by Joe McKinney
Anderson reached up for Paul’s hand, but then his gaze went over Paul’s shoulder to the metal wall behind him, and his eyes went wide.
“Paul, oh my God!”
Paul was bent over through the bars. He looked back over his shoulder and up the three story high wall behind him. Ten naked dead men were spidering down it head first. Their hair hung down from their heads like dirty rags. Their ruined junkie bodies shone palely in the low light. A keening moan rose from the one closest to them, and it was answered by the others in a sickening chorus.
“How?” Anderson said.
Paul turned back to him. “Run!” he said. “Get going. Get to the smokestacks.” He pointed to Anderson’s right. “That way. Go!”
“What about you?”
“Go!”
Anderson backed away from Paul.
“Go!”
He turned his gaze up once more at the dead men coming down the wall and stumbled off in the direction Paul had told him to go. Then he disappeared into the dark.
Paul watched him go, then stood up, and waited for the dead men to come for him.
***
It was like slogging his way through a muddy field. Anderson tried to make himself move, tried to get his hands and legs to obey, but it was so hard. He just wanted to fall back on his butt and rest. There was a loud, droning noise at the edges of his mind that threatened to wash over him. He sensed it like the coming of sleep, so welcome, so warm, so easy to just give in and forget.
But he knew on some level that to give in was to die, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not by a long shot. He grabbed hold of the railing next to him and stumbled forward, climbing over rusted debris and closing his nose to the smell of the old blankets and rotting garbage that he passed along the way to the smokestacks.
He could see them off to his left. They were gray towers poking above a skeleton of pipes and machinery. What were they, two hundred yards away? He could make that.
Maybe.
But then a sound stopped him, a slight noise around the corner ahead of him.
It had to be the wind rustling the sheets of corrugated metal that hung from everywhere around here. There wasn’t anything else up ahead.
He heard another noise, the straining of rusted bolts and hinges beneath a large weight. He stared into the dark ahead of him and shook his head. Footsteps sounded on the metal catwalk a few yards away. He could hear moaning, that same gut-turning moan he’d heard just moments before when Paul had tried to pull him up through the bars, and he knew what that dirty shape standing in silhouette ahead of him was.
Anderson felt the sweat on his lips. He could taste the dust in the air, and even before the dead man stumbled around the corner ahead of him, his arms raised towards him in a gesture of supplication, he knew it was Bobby Cantrell.
When Ram stepped into the light he almost seemed to be pleading with Anderson. Cantrell’s jaw moved constantly. His hands, mottled with the purplish tinge of lividity, opened and closed as though he was begging for food. His words wouldn’t come, though his face was twisted with the effort to make his wallowing tongue pronounce them.
Anderson pointed his gun at Cantrell. The weapon’s molded grip wasn’t any help. He was in such a state he could barely wrap his fingers around the receiver. The corpse shambling towards him obliterated every tenuous hold he had on sanity with each step. The rest of the world shrank away, and Anderson was left with an abomination moving towards him through the tunnel his vision had become.
Cantrell was barely recognizable. He had been in the South Texas heat for a week, the bacteria and the other microbes that fed on death eating him from the inside out, rotting him, creating a cloud of stench that moved with him. Anderson’s lips curled up at the corner of his mouth in a sort of snarl, though it was a purely reflexive response to the smell. He brought up his gun and aimed it at his friend’s chest.
“Stop, Bobby,” he said, though he knew they were well past that point now.
Anderson could wait no longer.
He fired.
The first shot hit Bobby in the chest. He fired twice more in close succession. The bullets thudded into Bobby and shook him like a man shivering against a sudden chill.
But Bobby kept coming on.
Anderson’s bowels almost let go. He raised the gun higher, took aim, and popped off another round.
The bullet hit right below the dead man’s nostrils. It was a flawless take down shot, the sniper’s sweet spot, designed to punch through the nasal cavity and turn the medulla oblongata behind it into a cloud of pink spray out the back of the head. And Anderson did see a wet chunk of something blow out the back of his friend’s head. But it did nothing to stop the corpse. Bobby Cantrell continued forward, staggering on rotting legs, reaching for him with swollen, purple fingers, staring at him with dead eyes that felt nothing and contained no hint of memory, no recognition of a lifetime of friendship.
More dead men appeared behind Cantrell. They poured around the corner, nude and hideous with their thick black autopsy scars on their chests, the skin around the sutures puckered over by purplish skin that had swelled grotesquely by the action of expanding gas within their rotten husks.
Anderson turned and ran.
He bounded up a half flight of rusted stairs and swung himself up and over a railing beyond that. He ran down the length of the catwalk until he reached a section where part of the structure had given way. An open pit thirty feet deep yawned in front of him. He looked down and saw a mess of debris below him. Across the other side of the pit, a distance of maybe seven or eight feet, was the remainder of the catwalk. He could see it holding onto the metal wall to his right with frail looking mounts.
He turned and looked back. Cantrell and the dead men were coming. They weren’t far away now. Where Anderson had been forced to stop and pull his soft, out-of-shape body up and over railings, or duck and belly crawl under loose sections of metal, the dead men advanced with the steadiness of ants.
He had to jump. There was no other alternative. They would be on him in another few seconds. He took a few steps back and muttered a quiet prayer. Then he ducked his head and sprinted for the edge of the busted catwalk and jumped for the far side. Anderson hung suspended in midair above the pit for a long moment, but even before his feet left the catwalk he knew he wasn’t going to clear the pit. The instep of his right foot caught the jagged edge of the far side and he pitched over forward, landing hard face down on the other catwalk.
For a moment, everything went purple. His body, overloaded by pain and starving for the air that had been knocked from his lungs, refused to process the sensation. All at once feeling flooded back into him and he rolled over onto his back and screamed with pain. His foot felt like it had been sheared off, and he was surprised to see it still there when at last he could move his head enough to look at his own body.
Blood was pouring out of the wound, and there was a sharp, searing pain of pulled muscles along the backs of his legs and up and down his back, but that wasn’t the worst of his problems. The metal catwalk was swaying like a tree in a stiff breeze. He could feel it moving beneath him, rocking against its mounts. There was a moment of dread that came from the foreknowledge of what was going to happen, and then his stomach rolled with nausea as the mounts gave way and the whole contraption upon which he lay went crashing over and down.
Anderson grabbed onto the railing. He felt the wreckage picking up speed, the collapsing metal groaning in protest. He imagined he could see the ground racing up to meet him, his body impaled upon tines of rebar sticking up from a debris pile.
And then he hit.
Everything rolled away beneath him and he hit, even harder than before, square on his right side. He tumbled downward on a tilted bit of catwalk and finally landed on his back. A wave of dirt rained down upon him and hit him in the face. Spluttering, he opened his eyes and saw metal. A large section of the catwalk had shifted downward and stopped just inches above his nose. Some sort of m
etal spar had speared into the ground less than a foot from his right ear.
But he was alive.
A thin groan escaped his lips. More dust sifted down from the debris above him and into his face. He shook his head and wiped it away with a bloody hand. Everything hurt, his whole body.
“Oh Jesus,” he murmured against the pain. He could taste blood in his mouth.
Above him, the wreckage continued to shift and groan. He blinked the dust from his eyes and saw movement through the web of metal that had landed on top of him. Cantrell and the other dead men were moving through that web, and they were close by, maybe ten or twelve feet above him at the most.
Anderson closed his eyes and prayed.
***
Paul listened to the sound of gunfire echoing through the superstructure. Three quick shots in succession. Anderson was in trouble. And wasting his ammunition, too. These weren’t Hollywood zombies. They didn’t go down with a well-placed shot to the brain. They were extensions of his father’s will, meat puppets at the end of a wire. As long as his father had need of them, they would continue to advance.
Several of the dead men dropped from the wall and onto the platform. They were in front of him now. Others had him cut off from behind.
But they didn’t advance on him. They stayed back a good twenty feet. Paul stayed perfectly still. One of the dead men pulled a section of corrugated metal off the wall, exposing an empty space within. Paul looked into the blackness and knew it was a direct route into the center of the superstructure where the circular chamber, and his father, waited.
He scanned the faces of the dead men, and though their eyes were milky and vacant, he knew what they wanted of him. He was to go through there, and he was to do it of his own accord.
That was important. Somehow, in fact, it made all the difference. If he came willingly, it was his way of turning control over to his father, of surrendering his will. But to do that was to lose. Even if he fought, they would still subdue him and bring him to his father’s feet—he knew that—but he would do it with his will unbent. And that was the difference.
Yet it wasn’t so easy to keep his chin up. The same power that had been growing exponentially within him over the last few days had now become something like a magnet. It wanted to cling to what was in that circular chamber. Even the simple act of standing still required a tremendous effort on his part. He wanted to go inside. Every cell in his body begged him to go. Only his will fought back.
He reached into his pocket and he took out the Barber fifty cent piece. He turned it over in his hand and it winked at him in the low light. He caressed the edges of the coin with his thumb, feeling the deep gouge at the top that had been worn smooth by countless hours of slipping through his fingers.
It felt heavier than normal. He closed his fingers around it and tried to focus on everything that had happened to him. When he told Anderson that he felt like everything he thought he knew about himself had turned out to be a lie, he wasn’t being completely truthful. Yes, his childhood was a lie. He had been oblivious to his mother’s suffering. He had lived in the same house as her for twelve years and never understood what his father was doing to her, how he was bleeding her dry, body and soul. And when his father had returned, he had almost gone over to him. He had almost believed in his father’s vision. He knew now that was a lie, too.
But the one thing that had not changed was Rachel. That love remained, and it was not a lie. That part of his life was clear to the bottom of the glass, and when he held that Barber in his hand, he could touch the truth of that love.
When he opened his eyes again, he found it easier to hold his ground. One of the dead men held a withered arm out towards the blackness of the tunnel like he was leading a tour through an old Roman ruin. This way to the other side, sir. Through here you’ll see a lovely furnished colonnade that opens up to the public amphitheater. If you please, sir. Watch your step there...
Paul shook his head.
The dead man dropped his arm. Two others advanced on him.
Paul slid his collapsible baton from his belt and snapped it open. He stood with it cocked back over his right shoulder, waiting for the lead dead man to walk into the sweet spot of his stroke.
“Come on,” Paul said. “A little closer.”
When the first dead man came into range, Paul stroked him upside the head with a blow so forceful it broke the man’s neck and left a grotesque indentation just above the man’s left ear. Paul drew the baton back over his shoulder and backpedaled. The dead man continued to advance, his head bent over to one side at an unnatural angle. His hands came up towards Paul and the fingers flexed. Paul stepped forward again and swung his baton. This time it was like hitting a rotten pumpkin. The skull gave way beneath the blow with a splat. Paul rained blows down on it again and again, reducing the man’s head in seconds to something that looked like a deflated balloon.
And still it came on.
Paul swept its legs out from under it, then turned and tried to climb up the railing behind him. The dead were on him in moments. He fought with his fists and his knees and his elbows, slinging bodies off the side of the platform and down into the tangled wreckage beneath him, but there were just too many of them. They pulled him down to the floor and they twisted his arms behind his back and he felt the bite of his own handcuffs as they clamped down on his wrists.
Chapter 25
Rachel had crawled as far as she could go into a corner. Behind her, a pair of cement walls rose up twenty feet to the base of the smokestacks. The smokestacks towered up another hundred feet above the top of the walls. Gazing up at them made her dizzy. In front of her were huge piles of garbage laced through with skeins of heavy metal cables. Presumably, she was in some sort of abandoned factory, but what she was doing here, and what was to happen to her, she had no idea. The dead men who brought her here had evidently not wanted to kill her. They certainly could have if they’d wanted to. The way they’d punched into her apartment and pulled her from it like birds pulling a worm from the earth, she suspected they could have torn her to pieces.
Instead, they brought her here.
She really didn’t even remember how she’d gotten here. One of them had slung her over his shoulder in a sort of fireman’s carry and brought her into the backyard behind her apartment. They had stepped into thick vegetation that choked the alley beyond the fence. She’d felt weeds and branches tearing at her skin. And then they were through the vegetation and crawling over endless catwalks and piles of garbage. She had ended up here, tucked away in this corner.
Those things, those dead men, had been standing guard over her at first. But they were gone now. She was alone, scared and alone. There had been some strange noises, high, metallic popping noises that almost sounded like distant gunshots. After that, those dead men had scaled over the garbage and disappeared. They hadn’t looked at each other. They hadn’t spoken. They didn’t seem to perk up like dogs to a whistle outside of the range of her hearing. They just climbed into the superstructure and vanished, like spiders into a sink full of dirty dishes.
They’d been gone for a while now. Slowly, almost as though she doubted that she could, she rose to her feet. She wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and started walking through the wreckage, trying to be quiet, listening for anything, always expecting another of those dead men to suddenly step around a corner in front of her and tear her apart, until at last she came to a place where the superstructure had collapsed. The tangled mess before her seemed to be the remains of a catwalk and its supports. There was no way around it, and she couldn’t climb over it. It didn’t look stable. And she certainly couldn’t turn around and go back. Those dead men were back there.
Her only real choice was to try to go through it. She ducked down and found a small tunnel where a platform of some sort had collapsed over top of the catwalk itself. The metal lattice floor of the catwalk was tilted to one side, but if she held on to the railings and pulled herself along, she might b
e able to make it through. It looked like she’d have to crawl for about sixty feet, maybe less.
She grabbed the bottom rung of the railing and made her way into the tunnel with a hand over hand motion. Her toes provided a little grip on the lattice, but most of the weight was carried by the muscles in her arms, and after only a few feet of that, she was breathing hard and sweating. The metal bar became slippery in her hands, and though she was terrified, she knew she had to stop for just a second and catch her breath. She hooked one arm around a metal bar and stopped to rest. She closed her eyes and let her forehead rest against the metal lattice floor of the catwalk. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself staring through the metal lattice into another pair of open eyes.
She screamed.
***
“Be quiet! Goddamn it, shut up! Rachel, stop it. They’ll hear you.”
Hearing her own name seemed to calm her, and Anderson knew he’d guessed right. He made shushing noises after that, keeping his voice as low and as gentle as the pain up and down his right side would allow.
He said, “You’re Rachel, right?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice breathy. Her eyes were wide open, a deep, rich brown with flecks of green. She had dirt all over her face, and her features were twisted by fear, but Anderson could see, even beneath the fear and the dirt, that she was pretty. A little skinny for his tastes, but definitely a knockout.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m Keith Anderson. I’m here with Paul. He sent me to get—”
“Where is he?” she said. “Where’s Paul? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know,” Anderson said, and he had to stop there. Speaking had sent a fresh wave of pain through him, and he closed his eyes and groaned. When he opened his eyes again, he was panting. “He wants to stop his father.”
