This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. --T.S. Elliot

Chapter 1

Six Rules

"I've only got six rules to follow when we're out there. Number one, nobody leaves nobody. Ever. Two, nobody gets greedy. We're checkers, not runners. There's no pleasing the boys upstairs, and we're not going to try to. Anyone, I repeat, anyone, who is caught taking anything I don't say grab, will be left to the stenches. With their knees shot in. Three, check everything. We don't have the luxury of getting sloppy. Check every corner to a building you enter, then check it again. Four, five, and six, never take off your suit. Never. I haven't lost anyone to crotch rot in six months, and I don't plan on doing it again anytime soon. My last warning, don't take off any part of your suit while we're on a run. Do I make myself clear? I don't care how bad your balls itch or if you have a pebble in your boot; the clothes stay on."

McLeod finished up his usual speech the same way he'd finished it the last twelve runs. It was like clockwork now, but it was for their own good. All of them knew it by heart, but it was their brains he needed to know it. Red was quietly polishing a knife alone in the center of the room. Metallic church chairs fitted with red cloth seats formed two separate rows on either side of a main aisle. The rows were six by eight chairs deep at a slight arrowhead angle pointing to the central dais. The floor was covered in an ocean blue carpet, and the walls were coated in a thick off-white color. On the platform was a podium and mike setup, and other than the two large, red, metal doors directly opposite the podium at the end of the aisle, the room was bare. Everyone else had left the room to prep for the night's mission; except Red. He never left. Wherever McLeod was, Red was; and McLeod wouldn't even think about asking why.

The massive black man was already geared up, his eyes now focused solely on his knife. He was as bald as they came, with a scalp smoother than a baby's ass; he had a wide, strong jaw and large, heavy green eyes. Red wasn't his name, not his real name; but it was as close as anyone would ever know. Besides, no one had any proof that it wasn't his legit name, nor would they ask. Red was Red.

And red, is the color of blood.

Starry Night

The town of Brookstone, Massachusetts was as quiet as they came. They were the ones that scared me. The ones you couldn't hear stenches in, but the smell was there. It was always there. That smell never goes away. It's the smell of death, but more than that. It's the mix of a million different things they've crawled through. A rancid concoction of mud, shit, gore, and sometimes, the cologne they'd put on for their last day on Earth.

"How long until we're up again?" I asked impatiently.

"Engine's overheated, we just need to find a jug of water or something to cool it down." Lewis replied coolly, his head covered from sight by a thick cloud of steam billowing up from under the hood.

"Ain't there none in the back?" Red questioned, quite obviously irritated at the situation.

"No Gargantua, you drank it all, remember?" Graham tossed the empty gallon jug into the street. The container made a hollow thumping sound against the pavement before grinding to a halt several feet away. "Man, I'd hate to see you as a fucking walker. Always hungry as hell; I bet you'd eat another stench just to get that hunger to go away." Graham retorted angrily.

"Enough! Lou and Graham, stay with Betty here while Red and I go find some food and water. We need gas?"

"No, shouldn't. I put six containers in the rear before we left. That was enough to get us to Bunkersville and back without stopping." The sixteen year old responded dryly, taking a heavy drag on his cigarette. Normally, I'd have ripped the damned thing from his mouth and smashed it under foot; probably asked if he knew those things would kill him. Kind of a silly question now.

The truck, Betty, was one of a kind. I'm a special guy, and I have special tastes. Most of the big cities, the major human outposts, at least, had their own big trucks. Chicago has Dead to Rights, Pittsburgh had Dead Reckoning, and New York has Coche de la Muerte...car of the dead. I'm not big on the whole dead theme, figure it's been played out more than enough; so Betty it was. Specially outfitted moving truck designed to suit our needs: bigger engine, bulletproof glass, built in chainsaws for those "close" encounters, and the standard machine guns. Nothing fancy, two M249's, but I figure it's not the size of the boat, it's the motion of your ocean. Betty was designed with one goal in mind; to be as fast as possible.

Our suits, however, were designed with quite another goal in mind. Protection. Sometimes Red and I joke about how rich we'd be if we'd opened up a zombie suit shop before the outbreak. Honestly, I never understood why it took people so long to figure out how to bite-proof themselves. Walkers can't bite through more than three layers of clothing, not enough to break the skin and expose you to the saliva. But the majority of bites aren't on the body, they're on the limbs. Hands, feet, ankles, the parts that get stuck out first. They just grab onto whatever they can find. Me, I spent a lot of hard work making sure that I never bit the dust by some stupid zed biting down on my wrist.

Four layers of interwoven Kevlar, combined with light-weight polyester and nylon make one hell of a bite-proof material. Besides, there's enough Kevlar now that it's not expensive; nobody shooting back at us anymore. After some careful measuring by my old tailor, every member of the Royal Rock security detail was given a one piece zip-up jumpsuit of the stuff; black as night. The suit was tight, but not the point of being form fitting- it looked a lot like a pilot's outfit, except that the gloves and feet were sewn together with the suit. The suit itself had a turtle neck, and everyone on my team wore modified riot helmets to make sure none of the creepy crawlies got near our skin. Elbow and knee pads, shin guards, thigh guards, groin guards, strap on body armor chest pieces with ammo pouches, bicep and forearm protectors, and shoulder pads completed the ensemble. All told, the suit weighs at least thirty pounds, is scratchy, and hot; but it does its job as well as can be expected. Personally, I don't see any reason why anyone with the chance to wear one of these suits wouldn't, but there's a lot I don't understand anymore.

"Hey boss, there's a gas station up ahead." Red pointed a gloved finger into the darkness. The silhouette of a hopefully-abandoned Circle K loomed in the distance, it's distinctive circular symbol jutting into the sky. The chirp of crickets was the only noise in the night, and the pallid glow of moonlight the sole source of illumination. In an odd way, I liked it out here. I could always see the stars, and every now and again I'd think that maybe Hell hadn't won the rights to Earth. Every now and again was not tonight.

It was a measly half mile jog to the station. We'd broken down in what appeared to have been a somewhat commercialized district. Strip malls stretched out for blocks on either side of the four lane highway we'd been taking, and every now and then a three story office building would break the monotony of suburbia. This place was quiet...real quiet. The crickets had stopped chirping. "Shit."

"What?" Red asked as he halted. His head rotating a hundred eighty degrees trying to spot whatever had spooked me.

"We got walkers."

"No boss...we don't."

"The crickets."

"I mean we got worse than that. We got runners." He pointed down the street a half mile or so.

"Take out the cologne."

Cologne was our term for the foulest smelling shit ever to be bottled. It was a sulfurous, methane- smelling mixture that made even me want to gag every time I smelled it. Specially designed to keep what goes bump in the night from bumping into you. Red and I spritzed ourselves quickly and ducked into the shadows. Luckily, they hadn't seen us-- not withstanding that half or so were probably missing eyes. What they had seen, however, were Betty's headlights. The horde of decay shambled, crawled, ran, and limped with whatever limbs they still had attached towards the gigantic truck.

"Let's go," I motioned for the gas station after the mass had passed.

"What about Lou and Graham?"

"They've got Betty, they're in better shape than we are. What'll be bad is when one of them sees us. We don't have chainsaws and machine guns to back us up."

"Yea."

I slipped from the shadows of the tree I'd been hiding under and quietly stalked up to the garage door. My fingers slid under the corrugated metal partition and I gave a gentle tug; nothing. It had been padlocked from the inside. Red was at the glass front door, and equally out of luck.

Always the hard way...

"Anything?"

"Don't see anything."

"Want me to blow it?"

"Do you have your silencer?"

"It's glass, it won't matter."

"The lock isn't."

"Good point."

I grabbed my radio as my partner screwed the cylinder onto the barrel.

"Graham, save the gun ammo for now. We're gonna need it on the way back."

"Roger. Lou on the left, on the left!" My earpiece went silent as she terminated the connection.

"One...two...-" Pfft. Pfft. There were sparks and the door rattled violently as the bullets forced their way through the lock. We both looked at the truck; none of them seemed to have noticed. I slid the door open and rolled into the convenient store. I pushed the sliding glass doors back together and took a knee as Red gathered the stuff.

"I've been meaning to tell you something Red."

"Yea boss?" The sound of crinkling wrappers was music to my ears. I could almost taste the chocalatey sweet goodness of a Hershey bar.

"We been working together for a long time now."

"Yea boss." I could hear him open the cooler doors for water.

"I don't think you know what your friendship's meant to me." A candy bar landed at my foot; a Snickers.

"They out of Hersheys?"

"No, I got a whole box right here."

"Why'd you throw me a snicker?"

"I didn't throw..."

A guttural groan stopped both of our thoughts midway. I whizzed around to see the gas station attendant, or what was left of him, gnashing his rotting teeth in hunger. He was dressed in a one-piece mechanic's suit, with a name tag that read 'Earl'. His pot belly bloated the olive green clothing, and his skin had taken on the waxy white and purple tint that they all had. A thick pole was jammed into his neck, and coagulated blood coated the entrance wound. He raised an oil-coated hand to grab me, but all of the fingers on his left hand were horribly mauled; ivory bone jutted in thin slivers through the skin, and the tip of his index finger only hung on a loose piece of skin to the body.

If I used my gun, every zed for three miles would hear. If Red shot him in the head, the bullet would pass through both of our skulls, and I'd never have to worry about becoming one of them again. Thick clots of chunky red goo splattered onto my face-plate, sliding slowly down before dripping onto the floor. The corpse collapsed stiffly into me, and I pushed it quickly to the floor. The silver blade and black hilt of a knife was lodge deeply into the back of it's skull. Red wrapped one hand around the base of the man's skull and jerked the weapon out with the other.

"Can we just go already?"

"My pleasure. I'll get the bottles."