Empire's End (6 page)

“You’re liable for the cost of that laptop,”
Voorhees snapped. “And I don’t know why you aren’t in cuffs
already, but at the very least you’re going to be cited for
assault.”

Meyer had a shit-eating grin plastered across
his face. “Mister Blake, maybe you oughta educate the new guy about
how we do things.” His glassy eyes fixed on Voorhees, Meyer added
in a low growl, “You know what happened to the gentleman you
replaced?”

“All right, enough of that,” said Blake. “If
I have to come down here again because of you pushing people
around, we’re going to have a conversation with Cullen, you and I.
Because that’s how we do things in Gaylen.”

Meyer raised his hands in mock surrender.
“Whatever you say, boss. Just trying to make a living.”

Voorhees started to say something, but Blake
pulled him away from Meyer and out into the street.

“What in the hell was that?” Voorhees
yelled.

“There are some things you don’t understand,”
Blake said grimly. “Our job is to maintain a balance in
Gaylen—there are some elements that can only be contained, not cut
out.”

“Are you saying—”

“I’m saying, let’s go grab some dinner and
I’ll lay it out for you.”

It was probably going to rain soon. Voorhees’
sixty-year-old joints were aching, and he didn’t feel like arguing
any longer so he shut his mouth and went along with his
partner.

“How come you get to drive a truck?” the girl
asked.

Jack Calvert looked away from the road and
said, “It belongs to the company. Sometimes I have to haul
materials out to the job site.”

Sitting in Molly Calvert’s lap, Lily twisted
to make the seat belt fit more comfortably. “Are you allowed to
take us into the city?”

“Of course,” Jack replied. He was a man of
thirty with bright eyes and a lopsided smile that meant he knew a
lot of jokes. He was good at making Lily laugh, even if some of his
jokes were too silly. But she was only thirteen—or fourteen, she
wasn’t sure—and it was excusable.

“Anyway, I’ll drop you two off downtown, then
I’m gone until four in the morning,” Jack was saying to Molly.
“You’ll make it home okay?”

“So long as it doesn’t rain,” Molly sighed.
She was pretty, with long dark hair just like Lily’s. She really
could have been the girl’s mother, except Lily knew her parents
were dead.

“Did you have a nightmare last night?” Molly
asked Lily. “I heard you saying something in your sleep.”

Lily couldn’t explain to her new guardians
that they weren’t nightmares—that Death was her friend, that he’d
saved her life more than once. He had a kind, gentle face. His
doll-like eyes made her think of a baby, innocent and unformed. In
a lot of ways, he was like a child; he didn’t seem to understand a
lot of things, like feelings.

But he and Lily had still gotten along. He’d
held her while she wept for her parents, and he’d saved her from
the house in the swamp where her brothers and sisters were undead.
She longed to see him again, and somehow knew that she would—that
he was searching for her right now, at this very moment.

“What are you building today?” she asked
Jack. Sometimes he was reluctant to talk about his job, but other
times he had funny stories. This time he only shrugged. “I can’t
say, exactly. I can tell you we’re laying a sort of asphalt right
now. We hope it doesn’t rain either.”

He couldn’t tell her about the airfield
project—hell, he wasn’t even supposed to tell Molly, but he had. It
was a secret that only the Senators knew about.

The firm he worked for had restored most of
downtown over the past five years. It was a huge company, but only
a select handful were chosen for the airfield. He had no idea what
they intended to use it for—did they even have planes?—but he was
starting to form a theory.

If he was right, then he would have to do
something. It might mean a real future for him and Molly. And,
well, Lily...

Thunder rumbled overhead. Molly cursed, and
Jack tightened his grip on the steering wheel, his knuckles already
bone-white.

At dusk, Thackeray sat on a rock and whittled
arrows from kindling. The evening fires were being lit, and the
day’s purchase—rats and other small vermin—were being cleaned for
supper. To almost anyone it might seem like a dismal life of
poverty. But he knew better. He’d seen what was on the other side.
And he knew that, soon, the Senate’s empire would fall.

Somewhere far off, at the very edge of his
hearing, a little bell began to ring.

A few others heard it too. They looked to the
west end of the quarry. The jingling increased in volume as other
bells were triggered.

Then, to the east. More ringing. And the
north.

Thackeray snatched a bow off the ground at
his feet and peered into the trees on the quarry’s rim. Didn’t see
a damn thing. Ringing to the south now.

Panicked exclamations split the air. Women
grabbed their children and ran for their tents. Others took up
torches and bows and watched the woods above. The ringing was
almost deafening, every single lizard kicking its tiny legs as they
were bathed in the aura of a presence massive, something huge and
unseen watching the humans from the trees.

Then came the scream, the most godawful thing
Thackeray had ever heard—a ragged, high-pitched banshee’s cry that
seemed to come from all directions. It was in that moment that
Thackeray realized all of them were about to die.

The rotters surged forth, all runners—
all
of them—
cascading down the sides of the crater in a wave of
gray flesh that swept over the men standing at the camp’s edge.
Thackeray stared in abject horror as he saw his men torn limb from
limb in seconds, ripped apart and simply thrown aside—fresh meat
discarded while the undead went after the others!

He ran for the nearest fire. Fire, that was
all they had. And fires were being stomped out right and left by
the feet of the dead as tents collapsed under the weight of
ravenous attackers and then the screams of the women filled
Thackeray’s head, women grieving and dying all at once. Still the
rotters kept pouring in.

Thackeray spun, a torch in each hand, and saw
a pair heading right for him. He ran at them, flames thrust forth,
ready to beat them both to pulp with the goddamned things if he had
to—

They weren’t two. They were one.

Siamese twins, rotters fused at the torso and
scrambling along on three legs like some sort of giant insect. Its
heads snapped and slavered and both stared Thackeray dead in the
eyes. He dropped the torches and fell to his knees. God in Heaven,
it was them—it was
him
.

A shadow towered over him from the back.
Turning he saw, framed in firelight, a great hulk of a man, covered
in obscene tattoos and wielding a massive hammer.

Thackeray saw the hammer coming down and
couldn’t even close his eyes. He was trapped in this waking
nightmare, forced to see the death blow as it rocketed toward his
face; and then

* * *

Kill. Then eat.

He’d taught them that taking down the entire
herd at the onset left more meat for each of them. If they were to
stay strong, to stay fast, they needed to eat well. To increase
their chances of survival, all of the pack needed to stay
healthy—and each of them understood that.

That said, Eviscerato was the alpha, and he
always fed first.

All of the night’s kills had been dragged
into the open, out from beneath bloody canvas and away from the
heat of those campfires still burning; stripped naked and laid out
before the King of the Dead, for him to select his morsel.

The young girls were soft and fatty. He
grabbed one by the bracelet on her wrist, letters chained together.
He couldn’t read them, and cast the item aside. J-O-S-I-E.

Pulling her away from the others, he knelt
over her, lifting her to his mouth by her little ponytail—then tore
into her. And the pack leapt at the remaining meat, spitting and
gnashing in a frenzy of blood.

Eviscerato still wore his old suit, the
crimson vest and top hat, even his cane—a handy bludgeon—and he
hadn’t lost his showman swagger either. The dancer among the dead,
they’d called him. He still moved with a sort of grace uncommon in
thee dead. There were no memories of his former life, at least not
in his mind; but his muscles remembered that peculiar gait with
which he walked, and a certain instinct told him to smile grandly
in the face of a large crowd. So he often came at his victims with
an ear-to-ear grin, lipless and rotten, cane swinging in the
moonlight.

They were animals, the lot of them; but
preserved in each member of Eviscerato’s circus was a sense of
identity. The Strongman and the Fakir and the Geek each knew his
place.

And they all followed Eviscerato—who, in
turn, had been following the withdrawal, the human convoys heading
north. With those convoys long gone he pressed on, guided by am
intuition which told him that there was a great nest of living
flesh at the end of this long and bloody road.

There, they would feast until their bellies
burst.

The joke was that they called it Old New
York. Some people didn’t get it, some people didn’t know history
and didn’t care to know about the world before, and that was fine.
But for those looking for a little light in the world after, for a
little humor in the burnt-out labyrinth, the dust-swept
amphitheater of silence, the concrete-and-steel canyons of the dead
island—they called it Old New York and maybe cracked a smile.

101 years or so out from the Year of the
Plague, the Last Day, End Time, Old New York was a sun-bleached
husk of a city. Nature had reclaimed what it wanted, but it had
left a lot of the skyscrapers and sewers and streets to themselves,
a decaying spectacle bespeaking an ancient fallen empire. The
skeletons of monolithic business enterprises and government
concerns loomed over ruptured veins of asphalt and seas of dirt and
glass. Loomed over nothing.

“So what are we looking for?” asked Keane. He
was perched on a rusted-out hulk that had once been some piece of
construction equipment. It was now host to an ecosystem of plants
and insects that had infested its limbs and guts and built kingdoms
of their own. It was almost like a little hill, this so-called
“Caterpillar” entrenched in earth somewhere in the former
Manhattan.

“Anything,” answered Alex, balancing his axe
on his right shoulder while trying to sort through the torches
under his left arm. “Anything we can use.”

“Or eat?”

“If you want to hunt, let’s hunt. I don’t
know if we’ll find anything edible in these streets, but let’s
hunt.”

“Well, I am hungry.”

“Why’d they only send three of us?” asked
Jarrett.

“Because this is pointless. All of this,”
said Keane, gesturing to the ghost city around them, “and there
ain’t shit worth taking. Not anymore.”

“At least it’s empty,” Jarrett said.

“We don’t know that,” warned Alex.

“If there are any rotters here, they’re
starved down to fuckin’ skin and bones. They gotta eat just like
us, and just like us, they don’t eat.” Keane held an aluminum bat,
a relic from a time when there was play. It was caked with rust,
and other things rust-colored, and he wielded it like an extension
of his arm. “All right. Look, Alex, we know this city’s been
stripped bare... If there’s anything here, it’s under.”

“Under?”

“Ol’ New York is supposed to have a whole
other city beneath it—train tunnels, sewers, basements and
connections that ain’t on any of our maps. There might be some real
worthwhile stuff down there. Stuff locked up even before Plague
Year. Hell, there could be a goldmine down there.”

“We’re just looking for basic supplies—”

“Yeah, I know,” Keane snapped. “We’re just
trying to get by. Make it to the next day. Is that livin’? C’mon.
What if we could bring back more than some goddamn salt and paper?
What if we brought back books? Booze? Fucking juice! I don’t needa
get drunk, if I could taste apple juice just one more time—”

“Don’t start,” Alex shook his head. “Just
don’t.”

“Yeah, you hate to think about it, but what
if it’s really fuckin’ down there? What if, Alex? C’mon, we’re
otherwise basically wastin’ our time in this ghost town, why not
just go look? Jarrett, whaddaya think?”

The smallest and youngest of the three,
Jarrett stared at the dead city with wonder. He still had dreams,
Alex knew, he still had an idea that life was more than breathing
and eating and outlasting the rotters. He had a concept of the
future.

“I wonder what’s down there,” Jarrett
said.

Keane slapped his knee and held the bat up.
“Let’s just poke around this block, huh? Just see what’s under this
block. Under this hill here, Caterpillar Hill. If we find somethin’
interesting, we’ll head back to camp and they can send out a real
salvage team.”

Alex shrugged. “You know, there could be
rotters down there. Preserved somehow, away from the hot and the
dryness. It could be bad.”

Jarrett suddenly looked pale. Keane popped
his neck with a snap of his head and sighed. “I’ll take point.
We’ll sweep every room before we start shopping. Okay? I’m not
gonna take any chances with you guys. C’mon.”

“What the hell,” Alex said. “Might as well
make something of this trip.”

“Wait!” Jarrett said. He pointed, hand
trembling, at something approaching the hill.

It lurched forward, the gaunt, thin-limbed
thing, still partially hidden in the shadows of the buildings but
beyond all doubt a rotter. Its stilted, insane run, its head
thrusting downward with each step—it was alien and horrifying and
yet they’d seen it a thousand times before.