Empire's End (13 page)

* * *

Meyer called Casey on his radio.

“Did you get things taken care of with the
girl?” he demanded.

“I’ve got one of my best working on it,”
Casey responded. “We’ll find her.”

“Haven’t had one run on me in a long while,”
Meyer muttered. “I’ll need to make an example of her.”

“But before you do... ?” Casey said, an edge
of desperation in his voice.
That slightest sign of
weakness.

“Sure, you can have a go at her,” Meyer
replied. “You’ll really like this one, Casey.”

* * *

Dr. Zane sat before a small cage, his
expression dark. He watched the rats inside; one was lying on its
side, and the other was sniffing it timidly. Little white rats,
pink-eyed and trembling, blissfully unaware of their world.

The rat lying down twitched. Its eyes opened.
Tiny appendages grasped at the air.

It sat up and tore the other rat’s throat
out.

Zane had ground up part of the bone and fed
it to the rat. Without the benefit of an actual lab and scientific
equipment, this was all he could do to test the sample—but it was
enough. He shook his head in sadness as tiny carnage unfolded
before him.

Adam was lying in a bed in a small white
room. Blankets were tucked in around his arms and legs, and he
could feel the soothing moisture of wet wraps around his burns.

The woman entered. She was the most beautiful
woman he’d ever seen

Adam had not known the meaning of beauty in
his former life, but he had admired (envied) Man’s creativity and
often was taken by simple architecture. He had spent many long
hours wandering the streets of great cities where buildings more
than a century old stood beside new works, contrasting the minds of
then and now, structures complimenting one another and holding the
Reaper in sheer awe. He loved the geometry of it. Masons had once
thought geometry to be the language of God. Certain angles and
curves seemed to please him more than others, perhaps appealing to
his supernatural essence, and he grew to favor specific
artists.

In this woman’s face he saw a masterwork in
flesh. Every angle and shade was exquisite in itself, and when it
all came together, smooth angles framing the dark pools of her
eyes... it was overwhelming.

“Stay still,” she said, moving to adjust the
pillows behind his head. “I don’t know if I can heal you, but I’ll
try. It will take time.”

“I... I’m not a man,” he croaked.

“I know,” she replied. “I’m not a woman.” And
she smiled at him then, and he knew that she had once borne the
Reaper’s burden.

He knew there had been others before him, but
never had the slightest notion of what had become of them when they
left their station. He’d wondered what had made them quit. He’d
wondered what they looked like, which mortal myths each embraced as
their guise—but he’d never imagined that someone like the woman in
white could be one of them.

“It’s snowing,” she said. “You’ve been here a
day and a night. For a time, I thought you were gone. What did this
to you? Surely not the undead. Were they living?”

“No, no,” he coughed. “It was an undead. A
strange one. There’s something else driving him.”

“Do you have a guess what it was?” she
asked.

“No.” He studied her face. She just looked
too... too human. Too
real
. And yet—”You were a Reaper,” he
said.

She nodded. “A long, long time ago. You are
probably the one that took it on after me. It’s been ages since
I’ve met another. Tell me—why did you leave your post? I’m always
curious.”

“I’m just as curious about you,” Adam
said.

“Tell me yours,” she said, “and I’ll tell you
mine.”

“It was a child,” he said. “I couldn’t let
her die. Not like that. But there was nothing I could do... then it
came to me.
Quit
. Just quit. And all I had to do was
do
it
, to exercise this will. That was it.”

“Did you save her?”

“I think so.”

“I’m glad.” She pulled over a small
hand-carved chair and sat beside him. “Relax your body. I’m going
to try to relieve your pain.”

“What about your story?”

“Patience,” the woman cooed. She gently laid
her hands on his belly. He gasped in pain... then it was gone.

“Civilization was young when I fell,” the
woman said. “And civilization, which I thought would save Man, only
led to more reasons for war and greater means by which to shed
blood.” She massaged his legs as she spoke. “Early men fought for
basic needs. Now they fought for status, influence, pride. I wept
for humanity as I realized that they would only get better at
harming one another.”

The way she laid her hands on him was almost
sedative. He forced himself to sit up straight and asked, “You said
you
fell
... ?”

“We are all fallen,” she answered. “Those of
us who are born into our stations, as we are, never to grow or
change—when we
do
change, we fall and become like men. It’s
not as bad as it sounds.

“There was a time when I thought civilization
and faith heralded the dawn of a new peace, but I was so wrong...
so inhuman then. I didn’t know Man as I do now.”

Adam nodded. “The American government
actually made the plague... I believe the power existed long before
that, in some form, but they willfully created afterdead. That was
when I first became aware of them. It’s
how
I became aware
of them, I suppose.”

A small, sad smile crossed the woman’s face
as she looked at him.

“Adam,” he said, unsure what she was
searching for.

She laughed. “I didn’t know you
had
a
name.”

“Don’t you?”

“I could never settle on one. Sometimes I
wish God had named me the way parents name their children. But
we’re not His children, are we?”

“You speak as if you know Him.”

“I do, in my way. There was a time when I had
memories of being in His presence—I think—but they’ve long since
faded. Now I can only pray, and imagine, as they do.”

Adam clasped her hand. “What of the
afterdead?”

She told him. She told him about gods long
dead and about humanity’s rotten luck.

He didn’t take it well.

“Not even God knows what it is or what to do
about it? Then how are we to stop it? Do you even try to fight
them?”

“When I must,” the woman said. “I concentrate
on healing. I have a hope, silly as it may seem, that one day I
might heal the undead.”

“It does sound silly,” Adam muttered.
“Ridiculous. You were the one who said the plague was without
reason. That even Creation is random in nature. So how... ?”

She turned over her left hand and opened her
palm. There, right in the center of her soft flesh, a seedling
sprouted, green and healthy. Alive. Life from nothing.

“We are
potential
, you and I,” she
told him. “We’re not just clay. There is still power within us,
such as what you used to make your scythe... it’s just a matter of
channeling it.

“Once, we were simply bookkeepers, watching
life come and go, observing the random. Now we are part of it.”

“Remarkable.” Adam touched the seedling. It
curled away from his fingers, withering to dust.

“You’ll learn,” the woman in white said,
still smiling. “You have eternity.”

* * *

The Omega had returned to the hillside to
find Adam gone. He broke north, drawing on all his energy until he
was starving once again.

Now he crouched on a snowy ridge, watching a
pack of rotters below. More than a pack—an army. Hundreds.
Following a dead man who hurled brilliant flames high into the air.
The Omega nearly started after him, but the voices interrupted his
rapture.

We need to eat!

Yes, eat... then find the Reaper!

The Omega slipped down from the ridge.

There were several stragglers at the rear of
the pack, undead with broken legs or limbs nearly rotted off. The
slowest was a female walking on what looked like sticks. Sweeping
through the night, the Omega swung the shovel and cleanly
decapitated her.

He tore a handful of ragged meat from the
stump of her neck and stuffed it in his mouth. A few of the
shambling rotters glanced back, then continued on their way.

* * *

“Sleep now,” the woman in white said to Adam.
“Dream,”

“Of Lily,” he whispered, closing his
eyes.

The woman paused in the doorway to watch him
sleep. It was something she couldn’t do. He seemed to find
happiness there, though, there in the dark.

She wondered if he’d been replaced yet.

Nickel, who had handled the rotters in
Eviscerato’s circus, stayed close to the pack leader at all times.
He had faithfully followed Eviscerato into undeath, and his loyalty
was unchanged on the other side. The King of the Dead had no queen,
of course, nor any friends among his court; but Nickel was
something close to a companion. The beta zombie.

As such, he was sometimes one of the few
allowed to feed alongside Eviscerato when the scraps were few.
There were long periods roaming the badlands where they didn’t
encounter any fresh meat—only more rotters to join the ranks and
increase the need for food.

Despite that frequent shortage of flesh, the
pack continued to grow. Eviscerato was fiercely territorial, and he
wanted every undead under his reign; he also wanted enough troops
for the Great Feast, when they reached the end of the road and
found all the humans in their nest up north.

His sole drive was still self-preservation,
as was the case with any undead, but unlike the others, he saw past
his next meal. He knew his family would outlast the ferals who
survived alone.

It was true that, in the beginning, they had
traveled in wagons as the old circus. It was easy so long as he
could contain his minions until they had gathered the meat beneath
the tent. But word spread quickly from community to community. The
living told stories.

So the badlanders grew to dread the sight of
Eviscerato’s caravan. They would be prepared when he came. The King
adapted. The element of deceit was traded for the element of
surprise. The pack was growing far too large for even that now. Now
they would have to rely on sheer numbers.

Eviscerato thought about these things, in his
simple way, and he led his pack accordingly. Nickel always at his
side, the Strongman at his back, then the rest of his freaks.

In life the Strongman had been called Jordan.
An artist, he had designed all of the elaborate tattoos that
adorned his massive bulk. His hammer still served the same purpose
it always had—to pulverize flesh into a slick slurry—and sometimes
after a meal he would sit and draw strange images in the blood that
had pooled at his feet.

Claud and Chevis, the Siamese twins. They had
been born into circus life. There wasn’t a surgeon that could
separate them, not in the badlands, and they didn’t want to be
apart anyway. In death they found that two mouths for one stomach
was a luxury.

Thom, the many-limbed Geek, used to bite the
heads off of infected animals. It was a wonder he hadn’t been
infected himself until Eviscerato turned him. He still liked to
pull the heads off things.

Walsh had been the name of the horned Dwarf.
The runt of the litter, so to speak, he was able to squeeze himself
past the others in a feeding frenzy and get what little he needed.
Sometimes he was able to get into a barricaded building when the
others couldn’t, slipping through a duct or crawlspace to ignite
chaos among the living huddled inside.

Lee had juggled the fiery torches. In life,
when he could spare it, he’d fill his mouth with grain alcohol and
blow fireballs into the air. Now his belly was always saturated
with fuel. It bled from all his orifices. He could produce a
fireball at any time; it always captivated the crowd, living or
dead.

The Petrified Man had been a reluctant
performer, forced into the life by poverty and loneliness. A
genetic defect caused his connective tissue to ossify when damaged,
and the fusion of joints had led to his moniker in life. Undeath’s
never-ceasing dance of decay and regeneration had now resulted in
ossification beyond anything seen in the living world. Murphy had
been the given name of this strange man of bone; he, however, had
never known it.

The Fakir had never known his name either. He
was little more than a cheap imitation of the traditional Sufi
mystics, but he had graduated from firewalking to feats of
suffering. A human pincushion, aroused by the needles he threaded
through his skin, he was also a “blockhead” with a hollow cavity in
his skull that allowed him to hammer nails into his head. He’d
spent his life in a haze of drugs and pain; he awoke once to find
“
Regret cuts deepest
” tattooed into his flesh. Apparently
he’d entreated the Strongman to ink the words in his skin. Angry at
himself, he’d tried unsuccessfully to carve it out with a razor...
only later would he learn the Strongman had used an infected
needle. He was to become part of Eviscerato’s undead family. And he
held on to bitter regret until the very end. The words endured
still in gray scar tissue.

This motley crew had progressed from the
mindless state of the feral rotter to shrew animal intellect. But
even they did not compare to the Omega, who at this moment was
mingling with the rear of the pack and selecting his next
victim.

Soon he would need to resume his search for
the Reaper. This time, he would not walk away until the deed was
done; this time he would have the strength necessary to simply tear
the ghoul limb from limb. To Hell with prolonging the demon’s
suffering.