Leonard nodded a hesitant nod. “Yeah.”
David exhaled a snappy breath. “Do you think so or do you know so?”
This time, Leonard held the other man’s gaze. “Don’t know who else it could be.”
A shuffler in denim overall’s approached. Nonchalantly, David lifted his arm, and fired a shot straight into its skull. The beast teetered backward, finally landing with a splattering thump. It quivered, twitched, then lay still.
“Did you see him?” asked David.
Lenny shook his head, eyes darting at Randy, who was still inside the fence. “Them three we sent away?”
David looked at him, his expression unknowing.
“Right,” Lenny said, “you wasn’t part of that. They was three drug-heads we sent packing earlier today. When they left, they was alive. Next time we seen ‘em, they was moaning and groaning with the rest of them rattlers outside the fence.”
“Okay. So what does that have to do with Doc?”
Gabriel and the four other men now joined David and Leonard, listening in on the conversation.
Lenny continued. “Well, them three had notes attached to ‘em.”
“Notes? What kind of notes? What did they say?”
A gunshot blast rang out, and all flinched. Except for the Janitor, who held a snub-nosed pistol and was now lowering the weapon. About fifteen feet away, another shuffler crumpled to the concrete drive in gurgling death throes.
“Go ahead,” the Janitor prompted, gun now dangling at his side.
David almost smiled.
Lenny said, “They all had paper taped to they chests. One word on each: Deliver to David.”
David glanced around, expecting the notes to be right in his hands. “Deliver what?”
Pursing his lips, Lenny shook his head deliberately. “Don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” David could feel the surge pushing through him, the impatient irritability beleaguering his brittle emotions.
“Got a hunch, though. There was a box.”
“A box?” All at once, David’s body trembled uncontrollably, his mind already filling the box with body parts. Natalee’s parts. He just knew it. What else could it possibly be? Doc was playing a cruel, hurtful game. One that could drive a man to do terrible, horrid things.
Like run down tens of hundreds of walking corpses with heavy construction machinery.
His prized weapon was slipping from his sweaty grip. He choked down a swallow, the next and most obvious question hiding behind reluctant lips, desperately wanting out. Wanting to know—
“What… where’s the box?”
The large man’s eyes gleamed sympathetically, then landed on a spot about thirty feet away, smack in the middle of the decomposing muck.
David could barely make it out, but it was there. The flap of cardboard, poking up through the fresh gore, slicked with scarlet. Before he’d fully processed what he was seeing, his feet were moving.
Lenny laid a hulking hand on David’s shoulder. “I tried to stop you, before you run ‘em down, but—”
“Don’t,” Gabriel said, laying his own hand on Lenny’s arm. “Let him be.” He squinted his eye at Lenny, lowered his voice. “The demons…” he added with a dip of his chin.
The Lumberjack nodded knowingly.
David was on another single-minded mission, hearing nothing, seeing only the flap of cardboard. A blood-spattered road sign on the gruesome highway he’d just paved.
He’d almost reached it when someone stepped in his path, shoved his chest. “You son of a bitch.”
Luz’s voice was a low growl, angry with sparks, belying her svelte stature. Her brows dipped low on her lids, her lips pressed to a pale scar that threatened to cut off her breath. In her right hand, a gun.
“You had no right—no right—to kill all those people.”
David didn’t have time for this, not now. Doc had been here. Again. And he needed to find out what he’d brought. Right now.
“Move, Luz.”
“I will not.”
“I said move.”
“Are you threatening me?” Her pistol hand twitched.
Still clutching his own weapon, David said, “Luz, you either move it… or I’ll move it for you.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“You’re right, Luz. I wouldn’t dare.”
A smug arrogance replaced the intense glare that had twisted her features. But his next statement would have her reeling.
“I’m a doer, not a darer,” and he simply stepped around her, his shoulder brushing her, and started toward the mangled box.
“Hey!”
He ignored her, his back to his enemy. A potentially deadly mistake. A mistake taught only once.
“Stop, right now!”
“Fight with someone else, Luz. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”
The click of a revolver’s hammer forced him to pause.
Don’t you fucking do it, Luz. Don’t you do it. I don’t want to hurt you. I really, really don’t.
“You move and I blow your head off.”
David forced heavy breaths through his still broken, still tender nose, his teeth clenched to the breaking point. His body vibrated with the residual tremors of the compactor machine and anger once thought resolved.
He performed a slow turn, El Jefe grasped in a gnarly death grip.
“Luz,” the Janitor told her, “ain’t a good idea.”
As David pivoted slowly on his heel, he spied those still inside the fence, terror washing over tear-streaked faces. He wasn’t sure how much of it stemmed from his human mashed potato experiment, and how much of it was derived from the potentially deadly drama now unfolding before their very eyes. Either way, they were getting their money’s worth.
“Doc G., these is confusing times,” Lenny said, playing peacemaker. “So much we don’t know yet. David, well, he was just trying to do what he thinks is right. Can’t fault a man for that. Least he’s doing something about it. Helping keep folks safe.”
Luz faced Lenny. “At least he’s doing something about it? Keeping folks ‘safe’? That’s what you call the mass slaughter we just witnessed?” The pistol trembled in her hand, drawing Lenny’s wary gaze. She turned to the residents huddled behind what remained of the fence, and said, “Do you all feel safe now? Huh? Did this killer make you feel better?”
She turned to David again. Glowering at him, sparks of rage streaking from her dark eyes, she measured her words, delivering them like spoon-fed cough syrup. “You’re… a… killer. A murderer. And you’ll reap exactly what you sow. In Hell.” She said something else, incomprehensible to David, followed it by crossing herself.
David assumed it was a Catholic prayer in Spanish. Didn’t recognize any curse words. Gills had taught him a few of those, and David knew them when he heard them.
“You done?” David said, a biting sarcasm oozing like the crushed corpses underfoot. “I’ve got shit to do.”
“I will shoot you.”
Gabriel interjected. “No, Luz, you won’t.” The old man gripped his own pistol hard, the metal still warm and dangling at his side. His gaze grabbed the doctor’s, then he flicked his eyes to his own weapon, and back. A silent—and serious—warning.
David noticed, too, and the alarm firing up his fight-or-flight response wound down like an old-school police siren. Gabe had his back. Literally. For this, he was thankful.
Movement in his peripheral vision prompted him to look away from Luz. A straggling shuffler. One of the very last to survive his twisted roller derby. David chewed on this a moment. One of the last to… survive. To survive.
Survive.
In the next instant, Lenny yanked his hatchet, prepared to dispatch the shuffler about to stumble into the fray. He hoisted the blade high.
“No, Lenny. Wait.” David holstered his sidearm.
Lenny shot David a dubious glance, his axe hanging in the air. His gaze shifted back and forth from the shuffler to David.
The Janitor sidled up to Lenny. “I think I know what he’s up to.”
In the next moment, Lenny and Gabriel flanked the shuffler, each man snatching one of the being’s wrists and pulling him like a Stretch Armstrong doll. The restrained dead man snapped at them with grimy, mustard-colored teeth.
Though addressing Luz directly, David spoke plenty loud so all the Infirmaries could hear. “You keep preaching to everyone that these… things… are simply ‘sick.’ You insist, in front of all these people, that I’m a murderer. A killer. That I killed Roy. That I killed Scotty. That I ‘killed’ all these ‘people.’” He paused a beat. “Well I can assure you, Dr. Gonzalez, that I’ve never killed anyone in my life. At least not anyone living. Not yesterday, not today, and not now. Not ever.”
“You are a liar.”
David actually smiled. “You know what, doc? You’re right. I am a liar. I’ve lied. To myself, to others. And I’m working on it. But this? I’m telling the truth about this.”
“I don’t believe you. You just admitted to everyone here that you’re a liar.”
“Then believe this.” He unsheathed his knife, whirled around and drove the blade straight into the shuffler’s chest—and into its non-beating heart. The ghoul flinched, even took a step back. But it did not drop to the ground, nor did it stop trying to advance. It only hissed angrily, unfazed, wearing the knife’s protruding hilt like a badge of honor.
David studied the doctor’s reaction of silent surprise and horror. “Still don’t believe it?” He grasped the handle, yanking out the blade, and immediately impaled the beast again. Still, it stood, growling, legs churning.
He looked at Luz. The corners of her mouth dragged the ground in a furious frown.
“C’mon, Luz. Are you blind? Are you not seeing this?” he said, his palm upturned toward the agitated dead man.
David let his hand drop to his side, slapping his thigh. “I can do this all night, Luz.” He tugged out the knife, speared the ghoul’s torso again—and again and again, puncturing every vital organ the blade could reach.
Luz just stood there, arms crossed and eyes darting, desperately trying to disbelieve.
The gored shuffler slowed, its mobility hindered, but it did not go down. Did not stop. Even mortally wounded and with two men detaining it, the staunch creature struggled against the living clutches that bound it.
With both hands, David dragged the blade across the angry corpse’s belly, eviscerating the ghoul and exposing its rotting insides for all to see. In the next instant, he circled the beast, coming up behind it. Grabbing its hair like a handle, David sliced its throat from ear to ear, the smiling cut leaking an inky crimson.
He slid out from behind the beast to face the doctor and her followers.
“What’s it gonna take, Luz? Christ, I’ve gutted it and cut its throat and stabbed it in the goddamned heart.” He held his hand near the shuffler’s face. On cue, the undead being snapped its teeth, teased with a taste of living flesh.
But still, the doctor stood stoically, unwilling to believe her eyes.
“Gabe? May I?” David asked, holding out his hand. “Just in case she suspects my gun’s firing blanks.”
The Janitor handed over his revolver, and David fired round after round into the seemingly superhuman being. The aroma of gunpowder and burnt flesh wove itself into the polluted breeze. His ears rang madly, but he didn’t care. He could see it on their faces. His point was hitting home.
“Want to examine him now, doc? Drag your ass and your stethoscope over here and see why he’s still trying to fucking eat me?”
The doctor and Infirmaries were quiet and still.
“Not sure where you come from, but I’ve never seen a sick person keep trying to kill me after being stabbed and sliced and shot. Hell, the only thing I haven’t done is—”
He stopped abruptly, and just stood there for a moment, silently, while his eyes crept over the ghastly scene.
Lenny and Gabriel volleyed curious glances, the shuffler still wriggling in their grips and growling at David’s back.
“Dave,” the Janitor said, dipping his chin at the mutilated mess of a dead man.
Resurfacing from his reverie, David placed a palm on his pistol, prepared to finish what he’d started. He paused, his brows in a deep ‘V,’ then changed course, drawing the hatchet from Lenny’s hip, instead. Facing the resilient corpse, he grabbed it by the hair of its head, stared into its hazy eyes. The two men restraining it stepped back as far as possible, stretching the thing’s arms to the limit.
He wasn’t sure if what he was about to do would work. But he believed he’d made one hell of a convincing argument already. If this succeeded, it’d be the exclamation mark on the day. Perhaps of the entire experience thus far.
He yanked the dead man’s head to the side, exposing his neck, then chanced a glance at Luz. Her hands were pressed to her lips, eyes glassy, pleading and begging, don’t do it.
Her green-light expression was all he needed. With everything he had, he brought the blade down on the shuffler’s neck, almost decapitating it with one blow.
The thing dropped to its knees, David’s fingers still entwined in its greasy locks. One more whack of the axe was all it took to separate head from body.
The shuffler’s headless frame crumpled to the ground. It quivered, then went completely still. Burgundy blood spilled from its neck like wine from a tipped-over glass, the already saturated ground taking a slow drink.
David held the head to his audience like some arrogant conquering tyrant. Blood dripped and oozed from his trophy. And then something happened. Something that David had counted on happening. Its lids fluttered open. Its eyes rolled in their sockets, scanning. And its mouth opened and closed, teeth clacking, David still on the menu despite no body to nourish.
A small gasp floated over the doctor’s lips, and over the lips of every witness present.
Right at that moment, David could sense it. Could actually see it—the power and influence sliding away from Luz in hulking sheets of ice, shattering on the ground. He observed the faces behind the fence. Folks were coming around, an instant awareness. A realization that they were wrong to follow this woman, after all. That despite her credentials, and know-it-all bluster, she was… wrong.
And something happened within him, too: his own guilt-riddled realization, pummeling him, forcing an understanding of something he’d denied but knew all along. Natalee had suffered beyond death because of him. He’d prolonged undeserved misery. Her body—and possibly very soul—imprisoned in a decaying hell. He needed badly to find her. To free her.
Horrified gazes remained glued to the head in his hand.
His point made and nothing left to say or prove, David handed off the hatchet to Lenny.
Then, David pulled El Jefe from the holster on his hip. He cocked the hammer, pressed the barrel to the decapitated head he now held high, and fired, his own eyes closed tight against the blast. The head’s eyes stilled, its jaw froze. A grotesque horror that had fueled many a campfire story. David opened his fingers, dropping the head on top of its former body, where it landed with a sickening thud, like an overripe melon, before rolling onto the tainted ground.
More gasps.
A meek voice broke the silence. “She ain’t no doctor.”
Onlookers turned, heads swiveled.
A couple of men stepped away from a young Hispanic woman, who appeared to be in her early twenties. David hadn’t noticed her before. But being so engrossed in his life lesson, he wasn’t surprised.
“Go back inside, Maria. Now.” Luz pointed toward the building, thankfully with her empty hand.
“She… she’s no doctor.” The normally timid woman’s glare focused on Luz as accusatory tones leapt from her tongue.
The spectators, already reeling from David’s demonstration, tossed confused glances, unsure of this young lady’s intentions.
“I said go back inside. Now. You need to get back to the children.” A sudden unease exploded through Luz, like she had some deep, dark secret to hide. A politician being called out, found with the dead hooker.
“Maria—”
“These people, they need to know.”
The crowd parted like the fabled Red Sea, leaving Maria standing alone, bodies to either side. All eyes were on her.
Gabriel stepped forward, eyeing the woman, then turned his squinty-eyed gaze on the doctor. “This true, Luz?”
Her voice was a messy tremble. “Maria, I said—”
“Luz!” An uncharacteristic ire lit Gabe’s tone, his patience as thin as his old skin.
Luz volleyed his gaze, her eyes welling. She blinked away tears, swiping with her fingers what she couldn’t blink away.
“I asked you a question, Luz. Is Maria telling the truth?”
Luz started speaking Spanish, hurling her words at Maria. The younger woman behind the bars shrank, taking several steps back.
“Goddamnit, Luz! Answer me!”
Even David was surprised by the Janitor.
Defeated, she bowed her head, and sobbed.
Gabriel hooked a hand on his hip, shook his head. “Well I’ll be goddamned. We’ve been hornswoglled.” He paused a moment, allowing the revelation to sink in. “Why, Luz? Why’d you lie about being a doctor?”
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. She was too busy bawling.
“Son of a bitch,” David muttered. Evidently, he wasn’t the only liar on the premises. At least he lied mainly to himself.
No one stepped forward to comfort Luz. Just cold, confused stares. Whispers.
David seized his opportunity. Dr. Gonzalez had wronged him, sure. And he could gawk and point fingers and accuse with the rest of the crowd, but his own private war with a faux Doc Holliday was well underway. The wannabe gunslinger had struck a healthy blow earlier that day. And already, the next blow awaited him, only feet away.
Before he could investigate, Gabriel laid a hand on his shoulder, then patted his back. “Thank you, David. You showed some serious cojones.”
“I made quite a mess of the place.”
“It’s not about the place, it’s about the people. We could have the strongest walls in Texas, but if we’re weak and divided behind those walls… well, we may as well not have any walls at all.”
Dead South Rising (Book 2): Death Row Page 20
