“Look, if I could only ask your leaders—”

“That’s just the point! Zooms have very little of anything you’d call leadership. Sometimes a group’ll get an idea into their failing brains, and go shambling off in some direction to do one thing or other. Settle old scores they vaguely recall from when they were alive, for instance, or surround a house and bang on it to scare everybody inside half to death. And then there are brain-smorgs… those are hard to resist.

“But the very idea of doing something so… organized… as an ambush in Lik’em country…?” She shook her head, dismissing the idea as absurd.

“Well, what about you?” I asked, taking a chance. “You and Moulder are… well, recent is the word you used. You still have plenty of um…”

I almost said life in you, but decided to use other phrasing.

“…You seem just as bright and astute as anyone not saddled with your… uh, impairment.”

“Why, what a sweet thing to say!” She smiled and turned to her friend. “Wasn’t that sweet, Moulder?”

Moulder grunted and rolled his one eye in its socket. “Yeah, real sweet.”

“But you really don’t understand,” Sully continued. “Recents like us have to stay out of the way, or the older corpsies will tear us apart. We smell too fresh, you see. They assign us tasks that take finesse, like dealing with strangers and such. But when it comes to mass action, Zooms tend to follow those even further along than they are.”

“Farther along?”

“You know,” she said, and pretended to hold her nose, without actually touching it.

“Rule by the ripest,” Moulder summarized.

“Oh, I see.”

“Ripe makes might,” Sully corrected. “Only the decayed may decree.”

Moulder pondered. “Which means the really rank hath privileges.”

“Uh huh. And victory goes to the spoiled.”

“Then corruption empowers?” I interjected, on impulse.

They paused, then Sully replied with a grin. “Necrolutely.”

“Rot on!” Moulder enthused. “Power to the putrid!” And for a second I feared he was about to offer me a high slap-handshake. But he settled for raising a clenched fist.

I relaxed, having already, that evening, learned a new meaning to the expression – “gimme five.”

We sat in silence for a time, listening as the zombie “singing” on that far hillside coalesced, taking on a complex rhythm and eerie tonality I had never heard in all my travels.

I let go of the throat mike at last. It seemed futile, and anyway, my neck was getting raw. There had never been the slightest sign that anybody in orbit heard me. Something was terribly wrong, and I was going to need help ever to find out what happened to my crewmates in the slurry party, let alone the Clever Gamble herself.