The Crazies

The image on the screen was as crisp as modern technology could make it. So detailed that he could see the twitch of her fingers as Sgt. Canton sat next to McDermott and tried not to reach for a cigarette. Her lips flexed on the screen as she battled with her demons and he leaned closer to watch. But in the end, her willpower won out and Lt. Col. Jack Bennigan frowned deeply as she said something to McDermott that made the both of them laugh.

"Harlot." He whispered under his breath. "She that tries to take a man's place. But Satan would want harlots in his land under the hill."

The words startled him, and surprised that he'd spoken out loud, he swiveled to check that the room was empty. It was. No one entered his office without his express approval. And he hadn't cleaned a room since his wife had married him, which was expressly obvious to anyone brave enough to try and enter. Refuse and dirty clothes were scattered in neat piles all across his office. Their neatness abandoned only when their great height toppled them over, but he wasn't about to pick them up himself, even though she was dead.

Bennigan hadn't been a real military officer, and it had nothing to do with his status as a chaplain. The military was a safe haven, nothing less. As far away as he could get from his own demons until that bitch of a woman had gotten him dragged along to this hell-hole.

There were entirely too many demons down here.

But he was tired of watching the woman. She hadn't done anything of interest except show a fondness for Captain Rhodes. Back in the day, Bennigan would have had her written up for fraternization, but nobody seemed to give a fuck anymore. She hadn't slept with the Captain yet, because he knew that too.

The thought of fraternization reminded him of Rhodes and Bennigan flipped through the channels until he found Rhodes. The Captain was sitting in the mess hall where he usually held court with three different bottles of liquor sitting in front of him. A habit the chaplain knew from experience.

Rhodes wasn't alone drinking. At least fifteen other soldiers were with him. And the state of their behavior over the video feed indicated that most of them were well beyond the limits of sobriety. At least three were scheduled to be on guard duty above ground, and would be so shit-faced at that point, that their presence was useless.

"Demons….or the damned…" The words seemed to flow out of him without any physical control and he wondered again if the entire world hadn't gone made around him. Nothing had been right since he'd seen Marie rush after him at Walter Reed. For a few seconds he couldn't tell the difference between thirty years of hateful marriage and the dead woman who was howling for his flesh.

Bennigan itched at skin grown crusty with dead cells and grime. He really should head deeper underground to the showers to bathe. But the thought of being lower, being closer to Logan's lab, creeped him out even more than going towards the surface. So he was stuck in the middle, in a kind of limbo, surrounded by death and decay and darkness. And it was harder and harder to separate those conditions from reality.

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Rhodes took another swig of straight tequila and hissed as it burned straight through his larynx. "Where did you get this shit?" He demanded angrily. "And where the fuck are the lemons?"

The man across from him belched before he took his own hearty drink. Jonas Clem was his second in command and hadn't passed an Army weight check a single time during his military career. "Blame the doctor." A heavy wad of spit spurted from his lips to hit the ground. "And that fucking sheriff. Wanting to ration the food, give it to all the puling brats."

"The brats have to live." The sarcasm dripped off his tongue. "They're the future."

The soldiers screamed with laughter and scorn. Not one of them gave a shit for the civilians that the scientists insisted they bring inside. Most of them were sick of the guard duty and protection detail and would rather take their chances out in the world. Taking a glass-half-full approach to the end of everything. It didn't matter that over ninety-nine percent of their colleagues were dead. In their minds they were still the most badass mother-fuckers that the Army of One had ever seen.

"Shut up." Rhodes grunted. Suddenly he was sick of them and sick of everything around them. There wasn't any fucking future, despite what Cardille, Logan and Fisher might think. And it irritated him that Canton followed them without question. She should follow him without question, as soon as he figured how to get rid of the mad-hatter old man upstairs. That problem made him reach for the tequila again until he remembered that he hated tequila without lemon. But he drank it anyway.

"You see the new bird?" Byzajowski leered. "When do we get those benefits you promised us, Captain?"

"When I fucking tell you!" Rhodes screamed across the hallway. His voice echoed in the long hall, and in the aftermath of the echoes a knock sounded at the door. "Come."

"Captain?" Jayne stepped into the hallway. She'd abandoned her ammo vest for a simple shoulder holster over an old Vietnam era jacket. But like a Marine, her name was neatly printed over the lapel pocket and she didn't look one bit out of uniform as compared to his properly dressed soldiers that looked like bums on the street. "Am I interrupting?"

"No, come in. Care for a drink?"

"Not until I'm off duty."

"Not until she's off duty." Came a mocking echo.

"Shut. The. Fuck. Up!" Rhodes snapped.

Jayne ignored it, it was one of the things he liked about her. As compared to the list of things he didn't like. Make that several lists. The world had gone to hell, but she still acted like things mattered. Rhodes would have liked to show her the error of her ways but since she was the only one he could trust to watch his back, he was stuck with her.

"Give me the report."

She handed him the print-out. It seemed fairly complete. What was surprising was the FBI file on the cop. Rhodes scanned through it perfunctorily.

"What's it say?" His question didn't even make her blink.

"His brother was in the Army with a top level security clearance. They had records on his entire family." She didn't have to mention that he was also former USMC, which technically meant one more for her side.

"Very well, Sgt." He gave her an imperial wave to dismiss her and was glad at least that she didn't about face. "Canton?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Has anyone been down to check on him today?" He phrased the question slowly to try and catch her response but the dumb bitch didn't give him the rise he wanted. Another ding against her.

"No, sir."

"Well then," Clem said at his side. "What are you waiting for?"

Rhodes waited until she was gone before he tossed a plate at Clem. "And who told you to open your mouth?"

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"And let's see what happens when we insert this probe."

The body on the table twitched and the partially disconnected head let out a tremulous moan. Logan jotted the findings down on the pad next to him and repositioned the steel electrode within the visible brain architecture. The man strapped to the table moaned again and jerked as another current of electricity ran into him.

"Hmmm." Logan said to himself. "Didn't expect a response there."

His lab coat was covered in dried blood. Not just the smears that you expected from working in a lab, but great clots and clumps of blood from procedures that had lost any resemblance to the medical school tutorials that he'd learned off of.

"Doctor Logan?" Jayne stuck her head around the main door to the lab.

"Oh, yes, yes. Come in, Sgt. Checking on me to make sure I'm here?"

"Something like that." She hesitated less than a foot inside the room. There were mutilated chunks of zombies everywhere. Many that she'd personally collected for Logan. Now they lay in disheveled chunks from experiments that had failed. Some where he'd attempted to graft more than one together. "How are you today, sir?"

"Glad you're here." Logan held a probe out to her. "I could use a hand."

She approached him slowly and took the instrument. He guided her hand down into the gray matter of the brain and moved it into the olfactory nerve. It made a squelching sound as she pressed through a lesion that Logan had inflicted on the nerve.

"Right there." As she held it with a careful eye on the zombie below her, he pulled out a less than clean scalpel. "Don't move now, Sgt." And gashed her elbow just above the zombie's mouth and nose.

"Fuck!" She yelled but didn't move as he grabbed onto her arm with a fierce grip and held it in place. The monitor across from them began to jump and skitter as the zombie responded. Drops of blood trickled out of the cut, stained her jacket, and splattered across the dead man's chest. The restraints tightened against its body as it fought to get to this new proven source of meat.

"Doctor Logan."

Logan was surprised at the iciness of her voice. "Yes, Sgt."

"Release me."

"But look!" He was delighted with the results he was seeing. It made the entire day worthwhile. "I've just proved that there is more than one input into the olfactory nerve. Even with that lesion, it is still receiving data."

"Sir!" She jerked free then, leaving the probe still standing in the open skull. Blood continued to seep through her fingers and Logan realized that he'd cut her deeper than he'd initially thought.

But the thought had already vanished into the depths of his brain as he tried to decide where else input could be arriving from. Lesioning other sections might give him the answer.

"Oh, that's all for today, Canton." He said dismissively and turned back to the electrical stimulus. He rammed it into the zombie's brain again and again. He never paused to wonder if the moaning it caused was due to pain, or to wonder if he'd caused any to the living either. It was the fresh blood he needed to run his experiments and his own arms were already dotted with scalpel marks from his own donations to science. He'd barely nicked her.

"Ah…" he said to himself as the main lab door closed. "Let's try this."

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Okay. All these craziness has made my brain itch. Ch. 11 has a short intro before we go back to the munchy crunchy zombie fun. Violence, chaos, and character death will ensue.

Official preview Ch. 11 - McDermott finds more survivors, but is there enough time to get to them before they're overrun?