Cannibal Corpse, M/C

“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.