“Yes,” Ryland answered. “I am not like you. I am a new afterdead. I am the birth of a plague.”
He gestured towards an older zombie, one of the base’s experimental subjects, as it staggered across a field a few hundred yards off. “I have spread it to many, living and dead. They all carry the plague now.”
“Why?” Clarke asked. There was no bitterness or longing in the question; he asked only because that was his mission, to know why he had been killed. To understand, so that he would not be killed again.
“Because,” Ryland answered, “I wanted to see what would happen.”
An unsatisfying answer, perhaps, to the living beings that were now being infected with this new plague, but good enough for Clarke.
Ryland came at him then, and despite Clarke’s condition, it was easy to fend off the inexperienced fighter’s attacks. Clarke smashed a bony fist through Ryland’s teeth, and the other made to swallow the fist, seizing Clarke’s arm with both hands and gnashing the jagged nubs of his teeth on Clarke’s dead skin. Clarke felt tendon and muscle being torn away and, planting a boot on Ryland’s groin, jerked his hand free.
Ryland staggered back, snapping his jaws like a mad dog, ragged sheets of gray flesh dangling from his broken teeth. “No good. Dead meat.” Though undead, he seemed to be somehow relishing every new experience of his afterlife, the proud parent of the contagion and a new flesh. In the Humvee, Cervantes felt disgust for Ryland, disgust that boiled in his throat and threatened to make him retch; meanwhile Clarke, who felt nothing, raised his shredded fist and rejoined the fight.
He stabbed two fingers through Ryland’s eye socket, pulping the orb as if it were nothing and sinking knuckle-deep into the cold jelly of the dead brain. Ryland grunted, then made a sound like a laugh. He swatted at Clarke’s various wounds without effect.
Clarke hurled Ryland to the asphalt and knelt on his neck. There was a snap, and Clarke grabbed Ryland’s hair and jerked his head to one side. Another satisfying snap.
Ryland gurgled, tried to speak, but Clarke put all his weight on the man’s throat, and wrenched at his head as hard as he could, and before long there were no more words left to say.
Ryland’s head, a chattering, pulpy mess, rolled to the curb and was forgotten. Clarke stood up, looked back at the Humvee.
Within, Cervantes’ mind was suddenly assaulted by a crushing force that blinded his inner eye.
“My lucidity is… different from yours,” Ryland’s head whispered. Clarke whirled to see Ryland’s body writhing, churning in time with the words of the disembodied head. His chest rose and fell with something that wasn’t breath; ribs and flesh snapped apart. There was something inside of him.
“I used every resource at my disposal to try and understand what was growing inside of me. What I was becoming. And I found the words of the old gods who left their dark energy here on our little insect-world… I found that I could be much more than just the plague…”
Tentacles erupted from Ryland’s body and snaked across the street to caress his head. Ryland moaned; Clarke watched as his brains were pulled out through the bottom of his skull, watched as the tentacles withdrew with their prize and settled in the cavity of Ryland’s headless torso, cradling his brain there.
Clarke heard Ryland in his head now, as if the man had become pure thought. The brain pulsated as Ryland spoke.
Ia! Ia!
Ryland’s body rose with the brain nestled in a bed of throbbing tentacles. He began stalking toward Clarke.
I am more than a new flesh… I am a new being… a new god…
Cervantes rolled out of the Humvee, clutching his head, blood streaming from his open eyes. He rose to his knees and saw the horror Ryland had transformed into.
He raised an M16 and let loose.
A hail of bullets shredded Ryland’s body, sending him staggering back, his exposed brain jolting about as the tentacles exploded outward in an effort to contain it.
No! NO! You can’t kill me! I am—
I—
A trio of bullets sailed through the night and punched into the meat of Ryland’s brain. It flew apart like so much refuse.
I…
Ryland crumpled, tentacles flopping weakly on the asphalt. Cervantes’ head cleared, and he was able to think again: so much for the gods. He knew they had no place in this terrifying new world.
Clarke turned. Cervantes aimed the M16 at him.
Clarke considered this situation for a moment; here was meat, meat that had helped him in his mission but meat nonetheless. Yet, that meat had a gun. And something else was curious about that meat, something special about him that Clarke’s bruised mind couldn’t pin down.
He turned from the soldier and walked away.
Cervantes looked at the bite mark on his wrist. He could sense that something was wrong, very wrong, that this wasn’t a typical bite. Just as Ryland, whose disembodied head continued to gnash its teeth, was not a typical zombie. Something coursed through his veins and took hold of the cells in his blood.
God… I’m infected.
He turned away as well, away from the fight, from Ryland’s remains, and walked. He would need to tell others, on the outside. He’d need to tell the world that its end had finally come.