Dead Mann Walking

by Stefan Petrucha

  It was the chakz.

  Not the ones still struggling, the ones who’d been cut down and left to writhe. Even shredded, they couldn’t die, head for the other side, or melt into an existential nothing. The magic of ChemBet had seen to that. All they could do was abandon what little they had left, their souls, if you like to pray. As they felt it slip away, they cried for it, like it was a baby they couldn’t feed anymore. Once it was gone, they’d be feral.

  What was left? A predator honed by millions of years of evolution, or worse, designed by God, hungry, but severed from its higher functions. One after another, the maimed chakz bowed to their inner lizard kings, then lashed out at whatever moved.

  You’d think the hakkers would be scared, but they weren’t. They were thrilled. This was what they were waiting for, the moment that justified these little soirees. Ferals proved that chakz were dangerous, that we should be destroyed, that we deserved it. Safe and smug on their bikes, in their thick clothes, heavy weapons in hand, they howled and went back to playing their live-action first-person shooter.

  Like I said, ferals aren’t much of a threat unless they come at you in numbers, but you do have to be careful. The dog-soldier who sniffed me out after I shot his friend wasn’t. Maybe it was his first night out with the boys, or maybe he couldn’t handle his liquor as well as he thought. Who knows? Whatever the reason, he spent a little too much time gunning his engine, raising his fist, and whooping, and not enough time looking over his shoulder.

  Two moaners barreled into his back.

  It may have looked like a coordinated attack, but he was just whooping the loudest and had the shiniest bike. Ferals love two things: shiny lights and liveblood screams. Liveblood screams are different. They sound . . . wetter .

  When they hit, the dog-boy teetered. Probably would’ve been a big nothing if the bike hadn’t ridden out from under him. It climbed the coffee table, tore up the magazines, and fell sideways. I think the dog-boy said, “Whoa!” Took him a second to realize his situation wasn’t so funny. Even when he did, his first cry for help wasn’t very loud. The fall must have winded him.

  Ferals are fast. Before his friends realized they had a man down, four swarmed him. Two bit into his shoulders, their teeth grinding through his leathers until they reached skin. A woman straddled him, eyes so wide I think the lids were gone. It didn’t look like she could do much. Her arms were cut off above the elbows. But sometimes you just have to improvise. Fistless, she stabbed her pointy stubs at his head in quick staccato bursts.

  Now the other hakkers heard him. They dropped whatever they were mutilating to help. With a sudden pause in the slaughter, I figured I might as well let go of Boyle so he could do his thing. The LBs busy, he herded as many chakz as he could into the hallway. Mostly I followed his lead, keeping one eye on the hakkers.

  He must have noticed my divided attention, because he shouted, “Don’t look; just move!”

  We didn’t have long. Quick as a gamer’s fingers, they pulled the ferals off and chopped them into even smaller pieces. There wasn’t much they could do for the dog-boy, what with his jugular slashed and his face looking like something a cat threw up.

  Score one for the zombies.

  A hairy ginger with more freckles than skin kept hakking even when there was nothing left but limbs. When the chak pieces didn’t stop moving, he freaked.

  “Stay dead!” he screamed. “Stay dead!”

  Hey, pal, we would if we could.

  The ginger wasn’t the only rattled hakker. That was the second man they’d lost. No one goes on a chak attack without thinking he might cash it in, but might is a long walk from really believing it. They weren’t just grieving their fallen comrades; they were grieving their own mortality.

  Knowing how quickly that grieving could turn to rage, I pulled at Boyle again.

  “Come on! Now!”

  Ignoring me, he steered a few more chakz down the hall. I don’t usually try reasoning with a chak, but I figured it was worth a shot.

  “Boyle, do the math. Get cut up here, you’ll never build that sanctuary.”

  That did it. He turned and we ran. Between us and the basement door were about seven uncoordinated bodies, stumbling around as if they’d only recently discovered they had legs. Ashby was beyond them. He had the basement door open, but instead of going down, he stood on the top step, waiting for Boyle with a wimpy grin plastered on his face.

  Despite the obstacle course, we moved fast. I thought we’d all make it until a roar rattled the walls. It was an engine, but not a wussy rice-grinder whine. This was guttural, an all-American putt-putt.

  Some buried masochistic streak made me turn for a quick look, not that you could miss a hairy monster astride a gleaming Harley Softail Fat Boy. No grungy thug, the rider was nice and clean, a wash-and-werewolf decked out in impeccable studded leather. He and his machine were pointed down the hall, right at us. He flashed a grin, gunned the engine, and my chest rattled like a space shuttle was taking off. Boyle summed things up nicely.

  “Shit!”

  We picked up speed, pushed the others hard. Still at the door, poor Ashby found himself faced with a pack of oncoming bodies. Looking as if he was about to say heh, he fell backward and disappeared. Seeing his buddy vanish, for the first time Boyle shoved ahead of the others.

  By the time I neared the doorway, I couldn’t see Boyle or Ashby, only an Escher-like maze of heads, torsos, and limbs rolling down concrete steps into a musty, dark basement. Unlike the mess left behind, I assumed these body parts were all still attached.

  I was about to dive into the pile when the wash-and-werewolf put the Harley in gear. The rear tire screeched against the linoleum. The bike flew forward.

  If he kept his mean machine straight for about fifty yards, Lon Chaney Jr. would fly down the stairs, crushing everyone and everything, including me. Judging by all the flailing on the steps, nobody was thinking about getting out of the way.

  I went into a lightning round of Trivial Pursuit: How many seconds does it take a Softail Fat Boy to go from zero to sixty? Five? How long was the hallway? Fifty yards? How fast could I go from zero to sixty? Fast enough to reach the knob and pull the door shut? And if I didn’t get it exactly right, what would it feel like when that thing rammed into me?

  After wasting a precious two seconds on that crap, I grabbed the silver knob and jumped, yanking the door with me. As I flew, still in midair, I swear Chaney got close enough for me to see his eye color. Dirt brown.

  That, I remember.

  The door was half-closed when his front wheel caught it. The fire-resistant slab of gray slammed into me so hard I not only stayed airborne, I played Superman, up, up, and away as the door crashed into the frame. When gravity caught up, I fell onto the pile of scrambling bodies at the base of the stairs. A Twister game of the dead. Patent pending.

  Shaking off the vertigo, I extricated myself and looked up. There was a big wheel-shaped dent in the middle of the door. The hinges were bent. The cement around the frame had cracked, but held. I doubted Mr. Chaney looked nearly as good.

  We were safe, but not for long. It wouldn’t take much for the Livebloods to pull the bike out of the way. Then they’d come for us.

  I looked around for blunt, heavy objects, but it was too dark to see anything. I was trying to remember how many bullets I had left in my Walther when a flash of light got everyone’s attention. Boyle was standing in the center of the wide, shapeless space, holding a cheap plastic lighter with a tiny flame. Ashby stood behind him, looking like an accessory, but none the worse for wear. Other than the half shapes of nervously shifting bodies that reminded me of cattle stuffed in a railcar, I couldn’t make out much else.

  A community organizer to the end, he spoke softly. “Everybody stay calm. We don’t need anyone going feral.”

  But something else, even harder to ignore, competed for our attention, a loud . . .

  Crunch.

  All eyes shot to the door at the top of the
stairs. They were already trying to move the bike.

  Turned out Boyle wasn’t the only one who could talk. Some genius announced, “They have to come down on foot, one at a time. We can take them.”

  Ashby repeated the last two words. “Take them. Heh-heh.”

  Creak.

  A more resigned voice spoke up next. “Then what? If we make a pile of bodies, they’ll burn this place to a cinder in the morning.”

  “I’m ready for it,” another said. “It’s better than going on like this.”

  That was it for intelligible speech. Hisses and grunts followed, most sounding like they agreed.

  Boyle, for whatever ridiculous reason, turned to me. “Got any better ideas?” The equivalent of asking, “Excuse me, buddy, can you stop the rain?”

  Crunk!

  Back up at the door, cement drizzled from the cracks. It came down so freely, I looked around for an umbrella. We couldn’t go out. We couldn’t fight them if they got in. What was left?

  “Barricade,” I said. “We pile shit against the door. Hakkers don’t have a big attention span. Keep them out long enough, maybe they’ll get tired and go home.”

  I thought it wasn’t a half-bad idea, but Mr. Last Stand chimed in. “Barricade it with what? Cardboard boxes? How do we brace them? They’d just push them down the stairs.”

  One of the smart ones. Asshole.

  Clank!

  That last one sounded like the whole doorframe was coming loose. Everyone shifted like a bunch of cows. I thought I heard a few low moans.

  Boyle heard it, too. “Stay calm! We’ll be fine!”

  He didn’t sound like he meant it.

  Unlike having my back against the wall and a chain saw in my face, it was quiet enough here to pray. It was one of those desperate moments when you hope an angel appears and you don’t particularly care if it’s from heaven or hell.

  That’s exactly what happened, sort of.

  From somewhere out in the dark, a wispy, boyish voice nervously said, “Don’t worry. I called the police ten minutes ago.”

  At least it broke the tension. Everyone with a mouth laughed.

  I knew the voice. “Turgeon? You down here? Where are you?”

  “I’m sitting on some sort of crate. I think I have a splinter.”

  That earned him another laugh. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxed or in shock. If he was relaxed, I’d have the pleasure of telling him, I told you so. If he was in shock, what would be the point?

  “If you’re on a crate, better crawl inside it and kiss yourself good-bye, Mr. Turgeon. There’s no way the cops would bother showing up to save a bunch of chakz.”

  Turned out he was the one who had to spell things out for me.

  “You forget, Mann,” he answered. “I’m not a chak.”

  And that was when I heard the sirens.

  6

  I suppose the hakkers thought the sirens had to be for someone else. They kept at the door, grunting and banging, but couldn’t get it open. When the piercing wails grew louder and it was clear the police were getting closer, not farther away, they sounded confused. They whispered, told one another, Nah, couldn’t be.

  Then, like monkeys with their hands stuck in a jar, they went back to rattling the bike. When it was completely obvious the cops really were headed this way, I swear I could hear their brows furrowing. It was only when the brakes squealed right outside the building and the police tromped into the lobby that it finally occurred to them something was up and they stopped trying to move the bike.

  Great entertainment, but Turgeon was the only one expecting an actual rescue. The rest of us figured the cops would end up on the hakkers’ side, especially with two liveblood corpses upstairs, three, if the werewolf died in the crash.

  Any minute now, we’d be facing guns along with the chain saws.

  Loud and irritated the way only cops can be, their commanding voices filled the air, demanding to know what the fuck was going on. We all got quiet the way only dead things can. The silence is kind of a group thing. If one of us does it, everyone joins in. It’s like yawning. We’re great to be around in libraries, except for the smell. It also made it easier to hear what was going on above.

  Not that it was tough. The boys in blue made as much noise as possible, like they wanted to give any LBs in earshot a chance to vacate and avoid trouble. That was a good sign. Another good sign was the sudden change in the hakkers’ topics of conversation. Instead of macho whoops and gleeful academic questions like, “Who wants a piece of this next?” they were talking about packing up and getting the hell out.

  But one idiot straggler—there’s always one—drunk as a skunk, unable to believe his eyes, actually screamed at the cops, “What the fuck you doing here?”

  I was almost thinking I’d pull through this mess in one piece until I heard the sandpaper-against-a-bass-drum voice that answered. Angry, full of bile. How do I put it? It was the kind of voice that even if you knew the owner was supposed to protect you, you’d rather take your chances with the crooks.

  “You’ve got a lawyer stuck down there, dipshit! Get that twisted hunk of crap away from the door before I put you in lockup and introduce your fat ass to some real criminals.”

  Boyle blew out his lighter. A metal groan filled the dark.

  “Hey, man, easy on my bike, okay?”

  So the wash-and-werewolf had survived the impact. Only two bodies, then.

  He was told to shut the fuck up. The mangled doorknob jiggled; the door shifted like a sarcophagus lid, then froze. It wouldn’t give.

  I heard that voice again: “There a Sturgeon down there?”

  From the gloom, my client’s shiny head rose like a miniature sun. He shifted past the quiet dead, a twitchy smile on his face, and stopped at the base of the stairs.

  “Turgeon. William Turgeon. Yes. Could you . . . identify yourself?”

  “You hurt?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not bleeding. Could you identify yourself, please?”

  “He won’t answer,” I whispered. “Not even with the magic word. It’s Tom Booth, head of Fort Hammer homicide.”

  Turgeon gave me a quizzical look. “Isn’t he . . . ?”

  I nodded. “My old boss.”

  Also the man who diddled my wife and found me standing in a pool of her blood. Small world. Tiny world. So tiny, sometimes I wish I could put it between my thumb and forefinger and crush the damn thing. Booth must have caught a night shift, thanks to the budget cuts. Dragging his ass out here was the last thing either of us needed.

  A stubborn son of a bitch, he went at the door again, pulling, yanking, kicking, growling. Much as he might be our savior, no one from our side helped. I could feel the dead stiffen around me, worried they’d fallen from the pan into the fire. They must have heard me say his name. Booth hated me most, but after that, it was any other chak. He figured we were all RAR. Any overturned conviction was like someone tracking mud across his nice clean kitchen floor.

  After a few full, long minutes, the yanking stopped.

  “Could you ladies stop scratching your ball sacs and get some kind of wedge for this thing? A crowbar, something? Just give me one of those chak arms lying on the floor.”

  Big charmer, Booth.

  The next crunch was loudest. With a sound like Bigfoot’s fingernails against a blackboard, the door swung back into the hall and fell off its lower hinge. A flashlight beam danced down the steps, Booth right behind it. Lantern jaw and a curly red fuzz on his head, he looked as strong as I used to wish I could be. Good-looking, too, if it wasn’t for the pug nose that said canine in a big way. A show dog, but a dog.

  Turgeon motioned for Boyle to join him at the base of the stairs. Ashby gave off a nervous heh-heh and followed. Turgeon looked at me to do the same, but I shook my head. With Booth, I was better off hiding with the mob. Fortunately, Turgeon understood and didn’t ask twice.

  Spotting Turgeon’s pinker flesh, Booth waved him up the stairs. “Let’s move
it.”

  Turgeon pulled at Boyle and Ashby. “These men are with me.”

  At the word men Booth twitched and turned away like he couldn’t stand the smell.

  All the while, I was backing up, hoping to disappear into the darkness. No such luck. After they were a few steps up, Boyle, thinking he was doing me a favor, pointed me out. Unlike the nosy Turgeon, he didn’t know the history.

  “You, too, Mann. You’re with us.”

  Booth tensed up so fast I heard his bones crack. Hiding was no longer an option.

  After a pregnant pause, Turgeon managed to speak up. “Yes. He’s working for me,” he said. Then he lowered his big head and flinched as if expecting to be hit.

  Booth pivoted his flashlight into my face. I winced, not because I had to. My pupils don’t work quite the same way anymore. I was hoping it’d made him feel better if it looked like I was squirming. It didn’t.

  “Hessius Mann.” There was so much venom in his tone that even though the basement was packed, everyone around me stepped back.

  Saying nothing seemed worse than saying something, so I shielded my eyes with my hand, and nodded. “Tom.”

  He turned to Turgeon like he was ready to push him back down the stairs. “Do you know what it did?”

  I’ll say this for Baby-head: He was frightened, but held his ground. “He was exonerated, no? Partly because you beat him during his arrest?”

  Booth sneered. I could smell the wood burning. More than likely he was pondering the downside of caving in Turgeon’s head with the flashlight. But Turgeon was a liveblood, and where the living were concerned, in the end, Booth followed the rules.

  Besides, he still had his favorite chew toy to play with, me.

  “Remember what I said I’d do if I ever saw you again, Mann?”

  Crap. I didn’t. I knew it was something colorful, earthy, involving body parts detached and being forced into various orifices, but the details escaped me. I tried to remember; I really did. I even had it recorded somewhere.