Empire

28 Dawn

The East Harbor Mall on the next block had been one of the first large buildings to fall when the outbreak began in the early 21st century. Some old movie about zombies had sent dozens of townspeople fleeing to the mall, hoping to barricade themselves inside its stores and wait out the nightmare. Those who didn't kill each other were quickly cornered and ripped apart by the undead.

Clothing outlets, restaurants, a department store and a movie theater were among the empty husks within the mall. Everything from underwear to cash to theater seats had been plundered, and the bloodstained floors were eventually licked clean and the place was abandoned to the elements. Squatters were known to spend a night or two in malls but they were generally regarded as unsafe.

Voorhees led the group, checking each outlet to see if it still had the security gate that would block its entryway. Most had been torn down.

Jenna and Lauren brought up the rear, holding each other to no effect. The terrified couldn't comfort the terrified, Mark Duncan observed. Still he thought he'd give it a shot.

"We'll be okay. We're with these people now." He told the women. Neither responded. "We're better off than we were at Fetish," he continued. "That cop said we're on our way to the police department. He's got it secured."

"The cop who killed that man?" Lauren stammered.

"Here we go!" Mike called. They were ushered into a store with nothing on its walls to indicate what it had once sold. Voorhees pulled down the security gate. "What good will that do?" Said Wendy. "It'll do." Voorhees grumbled.

"I've got to get back to my apartment." Mike told him. "Cheryl, the girl I told you about, she's there. You continue to the PD and we'll catch up."

"Out of the question." Voorhees shot back, then, lowering his voice: "You're the only one I trust. Probably the only one who trusts me, now."

"I'll take Shipley with me."

"Why would you do that?"

"What if Cheryl can ID him as her attacker?"

Cop instincts taking over, Voorhees considered it. He eyed Shipley, who was sitting alone in the back of the room.

"Take my gun, Mike. No one else knows it's empty."

Mike nodded gratefully and motioned to Shipley. "We've gotta go get somebody."

"What? Why me?"

"If you'd rather stay with me, just say so." Voorhees cracked. Shipley narrowed his eyes and got up. "Fuck that."

Mike raised the gate, and Voorhees handed over the pistol. Shipley stopped in front of the senior P.O. before leaving. "You take care of these people."

"That's my job." Voorhees pushed Shipley into the corridor and slammed the gate back down.

Mike led Shipley back the way they'd come, and they searched the mall parking lot for rotters. There were none. The shelter was being rapidly consumed by flames, filling the early morning sky with black smoke.

"Don't try running, or anything else." Mike told Shipley. The other man snorted. "If I wanted to run I'd have already done it. If I wanted to do something else, I'd have already done that too."

Shipley had deserted the military, had run from his prison sentence, but with a purpose. He wasn't a coward. He was running TO something, not FROM it.

He'd deserted with two other soldiers: King, a female, and Bish. The pair were in love, and talked all the time about escaping the badlands and finding some lost beach to fuck on for the rest of their days. Shipley had thought they were both out of their gourds but kept his mouth shut.

They tromped across the dry, barren earth with a few stolen supplies. There was no safe cover under which to set up camp, so they each slept with one eye open. Tried, anyway. More than once Shipley had been stirred from a foggy dream to spy King thrashing atop Bish like she was a porn star. More than once she was watching Shipley while doing it.

"I'm bit." Bish said one morning while picking the charred skin off of an unlucky lizard. He pulled up his camouflage tee and showed Shipley a bite on his side. It was old. "How long ago?" Shipley demanded. They hadn't seen a rotter since they deserted.

"A few weeks?" Bish shrugged. "I don't think I'm infected. The window's five to ten days before you croak, isn't it?"

"They don't know. They don't know shit about it, no matter what they say." Shipley replied. King was relieving herself behind a bush. "She know?" He asked.

"She's seen it." Bish bit into the lizard with a crunch. "She don't care."

Because she can just plant herself on my face once you're dead, Shipley thought. He took a tiny sip from his canteen. "Maybe I can't get infected," Bish mused through a mouthful of guts. "It's like Gerry, you know, how she can't get pregnant."

Bish was functionally retarded, Shipley decided, and went hunting for his own lizard.

It was a few nights later that Bish slipped into a coma. He'd just shot his wad, and King shook Shipley awake with a rumpled shirt held to cover what he'd already seen.

"Maybe it's heat exhaustion." She said while he looked over the unconscious soldier. She'd pulled on the bottoms of her fatigues and was walking around topless; Shipley ignored the swaying of her breasts as she took shallow breaths.

"He's dead." Shipley muttered. They didn't have anything to decapitate Bish with, let alone torch him. The cheap combat knives handed out to grunts by the Army could barely cut a steak. Shipley would have to saw at muscle and bone until the blade broke, then wrench the head completely off.

King wailed. "He can't be! How did it happen? Not the bite! It wasn't the bite!!"

"OF COURSE it was the bite, you fucking…" Shipley spat and turned away. He pulled out his knife and she seized his wrist. "Please don't do this to him! Just leave him in peace-"

"Cut the crap! You didn't love him!" Shipley plunged the knife into Bish's throat. King opened her mouth, but no sound came out. "I know what love is," Shipley said softly, and started sawing.

Bish threw him off with a gurgling cry.

Shipley lost the knife in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet and saw Bish sitting up, blood gushing down his bare chest.

"Oh GOD!!" King sagged, sobbing hysterically. Bish turned to look at her and more blood spurted from his ragged wound.

"King — Gerry! Get away from him!!" Shipley crawled in circles trying to find the knife. How far could the fucking thing have gone?

"I DO love you!" King cried, taking Bish's face in her hands. He stared dully upward, and she knelt to kiss his mouth.

Shipley's finger found the tip of the knife. Cursing, he grabbed the handle. King's muffled scream rang through the night.

Bish tore her lips away, greedily gashing at her face, one arm wrapped around her back and the other mauling her breast. Blood spilled over his face, into his gullet, and his wide open eyes stared into hers the entire time.

Shipley buried the blade in the back of Bish's head. There was no response from the undead; as the tip of the knife emerged from his mouth, he met the dying King in a hungry kiss.

Grasping the handle with both hands, Shipley threw all his weight against it. Bish's head was ripped from his neck.

King slumped over on the headless, spasming corpse of her lover. Shipley wrested the knife from the zombie's skull and stood over her, sawing into her throat. He screamed to drown out any sound she might make, and screamed and screamed and screamed until he was utterly alone with the soldiers' unrecognizable remains.

Gerry King was the first and last living person he'd ever killed.

"Here we are." Mike pointed up the staircase of an apartment building. The sun had risen a bit and, though the sky was slightly overcast, it cast its warm light down upon them. Things almost felt normal — normal meaning Jefferson Harbor without a family of rotters prowling inside its walls.

Mike followed Shipley to the landing, then had him stand back. He rapped on the door. "Cheryl! It's me."

A series of locks could be heard turning. Cheryl yanked the door open and wiped tears from her eyes. "There was one out here! It had a shovel, going from door to door, and I didn't think it could get in but if it had been here when you came back-"

"It's okay, the coast is clear." Mike stepped into the doorway. "We've gotta go. There's a safer place downtown, with other people. I just need to grab a few things, then we can go."

Yet he didn't go in. He stood beside Cheryl, closing his grip around Voorhees' pistol. There was ammo inside, but her eyes had already met those of the man on the landing.

"This is Shipley." Mike said.

Cheryl smiled.

"Hi."