“Goddamnit,” he said.
Lila said something, but Scott barely heard it, something about ‘what’d you expect’. He stared down at the creep’s blown-apart skull, wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. None of it made any sense. One minute he was driving down the expressway, and now this, wandering barefoot through a nightmare landscape of death and destruction, where two-legged beasts turn women into smoldering slabs of food.
They made their way to the last two miscreants Scott had sent tumbling to their deaths. Bypassing the guy with a bleeding stump where his knee should’ve been, they went on to the next, to the one with a fist-sized hole chewed out of his back. Scott was glad. He knew what the shotgun had done to the other guy’s head. It was bad enough to have the image burned into the back of his eyeballs—the creep’s smile as Scott stood over him, the way his entire head exploded when he pulled the trigger—he didn’t need another look at the horrible mess he’d made. But he couldn’t escape the nauseating stench as they walked past him, the thick copper taste that settled in the back of his throat, the rotten-meat smell that filled the air around him.
“Bingo,” Warren said as he knelt down to remove the guy’s shoes. They were black Nikes, and it took only a moment for the midget to untie them and pull them off his feet. “Sit down, man,” he told Scott, and then handed him the sneakers when he sat.
“Want his socks too?”
“No way.” Scott slipped his bare foot into the shoe. It was a couple of sizes too large, loose, but not uncomfortable, not really, and when both were on his feet and the laces securely tied, he was glad to have them. He stood up and so did Warren, and together with Lila they left the gruesome scene behind, Warren in front, Scott and Lila behind him, Scott carrying the useless shotgun, hoping like hell Lila’s firearm would serve to keep them safe and secure.
Scott heard it first.
They had crossed the street and were moving past the burnt-out shell of a car when a sound grabbed his attention, a low orgiastic moaning more befitting a late night session of lovemaking than something that should’ve been coming from behind an old abandoned automobile. A shiver of dread rolled up his spine as he said, “Jesus, what the—”
“Behind the car.” Lila stepped to the rear bumper, took another step and said, “Oh, fuck!” Her eyes narrowed and her left hand shot up to her mouth, but it did little to mask her apparent revulsion as Warren ran to her side.
Scott, who had followed close on Warren’s heels, looked down and gasped.
Sitting on the sidewalk with its back against the car was the runt of a creature Scott had encountered on his way out of the rehab center. It had ripped the pants from the missing lower leg of the slain behemoth who had lost his head to the roaring shotgun blast, and was tearing chunks away with its broken and busted teeth, slurping and moaning and gnawing and chewing as Scott stood before it, a look of stunned disbelief etched upon his face.
The creature looked up, its scorched and tattered rags barely covering the three-foot-long torso supporting its hideously misshapen head. “What?” he said.
Lila tugged loose her pistol, and Warren said, “No!” She leveled it at the flesh-eater and he grabbed her wrist. “No, don’t. They’ll hear it and come after us!”
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said, holstering her weapon and looking up the street in the direction Dub and his boys had carried off their disgusting bounty.
The creature went back to his meal, and Warren said, “Use a knife. You got one, don’t you?”
“Damn right I do.” Lila pushed a hand into the knapsack hanging off her shoulder, pulled out a sheathed hunting knife and slid the blade free.
Scott said, “What in the fuck are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
“What, you’re going to kill it?”
The creature looked up when Scott said, “You’re going to butcher the damn thing?” It took the chewed up limb from its bloody mouth, and said, “Hey, what’d I ever do to you? Ain’t it enough what I already been through with this shit? You think I wanta be like this? I didn’t ask that goddamn fireball to nail my ass. I didn’t volunteer to have my face burnt halfway off and my legs melted together. The fuck am I supposed to eat? Dirt? Gimme a break here!”
Scott looked at Lila, whose eyes had not moved away from the object of her scorn.
“He’ll give us away,” Warren said.
“Said the kettle to the pot,” said Scott.
“We gotta kill him. Those big bastards come back, he’ll tell ‘em—”
“What? What’ll he tell them? That he saw us walking through here? So what? We’ll be long gone by then.”
“Long dead if they find us,” said Warren, and Lila said, “We can’t chance it.”
“You can’t do this,” Scott said. “It just isn’t… right. Where’s your humanity, for chrissakes?”
Warren chuckled, laughing out the words, “Humanity? Look around, Scotty-boy.” He nodded at the pathetic looking creature holding a gnawed-on piece of leg in its lap. “Look at that. That’s where our humanity went—seven weeks ago while you were sleepin’ like a baby down at your rehabilitation center.” He paused for a moment, looked up at Lila, and then back at Scott. Finally, he said, “You’ll see, eventually. Whoever you were before all this happened, you won’t be for long.”
Chapter Three
Dub sat on the edge of a three-foot-high concrete wall, the top of the wall level with and bordering what once had been the finely manicured lawn of a real estate office, covered now by dust and ash and brittle pieces of dead grass. On the sidewalk before him, his four companions busied themselves with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and rations of roasted flesh carved from the burned and blackened corpse that had been laid out like an unholy sacrifice next to Dub on the flat surface of the wall.
Dub wasn’t happy about losing those men, and he sure as shit didn’t like it that no one had paid a price for them. Four men splattered from here to Sunday—by what? Hell, they didn’t even know who’d done it. Whoever it was must have been some brave motherfuckers. Not brave enough to stick around to face them, though. Too bad—he’d like to have gotten a good look at those cocksuckers, get a little up-close-and-personal action going so they could see what grabbin’ the horns does for you. See what happens when you fuck with The Devil’s Own. Maybe what was left of the spics showed up while they were busy with the woman, caught them by surprise and threw a little payback on their asses. God knew they had some paying back to do. Dub sure as shit knew it. He just wished he could have sniffed out their hiding spot while he and the boys were inspecting the carnage. Somewhere close, he was sure of it. They hadn’t time enough to get very far—the blood was too fresh, the invigorating scent of death too new. Too bad the midget wasn’t around to give ‘em away. Give ‘em away like he’d given that woman up—sure as hell served her up when his balls were on the line. Served her up and Dub kept his word and let him walk away.
This time.
Four less in the army of Dub, the warrior king of The Devil’s Own, fresh off a seven-year-stretch when the shit hit the fan. Thank God for that day—or the Devil. Whichever of those cocksuckers tossed down the fire sure did Dub a favor. A huge goddamn favor. Seven years into Life-without, the doors popped open and out walked Dub. Hell on earth, baby. Dog eat dog and the strong survive, the winner gets the spoils and the meek fall to the back of the line for a good old fashioned ass-fucking.
If they’re lucky, that’s all they get.
No more shuckin’ and jivin’, hiding their activities from the cops. Hell, the cops were on their side now. What was left of them. What happened and why, he didn’t know and didn’t give a shit. He was glad all those people disappeared, and couldn’t have cared less where they’d gone, or who had taken them. God? More power to ya. The Devil? Muchas gracias, baby!
Out of the slammer and into the seat of power he’d left when that rat-bastard Sammy Figgs fingered him for those kids. Two college-boy motherfuckers too s
mart for their own good, who happened to have some high-powered ambulance chaser’s daughter along when Dub finally caught up to their asses, long after the blow and the money had run out.
Dub’s blow.
Dub’s money.
Dub and Figgsy and Rock-steady Teddy, and three punk-ass kids in the middle of the woods on a cold December night—a Crème Brulee torch and a razor-sharp knife, a shovel and a chainsaw and a Colt ’45, all combined to give those rip-off bastards a night they’d never forget. If they lived through it, which they didn’t. Who could’ve lived through something like that?
Dub took a hit off the whiskey bottle one of the boys had left tightly nestled in the inverted V below the corpse’s burnt patch of pubic mound, shaking his head at two of his men about to come to blows over a piece of ass—a blackened hunk of ass, to be precise. Bert and Ernie, whose names were not Bert and Ernie but were as empty as the two Sesame Street Muppets, moving aimlessly along until they found the hand of God shoved up their asses, propelling them forward with a dutiful purpose.
Dub’s hand.
Dub looked up at the same cold grey sky he’d seen every day for damn near as long as he could remember—no sun, no moon, no blue sky or fluffy white clouds, or stars at night. Nothing but that dreary grey haze settling over them like a death shroud. For the umpteenth time, he wondered what exactly had happened, what had caused this mysterious phenomenon.
When the cell doors flew open, half the screws up and disappeared. Those who didn’t were torn to shreds by the shrieking masses of inhumanity pouring forth from their six-by-ten cages. Dub didn’t hang around for any of that shit. The doors clanged open and the riots started, and Dub walked his ass straight out of D-block, down the corridor past damn near every act of depravity known to man as he made his way through several wide-open, unmanned checkpoints, stopping only long enough to run a sharp-ended piece of metal flange through the eyeball of Ike Forsham, a particularly nasty guard who’d taken it on himself to make Dub’s life a living hell. (Like it wasn’t already.) Too bad for Ike he didn’t vanish with the others. Too bad for Ike somebody strung him up naked, upside-down with his guts lying across his bruised and bloodied chest.
Too bad for Dub the son of a bitch couldn’t feel the metal gouging his eye socket. Didn’t stop Dub from giving it a good twist once it was in, though. Didn’t stop him from spitting on the prick, either. Dub just wished he could’ve been there to see what else had been done to Angry Ike. He left Forsham swinging over a slick pool of coagulating blood, suspended from a set of handcuffs looped around a metal beam, buried deep into the prison guard’s swollen ankles.
Down the hall he went, weaving through bands of stunned revelers, who seemed to have no idea what they should be doing, other than brutalizing guards and going at each other and anyone else they could get their hands on like roving packs of attack dogs… through the mess hall and into the kitchen, where he found three black inmates pinning a guard with a butcher knife buried in his gut against a blood-soaked wooden counter, the guard shrieking while a fourth inmate hacked off his fingers and tossed them into a pot of thick, crimson liquid that bubbled up like a frothing witch’s brew.
Blood Feast, thought Dub, as he left the laughing inmates to the gruesome business of seeing how much of the guard could be chopped away before the screams stopped and the life was bled from him. Blood Feast, he thought, and wondered if they would actually eat from the pot.
Out the back door he went, navigating the grounds until he suddenly found himself staring in stunned disbelief at the unguarded prison entrance—unguarded and unlocked.
Dub found an unoccupied police car parked at the curb, keys in the ignition, the engine still running, as if the cop had pulled over and… vanished—yes, vanished, just like Dub’s cellmate, the poor bastard he’d been brutalizing long and hard for the last six months; disappeared right in front of Dub, seconds before the cell-doors clanged open and the screaming and shouting began. Dub had no time to consider what that had meant when he hopped into the police car and roared away from those cold, stone prison walls, but he’d had plenty of time to think about it since. Was it true, what he’d been told, that some kind of biblical Rapture had occurred, plucking all the righteous people from the face of the planet? And what did that mean, that Bernie the forlorn accountant with calluses on his knees for constantly blowing Dub the past six months really was innocent, framed by the so-called ‘crooked son of a bitch’ who’d been banging Mrs. Bernie on the sly? So-called by Bernie every time he exploded into a raging, fitful tirade—usually in the middle of the night, hours after Dub had bent him crying over the edge of his bunk. And what about Figgsy? Dub would’ve bet just about anything that cocksucker hadn’t been swept up to… to where? Heaven?
Dub took another swig of whiskey, returning the bottle to its resting place as he stared out across the grey horizon. He didn’t know if he could get used to that concept, didn’t know if he actually believed it. Maybe they were in the middle of a nuclear holocaust or something, maybe all that fire raining down had been warheads soaring across the sky. Maybe the rag-heads had finally dug up Sadaam’s weapons of mass destruction and loosed them against the world. But Dub didn’t believe that, not really. He’d seen Bernie wink out of existence like a turned-off television, leaving behind nothing but the space he had occupied. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t. He’d been told about the guards, but he’d actually seen Bernie. Whatever it was, it wasn’t some nuclear rag-head bullshit, and whatever it was didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except staying alive and keeping the wolves at bay.
Dub picked up his machete from a patch of dust and ash by the concrete wall, stood up and said, “You boys about ready?”
“Yeah,” said Bert.
“Sure,” Ernie said, as the other three nodded their agreement.
“Well, let’s get going then. We’ve got business tonight.”
Ernie’s eyes grew wide as Dub raised the machete. Bringing it down in a high-arcing swing sent the corpse’s head thumping like a misshapen medicine ball down the rough concrete stairs it dropped onto. He picked it up, fingers through the eyeholes like a bowling ball, and carried it to his Harley Davidson Sportster, parked at the curb in front of four more Harleys that had been taken fresh off the showroom floor six and a half weeks ago when the thumb in the dike of civil law gave way and the shit spinning through the fan blades of a crumbling society finally stuck to the wall. Commandeered by Bert and Ernie and pals, and Charlie K., the reigning leader of The Devil’s Own.
Dub’s sawed-off shotgun was in its leather sheath, strapped to the hog like the legendary buffalo hunters two hundred years before. A chrome riser tipped with the iron cross of Germany rose from the back of the bike, the cross welded in place by Dub himself when he’d taken possession of the Sportster. He lifted the head, jamming it in place atop the iron cross—just as he had slammed Charlie K’s freshly severed head down the day the prick insisted that he, not Dub, would rule The Devil’s Own.
Chapter Four
They left the bizarre scene behind and made their way back to the Park West Rehabilitation Center, where they happened upon a police car parked right outside the place. This took Scott completely by surprise, because he didn’t remember seeing it when he’d staggered away from the building. But who could blame him for missing it after witnessing that bizarre creature squirming up the sidewalk like a giant tadpole?
There it was, sitting directly in front of the walkway that lead up to the entrance, covered by the same grey ash that seemed to be spread over the entirety of this dreary landscape. Scott leaned in through the open window and popped the trunk, and the three of them proceeded to the rear of the car. There in the trunk was the box of shells Scott had hoped he would find, along with a bullhorn and jumper cables, billy-clubs and citation books, an old first basemen’s mitt and a couple of bats. Several scuffed-up baseballs also lay scattered throughout the wide-open compartment. Scott wondered how long it had been since they’d last seen a
ction, and what had happened to the people who may have used them.
Lila leaned against the car while Scott opened the box of shells and began feeding them into his weapon. Warren stood at the curb, looking up and down the street for a moment before glancing over his shoulder at Lila, who was staring directly at him.
“What?” he said.
She smiled—more smirk than smile, really—patted her shoulder holster but said nothing.
Scott, finished with loading the shotgun, had leftover shells but no pockets to store them in. So he turned to Lila, who opened her backpack and held it out to him. He spied a package of Hostess Twinkies when he dropped the remaining shells through the opening, and the thought occurred to him that he had no idea when he had last eaten. And that thought led him to a place he really didn’t want to visit, a dark place full of unavoidable questions, like: had he really been vegetating in that room for seven weeks? He didn’t see how that could be. How could he have survived with a hole in his head and no food or water, or any nourishment at all? And what about the guy in the bed next to his, how long had it taken for his corpse to reach that level of decay? The nurses, the doctors and staff who had kept him alive—where were they? Surely he didn’t just lie there with the needles and the tubes and a dead man rotting in the bed next to his. It didn’t make any sense. None of it. That was not how the universe worked. He wanted the whole thing to be a dream, a nightmare brought on by his sudden dismissal and the subsequent fight that surely had come about the minute he’d walked through the door that evening. He wanted to wake up in his comfortable bed and find Sandi snuggled up next to him. But that wasn’t going to happen, because he was not asleep. This was not a nightmare. And that led him to the darkest, most horrifying conclusion of all, that he was dead and this was Hell. How else could he have survived all this time without eating? The answer was simple: he couldn’t have. He didn’t.
THE DAMNED Page 3
