by Matt Wallace
Pacific lingers behind her, scraggly blond hair tied back into an unusually formal ponytail and wearing his best busboy uniform. Despite the dressy garb, in typical Pacific fashion, he’s casually puffing on an expertly rolled blunt.
“Jett!” Ritter shouts to her. “It’s time! Turn ’em loose! Do it now!”
“This is gonna be so gnarly,” Pacific comments through a cloud of smoke.
Sin du Jour’s dutiful event planner nods with a steel-reinforced expression on her face and turns to the large metallic barn-style door affixed to the wall beside her. Someone has graffitied its patina-covered surface with ALRIGHT SHAMBLERS, LET’S GET SHAMBLIN’. The door is secured with a thick chain and combination lock. Jett quickly disarms the lock and slips its U bend free of the links, yanking the length of chain through the door’s handle and whipping it aside. Pacific purses his lips securely around the end of his blunt and uses both hands to aid Jett in sliding the heavy slab of metal aside.
Light pours into the otherwise darkened corridor. It’s an eerie-enough addition to the setting even before the first zombie clown stalks out of the room behind the security door. He’s a ghastly, macabre parody of the once popular Henley’s fast food chain mascot, Redman Britches. Every Henley’s in New York City has been shuttered for months since the corporation behind the franchise filed for bankruptcy amidst a massive and crippling class-action lawsuit verdict. Hundreds of people sued the chain after biting into their signature fried, breaded Chicken Nuggies and tasting battered bits of a human body instead.
The first zombie clown to shamble out of the room is followed by a dozen more undead versions of Redman Britches the Clown, some of average height and build, some tall and thin, some short and fat, and all of them in various states of decay corroding their once-vibrant painted faces. The first dozen are followed by a dozen more, until the corridor is packed with them.
Jett touches the organic device covering her right ear and whispers arcane words that are definitely not English. The zombie clown horde lurches forward in perfect step with one another, dragging their feet toward Ritter, Marcus, and Cindy, who run at them without fear. The trio sprints through the center of the horde and weaves deftly around their decrepit forms, the zombies ignoring their presence utterly. A moment later, the three of them join Jett and Pacific behind the advancing walkers.
“You okay, brahs?” Pacific asks with genuine concern.
Ritter hunches over and grips his knees, breathing slowly through his nostrils and exhaling from his mouth. He closes his eyes for a moment before opening them again to regard Pacific.
“Just another day at the office.”
Marcus pats him on the back, motioning down the hall.
“It’s about to be worth the jog,” he says.
The presidential meat puppets actually halt as they find their way barred by dozens of zombie clowns choking the corridor.
“Talk about an epic smackdown,” Pacific says with childlike excitement.
Marcus leaps high enough to see beyond the heads of the undead Redman Britches actors, yelling at the meat puppets, “Come and get us, ya fuckin’ Nazis!”
The gremlin pilots inside the meat puppets no doubt take ultimate offense at that accusation, gremlins being the most blindly patriotic of all domestic supernatural creatures.
The President clones steel themselves and charge headlong at the zombie clown horde, gargling unintelligible cries issuing from their mouths.
“Eloquent as ever!” Marcus shouts through his cupped hands.
The meat puppets collide with the Redmans at the forefront of the horde, battering them with their bare, swollen fists. The Presidents strike down several clowns before the rest surge forward and close in on them, the undead clawing and biting the artificial flesh of the meat puppets, tearing into them like rabid dogs attacking a battalion of foam CPR dummies. It quickly becomes a dogpile of inhuman shells falling over each other like angry cannibalistic lobsters in a tank. The zombie clowns don’t stop eviscerating the meat puppets until they’ve rooted out the gremlins driving them. Some are lucky enough to scurry away and skitter for their lives; others aren’t lucky at all.
Soon, bloodless flesh-colored chunks decorated with ripped pieces of suit are splattering the walls and ceiling as if being spat from a wood chipper. The grotesque, violent pile-up becomes more rotting clown than puffy blowhard politician as the meat puppets are swallowed beneath the horde.
Marcus slaps his brother across the shoulder. “I told you it would be worth going back for these guys. As soon as Cindy recapped your whole Henley’s heist for me, I fuckin’ told you!”
Ritter continues watching the melee. “Uh-huh.”
“The boy is impetuous,” Cindy tells him, “but he has good ideas.”
Pacific takes a final, drawn-out hit off his waning blunt and rubs the remnants of the paper between his fingertips to extinguish them.
“You don’t see that kind of shit every day,” he says. “Even workin’ here.”
“I’m just happy some of that untouchable white-privilege karma of yours rubbed off on the rest of us,” Cindy says.
Pacific shrugs. “I just go with the flow, brah.”
“Statistically, Zen management techniques have a noted effect on productivity and morale in corporate settings,” Jett offers.
Cindy shakes her head. “Y’all make me feel like I’m multilingual sometimes.”
Pacific giggles, but Jett only furrows her brow.
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s my point,” Cindy says.
LOOK AT ME
Bronko and Lena watch from their rooftop station. They watch the battering ram whip down the street and lance the parked compact. They watch the troop carriers stream after it. They watch the horde of orange-faced meat puppets storm the front entrance. They rush across the blacktop to watch the troop carrier scream out of sight into the loading dock, and the other tear up the back alley toward the service entrance. They hear the metal thundercrash of the wreck, and from their vantage point, they glimpse Ryland’s RV slammed against the alley wall in two mangled halves.
“Maybe we should get downstairs,” Lena says desperately, her whole body aching to take action. “Reinforce the line in the loading dock, or back up Ryland and Moon. I mean, it’s a lush and a slacker against who knows—”
“Ryland can handle his own self,” Bronko assures her with the icy calm of thirty years leading large kitchens. “We’re up here for a reason, same as they’re down there for a reason. They gotta hold theirs; we gotta hold ours. I know you sense a fight and the soldier in you says you should be in the thick of things, backin’ up your buddies, and I feel ya on that, but our job is up here. Stuff it down and stay calm. We’ll see action yet, I promise you.”
Lena takes her executive chef’s lead and follows his instructions as she always does, tamping down her adrenaline-fired need to move and trying to breathe slow and evenly.
“Yes, Chef.”
“We’ll see action yet,” he repeats, more to himself than to her.
Bronko looks back across the rooftop. It’s the same rooftop upon which half the Sin du Jour staff battled and defeated a demon assassin version of Santa Claus and his monstrous elves. It’s the same rooftop upon which they held Hara’s funeral. It’s also vulnerable to any matter of nasty things Allensworth could summon that take to the air. And if the lines being held downstairs fail and the staff is pursued through the building, the roof is the only place they’ll have to retreat.
Either way, something’s coming and this rooftop must be secure, so it’s where Bronko and Lena need to be.
He walks over to the roof’s single access, opening the old but thick and sturdy metal door. The stairwell beyond is empty, quiet. The interior of the building beyond the stairwell, what Bronko can hear of it, is quiet too. Whatever chaos is occurring at those ground-floor access points being guarded by the others has yet to sweep through the rest of Sin du Jour.
Lena watches
him. “Are you feeling it too, Chef?”
Bronko snorts, offering her a wry grin. “I’m feelin’ it all, Tarr. Every bit of it.”
Lena smiles at him, taking genuine comfort and solace from his always easy, irrepressible manner, no matter the situation. The smile slowly fades as she watches an inexplicable spiral of bright red blossom in the center of Bronko’s chest, the stain quickly spreading through the cotton capillaries of his white chef’s smock.
He looks down at it curiously, detached from the sensation. When his brain finally receives the report from his body, Bronko awkwardly begins sucking in air and his eyes begin to glaze over.
Allensworth leans over Bronko’s shoulder, speaking directly into his ear from beneath the hood of the cloak.
“This is what it feels like to be stabbed in the back, Byron.”
“Chef!” Lena cries, rushing forward in panic and rage to maul Allensworth with her bare hands.
He uses his lethal leverage on Bronko to swing the former linebacker’s massive frame into Lena, who collides with what feels like a brick wall. She’s bounced down onto the rooftop, landing awkwardly on her hip and kidney, gasping for breath.
Allensworth disengages from Bronko’s back, prompting the larger man to grimace and groan. Bronko slumps to his knees, then onto his side.
Lena sees that Allensworth’s right hand has become a clawed reptilian thing, the talons slathered in Bronko’s blood.
“Incidentally, Byron,” he says, removing a scroll from inside his cloak and unfurling what looks like a contract prop from a community-theater staging of Faust. “I’m taking it upon myself to release you from our arrangement.”
Allensworth draws one of those razor talons through the center of the contract, slicing it cleanly in half.
As he does, a stale, hot wind blows through the severed pieces of parchment, as if something has been released from its compressed state.
Allensworth lets the pieces flit to the black rooftop.
“What the fuck are you?” Lena asks, pushing away from the roof with her hands and standing slowly.
“Enhanced,” he answers cryptically. “Thanks to you, Miss Tarr.”
Allensworth draws back the hood of his cloak. More than half his face has been overtaken by the aspect of a demon, one eye yellowed and thinned in shape, tough, sickly green/brown hide replacing much of his usually perfectly coiffed hair. The right side of his mouth is wider, and the teeth curving over his lower lip are more like fangs.
“Don’t worry, Miss Tarr; I’ve brought a gift for you, as well.”
Allensworth’s still-human hand delves beneath his cloak and produces a long shock of white hair, bits of bloody scalp still clinging to one end.
He tosses it at her feet.
“The old Navajo was full of surprises, I will attest. I had meant to batter down the walls of this decrepit tomb myself and exterminate you all level by level, saving Byron and yourself to the last, but he forced me to alter my plans. This worked out nicely, however. The rest of your Saturday-detention friends will be a lovely digestif. I’m only sorry you won’t be around to witness it, to experience what that feels like. The knowledge it’s going to happen is vastly different from watching it occur. Don’t you find that to be true, Miss Tarr?”
Lena doesn’t answer him. Instead, she draws a large knife; not a chef’s knife but the kind she carried in Afghanistan, a knife designed as much for fighting and killing as utility.
Allensworth smiles a horrific, lopsided smile that brings that demonic visage through to the other side of his face.
“Excellent,” he says. “Truly excellent.”
She lets the rage and pain and malice fill her, checking nothing, denying nothing. Lena lets all of that hate saturate her every cell, flooding her brain and muscles with deliciously savage chemicals. When Lena charges him, her charge is feral, and so lost in it is she that the screams pouring from her own lips don’t register in her ears. She swipes wildly at Allensworth with the knife, the half-demon puppet master backpedaling from the attack quickly.
Three feet from the roof’s edge, he steps forward and takes a single, powerful swipe at her with his lethal talons. Lena ducks under his arm and immediately thrusts forward with her knife hand, a jubilant shock running through her as the blade finds purchase, sinking deeply into flesh.
That jubilance just as quickly fades when Lena realizes she’s speared the meat of that demon hand, Allensworth managing to intercept the thrust with the center of its palm; worse, she realizes she can’t jerk the blade free of the unnatural appendage, no matter how hard she pulls or cries out in frustration.
He draws his demon hand away and strikes the side of her face, the blade of Lena’s knife opening the flesh of her cheek. She doesn’t see the rooftop rushing up at her, but she feels its impact. In the next moment, he’s on top of her, the weight of his body crushing and immovable. Lena can’t move her legs, let alone put up her guard. Allensworth rips her knife free of his changed flesh and casts it away, wrapping that demon claw around her throat, the strength of its grip shocking in its power, immediately cutting off her air supply.
“You realize, of course, the fallacy in your central conceit. You still believe this story is about you, all of you, a pile of lowly cooks, secondhand mercenaries, and cut-rate magicians. This is the beginning of my story, Miss Tarr. It is the story of my eventual and inevitable ascension. You and the others, you’re a small part of the prologue to that story. It’s now time for the prologue to end.”
Allensworth cinches his scaly fingers around her neck, watching the flesh of her face darken to a shade of red bordering on purple.
“And now it ends,” he says.
The world goes silent for Lena. She can’t feel anything except the hemorrhaging gash in her cheek, raised and aching and running hot with blood. The sight of Allensworth’s monstrous, utterly euphoric expression as large and looming as the sun directly above her begins to distort in Lena’s vision.
Although she technically does see the pressed steel head of the shovel collide with Allensworth’s skull, Lena’s conscious mind doesn’t really register it. The same is true for Allensworth’s demonic hand leaving her throat and the weight of his body vanishing from atop hers. She experiences these things, but reality is still a stunted haze, and it’s only after her lungs reinflate and she’s dry-heaved for several moments that the sound of the world around her returns and her brain begins to catch up.
The first thing she’s truly aware of is Bronko lying on his back several yards away, not moving. She is beginning to crawl toward him when a disturbing gargling noise and a familiar voice growling hateful words draw her attention in the opposite direction.
Darren is kneeling over Allensworth’s prone form, one of his knees pinning the wrist of Allensworth’s demon hand to the rooftop. Both of Darren’s hands are wrapped around the man’s mutated neck. Allensworth seems utterly helpless beneath Darren’s ministrations, a fact Lena can’t reconcile, considering the otherworldly power she felt in Allensworth’s grip just a moment ago.
“Look at me!” Darren commands him. “Remember what you did to me! Think about what you did and look at me! I’m doing this to you. Do you understand that? Do you hear me? I want that to be the last thing on your mind. I want you to remember what you did to me while you watch me fucking kill you. I want that to be the very last thing you think about before you die, you son of a bitch!”
Lena weakly raises her arm, extending her hand toward Darren and opening her mouth to voice some kind of protest. The words never come. Some part of her brain knows what’s happening in front of her needs to happen, but the image of Darren in that state, the fury and violence so unlike him, is enough to prompt another part of her to want to stop it from going any further.
The sound of Allensworth’s bones crunching as Darren’s inhumanly strong grip tightens and crushes his neck is loud enough to be heard clear across the rooftop, and it lasts until there isn’t a shard of bone left that’s la
rge enough to shatter.
Darren doesn’t loosen his grip, even after both of Allensworth’s eyes are threatening to pop from their sockets and his body has gone completely slack. Darren’s breathing is so heavy and so shallow that spittle is flying from his mouth, and his every muscle is visibly trembling.
“Darren, he’s dead,” Lena whispers. “He’s dead. It’s over. Stop. Please.”
His fists unclench. Darren finally exhales one long, labored breath, leaning back and letting his face turn to the night sky, the peace and serenity that cover them there contrasting the violent scene.
“Darren . . . how did you . . . how did you do that?” she asks him, eyes transfixed by Allensworth’s neck, which looks like a discolored, deflated balloon.
“I still have the strength,” he whispers to the sky. “I still have whatever he gave me so I could kill for him. That hasn’t gone away. I don’t know why. Maybe it’ll go away too after a while. Maybe it’s just part of me now.”
Lena nods, accepting that because her brain is too tired and too preoccupied to question it further. She turns away and crawls across the rooftop to where Bronko is sucking wind, staring at the stars much like Darren. Most of his smock is now dyed in his blood. She hovers over him, unsure where to even begin. Applying pressure to his chest wound will just pump blood from it faster and heavier.
“You’re gonna be all right, Chef.”
His voice is broken and ragged, but it still belongs to Bronko Luck. “Seein’ this here smock is meant to be white and not red, I’m thinkin’ I’m fucked, Tarr.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Not sayin’ it won’t undo it.”
Frantic tears prick at the corner of her eyes. “Then you’ll come back, right? You came back before. You’ll—”
Bronko shakes his head. “Allensworth knew what he was doing when he eighty-sixed that contract. It’s a one-way ticket this time.”
