by Al Ewing
Cade stared for a long moment. It wasn't nearly that simple, but that didn't help him. He wondered if that was what Fuel-Air was going to be doing from now on. Pulling him up short when he bullshitted himself.
Fuel-Air smirked. Fuck yeah, murder boy. Better get used to seeing my dead ass around.
Cade frowned, turning east on Oak, hurrying past the people staring and whispering. Right or wrong, he didn't have much time for Fuel-Air right now. He needed to get out of Clearly's territory before somebody decided to take him on. People were starting to call out to him, asking where the hell he thought he was going. He didn't want to end up getting into a fight.
Cade only fought to kill. And he'd killed enough of these folks for his taste.
Yeah? You think? 'Cause I think it's never enough, motherfucker, not for you. I don't think there's a body count big enough for you in the world, the way you been handling shit. You could've had a pretty good life here, you know? But you fucked it up for just about everybody, and now these assholes are going to go 28 Days Later on your ass and anybody else they come across. Here comes the motherfuckin' night, bitch. Hope you're willing to take some responsibility for that.
"Shut up, Fuel-Air." Cade muttered the words as he turned up Masonic. He tried to remember the layout of the city - if he kept on this street, he'd run into the University. For all he knew, that was Clearly's manufacturing base - at the very least, it'd be a haven for students, intellectuals, Clearly's people, the people he wanted to avoid.
East on Grove, then. He figured by the time he got to Divisadero he'd be well out of Clearly's reach - that was the road the Pastor'd wanted him to take originally, if he recalled right. He could follow that one up all the way to Lombard.
Already the people were starting to thin out. The few still on the street looked at him a little funny, but Cade could tell they hadn't heard the news yet. They would soon, though. They were heading down towards the park, where their friends and neighbours were gathered to count and carry the dead and spend the day thinking over their revenge, and when they got there, they'd know all about it.
Night was on the way.
When it came - when they'd taken their pills and the sun was going down and they started to burn with rage and hate - then they'd remember he'd gone in this direction. They'd know where he was headed. They'd come for him, and they'd come for the Pastor, and after that... well, after that they wouldn't stop. Clearly had made that plain. He'd scarred them, and any battle with the Pastor's people would scar them more.
And they took their scars out on the world in blood.
They'd come for Muir Beach, eventually. They'd get revenge on anything he might have touched - torch the whole damned woods, most likely. Maybe if he hadn't been so damn curious, if he hadn't taken the drug, if he'd gone through the night sober - but no.
That was the hell of it. He knew himself, and the second they'd started coming at him he'd have killed them where they stood, even if they were holding back on him. It was the same as with the dog - he wouldn't have risked it. He'd have killed them in their dozens.
Cade guessed you couldn't kid a kidder at that.
Hell with it, anyway. Nothing he could do about it now. He kept walking, along the empty street.
Not a soul to be seen. Nobody to see him go. He'd about made it.
Yeah, dog. You got away with murder.
And the sound of a slow handclap from behind him.
Cade didn't turn to look. He ignored the voice and kept walking. He had a hell of a lot of ground to cover, and he was on the clock, no doubt about it. He didn't have much in the way of time, and he had a hell of a lot of things to get done.
The killing hadn't stopped for the day, he knew.
Far from it.
By the time he'd gotten most of the way down Lombard Street, it was not quite eleven o'clock and Cade was starting to notice things.
Bodies, for the most part.
There was a trail of four cannibals, hair matted, bodies filthy, flies buzzing, laying on the road, dead as hell. A couple of metres in front of them was a hunting rifle, and a pretty good one too, as far as Cade could see, laying broken on the ground. Cade glanced up quickly, and saw a man hanging half out of a window. Strips of meat had been torn from his head and body, and one arm was hanging by dangling line of gristle - the other one was plain gone. The man was a ruin. A charnel house of one.
Hell of a way to go.
Cade figured him for one of the Pastor's snipers - he must've seen the cannibals swarming up from the south, started shooting... either he was slow reloading or he plain ran out of bullets. Either way, they tore into his hole like a tidal wave and pulled him apart with their bare hands.
It wasn't a good omen for the Pastor's people, Cade figured.
Damn, dog, you're a fast-working motherfucker. Shit, I'll bet you managed to ruin two perfectly good little communities right about the same time. Regular man with no fuckin' name.
"Nothing good about this place," muttered Cade. Fuel-Air cantered up beside him - he was maggot-ridden again, eyeballs staring out of his festering skull, wearing Cassie's hand-woven poncho, with the addition of a cowboy hat and a lit cigar. It was the skeleton horse he was riding that pissed Cade off - that was overkill, pure and simple. "The Pastor set hell up on these damn streets and you know it."
He shook his head. Wasn't a good idea to start making speeches to Fuel-Air. It wasn't like he was about to listen to a damn word.
Fuel-Air grinned his skeleton grin, the bare hooves of the horse clip-clopping on the roadway. Bullshit, dude. Kids didn't have toys. Boo fuckin' hoo. They got to eat, they got a roof over their heads, they got to live. That's the bottom fuckin' line right there, bitch. Only suddenly you decide in your role as king of the fuckin' zombies that you're gonna set a wave of fuckin' face-eatin' cannibals up their ass. Smooth fuckin' move, bitch. Hope they saved some kid stew, because I'm a hungry motherfucker and so is my horse, dog...
Cade shook his head and kept walking. Another three dead cannibals on his right, next to a smashed-in door. Wouldn't be a prize for guessing what he'd find if he went in. For a second he thought about heading in there, retrieving the rifle from the cold dead fingers of the man who'd been using it - then decided against it. There probably weren't bullets for it, and he didn't want to be stuck with something that jammed or misfired or ran dry when he was in a tight spot.
Cade didn't like guns. Never had.
There were a couple more cannibals laying in the road as he walked east, along with a couple of the Pastor's people - wrinkled, lardy bodies draped in approved extra-large T-shirts. There'd been a running battle, and these were the ones who'd fell behind. Cade was trying to piece it together - had the snipers passed the word before they'd died? Had the Pastor sent an exploratory party to see what the hell was going on, or were these just luckless citizens on litter duty, or taking water for their sniping brethren in the Lord? Cade shook his head - no sense in playing detective. Whatever had happened, he'd find out soon enough.
Fillmore Street was a nightmare.
There had to be a hundred and eighty, maybe a couple of hundred corpses in the street outside the Moscone Recreation Centre - the Pastor's place of crucifixion. Cade could still tell the cannibals from the regular folk, although there were some with clothes torn, coated head to foot in blood, that could be either - he wasn't about to pick them over one at a time and check. It wasn't a football game, and Cade didn't exactly need a score.
Although there were a hell of a lot more of the Pastor's flock dead than the cannibals. He could see that much.
The tarmac was sticky with blood, and in the heat of the morning sun Cade could breathe it in, taste the hot metal of it in his mouth. It almost made him dizzy, the slick abattoir smell of it washing through him like wet paint.
Cade wasn't a man to get upset at blood, hot, cold or running, but there was something unsettling about seeing all those dead - reading them like a tracker might read the spoor of some big animal pas
sing that way. There'd been some kind of gathering at the Recreation Centre, he figured - maybe another crucifixion, maybe some of Clearly's scouts caught on the Pastor's territory. Cade hadn't seen the Conundrum Car anyplace, but it was possible Thelma and what was left of the Gang had been sent off on an errand that way. Probably not, though - more likely it was just some hobo wandering in from the north, or nobody at all. Could be they just wanted to smell the corpses awhile.
Whatever they'd been doing, the cannibals had caught up to them in the middle of it - no, first they'd have got the word something was happening on Lombard Street, send a posse to check it out. The posse'd come back with the crowd of cannibals snapping at their heels, and the battle had started.
Cade took another look at the slumped, stiffening bodies in the street. No women, no children. Not enough bodies fallen to make up the whole of the Pastor's people, which meant the rest of them had fled, and the cannibals with them.
He heard a sound to his right, and turned.
There was a cannibal picking through the bodies, peeling at the skin and trying to rip the muscles out of one of them. Cade got a closer look now - it was one of the Pastor's bodyguards, the aluminium bay laying by his side. There was a fair amount of meat on him still.
The cannibal saw Cade, and straightened. Cade wondered if he was one of the ones who'd seen him, or if he'd just gotten the word and followed along behind the rest of them. It was hard to tell - all the cannibals looked about the same to Cade, skin so coated with grease and grime that individual features were hard to pick out, faces lost beneath a scrubland of beard and ratty long hair. This one seemed to recognise him. He grinned, revealing his rotting teeth.
Cade wondered when he'd lost the ability to speak.
The cannibal looked at Cade's knife, then tugged at the exposed muscle, snarling like an animal. It was pretty obvious what he wanted - some help cutting the meat off the bone. Absently, Cade drew the knife, and the cannibal grinned, making a kind of grunting noise halfways between a dog and a monkey and clapping his hands.
Cade wondered how much he'd made a year. He wondered if Strong had told him when he started eating meat that he'd end up braindead and rotting. If he'd cared.
The cannibal was still making that dog-monkey grunting sound when Cade drove the knife through his belly and tore upwards, spilling his offal out onto the ground before the sharp blade split his heart. The cannibal made one last sound, a kind of shrill whine, as his eyes bulged and rolled back in his skull.
Then he flopped down on top of the other bodies.
Cade wiped his hands on his T-Shirt, adding to the fresh splash of blood that now covered HUG ME. Ruining perfectly good shirts was getting to be a habit with Cade.
It was one less loose end to take care of, anyhow.
The cannibals weren't capable of speech, so far as he knew, but on the other hand he didn't want to take a chance that one of them had brain enough still in his head to tell the Pastor what he'd been up to. Besides, Cade figured even one still alive might be dangerous later on, after he'd solved the problem of the Pastor and Clearly. Last thing he wanted was one leaping out at him on a dark night while he was trying to find insulin.
Better to take care of it now.
There were more bodies up Bay Street, and at the corner where it met Buchanan, the stink of sweet roasted pork and stinking gasoline made Cade's eyes water.
There was a gas station on the corner of Bay and Buchanan, was being the right word. Someone had taken a torch to it during the battle and now it was a smoking, smouldering ruin, littered with charred, blackened bodies and body parts. Cade figured they'd drained most of the gasoline from it a long time before, but they'd left enough in to make a big bang if they had to, and from the look of it, they'd had to.
It was mostly cannibals in the ruins, although there were a couple of dead men in their Jesus shirts. A couple more of the Pastor's bodyguards. A lot of the bodies were too charred to be recognisable.
Judging by the ways the bodies had fallen, Cade figured the forecourt of the place had been soaked down with what gas was left, and then someone had struck a match when the cannibals were charging it. After that, the fire would've ignited whatever gas fumes were left in the pumps.
A trap, then.
Self-sacrifice.
Something they'd set up for the occasion, maybe? Something planned, or a lucky inspiration that they'd found time for while the battle was raging outside the Centre?
Cade shook his head. There was no way of telling. He figured there were maybe fifty or sixty charred cannibal corpses, and the Pastor's fallen were in the single figures, so whatever it was, it'd worked.
Only maybe it hadn't worked enough.
The trail of dead led north, up Buchanan. Cade wasn't surprised. That was where the supermarket was. The Pastor's place of safety - that was where they'd have made the final stand.
The cannibals must have still outnumbered the Pastor's faithful - otherwise they'd have stayed and fought. At least, that was the way Cade figured it. To tell the truth, he was a little surprised how many cannibals there were dead on those streets - more than a hundred. Maybe two hundred, even - hard to say.
He hadn't figured on the cannibal lifestyle being healthy enough to keep that number of people alive any length of time. He'd figured he was just sending two or three dozen crazies to give the Pastor a headache. Instead, he'd called down an Armageddon upon them - a wave of screaming, blood-soaked freaks from George Romero's worst goddamned nightmare that outnumbered the Pastor's flock. And they'd had the strength and ferocity of madness on their side.
Cade was starting to wonder if there'd be anyone left alive in the supermarket at all.
Don't feel too bad if there is, dog. You tried your best.
Then that caffeinated snicker Cade was really coming to hate.
Goddamn Fuel-Air.
Cade turned the corner and found another bloodbath waiting for him in the supermarket's parking lot. By this time, he was used to the stink of blood, not to mention the piss and shit from bladders and bowels that'd let go, but there was a quality to this one that was a little different.
He took a deep breath, listening to the buzzing of flies as they landed on the older corpses. There were a good two dozen faithful, scattered and bloody, but for the most part the dead were cannibals - filthy bodies twisted in the positions they'd fallen. Cade blinked, narrowing his eyes, and stared for a moment. That didn't seem right, somehow. Most of the Pastor's people had died in front of the Recreation Centre, apart from the ones who'd blown up the gas station. Hand to hand, the cannibals should've torn what few of the Pastor's people remained to pieces, just through sheer weight of numbers.
The Pastor and his flock just didn't have what it took in a straight fight. Cade knew that from experience.
He took another look. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred cannibals. Then Cade saw what he was missing. The common factor that'd killed all the cannibals in the parking lot.
Gunshot wounds.
From automatic weapons, if Cade was any judge.
Some had been shot in the front, brains blown out as they'd charged, some mown down in retreat, shot in the back. A couple had been hit in the legs and had bled out while crawling, leaving a trail of slick red the length of the lot. A few had been blown away while dragging their wounded brethren towards shelter - although whether that was out of some vestigial sense of right and wrong or because they didn't want to waste good food, Cade couldn't say. But they'd died, and died by gunfire, every damned one of them.
The Pastor had had a stash of guns and ammunition that Cade hadn't known about. Machine pistols, definitely. Mac-10s or Uzis. Hell, maybe even an M16 or two.
Cade could see some of the corpses were a little fresher than others - less maggots, less flies. So the cannibals hadn't died all at once - they'd made more than one attempt to break the siege. Was that out of revenge for the ones who'd already died? Or were they following Cade's orders to the last man?
&n
bsp; Cade hoped they had.
That would mean they were another problem solved. They wouldn't be something for Cade to worry about any longer. Because Cade had to face facts - if they weren't all dead, if they hadn't followed his orders to the grave, he'd have to deal with those few that'd survived. As in eliminate them.
As in genocide.
Which was strong meat even for Cade. He'd rather someone else handled it.
Also, if the Pastor had had a cache of ammunition, wiping out the cannibals would mean it was running seriously low by now - maybe all gone. Which would be two bits of good news in one.
One fucking strategic motherfucker. You should'a been a General, dog. You're real fuckin' good at it.
Cade shook his head. There was movement out on the far side of the parking lot.
One of the cannibals, skin coated with filth, hair matted, looking shaky and feverish, huddling in the relative shelter of a parked car that'd already been riddled with bullets. He had a bullet wound in the meat of his thigh - a ricochet, or it would've torn right through and taken most of the femoral artery with it. As it was, he'd managed to bandage it with a strip of cloth. He was about five feet and eight inches, with a lean, wiry build. He looked young, under the dirt, and Cade wondered what he'd been - an intern at a big office, maybe, or even middle management, one eye on the prize and one eye on the door, a dog eating dogs in the world of suits and ties and fake smiles.
Cade looked in the cannibal kid's eyes, and it was pretty clear the boy didn't have a damned idea how he'd come to this. He stood, shakily, limping forward, wincing, tears rolling from his eyes at the pain, then pitched forward as his bum leg gave way, his fall broken by the flyblown body of one of the first to die. Looking straight at Cade, the boy opened his toothless, rotting mouth. Cade couldn't tell what he was trying to say.
