Free Empire's End by David Dunwoody

Army
patrol. They’d begun sawing off my legs.”
    He took a deep breath and massaged his
temples. “Oh, Voorhees. Don’t you see, that’s the alternative? If
we didn’t have Meyer and his honor code, there would be animals
running loose in the streets. And we wouldn’t have the strength to
stop them. Everything would fall apart—the Great Cities are in
their infancy and we have to safeguard their development.”
    “And then what?”
    “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to
it.”
    And Meyer will set it ablaze when you’re
halfway across, Voorhees thought.
     

Eleven / Best-Laid Plans
     
    Ian Gregory sat in on his first Senate
morning meeting, positioned behind and to the left of Gillies as
the Senate President spoke to his fellow statesmen.
    “I spoke with Britain by radio last night.
They’re still being difficult, but I think they’re beginning to
come around, at least as far as the airfield is concerned. I
assured them that it would be finished by November.”
    “Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” asked
Senator Georgia Manning.
    “If you need more manpower, Georgia, then get
it. You’ve got a whole damn city at your disposal.”
    “Enough people already know about the
airfield,” she retorted.
    “Then lie ,” came the exasperated
reply. “Go outside of that construction company for volunteers—I
don’t trust those people anymore. Tell the volunteers that they’re
working on the site for a new hospital. They don’t have to know
anything!”
    Gregory had tuned out the conversation and
was studying each Senator’s face. He tried to separate the loyal
ones from the opportunists. It was always visible in the face. As a
man of God—and Hand of God’s leader—he had honed his ability to
sniff out sin.
    Maybe that was why Gillies made him just a
little uncomfortable.
    But everyone had their flaws, their secrets;
and, though he fought it, his mind drifted again to Barry.
    The final days of the Wall’s construction...
the burn pits, trenches twenty feet deep and piled with crippled,
decapitated and paralyzed rotters. The foul stench of death, so
thick and pervasive that all the soldiers standing guard had to
wear gas masks. And the moaning. The moaning and gurgling as the
undead flailed about in a slurry of leaking fluids and decaying
meat. The burn team hadn’t come by in days and trucks were bringing
in all of the ferals that had been picked off along the Wall’s
perimeter. They said it would be more efficient this way. It was
madness. Weird, otherworldly groans filled the sky day and
night.
    Finally the burn team arrived. The dead in
the pits were liquefying beneath the summer sun, and a fog of
putrefaction had settled over the place; seeping into clothing and
skin, staining every man and woman on-site.
    When the burn team pointed their
flamethrowers into the pits, the things erupted like volcanoes.
Instead of ash and lava it was gore and thrashing, living limbs
that rained down on everyone. Suddenly all was chaos, and the
insanity that had been building for a week finally screamed to
life. Everyone was in a panic, including Sergeant Ian Gregory. He
was frantically searching through the smoke and slaughter for
Kendra Barry. He pulled off his mask and screamed her name, then
the stench of roasting flesh filled his nose and eyes and throat
and he fell to his knees vomiting.
    Somewhere in there, in the madness, she had
fallen. Perhaps shoved, perhaps tripped, or maybe she’d just run
blindly into the flaming pit and been caught in the blackened claws
of the undead.
    They did manage to recover her body a few
days later during the cleanup; official cause of death was smoke
inhalation. But Gregory, identifying her body, had seen the marks
around her throat where they had choked the life from her.
     
    * * *
     
    “Has Finn Meyer been extorting credits from
you?”
    Voorhees leaned on the counter and looked
Becks hard in the eye. She gave him a what’re-you-gonna-do shrug
and said, “It