by Paul Bishop
Well, in Ryan’s arms. But those days were long gone. I knew it sounded cheesy and I hated to even think it, but in my mind, the hand I lost is somewhere up in heaven holding Ryan’s hand, our fingers entwined the way we liked to do. The funny thing was, I didn’t even believe in heaven.
The crash made the girls jump. Gigi and Rowena clung tighter to each other.
“What the hell was that?” Cruz said.
“It sounded like the kitchen,” Sammy said. He’d pointed at the closed door the day I was hired and said it used to be a kitchen when they served a buffet. The way he dismissed it, I pictured an inch-deep layer of dust and cobwebs over the door to the stove.
Cruz let the baseball bat lead him like a divining rod toward the sound. “You girls stay here,” he said. But I hooked my crutches under me and went after him, leaving my leg on the stage.
Elon and Chris fell in line and even Charlie and Sammy brought up the rear in a less than convincing show of force.
The bartender jerked the door open and stood back, his bat at the ready. The kitchen looked exactly the way I pictured it. A dull film covered everything. An industrial freezer, a stove with six burners, twin ovens, and a metal prep table all stood inside—along with a window Sammy had apparently forgotten about.
Halfway in through the window were two rail-thin specimens in loose clothes stained with dried blood.
“Get that freezer over and block the window,” Cruz called out. He went in, already working on his backswing with the bat. Chris followed him while Elon and Sammy hurried to grab the freezer. Charlie looked around the dusty shelves.
“Do you have any knives in this kitchen?” he asked.
“Not for a long time,” Sammy said.
Cruz swung at a man whose hips had reached the windowsill in his slide inside. He caught him in the gut with the bat and he bent at the waist, pulled his face up involuntarily, and smacked against the glass.
Chris grabbed the other man by the arm and swung him hard at the wall. The cannibal held a length of bike chain in his hand and the momentum made the chain a whipping weed whacker. It clanged off a set of metal shelves with empty pans. The intruder impacted the wall and a half-dozen pots and pans fell to the floor.
These guys were skinny and weak. They were also obviously hungry but I didn’t know if that made them less or more dangerous.
I watched from the doorway as the freezer began to turn. Cruz brought the bat back to swing again at the man trapped half-in and half-out of the window, but he had other plans. The skinny man kicked with a cowboy boot. The tip glinted in the light and I saw he had a short knife tip mounted on the toe. The bartender took the strike in the stomach.
He jerked away and cracked the man across the face with the bat one-handed while he clutched his stomach with the other. The cannibal’s head snapped to the side and he spat several pointy, filed-down teeth.
Elon and Sammy moved the freezer more quickly now and carved lines across the grease on the floor. They bumped against a wire rack shelf with a few loose cans on it. It tipped and fell, but the cans were mostly empty and made a terrible racket on the way down. One full can—a sixty-four-ounce can of stewed tomatoes—bounced.
Chris dodged a swing of the bike chain and dove at his man, tackled him around the waist, and pounded him against the wall again.
Cruz dropped the bat, picked his opponent up by the scruff of his neck, and swung him face-down onto the stovetop. Charlie moved past me into the room. It surprised me to see him join the fray. He stepped up to the stove and turned a knob on the burner. As Cruz ground the cannibal’s face into the iron cooktop, a small spark lit a thin stream of gas and a blue flame lit under the man’s face. His screams were impressive.
By now, the freezer was almost at the open window.
The other two combatants fell in a tangle of limbs. They tumbled over the greasy floor and careened off the legs of the metal-topped prep station. Chris rolled near the can of stewed tomatoes. He managed to straddle the man and used his weight to pin him down while he fumbled for the can.
At the stove, the bartender still held down the face of the skinny cannibal to sear his face with the flame. There wasn’t much gas in the line as services like that had been cut long before. What remained trapped in the pipes after all this time had been enough to scorch the man’s face severely before the flame sputtered and died.
Chris pounded the can into the man under him. He brought the heavy weapon down two-handed on the man’s face again and again. I had to turn away because it reminded me so much of me and my leg beating a different cannibal to death. Plus, the smell of seared skin made me nauseous.
I crutched into the club and tried not to throw up. Gigi and Rowena clung to each other so hard they both had white knuckles.
While I leaned against the stage to catch my breath, the violent sounds that issued from the kitchen slowed and eventually stopped. One by one, the men returned to the club again. Sammy sweated profusely while Elon panted and rubbed his forearms. Chris wiped blood from his face and Charlie helped Cruz to walk by hoisting his arm over his shoulder.
“He’s hurt bad,” Charlie said.
Blood covered the front of the bartender’s shirt and his hand no longer staunched the flow. He dripped a trail as he walked.
“Lay him down here,” I said and moved my leg to clear space on the stage.
Charlie guided him over and set him on the edge where the dollar bills usually went. He sat still for a second, then flopped onto his back and stopped moving.
6
“Is he dead?” Charlie asked.
“Not yet,” Elon said. “But he will be soon if we don’t get out of here.”
“Does no one know how to help him?” I asked.
“Come on—does any of us look like a doctor to you?” Chris said.
We all stood around and simply stared while Cruz bled on stage. All of us seemed as useless as a cheerleading squad in a war zone.
“This is crazy,” I said to no one in particular.
“What can we do?” Gigi asked.
“I don’t know. Do any of you girls have a needle and thread? Maybe we can stitch him up at least.”
Gigi and Rowena both shook their heads, their gazes aimed at the ground. I watched Cruz’s chest rise and fall and expected each one to be his last.
“Is there nothing we can do?” I shouted.
Sammy put an arm around my shoulder. “Best let him go, hon.”
“Well, what do we do now?” Elon asked. “I don’t want to sit around and wait to get picked off one by one.”
Rowena spoke with something resembling confidence in her voice. “I think we should take our chances and get the hell out of here.” Despite her bravado, she never released Gigi and made no move toward the door. Every time I looked at the woman, I was amazed at how much fear I could see in her one eye.
I noticed the sour smell from where Jacqui still sprawled out on the floor. The blood around her lingered like a beer spill waiting until the cleaning crew arrived in the morning.
“Can we at least get the ones who are already dead the hell out of here?” I didn’t mean for it to come out so harshly, but I’d only known Jacqui less than a week.
“She’s right,” Elon said. He and Chris picked her body up and moved it to the kitchen with the others. They slammed the door behind them with her inside.
“I have something that might help us,” Sammy said. He walked toward his office and we all followed.
Over his desk hung a painting of a Western landscape with a cowboy on a horse and an open sky painted in pinks and oranges as the sun set over the Rockies. It was either kinda tacky or kinda romantic, depending on how you looked at it.
“After the shit went down,” Sammy said. “I stored a few weapons in case something like this ever happened.”
“Why the hell did you wait until now to tell us?” Elon wanted to know. We all braced ourselves for an arsenal, the tools to mow the cannibals down outside and free ourselve
s.
He pulled on the painting and it swung out on a hinge. We all exhaled slowly, disappointed like kids on Christmas morning who came down to a pile of our own toys rewrapped in newspaper under the tree.
Sammy’s arsenal consisted of a two-by-four with a few rusty nails protruding from one end, a slingshot, a brick with a hole in it through which he’d tied a rope, a wrench, and two broken bottle necks duct-taped to leather work gloves.
“What the hell is this?” Chris asked.
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” he said somewhat defensively.
“Screw this, I’m out of here,” Rowena said and stormed out of the room. We all knew she wouldn’t leave so we let her have her tantrum. Without her lifeline, Gigi drifted closer to me and I felt her hand on my arm. Right then, she needed me more than I needed my crutches.
Charlie stepped up and lifted the two-by-four from the wall. “He’s right. It’s better than nothing.”
With a shrug, everyone else fell in line and took something off the wall. Gigi and I hung back and let the men arm themselves first. I still had my pocketknife, although I knew it would be useless against a real attack. It gave me an idea, though.
“Hey, Sammy,” I said. “Do you have any more of that duct tape?”
“A little. Why?”
“Let me see it.”
He rummaged in a drawer for a while until he brought out a thin roll of silver tape.
“Is it all right if I use all of this?” I asked.
“I suppose so. Are you gonna tape that leg on tighter?”
I smiled. “Not exactly.”
Before I could explain, a scream pierced through the wall. As a group, we all turned and rushed out of Sammy’s cramped little office, each man brandishing his new weapon. For a group who had mocked the arsenal a few moments earlier, they looked confident with their thrift-store armaments now.
As usual, I brought up the rear and crutch-walked into the main room as an afterthought to the mob ahead of me.
It was Rowena. She hadn’t been bullshitting and had tried to get out.
By the time Elon and Chris reached her, only her legs were still inside. She had moved a few chairs out of the way in an attempt to open the door and slip out, but they must have grabbed her through the barricade as soon as they had a chance.
We all piled up behind Elon and Chris. Sammy and Charlie tried to grasp her legs. Charlie got a shoe in his hand but fell on his fat ass when it slipped off her foot.
She screamed through it all. Gigi stuck close to me, buried her face in my shoulder, and clamped her hands over her ears. She soaked my shirt with tears.
It was impossible to tell how many of the meat-eaters outside had a hold on her, but there were more than us. In a few seconds, she was yanked the rest of the way out the door and her legs slid along the broken glass on the door frame. Elon and Chris went into defense mode and began to rebuild the section of the barricade she’d undone.
The screams unnerved me but it hurt like a knife to my own gut when they suddenly stopped. It ended with no warning like a microphone had been unplugged.
“Thanks for the snack!” a voice said from outside.
We all rushed to the front. Everyone but Gigi took a place against the barricade where we could see out—but not too close since we knew they had grabby hands.
A short man in a leather jacket stood in front of his group of cannibals. A group of feral-looking people stood around him in a semicircle, four of them holding torches and the remainder staring at the cinderblock structure of Sammy’s with hungry eyes. They all wore clothing virtually in rags, but it seemed almost intentional. The torn and patchy clothing they wore, without exception, was bloodstained. So were their faces and those filed-down teeth they like to bare like wild dogs.
The leader spoke again. “It’s not exactly a fair trade—two for one,” he said, referring to the two men we’d killed in the kitchen. It sounded weird to hear one of them talk, and coherently at that. No wonder they made him their leader.
One of the those on the fringe shoved a dark figure at him and he took it. Rowena struggled in his arms and writhed not unlike she did for tips on the pole.
A torch swung near and lit them both for our benefit. I could see her throat and I understood why she could no longer screamed. A bone jutted from either side of her neck, one side polished and white and the other darkened red with her blood where it had been pushed through to destroy her voice box but not kill her—yet. As soon as they pulled it out, she would bleed to death like a game animal.
“Dear Lord,” Sammy said when he saw it.
“What do you want from us?” Elon said.
“What do you think?” The leader smiled.
“You sick bastard!” Chris said.
The cannibal held Rowena in one arm. She barely resisted now and her gaze wandered like she didn’t know where she was. I wished fervently that she didn’t.
“Y’know the best part of a fresh kill?” he said and drew a long hunting knife from behind his back. “The eyes.”
I couldn’t believe that I continued to watch, but something about this new world made me not trust it. I needed to keep my attention on the madness or else it might trick me—or worse, sneak up on me.
He took his knife—with a curved tip like a cat’s claw— dug out Rowena’s good eye with an expert move, and chewed it off the end of his knife with the prideful look of a hunter enjoying the first steak from a deer.
Her jaws opened wide as a silent scream filled the black hole of her mouth. I’d seen the madness. Now, it was safe to look away.
“My people will feast well tonight,” he said through an overstuffed mouth. “Thank you for providing us the sustenance we need to maintain our vigil.”
A cheer went up from the crowd.
One by one, we all moved away from the wall and shuffled silently into the room. By the time I crutched over to the stage to check on Cruz, his breathing had stopped.
7
Everyone kept themselves quietly busy.
Sammy passed drinks out at the bar. Charlie had enjoyed a few already. Elon and Chris kept their heads and talked quietly, alone in a corner. Gigi had gone to the dressing room and put more clothes on than I’d ever seen her wear—full-length jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. I didn’t even know she owned that much fabric.
I went to work with the duct tape. I searched the sea of dried blood where Jacqui had fallen and found the knife the cannibal used on her. It was a big, heavy blade with an ebony handle with a turquoise inlay, far better than anything in Sammy’s secret stash.
Satisfied with my find, I wound a healthy layer of tape around it and lashed it to the bottom of my right crutch like a bayonet waiting to be deployed.
The quiet unsettled me. I’d never been in Sammy’s without something on the stereo—mellow oldies when we opened, heavy metal at showtime, and jazz after closing. I think Sammy liked to show off a little that he still had power and a CD collection.
Gigi worried me especially. Since Rowena was killed, she’d turned sullen and glassy-eyed, almost like she was sleepwalking.
I crutched over to her.
“Are you doing all right?” I asked.
“As good as I can expect.” She shook her head and cracked a rueful smile. “Ain’t this some shit?”
“It’s a shitload of shit, all right.”
“Here we are, trying to make a living, right?”
I nodded.
“Shitheads going around eatin’ people,” she said. “I knew it would get bad, but I never saw it gettin’ this bad.”
“Me neither.”
“You know,” she said and wrapped her long-sleeved arms around herself. “When I had the cancer, I didn’t think it could get any worse. And I beat it, y’know? I beat that shit right outta my body. I gave up my left tit for it, ate a boatload of radiation, lost my hair, all that shit. But I’m still here.” She looked at me with wet eyes. “Now, the rest of the world goes through a few tough times and
they start eatin’ each other.” She shook her head, unable to imagine where it had taken a turn.
“I wish I knew what to tell you, Gigi,” I said.
“There’s nothing to tell. I guess all we can hope for is that we get to tell this story to someone else down the line. But I’m gettin’ mighty tired of living life only for the stories.”
I put an arm around her to show my agreement.
“How’s it looking out there?” Elon asked. Charlie stood at the barricade and peered out one of the gaps.
“About the same. I see torches lit but don’t see any of them.”
“Maybe they’re sleeping,” Chris said as he made his way behind the bar.
“Like we ought to be,” Elon said.
“Aw, hell, I can’t sleep a wink with them outside,” his friend replied. He pulled the cork on a bottle of moonshine.
“Hey, now,” Sammy said with a slur. “You gonna start a tab or what?” He reached for the bottle but missed drunkenly with his porky hand. It tipped and clear liquid spilled onto the bar. The alcohol smell burned my nostrils from the other side of the room.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Chris protested.
“Give him a break, Sam,” Elon said. “Now ain’t the time to start thinking about your profit margin.”
“Yeah,” the other man said and opened another bottle. “If you make it out of this with your ass in one piece, consider it a good night.”
Sammy sat heavily on a bar stool, too drunk or too tired to argue.
“Besides,” Chris said. “This one is for the road.” He filled a short glass and withdrew a cigar from his pocket. He put it between his lips and flicked the top on a Zippo lighter. It was the first one I’d seen in a while and I assumed he must have saved his fuel.
“One for the road?” I said.
“Me and Chris are moving on,” Elon said. “Gettin’ while the gettin’ is good.”
“Do you really think they’re asleep?”
“As close as we’re gonna get.” He looked at me directly “Do you really want to be here in the morning when they’re well-rested?”
