The requisition form arrived at 0600, which was Rita’s first clue that someone was fucking with her.
Nobody filed paperwork at dawn. Dawn was for sleeping off night shifts or pretending the war wasn’t happening for another twenty minutes. Dawn was sacred. Dawn was the last moment before the world reminded you it had ended fifteen years ago and was still working on the details.
Sergeant Rita Voss read the form twice.
Item 1: 3000 rounds, 5.56mm
Item 2: 40 gallons diesel fuel
Item 3: ~1 exorcist~ 1 flamethrower operator with theology background
The third line had been crossed out in blue pen, then rewritten in black. Two different people. Two levels of crazy.
Rita drank her coffee. Instant. Tasted like burnt dirt. The Fortress had been out of real coffee for three years. Someone kept saying a supply convoy was coming. Someone kept lying.
She stamped the form DENIED in red ink.
The form came back ten minutes later with a note paperclipped to it: *URGENT. COMMAND PRIORITY.*
Rita looked at the note. Looked at the form. Looked at her coffee.
The coffee had nothing useful to say.
-----
The problem with the apocalypse was that it had become boring.
Fifteen years of the same shit. Zombies at the fence. Clear the fence. Burn the bodies. File the report. Do it again tomorrow. Humanity had survived by making horror routine, and routine was the most reliable killer of all.
Rita had been a quartermaster for eight years. Before that, she’d been a kindergarten teacher in Denver. Before that, she’d been a person who thought the world made sense.
Now she managed inventory for a military base that pretended it was a government. Denied requests. Approved requests. Played God with bullets and toilet paper. Someone had to decide who got to shoot and who got to shit, and Rita had lost that coin toss a long time ago.
The radio on her desk crackled.
“Voss, this is Captain Mendez. You get my requisition?”
Rita picked up the handset. “I got a form that looks like someone wrote it during a stroke.”
“It’s legitimate.”
“It asks for a priest.”
“A flamethrower operator with—”
“With a theology background,” Rita said. “I can read. What I can’t do is understand why you need a priest with a fire fetish unless you’re planning the world’s worst baptism.”
Silence on the other end. Then: “Have you been watching the feed from Tower Seven?”
“I’ve been watching my coffee get cold.”
“Pull up the feed.”
Rita didn’t want to pull up the feed. She wanted to finish her coffee and deny three more requisitions before breakfast. She wanted normal. Normal was good. Normal meant nothing was trying to kill you in a new and interesting way.
She pulled up the feed.
Tower Seven overlooked the killing field—a half-mile stretch of dirt between The Fortress walls and the treeline where the dead liked to gather. It was called the killing field because that’s where things died. Mostly zombies. Sometimes people. The name wasn’t creative, but accuracy counted for something.
The camera showed the field at dawn. Gray light. Gray dirt. Gray stumbling shapes in the distance.
And something else.
Rita leaned closer to the screen.
“Is that a building?”
“Started going up three days ago,” Mendez said through the radio. “We thought it was just… I don’t know. Zombies stacking shit. They do that sometimes.”
They did. Zombies weren’t smart, but they weren’t completely stupid anymore. Sometimes they piled cars. Sometimes they stacked bodies. Sometimes they just stood in groups like they were waiting for a bus that would never come.
But this wasn’t stacking.
This was construction.
The structure was maybe twenty feet tall. Rough walls made of wood and scrap metal. A peaked roof. No windows. One door facing The Fortress like an invitation.
“Zombies don’t build churches,” Rita said.
“It’s not zombies.”
The camera zoomed in.
Skeletons.
A dozen of them, moving with the efficiency of a construction crew who’d forgotten they were dead. One carried lumber. Another hammered nails with a rock. A third measured something with a length of rope, checking the proportions like a foreman who gave a shit.
Rita watched a skeleton tie off a support beam with a knot she’d learned in Girl Scouts.
“They know carpentry,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“The dead know carpentry.”
“Yeah.”
“And you want a priest.”
Mendez didn’t answer right away. When he did, he sounded like a man who’d been awake too long thinking about things that shouldn’t be possible.
“Command wants you to do a field assessment. See if the situation requires… specialized intervention.”
“Specialized intervention.”
“Religious assets.”
Rita laughed. It came out bitter. “Religious assets. We’re calling priests assets now?”
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“We’re calling them something other than crazy, which is progress.”
“When do I leave?”
“Noon. Take a squad. Don’t get killed. We’re low on quartermasters.”
The radio clicked off.
Rita looked at her coffee. Still cold. Still tasted like dirt.
She stamped the requisition PENDING and filed it under “Shit I’ll Regret Later.”
-----
The squad was four people who looked like they’d rather be literally anywhere else.
Corporal Hayes: mid-twenties, buzzed hair, carried his rifle like it owed him money.
Private Chen: eighteen, fresh off wall duty, had the look of someone who’d just realized the apocalypse wasn’t going to get better.
Private Okoye: late twenties, machete strapped to her thigh, chewed gum like it was a personal vendetta.
Specialist Ruiz: early thirties, demolitions expert, wore a crucifix under his body armor because faith and C-4 weren’t mutually exclusive.
Rita briefed them in the motorpool.
“We’re going to look at a building.”
“What kind of building?” Hayes asked.
“The kind the dead are building.”
Nobody said anything. Chen looked like he wanted to throw up. Okoye blew a bubble. Ruiz touched his crucifix.
“It’s probably nothing,” Rita said, which was the kind of lie leaders told when they didn’t want to admit they had no idea what they were walking into. “We observe. Document. Come back. Nobody dies. Everyone gets dinner.”
“What’s for dinner?” Chen asked.
“Canned stew.”
“The beef or the mystery?”
“If you have to ask, it’s mystery.”
They took a Humvee because walking was for people who wanted to get eaten. The gate opened. The Humvee rolled through. The gate closed behind them like a mouth.
Rita watched The Fortress shrink in the side mirror.
She’d been outside the walls maybe twenty times in eight years. Every time felt like the first time. Every time felt like the last.
The killing field was quiet.
Too quiet, which was a cliché, but clichés became clichés because they were true and truth didn’t give a shit about originality.
Hayes drove. Okoye rode shotgun. Rita sat in back with Chen and Ruiz, watching the church get closer through the window.
Up close, it looked worse.
The walls were straight. The roof was level. The door hung on hinges that didn’t squeak. Whoever built this knew what they were doing, and that was the problem.
The dead didn’t know what they were doing. The dead shambled and moaned and occasionally remembered how to open doors if you left them unlocked. They didn’t measure twice and cut once.
Hayes parked fifty meters out. Everyone dismounted. Weapons up. Eyes on the treeline.
Nothing moved.
Rita had been in firefights. She’d been in sieges. She’d been in situations where the dead came in waves and you shot until your rifle clicked empty and then you used the rifle as a club.
This was worse.
This was anticipation. This was waiting for something that might not come, which meant your brain filled in the gaps with every nightmare it had filed away for exactly this moment.
“Chen, Okoye—perimeter,” Rita said. “Hayes, Ruiz—with me.”
They approached the church.
The door was closed. Rita tested the handle. Unlocked. Of course it was unlocked. Horror didn’t believe in locked doors.
She pushed it open.
Inside was dark. Dirt floor. Wooden walls. Smell of old blood and something else—incense, maybe. Or rot. Sometimes they smelled the same.
The center of the room had a circle carved into the ground. Symbols around the edge. Not random. Deliberate. Geometric. Rita didn’t recognize the language, but she recognized intent.
Someone had made this mean something.
Ruiz crossed himself.
“That’s not good,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Fucked if I know. But it’s not good.”
Hayes scanned the corners with his rifle. “Place is empty.”
“Now,” Rita said. “Place is empty now.”
She took photos with a camera that had survived three stronghold collapses and still worked better than most of the people she knew. Documentation mattered. Evidence mattered. When you reported back that the dead were building ritual sites, it helped to have proof.
They left the church and regrouped at the Humvee.
“We done?” Hayes asked.
Rita looked at the treeline. Still nothing. Still too quiet.
“Yeah. We’re done.”
They weren’t done.
-----
The attack came at 1700, which was also known as “exactly when Rita was trying to eat dinner.”
The alarm sounded. The walls lit up. The radio exploded with chatter that all said the same thing in different ways: *They’re coming. They’re organized. Holy shit, they’re organized.*
Rita dropped her mystery stew and ran to the command center.
General Carver stood at the tactical display like a man watching his retirement fund burn. Gray hair. Gray face. Gray future. He’d been running The Fortress for ten years, and every year had carved another line into him until he looked like a topographic map of disappointment.
“Voss,” he said without looking at her. “Your timing is shit.”
“What’s happening?”
“See for yourself.”
The display showed the killing field from six different camera angles.
The dead were coming. Not shambling. Not wandering. *Marching.*
Zombies in front—flesh still mostly attached, eyes still mostly functional. Behind them, skeletons in formation, moving with the kind of synchronization that required practice. Behind them, shapes that moved too fast to be zombies and too wrong to be human.
Ghouls.
And at the back, watching from the treeline, a figure in robes that might have been black or might have been covered in something that used to be inside a person.
A Necromancer.
First confirmed sighting in The Fortress’s operational zone. Command had briefed about them. Other strongholds had reported them. But reports were different from seeing.
Reports didn’t stand there and *direct traffic.*
The Necromancer raised one hand. The undead stopped. Every single one. Hundreds of them, frozen mid-step like someone had paused a video.
The Necromancer pointed at the church.
The skeletons moved.
Not toward The Fortress. Toward the church. Fifty of them, carrying bodies. Fresh bodies. Bleeding bodies. Bodies that might have been refugees or might have been from the convoy that went missing last week and nobody wanted to talk about.
They arranged the bodies around the circle Rita had photographed.
“What are they doing?” Carver asked.
Rita didn’t answer because she didn’t know, and not knowing was worse than any answer she could invent.
The sun was setting. The light was dying. The dead didn’t care about light, but apparently they cared about *timing.*
The Necromancer entered the church.
For five minutes, nothing happened.
Then the bodies started moving.
Not like zombies. Not shambling or groaning or doing any of the things bodies did when they came back wrong.
They stood up in unison. They walked to the circle. They arranged themselves at even intervals like points on a compass rose.
And they started screaming.
Not pain. Not fear. Something else. Something that sounded like language if language was made of broken glass and regret.
The Necromancer walked out of the church.
Every undead in the killing field turned toward The Fortress.
Every. Single. One.
Hundreds of faces that shouldn’t have faces anymore. Hundreds of eyes that shouldn’t be able to see. All looking at the same place. All waiting for the same command.
The Necromancer pointed.
The dead charged.
“Light them up,” Carver said.
The wall turrets opened fire. Fifty-caliber rounds chewing through the front ranks. Bodies dropping. Bodies exploding. Bodies collapsing into pieces that still tried to crawl.
It didn’t matter.
For every one that fell, three more kept coming. And behind them, the skeletons marched through the kill zone like they were already dead and had nothing to lose.
Because they didn’t.
Rita watched a skeleton take a round through the ribcage. It didn’t slow down. It didn’t fall. It just kept walking with a hole where its lungs used to be, because lungs were optional when you didn’t breathe.
“We need that flamethrower operator,” Carver said.
“I’ll approve the requisition,” Rita said.
“Do it now.”
Rita ran back to her office. Pulled the form. Stamped it APPROVED in red ink that looked too much like blood.
She filed it under “Religious Accommodation.”
There was a form for everything. Even the end of the world.
-----
The exorcist arrived thirty minutes later, which was faster than any supply request Rita had ever processed.
His name was Father Hale, but he introduced himself as “the guy who sets things on fire for Jesus,” which was either blasphemy or the most honest thing Rita had heard all week.
He looked like someone had put a priest and a special forces operator in a blender and poured out the results. Black fatigues. Crucifix on a chain. Flamethrower strapped to his back like it came standard with the vestments.
“Where’s the problem?” he asked.
Rita pointed at the window.
The church was glowing. Not burning. *Glowing.* Green light spilling from the cracks in the walls like someone had trapped lightning inside and it was trying to get out.
“That’s new,” Hale said.
“Is it fixable?”
“Depends on your definition of fixable.”
“My definition is ‘stop the magic zombie church from doing whatever the fuck it’s doing.’”
Hale smiled. He had the kind of smile that said he’d done this before and it hadn’t killed him yet, which was the best endorsement anyone could offer in the apocalypse.
“I can work with that.”
He requisitioned a squad. Got Hayes, Okoye, Ruiz, and Chen, who looked thrilled to be going back outside.
“Stay in the rear with the gear, Sergeant,” Hale said to Rita.
“That’s the plan.”
“Good. If this goes bad, someone needs to survive long enough to file the paperwork.”
He walked toward the gate like a man going to church. Which, technically, he was.
Rita watched from the command center.
Hale’s squad made it to the church without contact. The dead had pulled back. Not retreating. *Waiting.* Like they knew something was about to happen and wanted a good view.
Hale kicked the door open.
Green light poured out. Bright enough to hurt through the camera feed.
He walked inside.
For thirty seconds, nothing happened.
Then the screaming started. Not the bodies. Not the undead.
*The church itself.*
A sound like metal tearing. Like reality bending. Like something that shouldn’t exist realizing it did and being furious about it.
Hale walked out.
The church exploded.
Not fire. Not shrapnel. *Light.* Pure, green, wrong light that washed over the killing field like a wave and knocked every undead flat.
The Necromancer shrieked. A sound that carried over the wind and the gunfire and the distance. A sound that promised this wasn’t over.
The Necromancer retreated into the treeline.
The undead followed. Not running. Not fleeing. *Withdrawing.* Organized. Deliberate. Tactical.
They’d be back. Probably tomorrow. Probably with a better plan.
That’s what organized meant. That’s what they were fighting now.
Hale’s squad returned through the gate.
Hale was smoking a cigarette. He offered one to Rita.
“I don’t smoke,” she said.
“Start.”
She took the cigarette. It tasted like burnt dirt, which meant it paired well with the coffee.
“What was in there?” Rita asked.
“A summoning circle. Bodies for fuel. Bad theology and worse Latin.”
“Did you stop it?”
“I interrupted it. There’s a difference.”
“Will they try again?”
Hale looked at the treeline. The dead were gone, but everyone knew they were just offscreen. Waiting. Planning. Learning.
“They’re not mindless anymore,” Hale said. “They’re not even improvising. Someone’s teaching them.”
“The Necromancers.”
“Yeah.”
“How many are there?”
“More than there used to be. Fewer than there will be.”
He finished his cigarette and flicked it toward the killing field. It landed in the dirt next to a piece of a zombie that hadn’t finished decomposing.
“Good news is, you’ve got me now,” Hale said. “Bad news is, you need me.”
He walked toward the barracks, flamethrower still strapped to his back, rosary swinging from his belt.
Rita watched him go.
Then she went back to her office and filed his deployment under “Active Personnel—Religious Assets.”
There was a form for everything.
Even for priests who burned churches.
Even for wars against enemies who remembered how to build them.
-----
That night, Rita couldn’t sleep.
She lay in her bunk and stared at the ceiling and thought about skeletons who knew carpentry. About zombies who could march in formation. About Necromancers who pointed and thousands obeyed.
The dead had a chain of command.
Humanity had walls and guns and forms filed in triplicate.
She’d seen which one was winning.
At 0200, another requisition came through. This one from Tower Seven.
Item 1: 5000 rounds, 5.56mm
Item 2: 60 gallons diesel fuel
Item 3: 1 exorcist (confirmed available)
Item 4: 2 exorcists (additional, if available)
Rita stamped it APPROVED.
She was running out of red ink.
She was running out of everything.
But there was still a form to fill out, and forms meant structure, and structure meant they hadn’t lost yet.
She filed it under “Religious Accommodation.”
There was a form for everything, even the end of the world.
Especially the end of the world.
The dead were learning.
Humanity had better learn faster.
