by B. L. Morgan
"He may not be as easy to kill as you would think," Jeanette told me. She reached into a large handbag that I now noticed was beside her and handed me a small bottle of what looked like water.
The bottle was about the size of an aspirin bottle. It may have been my imagination but I thought I saw the bottle glow a soft blue as I took it out of Jeanette's hand.
"This may help you against the dead who walk, if they truly are dead," she said.
"And what if they‘re not dead?" I asked her.
Jeanette smiled at me again, but her smile was strangely grim and foreboding. She said, "In that case, you are on your own."
PART II
THE CHILL
OF
DEATH
"It is my nature to sting you,"
Said the scorpion.
"I am what I am."
- From the Fable
"The Frog and The Scorpion"
"Good and Evil
In themselves
Are Passive Forces,
But once you move
Toward one
Then, you become
As a magnet."
- The Walker in Darkness
There are many more things
Than you or I could dream
And I have many nightmares
Many terrible, evil dreams.
- The Walker in Darkness
CHAPTER 45
PLAYING TAG WITH THE BOYS
In less than two hours it looked like the sky had dropped more than two feet of snow on the ground. The roads were rapidly becoming impassible. I was having to drive slowly down the road with my head stuck out of the window because my windshield wipers were practically useless. There was a layer of ice on the windshield that the wipers were riding on top of.
Most people were hiding in their houses today. Even the junkies and winos were off the streets. Usually they were so numbed out that no kind of weather bothered them at all. Today the weather was so severe that even they were trying to find shelter.
I was beginning to wonder if I was going completely out of my mind. If you had told me last week I was going to be warning someone that they had better go into hiding from a dead man out walking around, I'd have told you to go fuck yourself. But now, here I was on my way to do just that. Not only that, but it seems like I'd just picked up a sudden belief in voodoo.
What the hell is going on in my head, I asked myself and wiped the slush away that was accumulating on my forehead. Hell, I was even believing in Jeanette's ability to tell the future without questioning it at all.
All of this was beginning to have the feel of some kind of a weird LSD flashback. Except that the snow stinging my face felt all too real for this to be any kind of hallucination.
Before I'd left Johnny's place, I'd given him Graham Nash's number with instructions to call him and tell Graham where I was going if I didn't call him in two hours. In this weather, I didn't know if he could arrange any help anyway.
It was only about five o'clock in the afternoon but the sky was looking much darker than it should for this time of day. The clouds appeared grayer and heavier than any other snow clouds I can ever remember seeing. If I hadn't have known better, I could have sworn I saw a lightning flash from up in those clouds.
That was impossible of course.
Then I remembered what happened to Tor's house right after I interrupted his sacrificing Felicia to some pagan god.
I was so shell shocked the night Tor's house went up in splinters from a lightning bolt that I didn't even bat an eye at it. Now that I thought about it, maybe the timing for the lightning bolt hitting Tor's house was a little more than just circumstantial. Maybe Tor had pissed off someone other than me that night.
Then again, maybe I'd pissed off someone that night but their aim just wasn't too good. That was a nice thought.
* * *
My whole world was blanketed in thick white as I drove slowly down the streets toward Julia's house. Some kids were out on the streets throwing snowballs. The sound of their voices as they shouted to each other was muffled. Their shouts broken up by the snow sounded like loud whispering. With the snow showing white on their heads, shoulders and backs, the kids looked strangely like winter gremlins.
I turned the corner onto Julia's street and all was silence there. No one was out on this street. Everything was dead on this street except for Julia's house.
I brought my car to a sliding halt and jumped out the door. The front door to Julia's house had been ripped off the hinges and was laying in the bushes to the right of the door. I ran to the doorway slipping and sliding the whole way and nearly falling on the porch.
Julia's living room was an obstacle course of turned over and broken furniture. A sudden mental image of the bleeding and broken bodies of Julia and Felicia rushed through my mind. I had to force it away. That vision did make my heart stop cold in my chest just like I'd been hit there. I realized right then if anything had happened to Julia or Felicia I would kill whoever was involved.
I stepped over the shattered furniture and into the house. The wind whistled in after me and straight out the back door. I could see the back door open through the kitchen at the back of the house. The back door slammed shut when a burst of wind came screaming through.
The kitchen was wrecked just like the living room was. There were broken dishes and glasses littered all over the floor. The icebox was turned over on its face and the dining table was on its side.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and yelled Julia's and Felicia's names.
There was a moment of silence that seemed to stretch out like hours. Only the sound of the echo of my voice came back to me.
Then the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor came from where I knew Julia's bedroom was. Something smashed to the floor in Felicia's bedroom as well.
I went into the hallway that led into both of the bedrooms and both of the bedroom doors were jerked open simultaneously.
Into the hallway stepped two men who I'd never thought I'd see again. It was Tor Ambrose and Morris West, and neither of them were looking happy.
Both of them looked at me with dead eyes and their faces were grayish and expressionless.
They were moaning slightly and took a step toward me.
I jerked out my Thirty-Eight from my holster and took aim at Tor, the closest one to me.
"Hold it motherfucker," I yelled at him. "Or I'll put your ass back in the ground where you belong."
They both acted like they hadn't heard anything and came on toward me. They were both moving slowly, lurching forward like they were doing a bad impersonation of a Frankenstein monster.
"Where's Julia and Felicia?" I yelled at them. But they didn't seem interested in answering.
I knew I had to get past these two to see if Julia and Felicia were in their bedrooms and if they were alive.
Tor took another lurching step toward me and I pointed my Thirty-Eight at his face. I pulled the trigger twice and my gun roared in my fist. Tor was knocked backward. Holes were punched completely through his head. Blood and fragments of brain and bone sprayed all over the face of Morris West behind him. Tor stumbled backward and went down on his back in an ungainly heap.
I took aim at Morris West's face who stepped over Tor's body.
"You hold it motherfucker or you're next," I shouted at him. My ears were ringing from the sounds of the shots in the small hallway.
Morris came on and I saw behind him, to my horror that Tor sat up on the floor.
I fired three times into Morris West's head and his face was turned into a red ruin. He spun sideways, fell over Tor, and went down on his face on the floor.
Tor got to his feet now. A chill ran all the way through me when I looked at the deep holes in Tor's head. There was no way on earth that he could be on his feet and coming at me. But, that was just what he was doing. I holstered the empty Thirty-Eight.
The sight of Tor coming at me with his head hanging open and his brains exposed must have driven me a bit
insane. I jumped forward and yelled something like, "You need to be dead, you sack of shit," and kicked him as hard as I could in the balls with my left foot and drove a hard right cross through his jaw.
I thought the punch would land with a smack, but the sound it actually made was more like a squish. What was left of Tor's head was rocked to the side and I was spattered by flying blood flung off from his head. The eyeball on the left side of Tor's face popped from the socket and swung out at me hanging from connecting nerve tissue.
Now Morris West was back on his feet. He was coming at me too.
I backed up and threw another kick to Tor's balls and hit him with a left hook. I was hurting him about as much as if I had been pounding a heavy bag. His head and face was going to pieces, but he showed no reaction to anything I did to him.
Tor threw a wide, slow, arcing blow at me and actually hit the wall instead of me. I stepped backward and stepped on something, maybe a table leg. My foot shot out from underneath me and I went down to my knees.
Tor fell onto my back and grabbed me by the shoulders. Some kind of slimy oozing crud fell off of Tor's face onto the back of my neck and ran down into the back of my shirt.
I spun over to my back and kicked out with both feet and knocked Tor flying backward. Morris West was on me then. He fell on me and his knee found my crotch when he came down. I saw stars.
He clubbed a blow to my head and I punched back instinctively through a thickening fog.
Then I saw Morris West pulled up over me by hands that grabbed him by the back of his shirt and by the hair on the top of his head.
I saw through the fog that it was Johnny. He jerked Morris past him and threw him towards the turned over table in the kitchen. The top of Morris's head ripped loose in Johnny's hand. He looked at it and threw it away saying, "Damn, that's fuckin’ sick."
Johnny pulled out a pump sawed off shotgun from underneath his coat and chambered a shell.
When Tor got to his feet, Johnny let rip with the shotgun and blew off both of his legs from below the knees.
I got to my feet and when Morris West did the same, Johnny blew his legs out from underneath him too.
The two were still trying to come after us like windup toys but without their legs they weren't coming too fast.
Johnny looked at them and said, "Christ, these are some dedicated uglies here."
"No doubt about that," I told him. "Hey, thanks for the help."
"About a minute after you left," he said. "I got to thinkin I better come help. I know you can't do shit without me."
"That's about the truth," I told him.
We kicked Tor Ambrose out of the way and checked the two bedrooms for Julia and Felicia.
They were gone.
Everything was torn up in the rooms and the furniture was busted up, but there wasn't any blood in the bedrooms.
"They must have been taken somewhere," I told Johnny. "And these two uglies were left here to take care of me."
"That's what it looks like," Johnny answered.
"I’m gonna have to find Julia and Felicia fast. Are you in this with me?"
Johnny gave me a strange look and said, "Motherfucker, I'm here ain't I. I just shot two zombie things for you and you ask me if I'm in this. Shit, I should shoot you for bein so fuckin stupid."
"I was just askin Bro," I said.
"Yeah, well you don't have to fuckin ask," he said.
CHAPTER 46
OLD FRIENDS
We were going to use Julia's phone to call Graham Nash but it had been ripped out of the wall. I figured that Graham, with his connections, might have some information about where Julia and Felicia might have been taken.
We went out through the front door and got into Johnny's car because what was left of Tor and Morris kept dragging themselves after us and we didn't want to have to keep kicking them off. We got in Johnny's car because his heater was a lot better than mine and I was tired of sticking my head out the window to see.
The snow was still coming down furiously but Johnny's defroster was handling it pretty good.
Johnny was behind the wheel and he asked me, "Where the hell do we go now?"
"Well, let's see," I said and looked back toward the house. I saw Tor drag himself out onto the porch, reaching toward the car each time he pulled himself forward. "Let's drive down the road," I told Johnny and he pulled out.
"All right," he said. "Where to?"
I thought for a few moments and said, "What do all these people who are involved in this have in common?"
"Fuck, I don't know," Johnny said. "You've been in the middle of this shit. You tell me."
"Well, Tor was the head of the Jamaican dealers and Morris worked for him," I told Johnny. "Graham told me that Robert Perry started importing drugs into this area after the Jamaicans were gone."
"So fuckin what," Johnny said. "There's been drugs in these neighborhoods since the stone age. It wouldn't surprise me if they found out the reason the Cahokia Indians vanished was because they smoked too much crack. They might of got so stoned that the whole Cahokia civilization might have forgot where the river was and marched their ass right in there and drowned."
"Well, I don't care who the drug lord around here was five hundred years ago," I told Johnny. "I just need to know who the new kid on the block is. Whoever is getting set to take over now, I'd bet that's who took Julia and Felicia."
"Why would they do that," Johnny said. "Julia and Felicia don't have shit to do with anything in the drug trade."
"No," I said. "But Julia and Felicia are just a tool to get to me. I'm the threat because of what I did to Tor's business."
"All right," Johnny said. "Who do we know that might know who this new dealer in town is?"
I thought for a moment and said, "We don't want to talk to someone who works for the new head of the drug trade either."
Johnny said, "Or if he does work for the new guy then he needs to be so far down in the chain of command that he could care less what happens to the big man."
"He'd probably be like one of these street junkies," I told Johnny. "Who sell just enough drugs to keep themselves stoned all the time."
"Who do we know like that?" Johnny asked.
I considered that for a moment and said, "Do you know where Marco Rios lives?"
"Yeah," Johnny said. He hit the gas and spun the wheels. The car did a donut on the icy road spinning completely around and stopped, heading back the way we had been coming from.
I grabbed the dash and yelled, "Damn, man!" as the world spun around me. When we were stopped I said, "Why the hell did you do that?"
"Cause we're in a hurry," Johnny said and drove toward downtown.
* * *
Johnny drove down Main Street then turned north on Franklin Avenue. Where the other streets had ruts in them from vehicles driving through the snow, on this street there were no ruts at all. Only a couple of sets of footprints marred the smooth top of the snow in the street.
Johnny stopped his car in the middle of the street at the entrance to Franklin Avenue.
"If I drive down there, I'll be stuck bigger than shit," he said. "It's only about a half block to where Marcos is staying anyway. We can walk from here."
We both got out of the car into knee deep snow. Johnny pointed to an office building that was boarded up and appeared dark and deserted. "Marcos stays in there," he said. "With a whole group of other crack heads."
Johnny left his car running and we went walking down the street. He carried his pump sawed off shotgun with him. I reloaded my Thirty-Eight and slid it back into my holster. The snow was slowing down a little bit, but the wind was still blowing with a bitter stinging force.
I followed Johnny to the east side of the street and onto the snow covered sidewalk. I walked right next to Johnny and he had to shout at me to be heard over the howling wind. "It pays to know where these guys stay," Johnny shouted to me. "If someone breaks into my place and steals something, I'm coming straight here. If anybody g
ets broken into around here, it's a sure bet that one of these guys had something to do with it."
Johnny led me down a stairway at the side of the building. There was a metal door that he pushed open and we stepped through it into the basement of the building.
We shut the door behind us and stood still for a minute so our eyes could adjust to the dim light that filtered in through cracks in the floor and small windows at ground level. The basement was divided into different rooms with a central hallway between all of them.
We heard voices and a rasping cough coming from one of the rooms ahead. A flickering light was coming from the third room. We walked toward the flickering light and knew that's where the voices and coughing was coming from.
The floor was a cold cement basement floor and we heard the wind howling through broken windows and cracks in walls. We breathed out steam in front of us as we walked toward the room where the voices and light was. It wasn't as cold in here as it was outside but it was nowhere near what you'd call warm.
Dust motes swirled around our heads as we walked along the grimy floor.
We went to the third room and through the doorway. There were six ragged looking men sitting or laying around a fire built in the center of the floor. They were laying or sitting on a ring of old soiled mattresses with tattered blankets wrapped around them.
They didn't even seem to notice us as they passed a crack pipe between them and took long deep sucking hits off of it. The blank, staring dead look in their eyes and the gray pallor of their Negro and Hispanic faces reminded me of the way that Tor and Morris looked when I'd first seen them in Julia's house this afternoon. The only difference I could see in these zombies and what Tor and Morris had become, was that these zombies would die easier.
I looked at the group around the fire and saw the man that I was looking for, Marco Rios. Marco had slid down a long way since I had seen him last.
When I'd first met Marco, he'd been a slick-dressing, fast-talking, arrogant guy, with a string of fine girlfriends and four fine, shiny, big cars. He made me a business proposition and I sold cocaine for him. We made a lot of money together, even if neither of us had anything to show for it now.
