“Maybe,” she says.
“You should,” he replies.
“Why is that?” Abby asks.
Bruce’s lips curl up into a sickening smile. Almost devious. Though his mouth is smiling, his eyes tell a different story. I see regret in those eyes, or something close to it.
“Because I’ve already notified the District. They’re on their way. I presume they’ll be here in less than an hour.”
Fifteen
Lilly’s going to pull the trigger. I make my move, and strike out for the gun, slap her hand away, toward the floor. The first shot whines off the concrete, blowing chunks everywhere. Again, our eardrums are assaulted.
“No!” I shout.
“What the hell, Jack?” Lilly says, scrambling for the weapon.
Bruce quivers. His knees are clattering so rapidly, I can practically hear them knocking together.
“Not yet,” I say.
Lilly looks to Abby. Abby just shrugs. “You wanna shoot the old bastard, I say go ahead. What does he have to offer us but our deaths?”
“No,” I say again.
I’m trying to put myself in this guy’s shoes. His nice, Italian designer dress shoes. I’ve been alone for a long stretch before. I know what it does to your mind, how it eats away at everything, how the loneliness speaks to your soul with a devilish tongue. He was only doing what that loneliness told him to do.
“I have an idea,” I say.
“Oh, great, another Jack Jupiter idea,” Abby says, rolling her eyes. She walks around the table and picks up the chair Bruce fell out of. “Sit down,” she tells him.
He listens dutifully, his hands still up, wrinkled flesh trembling.
“Screw ideas,” Lilly says. “He’s the reason we’re about to die. He doesn’t deserve to live.”
I walk over to Lilly. “Just hear me out,” I say.
Abby is already one step ahead of me. She has fished a few leather belts from a rack behind Bruce, and she straps him to the chair, wrapping a belt around his legs, around his wrists. He’s not a very big man, no muscle mass; not even the ropy, apocalyptic muscle one gets from countless days spent traversing the wasteland. He lives off of old bread and beans and vegetables. Not exactly a fertile diet for muscle growth. The leather belts hold him just fine.
“The District is coming here,” I say.
“Yes, any minute now,” Lilly says urgently. Her hand wavers like she’s about to raise the gun again. Doesn’t. “That’s why we need to get the hell out of here.”
“Run again,” I say. “Run. Always running. I’m sick of it.”
“Jack, they know we’re dangerous,” Abby says. She looks at me with understanding, like she already knows what I want to do. “They’ll come in a group, they’ll send their best killers. After what we did to the gas drilling operation, they’ll bring the big guns.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I say. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll be ready.”
Abby turns on Bruce. “Who is it? Who’d you contact?”
His bottom lip trembles, and his eyes go hazy as he tries to remember.
“Give me the gun,” Abby says to Lilly.
Lilly doesn’t.
“Give me the gun now!” Abby shouts, causing us all to jump. Lilly hands it over, and Abby levels it at Bruce’s face. “Now, Jack is a gentle soul—too much of a softy, if you ask me. I’m not. I was with the District for over two years. I’ve seen messed up shit, Bruce. But I’ve done even more messed up shit. You understand me?”
Bruce gulps, the loose flesh on his neck tightening, and then he nods.
“So I have no qualms about putting a bullet in your head,” Abby continues. “See, Jack here will be mad at me for a while, but he’ll get over it. Probably as soon as he sees your brains leaking out of your skull. Once he sees that, he’ll realize he should’ve put a bullet in you himself.”
She glances at me. I remain still.
I used to know when Abby was bluffing. It scares me to say I can’t tell right now. The time she spent with the District has changed her, and not for the better, I’m afraid.
“You reading me?” she demands.
Bruce nods again. The navy blue of his suit pants turns darker as a puddle of urine pools near his left ankle. The poor guy has pissed himself.
“Abby,” I say. “Enough.”
“No,” she says as coolly and calmly as ever. “He knows who he called.”
“I d-don’t,” Bruce says. “I swear.”
“Think harder,” she suggests and shoves the gun against his forehead.
I’m conflicted, I don’t know how I should feel. This man’s not District. He may have called the District, but he’s not one of those bastards… He’s just a lonely old man.
I need to put a stop to this before Abby accidentally pulls the trigger.
“That’s it,” she says. “It’s t—”
“Mason!” Bruce suddenly shouts. His voice cracks with urgency, and it’s almost as loud as the thunderclap of the previous gunshots. “His name was Mason.”
Abby removes the barrel from his forehead, the flesh there now sporting a red circle. A third eye.
“There, was that so hard?” she asks, dismissive
Tears are rolling down Bruce’s face, and he’s practically convulsing. I feel bad for the guy.
“Mason,” Lilly echoes. “Is that bad? It seems like it’s bad.”
“Oh, it’s bad. Worse than I thought,” Abby says.
“Who’s Mason?” I ask.
“Mason Storm,” she says. “He’s one of the District’s hunters. One of the best.”
“Hunters?” Lilly says, arching an eyebrow.
“Yeah, they’re like bounty hunters. Part of the one-eyed man’s Black Knights. Yes—capitalized. Silly, I know,” Abby says.
“So what do we do?” Lilly asks. “We should run, right? Definitely run?”
Abby looks to me. “We run, we’re only prolonging the inevitable. The Black Knights will find us sooner or later. At least right now, we have the jump on them, if we stand our ground.”
“We can get information from them, too,” I say. “About Norm.”
Abby shrugs. “Mason Storm would die before he talks. Those Black Knights aren’t even brainwashed, I don’t think. They’re just men and women who love death and destruction. Martyrs.”
“Anyone will talk,” I say, “if you torture them enough.”
“Grim, Jack,” Abby says. “Real fuckin’ grim.”
My turn to shrug. I look back toward Bruce. “Those weapons real?” I ask, nodding my head in the direction of the windows. He looks around, doesn’t know what I’m talking about, actually looks like he would rather be in the middle of a pack of zombies than be here with us. I ask again. “The weapons you’ve armed your mannequins with, are they real?”
Realization comes to his eyes. “Y-yeah. I’ve got more weapons than I know what to do with,” he says.
Seems like that’s the case for everyone in this world. Except us.
“Where at?” I ask.
“Across the street,” he says. “In the bank.”
“Take us there,” I say.
Lilly walks up next to me. “So we’re doing this? We’re going to fight them?”
“I’m sick of running,” I say.
“Me, too,” Abby adds.
“They’ll kill us,” Lilly says.
I shrug. “Maybe, but I’m betting we’ll take a few of them down with us.”
Sixteen
We know time is short, so we hustle over to the bank across the street. It’s not some national branch like Chase or PNC. It’s some local joint with a funny name that I can’t make out. The sign has been half torn down. Federal something or other, I don’t know.
The inside is dirty. Leaves and splotches of mud everywhere. The windows are broken, and the walls and floors are swollen with collected rainwater. They look like they’re close to bursting. The poles and rope dividers that used to guide the customers to the bank tellers
’ desks are tipped over and stringy with decay. It’s cold in here.
Bruce leads us through a backdoor and a series of hallways. They’ve seen better days, but they’re not bad, compared to the lobby. There are no windows back here; that would be a security risk. We pass a cart full of saran-wrapped cash. Old bills featuring long-long-dead presidents. The wrapping has preserved the money, but it’s just worthless paper now. Still, even after all this time, I’m in awe of the bills. I want to grab them and run away. Buy a house in the Bahamas, and forget all of this ever happened.
Of course, that’s impossible. But old habits die hard.
Around the bend we go, and we’re face-to-face with the heavy, metal door of a vault. It’s cracked open. Probably can’t work without power. If it did work, I don’t think Bruce would know how to unlock it. These things were pretty much unbreakable back in the day.
He opens the door wider. It creaks loudly. Needs its hinges oiled. The inside walls are covered with drawers on each side. I’m not sure what’s in them, but I’m guessing it’s more cash. More useless paper. The wall opposite the entrance is lined with safes, the old dial kind. There’s long, aged gashes in the metal, like someone tried to take an axe to the lock mechanism and failed. Again, they’re probably full of useless paper.
The stuff worth anything is splayed out right in front of us on the tables: rifles, bullets, vests. It’s a small armory. It doesn’t take my breath away or anything like that; I’ve seen some truly great armories in the apocalypse. At Haven, we had quite the weapons cache before the District attacked us and cleaned us out. Rocket launchers, flame throwers, machine guns with bullets that probably could’ve turned the vault door into Swiss cheese. There’s nothing like that here, but what is here is a start and it’s certainly better than nothing.
Abby picks up one of the rifles. Examines it like it’s some fine piece of art and she’s a collector, ready to drop tens of thousands of dollars on it. “Good stuff,” she says.
“This all you have?” I ask.
He nods. “Not including the weapons strapped to the mannequins. Those are empty. Didn’t see the point of loading them.”
“So it was you who shot at me,” Lilly says. “Not some timed mechanism, huh?”
Bruce looks away, guilty. “I’m quite sorry,” he says. “I was nervous. It has been so long since I’ve had guests that weren’t District, I didn’t want to lose you. And then…when you turned out to be the very people the District is looking for, I had no choice. They would bring ruin to my town if they found out I harbored you and didn’t report it.”
“They wouldn’t have found out,” Lilly snarls. She lunges at Bruce.
It’s a halfhearted attempt, but it makes him stumble backward. He hits the table, and knocks off a Desert Eagle. It clatters loudly on the bank floor.
Taking a look at this bean-covered, urine-soaked man, I wave my hand and tell Lilly that Bruce has had enough.
“So, what, we’re just gonna let him go after this is all said and done?” she asks me.
I shrug.
Abby shrugs.
“He ratted on us!” Lilly says. “We should be miles away from here. At least let me kill the son of a bitch.”
“We’ll need him when the Black Knights get here,” Abby says. “After that, I don’t give two shits about what happens to him.”
“Me either,” I say.
But, like I said before, I feel for him. I don’t know why exactly. He did technically rat us out, but what can I do about that now? What’s done is done. If I kill him or let him die right in front of me, that’s just more blood on my hands.
I walk over to the table and grab one of the rifles and a few magazines. “All right,” I say, “let’s plan. We don’t have much time.”
“Well, it’s your idea to fight back,” Lilly says, “so you give us the plan.”
I think about this for a moment. I realize I don’t have much of a plan. When it comes down to this stuff, this warfare stuff, I rarely ever do. Except, you know, besides just going out in the battlefield and shooting the bad guys until there are no more left. That usually seems to work for me.
This is when we hear the rumbling of engines in the quiet of the town. Engines that could only belong to the Overlord’s Black Knights. My stomach drops somewhere far below the earth’s surface. Looks like a plan is out of the question.
Seventeen
The rumble of the engines shakes the night away. We walk outside, and the sun is beaming through a haze of clouds.
“You’re up, Bruce,” I say.
We don’t have time for a fully formed plan, but we have enough time to regroup.
“Where we going?” Abby asks. I nod in the direction of the parking garage. “Genius,” she decides.
I shrug. “I guess I’m practiced in the art of warfare… Kind of.”
We have three rifles between us.
We push Bruce forward into the street. He’s still covered in beans and his own urine. He looks like he’s had quite a night.
“Remember,” I say to him, trying to make my voice deeper. “You’ll be in our crosshairs. First sign of foul play, and…” I squeeze my trigger finger in front of his face, “blam.”
“You won’t shoot me,” he says.
I shrug. “I might not, but I can’t say the same for these fine ladies beside me.”
Abby smiles. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone’s head explode—”
“No, it hasn’t,” Lilly says. “It’s been, like, less than twenty-four hours.”
“Too long,” Abby says. She looks at the rifle like it’s her long-lost lover.
Bruce nods. I see he knows she means business. And she does. She craves blood like a zombie craves flesh.
Like I’ve said before, Abby is not one to mess with. You don’t want to get on her bad side. Bruce has been on her bad side since he ratted on us.
Poor Bruce.
“All right, let’s go,” I say.
I estimate that we have about three minutes before the Black Knights roll through the town. I can see them up ahead on the lonely road. Dust billows out from behind them. There are three cars, all of them black—the apocalyptic equivalent of a knight’s trusty steed. They’re polished and waxed, shining brightly in the morning sunshine. The Overlord takes care of his own.
The one thing we have going for us is the element of surprise. If the Black Knights and Mason Storm are as bad as Abby makes them out to be, though, the element of surprise pretty much means jack shit.
Still, I like our chances up there on the parking deck more than down here. But can we trust Bruce? Will the threat of his death make him shut up?
I doubt it, but time will tell.
We go up the parking deck, which takes a lot longer walking. The damn thing seems like it’s gotten bigger since we drove up here in Abby’s truck, but we eventually get to the top, where we have a clear view of the town. I see more mannequins on the opposite buildings. In the daylight, it’s funny to think that we were actually threatened by the things. They’re just regular old mannequins, the kind you’d see in a department store. Featureless. Sexless.
I shake my head and crouch down with Lilly and Abby.
“This is crazy,” Lilly mutters.
“Wow, you really haven’t caught on yet, have you?” Abby says. “You gotta be crazy sometimes.”
I nod. “She’s right, but that’s a rarity.”
Abby doesn’t smile, just sighs and goes to her position, which is on the opposite side of the deck, where she can look down on the bank. Lilly goes to the other corner, and I stay somewhere in the middle. We have a really good vantage point over the main drag of the town. Bruce is in the middle of the street, waving his arms back and forth, trying to flag down the cars.
They’re coming in hot, too, like they don’t see Bruce standing there. Like they’re going to run him over just for the hell of it.
Bruce notices this, and just at the last moment, he jumps up to the sidewalk.
It’s not a graceful movement.
The black cars stop with a screech, burning rubber. White tire smoke drifts up from their rears. Their engines are idling loudly, like race cars.
Nice cars.
Suddenly, the engines shut off.
I aim down my sights at the driver’s side door. If this Mason Storm is as bad as Abby says he is, he’ll be the one driving.
But the driver’s door of the lead car isn’t the one that opens. It’s the passenger’s. A heavy fellow leans out; he looks too big to fit inside the cab.
I glance at Abby, but she shakes her head. That’s not Storm.
Shit.
My strategy is to cut off the head of the snake. You cut off the head of the snake, the rest of the body dies. The Black Knights won’t fight without their leader. Or so I hope.
But now there’s this fat guy. He’s looking at Bruce, and they’re having a conversation. I thought I’d be able to hear it in the quiet of the town, but up here, the wind’s picking up and rippling through my ears, drowning out any chance I have of deciphering their words. I just hear the ‘S’s and ‘Th’s.
My heartbeat is slow, but it’s thudding pretty hard, hitting my ribcage like a man buried alive would hit the inside of his casket. This means I want the fight, want the kill. Like Abby, I’m going through a withdrawal. I need to spill blood. It’s a bad, bad thing, but that’s life now.
The talking stops. I see the fat man shake his head. Then—
Bruce, the rat bastard, points up to the parking garage, and the fat man follows the old man’s finger with his eyes. Looks directly at our vantage point.
His expression never changes. He knows he’s in my crosshairs right now, and he doesn’t even frown.
“We’re blown,” Abby says.
“I know,” I say.
“What do we do?” Lilly asks.
“We start shooting,” I answer.
And I pull the trigger.
Eighteen
The first shot hits the mark.
The rifle has a hell of a kickback, but I’m able to keep my aim steady enough to bury two shots in his head for good measure before he collapses in a bloody heap. He hits the ground without much of a face. I don’t think they’ll be having an open-casket funeral for this fellow.
The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8 Page 46
