An Axe to Grind

by Hope Sullivan McMickle

  An Axe to Grind

  By Hope Sullivan McMickle

  Copyright 2008 Hope Sullivan McMickle

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  John Warren squinted in the glare of the late morning sun and watched the girl stagger across the grocery store parking lot. He leaned forward on his perch in the deer blind he’d installed in the tall tree beside the university library, slowly adjusted the focus on his binoculars, and studied her for a long moment. She appeared to be an ideal candidate. Despite her unwashed and tangled blonde hair and flaking purple sparkle nail polish, her lithe body was still somehow graceful. A thin gold bracelet glinted above her right ankle - a glittering bauble above dirty bare feet. He lowered the binoculars and raised the barrel of the AR 15 - not yet modified to fully automatic although he supposed he’d get to it one of these days - until the girl was framed in the crosshairs of the sight. She wore a black silk halter top above a pair of high-cut blue jean shorts faded nearly white. A spattering of blood partially obscured the rose tattoo on her left shoulder, trailing back to the gaping maw where her throat had once been.

  He paused and swore softly under his breath, just to break the silence that filled so much of his days. He lifted his eye from the sight and watched her weave her way past the deserted parking area, getting hung up briefly in the cart corral, before resuming her lurching shamble in his general direction. Her age was right - she looked to be about 20 - her look was right, and her body was as yet largely unmarred by the decay that plagued so many of the others. As he watched, the dead girl made her way past the grocery store and approached the nearly invisible wire snare that he had rigged across the narrow alleyway between the store and the neighboring Domino’s Pizza, an area that created a natural bottleneck. At one time, the area had been notorious for exceedingly poor traffic flow but now it made for an exceptional capture point since traffic had ceased being an issue nearly two years ago. He knew the girl would keep coming, never straying from her trajectory as long as no obstacles got in her way and necessitated a change in path. It was the singularity of purpose and unity of the damned that he had observed a thousand times. Motivated only by hunger, the girl continued down the alley drawn to the scent of fresh blood that John used to bait the trap. There was an audible snap when the girl’s left foot triggered the snare. They fell for it every time. John laughed, clicked on the rifle’s safety, and climbed ponderously down the aluminum ladder to meet the new girl, who was dangling by her ankle in the snare.

  He paused at the base of the tree to scan north and south along Commercial Street, then east and west down 12th. Although night was more dangerous due to limited visibility and the element of surprise, John found that daylight made them restless and he was more likely to come upon small contingents of them stumbling about. The dead demonstrated no capacity for planning or coordination, but their ferocity and tenacity could overpower and overwhelm those caught unaware, and he intended to put a bullet in his head before he became one of them.

  John shouldered his rifle and walked over to the police car he had appropriated and retrofitted compliments of the Lyon County Sheriff’s Department. Equipped with a 4.5 liter V8 engine, the Crown Vic Interceptor had a speedometer calibrated for 140 miles an hour. He’d got it up to 115 on the ten mile stretch outside of town, heading east to Olpe, before he chickened out and slowed down. Every so often cattle made their way onto the roads, and the idea of hitting one at that speed made his skin crawl. He retrieved a Kevlar vest, thick leather gloves, a utility belt, riot helmet, a pair of handcuffs and foot shackles, and a catch pole from the trunk. The catch pole he had discovered in the back of an overturned animal control van, and had found it to be imminently helpful. He donned the Kevlar vest, not that it would do him much good - it was designed to stop a bullet, not prevent a set of gnashing teeth from ripping his throat out or taking a massive chunk out of his forearm or thigh - but it did make him feel safer. He tugged on the riot helmet and hurried across 12th Avenue to properly introduce himself to the girl.

  Her halter top had fallen forward over her head as she swung and thrashed in the snare, exposing perfectly rounded breasts that would have once been attractive but were now little more than sallow grey lumps. John gazed at her with clinical detachment; up close, he noticed more extensive damage. Tatters of bloodless flesh dangled from her palms, and bone gleamed from within a deep gash just above her elbow - clearly post-mortem damage. As John approached, the girl ceased struggling and stared in his direction, tracking his steps. Her eyes burned, not with any kind of cognition or intellect, but with hunger. She bared yellowed teeth and hissed. John hissed back with a wink and a grin. They were so easy to toy with.

  He held his breath as the smell of decay enveloped him. He had never quite become used to the smell of them; the tolerable ones smelled like a gassy dead skunk baking on the highway in the Kansas summer heat. The bad ones emanated a sweet, cloying stench of rot and putrefaction that was nearly unbearable in close proximity. This girl smelled more like dead skunk. John drew in one last breath of clean air and stepped forward, focusing on the task at hand.

  The girl resumed thrashing in her snare, fingers hooked into purple sparkle claws, reaching for him. The movement of her body swung her toward him, and John chose that moment to act. He swung the animal catch pole and deftly slipped the vinyl coated cable loop over her head and around her neck, then released the brake to tighten and lock the noose into place. The vinyl coating in the cable kept it from cutting too deeply into her flesh. The catch pole was six feet in length, but could be telescoped to eight feet, and was perfect for controlling feral animals and keeping them at a distance. John held onto the catch pole and as it shuddered in his hands, eased behind her and released the snare in which she’d been suspended. As he did, her body plummeted awkwardly to the ground and hit pavement with a sickening thud. She immediately began growling and crawling toward him. The whole operation had taken less than a minute but John glanced up and down the alley to ensure that the commotion, or more likely his scent, had not attracted more of her kind. He had been distracted and caught unaware several times before - most recently while helping himself to the Liquor Locker’s stock of Patron, when four adults, a half-grown boy, something that had once been a toddler, and a wolf, a fucking zombie wolf for crissakes, cornered him - and since that last near miss John had been vigilant almost to the point of compulsivity. The alley was clear, the parking lot vacant, and there was no sign of movement or sound other than the growling and hissing of the bag of flesh at his feet. Reassured, he stepped toward her and used both hands to leverage his considerable weight to flip her onto her stomach and drive her head - and most importantly her teeth - into the hot blacktop. He took another step forward and pinned her to the ground with a heavy leather boot caked with dirt and old blood.

  In a single fluid movement, he let go of the catch pole and leaned forward, roughly cuffing her wrists behind her back. He then dropped to his knees and slipped a black leather bondage mask over her face and belted it behind her head. He’d found the mask on a mannequin at the adult bookstore next to the railroad tracks, and although he’d never been into the kinky shit, the mask certainly did an excellent job of preventing bites. He’s already zipped up the nose and mouth slits; the lack of oxygen was not going to be an issue for this woman.

  “Let’s go, princess,” he said, laughing as she bucked and squirmed beneath him.
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br />   It only took a moment more to secure her feet in the shackles and he stood back up, grimacing and rubbing his back. He watched the girl struggle for several long moments before he released the noose on the catch pole and removed it from her head, doing the same with the snare that had been attached to her ankle. He absently tossed the snare aside; he’d re-rig it tomorrow. The wind blew through his long, graying hair as John reached down and pulled her up by her manacled wrists and carried her like an awkward piece of luggage to the back of the police cruiser. He’d decided not to drag her since she was pretty. There was no sense doing more damage. He opened the back door of the squad car and shoved her in head first.

  ACDC’s album Back in Black was in the rotation today. The ride to White Auditorium was less than two minutes, even though John took the long way so he could hear the end of Hell’s Bells. He’d ripped the two-way radio out of the cruiser and replaced it with an Alpine stereo and a 50 disc CD changer, which was housed in the trunk. Triggering the lift to the garage door, John parked in the empty bay of the fire station and leapt out of the vehicle to lower the door behind him. The fire station had been housed in the massive city auditorium since it had been built in 1940 as a multi-purpose facility. With seating for 2,000, a fire department, and numerous city offices, it had been a simple task to clean, fortify, and defend. The facility offered him more room than he would ever need. The fire station served as his primary base of operations, although he maintained his living quarters on the second floor of the building. A little more than a year ago he’d spent a week removing the surveillance equipment from the jail across the street and re-installed it throughout his building. A large bank of generators he’d scavenged from the Home Depot were housed in a shed behind a small area of chain link fencing, and they provided plenty of electricity. He’d worried a little about electrocuting himself when he’d installed those damn things. A quick glance at the monitors revealed nothing out of the ordinary, outside or inside the building. Satisfied, John hauled the girl out of the police car by her feet, sliding her onto the concrete floor. She gazed dully at him, oddly submissive. As she lay on the floor John retrieved the hand truck from where he’d stashed it and laid it flat on the ground beside her. The girl weighed no more than a hundred pounds, and it was an easy matter to roll her over so she laid flat on the hand truck, enabling him to secure her to it with thick leather straps that went around her shoulders, hips, and knees. Once she was secure, John removed the mask. She exceeded his expectations, and would make an excellent addition once he’d prepped and cleaned her up. John bent down and grunted with effort as he raised her to an upright position. Behind him, fingernails scrabbled against the metal garage door. One of the external monitors confirmed that two walkers were outside, probably drawn by the sound of his engine. John figured if they continued to loiter around he’d burn their sorry asses, but at the moment, that sounded like more work than he’d planned on that morning over coffee. Getting the girl was plenty of work in and of itself.

  Since the garage door was constructed with heavy sheet metal and secured with multiple locks from the inside, John figured they posed no immediate threat. Hell, there were dead people everywhere. He wheeled the girl up the access ramp he’d constructed over the concrete stairs to the first level office area. The building was stuffy but not unbearably hot. Air circulated through the open windows on all sides of the second story of the building, and the lower level tended to have an aura of damp coolness even in summer. The yellow brick façade of the building did a nice job of reflecting a lot of heat, although it was probably 92 degrees inside. John had sweated through his t-shirt before he made his way halfway down the hallway. The lack of air conditioning was something that he had grown accustomed to, but the lack of central heat in the winter was frustrating. Even with the generators, there was not enough power to run the heating and cooling system. Despite space heaters in the rooms he used with the greatest frequency, there was a deep chill in the building throughout the cold season, and John made do with many layers of clothing to combat the cold. In the winter, his fingers and toes seemed to be perpetually numb. Now, he dripped sweat as he wheeled the girl into the clean up area, previously the city water and sewer department. Thousands of people had walked through the outer door to pay their water bills here over the years, but not anymore. John had installed metal hurricane shutters over the windows, machining most of the parts himself at the city maintenance shop across the street. Then he’d bricked up the doorway. It hadn’t been difficult to learn how to mix the mortar and lay the bricks; the public library was across the street and John had discovered that even without the internet it wasn’t too hard to find out just about anything if he spent some time reading books. He had plenty of time on his hands now.

  It was funny how things worked out, he thought as he rolled the girl over and transferred her to the table he’d transferred from the mortuary and reassembled, welding shackles to it as a finishing touch. It gleamed in the cold fluorescent light. He turned on the CD player on his workbench and sang along with Black Sabbath as he worked. At forty-six, he’d long considered himself too old to learn another line of work but had, with practice, discovered that he had a knack for embalming. He inserted plastic tubing into an artery and a vein - they were easier to find on the walking dead than they were on a junkie - and turned on the embalming pump. It was funny how things turned out, he thought again, watching the flow of clear fluid in and brackish fluid out. He never expected to live out his days in a fortified public arena in a tiny town in the middle of damn near nowhere, fifty miles from Topeka and pretty much completely isolated amidst miles of tallgrass prairie. He’d had a gig that night and he supposed that it was just luck that it had been here rather than in Topeka, where he usually played, or Lawrence or Kansas City. Those places were death traps, teeming with ravenous undead.

  Kickstart, his band, had just started their second set at Wranglers when things got weird. The house soundman had started coughing violently, sending what looked like a bright red arterial mist over his 32-channel mixer. That was repulsive enough but the crowd had just kept drinking and didn’t seem to notice, and so John had kept on playing to the skimpily clad girl in a cut-off Harley t-shirt and an older woman that could have been her mother who were sitting at a small table directly in front of the stage - he’d have done ‘em both for sure - soloing to LaGrange with his Les Paul behind his head and checking out the younger one’s substantial cleavage. He’d have the bartender send over a couple of shots of tequila for them before the next break. Suddenly Andy, who’d been dutifully playing a chunky blues rhythm under John’s solo, missed the key change. John looked back and glared at him, but his anger dissolved into disgust and amazement when he saw that Andy was leaning back against his Marshall stack with his eyes closed, chin drooping down toward the collar of the stupid black t-shirt he always wore (emblazoned with a request to PULL MY FINGER!), and a thick sludge of blood was running over his lips and dripping off his chin. His shirt was saturated with the stuff and it glistened nastily on his hands and guitar strings. Alarmed but not sure what to do, John abruptly ended his solo and turned back to the three-quarters empty room. He hoped no one had noticed--good paying gigs were hard to get these days. He figured he could take a short break, get Andy offstage, and finish the gig as a power trio while Tommy, his roadie, took Andy to a Med-Check.

  No one in the bar had noticed, but then, no one in the bar other than the hotties up front were paying much attention to anything. A slender, slightly effeminate man in tight Wranglers, a white cowboy hat, and what were obviously his dress boots slumped over the bar, passed out. His wallet had fallen from his fingers and lay at the foot of his bar stool. Ty, the bartender and owner of the club, was polishing beer mugs with a grungy towel, his eyes half closed and his body swaying with the motion of his arm. From a distance it looked like he had a nosebleed, but John couldn’t see well in the stage lights and figured that would be too much of a coincidence. A woman in heels high enough
to defy the laws of physics slithered off her barstool and unsteadily made her way toward the ladies room, sashaying past a pair of bikers arguing good naturedly and playing pool at the back of the room. He glanced back at Andy, who was still doggedly pounding out an A5 power chord oblivious to the fact that everyone else was playing in C, for the love of Jesus, and John opted to end the song. He’d had weird shit go down at gigs before but in his nearly 30 years of playing the bars, nothing compared to this.

  “We’re gonna take a short break, be back before you know it. Don’t go nowhere we got some David Allen Coe and Skynyrd comin’ up.” John smiled at the hotties and switched off his mic, then rapidly walked back to Andy and ripped his instrument cable out of his amp - fucker was still playing. The rest of the band were staring at Andy with frank fascination. Blood now gouted from his nose and mouth. John pulled the guitar out of Andy’s hands and set it down in the stand beside his amplifier.

  “C’mon, buddy, let’s get you some help. You don’t look so good right now.” Andy gave no indication that he’d heard, but complied when John began walking him toward the exit door to the left of the stage. Andy’s movement was sluggish and uncoordinated, and John grimaced when he reached out to steady him and pulled his hand back, slathered in viscous, clotted blood. They slowly walked past a big screen television where the Kansas City Royals were losing in high-def. There was some sort of disturbance on the field.

  “Fuck this,” John swore. His cell phone had started vibrating in his pocket. He paused to pull it out, and was surprised to see on the caller ID that it was Nicky, his girlfriend. She knew better than to call him during a gig. He silenced the phone and put it back in his pocket. John had time to wonder why she’d called when Andy stumbled and collapsed by the exit as a woman’s shriek cut through the now-silent bar. John whipped his head around so quickly he felt the muscles in his already tense neck hyperextend and viciously cramp. He couldn’t believe what he saw. The woman in high heels had returned from the ladies room, so intoxicated or disoriented that she’d left her mini-skirt behind. Wearing only her heels, a black thong around one ankle, and a sleeveless maroon blouse, she stood gazing into the room. Clutched in her right fist was a mass of gore, and her jaws snapped open and shut, open and shut, gnawing on what couldn’t be - but sure as hell looked like - a dangling, glistening string of entrails that had smeared blood across her face and mottled neck. One of the bikers threw down his pool stick and ran past her to the women’s restroom, shouting the name of some woman named Sheila. Seconds later, John heard the man coughing, retching, and screaming in either pain or panic. The other biker had warily approached the woman in high heels and had gotten within four feet of her when she suddenly rushed him. Taken by surprise, he stepped back only to have his boot come down on the discarded pool stick and fly out from underneath him. The biker twisted awkwardly and came down hard on his left side with a hoarse curse. Then the woman was on him, her jaws locking around his neck. She ripped her head back and tore most of the soft flesh of his throat out as blood geysered against a neon blue Bud Light sign and spattered across a cardboard Nascar cut out of Clint Boyer. The biker’s white t-shirt had rucked up as he fell, and her fingers scrabbled and dug into his abdomen. One of her manicured nails broke off, but the others found purchase, tearing into his flesh and ripping great gashes below his ribcage. She paused long enough to lean forward and bite into one of his cheeks. The man howled and struggled to push her away as she tore the flesh from his lower face in a long bloody strip. It hung from her bloodstained teeth as she resumed tearing into his abdomen.