Click. "This is a wight. Toughest of the zombie family. One of old Europe's least popular exports." This picture took me by surprise. Sure the creature was as nasty as expected, appearing to be a normal man except for his horribly distorted visage, sharp, black teeth and red eyes, but this picture caught my attention because it was an action shot. Julie Shackleford was in the corner of the frame, with a long spear in her hands, keeping the creature at bay while it clawed at her. She was wearing some sort of strange body armor that I did not recognize. Her dark hair had been captured flying wildly around her head like a halo, and there was an intense look of fear and concentration on her face. She was frozen in midmovement, gracefully lunging toward the claws of the undead beast. It was like a cover shot from Sports Illustrated only this time the sport was Mutant Tag and the penalty for losing was painful death.
I studied her face. She was much younger, far too young to be doing what she was doing. Not as gorgeous and distinct then as she would turn out to be, but obviously filled with courage. She was wearing her glasses, but I could still see her brown eyes, and her teeth were a hard white line in her face. My heart knotted at the sight of her in danger, though obviously that incident must have turned out just fine. She was beautiful.
I'm such a sap.
I snapped out of my reverie and tried to pay attention to Harbinger's lesson. I had missed part of what he had said, but I did not dare ask him to repeat it. He was finishing up on the dangers of facing wights.
"Their touch causes immediate paralysis, even through armor. It wears off quickly, but by then it's usually too late. They can be insanely strong. So don't screw around against these without backup and heavy weapons."
"What happened?" I blurted.
"Huh?" he answered.
"In the picture, with this… wight."
Harbinger paused. Probably debating whether he should rip me for butting in, or just tell the story. He was notorious amongst the Newbies for not telling the stories behind their adventures, as opposed to Sam or especially Milo who seemed to love it. Finally the internal battle was ended and he decided to share. However, the look he fixed me with let me know that I would be running laps until I puked because of the interruption.
"Outside of Sandusky, Ohio, October of '95. Just before Halloween. Crazy time of year in this business. My team was taking care of a ghoul problem at an old cemetery, when this one surprised us. We didn't expect a wight. It popped out of the ground right in front of our vehicle, crushed the whole front end with its bare hands, and smashed through the window like it was nothing. I was in the passenger seat and it was on me so fast that it was a blur. It hit me and all of my muscles locked right up like I was frozen. Milo was driving. It nailed him too. Julie was in the back seat. She opened up right between us with her pistol, surprised it apparently, because it quit trying to kill me and Milo. The wight jumped on the roof and started peeling it back to get her. She bailed out with that spear." He paused and chewed on his lower lip for a moment.
"Make a note, it was a good thing she didn't just keep using her gun. Firearms will stop a wight eventually, but eventually is the key word. See, the longer an undead like the wight exists, the stronger it becomes. New ones are pretty easy to kill, but this particular son of a bitch dated back to the Civil War. They can take forever to quit, so you work in teams, hold them off you while you pour fire into them. The rest of the team heard the commotion on the radio, and they were coming fast, but not fast enough.
"So anyways, Julie gets out and uses the spear to hold it back. Every time it moved, she would stick it. You can see in the slide that it has a catch past the blade to keep creatures from slipping down the shaft to get you. She kept sticking it and basically played keep away. It couldn't reach her as long as she kept stabbing it, but there was no way that spear was going to put it down. The guy that took the picture was no help. He was just some bozo bystander. Great shot though. Finally the feeling returned to my limbs enough to flop out of the Suburban and I lit him up."
"Lit him up?" somebody else asked.
"Flamethrower. Don't fight high-level undead without one. Once its flesh was on fire it was only a matter of time before it ran out of steam. Julie pinned it to a mausoleum door and held it there until it quit kicking. Took forever. Mean sons o' bitches."
"How old was she?" Holly asked.
Harbinger thought about it for a moment.
"She had just turned eighteen."
"Damn."
"It runs in the family." He returned to the lesson.
Sawing off a human head is harder than it looks. The body tends to flop around every time you hit it, and it makes a really nasty mess. Once goo gets on the handle of your knife, it gets even worse, and the next thing you know, your blade is glancing off of bones that you didn't even know were there. I grunted as I strained the blade against the rubbery flesh.
"Damn it, Pitt, don't saw. This ain't gardening. It's killing. Chop it!" Sam shouted at me. Sam always shouted.
Responding to the order, I raised the heavy knife over my head and brought it down with as much force as possible, this time chopping completely through the tissue and breaking the vertebrae. The cadaver's head rolled off the table and landed on the floor with a damp thud.
"Much better!" the instructor bellowed. "See that, class? Don't screw around with them. There are some things that don't quit until you take their heads off. If you have got to do it, do it quick. Solid whack like you're chopping wood. Don't *foot around. And remember the fresh ones squirt more!"
Our class of remaining Newbies was slowly shaping up into a coherent team of Hunters. Currently we were standing in a small refrigerated room near the hangar, known as the Body Shack. MHI had saved the most disgusting lessons for the last of us. I'm sure that staking and beheading corpses was practical training, but I believed that the main reason we did this was to weed out the trainees who couldn't handle the sheer nastiness of lopping off a human head.
It probably would have been more efficient to do the horrific stuff first, as it really took out anyone with a weak stomach. According to Milo the reason we saved it for this late in the training was that it was hard to get a good supply of medical school leftover bodies. By saving this part until most of the trainees had washed out he had to scrounge up fewer corpses. Milo was a pretty efficient guy.
"Next team. Newcastle and Mead," Sam said to Holly and Chuck, the next people in line, as Milo used a hose to spray down the floor. Several of the other Newbies had lost their lunch on this exercise. Mingled fluids coagulated around the central drain.
Placing the gore-splattered knife on the table, I stumbled away to wash my hands. They were shaking badly and I felt a strong urge to vomit. Trip was already at the sink scrubbing furiously.
"Dude, that sucked," he hissed.
"Next time I stake, you chop," I replied.
"Hey, you called heads. Not my fault."
"At least it wasn't the Gut Crawl."
He frowned at me. "Come on, man, I'm already trying not to barf as it is, don't bring that up."
The Gut Crawl had consisted of a single Newbie wiggling through a long section of pipe filled with cow entrails. Between the dark, the smell, the heat of the pipe and the horrible squishiness of it all, it was probably the worst experience of my life, up to and including actually dying. Supposedly it had been a test of our ability to deal with disturbing surroundings and still keep our wits. Personally I thought it was Harbinger torturing us. Two of our class had quit rather than do it, and when I had been stuck halfway down that dark pipe, covered in slime and feces and intestines, I had envied them. One other trainee had made it halfway down the pipe, only to suffer a panic attack and lock up. All three of them had been given fat severance checks and sent home.
There were only a dozen of us left. Judging by the standards of our instructors, it was no surprise that MHI was currently short-handed. Harbinger had been very up-front about it though. He was a firm believer that the harder we sweated in practice, the less we would bleed when it was for real.
Holly finished her staking and came over to wash up. She seemed unperturbed by the minor fact that she had just used a hammer to drive a sharpened wooden shaft through what had once been a real live person's rib cage. I had been surprised by our former stripper. Nothing ever seemed to faze her, and she attacked every job with a vengeance. We still had not learned her story, but it was obvious that she well and truly hated the other team, and she was looking forward to exacting some payback. If that required crawling through guts, or chopping off limbs, no problem.
"That wasn't so bad. Chuck got stuck with the head. Poor guy, he brought it on himself though," she said, flashing us with a wicked grin.
"How?" asked Trip, still washing his hands. I had news for him, no amount of water was going to make us feel clean after what we had just done.
"He always goes rock. Never paper or scissors. Dumb ass." She examined the old blood staining her nails. "By the way, I overheard Dorcas talking to Milo. Harbinger's pretty happy with how we're doing. We're going to get the whole weekend off."
"Awesome," I exclaimed. We had been training hard for a solid month. I'd be more than ready for a break this weekend. With the prospect of an actual couple of days off, I suddenly didn't mind so much being covered in gore. "It'll be good to get out of here."
"No kidding," she replied, then turned toward Trip who was adding more soap and giving it another try. "Dude, Trip, you need to hurry up, the rest of us need a turn too."
"Ugh, you have no idea what kind of bacteria is in something like this," he said. "You've got to do a good job sanitizing."
"Weren't you a science teacher?" Holly asked.
"Chemistry, and I subbed band, and I was the assistant football coach. It was a small school." Being his roommate, I knew his story well. Having to cave in some students' heads once they had joined the ranks of the undead really tended to mess up a teaching career.
"I figured with all of the frog dissecting you wouldn't be so damn squeamish. Hey, you have some blood or snot or something in your dreads." As he reached up in disgust, Holly cut in front of him to wash her hands. "Sucker."
With a thwacking noise and a flourish Chuck took his cadaver's head off, and Sam bellowed at us the fact that we did not do too bad for a bunch of derelicts, thus ending another day of training.
My breath came in ragged gasps. I had long since passed the point where I could control it. The muscles in my legs were on fire, especially where Huffman's talons had pierced me, and my feet and knees ached with each footfall. Blinking away the sweat in my eyes, I pushed on, trying to once again find that point of oblivion where the pain didn't matter. I hate running. All big men hate running. Sure, I could sprint, but you don't see very many three-hundred-pound marathoners for good reason. Only crazy people run for fun.
The last mile of forest trail was the worst. It had the steepest hills and the most rutted path of the whole trek. But I took comfort as I made my way up the red dirt road, as we were almost done for the day. It had started just after dawn, with hours of physical training, tactics, armed and unarmed combat practice, monster class, and now the sun was down and we were limping in from a six-mile run from hell. Finally the trees thinned, and I even managed to smile as we passed the kudzu-covered chain link fence to enter the compound. Most of the Newbies had already arrived and were crashing out on the available benches or stretching on the grass. The good runners like Trip, Lee, and Mead looked almost relaxed and refreshed from the little jaunt. Trip's good natured thumbs-up made me want to beat him to death.
"About time, Pitt," Grant Jefferson shouted. He glanced at his stopwatch in disgust. "Pathetic. Just pathetic." He had led the run and had made most of the rest of us look bad. Of course, some of us came out looking worse than others. One of the other Newbies stumbled off to the side to puke. Grant just smirked. "All right. We're done for now. Stretch out tonight, because we're doing this twice tomorrow." Everyone groaned.
I sat on one of the empty benches and put my head in my hands. I knew that I was supposed to walk around and gradually let my heart rate subside to avoid muscle soreness, but man, I just needed a break. I excelled at everything physical except for this. Gradually my panting turned to normal breathing, and my heart was no longer pounding away. The other Newbies began to wander off toward the barracks for some much-needed sleep. I stayed on the bench to enjoy the cool twilight.
"Hi." A lovely voice spoke from behind me. "Mind if I have a seat?" It was Julie.
"No. Yes. I mean, of course," I stammered, sliding over so she could fit. She dropped down next to me with a smile. She was wearing shorts and looked like she had been working out. I tried not to stare at her well-muscled legs. I was suddenly very self-conscious about my sweat-soaked T-shirt. I bet I stunk.
"So how's everything going?" she asked.