supplies ready for the trek north we were fixed to the television. We lived in the woods at the time, nothing huge but about 1000 acres on all sides and at the top of a decent hill, and that gave us a little more freedom because the dead were still concentrated in the urban centers at that point, and the rednecks in the sticks were doing a good job of keeping them at bay. Stacey, my wife, was really upset because her mother lived in Queens. With the phones down there we had no way to contact Mom — cell signals weren’t working for a while, remember — and we were quietly assuming the worst. She kept saying that splitting up was a bad idea and she was right. She wouldn’t come with me though, for whatever reasons she had. It was a bitter fight, but in the end she held down the house after some friends of ours had shown up at around 10:00am. They came in two cars, loaded with all sorts of camping gear and food. They started making plans right away for where to get more cans of food, talking about what was important to bring. I remember mumbling something about having people to take care of and driving off before any more arguments could start. There were seven of us at that time.

I still remember that drive to work. It was so damn surreal. 18 miles of mostly back roads that seemed exactly the same as always, yet the satellite radio was filled with panicked, conflicting news broadcasts, mostly involving the same stupid fucks doing their commentary, arguing over what should be done. Talking heads — if there was one group of people I would have loved to listen to over the air get eaten that day… The music channels were switched to news, the news channels the usual worthless shit at the time. And it was a beautiful, sunny, cool morning. It probably was weird too since I normally worked evenings and hadn’t been awake at 10:00am in a long time. there was the usual amount of traffic on the state road but it felt more frenzied. A lot of cars were loaded up, lines at the gas station, the little convenience marts were jammed as I drove by.

The parking lot of nursing home was crazy with activity. A lot of families had come to take their relatives with them but it wasn’t working. Some of these people were such high maintenance just to keep alive, with pills four times a day, diabetics, incontinence, full-blown dementia… the list goes on and on. I mean, that’s why the people were living under care. When I pulled up to the front there was a dozen cars parked with doors open, the children and grand children trying to figure out how to get their immobile parent from a may chair or wheelchair into a minivan or family sedan. One guy, I never saw him before, was wrestling with Mrs. O’Brian. I guess it was his mother. I knew her well, or as well as you can know someone who essentially isn’t living in the same time period as we are. He was trying to reason with her to get into the car but she was really upset, screaming in her wheelchair, chanting the Lord’s Prayer over and over as she always did. After I’d parked my car at the far end of the lot and was hustling towards the doors I saw her sitting in her chair, arms reaching out and her pudgy little fingers grabbing for something, still chanting, alone on the sidewalk. She was oblivious to me and invisible to everyone, it seemed.

It was then that I felt I’d been given a twisted power I’d never asked for and didn’t really know how to handle: I was really going to decide how so many people would die. Instinct made me grab her wheelchair handles and I rolled her back inside, past an old man sitting in the foyer next to his vegetative wife in a big may chair, holding her hand and talking to her like he did every single day since I’d started working at the Home. I kind of parked Mrs. O’Brian’s wheelchair off to the side of the commotion and went to the supervisor’s office.

I remember there were three of the supervisors there, all with their calendars on the desks, scribbling notes and going back and forth to the phones and each other, and whoever walked in. The pace was furious. One of them was chain smoking right there at her desk. There was also this weird calm every time someone else come in, some other nurse or aide, this back and forth smile that said “Oh, you came too?” followed by the usual quick questions: Where are you going? Do you have a gun? How long will this…?” This one nurse, real sweetheart with short brown hair and big eyes from the overnight shift named Alyssa, threw up in a trash can when someone asked that last question. Didn’t even get to finish asking what was what, but we all knew what it meant. On many levels we knew what it meant. Her puking right then felt so fucking right. The smell… well we were all used to the smell. When she was done I remember her standing up straight and just letting out this “Fuuuuck…” It was so beat down, so hopeless. Her pink scrubs had these little Snoopy’s on them…

I was a float nurse, but I was asked to go to my main floor where I had my locker, where I’d been orientated and trained, and where I knew the residents best. Ground floor. The place was a mess. The smell of shit was thick in the air. An empty linen cart was in the north hall, and the bins for the dirty linen were overflowing, the hinged lids popped up over wrapped balls of dirty chux [incontinence pads placed on beds that soak up urine and can be easily changed] and soiled wash cloths and towels. The residents that could walk were milling about, asking where breakfast was or when the regular television programs would be coming back on. There were a few in wheelchairs, the ones who were mobile enough to push themselves or aware enough to ask to get out of bed even if they couldn’t move due to stroke or paralysis or atrophy.

– The patients that were fully aware — what were they doing?

Residents. Not patients. See, patients… Anyways, it really depended. I was at the home for about ten hours that day and I saw and heard more intense crap from those people than could fill two books. There was so much fear, so much bravery, all mixed in with a comical amount of Alzheimer’s patients who had no idea what was going on except that something was not normal.

– Comical?

Working at the Home, you develop a quick appreciation for the sane mind, and a way of dealing with so many people who don’t have that anymore. You get to choose frustration or humor. If you choose the first one, you lasted a few months. There’s something fucking dark and funny in regular circumstances when you have one person who is literally dying in front of you from whatever and ten feet away are two old women singing “Show me the way to go home…” who have no idea what’s happening, and an old man rolling up in his wheel chair who is pissed off because he hasn’t gotten whatever crazy shit is going on in his dementia-ridden reality, like maybe he’s asking what all the children on the school trip are doing up this late. And that was a normal evening. So yeah, you learn to deal with that. And learn to deal with dead people. We all know dead people now, but before the war, how many dead people did you know? I mean, really know? I went from knowing maybe ten before I started working at the home to knowing about 140 when the walking dead came around. I got to know death really well.

– Did the supervisors tell you what to do? What was the plan at that point?

I think they had a plan from the start. But there’s logistics, there’s families, there’s the hope that things will fix themselves. We know now what happened down at Ardsley in Westchester, but remember that right up until then there was a hope that we could turn things around. I even grabbed the med cart and passed out medications. The important ones. Insulin, heart pills, pain pills. I was liberal with the pain pills and Xanax. I was even keeping my usual notes for a few minutes until I decided that if everything did turn around I would probably be forgiven for not writing anything down considering the circumstances, and because stopping to even sign the med book took time that I didn’t feel I had.

And someone, I don’t know who, actually showed up in the kitchen and threw together what he could for the residents. It was a shitty last meal, mostly cold cuts and easy stuff like that. A bunch of sandwiches piled on a cart and wheeled to the unit. I wish I’d seen the guy so I could thank him. We gathered everyone who was able or mobile and who wanted to — a few still wanted to stay in their rooms alone to watch the television, or who didn’t want to go through the trouble to get out of bed — and we ate together. I had a ham and cheese sandwich and a ginger ale. Fuck, now even a shitty ham sandwich seems like a luxury. Maybe in hind sight it wasn’t such a bad last meal.

Anyway, in the corner of the dining room there was this huge television. The staff was glued to it more than the residents, slowly eating and pacing and instinctively and robotically taking care of the residents that needed care. CNN was on… the live feed from Ardsley. I mean there’s no use rehashing what we saw and how it felt because we all saw and felt it. Well for us it was different than someone in Kansas or something because it was only 50 miles south — and across a river. I remember feeling a little safer because of the river. But knowing that horde was rolling north, and that they’d cross the Tappan Zee bridge… Man, it boggles the fucking mind that they didn’t blow those bridges. Maybe buy us on the other side a few more hours. It was weird too, because I remember for one instant I thought I saw someone I knew on the screen, this guy from a job at a deli I’d had years earlier who had gone into the Marines, leaning up against a truck aiming a rifle at a distant deadfuck. But… whatever. It is what it is.

[Bryce lights another cigarette, takes a slug of his homemade potato vodka with what appears to be a slice of tree bark at the bottom of the glass, and looks everywhere but at the interviewer as he continues.]

When we saw the shit drop on the TV, when it was obvious the Ardsley line had fallen, you could hear shouts from the halls, from a nearby stairwell, “Fuck this! I’m getting the fuck out of here!” People buzzed by in the hall past the dining room where we were, and we all looked at each other to see who would walk out first.

It was a fucking tough moment because there’s the human instinct of self preservation, and the caring instinct in each of us that made us nurses and aides in general. I mean, we were at about a quarter of the staff we needed to normally run the place, and this was the conglomeration of everyone who’d decided to show up. This was the last of the best of the most caring, and now they were bugging out, heading out to get their families or whatever before that huge fucking swarm of moaning corpses found [name of the city withheld], or before the highways stopped, or whatever they had planned. Or didn’t. God, it was such a cluster-fuck.

At this point it was — you can print these names if you want — Alecia, Deb and Natasha. They’re fake names anyways. Really. I’m the only nurse on the floor but that means nothing at this point since Deb had been an aide for 28 years. She was kind of a mom-figure and with no rules, even though I was technically in charge, we looked to her. And she, I’ll never fucking forget how she sounded when she said this, she says “Let’s just start with Maggie.” Maggie was one of the veggies, as I’d privately called them. It seems wrong to say that just now, but she was in a vegetative state since I’d met her two years earlier, hooked up to oxygen and a feeding tube… still had her CPR bracelet on too. [A bracelet indicating that if the resident’s heart stopped, he or she wished to have CPR performed in order to resuscitate the resident.] I went to the med room and loaded the cart with all the narcotics left in the lock boxes — because I am not stupid — and locked them in the med cart’s lock box. You know, keep the good shit where it’s in my view. Then we rolled the med cart to Maggie’s room. She was in bed, in her silent stare with fists clenched, sheets soaked, feeding tube empty and shut off whenever ago. Deb put her hand on Maggie’s shoulder and said something — something nice about this being a better way — and I injected a thousand units of insulin into her arm with an IM [intra-muscular] needle. I remember instinctively wiping the area with alcohol first, until Natasha asked what the fuck I was doing. What could I say? I didn’t bother. Looking back it still seems strange they waited for me to do it.

And so we went from room to room, first hitting all the veggies and those that were barely aware. It got harder as we went because each next resident was slightly more aware than the last. And all the while there are residents crying, some asking to be changed [a term referring to changing linens in the bed that had been soiled with urine or feces], some asking if their father is coming in today, one just gibbering away at the window as always… And the three of us, moving like zombies from room to room quietly injecting our residents with insulin. And when we’d run out of insulin, and we came to those who had more of a mind, it was a cocktail of 30 or so heart pills, whatever it was they took normally, like Coreg or Metoprolol, mixed with a dozen Tylenol that I told them was Vicodin or Percocet. One of us would say a little something, or kneel down to the wheelchair and smile and say “Here’s your medicine” like it was a normal day, and give them a few spoonfuls of crushed pills in applesauce. Each of us had residents we couldn’t do, and residents we felt we must do. Tears flowed but we never outright cried. Not yet.

By the time we’d reached Mr Vernoy’s room I had grabbed a fifth of whiskey from the med room. It had belonged to a resident who used to have a shot a day back when he could think enough to ask for it. Natasha and I traded slugs off the bottle, sometimes chasing it with the generic cola from the dining room fridge. Deb said she had quit drinking years ago and wouldn’t touch the stuff, even in these circumstances. Alecia was chewing Valium from a blister pack I’d handed off to her like they were Skittles at that point, whispering “My God” over and over.

Mr Vernoy was this awesome guy. All his wits, great sense of humor, completely motionless though from a stroke, except for his right arm. His mind worked perfectly. He used to watch this big flat screen TV all day, mostly politics or sci-fi. When we got to him and saw a TV again, after maybe two hours since we’d left the dining room and began our mission, the ticker was scrolling at the bottom about the horde moving north, the one talking head was shouting to board up the windows and wait for help while the other two just shouted “Go north!” Mr. Vernoy, crazy fuck he was, asked me to lay out all of his sleeping pills on his table so he could take them when it was time. I still remember him smiling and saying in his warbling tongue “I don’t really want to miss this. This is the best shit that’s been on TV in years!” So fuck it. I did what he asked, lay his remaining 40 or so Tramadol on his table along with a bunch of the nectar-thick water boxes he used, and we moved on. It wasn’t easy to leave that room. I was really not convinced he would take those pills in time.

– What about the authorities? Where were your supervisors?

Shit, the authorities had much better places to be. The supervisors? They never came to the floor, for whatever reason. I know one of them killed herself. Or tried to. I don’t know what happened, but when I left the floor later on I looked in the office and she was on the floor in a pool of emesis, probably twenty empty Roxanol [an oral form of morphine] syringes lined up on her desk all OCD-like. I didn’t check her for vitals. At that point I didn’t care. No clue about the other two. Or if there were more in the building. Fuck, we never even finished.

– Finished?

Killing everyone. Yeah… There. I said it for what it was. We had maybe a dozen residents left on the floor. Alecia was stoned out of her mind from the Valium, and half of the pills she’d eaten probably hadn’t kicked in yet. I remember she stumbled off, holding the railings built into the walls that the residents used to help them walk. I never saw her again. Poor girl. She probably passed out and woke up dead.

By this point we tried to pick up the pace but everything was harder. The residents remaining were aware of what we were doing. Some wanted to wait for a relative they’d hoped was coming, like relatives had come for their friends on the unit. A few of them begged us to take them with us. The smell of shit, even though we were generally used to it, was really getting hard to deal with. And the tension headache, the emotional weight, Mrs. Corman slumped over the side of her wheelchair in the hallway by my hand with 23 more people dead that I couldn’t directly see…

I wanted to make myself a cocktail of whiskey and Lortab so badly, but I knew my wife and friends were waiting for me at home, dealing with whatever they were dealing with.. I wanted to just hole up in the med room with all those narcotics and waste away, locked in safe from what was coming north. I wanted to be strong and protect my residents who were still sitting in the dining room watching the television, crying and begging to be taken north. I wanted to make the perfect mix of pills and say the most perfect things for those that wanted me to stop and listen to them talk about how they’d lived a long, good life and were ready to let it go. I wanted to fucking bludgeon this one resident that screamed endlessly like a colicky infant because she made it so hard to get my head straight. I wanted my back and legs to get back from being gelatin. And I wanted to get back to my wife so I could hug her and fuck her and cry in her arms forever while she stroked my back with her fingernails and made the monsters and memories crumble…. God, I was a fucking mess…

[After a long pause, another cigarette and a fresh glass of vodka, Bryce goes on.]

We’d kind of stopped for a few minutes. I was trying to eat a Fig Newton and watching the TV in the dining room, leaning against my med cart and sliding a small pile of cardiac meds back and forth with my other hand… And that was when I saw my first real zombie.

I saw him through the window slumbering across the parking lot. A man, mid 40’s. Fresh kill. Not like the walking dead we all got used to later. He wasn’t even really gray yet, but it was unmistakably a zombie. I remember seeing him, maybe 50 yards out, and I went to the window for a close look. We were on the first floor or a three floor facility, and that didn’t help the situation at all. Of course someone else saw and shouted, and then they all shouted. Natasha, I remember, kind of stepped back, said “Fuck this” and started towards the exit. But she stopped, came back to me and gave this ferocious hug. We both wanted to break down but she broke off… (laughs) she grabs the bottle of whisky and takes a slug, and she just sort of hovers and mouths to the one resident who was looking at her instead of the direction of the deadfuck, “I’m sorry.” And she kind of shook her head with her eyes all squinted and puffy, and side-stepped out of the dining room. I’m still pissed she took that bottle. I haven’t tasted real whisky since then. Just this shit:

[He motions to his glass of vodka, takes a long drink, and smiles.]

Deb was at the window for a minute, watching the zombie as he closed in. It was so odd at the time. Dead guy walking towards us, dead people all around me. We know now for sure how the particular disease process works, that direct fluid contact is required for transmission, but back then? Fuck, I remember this wave of panic unlike anything I’d ever felt. It got my muscles back at least, and thankfully it gave me some tunnel vision.

I pushed the med cart out of the dining room into the hall, behind the nurses station. The quiet was surreal, but it was better than the moaning that was barely echoing from around the corners. I could hear a ton of movement upstairs, furniture being pushed maybe. I think they barricaded themselves in but I have no real idea. Fuck, I wish I could find just one person that was there that day. Just so I could have someone to talk to that knows. You know?

Anyway, I ended up grabbing a garbage bag and filling it with all the medicine I could think of. Mostly antibiotics, anti-diarrhea meds, heart pills… I took all the narcs from the med-cart lock box, of course. It was this adrenaline-fueled mania. It was like suddenly everything was so clear, like my vision was so precise and thoughts with just one direction. I’d filled the bag, made sure I had my car keys and headed back to the dining room.

Deb was still there, filling needles with something. I don’t know what. I don’t remember her getting the needles, even. And I didn’t go to hug her, as bad as I’d wanted to simply because I was afraid for my stockpile in my trash bag, which was wrapped around my fist. I knew, from years of casual reading about survivor stuff, that medications would be an incredible legal tender when the world ended.

There was this frozen-in-time look at Deb in her purple scrubs standing next to Mr Vanderwater as she filled a syringe, as that fucking corpse made it to the window and started slobbering his lips and teeth on the glass with that fucking moan, and Mr Bodero and Mrs Grein pushing backwards in their wheelchairs with their feet to the far wall, a quick glance at the TV guy saying “Aim for the head!” and the ticker saying Go North.

I backed out of the room and started down the hall, speed walking at first. I heard Mrs Grein, ever alert and assertive, shouting “You have to hit him in the head!” from behind me. No other sounds but Mrs Grein and the moaning zombie. I broke into a run, hit the doors to the lobby. A few residents were still there. Mrs O’Brian was still mumbling her Lord’s Prayer, though she was fifty feet further down the hall from where I’d left her, shuffling along by her feet, still strapped into her wheelchair, arms outstretched for something to grab onto… No supervisors, no security, no families…

I ran out through the automatic doors and felt that clean, wonderful air for the first time in hours. The smell of shit and urine was still burned into my nose but as I ran to my little Acura I could feel my shoulders pick up a little. No walking dead in the front of the building, no moaning to be heard. Just a one-mindedness to get back to my wife and go north.

– Did you ever find out what happened to those who were left behind?

No. It still bothers me because I didn’t somehow — and I don’t know how — deactivate the automatic doors at the front of the facility. Those dead dumb fucks would have a hell of a time getting in without those doors. I mean, they probably would have eventually. Maybe the power failed before they got to the front the building. Maybe if there really were people upstairs making barricades… maybe they would have done it.

I just keep thinking of Mr. Vernoy. He really put on a good front for us. He was in the Navy in the Pacific conflict. I sergeant, I think. Once, only once really, he talked about the Kamikaze pilots and the insane fear, but he always stopped talking about it before he got too in depth. Looking back, him saying stuff about the television being interesting… he was just trying to save us, get us moving along I think. Looking back I can hear the fear in his voice, I can feel him questioning if he could kill himself permanently before the zomb’s got into him. I keep imagining him stuck in that bed, nothing but one working arm, hearing the moans get louder, chewing those Tramadols and hoping beyond hope that they would do the trick and do it fast enough. And I keep imagining him stuck in that bed, one working arm, moaning and clawing at the air, hoping for a bug to eat or whatever the fuck the rest of the veggies turned living-dead-veggies hope for…

And this image I keep having of Mrs. O’Brian chant-mumbling her Lord’s Prayer as some limping zombie just barely as slow as her bites into her shoulder… and Mrs Saldnez… We forgot to do her. We forgot…

[Bryce stands and paces, grinding his right fingernails down the back of his head and up again, then slides his clenched fist against his chest, his thumb vibrating a low thump against his shirt, his head down and lips almost contacting his thumb. His eyes veer right and stare through the floor as his voice becomes timid and distant, his breaths very long. The thumping hand then mixes with it sliding a frigid clawed hand across his chest and neck. Back and forth, twitching in what appears a ritualistic compulsion. His left hand holds the glass of vodka perfectly still, as though it’s unattached to the manic gestures of his body. His voice sounds evicted.]

How many therapists do you think this is going to take? Not just me, but all of us? Who will teach the next generation of therapists? What do we tell them? How the fuck do I tell my kid about… about life before this? I—

[He quickly stands, moves to each window and evaluates, breathes, moves on. His right hand slides down his clothing to the custom steel punch handle in its thigh holster. When he crosses all three windows he draws a deep breath and with a sudden casualness lights a cigarette.]

The rest of the story is the same shit you’ve heard. Starvation in the snow up north, that awful fucking aftertaste of lungs, the reduction to animalistic instinct and how pure it felt and at the same time how fucking horrible it felt. But we made it out. We fucking made it through that winter. And… [he half-laughs and gestures to one of the bottles of homemade vodka on a nearby shelf.] And at least I can sometimes justify what I did. Sometimes I wonder if I’m wrong, that maybe there is some sort of God, and I wonder if I’ll be punished for doing His job by deciding who lives and who dies. I wonder if all those people who called me an angel will testify on my behalf in the afterlife. I wonder what… [He stands still with his line of sight drifting in long circles.] I don’t want to wonder about this shit anymore. Look, I help people. That’s what I do.

– Bryce and his wife Stacey have been married for nine years. They currently manage a government-funded not-for-profit euthanasia resort. Their first child is expected in early September.

What you Yanks don’t understand is that Britain was one of the most densely populated places on earth. No wide open spaces. Nowhere to run to. We weren’t cowards, you see. We did what we had to do, had the damn bravery to do what had to be done!

It was the first winter that hit us hard. Ten of us, all tucked away into one block of flats in one college. The last refuge of the living until you got to the London strongholds down south. Cambridge got hit hard, you see, almost immediately. We were a big, international university and the Plague hit at the start of spring term. Thousands of international students all flocking to Cambridge, all infected.

[You surely can't think that the virus would have escaped airport controls?]

Damn foreigners! We let them in, helped them get to Cambridge, moved them into the hospital when they turned! Couldn’t lose the money, you see? An eight-hundred year old institution felled because students weren’t paying their bills? Better to wait and see if there was a cure – then they could get the cash! Even when the scientists were screaming the rest of us just thought we wouldn’t be affected.

So we weren’t prepared, not prepared at all. It all happened so quickly, one day everything was fine, then the next just about everyone was… infected. Must have happened at a nightclub or something, only way to get so many of us over one night. I didn’t go out, had an essay to write….. I don’t remember. But I do remember being woken up, middle of the night, by a hell of a scream. I shouted something out the window, thought it was freshmen pissing about.

[Was it?]

No. Not at all. It was a zed, chasing someone – I remember seeing her later, her name was Sam. She was a first year, out enjoying herself on a Wednesday night. No right arm, no bottom jaw. Three of my friends weren’t bitten, six others managed to stay safe that night, out of 22 flats. Everyone else was… fucked, all trapped in their rooms, banging at the doors. Tom got stuck inside with his girlfriend, and we heard her attack him – wet sounds, then later a second zed banging on the doors.

We had no food, no weapons and nowhere to go. We got the food, and barricaded ourselves into my room. It had a balcony – a way out that the zeds couldn’t touch. But there were ten of us at that point, in a room small enough we couldn’t all lie down. We filled the bath up  and kept cans outside for drinking water. When the food ran short, we knew we were sodded. 3 men and 7 women.

You know what I did, what we had to do.

[But what you did was unethical, horrifying even by the standards of a world working under the stress of the crisis]

I killed them. I killed the other men one night, friends of mine. I hit them with our only weapon, a hockey stick. How very Cambridge. Then I pushed them over the balcony, into zed town below. They took care of the rest.

There wasn’t enough food for ten of us. There was enough food to get us comfortably ’till December when the other guys had gone. When the zeds froze outside, I sent the girls out to get food. Sarah and Tess didn’t come back… well, not immediately anyway – know what I mean? It wasn’t a big loss and we managed to get a few cans of food out of other flats. The supermarket was too far, we weren’t living in a mall, like you yanks did.

That took us till January, I remember the date well, actually. January the 17th, the day I made the choice that kept us alive. I woke up early, tied, chained and handcuffed the girls to the walls, the balcony and the radiators, then made the decision. Used the resources available, and kept myself alive for another year and a half. Bit by bit, I lived, keeping the girls alive for as long as possible. Fresh meat, you see? And other …. uses. Hair and skin for warmth, bones for weapons when I had to go out, towards the end. Company was the worst thing, when they stopped talking. Estelle was chained long enough to become noticeably pregnant, in that second year. She’d lost her arms and legs though. It was a waste of resources to feed two of them, so I ended it.

[and when you were found?]

They found me two months after, living surrounded by three hundred zeds in my second floor room. I was alive, I’d made it. That’s a hell of a lot more than can be said for the “heroes” of the reclamation, or those idiots that formed the London communes. I lived, they didn’t. I won, don’t you see? This wasn’t a fair war, this wasn’t a human war. It was kill or be killed. I killed.

[Maybe you should have died, if that was the cost]

Fuck the cost. They aren’t here now. I am. You are. No one else matters! Do you hear! You hear? There were billions of dead, we had to survive you fucking smug bastard! We had to fucking survive!

[Aaron Worth stands in the middle of a field, tugging a hoe through the dirt of a large, walled in garden. Beyond him is a stilted house that is clearly a post-war build. A rifle is still slung on his back, despite the fortification. During the war, Worth served as a special attachment to Army Group South – he was the first of many "Whistleblowers" to aid in the relief of the larger cities of the eastern U.S.]

It wasn’t my idea. A lot of people ask me that. Nope. Some guy with thick glasses must have dreamt this up, because the idea at first seems ridiculous. I know I laughed in the Sergeants face when he proposed it to me. I mean, seriously, take a loud ass train deep into Zackland and hope to God you don’t get bogged down and eaten alive. Yea, sure, sounds like a plan.

So, that is how this whole “Whistleblower” thing got going. Some guy said to some other guy who must have known a guy who said, “Hey! Lets throw any poor, dumb fuck who worked on trains into an engine and send them on their merry way into D.C. or Atlanta.”

[We walk up to the house and sit on the porch. He offers me a glass of water and lights up a Q for himself]

You know, I didn’t smoke before the war.

[He takes a drag and sets it on a butt-laden ashtray]

So, back to this “Whistleblower” business. Yes, I was the first ones in on this crazy scheme. They had this old ass engine ready to go and everything. I swear, you wouldn’t find an engine like that outside of the history books, and that is for damned sure. The military had put this big, giant loudspeaker assembly on top and armored it to hell and gone. They said it would remain stable on the tracks, would be slow, but would be able to push through any Gs that got in our way. Sounds good right? Like being in a tank. [He rolls his eyes]

So they told you it would be safe?

Hell no! Safe? Nothing was “safe” back then. They couldn’t say for sure that Zack couldn’t just knock it over or bog it down and trap me in the city or whatever. I said, “Oh! In that case, why not?” I mean, I had worked on the railroad for a while; it was a hard job with good pay and I got to travel. They had lines up and down the coast, most of which weren’t in too bad of shape. We didn’t lose too many folks; at least not once we set up the basic routine.

What was the casualty rate?

Something like fifty percent at first, but near the last few months, we didn’t lose anybody. It became just another part of the crazy world we had accepted. Drive into town blowing your horns as loud as you can, get the ghouls all hot and bothered, then just bug out with as many moaning Gs as you could.

We must have lost a good chunk of those casualties to ruined lines and blockages. Can you imagine getting stuck in a giant tin can surrounded by Zack trying to scrape their way in? A few guys hung on. Sometimes, we could get to them, but most of the time they just cracked an L-pill and went on to some better place.

[The cigarette in the ashtray has gone out, so he lights another with a thoughtful drag]

Those were hard times, early on. I remember when we had to go into Atlanta. We had gone up through the south, from New Orleans and that area. This wasn’t our first shot at a really, really big city, but fuck! Atlanta. That place was huge, but we had to lure them out to try and bring the numbers in the city down. The brass didn’t want to touch that place and who can blame them? Estimates placed the number of Gs at four to ten million.

Why such a discrepancy?

Well, how could anyone really tell? The days of satellite feeds and all that were long gone. So, they had to guess. A few flights went over on their way through and shot us an estimate. Big swarms. Some of the eggheads said that the area was so dense that it was likely a Chain Swarm effect and had brought in hundreds of thousands from around the entire area.

If you didn’t know, there were actually some survivors too. Can you imagine? That many of those fuckers milling about and some people eked out a living in skyscrapers and all that. How they hung on for so long is beyond me. Shit, I just lived day-to-day at that point. Just before Atlanta, in a live-run in Albany I had lost about four buddies in the span of a week. That is hard on anybody, especially when it looked like we were going to survive this living hell after all

Believe it or not, one of them was bitten while taking a piss outside of the engine warming up outside the city. Hell of a thing, right? Caught with his pants down. Before anyone noticed, the fucker had taken a chunk out of his ass. Being practical as Terry was, he plugged the G and blew his own brains out.

We lost one in an engine overturned into an embankment. The roll must have knocked him out or just killed him. Some Secessionists shot the other two, if you can believe that. They holed up in some big fortress of a house covered in camo netting and shit. They had these big, nasty scoped rifles and a few years worth of practice on Zack. Mick and Joe didn’t even know what hit them, which is a hell of a better way to go than some ways I’ve seen.

What was it like personally?

Are you kidding? It was terrifying. Not one moment went by that you weren’t scared shitless. I must have done it more than anyone and I can’t say I ever, ever wanted to get back in those engines and do it each time, but I did. That was what was needed and it worked most of the time. A few times I bogged down and thought to myself, “Well kid, you had a nice run but your time is officially up!”

A few times we would see survivors. That was hard. They would wave flags and try to get our attention like we were the damned rescue wagon. [He frowns] We had to drive on by groups of people just begging to let them on board. Some would struggle and try to jump on as we went under overpasses and near buildings and shit. I saw more than one fall, more like dozens of them in each city. Hard to imagine that anyone was alive in these places, but the sight of someone leaping to their death just for the hope of rescue was too much for some guys.

In general, though, the idea worked? It brought the zombies out of the cities and into the soldiers waiting for them?

Damned straight. They would have those RSs all set and just go to work once I passed through. Clever, I guess. It still leaves me drenched when I jump ten feet out of bed with a nightmare of Zack or riding in that damned engine for hours and hours with them clawing at the outside. Jesus, I know a lot of those heros go on about how they would do it all over again. Shit. Not me! I am no coward, because I did it, but if I had the option of a nice, sun-in-the-fun vacation riding the waves of the Pacific¹. and a trip through Zackland again, which do you think I would take?

1. He refers to the common misconception that sea-going survivors had it easier than the land-based ones.

[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.]

Clyde Doutree sits in his office and listens offhandedly to a police scanner. The dark room seems to be more of an armory than an office. As the leader of the newly formed Texas Rangers, Doutree has spent the last few years after the war reclaiming Austin. His white hair, well-worn cowboy hat, and handlebar mustache make this already big man seem that much larger.

“After years of watchin’ movies about this stuff, you never get used to the idea that zombies are even real. It makes you stop and think… What about vampires and werewolves? Should we be lookin’ out for the goddamn chupacabra?”

When did you realize that something was wrong?

You’d never know that this was at one time “the liberal Mecca” of Texas, not that liberal means anything now. But, after things began to calm down, we knew life wouldn’t be back to normal. Not with Zack all over the place and those stupid assed cowboys charging down the streets in their jacked up pickups. Goddamn Rednecks! I have to spend half my time makin’ sure they don’t get outta control instead of killin’ Zack.

When it began for us here, we heard news stories about the police firing on crowds of rioting illegals. It just seemed strange because illegals don’t show their faces in crowds of more than 10 or 20 and that’s just to find day labor. And they certainly wouldn’t attend a demonstration where there might be any cameras or la migra.

I’d say that it had to be when my family and I were on our way out to the Salt Lick in Driftwood. Best brisket in the area if you ask me. How you like your plate? Good.

So anyway we’re headed out to the Salt Lick and I see some commotion on the side of the road, kinda looks like a car crash with a crowd congregatin’. So I slow down to check it out and it was obvious that something was wrong by the way they just moved. You know that Z draggin’ and shuffling. It’s just not natural and you can pick it out at a mile.

So I’m passin’ real slow-like and sure enough they were tearin’ apart some poor bastard that was on the side of the road. Now I had seen all sorts of movies and read books and, there’s no mistakin’ zombies. Not that bullshit from 28 Days Later. They never move that fast. There’d be none of us left if they were like that.

We got the hell outta there as fast as I could while Kate called 911. But we couldn’t get no signal out there in Driftwood. So we had to wait until we could get back onto 35 where we could get a strong signal and call it in–by that time it wouldn’t have done no good.

They had already overrun the city?

He takes a long drag and then stubs the butt out. Then with one hand, he extracts another cigarette from the pack and puts it in his mouth. It is only then that he exhales the smoke from the previous butt as he lights the new cigarette. It’s one continuous motion.

Yeah. We were already ass high in Zack by that time. Y’see. College kids participate in all sorts of risky behaviors and act really stupid about it. While a clear thinkin’ adult would go to a hospital or the police if they are attacked or feel sick, these kids just hid out in their rooms and kept partying. It took one day to overrun the UT Downtown Campus. There were thousands of them, all over downtown Austin, infecting the homeless and anything else that moved. Jezus what a mess. You’d see ‘em wandering around the city or gurgling under Town Lake in their “hook ‘em horns” T-shirts. Even today, when I see a UT t-shirt, my trigger finger gets to itchin’.

Lucky for us we had the farm in Hutto.

How long did they take to reach your farm?

Ya know, it’s funny that you mention it that way because I was thinkin’ about that just yesterday. It was 3 days after we had been downtown. And I remember watching the national and local news and seeing so many different reports but we had gone down to the Home Depot and picked up some supplies and a generator (that was a waste of money …. If you used it, their super zombie hearing would pick it up and you’d be killin’ hundreds of them in an hour. Later on, we would turn it on when we wanted to ambush a shitload of ‘em). So the evening of the 3rd day, we started to hear the moanin. They had surrounded Gene’s house and were pitchin’ a fit about something. (Turns out one of his girls was listening to rap and they’re attracted to the bass. I used to joke with Gene that even Zachary can tell good music from bad. Hah.)

Anyhow. There was about 20 of them and I couldn’t just let em get them so I got my rifle and started to pick em off. That was the first time I ever killed anyone. Now I know that Zack ain’t anyone but they were still pretty fresh and at about 75 yards, they looked as human as anyone else.

After that, Gene an I became the best of friends and took a trip the next day to the sports store and “appropriated” some rifles and ammo and then we did some food shopping. Once you kill off most of the Z’s the store managers are real happy to give you as much food as you want. Sorry to say he got bit some time later and we had to pop him. He was alright when he was still a man.

When did you start to go into Austin?

I don’t know the date, but I do remember that it was probably around mid August cause it was ungodly hot. Round Rock and Pflugerville had been picked clean by people over the last month and we had to start foraging for food and items that we couldn’t produce ourselves. We had some vegetables growin’ and still had about 10 head we bought for property tax exemption but we needed various other items for first aid and the like you know the drill, I’m sure you had to stock up and defend yourself. So we just thought that since Austin was overrun so quickly, that no one had a chance to clean out the stores. We were lucky on that one.

Me, Gene and two others riding shotgun in the back of the truck drove down 35 downtown and it looked like something out of a horror movie. You know what it looks like, hundreds of them just wandering around with nowhere to go looking for something to eat. Then they get a load of you and that moanin begins. Soon they are all comin’ at you like ants to sugar. I had to yell at those bumpkins in the back to save their ammo. Between you and me, they sounded like assholes shoutin’ their “ye haws” and blowing zombies in half with their shotguns. We hadn’t figured out how useless shotguns were yet. Plus we were all Texas cowboys what else ya gonna do?

When did those trips change from raiding parties to cleaning missions?

“Probably around Thanksgiving, that was when my Kate and I began to talk about surviving the plague… that’s what we used to call it before it became a war and we ran into those kids.“

Takes long pull from the glass

“We were coming back from a raiding party with two trucks full of fuel, clothing, food, tools, ammo and guitars. We had been raiding pawn shops as a rule because we developed a quick way of busting the bars off the walls and we would get the guns and there’s always a guitar in pawn shops. Anyway, we bust in and we find these kids in there. They weren’t feral, but you could tell they had been eating rats or something cause there were carcasses all over the place. “

“Long story short, these kids had been there since June. They had seen their parents chewed up by Zack and just barely got away living on the streets and hiding in abandoned buildings. “There was a helluva lot of noise coming from the back room and they told us that they had locked their sister in there when she got bit.”

“Once we inspected them kids and put them in the back of the truck, me and Gene went back in there to take care of the sister. I had never seen a small child turned before. She couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 but she was turned just the same. Gene couldn’t do it…”

“We brought them back with us and all of us got together and we decided that we had to do something to clean up Austin. So that’s when we began the whole Texas Rangers thing. That was all Kate’s Idea. “

He pauses as if deciding to cough and then deciding against it

“I told them from the beginning I wasn’t going to wear no matching shirts and bandanas … but maybe the hat. “

Anyhow, we organized posses and started to make regular visits into town, clearing out zones one at a time. Eventually we started to set up posts in town and soon, Zack started to come around less and less. I can’t go out as much now as I did (he wags his arm as an excuse).

So, how did you hurt your arm?

He looks down… “Truck flipped over.”

He picks up the cigarette with his left hand.