"Do you remember being dead at all?”
“No. I don't have any visions to tell you about heaven or hell. If any of the others remember anything they are not talking. I can tell you this though, they burned all of the churches in town, on Sentry's orders. I think some of the faithful were inside them at the time too. The first thing I remember when I came back was having my head inside the bucket, licking up someone else's blood. I remember drinking a half dozen times, I didn't get the whole bucket, I just got a portion and when Sentry decided I was smart enough he booted me out with instructions to not make any more zombies and lay low until he called me. Of course not everyone followed that rule, he must have messed up his instruction to some of the others somehow and that is when the problems started. Things got out of hand pretty quickly and all of us were called up to rein in the renegade zombies. Zombies attacking others in the street and one couple moved off to a nearby community and started a nest of zombies there, it was a mess and Sentry barely got it under control before he made his plans. We like the flesh of our enemies too, blood is good, if it is fresh enough, but nothing is better than living flesh.”
“Even now?” asked Stewart.
“Now…well now I am able to control my hunger a little better, I am not sure why. Before I couldn't, I just had to eat, there was no way I could stop, aside from having the food removed from me or being ordered to stop eating.”
“So you don't eat anymore? Not even regular food?”
“No.”
“How is that possible?”
“You know what I did Stewart? Before I became what I am?”
“No, what?”
“I was an assistant manager at the 'Bait Bucket', we sold fishing supplies and bait. Do you really think I might be able to tell you what has happened to me or why I don't need to eat anymore?”
“No, I suppose not. So how'd you end up in Colorado?”
“You two know anything about 'Og'?”
Max shook his head, “No, I thought I heard the name on the radio, WWEB. Just before it went off the air.”
“Yeah that is right, well Og was actually Neil Rosol, I never liked the guy. I was with him, not by choice I had to go with him.”
“Everyone has choices Red.” said Stewart.
“Humans have choices, Stewart, zombies have to do what their maker tells them to do. Most zombies, even the smart ones never figure this out, that they can control their own 'children' quite well and even lesser zombies to a great extent. Anyway Neil and I came up from Florida. There was this guy there, Doctor Sentry, he is the one who made us all, in theory that makes him the head zombie and he should be able to control all of his creatures. However I know for a fact that controlling zombies a couple generations removed from you is more difficult than one you made yourself. If I ran into a really smart zombie…”
“We call them 'Super Zombies'.” said Max.
“Yes that is good, if I ran into a super zombie who was my great-great-grandchild I might not be able to tell him to do anything, unless I was more powerful than he was.”
“How do you get more powerful?” asked Stewart, already suspecting the answer.
“Eat more humans, or drain their blood at least. Anyway I was talking about Neil. He was a big fan of Egyptian mythology, one day he decided we had to call him 'Og' some sort of sun God or something. I was down there with him at the radio station, a group of soldiers came and were roughing up our troops, they tended to use wounding tactics, fragmentation grenades, shots to the arms and torso when they first ran into us. They soon learned that only major trauma to the head would keep the zombies down and switched tactics pretty quick. What they didn't expect was that we, well, you would call us 'supers', had picked up several weapons from the police and other convoy's we had ambushed earlier, we even had some rocket propelled grenades, that sort of thing and a few zombies who knew how to use them. We let the convoy get in real close then hit them hard, we almost wiped them out, but they had a reserve that retreated when we got the first bunch of them. I was sent by Neil to pursue those soldiers when the bomb went off behind me. Almost everyone I was with didn't make it. I had the luck of being down by this shitty little creek and it was just low enough that the debris went flying over my head by inches instead of into my head. I tried to crawl down under the stream bed after that, I didn't know if there would be more bombs coming or if it was over. There was only the one, and it took the heart out of Neil's army, most of the supers were there with him, and the ones who had come with me were just gone once I got up. Here and there a few dumb zombies shuffled around, but I was free. See it gets back to the orders I was given by Doctor Sentry.”
“I thought you were following Neil, had to do what he said?” asked Stewart.
“Yeah Sentry told me to do what Neil said. And Neil's last orders were to make sure the remaining men in the convoy didn't come back to interfere with his plans anymore. No Neil meant the convoy people couldn't mess with him. Therefore, I was free.”
“It was just the two of you sent to Denver? You made all those zombies?”
“Oh yes, yes we did. We checked into a hotel downtown, converted it in a single night about a week before the fall, when the second shift employees came in we used them to feed the first shift and get them into some sort of intelligence, then sent them home to get their families and told them to hide the slow 'children' they had made until the twenty fifth, which is when this whole mess started in earnest. After that hotel we split up, I went on a journey up highway seventy, taking two of the single guys with me. In one day I dropped zombies off in Idaho Springs, Frisco, Vail, Eagle, Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction. Whenever I ran out of zombies to plant in those towns, I just stopped and made a few more. I swung south from Grand Junction to hit Montrose and Durango before heading straight east towards Pueblo. I hooked up with Neil in Colorado Springs the very next day, in three days we had over two hundred operatives waiting to strike, in four more days we had zombies smart enough to follow our orders in almost every medium sized city in the state, and I even dipped down into New Mexico after meeting Neil because he told me no one was assigned to spread the plague there.”
“Just two of you wiped out the entire state. Somehow I just can't believe that.” Stewart said.
“We didn't make zombies and send them out to terrorize people, we made them stay inside and wait for a few days, we brought some of them back to almost the super level and gave them some autonomy to act discretely. It was a quick, silent takeover of society. Believe it, it happened worldwide.”
“So this isn't just happening here?” asked Max, he could see Red shake his head through the corn, “I was hoping there was someplace we could go, somewhere safe again.”
“I wasn't in the inner circle of the planning, but when I left most of the town left too, about three thousand of us flying out of the airports in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and other locations, they had buses up the coast to catch flights out over a period of like three days, from what Neil said. He said I would like being second in command of a state.”
“What was the rest of the plan?”
“I have no idea. I know phase one was to create as many zombies as possible, that is what we did. My opinion is that it worked too well. We destroyed too much of humanity. It has been a week and almost the entire state was destroyed, if it worked that well in other places then there are not many humans left.”