by Ed Kurtz
Lester, looking more upset than ever, said, “The second we open that door, it’s on.”
“Then keep it shut,” Jim said. “They’re too dumb to get it open themselves. They’ll keep on, but that’s the worst they can do for now.”
“What about the upper floors?” Irma asked, pitching her voice above the rising volume of the things in the stairwell. “Are they secured, too?”
“Some,” Jim said, “but I don’t know what L.T. might’ve done about that. But I’m about to go find out.”
“Righteous,” Arkansas said enthusiastically. “I’m with you.”
“Me, too,” Irma said.
“The hell you are! If there’s anything worse than the ghouls in that stairwell, it’s Little Tee and his gang. And I’m not about to take you chicks up there to get hurt or killed.”
“Fuck that,” Arkansas spat. “Irma and me ain’t no dainty little housewives—we’re cons, baby. We can hold our own.”
For a second Jim regarded her with a stern expression, but his face broke into a smile and he shook with laughter.
“Right on, right on,” he said, clapping a hand on her arm. “Let’s get you gals gunned up then, shall we?”
* * * * *
If Irma and Arkansas were out of breath after four flights of stairs, the climb up to Bucktown’s highest level nearly killed them. Neither woman had slept since their night with the Deadbreakers, and that was sorely truncated by the fight that resulted in the MC’s decimation. Now they trudged up in Mean Jim Turner’s wake, step after step, flight after flight, each of them trying to outdo the other in terms of not looking as shitty as they felt. Nonetheless, a deal was a deal, and now that they were in it, they were in to win it.
“How much farther?” Arkansas caught herself saying before she could stifle it.
“Next landing’s the ninth floor,” Jim called down, though he was already past the ninth landing and ascending with little effort.
Irma paused when she made it to the landing, bent over and groaning.
“Next of those things I kill,” she wheezed, “is for the elevator.”
“Shit, I’d have thought the pen woulda put some muscles on you girls,” Jim taunted from above.
“Slow down so I can catch up and show you some muscles, fool,” Arkansas yelled back.
Her voice echoed in the dark stairwell and was promptly answered by a penetrating shriek several levels up.
Irma said, “Oh, fuck.”
“Sounds like we got company,” Jim said sternly. “Look alive, now.”
While Irma tightened her fingers around the butt of the pistol Jim had assigned to her, Arkansas did much the same with the shotgun slung over her shoulder by a leather strap. Once the screaming started, it kept on, though it was a good thing as far as locating the creature went. It trundled down the steps after them, wailing all the way and pounding against the walls as it came. The tension and fear imbued Irma with a second wind, and she hurried up to Jim’s position between the tenth and eleventh floors. The moment she reached him, the beam of his flashlight illumined a white-haired old woman in nothing but an enormous pair of white underwear, her breasts the color of slate and drooping low on her abdomen. She raised her hands up, her fingers curled and nails mostly missing, and howled with a mixture of pain and rage.
Jim raised his own semi-automatic to take care of her, but Irma beat him to the punch. She pushed past him, stepping into his line of fire, and fired a round into the center of the old woman’s face. Her nose seemed to suck in on itself in a mist of red and she went silent instantly as she dropped like a stone on the steps. The wall directly behind her was sprayed with blood, bone, and brain. The smell was overpoweringly foul.
“Goddamnit, woman!” Jim bellowed angrily. “Never walk in front of a man with a gun like that—I damn near blew your fuckin’ head off!”
Irma looked away and shuddered with shame. “I—I’m sorry, Jim. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Well, you best start thinkin’. This shit’s for real, do you dig?”
Arkansas wrinkled her nose at the gore and the stink, then turned to Jim.
“Wait a minute,” she said low, “where the hell did that one come from? She was up on the higher floors. This isn’t one of them that came up through the front.”
“Yeah, and this is the back stairwell, anyway. They shouldn’t even be in here,” Jim said.
As if to counter his statement, a fresh spate of screams shot down from above like a volley of arrows, loud and high. Footsteps slapped at the stairs, the rickety wooden handrails shook like the building was in the throes of an earthquake. There was no telling how many of them were coming, but it was a lot.
“Get ready!” Jim cried, though he needn’t have—the girls were more than ready.
The first wave came braying and snarling, most of them not at all decomposed but as sightless and savage as any of the dead any of the armed trio had seen. Arkansas, Irma, and Jim fell into a line and opened fire all at once, filling the enclosed space with bright orange-yellow flashes and acrid cordite, blowing corpse after corpse to bloody, ragged pieces as yet more appeared wailing behind them.
Arkansas blew load after load of scattered shot at them, pumping the shotgun as fast as she could and shouting, “Eat lead, you jive motherfuckers!”
Irma filled four out of six skulls with hot .45 rounds before falling back to reload, which she managed to do without trembling too much or dropping bullets on the steps. As soon as she was loaded again, she returned to her place and fired off six more rounds. The shrieking chorus grew less intense as corpse after corpse went down to join the gruesome pile building up on the landing and extending up the steps to the eleventh floor. Soon all three of them were coughing and wheezing from all the gunsmoke, but on and on they fired, killing the already dead until they were all dead for good.
When the shooting and the screaming stopped and the ringing in their ears began to fade, the overwrought threesome fell against the walls and railing to catch their breath and take stock of the damage. It was appalling; at least two dozen gory bodies littered the smoky stairwell now, a tremendous mountain of arms and legs and shattered, seeping faces blocking their way up. Every one of them had seen worse, but the closeness of it and the still unrelieved tension of the firefight shook all three of them to the core.
At some length, Jim said, “We got to move these fuckers outta the way.”
Neither Irma nor Arkansas said a word; they simply stepped up and started dragging the bodies from the pile, one at a time, and pushing them down to the lower landings. They landed with sickening slaps, sent invisible mists of foul odor up at them when they burst apart at the bottom. But Jim and the women kept at it until there was nothing left to prevent their continued ascent to the top of Bucktown.
So, on they went.
—Four—
Slaughter
“This is it,” Mean Jim said when the stairs ran out and there was only one door left. They had met a few stragglers from the horde that rushed them some nineteen floors down and dispatched them without much effort, and now that they were at the gate to L.T.’s minor kingdom, Jim, Irma, and Arkansas took stock of their remaining ammunition.
It did not look good.
Irma held out a handful of cartridges and counted them aloud: “Four, five, six, seven. That’s the last of mine.”
“Damn,” Arkansas said. “Two goddamn shells.”
“I still got another ten rounds in my pocket. Look, it’ll be all right if we shoot straight, ya’ll.”
“Well, how many assholes are we gonna face in there?” Irma wanted to know.
“I don’t know how many L.T.’s recruited since he set himself up in here,” he said, “but maybe fifteen, twenty dudes?”
“Then we better make this shit count,” she said gravely.
“Damn right,” Arkansas said, reaching for the door handle.
Half a second later, the bright working lights of the thirtieth floor hallway blinded them a
nd they squinted in unison with their guns drawn. As the white spots faded and the guns squirmed in their sweaty hands, Jim suddenly shouted, “Wait! Don’t fire!”
The hallway was entirely empty apart from a single man seated on a wooden chair halfway down. As her vision cleared, Arkansas was startled to discover that it was Mac, and he was tied to the chair and gagged.
“The hell?”
“Mac!” Jim blurted, making a bee-line for the sweat-drenched, terrified man.
Arkansas reached for him. “Jim, no!”
The door to Mac’s immediate left opened softly then, and an exceedingly thin man in a purple robe and large, tinted glasses stepped out into the hall. He wore a toothy grin and pointed a .32 with a six inch barrel at Mac’s temple.
“Hold it, brother,” he drawled in a high-pitched voice. “You don’t want this nigger’s brains blown out all over the place, do ya?”
Mac murmured behind the gag. Jim knitted his brow and dragged a deep breath into his lungs.
“You wanna tussle with me, Little Tee, then you tussle with me. Mac don’t got nothin’ to do with it.”
“Sure he does, Jimmy, sure he does. Why, ain’t he one o’ your boys? That makes him my problem. Because you my problem, cuz.”
Jim sneered. Irma and Arkansas exchanged fretful glances, and Arkansas’s shotgun started to rise. L.T. whipped his own hand around to aim right for her.
“Nuh-uh, baby—drop that shit right fuckin’ now.”
Her cheek twitched, but other than that she didn’t move until Jim growled, “Do it, Ethel.”
“Jim…”
“Do what he said, damnit.”
Irma nodded to her, and with a heavy sigh she bent at the knees to set the shotgun on the ragged carpet.
“The white bitch, too,” L.T. seethed, his grin ever present.
This time there was no argument; Irma did as she was told.
“See? Now we even, Jimmy boy. One gun for one, ya dig? Shit, I ain’t nothin’ if not a fair motherfucker. A’ight, bitches—make daddy proud.”
Before Jim could question what L.T. was talking about, two curvy girls, both with their hair in cornrows and sporting nothing but bikinis and high heels, stepped lightly out of the same apartment L.T. had come from. Both of them looked stoned out of their heads, all bloodshot eyes and open mouths. L.T. pinched the taller one’s ass on her way past, and they came to a stop on the other side of the hall, each facing a different door.
“The fuck is this shit, man?” Jim grunted.
“The big show, nigger,” Little Tee jeered. “Bitches, proceed.”
Their faces betraying their nervousness now, the girls seized their respective doorknobs and after a brief pause, turned them, pushed the doors open, and ran swiftly back to the apartment from which they came. L.T. laughed crazily, backing away.
“Me? I don’t really dig killing folks,” he said, as a low moan from the nearest of the open doors built quickly to a bone-chilling scream. “But that don’t mean I don’t dig it when some motherfuckers got to die.”
A hulking form emerged from the darkness of the first apartment on Jim’s left, and as it came into the light, he gaped in horror at the obese, bearded man who shambled out at him. The man’s hair stuck out in tangled tufts, his eyes were yellow and the undershirt that barely contained his girth was soaked in blood.
“Jesus Christ,” Jim breathed quietly. “Is that Big Anthony?”
“Usta be. Now he’s just some fat nigger gonna eat yo’ ass. Ciao, baby…”
With that, L.T. slammed the door shut and left Jim and the women to the giant corpse’s mercy, or lack thereof.
Jim rapidly walked backward, keeping Anthony in his line of fire, until he rejoined Irma and Arkansas.
“He was L.T.’s number one dude,” he explained.
“Any particular reason we ain’t putting holes in him?” Arkansas asked breathlessly.
“Be my guest, sweet thing.”
Big Anthony jerked his huge head to one side and, with a pinched brow that made him look terribly sad, he let loose a deafening roar that all but shook the walls. Arkansas swept the shotgun up from the floor, pumped it hard, and rushed forward to jab the double barrels against the fat man’s chin.
“Sorry, big fella,” she said sincerely as she squeezed the trigger and the dead man’s head came apart in the blast like a rotten melon in a shower of blood and gore that rained down on Arkansas, covering her from head to waist.
She wiped a thick layer of brain matter from her face with the back of her hand and gasped for air.
“Oh, that’s nasty.”
Blinking the gore from her eyes, she heard the growing groans before she could see a thing. Next thing she knew, Jim was rushing past her, firing into the hall. Arkansas winced at the shots and flattened herself against the wall to finish clearing her eyes for the next round.
By the time she could see again, Irma was busying herself untying Mac and Jim was already shooting—from the two apartments the bombed out bikini girls had opened, a fresh group of spasming, mottled cadavers came shuffling out. Mac stood up from the chair and pulled the gag from his mouth.
“They all L.T.’s boys,” he said, rushing to get away from Jim’s line of fire. “One of ‘em OD’ed in the bathtub last night, got back up started killin’ folks before morning.”
A short, light-skinned kid with a deep, reddish-brown gash across his face hopped weirdly at Arkansas, hissing and growling. She took her aim and squeezed the trigger, but she’d forgotten to reload. Without missing a beat, she swung the shotgun over and up, smashing the stock against the dead kid’s face. While he stumbled backward, clawing at the mess of blood and broken teeth, Jim fired a single round into the kid’s temple and put him down for good.
“How many does he got left?” Arkansas asked Mac, her words all strung together.
Mac scoffed. “None at all. Just them girls. The rest of ‘em’s all here, all dead.”
“Well, that simplifies things,” Irma offered matter-of-factly as she joined the fray, firing round after round as each new corpse appeared from one doorway or the other. This time around, each one was a headshot. Jim gave her an appreciative look before blowing the scalp off a coked-up looking dead man with a scraggly goatee and a seeping pit where his nose should have been.
Arkansas dug the very last shell from her pocket and chambered it as a small girl, no older than eight, walked sideways out of the closer of the two doors. Her hair was in braids and her top lip had been gnawed off, giving her the appearance of a buck-toothed grin. In her hands she held a human head, the skin marbled with decay and its neck a gooey, ragged stump.
When the dead girl screamed, it sounded like feedback from a microphone. Arkansas winced and Irma shouted, “Shoot her!”
With a hard, clacking pump of the fore-end, Arkansas fought back tears and blew the child’s head apart in a repulsive, stinking spray of blood and bone—but in the last second before her head exploded, the little girl tossed the head up into the air like she was playing with a ball. The head arced high, smacking its mouth but unable to make sound, and came down at Mac who instinctively caught it in his arms. No sooner had he caught it did the head’s mouth clamp down on his wrist, the teeth digging under the thick arteries and biting them clean through. Mac squealed with pain and swung his arm wildly, but the head’s grip was so tight it wouldn’t come off.
“Get it off me! Get it off!”
Dark jets of blood spurted from Mac’s wrist and he slapped at the sucking severed head. Irma spun toward him and delivered a solid punch to the side of the head hard enough to knock it off. The head hit the floor rolling, and Arkansas gave it a swift kick that sent it spinning at a wall where it cracked apart with a wet splat.
Irma whipped her top off without so much as thinking about it and set to wrapping it around Mac’s gushing wrist. The fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra was evident to Mean Jim, who had to physically shake it off, but the spectacle of bare breasts was lost on Mac. He o
nly moaned in anguish.
“It’s okay, it’s all right,” she mumbled, pressing her fingers hard against his shredded veins.
“It’s not okay,” Jim said sadly as he sidled up to them. “He’s bit.”
“Just gotta stop the bleeding,” Irma said desperately.
Arkansas touched her shoulder. “He’s bit, girl. You can’t unfuck that.”
“She’s right,” Mac hissed through clenched teeth. “It might not kill me fast, but…aw, shit. I don’t wanna turn into one of them…things…”
“Just hold on, Mac,” Irma purred to him. “Just hang on—”
Mac had dropped his chin to his chest, but suddenly his good arm shot up and snatched Irma’s pistol. Shocked, she let out a gasp and made to grab it back, but Mac evaded her, scrabbling backward across the well-worn carpet.
“Mac, no!”
“Look out!” Arkansas shouted behind them, and Irma turned to see one more dead man lurching into the hall, his head rolling around on his shoulders as if his neck was broken. Jim shot him quickly and the corpse dropped like a stone. Before the echo of the gunshot died down, another one cracked the air. All heads spun wildly toward Mac, who lay dead on the floor, blood pumping grotesquely from both of his nostrils and the gaping hole under his chin.
Irma broke into a fit of heaving sobs and Arkansas wrapped her long her arms around her weeping friend.
“It’s Hell,” Irma moaned. “We’re in Hell.”
No one argued with her. All was silent apart from Irma’s sobs and the ringing in everyone’s ears from all the gunfire, at least until the stairwell door groaned open and Jim yelled, “Hold it!”
He aimed his unloaded gun at the man who came loping from the stairwell, hoping his bluff wouldn’t be called. As it happened, he didn’t have to worry about that. When the man came into view, Jim breathed a sigh of relief and wiped the sweat from his gleaming brow.
“Bruce! Shit, man—what are you doing here?”
“It’s over, Jim,” Bruce wheezed, gasping for breath. His eyes momentarily widened at Irma’s bare, heaving breasts, but he blinked and returned his attention to the business at hand. “Bucktown is done, brother.”
