by Ed Kurtz
In the morning he took two eggs from the carton and gingerly placed them on one of the student desks. He jumped up on another desk, positioned his hands on the first, and fell into a spate of push-ups on just his fingertips, an egg beneath each hand. He did this for over an hour, breaking three eggs in the process and depending upon Irma to toss him fresh ones. After that he went back to laps with the water pails. Then the charcoal again. On and on he trained until a week and a half went by, the women hardly speaking, even to one another.
Finally, on the morning of the two week anniversary of their refuge in the elementary school, Bruce awoke full of energy and unceremoniously announced, “It’s time.”
No one required more than that to get ready.
—Three—
The Black Dragon
The oaken gates exploded in a shower of splinters as the rumbling, battle-scarred Dodge Charger roared into the courtyard. It kicked up a swirling cloud of sand and peeled out close enough to the wall that the back bumped knocked over a row of staffs. Uniformed fighters broke training formation and ran for their lives.
Bruce stood on the brake with one foot and revved the engine with the other. Through the dust on the windshield he saw the pock-marked sihing from before, standing his ground and staring Bruce down.
“Run him over,” Arkansas urged.
“No dice,” Bruce argued. “I fight fair.”
He jerked the stick into park, yanked the keys from the ignition, and stepped out into the courtyard.
“We got no problem with you, old man,” Bruce called out. “We’re here for Wu and Zeke, no one else.”
“And where do you propose I go, black dragon? The world outside the Black Sun School is forever ruined and you have destroyed the gates that keep that hell out.”
“Where you go is your problem,” Bruce said, scanning the regrouping fighters. “I got no beef with you.”
“But we,” the sihing said, gesturing at the dozen or so young men gathering at his back, “have plenty of beef with you, black dragon.”
Four of the boxers stepped up, two on either side of their elder brother. They were larger than Bruce to a man. The biggest of them, a massive Chinese man with a chest like an oil barrel, grimaced and cracked his knuckles. The other three looked no more friendly than him.
“I’m not leaving without Wu and Zeke,” Bruce said, ignoring the men.
“As you wish. Shâ!”
With the sihing’s command to kill, the four boxers advanced. The second Bruce saw the huge man’s hands up, he jabbed his hand between the man’s arms and with crane’s wings stabbed his thumbs into his opponent’s eyes. The man bellowed furiously, blood and tears running in thick rivulets down his cheeks, and Bruce drove his palms hard against the chin before driving his elbow into the sternum, dropping the first fighter to the sand.
“Who’s next?” Bruce roared. “Come on!”
The next man danced over his fallen comrade, shrieking and flailing his arms in a rapid blur. Bruce attempted the crane’s wings again but got blocked with a fist to the solar plexus for his trouble. Irma cried out somewhere behind him, but he shut her out—a crane beak to the fighter’s groin stopped him dead in his tracks. The boxer groaned as Bruce closed his fist and brought it up in a smashing blow to the side of his head.
The third and fourth fighters came on at the same time, flanking Bruce.
Arkansas yelled, “That’s not fair!”
The sihing only laughed. Bruce spun a kick at the taller of the two, a red-haired boy no older than eighteen, but the boy countered with a snake defense, striking a flat hand hard into Bruce’s groin. Bruce grunted, staggered back. From the corner of his eye he saw Irma bolting across the courtyard to him. He scrunched up his face, tried to warn her off, but she stopped cold of her own accord. To Bruce’s considerable surprise, so did the two boxers. He was puzzled in spite of the stabbing pain in his crotch, but only momentarily—the wretched symphony of shrieks that spilled into the courtyard explained everything.
“Jiangshi!” someone cried in horror.
Blinking the tears from his eyes, Bruce straightened out and turned toward the gates. The dead were spilling in, dozens of them, gray and stinking of decay. Some almost looked alive apart from their milky eyes and shambling gaits, while others were absent limbs, jaws, scalps. They were men, women, even children as young as the two that attacked Arkansas back at the elementary school. Several were coated in the soil and dust of the graves they crawled out of. Every single one of them screamed.
Bruce heaved a sigh and swallowed hard.
“Just when I thought this was gonna be easy.”
The first of Bruce’s opponents, the enormous Chinese man, shot an anxious glance at him.
“Don’t let them get me,” he implored.
Bruce nodded sharply and hurried to him, grabbing a massive arm to heft him up.
The fighter muttered his thanks as the corpses drew near, but a blinding pain exploded suddenly at Bruce’s side and he fell backwards. The sihing had flown over the courtyard and driven a tiger’s tail kick that cracked Bruce’s ribs.
“Are you fuckin’ crazy?” Bruce gasped. The ugly man grinned, paying no attention to the emaciated, nude corpse that fell upon the giant boxer and sank its teeth into his calf. The fighter cried out in pain. “I was trying to help him, you bastard!”
“Black Sun disciples do not accept your help, black dragon. If any man here cannot defend himself, he is a disgrace and deserves to die.”
The corpse tore a spurting chunk of meat from the fighter’s leg. The man hollered in pain and terror; his attacker relished its gruesome repast. Bruce looked away, horrified.
“You got no honor,” he growled. “You’re a damn disgrace. You’re a disgrace to kung fu!”
The grin vanished from the sihing’s face as his eyes bulged. His upper lip twitched with rage. As the dead piled into the crowd of assembled fighters, snapping their jaws and receiving otherwise deadly blows with no evident effect, the pock-marked man assumed a ready stance.
“Fight me,” he snarled.
Bruce rubbed his aching ribs, looked over the master’s shoulder to see that Irma and Arkansas were all right. Irma had taken the tire iron from the Charger. Arkansas armed herself with a spear from the wall.
“Fight!” the master boomed.
His eyes back on his furious opponent, Bruce spit on the ground and said, “You got it, baby.”
* * * * *
“C’mon, Irma,” Arkansas said forcefully, tightening her grip on the spear. “This ain’t no spectator sport.”
Irma nodded her agreement and the two women ran into the fray. A pair of shrieking corpses turned on them almost instantly, clawing at the air and twitching with hungry rage. Arkansas drove the tip of the spear clear through one’s neck while Irma rushed forward to cave in the other’s head with the tire iron. Hers went down and she gave it another three wet whacks for good measure, reducing its skull to rotten pulp. She then helped Arkansas pull the spear from the first corpse, which continued to gurgle and jerk. A solid strike of the tire iron at the crown of its head put a stop to that.
“Two down,” Arkansas gasped.
“About thirty to go,” Irma finished.
She shook the fetid goop from her weapon, sneering at the foulness of it, when a pair of hands grasped her shoulders and pulled her back. Irma yelped, her nostrils filled with the reek of the dead. Her head spun with terror, but then she was suddenly free—the thing had been pulled away from her, and when she spun around to see what had happened, she saw one of the Black Sun fighters deliver a rapid punch to the monster’s temple, dropping it to the ground.
“Uh, thanks.”
“He’s wrong, you know,” the lean Asian boxer said. “The sihing. We should be fighting together right now.”
“Yeah,” Irma agreed. “I know.”
With a sad but determined look, the fighter went back into the melee, jabbing fists, elbows, and feet wherever a corpse crossed his
path.
“Seen Zeke yet?” Arkansas asked, startling Irma back to reality.
“No,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the horrible spectacle unfolding in the Black Sun courtyard. She was shocked to discover that some of the Black Sun boxers were now fighting one another instead of defending the whole against the dead horde. “Fuck me running, they’re crazy.”
In the midst of the clash, she could see the sihing leaping up with bent knees, one of which crashed into Bruce’s chest and knocked him roughly to the ground. Irma sucked in a breath and held it, unsure if she should try to help—and undoubtedly get killed by the skilled fighter—or continue dispatching the cannibal corpses. In her frozen state of indecision, she watched helplessly as the master hauled a dazed Bruce back to his feet and pointed a single, ramrod straight index finger at the center of his chest.
“Oh, oh no,” she cried. “He’s going to use the Serpent’s Last Strike!”
Arkansas did not hear her; she was busy with a dead woman gnawing on the face of a fallen fighter, her own face shiny with her victim’s blood and peeled-back face. But Irma was not the only one opposed to the sihing’s stance—one of his own students, a bearded man with a dragon tattooed on his neck, all but flew to the spot and to Irma’s shock beat him at his own game. The man howled and poked his own two fingers into the elder brother’s chest, his arm fluid like a babbling brook, and the sihing dropped Bruce and went ashen-faced in an instant. It all seemed like slow-motion to Irma, how the man’s pitted face slackened and his eyelids drooped as he crumpled beside Bruce on the sand, cold and quite dead. The fighter who killed him looked down, furrowed his brow and shook his head. Irma felt near to knowing how he must have felt, having ended the life of one of his own, a sad and appalling state of affairs in a world gone to shit.
The bearded boxer offered Bruce a hand, helped him back up while rubbing his chest rapidly with the palm of his hand. Bruce nodded, muttered something. He looked like he was going to be all right, and Irma breathed a sigh of relief. A scream sounded to her left, and without hesitation she swung the tire iron in a wide arc until it collapsed the back of a dead man’s head. And though the screams were deafening—the horrible, agonized shrieks of the myriad dead combined with the war cries of the Black Sun boxers—the powerful cry that came next outdid them all.
It came from above, like the fury of an angry god, and the eyes of all who were not defending their lives shot to the terracotta roof where the flowing beard and robes of Master Killer Wu took center stage. His potent scream silenced even a few of the dead, and while some of the fighters struck down corpses and others were overtaken by their ceaselessly snapping maws, Killer Wu floated gracefully down to the nucleus of the battlefield. He touched down right beside the bearded fighter who had just saved Bruce’s life, stroked his long, wispy white beard, and grunted.
“Hrmph.”
Then, without so much as looking at the heroic fighter, Wu reached out and gently touched the man’s chest with a single finger. The boxer seized, blood trickled from his lips and nostrils. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Irma bellowed, “You fucker!”
Killer Wu slowly craned his neck to look upon her, the tiniest of smiles playing beneath his fluttering mustache.
“No. Mercy.”
“Your rules, motherfucker,” Irma said, and she hefted the tire iron en route to him.
Wu laughed then, a condescending guffaw, and Arkansas shouted at Irma to stop. She ignored them both. A boxer wrapped his arm around Bruce’s neck and yanked him into another fight. At Wu’s feet, the dead, bearded fighter groaned, and his groan turned into a scream. Keeping his sullen gaze on Irma, Wu shot his right foot out and drove the dead man’s nose back into his brain, silencing him forever.
“Come, stupid girl,” Wu said. “I have no qualms killing even one as weak as you.”
Irma steeled herself to charge; she was sure in that moment that she would not survive the encounter, that all of her struggle, all of her hardship to get to this place and kill Zeke would be for nothing once Killer Wu was finished with her, but the roiling rage in her heart against the murderer before her permitted no other option. Someone else would get him, Arkansas or Bruce, or one of the other fighters who now battled against their own. Or perhaps Zeke was already lying dead somewhere in the chaos and confusion. Maybe, Irma thought fleetingly, he had joined the screaming dead. Whatever the case, she put it out of mind. None of that mattered now. The world had ended, and Irma had one last task to accomplish before she too was finished.
She lurched forth, and Wu stood still as a statue. But Bruce had other plans for them both.
He dropped down like an invisible safe fell on him, releasing himself from his attacker’s grasp, and immediately sprang back up with an elbow to the fighter’s chin. No sooner did the fighter fall than Bruce lunged for the nearest shrieking corpse, which he seized by the midsection and lifted up above his head. The dead man struggled and screamed in the air, and with a few long strides Bruce launched the angry, undead abomination at Killer Wu.
Time stopped—or at least it seemed to for Irma. She watched with mixed horror and excitement as the twitching, snarling corpse fell upon Wu, who sidestepped and snapped the thing’s neck with a twist of his hands. The dead man’s head turned at an impossible angle and his mouth latched onto Wu’s forearm. For the first time since she first laid eyes on the sifu of the Black Sun School, Killer Wu looked both shocked and terrified.
He was bitten. Blood dribbled from his arm and the dead man’s mouth. The corpse worked its throat, swallowing what he chewed away from Wu, and though Wu quickly rallied and freed himself from the creature’s grasp, it was too late. He was doomed now, and he knew it.
Irma flashed a grin and waggled her fingers at him. His mouth hanging open and shaggy white eyebrows turned up in fear, Wu dropped to his knees and screamed.
* * * * *
Arkansas saw none of this—she was engaged with a corpse and a boxer simultaneously, the former shrieking and reaching for her while the latter evaded quick jabs of her spear. The fighter feinted right and left, but misjudged, grew too comfortable with the rhythm, so when Arkansas mixed it up and jabbed right twice the fighter got stabbed in the heart for his error. He grabbed the shaft with both hands and twirled away, yanking the weapon from her hands as the corpse lurched for her. Someone yelled, “Here!”
She looked in time to see one of the younger boxers tossing a burning torch to her. She caught it, smelled singed hair as the flames licked at her afro. Ignoring it, Arkansas lunged for the shambling corpse and set it aflame. The dead man was unaware of the spreading flames that consumed him; foul black smoke curled up thickly from his burning body but on he staggered. Arkansas wrinkled her nose and hurried away, the torch still in her hand. Almost instantly she collided with a uniformed boxer, his arms hanging limp at his sides. She stumbled back from him, expecting some expert move, but the boxer merely hunched his shoulders and screamed.
“Jesus,” she muttered, and lit his uniform with the torch.
* * * * *
Now it was nearly impossible to tell who was fighting for whom, who was still living and who was now among the mindless, hungry dead. Irma lost track of Killer Wu in the undulating throng, swept away by the jerking, punching bodies. Acrid smoke burned her nostrils and her eyes watered. From her position she saw several flaming columns teetering through the courtyard; to her complete horror she realized that they were people, wholly consumed by bright flames and yet still shuffling over the sand.
The fighter who failed to defeat Bruce just moments earlier sped to the front of the dojo and kicked one of the burning dead through the open doors. In seconds smoke and flame roiled out from inside. Irma wondered what was left to fight for.
“Irma!” she heard Arkansas shout. “Behind you!”
In her reverie she had let her defenses down, and she now turned to find a skeletal woman with no eyes or lips descending on her. Irma yelped in fear. The next seco
nd, the corpse vanished from her sight as a burly black fighter filled the void, having just smashed the thing to the ground. His chest heaved and sweat dappled his brow.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Y—yes. Thank you.”
He nodded curtly, turned to go, and was met with a finger poked into his chest. The fighter stiffened, then went limp. He collapsed at Irma’s feet, dead. She gasped, jerked her head up to see the man who just murdered her savior in cold blood.
It was Zeke.
—Four—
Duel to the Death
“You!”
Irma took a step backward, gaping. If Zeke was at all surprised to see her, he did not show it. His heavy eyelids drooped, his mouth a thin line cutting across his gaunt face. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed.
“Hi, babe,” he said without inflection. “You got out.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “And you’re alive.”
Zeke shrugged. “I’m a survivor.”
“I’m here to kill you.”
“I figured.”
“You don’t think I can do it.”
Zeke chuckled.
“You always was a tough chick, Irma—but I’m tougher. Master Wu taught me the Serpent’s Last Strike. You can’t top that.”
“Is that what you’re going to do, then? Touch my chest and kill me?”
“If you make me, I will.”
Irma blinked smoky tears from her eyes. Zeke just stood there, waiting for her to make her move. Screams of rage and terror mingled with the smoke and the heat. From everywhere around them came the sounds of punches and thudding kicks against bodies. The air smelled of roasting, rotted meat. Irma felt her gorge rise, but she willed it back down.
“We had a few good times, kid,” Zeke said with a wink that made Irma’s skin crawl. “See you around.”
And with that, he was subsumed into the burning chaos.
“Shit!” Irma rasped.
She hesitated, uncertain if she should give chase or not, when a glinting light caught her eye just beyond the doors of the burning school.
