the driving rain. “You get a crack team of nutcrackers like my boys and the powers that be waste ‘em puddle- jumping from one shitsplat to the next here in God’s country. A prison riot of all things.”
“Not just a prison riot, Sir,” Waterman reminded him. “I think most of the convicts and guards are dead. At least they were. Now we have those goddamn zombies all over the place.”
Pearle looked over at him and looked over at him hard. “Oops-de-doo, Bob. I think you just said a naughty word that is not to be spoken over unsecure channels.”
“Sorry, Sir.”
Pearle kept staring at him, something beneath his skin that was savage and bloodthirsty very badly wanted to burst free and maul Waterman. But that was Pearle. A tall, thin, wiry man that exuded something from his pores, maybe, that was just downright disturbing. You knew instinctively not to cross him. He did not shout and he did not swear. There was an icy coolness to him that could make your skin crawl when he put those eyes on you that were just flat and dead and gray as slate. Looking into them was like peering into a tomb. You saw death in them and not just death, but an unpleasant appreciation of death, a secret joy over that state of being that he had offered up so freely and plentifully in his career.
There were not many men who could meet those eyes for more than a moment or two and Waterman was surely not among them. So he looked away as something cold slinked in his bowels.
Pearle smiled. “Look at me, Bob.”
“Sir, I?”
“Look at me,” he said. “I am ordering you to meet my gaze and I’m giving you exactly two seconds to comply.”
Waterman did, those eyes boring right through him. Slash-and-burn eyes that would leave nothing left standing in your soul if you looked into them long enough.
“I wasn’t thinking, Sir,” Waterman managed. “I’m sorry, Sir.”
Pearle kept smiling. “Sorry don’t cut it, my friend. Don’t cut it at all. What we have at this prison is a riot instigated by unfriendlies and I’ll ask you to keep that in mind. I do not wish to hear that other word. You may refer to these individuals as “Walkers” if you so desire, but if I ever, ever, ever hear you use that other naughty curse word in front of me or my men, I will surely draw my K-Bar from its sheath and free you of your much-beloved but seldom-used jewlies. Are we on the same page here?”
“Yes, Sir,” Waterman said, deflating inside in a rush of tepid wind.
“Excellent,” Pearle said, looking away. “Excellent.”
When they hit the ground and the men and equipment of the 4/1 had been deployed and they had linked up with the National Guard unit that was essentially shaking and pissing its own boots on that makeshift perimeter, Pearle took charge. Took charge of his men and those of Captain Sheebly, the Guard commander.
“Here’s what I want,” he said. “First off, reinforce this perimeter. Frankly, it’s sad. It’s pathetic. I’ve seen two-year old girls fresh off the nipple build a better fortification with wet beach sand. Hop to it. Your men are bunched together, Sheebly, and that is surely a sad state of affairs. You have gaping holes in your perimeter. I want them plugged. I want the fifty cals and the sixties in place. I want fire teams ready to respond. I want flamethrowers every seventh man. I want that outer perimeter mined. Tell your boys to set their Claymores and be ready. Last and surely not least, bring in those earthmovers. I want a four-foot by four-foot trench dug right around the prison wall. And when that’s done, you bring in that tanker and you flood that trench with hi-test. You got me on this? Good. Now I want all this yesterday. Hop to it.”
Nobody needed to be told twice.
While Pearle stood there waving his K-Bar fighting knife around like a conductor directing a symphony of death, men scurried every which way like the industrious little ants they were. When Colonel Raymond Hargesy Pearle took charge, things happened. And if you could not accept that and become part of the solution, then you were definitely part of the problem.
And you sure as hell did not want that.
11
Before the 4/1 was deployed, they were briefed.
Briefed as to what to expect at Fort Providence.
And it was like no briefing anyone had seen before. What the officers and NCOs of the 4/1 were shown and told was about as classified as classified got. So top secret that not only would said files go right into the classified burn-bag at the close of the briefing, but so would anyone else that looked like they might want to spread the news. Pearle sat there drumming a pencil against his knuckles. He was a good soldier who did things by the book and definitely knew when to speak up and when to zipper his mouth duly shut. So he listened while the intelligence people from S-2 had their say. He did not so much as raise an eyebrow when it was all laid out for him, even though he was thinking that what he was being told was strictly drive-in movie fare.
When the slicks from S-2 were done jabber-jawing, Pearle opened his mouth. “First off, gentlemen, am I hearing you correctly here? Am I to understand that a United States Army medical research facility has been overwhelmed by something that generally provides fodder for bad movies or cuts sugar cane in Haiti? Am I hearing you correctly?”
Simmons, an S-2 major, assured him that he was. “Yes, Colonel. The situation at Fort Providence is of a most extraordinary nature.”
Pearle looked at Waterman, arched an eyebrow. “No, Major, you are most certainly wrong in your assessment of the situation. A group of Middle Eastern urine-drinking, camel-riding, Allah-worshipping extremist ragheads that were able to breach the security of this country and fly planes into the Twin Towers was extraordinary. This is inconceivable and downright distressing.”
Simmons licked his lips. They were very chapped as if he spent a lot of time licking them. “It is, Colonel. But the point is that this is a real situation. And we need you to take your men in and secure that base so that another group from Bragg can…sanitize things there.”
“And might I ask who this nameless group of sanitizers might be called? Are we talking Berets here or Delta Force? Or might this be a unit that is truly nameless?”
“Colonel,” Simmons said. “The identity of this group is unimportant. What I will show you now is what concerns us today.”
“By all means proceed,” Pearle told him.
Now that the colonel and his people had received their introductory chat, they viewed a series of videos that were not only extraordinary, but inconceivable and downright distressing. And maybe that didn’t even cut it. As Pearle watched, his men more than a little nervous around him, he decided that had it not been for the very clinical, almost sterile approach to the subject matter, he would have thought what he was seeing was thrown together by Hollywood effects people.
It was that unbelievable.
They were shown video of what appeared to be a woman who was strapped to a table in some sort of containment facility. She was naked and appeared to be psychotic. She was straining at the straps that held her, her yellow teeth snapping, foam that was dirty gray spraying from her mouth. Her flesh was white as ivory, swollen in places with lumps and set with odd punctures from which an obsidian liquid ran like tears. And her eyes were just black holes, shiny and somehow vicious. She was screaming and writhing on that table, almost bonelessly, thrashing her head from side to side. And this was how they saw the massive wound above her left ear. There was a great cavity there, most of the skull blasted away.
She should have been dead; but she was not.
“Zombie,” someone said.
And although this word would later become taboo, at that moment in time nobody disagreed. For yes, this woman was dead…yet she was quite animated.
She fought for a time, then she relaxed.
She looked right at the camera with those black, almost gelid looking eyes, and began to laugh with a wet, gurgling sound. Ink-colored saliva ran from the corners of her lips, accentuating the bloodless pallor of her flaking
