The Longest Midnight: A Zombie Novel Read online

  The Longest Midnight

  J. J. Fowler

  “War would end if the dead could return.”

  Stanley Baldwin

  Copyright 2016 by J. J. Fowler

  Chapter One

  It was early afternoon when the sun reaches its zenith, covering the land with its vast blanket of warmth and light, but in a world of darkness, only a dull gray filled the sky above Captain Joshua Drake as he placed the beast’s head in his riflescope. He ignored the biting cold, the moaning wind, and the deathly sky to concentrate on his target. The beast, its face trapped into a perpetual bony smile from the flesh rotting off its cheeks, locked eyes with Drake’s scope. It wore an archaic metal helmet with a pointed top from a war long over and was largely naked except for a few strands of fatigues covering its bony and decaying frame. It opened its mouth to hiss and roar as it raised its own primitive rifle towards Drake.

  Then the beast’s head split in half from a high-powered bullet that blasted through it. Purple blood and brain matter flew everywhere, landing on the ground, the bodies of the dead, and Drake’s uniform like a bucket of watery shit thrown against a concrete wall. The zombie’s body went limp and fell onto the dirt with a light thud. Green and yellow body fluids flowed freely from the wound like small rivers and mixed with the parched dirt.

  Drake had seen it all before, countless times. The gruesome scene left him feeling nothing. He’d killed thousands of the things since being drafted into the Army at sixteen. There was something odd about this one, however, because he swore he heard it communicating in his tongue to one of the other zombies moments before he shot it.

  “Captain Drake! Captain Drake!” a voice yelled frantically behind him.

  Drake didn’t respond as he stared at the rotting flesh and blown-out brains of the terminated zombie.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and instantly spun around.

  “What, Murph?” he said angrily.

  “You okay?”

  “Do I look like I’m not, private?”

  “No, sir, but you ran off on your own.”

  Murphy looked around and saw a dozen extinguished deaders surrounding them. He was amazed.

  “Did you kill them all on your own?”

  Drake didn’t respond. The answer was obvious.

  “Wow!” Murphy said after understanding the stupidity of his question.

  Murphy was an eighteen-year-old kid on his first tour. He had never shot at a zombie until his deployment to Forward Operating Base Alpha a month ago.

  “How’s Trev?” said Drake.

  “The sarge? Well, sir, I’m afraid he’s really bad.”

  “Fuck. Take me to him.”

  * * *

  Trevor Esoog was on his back being attended to by Sergeant Mifune. Things appeared hopeless. There was a bullet wound in Trevor’s chest and his breathing was rapid and hoarse. Blood dribbled out of his mouth.

  Drake knelt next to him and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. They were the same age and had been fighting together for the past twenty years. They’d seen a lot of their friends die, yet somehow they always survived. Trevor was Drake’s best man in the platoon, the only man whom he knew he could trust to accomplish anything. Now a zombie sniper had ended all that.

  “How are you, bud?” Drake said quietly.

  Trevor smiled and his round, deathly pale face struggled to hold the grin. He hoped to reassure his longtime friend Drake that all was well, but they both knew it wasn’t. He was dying.

  “You’re a trooper,” said Drake. “You can hack it. We’ll get you back.”

  Trevor’s grin was replaced by a frown. Tears appeared around his eyes just as they went blank.

  He was gone.

  Mifune was still working at stemming the bleeding when Drake grabbed his arm and gently pushed him back.

  Mifune sat on his legs and softly wept. The remaining men from the platoon gathered around to look at their fallen comrade one last time.

  Drake closed Trevor’s dead eyes.

  “Get outta here, all of you,” said Drake. “Set up a perimeter so we don’t get fucking ambushed again.”

  Mifune refused to move. Trevor and Mifune were good friends, the two sergeants in the platoon. Trevor was the more aggressive and risky one, Mifune the deliberate and cautious sergeant. Trevor was suave and funny, Mifune serious and emotional. Their personalities were even reflected in their physical appearances: Trevor’s stubbled face and beer gut, Mifune’s neatly shaved face and trim, muscular build. Together, their yin-yang of the platoon was an effective balancing force under Drake’s confident leadership. It was no surprise they were considered the best platoon at Forward Operating Base Alpha.

  Now that, too, was over. The platoon would never fully recover with the demise of Sergeant Trevor, Mifune believed.

  “Mifune, make sure everyone else is good.”

  “All eight of ‘em?” Mifune replied quietly.

  “Yes. Go!”

  Mifune slowly got up to his feet and walked away.

  Drake stood up, pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol, and aimed it at his dead friend’s head as he lit a cigarette placidly. The bright red and orange cherry of his smoke illuminated the creases around his face. His weathered and tired visage was once strikingly handsome before he was drafted twenty years ago into the Army and deployed to the front. Constant war ruins a man’s good looks.

  Drake waited. He wanted to make sure Trevor was truly gone. If he was going to reanimate, it should only take a few minutes. Then Trevor’s mouth twitched several times. It was beginning.

  Drake moved closer, making sure he had a good shot at his forehead.

  Trevor’s eyes opened, the whites horribly bloodshot, and the blue irises now a piercing red. His mouth opened and he let out a snakelike hiss as his eyes fixed on Drake.

  Drake spit out his cigarette and fired two rounds into his friend’s head. Then he looked up at the darkness above him. It was the Longest Midnight as his parents called it, a midnight without end. He wondered if anyone would ever see the dawn.

  Chapter Two

  The trek home from a patrol was often more nerve racking than the trek into the wilds. Deaders didn’t respect any rules of war and could jump out of nearly any place in the maze of urban ruins. Drake did his best to keep his men frosty and hyper aware. The dark conditions made things difficult for humans, yet over the generations living in such an environment, the human eye adapted well to the darkness. Only small amounts of light were needed for the evolved human eye to partially see in the endless night. Still others, like Drake, were blessed to have perfect 20/20 vision and an even more gifted sense of sight akin to seeing the world of dark as if it were just an overcast day. But such gifts didn’t always keep one alive. Sergeant Trevor was blessed with such vision and died after eating a deader bullet.

  They marched in a long, silent line through the broken concrete, twisted metal, and rotting wood of the wilds. Fallen comrades were never carried back. Doing so would only slow down the platoon and speed was of the essence. To slow down would give the dead more opportunities to strike. Deaders were generally slow until the moment before they struck. The speed of such attacks oftentimes blindsided their innumerable victims.

  Drake forbade smoking and conversation when they moved. The dead could hear as well as the living. Drake had already lost his best man and didn’t want to lose anyone else in his depleted platoon. Drake always walked behind the point-man because he believed doing so gave him the best chances of organizing his men in case of an attack. He was usually right in this.

  Private Nekot was the ass on this ride back. No man wanted to be point or the ass in a patrol. Both were the most
vulnerable positions. Drake would shuffle such jobs as best he could. He wasn’t too keen on Nekot being the ass because he was nearly as green as Private Murphy. He did have a few patrols under his belt unlike Murphy and didn’t seem as shaken by Trevor’s death.

  “Captain,” Murphy whispered behind Captain Drake. Drake did not turn around. “How far is the base?” Drake raised his fist indicating silence. He liked the kid. He was smart and had good instincts. He was reminded of himself as a private touring in the land of death and doom. Still, he was a rookie and a rookie rarely made it a few weeks out here.

  On a patrol, Drake did his best to keep himself and his men focused on their jobs. Morale wasn’t an issue given they all had something to fight for. As Drake figured it, humanity may have lost much of the world to the dead, but that didn’t stop humanity’s capability for ingenuity and civilization. From the ashes of the bombs, a new city was founded long ago on a peninsula jutting out into the Dead Ocean – an ocean which covered much of the Earth after the polar ice caps melted. The thousands of humans who congregated there many years ago ignited an old nuclear reactor for power, built massive greenhouses with artificial lights for agriculture, and used much of the rubble to construct a new and large city where civilization could thrive. Industry was formed again. Crops like corn, wheat, and barley flourished. Livestock was raised and slaughtered for meat. It was this city that Drake and his men fought for. It was the last of the human cities. Everything else was dead. This city was Freetoria.

  Drake’s thoughts were interrupted by a terrible cry behind him. Drake hurried towards the rear and saw a deader on top of Private Nekot with its mouth on the rookie’s throat. His men unloaded their assault rifles into the deader, hitting Nekot as well. When the guns fell silent, the bodies of the deader and Nekot reminded Drake of a pig’s body after being butchered in his dad’s old meat factory: a giant bloody mess. He knew his boys had to waste both of them because Nekot was as good as dead once the deader chomped into him. Even a rooky like Nekot knew that.

  Mifune raced by Drake to check on Nekot. Drake didn’t see the point and signaled for his men to line up and file out.

  “Mifune!” Drake yelled. There was no point in worrying about noise after all the loud gunfire. “Get your ass back in line!”

  Mifune knelt down before Nekot and checked his pulse. There was nothing. Drake was now behind Mifune and touched the medic’s shoulders.

  “We need to move it. The kid’s dead.”

  Mifune looked up at Drake and shook his head lightly. Behind him, Nekot’s dead eyes opened and he lurched up for Mifune’s forearm. Drake saw it the whole time. He aimed his gun towards Mifune while simultaneously swinging his leg towards Mifune’s back. Mifune’s eyes opened wide as if he thought Drake was going to shoot him. He had no idea zombie Nekot was about to dine on his pale forearm. Drake’s foot collided with Mifune’s back and forced his medic forward. Dead Nekot was nearly on Mifune’s forearm, so the moment the medic’s head cleared the line of fire, Drake pulled the trigger. The bullet went straight through Nekot’s left eye and blew out the backside of his skull. He was dead – final dead.

  Mifune stood up to confront Drake when he noticed Nekot’s lone red, bulging eye and knew Drake had saved him. Instead, he meekly brushed himself off and nodded his head at Drake as thanks. Drake responded: “Move it.”

  This time, Mifune listened to his captain.

  Chapter Three

  If a man managed to survive his ten-year service in the Army, and it was always a man as females were prohibited from service, he still was forced to contend with the leading cause of death for Freetorians: cancer. From the environmental degradation to the still highly radioactive world, cancer ravaged nearly everyone after they reached fifty years of age. Those who lived beyond the age of fifty were considered elderly and quite lucky. Cancer was as normal to Freetorians as pouring a cup of tea for breakfast. It was assumed one would get it at some point in their life and most likely die from it. The treatments available to Freetorian doctors were limited mostly to radiation treatment and a couple of medications. Medicines were very difficult to manufacture in a world where most of the plant and animal life were extinct. Assisted suicide for those in the final stages of cancer was de rigueur. It even became a ritual for the people of Freetoria. The passing of life into permanent death and the body placed in a burial canoe and pushed out into the Dead Ocean.

  When one dies in The Longest Midnight, one does not stay dead for long. It may take an hour or even only a few minutes before one awakes from the peaceful slumber of death into a ravenous creature with an insatiable lust for human flesh. Consequently, the Founding Fathers of Freetoria created an elite police force called the Execution Squads. It was the job of the Execution Squads to ensure that deceased bodies were properly disposed of and any reanimated corpses were swiftly destroyed. The ever-present threat of a potential zombie outbreak within the congested confines of urban Freetoria required the Execution Squads to have considerable latitude when it came to doing their jobs. They could break into any home or apartment and any protest against their usually violent solutions to problems fell on deaf ears. It was just accepted that the Execution Squads, or ES, had to do what they had to do. And that was just life.

  It was also accepted that nothing could be done to stop corpses from reanimating. Many scientists tried to understand the peculiar phenomenon that only affected human dead and the only thing they could say is that it happens. It just is. There was no point in spending limited resources on trying to understand the dead coming back to life when those resources might be better spent on researching better and more effective ways of growing food to feed the populace or to bolster defenses, for instance.

  The populace. How large was it? Various censuses arrived at a number of 400,000 inhabitants of Freetoria. Not a small number, yet not a large number either. The short lifespan, the constant fighting against the dead, and the generally rigorous existence for humans made it difficult for the population to grow much beyond a certain point. The relentless poverty and crowded conditions of most of the districts in Freetoria was another matter as well. When the Founders built Freetoria, they built it in much the same fashion as the Old World. There would be the elites at the top, a small middle class, and a mass of poor who did most of the work and dying to keep the middle and upper classes afloat. Drake and all his men were from those poor classes.

  Freetoria was a democracy on paper. The citizens elected the five members of the Council every two cycles or years. Only those with connections and wealth could even run for Council, which insured permanent domination by the elites. The elites concentrated power because they believed they were more intelligent and capable at leading humanity through the perpetual risk of extinction than the slobbering poor masses. If such was the case, Captain Drake could tell them a thing or two how the elites were fucking up. Not that they would listen, of course, yet Drake was cynical enough to try.

  ***

  For more than a decade, Forward Operating Base Alpha suffered a lack of funding and manpower. For much of its history, the base was staffed by thousands of troops as a bulwark against armed zombie troops. If Alpha fell to the enemy, only bases Beta and Charlie remained as the last buffers on the thin peninsula they defended. As Alpha endured relentless attacks over the last decade, civilian authorities in the city of Freetoria ordered a slow withdrawal to Beta and Charlie. The commanders of Beta and Charlie, Colonel Jack Kaluma and Colonel Han Wuqi, respectively, were ambivalent towards the plan. The commander of Alpha, Colonel Tarte, was an enthusiastic supporter of the plan and regularly contributed his thoughts on it to the Council. Captain Joshua Drake and many others stationed at Alpha, however, vehemently disagreed with these actions. They saw it as a retreat from the never-ending threat the zombies posed to humanity. The Freetorian Council disagreed, or, more accurately, didn’t care about the opinions of grunts.

  The Council’s plan was to build a massive trench from one end of the peninsula to th
e other, several kilometers in front of Base Beta to counter any attacking zombie forces. The remaining Base Alpha men were ordered to buy time while the massive defenses outside Beta were constructed. The construction of the trenches and other defenses were far behind schedule because civilian and military leaders in Freetoria squabbled over the particulars of the project and how to fund it.

  Drake hated the Freetorian Council. He saw them as nothing more than a cabal of naïve elites with no understanding of the situation humanity faced. None of them ever visited the front near Alpha, nor did they give the brave troops at Alpha any encouragement in their mission to hold off the horde long enough for the defenses to be completed. Drake and the troops at Alpha were expendable, the lower classes from the slums of Freetoria sent to the worst hellhole on Earth to fight and die while politicians and brass jockeyed over one another to influence the construction of the trenches. Humanity, in Drake’s view, never learned from its mistakes.

  * * *

  Drake’s platoon of now nine men approached the two giant steel entrance doors to the massive concrete structure of Forward Operating Base Alpha. Exterior walls were charred black from decades of combat, and atop its one story structure were machine gun pits crewed by exhausted and emotionless troops. Drake knew how they felt, knew how years of war were draining the men here, and how no matter the personal costs, they had to hold this base—at least for now.

  A guard dressed in standard grey combat fatigues with a black jacket, which all the soldiers stationed at Alpha wore, nodded his head as Drake and his men passed by. Drake nodded in return, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the soldier’s name. So many faces, so many names passed through Drake’s time here that they all became a blur. He told himself he’d ask one of his men after they were inside the base, yet knew he probably wouldn’t bother. What was the point? The man would likely die in a day, or a week, or a month.