Those rotters that run like the wind… I’ve seen them. “Alpha zombies,” as the commander calls them. I’ve only seen a few, and they didn’t last long against our troops, but Lord they were frightening.
I guess that’s it for now. I want you to know that I am safe and I am happy. Believe me when I say that our men and women in uniform are up to the challenge, and only the best of the best were handpicked to protect the Senate President’s convoy. I think we’re going to make a real difference out here. We’re going to save the badlanders.
I love you, and I’ll see you in a month’s time.
Todd
Mom never got the latter.
It was lost in the ambush. An ambush by rotters.
Heavy with stains of blood, the letter fell into the Utah sand and was forgotten in the unfolding chaos. Then, eventually, it was buried, and finally the elements claimed it and erased the words that a naïve young man had written to assuage the fears of his worried mother.
Two / The New Flesh
October 18th, 2112
Every Main Street in every town in the badlands looked the same. The leaves had turned and fallen from the trees encroaching on empty businesses; plants grew in smashed windows and uprooted the sidewalk. The sun bleached crumbling brick and cracked asphalt, The rust-eaten skeletons of cars sat in the street, now home to small animals, the entire city slowly being reclaimed by Nature; the last signs of human life nothing more than scars fading in her flesh.
This particular Main Street in central Colorado had only a few cars in the road. There was a minivan that had run up onto the sidewalk, and a police cruiser abandoned in the middle of the street. At the end of the street, however, blocking off a municipal plaza, was a barricade of vehicles scorched by fire
And at the other end of the street, hanging from a traffic light, was a man in a noose.
He’d hung himself that very morning, and the rotters scattered throughout the area had begun to take notice. Raspy moans issued from desiccated throats, and creaky joints made scraping sounds as the dead started to move.
The moans increased in volume, attracting rotters from nearby streets. It wasn’t long before a mob of several dozen shuffling corpses was advancing inch by inch toward Main Street, most of them with no idea why; they just followed the sounds.
Rotters who would have once growled menacingly at their competition could now only gurgle on the rotten paste filling their windpipes. They hadn’t fed in perhaps years and had just stood, silent, patient; waiting for food to come along as they decomposed. The virus could only fight off the elements for so long. The dead in this Colorado city were nothing more than shambling husks. But most of them still had arms, and fingers, and most important of all, teeth. And they all had the hunger.
They closed in on the hanged man from all directions. The man wore a dark suit. He was pale and hairless and thin. A pleasant breeze carried the odor of decay through the air, though none of them could smell; had they been able to, they might have noticed the lack of any odor coming off the hanged man.
Closer, closer. Thick saliva gathered behind swollen lips. Hands groped through the air. The moans all came together in a maddening crescendo.
The hanged man had one arm behind his back. Strapped to it was a blade: a long, curved implement made from fused bone, sharpened to a razor’s edge on both sides. Its tip rested against the noose around the man’s neck.
His eyes opened. They were dark and lifeless, doll’s eyes. They stared coldly down at the undead.
A shoulder sling and wrist straps secured the enormous curved blade to his right arm. A leather thong bound around his hand, he simply flicked his wrist; and the noose was severed.
The man came down in a tight crouch, sending plumes of dust into the air with his impact. Before any of the stupid, shambling dead had a chance to register what was happening, to even hazard a guess at what the man really was — he rose and thrust the blade out and spun with a battle cry that killed the dead’s senseless conversation, as if he were an unwelcome guest; and he most certainly was.
As he spun, rising, the blade cutting upward in a sweeping arc — heads flew off of shoulders and rolled through the air. And those slashed across the torso opened up and rotten gray guts spilled onto the street. Stomachs burst and vomited their contents onto the man’s feet. He threw the blade out again, spinning in the opposite direction, and cut down a dozen of them at once.
They were dead, the ones he’d struck — dead and deader. They would not rise again.
The others came at him. He planted the tip of the scythe blade in an emaciated rotter’s gut and ripped through his sternum and skull, halving the bastard. The blade turned and tore downward, through the legs of another undead, then reversed course and decapitated a hissing female. Her open throat continued to hiss as foul ichor spayed into the air.
The man barreled into a line of rotters, lifting one off its feet and divorcing its legs from its torso with a mid-air strike. He whirled to knife through the kneecaps of the others, and they fell limp, never to get up again. Every blow with the scythe blade was a death blow. The blade seemed cursed; no, enchanted.
He had forged it himself, binding and shaping the bone with dark magic, then endowing it with the power to kill the unkillable — to reap the undead. Such a task had been his burden, as he had once been the Reaper himself.
For thousands of years little more than a silent record-keeper, marking the passage of souls from one plane to the next, the Reaper had felt obligated to take on a new role with the rise of the undead. It was more than just a plague on humanity; they upset laws and balances set before time began. With every fiber in his being he’d hated them… and with that, he himself had begun to change, even as death had.
He’d found will, and righteous anger. And when he’d found her—the one he dreamed about, the child from the swamp-house — that had been it. He had relinquished his role as Death and bound himself to the mortal coil upon which shuffled Man himself.
He was still a supernatural being, yes, but so much more fragile than he had once been. Unharmed, he might live for an eternity, but if the undead were to overcome him, and tear him apart, he’d simply be gone. No afterlife awaited the pale man with the black eyes. He was a spirit made flesh, and this was his only life.
But he had accepted all this without hesitation because it meant saving her. Lily, the child who, once he found her, helped him to find himself. She had been forced to live among the undead in the swamp-house by her mad brother, forced to treat the cadaverous predators as kin. And the Reaper had—
You simply lost it. You lost it.
But what he’d gained had been worth the price. He was alive now. And he had begun to sleep, and to dream, and in his dreams he saw the little girl and he knew he had to find her again. To ensure her safety, of course, but more than that. Their bond seemed beyond his understanding.
Upon entering this strange new life, the former Death had chosen a name for himself: Adam. And it was as Adam that he spun like a grim dancer through this sea of severed limbs and putrid gore. He’d already cut down a third of the mob; the end was near, at least for today.
Leaping atop the police cruiser, he vaulted off the roof’s edge and took down a row of rotting fiends before they could flinch. Some of the undead had begun to slow in their approach, but the lure of the flesh was too great. None would flee, making Adam’s job all the easier.