Starts with a Match

The Cherries

Margaret's there already with the load, chock full of another supply of explosives. She greets us with her usual loud gusto and her signature move—tossing her head to throw her blonde bangs outta her face. Cut her hair short a month ago but made a mess of it. She's super proud of the fade Jim gave her last week, though she insisted she keeps her long bangs just so she could complain about them.

Jim gives us a nod and goes off in his own truck to meet up with Hannah Medrano in Adler, a few miles southeast of Sochi, nine hours away from our base in Rustavi and our next mission.

He always rides ahead, cause no one can maneuver these forests like he can, managing hopping off curbs and onto the side roads like a pro.

Plus he's the only grunt I know that doesn't flinch anymore when he mows down gluts in that truck.

Us remaining three get to our spots in our ride, a suped up old f250 with a bloody stripe painted along the sides just like all the others in red unit. Elijah's in the passenger seat with the map and a massive flame thrower resting against his thigh. I'm driver. Margie's in the truck bed with a bag of goodies between her knees.

We call them 'cherry bombs'.

A sick-smelling mess of scientific nonsense that's a concoction of gasoline, shrapnel, and blood.

I can tell you most of the blood in these bombs is mine.

Shared the task of blooding with eight other soldiers who have the same O negative type, but a month ago, six went missing, one died in combat, and the other died when the medic on duty passed out and forgot to check on them. Seven hours later. Person fell asleep with the tube in their arm and didn't wake up again.

So it's just me now, the last, personal keg for six different units. Hence why the bombs are rarer these days than before, and why I'm. I dunno. The younger brother who's ignored by his sister, because she was right about the whole fucking army using and abusing its soldiers, but it's too little too late for me to back out now.

My O negative blood type is the closest smelling thing to the real deal, so it's what we use for the bombs.

The PCS go crazy for it.

Plagued civilians.

Most people in the units, especially here on the front lines where they're sick and bored of all this shit—they call them gluts.

Gluttons. Ravenous, insatiable. Zombies.

Can't be a zombie if they're still alive. Which they are. They're just starving and out of their fucking minds.

We can thank Arizona for that discovery.

Plague that started the 2022 November had already wiped out half a million people by that point. Came from somewhere in New Zealand, I think, in Christchurch. You can bet half the world thought there was something to be said by that. End of the human race, coming out of a place of Christ.

Least the name they came up for the damn thing didn't have to do with that. Just called it NZ23. Made it rhyme. Snappy.

At the worst of it, there was no cure for the NZ23 in sight.

Homes and businesses on fire, hoarding and riots, and President Melinda Flenner was stumbling over herself day by day trying to keep people calm. She got shot in the leg at a speech in DC, and everything shut down. Curfews, stores boarded up, loved ones split apart and forced to quarantine. Two million people died.

Then in Arizona, January 2023, lead spilled into some pipeline. Whole fiasco on the news, lots of bigwigs pointing fingers at each other. No one ever really took the blame.