Empire's End Read online

  This particular Main Street in central Colorado had only a few cars in the road. There was a minivan that had run up onto the sidewalk, and a police cruiser abandoned in the middle of the street. At the end of the street, however, blocking off a municipal plaza, was a barricade of vehicles scorched by fire

  And at the other end of the street, hanging from a traffic light, was a man in a noose.

  He’d hung himself that very morning, and the rotters scattered throughout the area had begun to take notice. Raspy moans issued from desiccated throats, and creaky joints made scraping sounds as the dead started to move.

  The moans increased in volume, attracting rotters from nearby streets. It wasn’t long before a mob of several dozen shuffling corpses was advancing inch by inch toward Main Street, most of them with no idea why; they just followed the sounds.

  Rotters who would have once growled menacingly at their competition could now only gurgle on the rotten paste filling their windpipes. They hadn’t fed in perhaps years and had just stood, silent, patient; waiting for food to come along as they decomposed. The virus could only fight off the elements for so long. The dead in this Colorado city were nothing more than shambling husks. But most of them still had arms, and fingers, and most important of all, teeth. And they all had the hunger.

  They closed in on the hanged man from all directions. The man wore a dark suit. He was pale and hairless and thin. A pleasant breeze carried the odor of decay through the air, though none of them could smell; had they been able to, they might have noticed the lack of any odor coming off the hanged man.

  Closer, closer. Thick saliva gathered behind swollen lips. Hands groped through the air. The moans all came together in a maddening crescendo.

  The hanged man had one arm behind his back. Strapped to it was a blade: a long, curved implement made from fused bone, sharpened to a razor’s edge on both sides. Its tip rested against the noose around the man’s neck.

  His eyes opened. They were dark and lifeless, doll’s eyes. They stared coldly down at the undead.

  A shoulder sling and wrist straps secured the enormous curved blade to his right arm. A leather thong bound around his hand, he simply flicked his wrist; and the noose was severed.

  The man came down in a tight crouch, sending plumes of dust into the air with his impact. Before any of the stupid, shambling dead had a chance to register what was happening, to even hazard a guess at what the man really was—he rose and thrust the blade out and spun with a battle cry that killed the dead’s senseless conversation, as if he were an unwelcome guest; and he most certainly was.

  As he spun, rising, the blade cutting upward in a sweeping arc—heads flew off of shoulders and rolled through the air. And those slashed across the torso opened up and rotten gray guts spilled onto the street. Stomachs burst and vomited their contents onto the man’s feet. He threw the blade out again, spinning in the opposite direction, and cut down a dozen of them at once.

  They were dead, the ones he’d struck—dead and deader. They would not rise again.

  The others came at him. He planted the tip of the scythe blade in an emaciated rotter’s gut and ripped through his sternum and skull, halving the bastard. The blade turned and tore downward, through the legs of another undead, then reversed course and decapitated a hissing female. Her open throat continued to hiss as foul ichor spayed into the air.

  The man barreled into a line of rotters, lifting one off its feet and divorcing its legs from its torso with a mid-air strike. He whirled to knife through the kneecaps of the others, and they fell limp, never to get up again. Every blow with the scythe blade was a death blow. The blade seemed cursed; no, enchanted.

  He had forged it himself, binding and shaping the bone with dark magic, then endowing it with the power to kill the unkillable—to reap the undead. Such a task had been his burden, as he had once been the Reaper himself.

  For thousands of years little more than a silent record-keeper, marking the passage of souls from one plane to the next, the Reaper had felt obligated to take on a new role with the rise of the undead. It was more than just a plague on humanity; they upset laws and balances set before time began. With every fiber in his being he’d hated them... and with that, he himself had begun to change, even as death had.

  He’d found will, and righteous anger. And when he’d found her—the one he dreamed about, the child from the swamp-house—that had been it. He had relinquished his role as Death and bound himself to the mortal coil upon which shuffled Man himself.

  He was still a supernatural being, yes, but so much more fragile than he had once been. Unharmed, he might live for an eternity, but if the undead were to overcome him, and tear him apart, he’d simply be gone. No afterlife awaited the pale man with the black eyes. He was a spirit made flesh, and this was his only life.

  But he had accepted all this without hesitation because it meant saving her. Lily, the child who, once he found her, helped him to find himself. She had been forced to live among the undead in the swamp-house by her mad brother, forced to treat the cadaverous predators as kin. And the Reaper had—

  You simply lost it. You lost it.

  But what he’d gained had been worth the price. He was alive now. And he had begun to sleep, and to dream, and in his dreams he saw the little girl and he knew he had to find her again. To ensure her safety, of course, but more than that. Their bond seemed beyond his understanding.

  Upon entering this strange new life, the former Death had chosen a name for himself: Adam. And it was as Adam that he spun like a grim dancer through this sea of severed limbs and putrid gore. He’d already cut down a third of the mob; the end was near, at least for today.

  Leaping atop the police cruiser, he vaulted off the roof’s edge and took down a row of rotting fiends before they could flinch. Some of the undead had begun to slow in their approach, but the lure of the flesh was too great. None would flee, making Adam’s job all the easier.

  And I am not a man of flesh. They could not consume me. Although some have tried...

  He climbed the barricade of vehicles at the end of the street and ran onto the municipal plaza to make his last stand against the horde.

  When they came at him he spun right into their midst, cutting a crimson swath through the center of the mob, ripping it apart at the seams and scattering the shell-shocked remnants across the plaza; he then flew at those stumbling about the edge of the plaza and slew them with surgical precision. A pair of rotters attacked from behind. He turned on his heels and skewered them both. Their guts churned as they struggled, fluids spilling down their threadbare jeans, and then both fell still. Adam yanked the blade free and watched them drop. They were the last. It was done.

  His own clothes were soaked through with gore. He’d taken this nondescript suit off of a corpse after shedding his reaper’s robes. A spongy mold was beginning to grow inside the jacket, feeding on the blood that suffused it. He figured it was time to trade up. Maybe this time he could find a pair of pants that felt less awkward, since he didn’t have a—

  Movement to the left. He spun and saw a shadow disappeared into the old town hall.

  Uncommon for a rotter to run; then again, this one had just seen dozens of its contemporaries mowed down by a single man. Maybe they were getting a little smarter. Adam wasn’t really interested in the reason for it, though. It only made his mission more complicated.

  Stealthily he crept up the steps of the town hall building and peered through the open doors. He saw a lobby, littered with debris and dimly lit by the sunlight spilling through a fractured ceiling high overhead. As he entered, the floor creaked loudly beneath his bare feet. It felt like the whole thing might come down on his head at any moment.

  Somewhere in the building, footsteps creaked in response to his. From upstairs. Up the grand staircase, past the soiled American flag and the faded photos of city councilmen. Adam padded across the floor like a tiger after its next meal. Another creak led him down a narrow hallway lined with empty off
ices. The windows were all shuttered, allowing only a few slits of light into the corridor. Any moment now he’d find his prey cornered in one of these rooms, and he’d pounce.

  He passed a doorway, just barely registered a silhouette standing in the room, and stopped short.

  It might’ve had its back to the doorway. Maybe not. He had to strike.

  Adam leapt into the room, and the rotter swung something at the shutters and they came crashing down, flooding the room with light, temporarily blinding him—

  But he saw enough.

  It was a thin-haired, stocky rotter in coveralls. He was holding a shovel. He was the one from Jefferson Harbor, Lily’s town. The one with the shovel who had separated him from the girl—and who was supposed to be dead—but now he was here and he was bearing down on Adam with the shovel pointed at him like a spear.

  No time to think. Adam deflected the shovel with the scythe and threw an elbow into the side of the rotter’s head. It stumbled right into a wall—through it—and into the next room. Adam followed through a shower of sawdust.

  The floor groaned as the rotter rose to face him. Shovel met blade again, and this time it was Adam who was knocked off balance. He fell on his back and rolled aside just in time to avoid being impaled. The rotter caught his ankle and hurled him across the room with inhuman strength.

  This was much more than just a zombie. Something had changed, and Adam knew why. When the bastard had ambushed him in Jefferson Harbor, he’d done something that defied all undead instinct: he’d tasted of the Reaper’s flesh, swallowing a pound of Adam’s otherworldly constitution before collapsing on the ground. Adam had revived to find the rotter lying inert and assumed he was finished. Wrong.

  What had his false flesh done to the rotter? And had he actually followed Adam all the way here from Louisiana?

  Again, no time to think, and Adam paid the price for his hesitation. The shovel bit into his side and he felt himself propelled through the air like a rag doll, crashing through a paper-thin wall and into a railing and nearly toppling over it to the lobby below.

  He turned, ducking as he did so, and the shovel whistled over his head. He thrust the scythe at the rotter. No purchase. He had to get closer. But that damn shovel was beating him back with every effort, and he felt the railing pressing into his back, then he heard a sharp crack and suddenly there was nothing at all supporting him.

  Adam dropped through space, through beams of light and dust motes, down down down to the floor where he landed on the shattered railing and felt a sort of pain he’d never felt before. It knifed through his spine, from his neck to his buttocks, and he arched his back with a cry of pure agony.

  He had no bones, was only God’s clay, but his new life had blessed him with a knowledge of suffering, and he felt now as if he’d been snapped in half by the fall. And the rotter was thundering down the stairs.

  Thunder. The entire chamber was rumbling. It was all going to come down.

  As the rotter crossed the lobby toward him, Adam forced himself into a kneeling position and swung his blade into a nearby column. It bowed and exploded outward, and a balcony dropped from the upper levels with a boom that shook the foundations of the town hall.

  Adam rolled out of the way of falling plaster and wood, landing right at the rotter’s feet. He swept the undead’s legs out from under him.

  The rotter hit the floor with a solid thud. He was all meat, wasn’t he? Healthy as a living man but with the appearance of a cadaver. Bloodshot eyes glared at Adam from skeletal sockets. The thing fumbled for its shovel, but Adam got it first and he brought it down on the rotter’s face with a wet crunch.

  The staircase crumbled. The roof was sagging. Time to go.

  Adam dove out the front doors and was followed by an eruption of debris as the building fell in on itself. Dust blanketed the plaza, and Adam pressed his face into the ground and covered his head while hunks of wood and marble skipped across the concrete like wayward missiles.

  At last the world settled. Adam looked up and took in the scene. A work of classic architecture, centuries old, a testament to Man’s spirit, now dust; for the sake of one rotter. And Man would not rebuild. Not today. Such was the plague.

  * * *

  By twilight, the man with the scythe was gone. There were only the voices.

  You feel him in your bones. You taste him in your mouth—quickly now, before he’s gone too far and you lose him!

  Get up! Get after him!

  You are the end of him. You are the Omega. It is what you must do.

  Aren’t you aching for his flesh? Isn’t your black blood on fire? What’s keeping you? GET UP!

  A cacophony of disembodied voices crowding out the rotter’s own animal thoughts. These voices, spitting and howling, arguing with him and with one another—they were his conscience, or had at least taken its place. Voices young and old, speaking in all tongues yet perfectly understandable to him. It was their rage that made it all so clear, more so than any of their pleas or threats. He felt their collective rage in his rotten core, like flames rising to warm the walls of a broken-down furnace. It was the rage that drove him, and the lingering taste of the Reaper’s flesh—the memory of it sending chills through his bones even as his black heart fluttered to life.

  The Omega clawed his way out of the rubble where the town hall had stood. Using the recovered shovel to pry his legs free, he climbed down from the ruins and surveyed the plaza.

  A few other rotters were standing around the site, swaying slightly as their blank stares turned toward the Omega. He approached the nearest one, a female with sagging breasts and belly, and he raised the shovel.

  It cleaved into her heart with a brittle snapping of ribs. She staggered, arms swinging at her sides, face expressionless. She tried to turn and walk away.

  The Omega sank the shovel into the tough meat of her back and wrestled her to the ground. Then he fell upon her.

  Yes!

  Devour her, all of her! Take her energy into yourself. We’ll need all we can get.

  Cleanse your body! Drive out the rot!

  He fed. Pus was spat from the lips of abscesses in his legs and back. Writhing maggots were forced from his ears and hair. The fungus in his innards boiled away. As his body grew stronger—as they grew stronger—all impurities were driven from him, and his latest wounds began to scab over. He felt the broken bones in his face being manipulated and healed together; and he ate ravenously.

  They knew how to use the virus’ dark energy. He was a mere animal, maybe less, dead and dumb; but they took care of him. And they drove him across the badlands after the scent of the other. Soon would come the inevitable, the final feast... the Reaper.

  Fill your gullet to its brim. Then go after the other ones. Feed!

  When next we cross paths with him, it shall be our last meeting.

  Three / Normal

  More than five months had passed since the exodus from Jefferson Harbor, and Voorhees still didn’t know what had become of Lily.

  As he boarded a bus on the outskirts of Chicago, someone caught his arm. It was Killian, a young officer he’d met during his orientation. “I found her,” Killian said.

  They got a seat together near the back and waited until the bus got moving. “I can’t believe buses run between the cities like this,” Voorhees muttered. “All those miles of lonely highway...”

  “And not a rotter to be seen,” Killian said. She nudged his arm and smiled. “So, do you want to know where your girl is or not?”

  “She’s not my girl.” Voorhees frowned out the window. “I don’t know if I want to know. She was the last living citizen of the Harbor... I was supposed to protect them all, and I got one little girl out. Then she’s taken from me the second we enter the Wall. Who knows what’s happened.”

  “Well, do you want me to tell you? It’s nothing bad, Voorhees.”

  “Tell me.”

  “She’s in Gaylen, the same city where we’re headed. A young couple took her i
n. They’re seeking permanent custody.”

  Voorhees let out a long, tired sigh. “So she’s safe, then.”

  “She’s safe.”

  “Now I can start worrying about what’s going to happen to me.”

  “You’ll be fine. I’ve got your back.”

  “You’re half my age.”

  “Really? I didn’t think you were that old.” Killian smiled again, leaning toward him. “It’s a joke, Voorhees. When’s the last time you had a laugh?”

  “I don’t remember what my laugh sounds like,” he replied.

  She saw he wasn’t kidding and whistled. “That’s gotta change. You’re okay now. You’ve come a long way from that place. You’re in the Great Cities now—and you’re gonna be a real cop again. Did they not mention that to you, repeatedly? You’re gonna be a Gaylen P.O.—of course that means Peace Officer here, not Patrol Officer—but it’s the same thing.”

  “I was a senior officer in the Harbor.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, buddy.” Killian patted his arm. “Look at it this way. Being a beat cop means less time filling out reports and more time doing the job.”

  “Paperwork is the job—”

  “Oh, you’re hopeless.” Turning from him, Killian stared ahead. Feeling guilty, Voorhees tried to think of something to say. “Hey, I’ll be getting paid again. That’ll be nice.”

  “Social Services explains in orientation that you earn credits, but what they don’t tell you is that, as a P.O., you don’t have to pay for everything like the rest. Explaining that is my job.” She had been in the Great Cities for a year, and had only been in Chicago to help run orientation. With a sideways glance toward the other passengers, Killian slipped a card from within her jacket and handed it to Voorhees. “It’s a forever pass for medical services. Any hospital, any time. Everyone else has to spend their credits on day passes and hope that the line for the doctor isn’t too long.”