Zombpunk: ARROW

Chapter 1

It was an open-faced, roast turkey sandwich with a lashing of gravy and cranberry jelly. The thick slices of white meat, stacked on top of two slices of coarse, artisan wheat bread, filled the surface of a dinner plate, leaving no room for mashed potatoes or greens.

Elder Tull dug into the feast hungrily, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. He paused occasionally in his assault on the sandwich to take a swift sip from the flagon of beer that sat beside his plate. He ate with a singular focus, famished, his rifle lying before him on the kitchen's cast-iron counter. It was 4 AM. Maybe earlier.

Between bites, Elder yawned.

He chewed and watched the voluptuous rear that wiggled before him. He couldn't help but think a few unclean thoughts. There was certainly ample rear for Elder to watch. It belonged to Mary, Bannock's head chef, shifting under her drab white uniform as she paced before her stove, readying eggs and bacon. The morning shift would be waking up soon, expecting their breakfast. She was never caught unprepared.

Before starting on breakfast, Mary had dutifully provided Elder, the last of the graveyard shift, with his dinner. Leftovers, sure, but what leftovers... Mary always had a little something extra hidden away for Elder when he returned from patrol. Sometimes a choice cut of meat or an extra helping of cranberry jelly.

She spoiled Elder Tull, doted on him like a pet. Elder didn't mind. Maybe she could play favorites 'cause she was slipping it to the Prime Administrator on the sly. It didn't matter, Elder didn't care. He liked to think it was perhaps something more substantial: a little comradely show of sympathy from an equally burdened soul. Like Elder, Mary was not a member of the Brotherhood of Bannock either by birth or conversion. She was no bible-thumping Jesus freak. Mary was an Arrowsoft employee, or had been before fleeing with Drew Arrow's entourage to the town of Bannock.

Before the end of the world, she'd been Drew Arrow's personal chef. Le Cordon Bleu trained. She'd once cooked for the President of the United States. Now she slung hash for a herd of pig-ignorant Christian zealots that denigrated her food and barked scripture at her as they ate.

How far the mighty had fallen.

It came as no surprise to Elder that Mary played favorites when she could, saving the best for those she liked: for Elder, Eydie, Sweet Beat, Kevin and Prime. They were fellow travelers, sieged on all sides by ignorance.

Living in Bannock as a filthy unbeliever was no easy task. The Bannocks treated anyone outside their ranks with apathy or disgust, as constant reminders of the filth and decadence that had led to the fall of mankind. It made no difference that they were all Pukes, just like the Bannocks. Lack of faith was enough to damn anyone as a Stem sympathizer. Only the protection of Drew Arrow, the Bannocks' great and beneficent patron saint, saved them all from banishment. And beyond the safety of Bannock's high valley walls, there was nothing left. The Stem phage still burned on.

Nights, Elder Tull patrolled, picking off what few Skinnies managed to stumble upon the Elysian bliss of the hidden valley. It was the duty for which he received his special meal. Eternal vigilance was the price everyone in Bannock paid for peace. It would take only one berserk Stem to destroy the town. One snarling, vicious, flesh-eating monster to summon a horde of its kin. For each Stem could somehow smell the living, zero in on the slightest scent on a breeze, and silently communicate the nearness of prey to the hundreds of other Skinnies nearby.

Elder chewed his food and watched Mary dish up eggs and bacon.

That also was a reason the Brothers of Bannock tolerated the non-believers: without the combat experience of Sweet Beat, the commune would be almost totally unprepared for what stalked beyond the valley walls. The Bannocks were proud to be nothing more than simple farmers. They never claimed to be pacifists, but could easily have passed as such.

However, even the chosen people needed protection from the evils of the greater world. And Drew Arrow had stockpiled the town with an arsenal of weapons sizable enough to keep the commune safe. Yet the Bannocks were wholly ignorant of guns. Any who wanted to help keep the commune safe required instruction, plenty of it, and no one knew the ins and outs of combat better than Sweet Beat.

Sweet, for her part, did nothing to make life easy. She went out of her way to antagonize the Bannocks. She relished insulting their puritan ways. She treated it like a sport. Buckle-hat baiting, she called it. In front of the Bannock wives, draped in their dowdy hemp dresses with their hair tied up behind their heads in tight buns, she paraded in cutoffs and heels. She sunbathed nude in plain sight of the workers in the fields, and made noisy, angry love in her bungalow at the unthinkable hour of two in the afternoon.

She elicited more than tuts from the buttoned-downed Bannocks. They could be downright vile, spitting venom. But what more could they honestly do? They needed her. No one else could fight like Beat. No one. Elder had seen her in action.

Elder finished the last bite of his dinner and wiped his mouth with his napkin. While Mary started on a second batch of scrambled eggs, Elder carried his plate to the sink and washed it clean. With a grateful nod to Mary, Elder picked up his rifle and headed out the kitchen door.

Outside, over the east canyon wall of Bannock's lost valley, the first sign of a beautiful summer morning awakening. Not dawn, but the hint that dawn was approaching. The still night air held on to the warmth of the previous day, and a soft breeze blew through the corn fields of the valley floor below Elder.

Elder paused to savor the sight: the stalks of corn dancing in the swirling. The crop was only a few weeks from harvest, standing taller than a full-grown man. Enough corn to last Bannock through the winter by far. And the barley and wheat, farther along the valley, was just as bountiful.

Elder slung his rifle over his and started down the dirt path towards his cabin. Just over two dozen of the small, prefabricated structures clung to the north wall of the valley, clustered around the Community Hall. One main half crescent path fronted each house, with a wide, graveled road intersecting it, spoking out from the grand steps of the Hall.

The Community Hall was half church, half mess hall. Its tall clock tower gave it the commanding presence of a rural county seat, with whitewashed steps leading up to grand, double doors. Mary's kitchens were at its rear, with administration offices around it. The Hall's main room was easily reconfigured for dining or worship, as necessity demanded. The tables and chairs could even be cleared out and basketball hoops lowered, should anyone be in the mood for a quick pickup game.

Only one cabin sat apart from the rest, farther up the valley wall. Larger, and with a number of smaller auxiliary structures. It held a unique authoritative overview of the valley of Bannock, as did its future occupant. For this was the cabin of Drew Arrow himself.

It sat empty, dark against the valley's wall, anticipating the arrival of the eccentric multibillionare. It had waited, along with the occupants of Bannock, for the last six months. The current, exact whereabouts of Drew Arrow was a much discussed and contemplated question around town. Honestly, the Bannocks were growing impatient.

If he was dead, caught up in the chaos of society's self-destruction, then the Bannocks were eager to know. His arrival was the ultimate event they were waiting on to finally secure the town. A massive boulder, the Rolling Rock, sat above the narrow entrance to Bannock's valley. They'd rigged it with charges to bring it tumbling down as soon as Drew Arrow was safe inside, locking the valley off from the madness and destruction of the greater world.

Bannock would finally be safe. There'd be no more need to patrol.

Elder Tull's combat boots crunched the dry dirt as he descended the shallow incline, dropping down towards his cabin. The cabin he shared with Eydie. It had been their home for the last six months, ever since their escape from Seattle and the air assault on the floating bridge. Elder even dared to say they were a couple, though the day-to-day shifts in Eydie's mood often kept him guessing.

He had carnal knowledge of her nightly, at least there was that. Whatever rights to her body he had, he was taking. But any claims he might have made to her affections were far more tenuous. After the attack on the Opera House, after all the Stems had gone insane, Elder had hoped that Eydie had put her past--and Steve--behind her. But the actuality was far more complicated.

Eydie was far more complicated.

He was dead, of course... Steve. Everyone knew it. Eydie knew it. Six months and the Stem phage would have consumed each and every Stem on the planet.

The Prime Administrator's calculations were the back-of-the-envelope type, but he'd generously given the global population no more than six weeks beyond the initial Psycho-Social Terminal Event. The phage was clearly exponential. For each Stem who sneezed – electrically speaking – a dozen more caught the cold. The madness spread like wildfire, manifesting itself first as acute paranoia and ending in the total extinction of all higher brain functions.

Any normal disease, as terrible and murderous as it might be, could always be ridden out. Even though the madness could not spread to Pukes – they had no stem to infect – it quickly became obvious there'd be no outliving the plague. For the Stems, once the insanity had finally burned out their minds, did not lie down and charitably die as one might have expected. Their bodies, perfectly controlled and regulated by the stem, continued on.

The dead truly walked.

Beyond the walls of Bannock's cloistered valley, the mindless husks of the Stems still wandered the wasteland they had created. Forever young and beautiful, they doggedly searched for any source of nourishment. When the lights were still on, electricity had powered them all. Billions feeding directly from wall sockets. In their hubris, they'd harnessed the power of the sun – a vast fusion reactor network – to feed their hunger. But when the plague hit, in an effort the stop its spread, the authorities had cut the power. The Stems were left to starve in the darkness. Or so everyone had hoped.

The Skinnies were not without their means. Their implants included a backup routine: the ability to extract electricity from consumed matter. Decades of dependence on cheep, abundant energy had atrophied this habit, but without an electrical grid to power their stems, the shambling dead, following their stem's fundamental programming, began a methodical search for anything eatable. Disuse had laid waste to the world's food economy. At its height, Stem culture had even turned to implanting household pets to ensure their sustenance. Nothing was left in pantries or on grocery store shelves. In desperation, Skinnies turned to what bounty nature provided to satisfy their hunger.

The animals they could find, the Stems tore limb from limb. With amped-up muscles and their lightning reflexes, the Stems, though dead, could still run faster than any deer, jump higher than any jaguar. When they'd exhausted what fauna was at hand, they'd turned their hunger on the one last source of warm meat: the Pukes – those human that had resisted implantation before the collapse of civilization. The Stems seemed able to smell living flesh, track it over many miles. Just the hint of warm blood on the breeze was enough to drive them into a frenzy.

There was just no chance that anyone was left alive outside of the town of Bannock. Not with a hundred billion Skinnies hunting day and night. It was impossible, even if Steve had somehow managed to survive the phage... Drew Arrow, too. Soon, everyone was going to have to accept the inevitable roll the Rolling Rock into place. Then, perhaps, they could all get on with their lives. Eydie and Elder most of all.

A rustle in the corn field caused Elder to stop dead in his tracks. He was a few yards away from the front door of his cabin, one of the chalets on the very edge of the village. His rear porch looked out over the corn, and south out towards the mouth of the valley.

Elder and Eydie had spent many a warm, summer evening drinking the Bannock's watery, home-brewed beer and watching the sunset over the hills. But the view meant little stood between the chalet and anything that might wander into the valley, searching for prey.

Elder quietly pulled his rifle from his back and raised it to his shoulder. His IR reticle lit up the pre-dawn gloom. The corn shuffled again. Elder stepped slowly forward.

He considered calling out, hollering to Eydie for backup. She would be asleep, of course, but her rifle would be close by. The corn rustled again... best not the startle whatever was in the thicket.

Elder moved closer, keeping the corn in his sights.

Chapter 2

Nathan thrust the cattle prod between the bars of the cage, causing the Thrall to spasm in pain. It wailed and sobbed like the woman it had once been.

Nathan knew better than to think of the Thrall with any sort of compassion. Despite the appearance of a young, naked woman – despite the pleading look in the Thrall's large, brown eyes – Nathan knew it to be nothing more than a carcass, the shell that had once been occupied by a human being. It would tear his head from his shoulders without blinking one of its beautiful eyes. Nathan had seen Thralls do it, out beyond the walls of the compound. Herds of them, overwhelming defensive positions, ripping into veteran Marines like they were dolls. The Thralls would feast on the flesh of the fallen before the men were even fully dead.

No, Nathan knew better than to have any compassion for a Thrall. He zapped it again through the bars with the cattle prod, eliciting another howl.

Fucking animals.

The Doctor only corralled the females, but the females were no less dangerous than the males. Nothing of their inward sex was left in the dead bodies. Perhaps that fed Nathan's revulsion: their outward beauty contradicting so sharply with their inner savagery. Nathan stepped away from the cage, returning the prod to its hook on the concrete wall. The Thrall snarled and breathed heavily, watching Nathan as he receded into the blackness.

Nathan rubbed at his sore right hand, flexing the fingers.

Are you going to dissect that one, too? he asked as he stepped towards the operating table, where another Thrall lay, its thorax meticulously pinned open. The Doctor leaned over it, examining the internal organs with a loupe over her good eye.

No, I shouldn't think so, she replied, distracted. Amongst the gore, the shaft of the dead Thrall's stem thrust out, cold and metallic against the lake of red. The Doctor was carefully cutting away tissue with a scalpel, slowly removing the device from the meat, like some deranged archaeologist. Her motions were fastidious, careful to the point of obsession. You can have her if you want, she said, not looking up from her work. I won't need another specimen.

For target practice? Nathan joked, looking back over his shoulder at the thing in the cage.

If you'd like, Doctor Ryan shrugged, finally looking up from her dissection. She smirked, removing the loupe from her good eye. Her other eye was loppy, mounted on her face in a Picasso fashion. Though the men have come up with a few more creative uses for the specimens. She nodded toward the caged, nude girl.

Nathan recoiled in disgust. "And you allow that?"

The Doctor shrugged again. Why not? she returned the loupe to her good eye and leaned back over her work. Properly restrained, they're perfectly docile. And the pass-time has some scientific merit.

Raping Thralls, Doctor, has no scientific merit, Nathan spat. He was well aware of what the conscript ranks got up to late at night in the holding cells where Doctor Ryan