Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

by Petrucha, Stefan

  I grabbed the side of a water cooler to slow us, then tugged the chain to get his attention. Booth swung the chair my way, looking like he was going to crush my head with it.

  I covered my face with my hands. “Don’t they teach you anything? Stop screaming! You’re bringing them from all over.”

  Instead of barking some clever response, he looked at the newcomers and brought the chair around in a wide arc. His swing threw a blond chak in a nurse’s outfit into what looked like a dead tree trunk wearing a business suit and tie. They both went down, and this time, Booth didn’t scream.

  We still made great targets. Booth did anyway. All I had to do was moan and groan and they’d take me for one of them. Dodge as he might, a few got close enough to rake their nails, in some cases their bones, through his clothes. Drops of his blood hit the tiles. My back smeared them as we went.

  We were heading for the open hall, but that wasn’t a good thing. Booth, wounded, was slowing down and the crowd ahead of us was getting thicker. I looked around, then back at the far end. Crap. We’d missed it at first, because we were kind of busy, but next to the door Penny disappeared behind, was a cabinet with a hose, a fire extinguisher, and an axe.

  I shouted “Tom, there!” about five times before he decided to pay attention. Hearing me, the dead looked around, but never thought to look down.

  “Even an axe won’t kill them all,” Booth said.

  “Not for the ferals, for the door!”

  Moving with the crowd, we went a little faster, but his bravado and adrenaline were waning, and now I was slowing him down. Worse, every yank of the chain sent a bone-deep throbbing through my ankle. But, back to the wall, chair holding the dead at bay, Booth made it to the cabinet. And I’d been stepped on only ten or twelve times.

  “You going to let me up now?”

  “No!” he said loudly. They all moaned in unison at the sound. He shoved the chair’s four legs into the nearest one, whose overalls made him look like a plumber. But there was something else about that one. As Joe the plumber tumbled over me, I noticed his skin was plump, thick with a puddinglike sheen that was very different from the typical desiccated chak look. It made me think he might be one of ChemBet’s latest experiments. When the big son of a bitch fell on me, I found out the hard way that he was heavier than most chakz, too.

  Crunched by his squirming chest, I called to Booth. “Don’t say anything, okay? Just think. By the time you drop the chair, open the cabinet and grab the axe, it’ll be over. You can’t make it without me.”

  His face shivered, like he’d been electrocuted. I thought he’d been bitten deeply, but somehow I knew he was wrestling with the idea of dealing with me.

  “I know you still think I killed Lenore. But as much as I swear I would have died for her, that I’d still die for her, I can’t anymore. Neither can you.”

  He tried to swallow his next scream before it got too loud, then shoved Joe the plumber off me.

  “Get up,” he said. “Fast.” He looked tired, as if he were about to drop the chair.

  I bolted onto my good foot, opened the cabinet, and grabbed the axe. With whatever he had left, Booth cleared enough of a space for me to take a swing at the door handle. Unlike what I did to Flat-face in one swing, this time my first shot barely made a dent. The second knocked the handle off and set the door swinging inward.

  Dropping the chair, Booth collapsed into the stairwell beyond. When the chair landed upright in the cafeteria, the feral in the business suit fell into it. Crazy in that special feral way, he looked around like he was wondering where the hell his desk was. I leaped over Booth, pushed the door shut and braced it with the axe.

  Through a little window in the door, I saw the other ferals push against the guy in the chair, trying to get to the door. I kicked the axe in tighter, the blade against the handle, the bottom against the floor. It held.

  “I was going to use that to cut your foot off,” Booth said, nodding at the axe.

  Our positions had suddenly reversed. He lay at my feet, panting, his blood staining the floor.

  “Gee, sorry. If I’d known I’d have tried to use the chair.”

  A quick blast came out of his nostrils. A laugh, or close to it.

  Tom Booth and I were never friends, but when I was alive, we’d respected each other. My memory used to be photographic, and my instincts weren’t half bad. He trusted both. Ridiculous as it was, even though he’d slept with Lenore, part of me wanted him to look at me like I was a still a cop.

  “How’s the bleeding?” I asked.

  He looked at his arm, then tore some of the sleeve away. There were scratches on his skin, some deep, but most weren’t seeping anymore.

  I held my hand out to help him up, but he huffed and puffed his way to his feet on his own.

  “Do exactly what I say until we’re out of here and I won’t crush your fucking head in,” he said.

  Below, we heard moaning. Above, moaning mixed with gunshots.

  “Fine,” I said. “But you do realize we’re not getting out of here, right?”

  Booth nodded. “Yeah.”

  A tall window in the stairwell gave us a view of the world outside. Below, two squad cars were parked in front of a marble version of the ChemBet logo, their motto carved beneath: QUALITY, SERVICE, CLEANLINESS, AND VALUE! Beyond a parking lot was a half acre of manicured green, a few abstract statues that looked like a bronze giant had taken a dump, then hills covered with junk pines. There were no other buildings in sight.

  I pressed my hands into the glass. “Too thick to break. Gunfire’s upstairs, so that’s where Maruta’s security men are. The chak dorms are in the basement. Assuming everyone got a gander at Jonesey’s pictures by now, it’s full of ferals. Which way do you want to go?”

  “Wherever there’s a phone,” he said.

  I felt in my pocket for mine, then remembered he’d tossed it to the rookie.

  Booth headed down, slow enough for me to follow. Our chain sounded like a Slinky as it tumbled on the steps. The office space on the floor directly below looked vacant, so we stepped out. We heard moans, but they were distant, rooms away.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “What city?”

  Booth thought a second before deciding to answer. “We’re about ten miles north of Chambers.”

  “What brought you?”

  “I said I wouldn’t crush your skull. I never said we’d swap tips.”

  A few seconds later, in a particularly plush office, on a desk full of flowers and cards, we saw a landline.

  “Somebody had a birthday,” I said.

  “Shut up,” Booth answered.

  As he grabbed the receiver, I picked up one of the cards. Dated November twelfth, it was addressed to Rebecca Maruta, best boss in the world.

  Before Booth got the receiver all the way to his ear, he chucked it onto the desk.

  “Dead.”

  Like a bad horror movie cue, the moaning got louder, as if a wall between us and the ferals had suddenly crumbled. They were nearby.

  “It’s not the only thing.”

  Exiting the office, we saw how bad it was. Out of nowhere, scores of dead, maybe fifty, came from both directions, filling the space. We barely made it back to the stairwell. When we closed the door, instead of being muffled, the sound echoed louder. They were coming up from below, too, fast.

  I shook my head. “It’s like they’re coordinated.”

  “Up,” Booth said, like there was a choice.

  We picked up our pace. By the time we passed the door held by the axe, we were taking two steps at once. On the next floor up, there were more shots than moans, so we stopped for a look.

  In the center of a mezzanine, the best boss in the world was standing on a table, looking down at the terrified group of boffins beneath her, clearly annoyed by their weakness. Her NFL-grunts stood in a semicircle around them, shooting anything that moved.

  And there was plenty moving. Shredded body parts lay all over. Legless fe
rals pulled themselves along by their hands as their fellows clambered over them, straight into the gunfire.

  The ferals looked like they were trying to get to Maruta and the boffins, as if they knew who was responsible. It was a plan. Not a very good one, but a plan.

  How many chakz did Penny say they kept here? Two hundred thirty-something? The livebloods would win easy, if their ammunition held out.

  I heard a rush of air next to my ear, then saw the neat hole the bullet had left in the glass. Booth and I jumped back at the same time. We kept climbing. The last door locked, we both threw our shoulders into it until the latch broke, then fell onto a wide plain of black tar, feet tangled up in chain.

  “Fuck,” Booth said.

  There were chakz on the roof. Maybe twenty. But they weren’t moaning. They’d been talking. Seeing us, they looked up, as if we were interrupting a secret meeting.

  Booth tensed, ready to run back. I put my hand on his shoulder, which only made him tense more. “Hold it. They’re not feral.”

  When a few shambled toward us, their formation broke, revealing someone at the center.

  “Jonesey!” I shouted. “You damn son of a…”

  He held up a finger, handcuff dangling from one wrist. His other hand held a phone.

  “No, I don’t have the photo anymore. I already told you, this isn’t my cell. They took that. I had to grab whatever I could.”

  Booth rushed toward him. “Give me that fucking phone!”

  Ten chakz blocked our path.

  Jonesey flipped it shut and eyed Booth. “I don’t think so.”

  Booth reared. “You’re not feral, listen to this. Give me that phone or I’ll have you all arrested. I’ll cremate you myself.”

  An airy rush came from their all their mouths.

  Booth made a face. “What the hell is that supposed to be? Are you deflating?”

  “No,” I said. “They’re laughing.”

  Booth moved for Jonesey again, but this time four chakz grabbed his arms and held him. He was too tired to put up much of a fight.

  I looked at my resurrected friend. “Jonesey, what the fuck is going on? You faked the feral?”

  “Worked, didn’t it?” he said. “Look, a lot did go feral when they saw that photo. About half. That’s real. This is sort of the command center for the rest of us. I’ve got some of the others trying to secure the perimeter.”

  “Secure the what?” Booth said.

  Jonesey ignored him. “It’s a revolution, Hess. The dead aren’t lying down anymore.”

  I shuddered in disbelief. “You’re going to take over the country with a hundred chakz? You’ll be sliced into pieces by Maruta’s men, or wind up gnawing on each other.”

  Jonesey lowered his voice. “It’s not just here, I got word back to the Bones, to Bedland, to at least four of the camps. Not everyone’s great at working the phones, but it’s spreading. Organizing is keeping some of them from going feral.”

  “They’ll cut every last one of us down!” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “They’re already cutting us down, and worse. But there’s always other possibilities, right? We’ve all got parts to play, especially you.” He smiled and pointed toward another stairwell entrance on the opposite side of the roof. “Follow that down to the bottom, and it opens up out back. You can take one of those squad cars. Oh, wait a minute.”

  He thought a moment, mumbled a mnemonic and pressed redial on the cell.

  “Bill? Remember those cars I asked you to put out of commission? Can we belay that order? Belay? It means stop, don’t do it. Yes, that’s right, don’t destroy the cars. Got it? What? Oh…”

  He walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. I followed. An angry Booth was dragged along beside me. Below, I saw the cars, hoods open, chakz ripping whatever they could from the engines.

  “Never mind then. No. You’re doing great. Thanks.”

  Jonesey hung up and walked us to the stairwell. “Well, you’ll have to hoof it.”

  “Hoof it where? Where do you think I’m going?”

  “To get Kyua,” he said. “You’ve got to. The cure is our only chance.”

  Booth smirked.

  “Kyua? Jonesey, you can’t still think…even after seeing what they did to Hudson…?”

  He shrugged. “Satan is often God’s companion. It was his project, right? Not hers. Of course I still believe.”

  I was speechless. Booth couldn’t care less. He tried to look sincere as he asked, “How about helping us get these chains off and we’ll do whatever you like?”

  Jonesey gave him a benign smile. “You’re lying. It doesn’t matter. Can’t help. No keys, no tools, just good thoughts.” He held the door open for us. “Now, I’ve got a lot to do, you’ve got a lot to do, so…go!”

  22

  If we’d been outside, or riding in a car, say, Tom Booth’s agitated muttering might’ve been quiet. In the high-ceilinged stairwell, his voice echoed louder than a shock jock.

  “Revolution? I’ll give them a fucking revolution.”

  His feet hit each step with increasing speed and fury, making it hard to keep standing again.

  “Whatever happens to the LBs, it’ll be worse for the chakz,” I said.

  “Poor babies. You already had your chance when you were alive. Screw this ‘lab’ and everyone in it, but in the cities? Those’re real people your compañeros will be hurting, like the ones who died back in the plaza.”

  He hit the landing and spun for the next set of stairs. The chain taut, I had to grab the banister for balance. “What do you expect us to do?”

  “I expect you to stay dead!”

  I kept hold of the banister. The sudden halt didn’t make him fall, but it stopped him.

  I stared into his steely blues. “So did we! How many times do I have to spell it out? You want to get out of here, shove your fist in your piehole and slow the fuck down! The building’s full of ferals and people, real people, as you like to say, who’ll really shoot us. Jonesey’s corpse commandos couldn’t protect us from a girl scout with a slingshot. They’re not going to last long. Neither will his revolution.”

  “Soon as the chain’s off,” he said, “neither will you.”

  “Christ, Tom, were you this much of an idiot when I was alive? What happened to you?”

  He went back to the stairs, moving slower and without a word.

  Jonesey hadn’t lied. At the bottom, the fire door opened easily onto the back of the building. The day slapped us with one of its better versions of fresh, cold air. Past the parking lot was the pine forest I’d seen from the window.

  “Road or woods?” I asked.

  Booth felt in his inside jacket pocket. “Still got my badge, I can flag a car down.”

  “I call shotgun.”

  He looked at me. “A joke,” I told him. “To lighten the sexual tension?”

  Out of the lot, we followed a road that curved past the front of the building. We’d nearly reached the main road when the sound of speeding cars had us diving behind the hedges. When we heard sirens, my dance partner looked relieved.

  “Police,” he said, rising.

  I tried to pull him down. “Yeah? Who called them? Maruta?”

  No sooner did he grudgingly crouch than three unmarked SUVs sped by. Top of the line and recently waxed, they made Fort Hammer’s squad cars look like go-karts. Keeping formation, they squealed to a halt in front of the building. When the doors popped open, ten more ChemBet linebackers leaped out. They carried machine pistols like the others, but they also wore body armor and carried shields.

  “So much for coming back with just the cops,” I said. “Your men are still stuck with peashooters, aren’t they? Last I remember, we only had six sets of body armor, too. You’re going to need the guard or the army.”

  When he looked at me again some of the anger was gone, but only because he was using part of his brain to think.

  “There may be more coming. Woods,
then,” he said. “At least until we’re a mile away.”

  We left the road for the pines. I hate undergrowth, and there was plenty. The live branches, too stupid to realize winter was coming, caught at my face and sweater. The dead ones grabbed at my pants. Booth, his scratches no longer bleeding, had gotten a second wind. He pushed through like one of those big machines they use to gobble the rain forest. I kept expecting him to run into a tree trunk and try to knock it over.

  When he kicked a grapefruit-sized stone, he didn’t even wince, he just bent over, picked it up, and carried it with us.

  “What’s that for?”

  “What do you think, asshole?”

  I decided not to guess.

  Eventually we hit an open spot. I wouldn’t exactly call it a clearing, more like the overgrown remains of a farmstead and the fieldstone foundation of the main house. All that remained of one corner of the house was a single boulder with a tree growing from under it, snaking around before heading skyward. The tree left a little cranny at the base of the stone, just big enough for a small mammal to nest in.

  Booth put his foot on the boulder, tugged the chain up and started slamming it with the rock he’d been carrying. His blows were slow, powerful, reminding me how easily he could crush my skull. Not the chain, though. Six or seven strikes later, he was getting winded, the rock had impact streaks, and the chain stayed shiny and new.

  I sat on the other side of the boulder and watched. He kept at it, growling, screaming, slamming, a King Canute commanding the ocean to recede. His sweaty grunts were no longer a danger, and kind of small compared to the woods. The absurdity of it was peaceful in a way. A couple of squirrels watched, too, taking us for nuts, wondering if we were too big to stuff into their nests for the winter.

  Bored after a while, I picked at my cracked, yellowed nails, hoping I wouldn’t accidentally tug one off. After a longer while, Booth, red-faced and sweating, looked like his heart would burst. The sky was still glowing but our surroundings were dimmer.