Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2)

by Durnin, S. P.

  Earlier that morning, Leo had moved the Humvee—per Foster's instructions—in front of the plane's hangar. He sat in the modified mechanism of mayhem with Elle, probably stealing kisses, or just possibly other things. Hey, it was the apocalypse, cut the guy some slack. When Jake nodded, Bee opened the hangar access door and waved to the Hummer. Immediately, the engine of zombie destruction came to life and began to pull the sliding barrier open. The powerful vehicle moved the steel wall effortlessly, allowing Rae to use the Douglas aircraft tug they'd found inside to roll the plane out, sans starting its props just yet. Once it was clear, she and Foster quickly unhooked the pull-bar, then sped the tug back into the space Warren and his companions had occupied over the weeks prior.

  Jake saw the blonde-haired EMT reach above her head in the cockpit and first one, and then both of the Beechcraft’s engines came to life. A few minutes later, Maggie threw them all a wave which most of the girls returned; brought the aircraft's RPM's up, took her foot off the brakes, and began rolling for the far end of the airport.

  The plane taxied onto the runway in the distance and they heard the sound of the engines rise in pitch. The turbines began pushing the Beechcraft ever more quickly over the surface of the earth, and finally it leapt into the sky. After not seeing anything fly—except for brain-matter—for over two months, the survivors watching from the ground felt a sudden rush of exhilaration as the plane circled slowly west and continued to climb. It was... Well, it was indescribable. O'Connor could only imagine what those on board felt as the King Air leaped into the heavens. When it passed back over where they stood, its wings rocked twice, letting them know those on board could see them waving goodbye and would be waiting in Pecos for their arrival.

  Jake moved to take Foster's arm as the rest of their party jumped and cheered and continued to wave as the plane climbed for the clouds.

  “How are you doing?”

  Foster grinned mirthlessly. “Swimmingly. We can head over anytime you’re ready.”

  The writer nodded and asked Laurel to take the others back inside.

  “Where are you going?” She was still, waving at the Beechcraft.

  “The control tower,” he replied.

  * * *

  The air traffic control tower sat only a couple hundred yards from the hangar which the Mimi currently occupied.

  Even though they hadn't seen a single one of the creatures inside the airport's grounds, both men still wore tactical gear and carried their full array of weaponry. You never knew. By the time Jake and Foster entered the abandoned structure the writer was already tired. Not from exertion but the guilt crushing down on him, like a mountain's worth of evil, over what he was about to do.

  The two of them climbed to the observation deck after locking the tower door, then stared unsympathetically at the man inside. The surviving raider sat secured to a chair by a pair of handcuffs. His face was damaged in a dozen different places, even though his nose was still unbroken and his mouth remained untouched. Jake had made it quite clear when the aged fixer had brought him here for interrogation, to keep his head intact. No taking an eye, no Chinatown style nostril modifications, no turning him into a modern day Van Gough. O'Connor wanted the bastard able to talk.

  “What's his name?”

  “Henry,” Foster replied.

  The raider watched them listlessly. Blood had dried on his face, his clothes, the chair he was secured to, and the floor. Jake could smell it again. The zombies didn't really bother him that much. Yes, they stank (did they ever), but it was the smell of fresh blood he hated. If you could smell it, there where ten to one odds it was splattered around the immediate area. Usually in large quantities. He pulled one of the tower's office chairs over and sat opposite the battered man.

  “Hey, Henry,” Jake said. “Your week's not going too well, huh?”

  The raider said nothing and turned his eyes away.

  “Now, that makes me think I don't have your full attention.” Shaking his head, the writer leaned forward in his chair and popped Henry in the side of the head with a swift, right cross. The man's face whipped around and a spray of bloody spit flew from his mouth. Henry shook his head groggily, then his eyes slowly focused on the writer sitting calmly a few feet away.

  “Better?” O'Connor asked. “You're not having any problems concentrating are you? If so, I'm pretty sure I can help you out with that. You've spent some time with the Chief here over the last few days. I know he's been providing you with the right motivation, but I'm telling you right now—”

  He grabbed the raider by the jaw and forced the man to look him in the eyes.

  “I am done fucking around.”

  He pulled the Glock from his thigh holster and put the tip of its barrel against Henry’s knee.

  “Now, Henry. I'm going to ask you about your friends,” Jake said, in a frighteningly calm voice. “You know. The rest of the assholes who feel the need go around kidnapping teenage girls? And, if you don't tell me what I want to know, I'm going to start blowing holes in your sorry ass.”

  “You haven't asked me anything yet!” The raider exclaimed. “That guy over there never even said a damn word, till you walked in together!”

  Jake's lip curled in disgust as he realized Henry had pissed himself. “That's because he didn't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to you either, so don't get the wrong impression. We're not having a discussion here. You will tell me what I want to know. Your only choice is whether or not you want to do it without experiencing one hell of a lot of pain.”

  “Man, I don't even know you!” Henry said. “I wasn't in on what they did to that girl! We weren't even allowed to touch her! Poole said he had plans for her, but then she took off and—”

  The smack of Jake's palm striking Henry across the mouth echoed through the observation deck.

  “So you shot her?” Jake yelled into his face. “Did that factor into the plan somehow? Or were you fuckers just making it up as you went along?”

  Henry spat between his shackled feet. “That was Milo. She wouldn't stop, so he told us to take her out. He was the one who took the other bitch—”

  A smashing hay-maker from Jake rocked the man's head back, almost causing him to lose consciousness.

  “Her name is Karen. Refer to her as a bitch again, and I have the Chief here cut off one of your balls.” Jake growled.

  George pulled the Tanto style blade from its sheath at the small of his back, then lazily proceeded to clean his fingernails with it, never taking his eyes from the bloodied raider.

  “So,” Jake pressed, “let's talk about your little butt-buddy friends. Especially this Milo...”

  * * *

  When Jake returned to the Mimi's hangar later that afternoon, he looked awful.

  Laurel and Rae had just about finished putting Gwen, her friend Donna, Penny, and George's niece Beatrix through a round of weapons training when he stumbled in. The writer shook visibly. Before his lover could ask him what was wrong, he darted to a nearby waste barrel and began vomiting into it noisily.

  Leaving Rae to finish up with the others, Laurel hurried to his side as he continued to be violently sick. She stroked his back as he leaned over the steel container, muscles clenching in time with his purging gut, giving him what comfort she could while his stomach emptied.

  Worry began to gnaw at her. With the exception of Foster and Jake (up until that point), each of the survivors had bazooka-barfed. Allan coined that phrase, after his spew of truly epic proportion. This seemed different. For one, he didn't stink to high-heaven.

  One of the bad things about a zombie apocalypse—as if there could be anything good involved with the dead walking around eating people—was the smell. They stank. Badly. If you encountered a thousand of the creatures on the street (after which, you'd probably be very, very dead) and picked a zombie at random, every single one of the others who were about to start chewing on your appendages would smell exactly like it. Laurel could only compare it to the aroma ach
ieved by dumping a moldy pig's carcass into a twenty gallon vat of human excrement. George and the writer had never shown any reaction to it before, however. They'd barely flinched when they came back down from the tenement once, covered in goo from the Hungry, Hungry Hippies on one of the upper floors, which was why the redhead was concerned as he dry-heaved the last of the spasms away.

  O'Connor spat into the barrel a few times, head hanging below his shoulders limply, as he recovered. Laurel handed him a shop-rag she'd grabbed on her trot over, and Jake took it gratefully to wipe his mouth.

  She'd guided him away from the others, to the staircase leading up to the roof. They were halfway up the metal steps before he noticed Laurel had a bottle of Jameson's in her hand. After climbing through and securing the access hatch, she pulled him towards the far end of the roof, and sat him down on a familiar ventilation duct. Uncorking the whiskey, Laurel handed him the bottle.

  “Swish and spit.”

  Jake did as he was ordered, going so far as to gargle before spitting the second mouthful out over the edge of the roof. Then he downed a large swallow while sitting eyes closed on the air vent, concentrating on the warm sting of the whiskey as it flowed down his esophagus.

  Laurel took the bottle back and capped it. “Tell me.”

  He didn't speak at first. When his voice finally pushed its way from his throat, it was numb and weary. Like an opium addict's, after a dose twice their normal size.

  “The raiders are based just southwest of Mount Pisgah, in the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Lake utilities complex. The location is roughly sixteen miles southeast of the city. There are sixty-four to sixty-eight of them left, after you discount the ones we took out at the water treatment plant.” He pulled out a cigarette, but his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn't hold his lighter steady. Laurel took the Zippo from his trembling fingers, flicked it to life, lit the cigarette for him, and put the lighter back in his vest pocket.

  “Thank you.” Jake inhaled sweet nicotine before he continued. “Their leader's name is William Poole. He used to be big in white supremacy circles. Poole was in Columbus for an Aryan Republic Army fundraiser in early May, preachin' the truth to some corn-fed morons, when all hell broke loose. He was the one involved in a failed attempt to link the group with the Fifth Reich a few years back.”

  Laurel frowned. “I've never heard of them.”

  “It's not surprising,” O'Connor said, blowing smoke out of his lungs to drift away with the warm breeze. “They're one of those 'run silent, run deep' organizations. They stay out of public affairs, don't have membership drives, and don't endorse the campaigns of politicians. Normally, they try to work within the system, attempting to change state policy to further their skewered interests.”

  “What? Like the white man's Illuminati?” Laurel suggested.

  “Not far off the mark. The raider we grabbed in Mulberry had been with Poole for a little over two years. He was banished from the inner circle when their hate-mongering leader contracted a gun for hire. Some guy by the name of Milo Tompkins. That's Mr. Skinhead, who lead the attack on Rae's place. He's also the one who took Karen away from the waste treatment plant.” Jake flicked the American Spirit over the edge of the roof. “What I can't understand is, why not take Maggie and Allen too? And why leave ten men in a facility fourteen miles from their headquarters, guarding a pair of captives that could easily be secured at your home base?”

  “That is weird,” Laurel agreed, pushing the persistent lock of red hair away from her face again. “Do you think maybe our friend in the tower is just playing dumb? I mean, if he was close with this Poole for so long, he should have some idea…”

  “Trust me,” Jake said, voice still numb with shock, “if he'd known any more, he would've talked.”

  Laurel's eyes narrowed. “Would've?”

  He was staring into the distance, eyes unfocused and unseeing. “George is reviewing the notes he took now. He said he'd be along. After he cleans up.”

  The redhead moved to stand before him and cupped his jaw with her hands, bringing his face up. “Jake? What happened?”

  He began to shake again and kept his eyes averted as he told the story.

  The raider had spilled his guts.

  Seeing George's knife come out had loosened Henry's tongue remarkably. He'd given up not only Poole's location and manpower resources, but also a list of the supplies and weaponry the hostile party had acquired. Between completely looting a National Guard armory and several large sporting goods stores, the raiders were in decent shape. Nearly all of them, with the exception of six female captives, were members of the Purifiers, as Henry dubbed them. Any survivors the group had come across were either killed outright for having the bad taste to be born as anything other than Anglo-Saxon, or—if of the proper stock—absorbed into the man's little pack of killers.

  A few had refused, citing that the dead don't give a shit what color somebody's skin is. They'd been tied to vehicles and left to die from exposure. More likely though, they had been consumed, or turned into ghouls themselves.

  Henry also informed them that when the Purifiers had attacked Rae's cache, they'd been given strict instructions to take everyone they could, especially Jake, alive. Poole told them, without any hope of misunderstanding by even the most mentally-challenged of his followers, that he wanted the writer brought to him whole and unharmed.

  Laurel's eyes widened. “Why??”

  “I have no idea,” Jake replied. “I've never met the man. I've never talked with him on the phone. I've never even sent him a postcard.”

  Once the Purifiers had taken their people back to the waste treatment plant, Tompkins (Skinhead) had split the party, telling those who remained that they'd be relieved in a couple of days. The man had left them some supplies, stuck Karen in the back of the lead armored car, ordered his men to load into the other vehicles, then hit the road south towards the Ohio-Kentucky border, fourteen miles distant.

  Henry had also explained Maggie's bloody appearance when Jake and the women had assaulted their location.

  He (Henry) and another man by the name of Pete Herbert, had decided to have a little fun during Allen's beating. The two had dragged the blonde woman, kicking and cursing at them all the way, into the office next door for a quickie.

  “He didn't want to talk about that very much,” Jake explained. “It took some convincing.”

  “How so?” Laurel asked.

  He shrugged. “Foster was going to cut off his d—”

  “I...! Get the picture,” she replied quickly.

  As it turned out, even though her hands were still secured behind her back, Maggie had put up such a fight the pair had given up on trying to get her out of her clothes. Henry forced her to her knees while Pete had doffed his weapons, and then undone his pants. The raider had then ordered her to start sucking the golf ball through the garden hose. The buxom EMT's response had been to call the man a pencil-dick, which had prompted Pete to smack her harshly. He'd given her half a dozen or so heavy-handed slaps, partially stunning her and—while she tried get the gears in her brain turning again—shoved himself into her mouth.

  Pete Herbert's high scream had quickly brought most of the other guards running. They found Henry dragging his companion into the hall, who was trailing a thick smear of blood and clutching his groin. Maggie was still knelt in the office, covered in blood from nose to navel, grinning savagely. There was something small and meaty on the floor between her knees. A trio of Purifiers had thrown her back in the cell with the then-unconscious Allen and carried the screaming Pete downstairs.

  The man bled out a short time later, and a couple of the other raiders had dumped his body in one of the waste plant's filtration pools like the sack of shit he was.

  “When he told us about that, George pulled his pistol out to shoot the bastard, right there,” Jake told her. “I didn't let him.”

  “Okay?” Laurel prompted.

  “I let him loose.”

 
“You what??”

  “I didn't say I let him go,” the writer said. “I cut him free, gave him my knife, and told him if he could get by me, George would let him out through the airport gate.”

  “And that's supposed to make me feel better?” She exclaimed, then quickly looked him over for stab wounds and cuts. Seeing none, Laurel took a calming series of breaths. “I take it Henry didn't manage to turn you into a pincushion?”

  He finally looked up at her miserably. “I killed him, Laurel. I beat him to death.” Jake held up his hands, displaying bloody knuckles and road-rash-like scrapes.

  The redhead's eyes widened perceptibly.

  “I- I couldn't stop. George tried to keep me from... I threw him across the room.”

  Her jaw dropped. Foster was no lightweight. “Is he alright?”

  “Yeah. Told me I hit like a girl, after he woke up again.”

  The redhead nodded with amusement. “Yep, he's fine.”

  He looked at her shamefaced. “I don't like the person I'm becoming, Laurel. He's not a nice guy. Who is this fucked up, nightmare of what used to be our world turning me into?”

  “Jake—”

  “I'm afraid.” He choked out, trembling violently.

  Laurel crushed him against her, wrapping her arms around his neck and shoulders. He clung to her; feeling like his sanity was trying to fall over the precipice like an unbalanced car. Just after it got the shit smashed out of it by an eighteen-wheeler.

  “I don't know how much more of this I can take,” Jake told her, his face buried against Laurel's collarbone. “I'm changing. And not in a good way.”

  “We've all changed, a little,” she replied softly, laying her cheek against the top of his unruly hair. “I never thought I'd become so good with a gun. Now, I'm dropping infected at fifty yards. It happens as people grow. Even without the world coming to an end. Heck, George actually used the phrase thank you yesterday.”