“His name is Adam,” Lily said, climbing out of the man’s arms. “He’s my friend.”
The old man, Eugene, cowered in the shadows and stared at the hooded figure.
Ian Gregory approached Adam with a curious expression. “You look different,” he said.
“We saw you come in here,” Adam replied. He’d walked his steed up a crumbling wall onto the roof, not wanting to further stir up the dead with his presence. At Lily’s request, really... that he save the other survivors, all of them, without incident. As if he were the old elf from winter legend who could grant a child’s any wish.
Dalton was silent. He remembered that night, in the badlands, when Hand of God had seen Death in the flesh. He didn’t know what to make of the apparition—did this mean salvation or certain death?
Logan backed up against the shelf blocking the window through which Gregory had made his entrance. “Well, I’m about ready to call it a night.”
Dead hands tore through the books and seized his head. He fumbled with the chainsaw’s starter cord and bellowed, “A little fucking help!”
Cam pried at the gray hands, but others reached through to grab at her wrists. The flesh was peeled from the backs of her hands. She fell to the floor in hysterics.
The saw started up. Logan, his head pulled into the shelf, unable to see, raised the weapon toward his head. “STOP!” Gregory yelled. “You’re gonna—”
The blade touched Logan’s throat and it blossomed like a flower of gore. His cries turned to a gurgling sputter as crimson showered down the front of his uniform. The saw fell idle at his feet. The dead hands in his hair and eyes tore his head from his shoulders and retreated with their prize.
Tripper cradled Cam, who was staring in horror at her hands. “God—I’m infected!”
“You don’t know that!”
“Yes I do! I feel it! Oh God!”
A window burst behind Eugene. He whirled to struggle with half a dozen rotting arms. Halstead ran to him. “I need a gun—NOW!”
One undead hand wavered uncertainly in the air, a shard of glass embedded in its palm. Then it swung down into Halstead’s eye.
She wailed as the glass tore a canyon through her cheek and into her jaw. The rotter’s fingers slipped into her flesh and tugged her forward. The hands holding Eugene left him and found her.
Lily grabbed Halstead’s legs. She screamed in protest as Adam pulled her away. Together, they watched the cop’s body slide out the window into the night.
Gregory shook Adam by the shoulder. “Can you help us get to the vehicle outside?”
Adam nodded. He pulled the scythe from under his cloak and strapped it on to his arm. “Where is it?”
“Out front.”
“Of course,” Adam sighed. He walked over to the barricaded doors and started pulling crates away.
Dalton pulled Cam to her feet. “We need you. C’mon.”
As Adam took down the barricade, he sensed something, something vague and threatening that gnawed at the back of his mind. What was it? The horde waiting outside? No, it was something worse.
As he pulled the last shelf away, the doors fell in beneath the weight of the undead. Zombies spilled into the room.
“Open fire!” Gregory shouted.
Adam sliced a pair of rotters in half and kicked their spurting remains away. He turned to grab Lily, pulling her onto his shoulders. He turned back just in time to be tackled to the floor. Lily tumbled away from him.
She scrambled past Gregory, who was busy shearing the heads off of rotters with his shotguns. He knelt to reload—cold hands clamped down on his shoulders. He batted them away and retreated further into the room.
The undead were still pouring in—far more than thirty now. It was a full-scale assault. Adam stood at the threshold and pared them down, but again and again he was overwhelmed by their numbers, and they broke through in waves. Such a wave swept over Ian Gregory. He discharged the shotguns as he fell, taking a couple more with him. He was fading fast beneath an onslaught of teeth, and fumbled through his uniform for the grenade there—released the pin—his last act of defiance.
The muffled explosion threw the dead straight up in a smoking geyser. They came down in pieces, only to be replaced by others. Every blast, every bullet—it meant nothing, the rotters were swarming in at an exponential rate.
Tripper and Cam were backed into the far corner of the room. They turned a shelf on its side and used it for cover until their guns were empty.
Tripper lit a joint, took a long drag and passed it to his lover. “I don’t know what to say,” he muttered, barely audible above the groans of the encroaching dead.
“There’s nothing to say.” Cam gently kissed his neck, then wrapped her arms around him.
The rotters pulled the shelf aside. Tripper glared at them over Cam’s shoulder. “Fuckers.” Then the pair was swallowed.
Lily cowered between a shelf and the rear wall. She screamed as a shadow swooped down to collect her. “It’s all right!” Dalton yelled. “We’re getting out of here!”
“Reaper!” he shouted. On the other side of the room, Adam turned to see the soldier and child surrounded by undead. He hurled himself into their midst like a torpedo, raking his scythe through flesh and bone and cutting a path to Lily. Dalton handed her over. “The car!”
He stayed glued to Adam’s back as the former Death made his way to the entrance. They ran out into the freezing cold, into the night—only to find the sky lit by flames as every building around them burned. Adam glanced up at the library’s roof and saw his horse’s head hanging over the edge, dead. It must have been struck by shrapnel. So, then, on to a new steed—Adam yanked open the Hummer’s passenger door and put Lily inside. Dalton was already behind the wheel. Gregory had left the keys inside. Knew he might not make it back. Good man to the end.
“WAIT!” a voice snarled. Adam turned—and was blown away by a volley of bullets.
Finn Meyer staggered toward the Hummer. “Get out!” he screamed at Dalton.
Dalton raised his hands and scooted out of the driver’s seat. “I have a child here!”
Meyer grimaced. “I don’t care!”
Then he heard a sound at his back—a ragged scream, but not that of the undead. No, it was a cry fraught with rage and grief and desperation, and Meyer managed to put his finger on the voice just before the widowmaker separated his head from his neck.
He fell into the snow; blinked a few times, in disbelief, at Voorhees, and at his own decapitated body; then his mind faded.
A zombie bit into Voorhees’ shoulder. He hacked into its skull and shoved it aside. Didn’t matter now. He’d followed Meyer’s gunshots and footfalls until he heard his voice and was sure. Now it was over.
“Voorhees!” Lily cried.
He held his hand out, clutching at the air. “Lily?”
Dalton put his arm around the half-dead man and dragged him to the Hummer. “Here. Get in.”
Adam got to his feet and grimaced as he felt the bullets searing his insides. He saw Voorhees, and that Lily was safe, and he left out a sigh of relief. At least it was finally done.
Then Eugene stepped around the front of the vehicle. Adam saw him for the first time, and that feeling of strange dread gripped him again.
“Who are you?” he called.
The old man opened his mouth. He did not speak, yet a voice—voices—poured forth like flies boiling from his lips. “We have many names.”
It was the Omega.
He’d fully regenerated.
And, with a strength unlike any man Adam had ever seen, the Omega surged forward and knocked him off his feet, driving him through a burning wall and into the mouth of Hell.
Forty-Four / The Beast
“WE ARE ONE THOUSAND MILLION STRONG! WE HAVE WAITED AN ETERNITY IN THE ABYSS FOR THIS MOMENT—WE ARE THE END, REAPER, YOUR END, AND NOW WE SHALL REAP YOU!”
Adam was half-conscious, barely aware of the scorching heat enveloping him as he w
as carried through a burning room. All was white around him, a swimming storm of flames, a maelstrom without end. Then he was slammed down on a table of glowing steel and the fissures of his burnt flesh opened to receive the pain.
The Omega smashed Adam’s head into the table in a mad frenzy. All the while his jaw hung open, hateful words spouting forth: “DEMON! FUCKING DEMON—NOW YOU JOIN US IN HELL! NOW YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE!” Hundreds of voices or more were fighting to be heard, screaming over one another in various languages, all of which Adam could understand—and all of which were saying the same things. They were wrong, he was no demon, he had once been a man himself. He pushed the Omega’s hands away from his throat and tried to speak.
“WE DON’T WANT YOUR LIES! WE WILL HAVE OUR VENGEANCE!”
The Omega tore the scythe from Adam’s arm; wouldn’t have done him any good anyway. He tried to look around and figure out just where they were. All he saw were flames.
The Omega overturned the table and sent Adam sprawling. He splashed down in a hot, coppery liquid. Blood. The floor was covered in blood.
Adam stood up. He was standing on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.
A white-hot chain was slung around his neck. The Omega lifted him off the floor, its own hands blackening as it pulled the chain taut. The façade of a healthy man was being scorched away. It shook Adam violently, throttling him, and he felt his flesh becoming brittle ash and falling away in flakes. Can’t take much more of this.
The Omega hurled him over a fiery conveyor belt and into a steel wall. Adam landed on his hands and knees and crawled toward an enormous block of machinery. He had to get out of here. He could feel the heat searing the lenses of his eyes. His body was falling apart. Had to keep moving.
The chain snapped against the side of his head and sent him sliding through coagulated gore. He heard the distant braying of livestock as the flames consumed them. Was he to join them, just another servant-animal gutted and cast aside?
The Omega straddled Adam’s back. “We’ll burn here together, Reaper—back to the abyss!” A cacophony of insane laughter tore through the air. The old man’s meat was cooking. His skin blistered and split open. “We’re starting to look alike, Reaper! Can you feel it—the burning? The terrible burning? Do you feel it eating you alive? ANSWER US!” Rising, the Omega turned Adam over and kicked him in the chest. “SPEAK!”
Adam coughed up ashy spittle and rasped, “Enough talk.” He grabbed the chain hanging from the Omega’s hand and yanked as hard as he could.
The Omega stumbled over him and into the conveyor belt. It spun around, but not fast enough, not even close—Adam leapt across the room and drove his knees into the rotter’s ribs. Both flew over the belt and into the fire.
Adam sent his fist crashing through the Omega’s teeth. Its head snapped back, bone tearing through flesh. It laughed. Adam grabbed it by the wrist and swung it into the wall. Its arm cracked loudly. Still the fiend cackled. “We’re already dead, demon!”
Its hand found a meathook on the floor and closed over the wooden handle. Adam saw it coming and caught the Omega’s wrist. With a grim smile, he crushed it to powder inside his fist.
He swung at its jaw again. This time, it caught his fist in its broken teeth. Driving his thumb into the underside of its jaw, he gritted his teeth and twisted... twisted. The Omega yelped. It struggled feebly with his grip, and then it grunted and its jaw was ripped free with a wet sound, its black tongue spilling down its chest.
The rotter’s eyes were wide with shock. It clawed at Adam’s face, and still the voices poured out from the hollow of its throat. “No! You can’t do this! You have no right!”
“YOU have no right!” Adam snatched the chain from the Omega’s hand, coiling it around his fist as the rotter staggered away. “You’re already dead!” He charged after it.
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!” he thundered again. His fist sailed through tongues of flame and shattered the Omega’s cheekbone. The voices inside screamed in horror—the killers, the rapists, the corruptors of humanity were all wracked with despair as Adam’s fist rained down on their shared limbs, breaking kneecaps in two, driving splinters of ribs into bursting organs, pulverizing joints and crushing tissue until there was a pulpy, sagging bag of bones left dangling in Adam’s grip.
“You can’t...” the Omega pleaded. Ichor ran from its punctured eyeballs and into the creases of its smashed face. It raised broken fingers before itself and hissed, “YOU CAN’T!!”
“I am,” Adam spat. He threw the crippled corpse into the fire.
* * *
“No!, Adam!” Lily was crying. Dalton did his best to ignore her as he sped down the street. She grabbed at the wheel.
“Stop it!” Dalton barked. “He’ll be all right! He’s not like us!”
“No, they’ll hurt him!” Lily protested.
Dalton was trying to think of a response when a towering beast stepped into the road ahead. He swerved to the left, felt himself losing control, the tires losing the road. Then the impact.
Dalton fell out his door and onto the sidewalk. Where was his gun? Drawing his combat knife, he crept around the rear of the Hummer to see just what had run them off the road.
The Petrified Man seized Dalton’s hand, crushing the bones of his fingers within their tubes of flesh, and lifted him to eye level.
“Run!” he shouted, praying Lily could hear him. “Run!”
The Petrified Man glanced downward. Lily started screaming. Dalton craned his neck to see her in the arms of another rotter. “NO—”
The Petrified Man rammed his fist into Dalton’s ribs. He was able to see his sternum buckle and split, erupting through his tattered uniform. He was able to watch the rotter pull his spine out through his chest, and lift it overhead to suck the fluid from it. Then, and only then, did he die.
Forty-Five / Final Things
Voorhees heard another commotion outside the Hummer. The door beside his head was torn open, and freeing cold washed over him.
“Where is she?” cried Adam.
“I don’t know what happen,” Voorhees breathed, enunciating as best he could. His strength was failing. He’d held onto this fragile, broken body long enough to finish Meyer; now, just when he thought he could finally lay his head to rest, another crisis. It never ends.
“I heard the driver yell at her to run,” he told Adam. “Then I heard him die.”
Adam strapped the scythe on and turned to face the empty street. Gaylen was an inferno. Somehow, the icy winter winds were still cutting through this concrete canyon, but its walls were all ablaze and flakes of snow were eroding away before they touched the asphalt.
And, at the end of the street, a hunchbacked rotter was dancing. Arms spread wide, head titled, a crazed grin on its face, it writhed in dark celebration. It beckoned to him.
Adam broke into a run. Nickel stopped dancing and lumbered into a mass of flames: a huge building that had been a train station a century prior. Adam followed without hesitation. He knew it was a trap. He knew it was the last trap, the end of this grim campaign—but he knew they had her.
He ran into the station. Tongues of heat crawled across a vaulted ceiling five stories overhead. He was flanked by columns bathed in fire. All was silent but for the crackling of the flames.
Nickel ran at him from the left. He turned and plunged the scythe through the rotter’s black heart. Threw the body aside. Too easy.
Eviscerato roared from the other end of the room.
He crouched like a threatened animal, pacing back and forth, Lily clutched against his chest.
“Let her go!” Adam bellowed.
The King of the Dead cocked his head and clacked his teeth together: CLACK-CLACK-CLACK, like some sort of primitive taunt. He tightened his grip on Lily. She screamed.
“I said LET HER GO GODDAMMIT!”
Eviscerato held out his right arm. He shook it violently, then pointed at Adam. The scythe. He wanted it off.
Adam removed
the straps and let the blade clatter on the marble floor. “All right!”
The Petrified Man seized him about the waist in a brutal bear-hug, swinging him high into the air and then squeezing his body against the zombie’s own bony bulk.
Then he was spinning through the air—a column approached—his back was folded around it for one brief, agonizing moment before he slumped to the floor. The Petrified Man was upon him immediately, smashing his head into the column. He grabbed the behemoth’s shoulders and pulled himself up to slug him in the jaw. The zombie simply smashed him into the column again. Adam’s world trembled. Bits of flaming plaster fell around him. Now flying again—slamming into the floor. Lily screaming.
Eviscerato hurled her aside and raised his cane over his head. Charged at Adam. The former Reaper lifted his head, and the cane lashed him across the jaw, sending him reeling straight into the Petrified Man’s arms. He was turned upside-down and swung into another column. Unconsciousness threatened to overtake him.
Eviscerato drove the cane deep into Adam’s gut, piercing his false flesh and churning his insides. Adam howled in agony. Eviscerato snapped his teeth and smiled that dreadful smile of his, that showman’s smile. Watch the fallen angel suffer and die at the hands of a mere human—less than a human, in fact! Nothing more than a rotten corpse, a dancing, capering corpse, meekest of all men –inheritor of the earth! The world is dead and soon she will be dead with us, Reaper. And you will be NOTHING—
Adam grabbed the cane and snapped it in two inside his body. Eviscerato grunted. Adam plowed his feet into the rotter’s teeth.
The Petrified Man grabbed Adam’s head and jerked him straight up, bringing him back down on a sharp knee, driving a spur of bone deep into his back.
Adam was pounded into the floor. The Petrified Man stood on the back of his head and started grinding his face down. And somewhere, Lily was still screaming.
Empire's End Page 20
