SNAFU: Black Ops
Edited by Amanda J. Spedding & Geoff Brown
Publisher’s Note:
This book is a collection of stories from writers all over the world.
For authenticity and voice, we have kept the style of English native to each author’s location, so some stories will be in UK English, and others in US English.
We have, however, changed dashes and dialogue marks to our standard format for ease of understanding.
This book is a work of fiction.
All people, places, events, zombies, variants, deep ones, various other creatures, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
BACK TO BLACK
Jonathan Maberry and Bryan Thomas Schmidt
—1—
The Soldier and the Samurai
The soldier was a ghost in a dead world.
He made no sound as he moved because noise was suicidal. Noise was how to attract the dead. Noise was how one became dead. The soldier was alive because he had learned those lessons long ago, often from seeing others make mistakes they could not undo. The soldier had buried so many people, even people as skilled as he was. Maybe that meant he was lucky, or maybe it meant that in many ways he was closer to an animal than a man. His instincts were feral, driven by a predatory nature that had let him survive when so many others had fallen. Stronger people, faster ones, better ones. He, though, survived. All of those deaths were lessons, and he was a good student in the school of survival.
Now he was a soldier in memory only. It was how he defined himself because it steadied him, gave him purpose. Gave him a reason to stay alive even when death called so sweetly and so persistently. Death, after all, was the kingdom where everyone he had ever known and loved now lived. Living was a lonely, brutal thing.
He moved up a dry slope past cactus and twisted shrubs, watching the terrain, listening to the wind. When he stopped, he stood still as the ancient trees. That was a skill he had learned when the world was still alive. When you stop you have to become part of the landscape. You can’t do anything to draw the eye.
The trick was to be a ghost so that he did not become a corpse. Before the end of the world that concept made sense to any soldier; since then it was an unbreakable rule.
Even so, being alive often made him feel strange, alone, and freakish. It sometimes made him feel every bit as much of a monster as the things consuming the world.
The living dead. The walking dead. The hungry dead.
Zombies.
Even now, even years after it all fell apart, the soldier sometimes found it hard to accept that zombies were real, that they were pervasive, and that they were the most enduring fact of life. Of everyone’s life. They were as much an unshakable constant as the need to breathe. They were. They were here, and from what little anyone knew of the rest of the world, they were everywhere. The plague had spread incredibly fast because it was designed to be quick-onset and one hundred per cent communicable. Nature could never have created so perfect a monster. No, it had been the cold minds of madmen on both sides of the Cold War who had taken civilization’s noblest advances in science and medicine and twisted them into weapons of mutually-assured destruction. Bioweapons had been officially banned but never actually abandoned. The lie that assured the black budget funding was that they needed to create the weapons so that cures and prophylactic measures could be created.
It was the logic of the shield maker who actually wanted to make and sell swords.
Lucifer 113 had been an actual doomsday weapon and though it had been locked away and chained up, it had slipped its leash and now the world had died, been consumed, and gone quiet.
And through that quiet the soldier moved, silent as the death that defined him and everything else.
He reached a knoll and paused, crouching in the shelter of a crooked pine tree, and surveyed the landscape. Red rocks, barrel cactus, yucca and Joshua trees. Some big horn sheep grazing on the tough grass near the dark mouth of a cenote. Nothing else.
None of them visible. That meant nothing, though. If they had no prey to chase they would stop walking and stand as still as statues, as still as stovepipe cactus. Dangerously easy to miss when scanning an area so wide and vast as Red Rock Canyon in Nevada.
There was movement and the soldier pivoted on the balls of his feet to watch a young man break from the cover of a creosote bush and move along a fault line, keeping to the shadows cast by an up-thrust ledge of ancient rock. The young man moved with an oiled ease that made the soldier long for the lost days of his youth. At fifty-five, the soldier could feel every year, every hour, every injury, every inch of scar tissue that marked his passage through a violent life. The kid had never taken a bad injury. To the heart, sure, but not to the body, and he moved like a dancer.
He moved smart, too, and the soldier nodded his appreciation. The kid was learning. Getting better, sharper, faster. Earning his right to live in a world as thoroughly unforgiving as this one.
The young man saw something and came to a complete stop, freezing and blending into the landscape. The soldier squinted as he surveyed the terrain to see what had spooked his apprentice.
He heard it before he saw it.
The dry desert wind brought the soft, low, plaintive moan of an absolutely bottomless hunger. One of them, crying out its need.
Then it stepped into sight, coming out of a shadowed space between two boulders tumbled down that slope by a glacier millennia ago. It was a man, or had been. Tall, heavy in the shoulders, wearing the soiled and sun-faded uniform of a Nevada State Park ranger.
The soldier did not speak, did not rush to help. He watched, instead.
The young man wore khakis and a many-pocketed canvas vest over a long-sleeved cotton knit shirt. He wore a backpack, too, and fitted between the pack and his own back was the lacquered scabbard of a katana, a Japanese sword of the kind the Samurai once used. It was nearly a match to the one the soldier had strung across his own back. The sword’s silk-wrapped handle rose above the young man’s right shoulder. He also wore a pistol in a belt holster and a knife strapped to his thigh.
He waited until he was sure there was only one of the dead shambling toward him, and then he stepped toward the zombie. His hand flashed up and down and there was a glittering arc of silver.
The zombie’s head fell one way, the headless body fell the other.
The soldier rose slowly and walked down the slope to the kid.
“Nice work,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the young man. “I think he was alone and—”
“And you should have used your fucking knife, Tom,” said the soldier.
“What?”
The soldier pointed to the far end of the valley. Three figures were moving toward them. Then a fourth stepped out from behind a tall cactus.
“That sword is pretty, and points for the sweet kesa-giri, kid, but that much polished steel is a big frigging mirror,” said the soldier sourly. “You might as well have rung the damn dinner bell.”
Tom Imura looked crestfallen. “I didn’t stop to consider—”
“Really? No shit.”
“I… I’m sorry, Joe,” he said.
Captain Joe Ledger pulled a pair of sunglasses from the vee of his sleeveless fatigue shirt and put them on.
“Don’t be sorry, kid,” he said. “Do better.”
“Yes,” promised Tom.
Ledger pointed to the four figures staggering toward them. “Now go clean up your mess.” He sat down on a rock, pulled a piece of goat jerky from his pack, and began to chew.
Tom Imura cleaned the black blood from his sword and returned it to its scabbard. Then he drew his knife. It was a double-edge British commando dagger with a matte black finish over the steel. Totally nonreflective. He drew a breath, held it for a moment, exhaled, nodded, and then set off to meet the four zombies.
He didn’t see Joe Ledger grinning at his retreating back.