David froze, hands still thrust in the air. He never even thought to cover his ears, though it little mattered now. The first gunshot had deafened him, and all he heard was a high ringing.
“What are you doing? Don’t do that! Why are you doing that?” he yelled at Cakey, but his voice seeming to come from a thousand miles away.
Findley slammed into Cooper hard enough that both of them went down. In the fall, Cooper’s gun discharged, but the path of the bullet was lost in the darkness. They landed in a heap, grunting and cursing. Cakey did not give them time to recover, nor did he pause to see if anyone had been shot, but he fell upon them like some kind of beast. An elbow to Findley’s cheek, a knee to his stomach, a fist to Cooper’s mouth, then he wrestled the second rifle away and leapt to his feet.
Findley grabbed his cheek, moaning, and rolled away, but Cooper went for his pistol. Cakey pulled the magazine from the rifle, cast it aside and ejected the bullet from the chamber all in one swift motion, then swung the rifle around and smashed the butt of it, which was a metal plate on a wooden stock, into Cooper’s forehead. The guard went limp. Findley made a brief attempt to get up, still clutching his cheek, but Cakey brought the rifle around and smacked him in the side of the head. Findley collapsed, as well.
“Why did you do that?” David wailed. “Why the hell did you do that? We’re dead. We’re all dead!”
“Shut up, kid,” Cakey snarled over his shoulder, casting the rifle aside. “We got more guys with guns guarding the front doors. If we’re lucky, they’ll think the gunshots were just part of the night’s symphony, but your screaming is sure to bring them down here.”
David clapped his hands over his mouth, but he continued to scream questions at Cakey through his fingers. Cakey drew the guards’ pistols from their holsters and set them next to the rifles. Then he grabbed a fistful of uniform in either hand and dragged the two men to the corner. He paused only a moment to glance around the wall into the parking lot.
“All clear,” he said. “But probably not for long. Come on, kiddo. Let’s be quick about this.”
David looked at the pile of guns at his feet and took a step back.
“You gotta help me,” Cakey said. “Or we’re all in trouble. Come on.”
That got David moving, but as he stepped around the guns, he stooped to pick one up. It seemed stupid to walk into dangerous territory unarmed. Cakey looked back and saw what he was doing.
“No, leave them,” he said, the unconscious guards dangling from his fists like giant broken dolls. Findley gave a weak moan. “We’re likely to run into more guards as we move through the city. If we’re armed, they might open fire. If we’re unarmed, we might be able to charm our way past ‘em. All the guards who were at the show tonight like us or, at least, no longer hate us. That’s to our advantage, if we play our cards right.”
David left the guns and followed Cakey out into the parking lot.
“Where are you taking them?” he asked. “Are they dead?”
“Nah, they’re both still breathing,” Cakey said, grunting with the effort of carrying them. He stopped in his tracks and dropped Findley. “Gonna tear my stitches if I try to drag them both. Get that one for me, would you?” He nodded in the direction of the dumpster. “Over there.”
David stood over Findley, saw the massive welt on the side of his head, blood trickling from a cut on his cheek. “Why did you attack them? They weren’t hostile.”
“Kid,” Cakey said, wrestling Cooper’s body inside the dumpster. “Everyone is this whole town is hostile. Every rube you ever met is hostile. Plus, if we’d done what they wanted and marched back inside, we’d be stuck.”
Findley moaned again, and one arm twitched. David grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him to the dumpster. Cakey then rolled him next to Cooper.
“What’s the point of putting them in there?” David asked. “The dumpster is on its side. As soon as they wake up, they’ll just crawl right out.”
Instead of answering, Cakey pushed David back a few feet and gestured for him to stay in one spot. Then he walked around to the back of the dumpster, struggled for a bit—David heard him cursing under his breath, heard the scrape of shoes on the pavement—and the dumpster tipped up and over. It crashed down on top of the two guards, trapping them underneath. The thunderous clunk of the heavy dumpster hitting the ground was louder than the rifles and echoed for a long time down the surrounding streets. Cakey quickly dashed back toward the alley, pulling David along with him. They ducked into the shadows and waited for the sound to dissipate.
After a minute, they heard footsteps from the front of the nightclub, the soft rustle and clank of a rifle being slipped off a shoulder and a voice speaking.
“Who’s back here?” A woman’s voice. “Cooper? Findley?”
“Someone was shooting,” came another voice, soft and shaky.
“Of course someone was shooting,” the woman said. Did it sound like Officer Mayes? David couldn’t quite tell. “They’ll be shooting all night, most likely, till we drive them back into the ruins.”
“No, I mean, it was closer. I think it was a lot closer.”
A moment of silence. David eased back against the wall, held his breath.
“If they were in trouble, they’d call out,” the woman said. “They’d call out, wouldn’t they?”
“I think so.”
Another moment of silence. David supposed she was debating with herself whether or not to check it out. Could it be that Officer Mayes, despite the weapons, the uniform and the authority she wielded, did not especially want to walk into the dark alleyway to check on her fellow guards?
“Anybody there?” she called again.
“Not sure they can hear you,” the other guard said. “Door’s all the way in the back.”
Officer Mayes sighed. “They’ll call out if they need help,” she said, finally.
They heard the click of boots again, and the guards were gone.
David let his breath out in a rush, but Cakey gave him little time to gather his wits. He stooped, picked up the guns one by one, dumped them in a pile of trash and kicked debris on top. Then he beckoned David onward and dashed out of the alleyway and across the parking lot. David went after him, though his better sense told him now was the best time to bail.
On the far side of the parking lot was a city street. David glanced back at the nightclub, saw a hint of light in the apartment window and cursed himself for his stupidity. Then he followed Cakey across the street to a row of rundown storefronts. Cakey ducked into the shadows under a tattered awning and pulled David back behind him. After a moment, a car, moonlight glinting off chrome edges, rumbled by.
“What if the guards wake up and get out of the dumpster?” David whispered. “And what if they go into the club looking for us? The others might get hurt. They might all get shot.”
“I don’t think it’ll happen,” Cakey said.
“But it might happen. And even if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out what to do with the guards when we get back.”
Cakey grabbed him by the collar and pulled him in close. “The ever-night will sort out all of these things. Wait and see how it unfolds.” He grunted, released his hold on David and added, “But, if it comes down to it, I am prepared to pay them back a hundredfold for whatever they do to us. I’ve got a lot of revenge stored up in me, Disturby, and you do, too.”
“Me? No, I don’t.”
“You go right ahead and tell yourself that,” Cakey said with a laugh and stepped out from under the awning.
They heard another burst of guns, two or three firing at the same time. Outside of the strange acoustics of the narrow alleyway, the direction became clearer. It was off to their right in the direction of the southern gate. Cakey turned that way and started down the sidewalk, moving in a half-crouch, slinking from shadow to shadow. The road wound past the storefronts into a block of small houses. Most of them were utterly dark and deathly silent, as if they were uninhabit
ed, though David saw cars parked in driveways and the detritus of human residency on porches. He imagined people huddled in dark rooms, hands clasped, teeth clenched, waiting with baited breath for their dear Councilman Peavey to sound the all-clear. Cakey wove a path through the neighborhood, creeping through backyards and gardens, hopping fences.
They reached a small park—if one could call it a park, as it consisted of two sad trees, a single dilapidated bench and an open field of grass and dirt. A bicycle sat discarded to one side, the front wheel bent. Cakey crept up behind one of the trees and pulled David down beside him.
“See that there?” he said, pointing into the sky.
David saw shifting starlight hovering over a landscape of dim, gray rooftops.
“What am I looking at?”
“Smoke,” Cakey said. “Rising from somewhere around the city gate. Wonder what’s burning.”
“Isn’t our truck parked out there?”
“Yeah.”
Cakey rose and dashed across the open park toward another row of buildings to the south, and David hurried after him. Only the tall dome of the Council House was recognizable in the gloom. Lights burned in the windows, and the long ribbon flag could be seen whipping violently in the breeze. The smell of smoke grew stronger now, the crack of gunfire louder, and gradually a din of voices became clear, cursing and shouting, guttural sounds of agony and rage.
A line of guards dashed from an open doorway a few yards ahead of them and turned in the direction of the Council House. Cakey dropped to his hands and knees. David stepped into a well of shadow between two buildings. The guards kept going past the Council House and disappeared around a corner. Cakey and David followed the same path but moved in the darkness, ducking into alcoves and recesses along the way. More guards passed periodically, and a car hurried by, headed in the opposite direction. The sound of guns and voices grew louder, smoke rolling like dirty fog through the streets, making David’s eyes water and his nostrils burn.
Just past the Council House, they came in sight of the southern gate, and, as if they had opened a doorway into hell, a panorama of violence unfolded before them. Cakey kept moving, creeping up behind a low wall, but David froze in his tracks as soon as he saw the chaos at the gate. The first thing he noticed was the column of smoke rising up in great billows from outside the city, as if the whole world had caught fire. Then he spotted the barricades, concrete barriers lined up in the middle of the road. Guards crouched behind the barricades, firing toward the gate. And then he saw the people crawling over gate. Many of them reached the top only to fall dead on the other side, bullet-riddled, and a pile of bodies lay just inside the city. People dressed in rags, in overalls and ill-fitting clothes, in hats and rough-spun dresses. Despite the dead, more kept coming, an endless stream of them, climbing the wall and gate. Some were working their way up the guard tower.
At the top of the tower, the mounted machine gun swiveled back and forth. When it turned to one side, David caught sight of the man wielding it, not a red-uniformed guard but a rube in a broad-brimmed hat, hooting and wailing. He opened fire, spraying bullets down on the barricade. Guards ducked down as the bullets ate away at the concrete, and the climbers used the opportunity to surge over the gate. They dropped down among the dead and clawed their way free. And just as the gun in the tower stopped firing, they rushed the barricades. Some of the guards recovered quickly, popped back up and opened fire on them. Bodies fell.
David watched all of this with a feeling of icy terror in his guts. He pressed his hands to his chest to quell their violent trembling, but it did little good. Cakey, leaning far out over the low wall, looked back at David with wide eyes.
“I do believe some of our West Fork friends are mixed in with this lot,” he said. “I imagine they’ve taken revenge upon our truck and trailers, judging by the smoke. It’s a perverse sort of a refund, I suppose, taking back the diesel fuel they gave us by setting it on fire. Ah, well, won’t be the first time we’ve had to replace everything.” He pointed up at the tower. “Who do you think the old boy in the hat is way up there? Look familiar?”
“Hess? Is it really him?” David said. “Can they have followed us all the way here?”
“So it would seem, and they picked up a whole lot of friends along the way.”
Most of the people who charged the barricades went down, bleeding and screaming, but not all. Two unlucky guards were dragged out into the open and beaten. Their comrades, unwilling to open fire and risk hitting their own, watched helplessly as the invaders punched and kicked and clawed at them, ripped the rifles out of their hands and tore at their uniforms. Then, newly armed, the invaders took cover behind the very same barricades and returned fire, aiming wildly. David heard a bullet ping off the street somewhere behind him.
“We’re gonna get killed,” he said. “We gotta get out of here.”
As if to prove his point, a bullet hit the wall a few feet above his head, and bits of brick rained down. Cakey dropped behind the wall.
“This may turn out badly for all involved,” Cakey said. “The stream of crazies climbing over the wall never ends.”
At that moment, an alarm began to blare from the Council House, twin notes, disharmonic, rising to an ear-straining pitch and falling only to rise again. Reinforcements arrived to join the guards, but a surge of invaders continued to pour over the gate and rush the barricade. The invaders were gaining ground, shooting and fighting their way past the first row of concrete barriers. On top of the guard tower, the man in the hat—the distance was too great to tell if it really was Hess, though the sound of that wailing voice did give David a sick sense of déjà vu—removed his hat and waved it back and forth.
The gate and barricades were off to David’s right, but he saw movement now to his left, well past the guard tower and outside the reach of the streetlights. Invaders climbing the wall out of sight of the guards. He pointed this out to Cakey.
“Remarkable,” Cakey said, low and breathless. David scarcely heard him over the blare of the alarm. “There must be hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds. Kid, you’re watching a fully armed city get overrun by a sea of infected rubes with nothing but fists and teeth. Ain’t it glorious?”
“No,” David said. “We’re in this city, too, you know. We gotta go back and get the others and find a way out of here.”
“It’s rubes versus rubes,” Cakey said, clasping his hands and giggling. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Look at it unfolding right before our eyes! Do you see this, Disturby?”
“Of course I see it,” David said. “I’m going back!”
He turned and started away from the wall. The long street before them, the Council House, the dozens of rooftops that stood between them and the nightclub looked like a much greater distance now. David cursed himself for not staying with the others. If the city was indeed overrun by the sick, at least they all would have been together. At least he would have been with Annabelle. And briefly he envisioned it, all of them standing together on the stage as the sick slammed against the walls of the nightclub. And as they broke down the door, Annabelle grabbing his hand again, the warmth of her fingers slipping in between his. He blushed, felt stupid for letting his imagination get the better of him and drove the image from his mind.
“Okay, we’ll have it your way,” Cakey said, coming up beside him. “Let’s go back for the others. They won’t want to miss out on the excitement.”
And with that, Cakey charged off down the street, away from the screaming, the dying, the endless gunfire, the sea of bodies dropping over the wall, and the man with the hat, standing atop the guard tower, shouting his endless lunatic nonsense.
Chapter Seventeen
All Kinds of Doomed
Stillness lay heavy over the nightclub, the window in the apartment dark, a place yet untouched by the unfolding chaos. Cakey and David waited beneath the awning at the abandoned storefront, listening and watching. The dumpster did not appear to have been mo
ved. No sound from Cooper or Findley. Still they waited another minute or so before dashing across the street to the parking lot. Cakey approached the dumpster, pressed his ear to the battered and dented metal side and listened.
“Think I hear one of ‘em breathing,” he said. “Maybe snoring. Getting a good night’s sleep.”
“Only one? Maybe you killed the other guy,” David said.
“Nah, a little tap on the head like that? They’ll be fine and making trouble for us before you know it.”
They stepped around the dumpster and headed back into the alleyway. As they passed the pile of debris where the guns were buried, Cakey slowed, reached down and snatched up one of the pistols.
“We need guns now?” David asked.
“Probably have to shoot something before the night’s over,” he said. “What we saw at the gate kinda changes things, you know?”
David dug through the pile of trash, shuffling the rifles aside and came up with the second pistol. It felt heavy and awkward in his grip, and he held it lightly, afraid he might somehow set it off. He had never used a gun before, never even held a pistol and didn’t like the cold, clunky feel of it. He pointed it downward and followed Cakey up the hill. They found the back door still propped open with the bottle and slipped inside. Behind and below, the alarm continued to blare out over the city, but the sound of gunshots had diminished—running out of bullets or running out of guards, possibly both. The screaming and shouting rose to a fevered pitch, though, buried under the alarm’s blare like an echo from a dream. As they entered the storage room, Cakey kicked the bottle away and let the door close.
Shadows of Tockland Page 21
