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

by Durnin, S. P.

  “Jacob, I get the feeling you're upset about something,” Poole said dryly.

  “Gee, you think so, Betty?” Jake replied. Voice dripped with sarcasm. “I've had enough of your Rah-Rah-Rah, Team! Go-Fight-Win! horse shit. Get Karen out here, so I can put her in my Hummer and send her off. Afterwards, if you feel like reading Mien Kampf or The Manifesto of Bigotry, I'll happily sit and listen to you rant your way through the entire damn thing. Before I tell you to go fuck yourself, that is.”

  Poole gave him a level gaze, while Tompkins continued to fume. Nichole's face broke into a wide smile and she folded her arms under her breasts. The Nazi's leader considered Jake's remarks.

  “Very well.” He nodded to the pair of men who'd walked Jake into the yard, and they headed unhurriedly down the fence-line.

  The other Purifiers grew more animated as he paced behind the chain-link, and they began to cluster together making gestures in his direction. Jake was willing to lay odds the bastards thought he and Karen had been intimate at some point and were betting on whether or not he'd take her behind one of the utility sheds for a goodbye quickie or something.

  The two guards had turned the corner and just walked out of view behind one such shed, when Poole spoke again.

  “Jacob O'Connor. You, by your own admission, have committed crimes against the Purifier Brotherhood. You've assaulted our people,” he waved at Nichole, “you destroyed our installation in Mulberry, and you've killed our members.”

  This was bad. The writer had hoped he'd be able get the bastards to kill him, but after he got them to release Karen.

  “What's worse, you've contributed to the corruption of our race. You thwarted our efforts to increase our numbers, through the release the two individuals we gained during your attack on the Mulberry facility. That is unforgivable.”

  The door to the shed behind which Poole's pair of cronies had vanished began to rise. Jake could see the pair of guards as they worked a chain and pulley system at the corner farthest from the main building. The shelter had originally been used to house a scissor-lift. Jake could tell because said lift sat, covered in dust and debris, slowly rusting beside it.

  As the door rolled up on its track, he saw the interior was actually empty. There were some strange looking stains on the concrete floor's surface, but...

  No. Not stains. He realized, and fear began to clench coldly around the base of his spine. Smears.

  Oh shit.

  *******

  The light was coming back.

  It got brighter as the barrier rose away. That was loud, but it wasn't food.

  There was food outside. It was moving. There was a lot of noise from somewhere out there too.

  Move towards the light and sound.

  Hungry...

  *******

  Jake had always heard people use the expression they'd been so frightened, that all the hair on their body had stood on end. It was common enough. A figure of speech to be used when telling a story about something stupid you did that had ended badly. Like the moron everyone heard about a few years back, that was jerking it over a belt sander and accidentally ripped his balls off.

  At least that's what the writer had thought, until the moment that shed door finished rising and a handful of the dead stumbled into the transformer yard. It wasn't the number of creatures that sent his brain into a tailspin. It wasn't the rotting form of Tracy Dixon, still clad in her bathrobe, looking like a semi-attractive mummy. It wasn't the man in the CGEL work shirt and name tag that read Dwain. It wasn't the pair of ghouls, so skeleton-thin that you couldn't tell whether they'd been male or female prior to their deaths.

  It was Karen.

  The writer's knees hit the gravel covering the yard and he stared brokenly at the once lovely, brown-haired young woman. She was most certainly dead. Her skin was the grayish hue common to all the creatures, and the yellow of her irises confirmed it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fatigue bottoms she wore were shredded all the way up to her hip on the right, and multiple bite marks contrasted clearly against the pale flesh of her leg. Her right boot had also been stripped away, revealing a missing chunk on the side of her calf. That would account for the pronounced limp she displayed as she moved her awkward and unresponsive form through the shed's doorway.

  She noticed him first. It only stood to reason, since she was the one in the best condition. The others were all in pretty sorry shape. The CGEL employee was missing one of his eyes (along with the left side of his face), both the skeleton-ghouls were pretty much blind, and Tracy had some serious stab wounds from where her friend Carly had tried to hold her off with a cheer-leading trophy. He saw her eyes slowly register that he was a living, breathing human, and then the hellish expression her face took on. He witnessed the precise moment when what was left of lovely Karen's brain told her to feed.

  His eyes were having trouble focusing through the tears. Everything he'd done. Those men at the water treatment plant, leaving the misguided group Rebecca let to be consumed, torturing information out of the lone survivor of their assault on the sewage plant, turning himself over to Poole... It had all been for nothing.

  He could read the story of Karen's death from the awful damage her body reflected. There were a lot of bruising under her armpits and ribs, which looked like it could've been caused by the links of a chain. Said chain was currently piled carelessly on the deck of the scissor-lift. They'd bound her with it, hooked her to the lift, and lowered her down to be infected. He couldn't imagine the despair she must have felt as the grasping hands first closed on her ankle. Worse, all the while she would've believed her friends would come save her.

  The thought of it folded him in half over his knees. They... he...had failed her.

  “I finished her, after they chewed on her a bit.”

  Jake turned his head slightly against the horror and, though bleary eyes, saw Nichole near the fence. She and Tompkins had moved to within a few yards of it after coming down the set of steps at the south-west corner of the cafeteria's courtyard. The blonde was on her hands and knees, staring intently at his face as Karen and the other creatures began their slow shuffle towards his position from forty yards off.

  “I did it. It was me,” she said, eyes dancing in insane glee. “Stupid little kike whore was going to die anyway. So, Milo let me use his pistol.”

  Jake's teeth ground together as his jaw clenched.

  She saw his reaction and smiled. “I had him chain her to the lift. You know, to keep her still? Then I just walked right up and emptied my man's gun into her, from about two feet away.”

  The writer's eyes left her to look at the approaching dead girl's chest. Sure enough, the distance and all the gore had obscured a ragged patch of holes, dead center in her upper torso.

  The creatures were maybe thirty yards away. O'Connor just knelt there, almost unable to keep himself from collapsing to the gravel with unfeeling arms.

  “It was easy,” she said with a wide smile. “Pop-pop-pop-pop! She jerked as the bullets hit her, kind of like a bug on a hot stovetop. Then, after looking down at the Swiss cheese I turned her ass into, poor, widdle Karen just slumped right down. For about two minutes that is.”

  Jake lunged at the fence, causing the blonde to fall backwards onto her butt as his sudden movement startled her. Tompkins moved to crouch beside her scowling at him angrily, but the writer was beyond all care. Flames were going up behind his eyes. Nichole and her bald-shaven beau watched in shock as his hands clinched around the chain-link, compressing the steel and crinkling the diamond pattern noticeably. The creatures were twenty yards away.

  “You'd better pray I don't get out of here,” he said quietly, as the Purifiers began cheering and hooting in anticipation up on the dining slab. “Because if I do... no matter what... I will kill the both of you.”

  The dead were ten yards away.

  Jake turned, pulled the crowbar from its sheath over his shoulder and ran to meet them. A cheer went up from Poole's men as they realize
d he was going to give them a show before he got turned into maggot chow.

  What those gathered didn't know, was that he (with a lot of help from Kat) knew how to handle small clusters of the creatures. Their nightmarish fight in the alley behind Foster's safe-house—while nerve wracking, terrifying and utterly disgusting—had been better than a year of paying some overly-aggressive jerk (who couldn't even spell Kung Fu) for self-defense classes. Most normal techniques wouldn't work with the dead anyway, due to their inability to feel pain. All that Brazilian Jujitsu, rolling around on the ground, trying to choke your opponent out stuff was utterly useless when it came to zombies. If you tried using a guillotine choke hold on one of them? While you were worrying about the one gnawing on your arm, the other twenty you'd attracted (by rolling around on the ground with the first), would be chewing your ass up into handy, little bite-sized chunks.

  The infected CGEL employee was a big, burly bastard. That one would pose the largest threat, so Jake circled around the group, determined to take him out first. The Dwain creature gave the zombie-trademarked, bubbling, signature moan and reached out towards him. It was missing everything on the right arm from its elbow down, allowing the writer to dodge its clumsy, grasping lunge. He slammed his crowbar's hook end against the creature's temple and Dwain went down.

  Running a dozen yards past the pack, he circled back again and shattered one of the skeleton-thin ghoul’s faces. His whipping, sidearm swing sent its teeth flying through the muggy, afternoon air. O'Connor then jogged left around the other, pencil-thin creature and smashed the rising Dwain's posterior fontanel (back of its skull) in, putting the broad-shouldered zombie out of the fight permanently.

  Karen and the other female were stumbling against each other, attempting to reorient on him as he hurried around one of the transformer units, but the second emaciated creature was already on the way. It followed Jake closely, grasping at the air in its eagerness to taste his flesh, until it rounded the far corner of the unit and he kicked it in the chest. The creature's back hit the machine's steel housing and he spiked it through the eye with the chisel-tipped end of his weapon. Its mouth stretched wide as it convulsed, then its arms fell limply to its sides and the ghoul's dead lungs expelled their foul, final breath.

  After pulling the crowbar out of its skull, allowing the body to fall to the gravel, Jake continued to circle the transformer. The second painfully-thin zombie was fumbling around blindly, thanks to all the damage sustained to its eyes. Its corneas had been abraded by months of exposure to the elements. Dust and dirt and insects and wind had turned them milky with scratches, and only provided the creature with intermittent visual images. That one was his next target.

  He didn't even try to stop as he barreled into the shambling rotter. Jake threw his shoulder into it and sent the zombie flying away into the chain-link fence. The gathered Purifiers cheered or booed respectively, depending on whether they'd placed bets for or against his survival, but all of them were clearly enjoying the show. The thing bounded off the fence just in time to catch the crowbar's hook—swung with all of the writer's fury, fueled strength—right between its eyes. Hardened steel met dead bone and the creature's head split like an overripe Durian fruit. A third of its rotted skull was taken away with the weapon's strike, and it flopped back to slide messily down the fence.

  The bastards outside were going wild. Some jeered, some called out encouragement, but all of them wanted Jake to keep going. After all, there were two more left.

  Just like the ancient Romans did at gladiator fights in the Coliseum, O'Connor thought.

  He lowered the crowbar and tossed them all the bird. That earned him more cheers.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you assholes? In a couple of months, you've gone from Americans to a bunch a shit-eating, murderous-..! You're all beneath contempt!”

  That was when a frigid hand closed on his arm.

  Jake spun, stabbing out reflexively with the crowbar, which was what saved his life. While it didn't kill her, the weapon punctured Tracy Dixon's neck just above the spot where her collarbones met. It passed on through her body and into the transformer behind her. The point penetrated the machine's housing and stuck firmly in its inner workings, pinning the once-gorgeous woman to the metal casing like a horrid butterfly on a pin. The writer jerked away—leaving a fair amount of shirt in her cold grasp—and backpedaled out of reach. Although she clawed at the hardened steel, the dead woman wasn't able to free herself and remained stuck in place upon his crowbar, struggling clumsily.

  Karen approached him on wooden legs and he pulled off the remains of his CBGB tee. O'Connor prepared himself as the young creature crossed the last few yards, then lunged at him mouth wide and ready to feed.

  He tripped her.

  She went face first into the gravel and he dove on the corpse, quickly immobilizing its hands behind its back. He stripped the belt from Karen's fatigues and used it around her wrists as well, insuring there was no way for her to break loose, while sitting on her calves. Afterwards he took her by the upper arms (so she couldn't bite him) and, scooting back, pulled her upright until her legs folded at the knees. She dropped into his lap and he swiftly took her under the jaw, preventing her gray teeth from closing on his shoulder.

  It was awful.

  She was so cold. The wounds in her chest had long stopped seeping and her eyes (which had earned her numerous compliments from Allen and Leo) were full of, well... nothing. No trace of the girl Jake and his three friends rescued early on during the outbreak remained. While they’d saved three women that day. Heather and Karen were dead. Now, only Maggie still lived.

  The thing in his arms continued its attempts to bite him. Even though he was far stronger, it would never stop trying. It didn't have the intellect to realize it wouldn't be able to sate the hunger, which drove every one of the infected on past the point of human endurance. It would never... ever... know him. Jake couldn't hold his tears back anymore and they fell on the uncaring creature's neck, forming lighter-toned streaks on its gore-smeared flesh. This was all that remained of the young woman he'd come to know, while locked away in George's safe-house.

  A corpse.

  A hungry, empty shell.

  A monster.

  Karen Parker was gone.

  It tore at him; knowing that he'd failed both the girls and Maggie so totally. Jake wept and hoped her father's ghost would forgive him. He'd tried. He'd done everything he could think of to keep their group safe. The problem was, no matter how much he planned, no matter how much they trained, no matter how far they fled, the dead were everywhere. Which meant people like Rebecca, Poole, Tompkins, Nichole and all the rest of the Purifiers would be out there, too. Foster had warned them back in his cache. The writer had hoped that they'd be able to bypass many of those left who had snapped, or just lost any inhibitions, due to the fact zombies were walking around eating people. But this was too much.

  The thing in his arms wasn't Karen. His mind new that. But his heart felt like a ten pound, softball-sized, piece of lead as he watched the monster wearing her body struggle against it bonds. Holding the creature still, Jake bent and pressed his lips to its cold, gray forehead. The zombie's eyes didn't hold any recognition for him when he looked into those dead, yellow orbs. Only hunger.

  “I'm sorry, Karen. I'm so very, very sorry.”

  The creature ignored him.

  Still weeping, he took it firmly below the jaw and by the back of its skull, then twisted the zombie's head sharply one-hundred and eighty degrees.

  The things body jerked and went limp, but it wasn't dead. He could still feel its jaw moving. Still hungering. Still trying to bite. Jake laid the remains on the surface of the gravel yard, walked back around the transformer, and there picked up a cinder block someone had placed beside it. Evidently, one of the maintenance crew (maybe even poor dead Dwain) had used it to stand on as they repaired the unit, prior to the end of the world. He hefted the block, walked back, and without hesitation, broug
ht it down on the creature's head.

  O'Connor turned his face away. Jake didn't see how the skull caved in like a brittle, clay jug full of hamburger. It was enough that Karen's suffering at the hands of Poole and his Purifiers was over. He didn't need the picture of her disfigured body in his head, even if he did only survive for a few more minutes. He glanced at what used to be Tracy Dixon on his way to the gate. Even though he didn't—and never would—know her name, he just couldn't bring himself to end her tortured existence. He'd had enough.

  “Finish that one, Jacob,” Poole called, pointing towards the pathetic creature pinned to the transformer with his crowbar. “You've earned the right to the kill. I must say, I'm hard pressed to remember when I've seen such an impressive display of martial prowess. You may even be equal to Milo in that respect.”

  “Piss off, you cock sucker.”

  “Excuse me?” Poole said, finally becoming irate at O'Connor's public lack of respect.

  Jake folded his arms across his wounded chest, over his heavy heart, and stood unmoving with his back to the struggling creature. “Fuck you. You want it dead? Bring your goose-stepping, pansy-ass in here and kill it yourself.”

  Poole was nearly incensed at Jake's refusal to obey. The older man's face reddened and he leaned on the railing as his nostrils flared. “Milo? If Mr. O'Connor kills that creature within the next thirty seconds, he can return to his cell. If not? Put a bullet in his head.”

  “No! You promised I could have him!” Nichole cried, waving her arm and pointing defiantly at the Purifier's leader.

  “You need to control your friend, Milo. Right now. If her insubordination continues, I'll be forced to relieve her of her position and assign her simpler duties. Like say, in the harem.” Poole's face purpled rapidly.

  Tompkins jerked the blonde close and began whispering intently in her ear. Whatever was said seemed to mollify her, but she still looked extremely unhappy. Poole's second in command pulled his Walther and flicked the weapon's safety off.