Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  “This is my notice. Thirty-two hundred for two kilos. I’ll pay half tonight, half in the morning.”

  Instead of replying, Wu studied Cole for a long, uncomfortable minute. The entire time Cole was forced to sit there, a placid, simpleton’s smile on his face. Finally, Wu said, “I need ID.” Cole had never heard of a dealer asking for ID, and he sat back with what must have been a stunned expression on his face. Wu’s flat, emotionless look had not changed since he had slid across from Cole. “I have friends on the force. I need to make sure you’re legit.”

  In this case, “legit” meant being a criminal. To most of the police force, Cole was the worst sort of criminal. He slid over his ID. Wu took it and disappeared for a full hour. It took all of Cole’s patience to sit in the sticky booth with the counter girl unrelentlessly sneering at him. The only time she took a break was when she sneered at a young girl with a bad case of slag who came slouching in. All the tattoos in the world weren’t going to cover up the rot eating away her nose.

  “The taxmen don’t like you much,” Wu said, coming to stand at the end of the table. He almost smiled. “That means I like you even more. Sixteen-hundred tonight. Order the number thirteen to go. Pay in cash and go. Simple.” He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “One other thing,” Cole said just as Wu started to leave. “I need some clean blood.” Wu’s eyes narrowed slightly, otherwise his face might have been made out of wood for all it moved. “Not much. A few quarts every other day maybe.”

  “I don’t move that stuff,” Wu replied.

  Now it was Cole’s turn to remain still. He forced himself to count to forty in his head before speaking. “You will for the right price.” Blood and Syn-ope; the implications were obvious.

  “Maybe. Wait here.”

  Once again, he went into the backroom and once again Cole was kept waiting. He figured it would be another interminable wait, but Wu was back in only fifteen minutes. “I have a call in,” he told Cole.

  “Will it be long?”

  “No.”

  Then why did you come out? To keep an eye on me? Cole’s eyes flicked to the counter girl. Her sneer was gone. She was standing very still. The stagnant, grease-stinking air had become thicker than it had been. Had the alley door been shut? Cole suddenly felt trapped, both in the booth and in the restaurant.

  “Have a seat while you wait,” Cole suggested.

  Wu’s head turned toward the back. “No, I have soup on the fire and I…” Cole’s left hand was below the table, the flimsy, wobbly, light table. He heaved one end up and smashed it into Wu’s surprised face. The Mandarin fell back as Cole leapt to his feet, his right hand sliding into the long black trench, going for his gun.

  The counter girl was no poker player, but God she was fast. She reached beneath the register and hauled out a cheap scattergun. The tip of the sawed-off barrel struck the register, giving Cole a split second to drop down and to the left, close to where Wu was scrabbling out from beneath the table. The girl hesitated, afraid she’d hit both Cole and Wu.

  In that split second, Cole had the Crown out and fired, aiming purposely to miss her. With the force looking for any reason to sink him, he’d be facing a murder charge if he actually shot her. He shot the aquarium instead. Three hundred gallons of brackish, toilet-stinking water exploded out, washing over the tiny slip of a girl and throwing her off her feet.

  Her scattergun went off with a deafening roar, taking out two ceiling tiles and a light fixture. Before the glass was done raining down, Cole was flying out through the kitchen. A knife was thrown his way, missing his ear by inches. The cook who’d thrown it reached for a second, but then lifted his hands as Cole aimed his gun at his face. “Where’s the back exit?” Then he saw it and raced on, glaring at a skinny teen with a wisp of black hair on his lip. He had picked up a bowl of near-boiling pho and had been thinking of throwing it at Cole. Instead it sloshed on his already stained wife-beater, making him shriek.

  Cole slammed through the back door, sending a pack of rats squealing beneath the battered trashcans they’d been feeding from. Hard, cold rain slashed his face, momentarily blinding him and nearly sending him into the back of a delivery van that was up on blocks. In the next second, he was racing down the alley, the sound of police sirens cutting through the storm.

  He took a quick right, then his first left, and immediately slowed, throwing his hood over his head to blend in with the rest of the afternoon crowd as it plodded dully about its business. Cole’s business was staying out of jail long enough to figure out how Santino and Wu were connected.

  As he walked, Cole ran over the timeline: Santino kills his wife and drains her dry. Sometime in the next few days, the wife is reported missing by a sister and Santino runs. Cole is given his ticket, tracks him to the flophouse and then to Wu’s. Santino dies half an hour later in the basement of his building.

  “He attacked the skirt to drain her,” Cole muttered, “and right in his own building, too. Talk about stupid.” He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, trying to remember what Santino’s slag numbers were. Sometimes the slag built up more on the inside than the outside, and every slag eventually turned into a moron.

  An armored police car trundled slowly up from behind. Cole recognized it by the crunching sound its wire mesh tires made. “Shit,” he whispered as it began to slow. When it pulled up abreast of him, he didn’t wait for the window to be cranked down; he turned and raced to his right. There was no alley to duck into, there was only a series of stoops, each leading to its own tenement building.

  With no time to be picky, he rushed for the nearest, taking the stairs three at a time.

  “Stop!”

  The one word was all the warning Cole could expect. The police could now legally shoot him if he failed to comply, something he had no intention of doing. He was through the door like a shot and found himself in a small vestibule that once held rows of mailboxes on either side of the front door. They were long gone. And so too was the door that led to the rest of the building. It and its frame had been stripped away, leaving a gaping hole that opened onto a long dim hall.

  Running up one side of the hall was a flight of warped “poly-granite” stairs. There was no actual granite in the formed rubber, and neither were they very hard. Each step sagged under his weight as he went up at full speed. Behind him a cop had just charged into the building. He paused long enough to jerk out his .480 service piece, which fired a huge slug that could turn a man inside out. They could defeat body armor and car doors with ease, and it was said they could penetrate an engine block, if that was ever needed.

  Cole felt his back tingle on the last few steps, expecting the bullet that would send his spinal column shooting out through his belly. The shot never came. He blended in so well with the darkened stairwell that the officer couldn’t line up a good shot in the split second he had Cole in his sights.

  The officer followed Cole up the stairs, losing ground with every step. He was carting around thirty pounds worth of body armor and another ten in equipment. The man was something of a juggernaut, built for power, not for speed. But he didn’t need to be especially fast. All he had to do was get a clear shot and that would be that.

  Cole wasn’t going to allow the cop the opportunity. With his life on the line, he ran at a full sprint up a third flight before speeding down the hall. This hall was even darker than the ones below and Cole was only a distant shadow by the time the cop made it to the third floor.

  Cole was only steps from the far end of the hall and another flight of stairs when thunder exploded behind him. It was followed immediately by a crack! as the bullet tore through the plaster wall in front of him. Then he was on the stairs, leaping down them seven, eight at a time. Down he went until he was at street level and, without pausing, he burst into the alley, knowing that if he was unlucky, he would charge right into one of the onrushing police cars he could hear screaming into the neighborhood.

  He knew that he was hated, but when he
saw a cruiser turn down the alley and plow into a slow-moving slag, he realized they weren’t thinking about taking him alive.

  The driver of the car stopped, rolled down his window and looked back at the slag bleeding in the street. Cole saw that it was Bruce Hamilton driving. “You heard the siren, didn’t you?” Bruce yelled at the slag. “Next time, stay out of the damned street.” By the time he turned back, Cole was across the alley and slipping between two buildings. There was barely room to move sideways and smack dab in the middle was a mound of trash, taller than he was.

  There was no climbing it, but with the walls so close he was able to put his back to one and shimmy up and over. Dropping down on the other side, he froze. Not fifty feet away was another police car, shining a light through the driving rain. The narrow passage was shadowed to begin with, but with the rain, it seemed like night, and Cole slunk down low hoping to blend in.

  The beam of light passed only a foot over the top of him and stopped. A curse was just taking shape in his mouth when he heard a low, hungry moan behind him. He cast a look over his shoulder and found himself staring at a grey…thing. It had made a burrow of sorts in the trash and was now emerging, flashing broken, yellowed teeth in black gums, and when the spotlight hit it, the angry moan became one of pain. Immediately, Cole’s mind screamed: Dead-eye! and he dug for his gun.

  Before he could get the gun from its holster, the creature hissed, “Go way,” breathing the hideous stench of death over Cole, causing him to shudder.

  It wasn’t a Dead-eye. A Dead-eye as grey as this one would have attacked without hesitation. No, this was a trog. A trog was what happened to a person when the slag building up in them hit a runaway point. Half of its face had rotted away, as had four of its fingers. The rest of his body was covered in lesions and boils. There was no telling what sort of insidious tumors were growing inside him.

  Trogs rarely ventured out of their pits beneath the earth where they lived out the remainder of their shortened lives. If the police hadn’t been searching for Cole, they would have killed it without hesitation, citing a “quality of life” law that had been in place since the bombs fell.

  Just then a trog was low priority and the light passed on. “Sorry,” Cole said, backing away from the thing. He still had his hand on his gun and was thinking about using it if the trog came any closer. They carried every disease known to man. “I’m leaving, just relax.”

  “Go way.” It pointed half a finger toward the street.

  Cole backed away from it until he saw it crawl back into its mound. Then he turned and hurried on, glad for the rain washing down on him. When he got to the street, he saw a police car half a block down. Despite the short distance, he breathed a sigh of relief, glad to have gotten away from the trog without being touched. “I’d kill myself before I ever got that bad,” he muttered, stuffing his hands down into his pockets and turning away from the police.

  After five blocks Cole felt that he was in the clear and he cut across town to the only place he was likely to pick up any leads: Santino’s apartment. The small lobby was just as dark as it had been the day before and this time, Cole wasn’t going to take any chances. He had his gun tucked in his coat pocket as he mounted the stairs on cat’s feet.

  He took the seven stories slow, stopping only to ask the one woman he passed about Santino. The man’s trench coat she wore hid whatever form she had, but Cole could see that she was well past her prime and crabby about it. The frown lines running down her cheeks were now permanent.

  “Never heard of him,” she muttered and tried to push past. Cole showed her a picture. “Nope,” she said after barely a glance.

  “Look again. It’s important.”

  She jerked her wrist out of his grasp. “And so is getting my shopping done before another Cat-2 comes in. Now, get out of my way.” She went stumping down the stairs in oversized boots that matched the coat.

  Cursing her, he went up to the seventh floor and paused before stepping into a windowless hallway. Evenly spaced along the ceiling were nine light fixtures; only three were working and the light they emitted equaled to a few candles. They barely gave off enough light to form a shadow among the shadows. While he waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark, he listened: two doors to his left a woman was nagging her husband about his job. In the apartment next to it, a baby was wailing while Station 3 played the annoying Busy Bee show. Another television was blaring some soap: “I’ve always loved you, Rhett!” A man’s rasping snore could be heard from behind another door.

  Once his eyes had adjusted to the near black, Cole crept past these doors and their living occupants and came to apartment 714. Out of habit, he put his ear to the door. It was eerily quiet inside. After giving the knob a single twist, he broke out his set of lock-picks. The lock in the door was ancient and the tumblers were practically begging to turn. The door opened into a cramped two-bedroom apartment that was almost as dark as the hallway. Light trickled in from a crack along the edge of a lead-shuttered window.

  In front of him was a living room with two couches; one threadbare and the other still wrapped in plastic. They were canted toward a big box television that sprouted bunny antenna three feet long. Past the living room and to the right was a narrow dining room that held an eight-foot long table with four high-backed chairs. Although they appeared to be made of wood, they were hardened plastic.

  A single door in the dining room led to the kitchen, while another in the living room went to the two bedrooms and the apartment’s only bathroom. At first glance, there was nothing special about the place. There was no suggestion that a Dead-eye had ever lived there—or a murderer for that matter. He had expected there to be a smell of death in the apartment. Instead there was only stale air and a whiff of cologne, it was a scent he knew.

  He sucked in his breath as a cold barrel touched the side of his neck.

  “Sorry, Cole.”

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

  Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

  Generation Z

  Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

  Generation Z: The Queen of War

  Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

  Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  Dead Eye Hunt

  Dead Eye Hunt: Into the Rad Lands

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  Tales from the Butcher’s Block

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