Flesh-Eaters Anonymous - pt 11

But the idea of a hoi z-word was urban legend on the other side (when there was one). I was quickly taken into a shower and scrubbed clean with wire brushes and given a thin orange jumper to wear. They then took me into what looked like an interrogation room, complete with concrete bricks and metal chairs on either side of a metal table. There was no one-way but a closed-circuit camera hung from a wall, trained down at the table. I sat with another pair of those plastic cuffs in one of the chairs; this time with my hands in front of me.

As fast as they'd gotten me down there I would have thought they'd want to know what I knew ASAP. But I waited so long in that cold room that my body warmed up the cold chair they'd left me in.

Finally the door opened. I don't know anything about rank, but an officer with a couple bars on his uniform came in with two cups of coffee. The smell made my stomach groan and I watched him, dressed for the low temperature of the room in a cozy-looking turtleneck.

He set the two cups in front of me. The one closer to me didn't have any steam coming from it. He sat back in his chair and picked up his cup, taking a short sip, but tipping his head slightly back and closing his eyes. I picked up my cup and guzzled the bitter stuff down.

He wasn't wearing a nametag. I wondered if that were a bad thing. I saw a look of controlled violence when he opened his eyes, training them on me. He set the cup down, his movements calm and deliberate, but the cords in his neck strained beneath the turtleneck, his jaw clenched. I had the sensation he would have preferred to have thrown me to the ground and begun stomping on my head and the tight smile locked on his face gave me the idea he'd done something a lot like that on more than one occasion.

"They told me you were talking to a corpse." His voice was barely a whisper. I had to lean up to hear him. "That it looked like you knew it." I was tensed, waiting for the other shoe to drop—hell, any shoe, I didn't know how to take the officer.

"That's impossible," he said. "We've been saying that a lot around here—impossible. Corpses don't get up and kill. You know what else they don't do."

"What?"

The officer sprang up, his arm sweeping toward me, the butt of his gun smacking across the side of my head.

"It wasn't a question." His voice was still calm, controlled. "Assuming they do think, you're going to tell me numbers. How many of them there are, when they're planning to mobilize, where they—"

A young soldier burst into the room in fatigues. He looked to the officer across from me.

"Sergeant, it's Noland." The sergeant rose in an instant.