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Park didn’t respond.
The man yelled, “You have any idea who you’re fucking with?”
Again, Park said nothing.
“Listen,” the man called. “This is real simple. We saw you all coming out. We know you’ve got women. We need them, your guns, and your vehicles. And you’re all drafted.”
They didn’t seem to realize that Park was one of the dead. Good. He shouted back, “We don’t want anything to do with your army.”
“Drafted means you got no choice,” said the man.
Park crept into the underbrush and took up a position behind a tree.
“Hey,” the man called. “What’s your plan, huh? Just how do you think this is going to end?”
For you? Park thought. Like this.
He fired. The man’s body toppled against the truck, then slumped to the pavement.
Park crawled away as the other men started shooting, their bullets shredding the foliage all around him.
By dusk Park was down to his last bullet. It didn’t matter. He’d won. Thirty men had come charging up the hill after him, and he’d kept ahead of them, taking them out one by one. He’d dropped nine already, and there were moaners in these woods too who’d surprised and overwhelmed maybe two or three more. Mei and Ashley and the others were well away.
Park had been hit twice in the chest, and many more times in the arms and legs, but those scarcely troubled him. By now his pursuers must know that he was one of the dead, and they would be going only for headshots.
One of the men emerged from behind a boulder and crept closer, sca
He was shocked. My face, he thought. My old face.
No, he decided then, studying the man. But close. We could be brothers.
Park’s finger twitched, tapping the trigger. He could easily put a bullet through that face, but he hesitated. It had been such a long time since he’d looked in a mirror. Since he’d recognized himself.
Any moment now he’d be spotted. Take the shot, his mind urged. Do it. But what difference did it make? Mei was safe. Park continued to stare. He didn’t want to see that face destroyed.
No. Not that face.
He imagined the eyes of all the people he’d delivered into the horrors of the necropolis. He imagined the old woman screaming as his teeth tore into her. He heard Mei’s voice crying, “What’s happened to you?” and his own replying, “I’m what I have to be. To save you.”
Slowly he reached up and grasped a handful of fabric.
There. The man had seen him, was taking aim. For an instant the two of them stared at each other through their scopes.
Park removed his mask.
Dustin watched from the wall of his palace as an army of the living battled through the city toward him, but he was powerless to do anything.
In the yard below, one of his followers came into view.
“Hey!” Dustin shouted. “You! Up here!”
The man stopped and looked at him.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Dustin said. “This is your Commander speaking. You are to walk around this palace to the main entrance. Once inside, turn right and keep going until you reach the stairs. Take them to the top floor and continue on the way you were. You’ll come to a door leading out onto this balcony. Then remove me from this fucking spike! Do you understand?”
The man stared back with vacant eyes. “Walk around the palace…” it moaned.
“Yes,” Dustin said. “And the rest of it. Turn right-”
“Walk around the palace… ” The creature took a step toward him, then away. “Walk around the palace… ” it repeated, as it wandered, back and forth.
Obedience by Bre
Bre
One of the most wrenching aspects of a zombie plague that makes it completely different from, say, an invasion of alien arachnids is the knowledge that these hordes of enemies were once our friends and neighbors, were once decent, loving people. As we perforate their faces with a.50 caliber machinegun, or hack at their clutching hands with a machete, axe, or chainsaw, it’s impossible not to wonder whether these moaning ghouls retain any trace of their former personality. Are the people they once were still trapped in there somewhere, aware of what’s happening around them? Might they ever be cured, the way a mentally ill patient can be, with the right treatment?
Books and films are filled with incidents in which survivors try to show mercy to zombies-as with the barn full of zombies in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead-or will even fight to protect them, as with the zombified newborn in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park suggests that it’s impossible to safely keep dinosaurs in captivity, and much the same thing seems to be true of zombies. The temptation is always there, though-what if it were just one zombie? Just one little girl, surely we could handle that?
But if zombie stories have taught us anything, it’s that keeping zombies around, whether out of mercy or as research subjects, seems to have a way of ending up badly for everyone involved-and by “badly” we mean with teeth, blood, and screams.
When the first drinking glass hit the floor and broke, Private Grace pressed her back against the wall and steadied the sidearm with both hands. The window above her was single-paned, the weather-stripping rotten. To her left, a freestanding radiator was rusting gently. The house was a summer cabin, cramped, and redolent with the smell of mice. They’d spent the better part of an hour nailing the windows shut, then gathering glassware-pitchers, vases, di
Now, they hunkered down, waiting. There had been food at least, ca
“What do we show these giddy bastards?” Whitaker called from the adjoining room, sounding clipped and perfunctory.
The answer came from a dozen positions, followed by the metallic sound of carbines, magazines and bolt assemblies clattering into place. “No mercy, sir.”
They had begun as an infantry platoon of forty-seven, mostly up from New Mexico and Texas. Now, they were thirteen. Ten privates, one combat medic, and Denton the Marine, all serving under Whitaker.
Of the privates, only Grace and a trooper named Knotts were from Whitaker’s original squad. The other eight and Jacobs, the medic, had come off a company that had gotten pi
The base had been a short-term El Dorado, but when they arrived, their grand welcome was absent, save for a few survivors holed up in the bunkers. Some of the medical technicians had made a last-ditch effort to seal themselves in the sleep chambers. It was difficult to say whether the massacre had happened with the techs scrambling for safety or already in stasis, but one thing was certain. The flyboys had been dead for weeks.