The Longest Midnight: A Zombie Novel Read online

  They reached the portly sergeant in charge of approving entrance to the base. By law, each man after completing a patrol was examined for bites. If a man showed bite wounds, he was arrested and executed in order to prevent spreading the virus. It was a nasty, gruesome business to kill your own, but the men of Alpha understood the necessity of these strict security protocols.

  The middle-aged sergeant scratched his scruffy beard as he looked over Drake and his men. The sergeant assumed Drake was in his late forties though his real age was thirty-six. Drake rubbed his bald head and ran his fingers down the large scar on his left cheek—the result of a zombie bullet grazing his face long ago.

  “Your orders, sir?” the sergeant said to Drake.

  Drake handed the older man his patrol orders and personnel list.

  “Where’s the other sergeant, Captain?” asked the sergeant.

  “Dead.”

  “Oh,” said the sergeant nonchalantly. “Make sure you inform the colonel.”

  “I will,” said Drake coldly.

  The sergeant nodded toward the five men behind him and they stepped forward to examine Drake and his men for bites.

  After several minutes, they stopped and gestured their approval to the sergeant.

  They passed.

  The sergeant lifted his walkie-talkie and cleared his throat.

  “Twelve cleared for entrance.”

  “Affirmative,” came a reply through the walkie-talkie.

  Then the giant steel doors creaked and squealed as they slowly opened.

  Drake lit a cigarette.

  “No smoking in the base please, Captain,” said the sergeant. “New orders from the colonel.”

  Drake took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke toward the sergeant.

  “Fuck off,” Drake replied. “I’ll make sure to inform the colonel exactly that if he tells me to put out my smoke.”

  The sergeant shook his head in disapproval and then waved Drake’s team in.

  Chapter Four

  The interior of Base Alpha consisted of one long corridor with rooms spaced approximately fifteen meters apart. There were also a dozen or so smaller corridors, which branched off from the main corridor like arteries snaking away from a heart.

  Incessantly flickering, puke-green, fluorescent lights illuminated Alpha, giving the interior the feel of a madhouse. To many of the troopers stationed there, it was.

  The concrete ground was a wretched mess of random debris, human waste, roaming rats, and pools of blood. Soldiers lay along the walls sleeping, talking, and sipping on rancid beers brought in from Freetoria. A few of them struggled to clean the corridor, but it was useless. It would only come right back because the troops understandably put cleanliness far below survival.

  So this is what a dying species looks like, thought Drake, as he and his men walked slowly down the corridor. He felt the cleanliness of the corridor should be attended to for hygienic purposes, but the colonel couldn’t give a damn. He only cared for battle results to please the politicians in Freetoria so he could get a nice cushy job back in the city when Alpha was abandoned.

  One soldier walked by Drake carrying a bucket full of blood with a severed head bobbing up and down in it. The eyes of the severed head were open and moving frantically left and right.

  Drake stopped and turned around.

  “Soldier!”

  The soldier carrying the severed head paused and looked over his shoulder.

  “Taking it to the incinerator, Captain!”

  “All right. Carry on,” replied Drake.

  Drake and his men continued through the corridor and observed soldiers setting rat traps, arguing, and sleeping in puddles of urine and vomit. The stench was unbearable for new recruits and the rare visitors to Alpha. Regulars hardly noticed it.

  As they approached the medical sector, wails and whines from the wounded floated toward them. Drake always hated going past this section, for many a friend of his had perished while waiting for treatment. There simply were not enough medical personnel to care for all the casualties.

  Only a single medical officer tended to the more than dozen wounded when Drake passed the moaning and crying wounded. He knew many of these men would die because the surgeons were overwhelmed. Plasma and blood were chronically low, not to mention the appalling sanitary conditions.

  Several weary soldiers stood guard, ready to shoot any of these poor bastards in the head should they die. It was an unfortunate safety precaution for the base, but a reanimated corpse inside Alpha could spell doom for everyone.

  * * *

  Following Drake’s muddy heels was Murphy. He was as tired as any man from the patrol and still unnerved by Private Nekot’s sudden and senseless death. He wondered if there really was any point to these patrols. What did we accomplish, exactly?

  Just beyond the rows of wounded was a tiny room with a steel door and two troops posted outside. The door was open. As Drake’s team passed by, Murphy paused a moment to gaze inside. He’d heard of this room before, but had never seen the interior because the steel door was nearly always shut.

  He watched curiously as two soldiers strapped a severely wounded trooper to a metallic bed facedown. The wounded soldier’s head hung over the side. The dying man turned to look at Murphy as his head was locked into place between two pieces of bloodstained wood. Each piece had a semi-circle cut into it so a person’s head could lie between them.

  It was a guillotine.

  One of the guards slammed the steel door shut and ordered Murphy to move on. Murphy was too shocked to move and remained frozen. The horrors inside Alpha appeared nearly as bad as the horrors outside. Why, oh why, did they post me here? Two weeks have felt like an eternity.

  Mifune grabbed his arm.

  “Let’s go, Murphy.”

  Murphy reluctantly went along. He shuffled his feet and stared at the guards and the door. Why on Earth would they kill a wounded soldier? His big, round, blue-green eyes instantly betrayed his emotions to Mifune.

  “He’s mortally wounded,” supplied Mifune.

  “So? Let him die peacefully.”

  “There isn’t much time for screw-ups in a place like this. You’ll learn that soon.”

  Murphy now walked side-by-side with Mifune. Murphy had a tall, lanky, still-developing, adolescent body and pimply face that looked awkward in a soldier’s uniform. He was an idealist. He hoped he might make a difference in the war, something most newbies to Alpha gave up after a month or so.

  “They shouldn’t do that, especially not like that. It’s degrading.”

  “Well, they do. They must. If someone is going to die, you put one in their head, or lop it off and put a bullet in the brain. You know that. You saw what we just did to…”

  Mifune considered his dead friend Sergeant Trevor. Murphy knew what Mifune was thinking and kept quiet. He hadn’t known Mifune long, but knew that Trevor and Mifune were close friends.

  Mifune bit his grimy fingernails, a habit he engaged in when worried, depressed, or nervous. He couldn’t believe his best friend was gone. He and Trevor always joked about who would die first, but Mifune never really believed it would happen to either of them. He’d assumed they’d survive their time in the Army and return home to relative peace in Freetoria’s working-class neighborhoods to collect a nice pension. He was wrong.

  Mifune rubbed his moist, bald head and realized he may not survive either. He had faced death since being drafted, took it in stride, even mocked it, but Trevor’s death shook him to the core. As a boy, his father told him to never mock Death, to always respect Death. Death waits for you patiently. To invite Death’s fury only brings Death closer to you.

  Mifune wished he had listened more to his father.

  Chapter Five

  The ruins of a once great, sprawling metropolis surrounded Forward Operating Base Alpha. The elders in Freetoria knew its name, but the uneducated poor like Drake and his men didn’t know and didn’t care. They saw it as one massive death trap.
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  Indeed, death was everywhere outside Alpha’s walls. Even if zombies didn’t shoot or devour you, you had to contend with dangers of debris falling off crumbling skyscrapers, ravenous packs of dogs, rats measuring half-a-meter in length carrying deadly diseases, and the dusty, harsh, cold air of the Longest Midnight asphyxiating you in your sleep.

  Beyond the urban ruins lay the Dead Mountains. Rarely explored and infested with deaders and nomadic and violent humans, most patrols avoided it at all costs. They were to fight to contain the dead in the urban ruins. What happened outside it was of no concern to most Freetorians.

  Drake and five of his men manned a small machine gun nest less than a kilometer outside the base. They were deep in this dead city atop a massive, toppled monument to a man who died centuries ago. The monument, a crumbled ruin to a forgotten hero of a culture wiped out in the zombie plague, was an ideal place to set up a machine gun nest. They were three meters off the ground with an open field of fire.

  Drake’s team was part of a string of machine gun nests spread out over a dozen kilometers. This gave Alpha an early warning system of a mass deader attack. Most of the time, the attacks were by small, disorganized deaders without the training of the more deadly armed zombies. None of the men expected much trouble beyond a few small groups of unarmed deaders and the occasional zombie sniper, most of whom were awful shots.

  Casey, a gaunt veteran of the war, sported a graying goatee and had thick, black glasses. He slammed his walkie-talkie against a rock in frustration and flipped the communication switch on again. “Come in! Come in, Echo One! This is Echo Two. Do you copy?” he yelled. “Figures.”

  Drake grabbed the walkie-talkie away from Corporal Casey.

  “Stop wasting time with that shit,” Drake snarled.

  “Murphy!” Drake hollered. “Stop hiding behind that boulder and get up here! You’ll be feeding Tram’s M-60.”

  Murphy closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and then jumped up and ran over. Tram was the most experienced machine gunner in the depleted platoon.

  Mifune stood silently next to Drake, and peered into the blackness for any sign of movement. He saw nothing.

  Casey kneeled in the machine gun pit and looked at Drake.

  “Sir, what are we going to do? Echo One is M.I.A.”

  “I’m aware of that, Corporal.”

  Drake knew everyone was scared. He was too. Echo One was less than a half kilometer in front of Echo Two. The last message they received from them was forty minutes ago—more than twenty minutes overdue.

  Drake handed the walkie-talkie to Casey.

  “Inform Alpha that Echo One is not responding. Tell them we are preparing for an assault and the base should be on high alert.”

  “Affirmative,” replied Casey. “What do we do, Captain?”

  “We wait.”

  * * *

  Drake and his five soldiers waited impatiently for the inevitable attack. Drake hated this part of the war. He preferred to get it over with. The anxiety was worse than any bullet zipping past his head, or a deader roaring in his face.

  Drake heard someone snoring behind him. He looked back and saw Casey passed out next to his communications pack.

  “Casey!” Drake whispered rather loudly. “Wake the fuck up!”

  Casey snapped to attention.

  “Sorry, sir!”

  “Has Alpha said anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Goddammit, I want you to get back…”

  From nowhere, something leapt on the monument and pounced on one of Drake’s men. It was a zombie.

  Drake’s man fell off the monument screaming. The creature was on his back. Drake reacted swiftly, raced to the edge of the monument, and blasted the thing in the head.

  “You okay, Miguel?” Drake asked.

  Miguel, a raw recruit like Murphy, stood up and shook himself off.

  “Yes, sir,” Miguel said quietly.

  “You bit?”

  “I don’t think so,” Miguel said unconvincingly.

  “All right. Get back up here and get in your position.”

  “Sir!” said Mifune.

  Mifune gestured for Drake to come to him quickly.

  Drake knelt next to Mifune, who was busy staring into the darkness. He peered into the same darkness as Mifune, but saw nothing.

  “What is it, Mifune?”

  “There!” Mifune said while pointing above a small hill of concrete ruins.

  Then Drake saw it.

  Dozens of deaders approached their position, many of them armed. Armed deaders tended to carry a rifle straight out in front of them, chest high, with the muzzle pointed in whatever direction their head was. Armed deaders would often ‘enlist’ untrained zombies along the way to join them like a pack of wolves. The deaders hunted together with the armed deaders using a rudimentary command system between each other. The untrained deaders simply followed their lead. There was rarely a leader in these deader platoons.

  Drake patted Mifune on the shoulder and then looked at his frightened men.

  “It looks like a couple of deader platoons are coming our way,” Drake said quietly.

  “How many are armed?” asked Casey nervously.

  “Enough to make trouble for us,” replied Drake.

  Drake’s men groaned.

  “Casey, get on the horn and tell Alpha we’re being attacked and need reinforcements.”

  Casey nodded his head and immediately got to work.

  “Sir, are we retreating?” asked Miguel, who was still visibly shaken from his earlier encounter with the walking dead.

  “No, goddammit! They wiped out Echo One. We’re all that stands between those bastards and Alpha. Understand?”

  Miguel nodded his head.

  “Get set, men,” said Drake. “We’re holding our ground to the last. Miguel, it’s time to use those sniping skills. Hit the armed ones.”

  “Okay, sir,” replied Miguel as he got into position to aim at the approaching menace.

  “Captain?” said Tram. “We got this by the balls, right?”

  “Yup, Tram. Just shoot right and shoot straight.”

  Drake’s men moved into position along the dead monument to form a small line with roughly three meters between each soldier.

  Miguel carefully looked through his sniper riflescope with night vision and smoothly placed the crosshair on an approaching armed zombie.

  He inhaled and thought of the days his father took him to the shooting range to hit paper targets. This ain’t any different, he thought, except this time the paper target wants to kill me. He exhaled then, and pulled the trigger.

  The zombie’s head exploded from the impact of the large caliber bullet. The remains showered the rest of the ghouls with blood and brain matter.

  The dead quickly realized the shot came from the ruined monument and began to scream indecipherably as they charged Drake’s entrenched men. The armed zombies directed the unarmed ones toward the lone squad of humans with a combination of wild gestures, moans, and roars.

  Drake’s team opened fire on the racing horde. The fight had at last begun.

  Chapter Six

  Vlad witnessed the sight of humans battling zombies through his binoculars on a regular basis and was usually bored by the spectacle. This time, things were different. The commander of this platoon was unusually tenacious and furious for a human, a fury Vlad could respect. The humans poured merciless fire into the fast-enclosing zombie horde. Vlad was surprised the humans hadn’t been overrun already.

  He lowered his binoculars and rubbed his aged, weary, black eyes. He hadn’t drunk the blood of a living human in months, and his body felt weak and ill. His hive survived on the sustenance of pigs they raised. Live human pickings were dwindling from the long, hard war against the deaders.

  Things were great before the dead walked, before the nukes, before the humans became an endangered species, and before Vlad’s own began to die from poisoned zombie blood and the threat the dead placed
on his kind. The deaders attacked their own as much as they attacked the humans. While his pack fed off the random human patrol, he knew it wouldn’t last forever, not with the encroaching zombie hordes. Vlad must make a choice to survive.

  He made a choice before when the Muslims threatened his kingdom. He defeated them despite the horrors he inflicted upon his own people, yet this was a far cry from then. This was the end of days, the end of the humans, and with it, the end of the vampires.

  Vlad was the first vampire, the first to convert the others, and the first to understand the threat the deaders faced to his kind’s food resource. When it began, he considered bringing his race into the mainstream, confirming the many rumors that circulated for centuries. However, he hesitated. Before he knew it, the world’s superpowers used their nuclear arsenals in a vain and genocidal attempt to contain the zombie plague.

  Many of his own died in the nuclear holocaust. His rage at their stupidity forced him to keep quiet about his kind. He didn’t know how they’d react to a hidden world of vampires in a world overrun by zombies. So he tried to keep his people alive via the semi-nourishing blood of pigs. However, as the decades wore on and his people died from zombie attacks, he realized he finally must decide.

  Vlad’s top lieutenant, Chosin, coughed behind him to get his attention. Chosin was taller than Vlad and clothed in a long black leather coat. His black eyes revealed his obstinacy, and the missing eyebrows gave him a menacing appearance.

  “Master, what are your orders?” Chosin said as he checked his AK-47 assault rifle. “Do we attack? Do we feed?”

  “For now, we watch and wait.”

  Chosin turned to the three vampires behind him and told them to stay put.

  “Master, we are weak,” Chosin said.

  “I know,” Vlad replied, as he scratched his deathly grey and wrinkled face. The humans needed the sun and built facilities to get the necessary UV lights they needed. To his kind, the Longest Midnight was perfectly suited for them. If only humans were as ubiquitous as in the old days everything would be glorious, he thought. Vlad always thought the devil was on his side, but Satan dealt his people a bad hand.