Search and Destroy

by Jay Bonansinga

  Through her giggling, Lilly counts out the number of miles: “One … two … three … four…”

  The strobe light flickers outside again and fills the room with artificial day.

  The old man has raised his head.

  Lilly screams.

  The dead man’s eyes pop open.

  * * *

  The next few seconds unfold in the druggy time-lapse slowness of a dream. In that momentary flicker, which lasts only a second or two, Lilly jerks back as the creature lets out a series of inhuman, wet vocalizations—part growl, part howl—its discolored lips already peeling away from the old, yellowed enamel of its teeth. Strings of drool loop out of its mouth. It smells of the slaughterhouse, and its head rotates as if receiving a signal from space as its reptilian eyes stay latched onto Lilly.

  While all this is transpiring, Lilly finally—either through a sudden jolt of her adrenal glands or the greasy blood providing enough lubricant—manages to pull her right hand free of the knotted rope. Both hands are instantly liberated, and as the last of the lightning fades away, Lilly manages to grab the creature by the neck before it can bite her.

  Total darkness returns, and Lilly applies every last ounce of her strength on the choke hold gripping that skinny, turkey-like wattle of a neck. The thing that was once a chemist emits a piercing, snarling cry that sounds like a strangled hyena, but continues to gnash its teeth. Right then, in the back of her chaotic thoughts, it occurs to Lilly that walkers don’t breathe, so strangulation isn’t a mortal threat, but right now it’s keeping those yellow teeth away from the tender flesh above her jugular.

  In the palpable dark, the afterimage of the hideous, livid, demonic face that was once Raymond Nalls lingers on the back of Lilly’s retinal field. Unfazed, she keeps the vise-grip pressure on the thing’s neck.

  She can hear the creature’s teeth—its incisors and molars—clacking like castanets, and she can feel the thing’s wiry body writhing and wriggling in her grasp—an enormous, slimy thing pulled from the sea, fighting with the involuntary fervor of a barracuda on the deck of a boat struggling to escape the clutches of the net. Lilly lets out a piercing screech of rage and determination. She will not allow this thing to beat her.

  By the time the next salvo of thunder and lightning explodes outside the theater, the cable around Lilly’s midsection has loosened from all the violent struggling and strangling and writhing. Lilly feels the loops slip lower on her torso, the pressure now resting on her pelvic bone. The clamp has sprung open. It now lies at the bottom of the coil, on the floor between her legs. Still tangled up with the creature’s truss, the loose coil will at least give Lilly more leeway.

  In the brilliant, flickering firecrackers of light, Lilly’s hands keep their white-knuckle hold on the skinny neck of the monster while the thing snarls and gnashes and wriggles with subhuman vigor.

  The lightning flickers away.

  In absolute darkness, Lilly takes deep girding breaths, preparing herself, telling herself to ignore the dopey high feeling and concentrate. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realizes that she probably has just this one chance. She knows if she blows it, she’s dead meat. The moment she takes her hands off this shuddering, writhing beast in the dark, she has about a second and a half to get the job done. Walkers are slow in an open field. Sure. They can’t run, they can’t climb, they can’t maneuver through tricky obstacles. But up close and personal like this, especially in the dark, they can be ferocious and lethal.

  This one will probably go for her throat. Lilly knows this from experience. She has seen lurkers surprise people and get to the tender flesh of their neck before the victim even has a chance to react. In fact, the speed with which the dead go for a pulse point such as the jugular is strictly innate, automatic, involuntary … like a wasp stinging its prey. Lilly feels the grease of her blood and sweat on her palms as she strangles the thing and wonders if this will be her undoing. You can’t grab a weapon with any kind of speed or accuracy when your hands are as slick as this.

  She pushes the doubt from her racing thoughts and silently prays for the lightning to return. She’s losing her nerve, her focus, and her will. The drug is working on her, jumbling her thoughts into a chaotic mess. Her arms are killing her, her fingers numb around the thing’s neck. It’s slipping from her grasp—she can feel it.

  She summons all her rage. Like a spot-welder, she focuses her anger and sorrow and dread onto this creature shuddering in her grasp, this denizen of the deep rising up to kill everything she holds dear. She summons all her emotions in order to destroy this natural enemy, this nameless, soulless thing that will happily steal her children, her life, her world. She thinks of this being in the darkness as Death. She will never surrender to it. She will never give in.

  Lightning crackles outside.

  The monster’s eyes reflect the spark as Lilly makes her move.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At that moment, the radiant silver light fills the theater for a total of five discrete flashes—spaced fairly evenly, spanning a time period just shy of ten seconds—causing the action that unfolds to transpire in a dreamy, silent-movie-style motion that is neither slow nor fast but rather ethereal and otherworldly. And in that brief and eternal stretch of time, Lilly’s hypersensitive brain—exacerbated by the hallucinatory drugs coursing through her—instinctively deconstructs those separate flashes into individual components of a longer narrative.

  During flash number one, Lilly lets go of the creature as fast as she possibly can, moving her hand from the level of the monster’s neck down to the loose clamp leaning against her thigh. Simultaneously, the creature’s head jerks backward in reaction to the release of pressure around its cranial area. This latter movement is simply the law of physics at work, the coil of cables originally wound around the old man named Nalls now creaking and stretching with the weight of the whiplashing creature, its head snapping back violently.

  The second flash is a transitional phase, Lilly’s hand finding the sharp edge of the metal clamp, grasping it, and swinging it high and sideways toward the creature’s skull. Lilly intends to strike the thing high above its temple hard enough to drive the edge of the metal device through the tough skin of the old man’s scalp, through the periosteum, through the hard bone and marrow of the skull, through the dura mater, and finally into the critical spongy brain matter. The fact is, Lilly Caul has accomplished this task enough times with various weapons to understand the amount of pressure and force and speed with which to drive a sharp edge into the head of a walker to get results.

  During the wide arcing swing of the clamp, the monster’s head hasn’t snapped fully back to its original position. It’s still in midwhiplash. All of which leads to an unexpected outcome during the next flash.

  As lightning flash number three fills the theater with radiant faux daylight, the sharp edge of the clamp device collides with the creature’s mandible just above its jawline. The force with which the thing strikes the monster’s head—again, bolstered by the explosive cocktail of Nightshade, emotion, and adrenaline flowing through Lilly—completely rips through the bottom half of the creature’s skull, tearing away an enormous portion of the original cranium. The entire jaw segment rips free, as well as the cheek and upper nasal passages, sending nearly half of the old man’s face flying through the shadows on a kite tail of bloody tissue, bone fragments, teeth, and gums. The monster rears, half its face missing, the blood gushing and oozing down its sunken chest, one eyeball hanging by threads of optic nerves and blood vessels. Lilly holds fast to the clamp and slams backward against the wall, her scream a garbled cry of revulsion, rage, and terror. Right at that millisecond, the flickering dies away as quickly as it originally materialized.

  In the ensuing dark, Lilly strikes again and again for another couple of brief moments.

  On a cannon blast of thunder, lightning flares a fourth time, the storm right on top of the theater district, turning night to day, penetrating the cracks and gaps in t
he boarded windows, and illuminating the backstage area in sputtering silver radiance. By this point, Lilly’s cable restraints have stretched to the point of slipping, dropping below the level of her pelvis, the monster across from her flailing stupidly, still a captive of its own steel harness. In the momentary flicker show, as bright as an operating-room light, the creature looks insect-like now, almost alien with only half its skull intact—no jaw, no teeth, no throat, no nose, a ruined eye socket—to the point that only the pulpy concavity of its lower submandibular ganglion is visible, its exposed carotid artery like a branch in need of pruning. In the brilliant light, it looks like a blood-sodden praying mantis. In fact, the sight of it tossing its partial head and straining the bounds of its coil is so disturbing, so surreal, so trippy to Lilly that she loses her focus for a moment and bursts out laughing.

  The thing prods at her with its bloody brow ridge, and claws at her awkwardly, feckless and impotent now without its teeth, all of which makes Lilly laugh all the harder. She falls on her side, outwardly chortling with mirthless, frantic, hysterical laughter.

  As the flickering light subsides and sputters away, she can hear her own laughter honking in her ears as though it belongs to someone else. It sounds to her inner self—the part of her that’s not under the influence—like an old scratchy laugh track in some forgotten sitcom or game show. The more the creature flails at her with its crooked hands—hands that once belonged to a feeble old man, hands that once curled with palsy—the more ridiculous it looks. For one insane moment, it conjures images of pratfalls and spit takes and people slipping on bananas and stuffing their mouths with candy coming off conveyor belts. Lilly laughs harder as the creature futilely pokes at her with its dripping, bloody, praying mantis head. She easily bats it away with one massive slap, her head spinning, the dying light leaving streaks on her field of vision. Then the darkness returns, and the laughter dries up and leaves her with a desolate emptiness in the dark. Now all she can hear are the garbled, watery noises coming from the mutilated head of the walker inches away from her.

  Lightning hit number five comes a moment later, revealing the fact that the monster has grown still. Lilly stares at it. Sitting upright—its mangled, deformed head with its eyeball hanging down on a pendulum of veins—it faces her as though waiting … waiting for deliverance. She blinks and continues to stare at it. The thing shudders at her—without a lower skull impossible to read—a growl, a cry, a moan? The room settles for a moment. Lilly can hear the throb of rain outside, incessant, sibilant, drowning the ubiquitous buzzing of the horde, now thousands strong, maybe more, drawn to the theater, sounding like bees swarming a hive. The drugs in Lilly’s system act on her thoughts like rocket fuel for her brain. The thing across from her swipes at the air in front of her face, an ancient, clawlike hand missing her nose by a hair, as Lilly jerks back with a start.

  Then she hears the low drone of the multitudes outside and gets an idea.

  In the final few flickers of light, she wriggles out of the loose coils, extricating herself from the steel bondage as the pathetic creature on the floor prods at her and nudges her with its half face, the flood and fluids from its glottal opening still oozing. Lilly stands.

  Dizziness crashes down on her, threatening to knock her over. In the last sparks of light, she sees the monster gaping up at her with its one intact eye, looking almost expectant, its other eye dangling. The front of it has soaked through with deep arterial red. Walkers don’t exactly bleed. In the absence of circulatory functions, their blood leeches out of them with the slowness of sap extruding from a tree.

  Inspiration strikes Lilly as she gazes down at it, and she smiles in spite of her repulsion.

  The night swallows them.

  * * *

  Lilly feels her way through the darkness of the backstage area, leaving the mangled creature on the floor, trussed and bound in tangles of cable. As she moves through the dark, she takes deep breaths and fights the light-headed feeling. She is stricken with a diabolical idea. If she can only calm down and keep her wits about her and move quickly, she might be able to see it through. She takes one last deep breath as she approaches the workbench.

  She pauses, getting her bearings. The storm has settled into a low, droning, white noise. The thunder has seemingly moved on, as though it has grown weary of the city and now has migrated out across the southern rural hills. Every few minutes, Lily can hear the distant rumbling like a vast stomach growling, and can see a few faint flickers of lightning somewhere far off in the farmland, barely illuminating the theater. She swallows dryly. It occurs to her that she’s gone almost twelve hours without water. If she doesn’t find some within a day or two, she could die. Which strikes her woozy brain as a stupid and ironic way to go out, especially after surviving all she has survived.

  Now her eyes have adjusted enough to see the silhouette of the workbench in front of her.

  She feels her way down to the stack of drawers, and blindly goes through them. She vaguely remembers seeing a sealed package of batteries but she’s not sure. It might be her imagination. She feels around the contents of the drawer. In one of the last pale, feeble flashes of lightning, she finds a roll of black electrical tape, a stapler, and—lo and behold—a yellowed but still-sealed package of four Eveready AA batteries.

  She cackles—still flying high on the Nightshade—as she fumbles with the flashlight. She gets the new batteries in it, switches it on, and sweeps the narrow beam of white light across the room. Along one wall, she sees the scenery flats, the massive marble columns made of Styrofoam, the huge balsa wood castle turrets, and the row of old armoires filled with wardrobe.

  At the end of the armoires hangs a huge black coat. She goes over to it and takes a closer look. She wonders if it’s from Macbeth. It could very easily have served as a witch’s cowl—the kind worn by the three sisters in the play—which is one of the few memories of her single solitary theater class at Georgia Tech.

  For some reason, right then, amidst her scattered thoughts, a line from the play bubbles up from her memory bank, unbidden, unexpected.

  What are these

  So withered and so wild in their attire,

  That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ Earth

  She pulls the coat off its hook, puts it on, and looks in the cracked, grime-specked, floor-length mirror leaning against the corner. In the beam of the flashlight, which now bounces off the mirror and reflects back at her, she looks like a child playing dress-up. The witch’s coat is enormous on her. Another breathy, nervous laugh escapes her lungs.

  She gives herself a nod.

  This will work nicely.

  She hopes.

  * * *

  An hour later, the dawn closes in and the rain lifts. The sky outside the Pendragon Theater on Cherokee Avenue turns an ashy shade of gray as the mob of ragged figures mills about the intersection of Cherokee and Platt, aimlessly wandering the adjacent alleys, their metallic gazes turning toward every errant noise from the rainwater ringing in the gutters to the caw of blackbirds ushering in the day as they soar over the petrified cityscape.

  At first, the creak of the stage door at the end of the Platt Street alley draws little attention from the horde. The thing emerging from the theater drags out into the wan, gray morning with little ceremony, a pile of decomposing flesh draped in a theatrical cowl meant for an imaginary witch. It has spindly legs partially hidden by the gown. The smell it gives off is subtle—this one has died and turned only hours earlier—but it will soon join the others of its ilk in radiating tremendous rot.

  The draped creature slowly turns and awkwardly shuffles toward the mouth of the alley. To a normal observer—i.e., a human—there might be something strange about this thing’s stride, the way it carries itself. Unlike the myriad other denizens wandering the ruins—most of whom are now brushing past this newcomer, paying little attention to it—this robed creature seems to trundle slightly, as though it has four legs under its moth-eaten cowl. And the fa
ce also begs questioning. The dark visage that lurks in the shadowy depths of the oversized hood doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. Half of the creature’s skull is missing and oozing fluids, and something moves slightly behind it, as though a nesting doll is hiding there.

  Despite all these anomalous quirks, however, the thing in the witch’s cowl passes through the throngs milling about the alley with little incident. Not a single member of the horde seems to notice any disparities as the newcomer reaches the street and turns down Cherokee Avenue.

  If our theoretical human observer investigated even further, they might also note the way this monstrous thing is maneuvering itself—making willful turns, cocking its head toward noises, sidestepping obstructions and clusters of upright cadavers blocking its path—which completely sets it apart from the directionless nature of the other reanimated dead. This newcomer seems to have a purpose. It appears to have a destination that is beckoning to it somehow. In fact, it seems to be moving southward.

  For a time, the hooded figure moves unabated through the swarm of dead, the witch’s robe trailing after it like the train of a gown from some satanic ball. Every few moments, the sound of a cough comes from within the cape, which coaxes a ripple of turning heads and agitated growls among the horde. Something about this figure is starting to attract attention among the horde.

  As the newcomer closes in on the massive culvert under Interstate 20—a graveyard of human remains that was once the home of countless plague refugees in squalid tent cities—the creature comes to an abrupt stop. From the way it tilts its hooded head upward, it seems to be gaping at something through its ruptured, mutilated eyes. Could it be looking at something along the trestle of the highway?

  Agitated walkers surround the newcomer, sniffing it, their snarls and growls attracting more and more attention from the outer circles of the swarm. The coughing within the hooded robe intensifies.

  At last, the thing inside the witch’s cowl seems to convulse and give birth to the nesting doll—a living woman—who bursts out of the garment with a small-caliber pistol in her right hand.