Zombies II: Inhuman (4 page)

A vision of rotting bodies with the white of
bone protruding from battered and crushed wrists, slamming them
repeatedly against the metal of the only door to the bunker came
alive in his head. He shuddered and tried to continue opening his
lunch, pushing the mental image out of his mind. He was down to the
last dregs of the bunker's supplies and the can of meat his was
opening, he knew from experience, made the thought of cold, greasy
Spam even sound appealing in its place.

Burke hated his visions. He'd been born with
the ability to see things that others couldn't. Sometimes, he could
watch faraway places through his mind's eye like a gazing through a
crystal ball. He could also reach into another person's mind and
read their thoughts as if they were his own.

On his most clear of days, he could sometimes
even catch glimpses of the future. It had been hell growing up with
his "gifts". He'd spent most of his thirty-odd years of life
bouncing in and out of various asylums. He'd had his first visions
of the end when he was only four years old. His parents had thought
it was just a nightmare induced from his love of horror films but
the visions kept coming and soon they were frightened by the images
he'd described of men eating men, women being ripped apart, and
rotting dead things that didn't stay dead.

When he'd finally gotten free of the last
institution, Burke had felt it in his bones that the end he'd been
seeing for mankind was near. Using his gifts, he'd conned and
forged his way into the military. Burke had no wish to die and the
way he saw it, the military would hold out longer than anyone else
in a world destined to be overrun and eaten by the dead. Of course,
things hadn't exactly worked out as he had planned.

His unit had been assigned the duty of trying
to hold the containment line around Richmond. The battle had been
raging for days when he and his fellow troops arrived to offer
reinforcements to the poor souls who had held it during the early
days when humans still emerged from the city intermingled with the
dead as they tried to flee. The army was fully dug in around the
city fighting a pointless war. The containment lines around New
York and many other places had fallen.

There were rumors of nuclear strikes on
American soil in places where the lines had failed to retrain the
dead but no one believed them and hearing or seeing actual news was
a thing of the past. Most civilians were too busy just trying to
keep breathing, journalists included.

Burke fought with his unit two days before
things began to fall apart. They were taking heavier losses each
day as their arms stockpiles grew smaller and the dead pushed
closer with each wave of rotting flesh leaving the city in search
of new meat. People began to desert the line in droves, heading off
in search of their own families, whether to say goodbye or to try
to start over, Burke had no idea. He stayed to the end until only
he and the commanding officer General Stark were left.

They enclosed themselves in the fortified
walls of the command bunker and took pop shots at the dead still
flowing from the city out into the world beyond. Stark's thoughts
of gloom and hopelessness cut into Burke like a razor more and more
with each passing hour.

There was no way he could shield his mind
from them trapped in such close proximity. He had no choice but
relieve the General. He'd blown the man's brains out with a point
blank shot from his sidearm. He felt no guilt over it. He knew it
was what Stark wanted and would have done himself if he'd been able
to give him the time to.

Burke had never been a long-range telepath
but he tried now. He spent his time attempting to understand his
gifts and force them to grow. He would sit perfectly motionless
with his eyes closed and reach out into the world seeking someone
else alive. He always saw death in his visions and never heard a
single other thought which wasn't his own. In fact, all he could
feel in the world was a coldness which seeped into him and made him
consider following Stark on to the next life every time he awoke
from one of his trances. Today was no different.

His mental searching left him hollow and the
food he was opening turned his stomach. He listened to the pounding
outside for a moment once more and then let go, simply willing his
heart to stop. Burke blinked or would have if he'd still had eye
lids in a normal sense. He looked down at his body on the floor of
the bunker as shock flooded his mind. What the hell had he become?
A ghost?

He didn't know but he was sure this wasn't
what death was supposed to be like. He reached for his weapon but
his fingers glided through it as if the metal wasn't there. It
began to sink in that he was no longer part of this plane of
existence though he could see it. He laughed silently at the
madness of it all. Deciding he would make the most of God's little
joke on him, he walked out of the bunker and literally through the
horde of mindless dead outside to bear witness to the last days of
the human species. He hoped deep down that maybe he'd meet another
ghost like himself.

The scent of the corpses littering the ground
stank to high heavens. The flaming summer sun baking their rotting
flesh and us as we stood there didn't help matters none. I can
sympathize with Peter. He didn't ask for this job like I did. He's
just the sheriff, not a professional killer.

I can tell from the slight glint of tears in
his eyes he wants this all to be over with. That this massacre is
all it will take to right the world once more. But it's not. These
poor bastards were just the beginning.

Others will smell the blood here or sense the
life in Springtown in the valley below and they will come
again.

Next time it likely won't be a few dozen
either. It never is after they find you. It will be hundreds, maybe
thousands. I have been on the run from them for a while now since I
saw the first ones walking around in Mexico. I move north from
place to place always warning the folk of what's coming in my wake
and offering them my services. Never found a town that's held
against them yet even my guns added to theirs. But Hell, the
money's good and I ain't dead yet.

I spit into the face of the closest corpse at
my feet as Peter finally gets it together and starts barking
orders. Dillon and his brother, Jack, are the only two others left
alive in our little hunting party. Peter tells them gather up the
bodies and burn them. I don't bother to help. No one says a word to
me about it. Those dead things are scary, but people like me are
scarier. That's why we'll be the last to die.

Besides I know the whole thing is a waste of
time, seen it done before. If Peter wants to try to clean up our
tracks and lower the odds of more of the dead things coming down
out of the hills, who am I to crush his hope. I think deep down
Peter knows the truth too on some level though he would never admit
it to the folk in his town or even to himself.

Peter watches the fire as the "brothers dim"
get our horses and the sun falls from the sky then we're all in the
saddle on our way back to Springtown. Too bad for us, they have
beaten us there. I can smell the dead before our horses crest the
hills around the town and we see the fires burning. One glance at
the mess below would be enough to tell any sane person to get the
hell out of dodge and make dust in another direction, any direction
but down there, only Peter ain't sane when it comes to his
town.

He's got to try to save them. He kicks his
horse's sides, charging down the hill, so fast it surprises even
me. The brothers follow him. I pause for a second, taking the time
to light up a smoke, weighing my options. The town's already paid
up, no reason for me to go down there but I decide to play the good
guy anyway and do them all a favor. I hear the sound of metal
scraping leather as my revolver comes free of its holster. My first
shot splatters Peter's skull open before anyone so much as hears
the shot.

The brothers are stunned, too confused by my
actions to go for their on weapons on instinct. I take out Jack
next because he's the smarter and faster of the pair of idiots. I
put a bullet in his face and watch him topple off his horse then I
get sloppy. Don't know why, bad luck, the glare of the stars, who
knows? It takes me three rounds to drop Dillon for good. I feel a
bit bad about the gut shot, never should have happened but the
third one I put in his eye means he won't be getting up later so
it's not like he'll be upset about it.

I stare at Dillon's body still telling myself
I took the high road. Peter never had the chance to see his dead
wife coming screaming at him with red smeared lips wailing for the
taste of his flesh. And for the brothers, my sloppy work was at
least cleaner than being ripped apart and eaten.

I turn my horse away from Springtown's ruins
to try to find somewhere else to breathe a while longer but I know
even the last to die has to die sometime. Though I won't see Hell
tonight, other than the one on this earth now, I'm still just the
walking dead myself. There's a set of yellow teeth or a bullet out
there somewhere waiting for me to find it. And somehow, with the
way the world is dying, I think it will be sooner rather than
later.

The cities were dead. At least that's the way
Travis figured it. Most folk here in Jackson died that first night
when all hell broke loose. It'd taken every officer in the
department and every able bodied man sheriff Morgan could enlist to
clear out the town and bring back some semblance of order. Travis
knew Morgan was doing all he could.

Hell, everyone in town was but he still hated
sitting out here in the field by the interstate on a Sunday
afternoon. He'd rather have been home watching the races except
there weren't any races anymore.

Travis guessed the NASCAR drivers were dead
too. He hated to imagine Dale Jr. stumbling around in the pit at
some track somewhere, his rotting flesh stinking to high heavens
because the poor bastard was too mindless to get out of the
sun.

Travis picked up the AK-47 from the passenger
seat and opened the patrol car's door to stretch his legs. Time
passed slowly these days whether you were sitting on your ass in a
field keeping an eye out for the wandering dead or sitting in the
bar with your buddies, it didn't matter. It always felt like you
were just waiting to die.

The once high grass crunched under Travis's
boots as he got out of the car. Even the damn dead getting back on
their feet and eating the living hadn't ended the drought here in
Jackson. Everything green was drying up and dying like the rest of
the world.

He caught the sight of something moving on
the interstate from out of the corner of his eye and turned to see
a dead man dressed in National Guard combat fatigues making his way
down the interstate's exit ramp to the road beside the field.
Travis checked the silencer attached to the barrel of his rifle and
sighed wondering how many of the dead he'd sent to hell over the
last few weeks. Had to be going on a hundred, he was sure.

He leaned over the hood of the car and took
aim, only squeezing the trigger when he was sure of his shot. The
bullet struck the man's head snapping it backwards before the man's
body stopped in its tracks and toppled to the asphalt.

"Head shot," Travis muttered and smiled.
"That fucker is staying down."

He walked out of the field, shouldering his
weapon as he went.

This was the part of his job he hated the
most. Now that the thing was dead again, he had to drag its body
out of sight so that any other corpses which strayed by wouldn't
see it and come to investigate in hopes that the body was still
fresh enough to feed on.

The man was Travis's third kill of the
afternoon. The things were showing up more and more with each
passing day. If their numbers didn't level out soon, Travis would
have to start walking out to the fields because Morgan would
convince the town that it was the noise of the patrol cars in an
otherwise silent word which was attracting the dead.

Travis admitted that Morgan might be on to
something with that theory but sooner or later, a good portion of
the dead from Asheville and the other close cities would wander
their way into Jackson regardless. It was just cold and simple
logic that the creatures would spread out in search of food and
there were so many of them that it was a statistical certainty that
enough of them would eventually make it to the town to wipe it off
the face of the Earth.

Travis reached body of the man and stood over
it. He thought he recognized him in spite of the maggots which swam
over the man's flesh and the gaping hole in his skull. Yep, it was
Billy Clayton all right. There was no doubting it. When the shit
first hit the fan, Billy's unit had been called up by the governor
to help contain the outbreak of dead in the cities. Travis
remembered driving out to Billy's house with Morgan the day before
Billy had left. Morgan had done all he could to convince Billy not
to leave the town but Billy was young and stubborn. He bet Billy
wished he'd listened to Morgan now.

Travis squatted down, pulled Billy's military
issue sidearm from its holster, and inspected it. He popped the
clip and checked the firing mechanism before he slid the gun into
his own belt. A good weapon and ammo were not things you left to go
to waste no matter who their owner had been. Travis picked up
Billy's body with his hands under Billy's arms and started to haul
his remains over to the ditch beside the road. The sound of someone
moaning caused Travis to jerk his head up. Billy's body thumped to
the road as Travis let go of it.

"Oh, holy. .." Travis breathed. He couldn't
believe what he was seeing. Hundreds of bodies were heading down
the interstate's exit ramp towards him, pouring onto the road like
ants from a hill, only they weren't just coming from the
interstate. They were coming out of the damned trees all around the
field too.