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In the dull illumination of the emergency lighting, technician Jeremy Owen watched Lieutenant Asshole as the officer quietly wrestled with an old crossword puzzle. Actually, it was Lieutenant Tad Ashley, attaboy college graduate from Case Western in Cleveland, Ohio, his folks likely rich as shit, unlike Jeremy who'd escaped from Pittsburg and a drunken violent dad to join the Army and see the world.

But the chump, about the same age as the twenty-three year old grunt who sat in this inactive bunker with him, was incompetent as an officer and insufferable as a human being.

And the world...

The world was currently these flat ass plains which even Dorothy Gale found boring enough that she ran off to Oz on the first available tornado. Of course after the fifteen kiloton device, as the tech-geeks called it, was exploded only five hundred feet above the mid-western city, those plains were flatter still, and radioactive as Hell!

Twenty days underground with this idiot, hopefully only a few more to go before the outside conditions were deemed safe enough for the soldiers to leave. But Lieutenant Asshole had made sure that the equipment which could tell them this, as well as all communications with Omaha, was rendered inoperative after he left a system interface panel active during the detonation of the bomb.

Every idiot knew of the EMP affect, the destruction of electrical systems by powerful magnetic fields discharged by a nuclear reaction. Every idiot, that is, except Lieutenant Asshole...

"Hey, Owen." Asshole spoke out of the right end, for the first time since the Pentagon had sent them out to test a theory. The proposal, born from the necessity of crisis, was to tap the as yet untouched nuclear arsenal to stem the tide of unnatural slaughter which had spread through almost every city and town in the Americas.

The enemy, primitive but persistent in its' single minded purpose to kill, then devour the good citizens of the US of A, tended to congregate within the more crowded population centers. Conventional ordinance failed on two counts. First was a matter of numbers. There were far too many of them to unload enough ammo to make any appreciable dent in the murderous cannibalistic hordes. Second point, a reluctant consensus among the military and scientific brain trust, was that the supernatural force consisted of individuals who were... more or less... Dead!

The unburied Dead, cadavers from morgues and funeral homes, victims of drive-bys and drug overdoses, and so forth and so on... all rose up to begin an uncontrollable rampage among the Living. What they lacked in autonomic response, the ghouls made up for in their primal lust for consumption of loved ones, and neighbors, and bosses, and anyone who was too stupid to get out of their path.

The only way to stop them was to shoot em in the head, to effectively sever all connections between brain and body. The problem was, there were hardly enough marksmen available to make this work while the zombies were still few in numbers...

They also found out pretty quick that any person killed during the crisis was apt to get back up and join the other side. Zombie bites were 100% fatal and further added new members to the rank an file.

But the egg heads had an idea which the hawks in DC were hot to try. If the ghouls liked the cities so much, move the remaining human population out. With the urban sites turned over to the Dead, the military would arrange a surprise for them.

"What's an eight letter word for 'Utter Despair? ' "

The other shook his head as his superior muttered something under his breath before returning to the task at hand. Just a few days more till they could don the rad suits and manually crank open the airlock seal. Jeremy wondered if he could wait that long before putting a bullet through Asshole's head, just to get it over with.

"Hey, Owen? What were the anticipated human casualty figures from this test? "

Asshole was a volunteer. When his bosses asked for two observers to occupy a bunker, some eight miles from ground zero, attaboy waved his hand like he was back in school. "Me! Pick Me! "

As for the reason Owen was there? Grunt don't volunteer, their CO do it for them.

"Figuring that gettin people to leave their homes was like pulling teeth, probably as few as 5,000 to as many as 15,000 dead. Why? " asked Owen, wondering if Asshole had some agenda behind the odd question.

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