by Ed Kurtz
Arkansas whispered, “That must be Killer Wu.”
Irma nodded, about to reply that she agreed, but Wu suddenly howled with fury and flew through the air, closing the space between himself and the corpse in the blink of an eye. Before his feet touched the earth again, his right hand sliced in a blur across the creature’s neck. Wu landed gracefully beside the thing, whose screams were silenced as its head dropped backward on a broken neck.
“Jiangshi,” Wu grunted angrily, and he spat at the ground. The corpse stumbled, swiping its hands at its own lolling head, and then collapsed. Without missing a beat, Wu leapt up again, this time coming down with his feet on either side of the dead fighter’s gibbering head. He twisted his stance, gripping the head with his feet as he moved, and in what looked to Irma like an effortless ballet move Wu tore the head from the neck with a nauseating crunch and spun into the air as the head sailed over the wall and into the world outside.
Arkansas moaned with horror and disgust. Irma grasped her hand.
Killer Wu exhaled a long breath through a mouth shaped like an O and turned his steely gaze upon Bruce.
“Hrmph!” he grunted. “Who are you, that bring jiangshi into my school?”
“I didn’t bring that thing,” Bruce shot back, “and this isn’t your school. This school belongs to Master San Te, and you are trespassing.”
“San Te!” Wu exclaimed, his eyes widening. “I killed San Te with this finger,” he jeered, pointing a single forefinger menacingly at Bruce. “Your great sifu never even threw a punch—he merely cursed and died.”
“No—”
“And when he came back again, moments later, I had the great privilege to kill him a second time,” Wu said with a wicked grin.
“I’m only gonna kill you once, Wu,” Bruce seethed, his eyes growing watery. “When I’m done with you, there won’t be nothing left to come back.”
Wu’s grin melted away at that, and his mouth became a thin, angry line.
“Hah,” he rasped. “Impudent worm. You prove yourself unworthy of my skill—leave, or die.”
Bruce sneered, adopting a fighting stance—but Irma cried out and ran to him. She seized his sleeve in her fist and said, “Don’t—remember why we’re here!”
“He murdered my sifu!”
Wu chuckled, raising his shaggy white eyebrows.
“If I step on a maggot, is it murder?”
Bruce roared with rage and threw himself at Wu, who effortlessly struck out the flat of his hand and broke Bruce’s nose with a wet crunch. He staggered back, blood spurting from his ruined nose, and Wu only shook his head like a disappointed father.
“Go now, worm,” he said with evident disgust, turning his back on them. “Go, before I send you to hell with your precious sifu.”
“Come on, Bruce,” Irma urged. “This isn’t over yet, but we have to go.”
Tears ran down Bruce’s cheeks, mingling with the blood from his smashed, crooked nose. “Kill him…,” he muttered.
“Later, but we have to go now.”
Wu’s shoulders shook with quiet laughter. Irma shared in Bruce’s rage, but refused to give in to it. This was a man who decapitated his own student without empathy, a murderer with the power and the skill to destroy them all.
“Squirm back to your hole, little worm,” Wu chided, walking calmly away from them. “Squirm along, squirm along.”
“But master,” Wu’s subordinate complained, “surely they will return—”
“Let them,” Wu called over his shoulder as he stepped up to the school building. “Fools die every day.”
Bruce stiffened, tried to move forward, but Irma held him back.
“Later, goddamnit! Later.”
Killer Wu vanished into the dojo. Arkansas joined Irma and Bruce, keeping a wary eye on the remaining three men in the courtyard.
“What now?” she asked.
“We regroup,” Irma said.
“Hell of a plan. And then?”
“Then,” Bruce said, his voice marred by the damage to his face, “we kill the fuck out of Wu and Zeke. We fuckin’ end this.”
* * * * *
They left without further incident, apart from the sub-master’s taunting giggles as they passed back through the gates to the world outside. When the gates banged shut behind them, Arkansas gasped at the dozens of shambling dead that wandered the streets and alleys all around them.
Irma said, “They’re far enough away—let’s get in the car.”
She let Arkansas climb into the back and helped Bruce into the passenger seat. His eyes were starting to swell shut. He looked like hell.
And all with a touch of that bastard’s palm, she thought, replaying the scene in her head. She felt certain that Killer Wu was undefeatable, that even if they returned armed to the teeth they’d never best a man of his obvious skill. But for now she decided not to worry about that. For now, they all needed a place to rest, somewhere away from the dead and the Black Sun School.
Irma cruised back by the garage where they had slept the night before, but the place was completely overrun by screaming rotters now. Probably they were drawn by the activity in there the night before, and perhaps they’d left the scent of living flesh. Whatever the case, it was too dangerous now. Irma drove on.
At considerable length, she settled upon an abandoned elementary school, its parking lot mostly empty of both cars and corpses. She drove around the school building to make sure it wasn’t overrun like the garage was, and satisfied with that she parked close to the front doors and helped Bruce get back out of the car.
“Looks like school’s out,” Arkansas said glumly.
“We’ll hole up here,” Irma said, dragging Bruce up to the doors. “Hopefully we’ll find something to eat in the cafeteria.”
“Uh-uh, sister,” Arkansas jokingly complained. “I gave up cafeteria food when I dropped out of high school.”
“Because prison grub was so much better, right?”
“Best mystery slop this side of the Mississippi, girlfriend.”
To Irma’s relief the doors were unlocked. Arkansas held one open to allow Irma to get Bruce inside. The main hallway was dark and muggy, the floor littered with trash and schoolbooks. A bank of lockers to their left sported a long, reddish-brown smear of blood.
“Think there’s anyone left in here?” Arkansas asked. She flinched at the echo of her own voice.
“Alive or dead?” Irma replied.
“Either, I guess.”
“We’ll see.”
On they went, slowly down the dark hallway, past the main office until they reached a row of classrooms. To Irma it all looked suspiciously like she was back in her old cell block, but she did not say as much. She was relatively sure Arkansas harbored similar thoughts.
All of the classrooms looked more or less the same, so Irma chose one at random. The combination desk-chairs were still neatly arranged in four rows and there was a colorful map of the world hanging down over the blackboard. Arkansas paused in front of the map and snorted.
“So much for borders,” she said. “I don’t guess there’s much need for ‘em now.”
“Here, help me with Bruce,” Irma said.
The women gently laid him down on the floor and then Irma went in search of something to put under his head. When that turned nothing up, she sat down Indian-style and propped his head up on her lap. Bruce cracked one eye open and moaned softly.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped.
“Shut up and get some rest,” Irma commanded.
Arkansas checked out the room, glanced in a closet in the back, and looked through the windows at the empty field outside.
“I’m going to go see about some food,” she said absently.
“Careful out there.”
“The good news is school cafeteria food isn’t really food, so it should be good forever.”
“Depending on your definition of ‘good.’”
With a small, forced smile, Arkansas left the classroom.
And once again, Bruce whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Irma placed a hand on his chest and said, “Shh.”
* * * * *
The cafeteria was on the opposite side of the school building, and Arkansas went slowly along on her way to it. She discovered a few classrooms in various states of destruction, as well as more evidence of bloodshed like what she had seen on the lockers when they first arrived. All was quiet, however, and by the time she reached the cafeteria Arkansas found that she had calmed somewhat.
Just grab something edible and get gone, she told herself, scanning the wide, empty room as she entered. Brown and yellow trays littered the long tables, covered with moldering squares of pizza and foul-smelling milk cartons. She wrinkled her nose and ducked into the kitchen.
Here Arkansas expected to find more rotting food, and she did, but she also found a pair of rotting children.
They were tiny and gray, the skin of their faces tight and wrinkly like bad fruit. Each of them squatted on either side of an eviscerated corpse, an adult. It must have been a man, because the fetid entrails and exposed ribcage were framed by the tattered remains of a man’s gray suit. There existed nothing else by which to identify it, though—the body’s head was completely missing. As for the dead children, they grunted savagely as they scooped small handfuls of the dead man’s guts into their eager, chomping mouths.
Arkansas slapped a hand over her nose and mouth, and she whimpered. The smell was overpowering. The wet slaps of the children’s hands and mouths turned her stomach. She could not help but wonder who he had been in life—their principal? A teacher? Somebody’s dad? But all he was now was food. Food for the hellish things that used to be children, but not anymore.
A new world order, Arkansas thought. It was a phrase she had heard revolutionary types, Black Panthers and the like, utter back when the world was still the world. Somehow it now seemed relevant. Present.
She backed away from the gruesome tableau, taking short, stunted breaths through her fingers, and her heel kicked against an overturned can of tomato sauce. Arkansas gasped as the can clanked across the floor, leaving a slimy red trail in its wake. The munching grunts of the dead children rose in pitch, a pair of startled groans. Arkansas froze, her heart hammering against the inside of her chest, as they turned their dead, milky eyes toward her. Glistening red ropes of tissue and sinews swung from their bloodstained teeth. The one on the left, her filthy, greasy hair still in long braids, shrieked horribly.
“Fucking hell,” Arkansas moaned.
* * * * *
Bruce dropped into a deep, snoring sleep and Irma paced close by, keeping a watch over him. Unbeknownst to her, her lips moved as she worked over options in her head. She could see no other way to get back into the Black Sun School and kill Zeke than for Bruce to lead the charge, but he was in such bad shape he couldn’t even sit up. She and Arkansas were a pair of bad mamas, there was no doubt about that, but against an army of trained kung fu fighters they didn’t stand a chance. Even with Bruce their chances were middling at best, but without him they were lost.
Sending Zeke to Hell was all Irma had. It had become her center, her total focus. Her reason to keep going in a world gone completely to shit. She conceded—silently, to herself—that Bruce might even die before they left the elementary school. Then what?
If Irma couldn’t kill Zeke, what reason would she have to go on living at all?
She dropped back against the edge of the teacher’s desk and sighed heavily. Near her feet, Bruce continued dozing on the floor, and Irma noticed that he had assumed a fierce scowl and was clenching and unclenching his fists. His brow was dappled with sweat that sparkled in the weak yellow sunlight spilling in through the windows. She worried about his nose, how they hadn’t done anything to set it, though she wouldn’t have known how.
“Damnit, Bruce,” she whispered, matching his scowl. “What are we going to do?”
* * * * *
The first thing she grabbed for was a grease-spattered spatula. She grimaced at it when she realized what she had chosen to defend herself, but all the same Arkansas swatted at the oncoming children. The girl in braids screeched angrily at her. The other one, a vacant-eyed boy, wailed as he shuffled over the tiled floor. Arkansas swiped at them, but they remained unperturbed. On they came.
When the girl came within arm’s reach, Arkansas turned the metal spatula sideways and brought the edge down hard on the crown of her head. The spatula sank in with a wet crunch, cutting through putrid flesh and cracking the bone. The girl’s eyes rolled up into their sockets and she twisted her bloody mouth up into a vicious sneer. Arkansas sneered, too—the dead child smelled twice as bad as she looked, and the concrete colored mess bubbling out of her skull didn’t help much.
The boy seemed to double his speed then, jerking his little head from side to side as he scrambled toward Arkansas, hands outstretched. Black blood and dark green putrescence dribbled from his lips. Arkansas planted a foot on the girl’s chest and wrenched the spatula free. The girl crumpled, her head split open and leaking rotten matter. Arkansas slashed at the boy, raking the spatula’s edge across his face and tearing his cheek open. Her next swing bisected the dead kid’s voice box, transforming his screams into a guttural gurgling that made her stomach roil. As the boy’s jaw flapped chaotically, Arkansas dropped the spatula to the floor and sped around the burbling boy for the row of dull-looking knives affixed to the wall by way of a magnetic strip. She seized the largest of the selection, a butcher’s knife, and twirled around in time to see the small gray corpse tottering up to her.
“Gnah, gnahhh,” he garbled.
Without wasting another second, Arkansas grabbed a fistful of the dead boy’s dirty blonde hair and drove the tip of the blade into his right eye. The eyeball split apart like an overripe grape and the steel continued through until its width got wedged against the bone of the socket. Already coagulated blood gushed out like gelatin, and with a violent shudder the boy went silent and dropped down to the floor beside his playmate.
“Never did like kids,” Arkansas groaned.
Shaken by the attack, she stood for a moment, trying to will her frazzled nerves to settle. She didn’t want to look at the gruesome mess of small corpses twisted at her feet, so she averted her eyes to the shelves that lined the kitchen’s back wall. There she spied rows upon rows of tinned fruits and vegetables, boxes of saltine crackers, cans of soup.
“Eureka.”
She started to search for a bag.
* * * * *
The women ate in silence. When Irma first saw Arkansas’s gore-splattered clothes, she began to ask what happened, but she stopped herself. She knew what happened, and all that mattered was that Arkansas was all right. With that out of the way, they dug into a can of peach slices.
Bruce stirred a few hours later. He sat up against the wall without help, licked his split lips, and rasped, “Water.”
Arkansas gave him a bottle of warm temperature apple juice.
“Drink it slow,” she urged.
Somewhere outside a corpse yowled. Bruce stiffened, and Irma gently rubbed his arm.
“They don’t even know we’re in here,” she assured him. “Here, try some crackers.”
For the next four days, Irma and Arkansas returned to their old model of sleeping in shifts while the other watched and cared for Bruce. To Irma’s considerable relief, he rallied quickly, eating more with each new meal and taking to doing pushups a few times a day. By the morning of their fifth day holed up in the abandoned classroom, Bruce performed a set on his knuckles before calmly announcing, “I need to train.”
Irma assumed he meant doing laps in the hallway or something similar, so when he went out and returned with a fresh bag of charcoal briquettes, she was puzzled. Noting the confusion written on her face, he gave her a wink. Bruce then selected one of the desks, dragged it over to the window, and tore off the top. He dumped most of the charcoal in the metal basket that remained, dous
ed the lot with lighter fluid, and lit it with a match. Irma arched an eyebrow and cracked a window open to let out the greasy black smoke.
“Suppose you tell us what the hell you’re doing?” Arkansas said.
“Training,” Bruce replied. “Like I said.”
He fanned the flames and watched the briquettes burn for a while until the fire died down and the charcoal only smoldered. He then doffed his shirt, flexed his arms and chest, and thrust both fists into the crackling heat.
“Bruce!” Irma gasped.
His teeth bared and brow scrunched, Bruce withdrew his fists, now blackened and smoking. He grunted, then punched his hands back into the fulminating charcoal. The women stared with astonishment as he repeated the act over and over again, his grunts growing louder and face pouring sweat.
When at long last he was finished, Bruce heaved a heavy sigh, blew on his hands, and settled onto the floor for a nap.
The following day he went back to the kitchen and returned with new supplies: two pails full of water, a broom, and a carton of eggs. The eggs he left on the teacher’s desk while he went out to the hallway with the heavy pails hanging perilously from either end of the broom, which he balanced on his shoulders. Now he did the laps Irma had expected previously, though in a much more difficult fashion. He was gone for two hours, occasionally huffing past the room as he ran the entire length of the school, and when he returned he did not appear to have spilled a drop.
Divesting himself of the pails and broom, Bruce immediately fell into a series of sharp, rapid movements in the center of the classroom. He took measured, strong breaths and struck out at the air, kicked invisible opponents, leapt and spun and yelled with fury.
Irma and Arkansas stayed out of his way and remained silent. And when he was done, Bruce sucked down a carton of apple juice and a can of pineapple wedges, and then went back to sleep.
