Operation Zombie by Steven G. Johnson

Author:Steven G. Johnson [Johnson, Steven G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blood Moon Press
Published: 2020-12-18T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

I came upright in a spasm, smacking one knee into my mouth and banging the edge of my brow into the other. It hurt. I felt the pain flash into my being, snapping my eyes open and burning the rest of the sleep out of my brain.

I groped around for my Thompson and found it, right next to my side, where I’d laid it before I went to sleep.

Dave looked down at me, placidly surprised, from where he sat, his boots stuck straight out in front of him.

“Hey, Mick,” he said softly, so as not to wake the others nearby. “I think your internal cuckoo clock needs winding, Elf. It ain’t but two-thirty.”

This was meaningful, somehow, but I wasn’t all the way awake yet. Dave intuited my confusion from my face.

“We don’t jump off until oh-four-hundred,” he explained. “It was you who wanted everyone to get some sleep before the patrol went out. Whassa matter, you change your mind?”

Dave’s beard was solidly in place and didn’t seem to be covering any exposed bone. Brenner was facing away from us, but his head was right where it ought to be, too.

“No,” I said, to everything. But Dave kept right on existing, and we were still in Hell.

“Everybody knows the route?” I said, falling back on routine. “Carrying all the right gear?”

“Well, yeah,” said Dave confidently. “Everybody’s ready. Not much left to do now, unless you wanna kick off the patrol a little early?”

“No, let ‘em sleep,” I said. They were, at least the ones I could see. Nobody whose nerves were stretched too tight to ignore quiet voices was still with us.

No one but me, that is. I was feeling distinctly jangled. But I cared very much who knew it.

So I got up and busied myself checking the map, the loads, and like that. It was comforting, doing the same things I’d done ten thousand times before. And there was an open lava tube nearby, so the coffee was always hot.

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