He sighed, not much in the mood for hide-and-seek. Whenever he played that game he usually came away with death on his hands and, after staring in that pit, he just wasn’t up for it.
He heard scuttling, dragging footsteps.
Well, if it was a zombie they would have come right after him. A few of them returned from the grave with a certain amount of cunning but that was usually after dark. During the daytime they were all little better than deadheads, things that fed on the dead (or living) and were not ashamed of the fact.
No, not a zombie.
A person.
Maybe afraid, maybe just crazy, which brought up a whole new slate of troubles because the insane ones were as bad as the wormboys and sometimes worse because you really never knew what to expect.
Slaughter kept his eyes open, ready for what was coming.
He felt vaguely uncomfortable turning his back on the bone pit. A dark thread of superstitious terror was pulled tight in his head, but he knew there was nothing to worry about.
He started walking back to his bike, figuring he’d seen enough to give him a pretty good hypothesis about the sort of place this was or had been. Originally, it was probably some sort of military installation. Then, following the Outbreak, it became a research station where they were trying to figure out the worms, how to stop them maybe. Then, apparently, that ended and it became a Flesh Farm, one of those awful places you heard about like a Nazi extermination camp where gangs of wormboys herded the living to be fed upon at their leisure.
Now it was just a memory.
As he walked back past the lab building, eyes watching every shadow and every darkened doorway, hand on the butt of the Combat Mag, he could hear his stalker out there following his progress, keeping behind the buildings and out of sight.
“You can show yourself anytime, citizen,” Slaughter called out. “I ain’t gonna bite you.”
His voice echoed out in the desertion and that other moved about, failing horribly at its attempts to practice stealth. Finally, Slaughter heard footsteps behind him and whirled around to see an old man leaning up against the porch of a blockhouse. He looked like some grizzled desert rat from an old movie. All he lacked was a mule and a prospector’s pick. He looked fairly harmless with his soft gray eyes, slouch hat, and matted white beard, but Slaughter did not care for the shotgun he carried.
“You plan on using that?”
“No, son. It’s empty. I’m no threat to you.”
“Name’s Slaughter.”
“Rice. Martin Rice.”
“What’re you doing here?”
The old man set his shotgun on the porch and then eased his ass up next to it and it wasn’t easy. He looked frail; his limbs stiff, his back paining him some.
“What am I doing here?” Rice repeated, as if that was a pretty funny question. “Well, son, let me tell you. You probably already figured the sort of horror house this place was at one time so I won’t go into that, but now and again I come here to see if I can peg a few stragglers that come up from below.”
“Below?”
Rice took some time and explained it. Slaughter was right in thinking the compound had first been a military installation. It was built during World War II to house German POWs, then afterwards became the Kennebrau Proving Grounds during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts when artillery units used it to test their guns in the field out back. In the 1970’s it became a weekend training camp for the National Guard and then, following the Outbreak, a biological research facility that was part of the U.S. Army Medical Command.
“They were studying the worms. Trying to figure out some way of containing them, eradicating them, and coming up with a vaccine that would make people immune to the infection of the larva.” Rice shrugged. “But they never did. That’s when we were sent in. You see, the scientists became infected and pretty soon this was zombie central. They started capturing people and bringing them here.”
“Flesh Farm,” Slaughter said.
“You got it.”
“You said ‘we’ were sent in...”
The old man laughed. “I might not look it now but I was, some five years ago, a full colonel in the Army. I commanded the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry. Our job was to clean this place out. Long before we got here, about ten miles east in fact, we ran into serious resistance…”
The “resistance” had come in the form of wormboys that had massed in the thousands in a town called Freemont. The 1/25 rolled into town to bivouac for the night and what followed was a hell-for-leather nightmare in which Rice ordered his men to make a stand. The vicious skirmishing went on through the night with zombies attacking in waves. There was nowhere to retreat to as the dead surged from every direction. Even now, he said, he could still see it: the billowing smoke, soldiers falling and dying and crying out for help, the clatter of machine guns, and the boom of heavy field pieces. By morning, the 1/25 was a ragtag remnant of its former self. Even with the tactical and military superiority they possessed, the sheer numbers of the dead overwhelmed them. By dawn’s first light, Rice himself was a trembling thing splattered with dried blood and brains. With his ears still ringing with the thunder of small weapons fire and artillery, the wormboys charged in again, their numbers hardly depleted even though the streets were hip-deep with their remains. They started killing anything that was alive, feeding on the entrails and brains.
“Well, most of my men were dead and those that were still in one piece rose up, of course, against us. I think those of my men that were still alive deserted and I can’t say that I blame them.” Rice stared off into the distance. “I fought with a small contingent but the dead kept at us until it was just me.”
“And you’ve been here ever since, citizen?”
“Sure. I’m fighting a guerrilla war, son. I have a farmhouse a few miles from here that I use as a base. I don’t plan on stopping. I’ll kill those fucking ghouls till my last breath. Hell, last month I put down sixty-eight of ‘em. Wanna join my resistance?”
“Probably not.”
“You mind sharing one of those cigarettes with me?”
Slaughter gave him one and Rice told him that he was about all used up. These years of fighting the wormboys had left him old and broken beyond his sixty-three years. And now here he was at the compound with an empty shotgun and bad legs. No way in hell he’d make it back to the farmhouse.
“I gotta bike out front,” Slaughter told him. “I’ll give you a lift if you don’t mind riding bitch.”
“Hell, I’m not choosy, son.”
They made their way to the gate and it took some doing with Rice’s poor physical condition. They had to stop a lot so he could rest. While they did so Slaughter sketched out for him where he was going and what he planned on doing there, which was pretty much what Rice had been doing here: exterminating the undead.
“Today I saw something, though,” he admitted. “Something that made me think twice about my plans, citizen.”
He described the woman in the lab and Rice said, “She came up from below. That’s where the worst ones are. There’s a containment level below and the worst sort of mutations are going on down there. What we need is a good airstrike with some bunker busters to slam the lid on this place but I don’t imagine we’ll get one.”
“Probably not, citizen.”
“Why the hell you keep calling me ‘citizen’?” Rice wanted to know.
Slaughter laughed, but explained it all. He pointed to the red patch on his vest that read 1%er. Once upon a time, according to the American Motorcycle Association, it was said that 99% of motorcycle clubs were law-abiding citizens which meant that the other 1% were outlaws and members of what the law referred to as OMGs, Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
“Ah, so you’re one of those rough-riders and hellraisers.”
“I am a blood member of the Devil’s Disciples. I was chapter president in Pittsburgh. I’m the last one. But I live as a Disciple and I die as a Disciple. Us 1%ers had a code of conduct same as you did when you were a soldier: we live free and we die free.”
