This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel
are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

CARLOS WRZNIEWSKI VS. THE WALKING DEAD

Copyright © 2007 by David Brown

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form

Edited by Brandon Willey

Cover artwork by Tony Carrillo

An Open Page Publishing Book

Published by Open Page Publishing LLC
6340 S. Rural Rd.
Suite118-118
Tempe, AZ 85283

www.openpagepublishing.com

ISBN 0-9788660-2-9
ISBN-13 978-0-9788660-2-0

First Edition: September 2007

Printed in the United States of America

To George Romero, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell—
for doing more with zombies than anyone ever wanted to see.

And, to everyone, everywhere, in harm’s way.

After a few kilometers, the mines thin out, until the road is essentially clear. We send up a drone to check how far it stays that way. Two kliks down the road, there’s the wreckage of an Albanian helicopter. Not far beyond that is a trail of bodies, which only gets thicker down the way. To see further, I bring the nose of the drone up. That’s when I see something bloody weird. Another klik away is a figure. At first, it seems like a vaguely humanoid figure 3 meters tall. Then I zoom in with the drone’s camera, and it resolves itself into a man on a horse. There’s no chance of it being some rustic who can’t afford a car. The man’s wearing what looks like a gas mask, but I can just make out a hose that must connect to an external air supply- pretty fancy, the best thing the Serbs have. The horse has its own mask, which at first glance looks like a feedbag. The horse itself looks pretty odd: It’s short, wouldn’t be much higher than the man’s waist if he dismounted, but quite stocky, almost like one of those big Clydesdale carthorses reduced to 1/4 scale. That’s not as strange as it seems; look at a Mongolian wild horse, or a Pleistocene painting of a horse, and it won’t look different from this. What’s a lot stranger is the coloring, which is light gray spots on dark gray. It doesn’t look natural, more like mange.

I take this in in a few seconds, and I’m already calling it in. “We’ve got a live one on feature 4-1789,” says I. “He’s on a horse, possibly of genetically-engineered origin, and wearing top-level NBC gear. It must be a Serb officer or official. Instructions?” I’m thinking it’s already too late to do anything about him. He’s taken out a pair of electronic binoculars. He looks at the drone, then sights down the valley toward us. The response comes: “Mark him and track him, but take no hostile action. Our orders are to take officers and officials alive.” But the guy on the horse is obviously under no such constraints. He draws a four-barreled flare gun, and lets fly with all barrels. I take evasive action, but it’s not enough. The shells are seeker air-burst rockets. I catch a glimpse of one changing course as the drone pulls up. Then the drone shakes, and the feed starts cutting in and out. The last I see is a mountain very close up.

We go down the valley, but find no sign of the man on the horse. Then we move on. Soon, the bodies start coming thick: We pass more than 200 in the space of two kilometers. Perhaps one body in three has purple lesions, usually in easily concealed spots such as the armpits or the groin, and one in five has blood around the mouth- both symptoms of bubonic plague. But this is never the cause of death. They have instead died by violence. We find them in groups, usually next to a vehicle. The story told by the remains is always the same: the vehicle stops, and the men get ordered out. Then one or two of them destroy the vehicle, kill the other men, and then committed suicide. Sometimes, one or more run away, only to be shot. A few times, the men get the better of their executioner and then flee, either in the vehicle or on foot- the latter if they’re smart. Their trails usually end in a shot-up hulk or a greasy smear in the snow, testament to the ruthless efficiency of the helicopters. However, the helicopters don’t win without a fight. We find the wreckage of two more in the midst of the destroyed ground vehicles. I suspect that it was their loss that allowed some of the mutineers to reach the mine fields. We conclude that this fratricidal massacre has occurred in the last day, while we were on our way to help.

A kilometer or so down the line, we start finding civilians among the dead, looks like a mix of Serbs and Albies. For once, they’re all facing the same direction- away from the valley. They’re less concentrated than the soldiers, occurring singly or in small groups all along the valley. Almost all of them have been shot, and about 70% have lesions. We find one nasty scene where someone was nailed to the ground with tent pegs, had his head bashed in, and then set on fire with a steady stream from an oil drum with holes shot in it. Whoever did it knew that gasoline burns too fast to burn up a corpse without a steady supply. Business as usual in the Balkans. But there’s some odd details. The head trauma is to the back of the head, but the body’s face-up. So, he was probably hit before he was nailed down, and after the blow, that should have been entirely unnecessary. The hands are even weirder. The stakes weren’t put in quite right: through the palm instead of the wrist. In the palm, there isn’t any bone to stop the nail from tearing out. Incredibly, that’s what the victim did. But how could he have lived long enough to do it?

“We are almost to our destination,” Platt announces. “It is an UNCOST quarantine station, at the mouth of this valley.” Within minutes, we do- and we find a scene straight out of any Hell one might believe in.

The first thing we see at the quarantine station is a burned-out drone tank. 20 meters away is a smashed barbed wire fence, sagging under the weight of many, many bodies. Most of the dead are civilians, and all killed by gunfire. The camp is a typical set-up: A barbed-wire enclosure of 50 by 200 meters, with a gate at either end, and a bunch of pre-fab buildings inside. Eight guard towers stand over the fence. 3 of the towers have been knocked down with explosive charges to their stilt legs, one (the largest) has been taken by force, and the others got are destroyed by gunfire, hand grenades and improvised fire bombs.

We find most of the bodies at the rear of the camp, beyond the fences and behind a convenient projection of rock. The story there is plain enough: The staff do their best to dispose of the dead without drawing the attention of the living. Burning’s out of the question, as nothing advertises like smoke. Conventional grave-digging is impractical: Not enough men to dig, and not much soil either. But, it so happens that the camp is at the head of a line of interconnected natural channels, going at least two kliks down the valley. A practical solution presents itself: Dam the channels with debris, dump the bodies in, dump sand over the bodies, and repeat as necessary. They start down the valley- looking down, I can see at least two freshly-covered trenches- but the demand’s more than expected, and it won’t do to have a backlog. Soon they’re burying them faster, shallower and closer to camp, until they reach within thirty meters of camp. Starting with an erosional channel no more’n a meter deep, they dig themselves a sizable trench, almost 2 meters wide, 60 long, and at least 5 deep. It’s at the bottom of a steep rock face that isn’t looking too stable; the kind of picturesque cliffs where people build houses and geologists point and laugh. Maybe the plan was to set off a rockslide to top off the mass grave.

That’s where we find them. There’s about fifty bodies stacked next to the trench, and 3 dead Albanian MPs next to them. They all have those purple lesions. It looks like one keeled over as he worked, then one of his mates shot the other and then himself. There’s twenty or so bodies in the trench, some sticking up to within 30 centimeters of the top. It’s way too shallow. They’re lying on sand, and more bodies are poking up through that.

Quimby and I have to take an inventory of this gruesome scene. As we’re working, we hear a noise. It seems to come from the trench. We glance over our shoulders. One of the bodies is sticking up a few centimeters higher. Quimby laughs. “Something under it must be settling,” he said. “All this creepy stuff sure makes you jumpy, doesn’t it?”

“You looked, too,” I say defensively. “Let’s go back to the others.” Just as we’re turning to go, we hear another sound, louder than before. Then there are more noises. I look into the trench, and now there is no question: Something is moving beneath the earth. They grow louder, nearer and more numerous every second.

“They must have buried somebody alive!” Quimby says.
“There’s a lot more than one,” says I. By now, the sand and the first layer of bodies is going up and down like it’s high tide.
“Could it be infiltrators?” Quimby says.
“There would never be this many in one place. Besides, who was going to bury them? The Albanians?”
“They must be plague survivors, then,” Quimby says.
“Survivors?” says I. “How could there be survivors? The grave diggers are dead!”
“Well, what’s the alternative?”
“You tell me,” says I. I‘m looking at a rosary hanging from his equipment belt.
“Well, of course all the modern denominations recognize that actual, physical resurrection is out of-”

“Aye, aye- but I should think it’s those as is in the grave who have all the swing votes!” I unlimber my sidearm, a “super Uzi” submachine gun. It’s not really an Uzi, doesn’t even look that much like an Uzi, but whatever one calls it, it still kicks ass. It fires .45 ACP, Casull and 67-gauge shotshells, and it has an over/under grenade launcher. The grenade launcher is the kind where the grenades are stacked in a disposable barrel; it has multiple barrels for different kinds of grenades. “We can test this hypothesis,” says I. “If they’re alive, then they stop moving when I shoot them.”

Quimby tries to take away my gun. “You can’t do that! We should be helping-”
Just then, a hand thrusts out of the dirt. Rest assured, this the deadest thing I’ve ever seen. What next- how to tell? Well- I’m sure you have heard the cliche about people “freezing in terror”. I can tell you from experience that that doesn’t really happen in combat. When someone is in danger, the natural response is to is immediate action. Even a guy who cracks will run, hide or surrender, not stand still where he is. But that is exactly what Quimby does. We watch as something- it had been a woman- digs its way up from the grave, then climbs hand over hand up the wall of the trench. Right when it reaches the top, Quimby starts screaming.

I manage to pull the gun from his hands and fire a burst of ACP into the thing’s skull. Blow the better part of its head off. It falls back, but it crawls back up. A burst to the center of the back puts a stop to that, but it’s still moving a little. By now, there are at least a dozen of them coming up, all along the length of the trench. I shoot a couple concussion grenades into the trench. Things go snap, crackle and pop, and a 3-meter section of the trench caves in. All the zombies suddenly fall down- must be the noise messing with the inner ear. But moments later, they’re coming up again. I shoot a few more, then I decide that this is a job for hand-to-hand tactics. So, I shoulder my rifle and get out something I keep with me whenever I’m away from home: my rock hammer. Every geologist has one, and mine’s a little larger than most. It’s solid steel, about as solid as it gets short of actual armor, with a long, slightly curved spike on one end of the head. I pull this thing from my belt and let the nearest corpse have it with the pointy end.

These things- might as well call ‘em zombies- are getting out of the trench now, but they’re having trouble getting to their feet. They haul themselves out of the trench, and then spend the next few minutes trying to get to their feet. Most do, but some finally just start crawling through the snow- and they go almost as fast! I go up and down the line, hitting and kicking and stomping. A modest hit with the flat, heavy end is enough to knock one down, and a hard blow from the claw end around the ear or where the spine goes into the skull- the occiptital condyle, if you’re playing paleontology Jeopardy-will keep it from getting back up. I mostly get them with the flat end and follow through with the point. They don’t seem to know how to respond to me. Some try to grab me, but their hands flail around like they’re blind. I shoot 5 of them with ACP, fire a couple more conkers into the trench, and when things get a little too crowded, I use the last conker to knock the whole lot down at once. One catches me by the leg, and it grips me like a vice clamp. But instead of trying to pull me down, it tries to pull itself up, like it thinks I’m just an inanimate object. I kick it in the face, and it rolls back into the trench, hits at least three other zombies, and brings them back down, too.

Just then, I hear more sounds. Now the corpses above ground are moving. I start grabbing them and throwing them into the trench. Just as I’m picking up the seventh of these, I hear this whoosh. I look, and I see one of the gravediggers on his feet, flailing the shovel at my general vicinity. It isn’t tracking me with its eyes, which look too decayed to be much good anyway. I drop the corpse and back away, but it’s too late. I get hit in the head, barely stay on my feet. Fortunately, the impact knocks the shovel from its hand. The zombie makes three more swings before it figures that out. I can’t count on hitting hard enough through that helmet, so I give it a rap on the chin that knocks it into the trench. Another grave digger, this one with a pick axe, starts to get up. Before it can get off hands and knees, I jam the claw under the helmet into the spot where the back of the head meets the spinal column. It collapses, twitching. Behind me, I hear a click. I turn around, and sure enough, the third grave digger is sitting up and pointing a revolver at me. It pulls the trigger again, but the gun won’t fire, because the hammer isn’t cocked. Before it can figure out that small detail, I flip a switch on the grenade launcher and fire a couple armor-piercing grenades into its cranium. This has the unfortunate affect of spraying the contents all over my face plate.

So, I’m standing there, trying to clean off my helmet enough to see again, and hitting any zombie that runs into me. I hear gun fire from the camp, and Quimby is still screaming. “This won’t do,” says I. I manage to clean off enough gunk to see, then I look up the rock face, and see a particularly beautiful landslide waiting to happen. “Get back!” I say to Quimby. He finally stops screaming, but he still won’t move, so I have to haul him back.

I aim at a joint toward the top of the rock face. I fire the last 3 AP grenades. The noise echoes, and the zombies on their feet fall down. There’s a shower of rocks, including a dozen or so boulders in the one-meter size range. Most land in the trench, but not all. I have to step lively to keep from getting hit. I load another clip and fire 4 more grenades at likely spots, and a boulder big as a Thing comes down. It lands on the edge of the trench, collapsing a 5-meter section, and then rolls almost 20 meters down the line before it stops, caving in the walls. A lot more little ones come down, too. I fire the last grenade, and bring down some looser debris that fills up the trench nicely. Better’n half the trench is caved in or covered, but I still hear them moving. I got one more barrel in the launcher, and it’s loaded with phosphorous grenades: They make smoke, but the smoke burns. I fire all five through gaps in the debris cover, and throw a standard hand grenade in after. The smoke and noise and shrapnel is channeled through the trench. Plumes of dust come out, walls cave in, and the debris jumps up and then sinks down. When all this is done, seven intact zombies are still on the ground. I finish them with my hammer.

Just when the last one topside is down to nothing but twitching, Quimby screams again. I look down ad see a hand coming up through a chink in the covering of debris. There’s nothing attached to it. “Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” I say. I pulp it by kicking over a big rock. When I stoop and listen close, I still hear occasional movement. I also hear shooting from the camp. Then I hear someone coming up behind…

I turn; it’s Platt. I’m about to say something, but he speaks first, and it floors me. He says- I swear: “Why did you start shooting them?” And what floors me even more is, I can’t think of a single reason. Finally, I say, “Under what circumstances is a walking corpse NOT a bad thing?”

Platt talks, but not in answer. He says over the company frequency: “Cease fire. Repeat: Cease fire. Fall back to the outer wire. Maintain a secure perimeter. Fire only when necessary, then only with non-lethal riot rounds.” He turns off his com, and says to me: “Whatever these- these are, they have made no hostile move against us. We must proceed on one of two assumptions: Either they are ordinary civilians who are entitled to our aid, or they are representatives of a new class of entity seeking contact.” Then he orders Quimby back to the recon vehicle.

I follow him to the edge of the wire. There are about 400 corpses walking or crawling around within the circle of wire and rock. Fully 100 are clustered around the major breech in the fence, and once in a while, one comes through. The ones outside, 35 or so, are in loose clusters over a few hundred meters. They move like penguins: stiff (as it were), a little wobbly, but very regular, with short bursts of speed when they fall down and slide. What’s really weird is that they never seem to fall from slipping on ice, and they hardly ever run into each other. There’s no concerted attempt to break through. In fact, they don’t seem to be aware of the objects around them. They run into walls, rocks or the fence, turn away, but a few minutes later run into the same obstacle. It’s a horrid sight when one gets caught in the fence. It will just keep struggling until it tears loose.

At Platt’s signal, the tanks, the APC and Things take positions around the zombies outside the wire. Platt speaks, his voice amplified by a speaker in his face mask: “You are in a United Nations police sector. We guarantee you safety and any aid you require. It is in the interest of yourselves and others that you remain within the secured area.”
“They don’t seem to be answering,” says I. “Maybe they don’t speak English. Actually, far as speaking goes, they’re screwed one way or the other.”

“The UN has developed a code of visual signals for communication with uncontacted peoples,” Platt says. Then his shoulders sag. “The materials were in the APC.”
“I don’t think these things are big on visuals anyway,” says I. As we watch, one of the zombies walks off a sizeable cliff. Another follows it, and a third changes course and goes down after them. After a moment, Platt repeats his statement in three of the major Slavic languages, sometimes himself, and sometimes with canned recordings in his suit’s computers. We seem to be drawing their attention. Then Platt tries Greek. Finally, one of them, wearing an MP uniform, comes toward us. I casually slap another clip in my gun- my one clip of Casull ammo.

Platt gives another command: “Halt and identify yourself.” The zombie stops and crouches. It reaches out with its finger and pokes into the snow, seeming tentative. It makes a sloppy zigzag shape: Epsilon? It makes the same mark next to it, and keeps making the same mark, as often as not over ones it already made. I get the idea that it’s an M, which doesn’t make sense. Then I think of Roman numerals… “It’s giving us a number,” I say.
“You mean its serial number?” Johnson says. The zombie keeps making the mark. By now, it’s stirring up the snow.
“If I’m right, then M equals a thousand,” I say. That’s when something clicks. “Legion.”

Suddenly, the zombie stands up. I pull the trigger and fire a single shot, goes through one side of its helmet, rattles around a little and stops to make a big dent next to the hole where it came in. The zombie goes down, but lunges forward even as it falls, and grabs hold of Platt. He can’t pull free! Everybody else opens up, and 5 seconds and a few thousand rounds later, every zombie outside the fence is pulped. Here and there, some are still intact enough to crawl forward. After a moment’s thought, I decide I don’t have a choice but to shoot the zombie again even if it means hitting Platt. But the lieutenant solves the problem himself. His suit has a built-in taser. One shock from that makes the zombie let go. I shoot it again in the back of the head. That finishes it.

The zombies inside the fence charge- or, at any rate, lurch at a faster rate and in a more uniform direction. We start blasting them, of course, but it’s not doing much good. Most of the guys are shooting with 5.6 guns, which don’t do that much damage even to ordinary people. The zombies are wobbly enough that it’s hard to keep a bead on ‘em, and near impossible to hit the heads, which is the only spot where it does any good. And soon as they start to take serious damage, they fall over, an’ the other zombies go right over them. Within seconds, guns are running dry. Then small arms fire comes at us from the camp, none of it anywhere close to effective, but enough to keep us from covering the holes in the wire. One guy- sweet Mother, I never even knew his name!- tries to stand and fight with an automatic grenade launcher. He fires a two shot burst. Neither shot goes off. Then a zombie jumps on him from behind. It grabs the gun, and the targeting laser goes dead. He throws off the zombie, drops the grenade launcher and unslings his regular rifle. But as he does, the clip falls out. I see it happen, I see the catch move all by itself. Then the other zombies are on him. I crouch, hold my gun sideways, gangbanger style, and fire a clip of shotshells on full auto. The gun twitches to the left, across the knee. I bring down six of them before the clip runs out. There’s one little zombie that takes the better part of 2 shells right in the head. But it’s not enough. Some of the zombies are carrying knives, shovels and axes. They surround our guy, swinging all the while.

“Fall back!” Platt orders. “Bring the flame thrower to bear!” While the armored car is moving in, the drone tank executes a standard suppression maneuver: It drives across the line of the fence, blasting away with the 20 mm gun. All the group beyond the fence is knocked down, maimed or completely pulped. Two or three zombies go right under the tank’s tracks. Suddenly, it stops. The turret jerks. Then it traverses- toward the armored car. It makes some whirring noises. I figure, it’s trying to fire the six-pounder and the missiles first, which haven’t been armed. But the 20 mm gun is, and that’s the one that fires first. The armored car blows up in a huge ball of fire.