by JJ Zep
“Seen as the ol’ man ain’t gonna be around to water the petunias anymore,” he muttered.
His back was to Joe, the distance between them about thirty feet. But to get there Joe would have to cross open ground. He wasn’t about to do that and give a concealed shooter a clear shot at him. He broke instead to the right, using the cover of the trees to get closer to Colt, cutting the distance to ten feet.
Colt continued urinating on Hooley’s flowers. Behind him Joe could see Sheriff Walcott’s police SUV parked around the side of the house, by the storm door. Was Walcott here? Probably not. More than likely the Dumfries crew had bushwacked him and stolen the vehicle.
Colt was zipping up. It was now or never.
Joe closed the distance between him and Colt in a flash, moving so silently that Colt barely reacted until Joe was right on him. At the last moment he tried to turn, giving Joe enough of an angle to swing the butt of the rifle and collide it with the bridge of his nose. Colt was dead before he pitched face first into the flowers he’d been pissing on.
Joe dropped instantly into a crouch, using the porch for cover. He stilled his breathing and listened for any indication that Creed had been alerted to his presence. He heard nothing.
He skirted along the house, stopped in the shadow of the stairs and peered into the darkened interior. The front door stood ajar and Joe detected faint light spilling into the passage from the cellar. Then he heard Creed’s guttural laugh and realized that he must be down there.
There was no waiting now, no trusting in instinct. If Hooley was still alive then every moment might be critical. Joe climbed the stairs onto the porch and entered the house, eliciting a complaint from the floorboards.
“Don’t quit on me now, Hoolihan. This date ain’t even started yet!”
A dull thud was followed closely by a groan.
“That’s it, bitch! Moan for daddy!”
Joe edged along the wall, stopped at the cellar door and looked through. He ran his gaze from the landing down into the depths, picking out the shape of Creed Dumfries’ broad back, greasy black hair licking at his collar, shirtsleeves rolled back from beefy forearms, hands curled into fists. Hooley lay on the ground in front of him, his hand to his chest, blood oozing between his fingers. He’d taken a beating too, his face blackened by bruises.
Tension worked its way into Joe’s muscles, pounded at his temples, threatened to propel him down the stairs towards Dumfries. He sucked in a breath and stilled those responses, tapped the cold, reptilian place that had once made him such an effective assassin. Acting out in anger was a surefire way to get himself killed and Joe wasn’t ready to go yet. At least not until he’d sent Creed Dumfries to whatever hell would have him.
He stepped onto the landing, onto the first creaking step, the angle giving him a view of Dumfries bolt-action Winchester, leaning up against the workbench. Could Dumfries reach it in time? Doubtful. At least not before Joe put a bullet into his simian brain.
“Hey dipshit!” Dumfries shouted over his shoulder. “Getting awful thirsty down here. You find any booze in this shit hole yet?”
“Wouldn’t hold my breath on the drink,” Joe said. “Colt got waylaid.”
Dumfries swung towards him with an expression that might have been comical in different circumstances. He gained his balance with difficulty, shot a glance towards his rifle.
“Go for it,” Joe said. “I dare you.”
Dumfries mouth worked itself into a wordless shape, he looked frantically left and right then began slowly raising his hands.
“This ain’t what it looks like,” he stammered. “We found him like this.”
“Yeah right,” Joe said. He raised his rifle. He wasn’t planning on carrying on a conversation with Creed Dumfries. He needed to get Hooley to the hospital. Even now it might be too late.
Dumfries eyes widened. Then his gaze arrowed away from Joe to the top of the stairs and a peculiar grin formed on his lips.
Joe started to turn, caught a glimpse of Clay Dumfries in the doorway, tottering on a crutch, a long-barreled pistol raised in his free hand. He threw himself to the side as Clay’s six-shooter boomed, loosing his footing, crashing to the wooden rungs, the AR-15 skittering from his grip and plunging into the cellar. Joe felt a flash of pain as the bullet grazed his skin, dredging a shallow groove above his right ear. Clay was trying to get another shot, trying to maintain his balance at the same time. Joe reached up and got a hold on the crutch and yanked, sending Clay tumbling, screaming as he clattered to the bottom of the stairs. The entire staircase seemed to yaw away from the wall.
Joe lunged for the landing, his fingers digging in. The Winchester boomed behind him as Creed fired. A chunk of plaster was gorged from the wall to Joe’s right. Then the earth gave way beneath him as the staircase collapsed.
thirty
The needle of the Impala’s fuel gage had been hovering in the red for the last ten miles. So it wasn’t a surprise when the engine finally sputtered and died. Ruby allowed the car’s momentum to carry them for another twenty yards. Then she angled the vehicle towards the shoulder and brought it to a stop. She looked through the windshield at the swathes of moonlit forest that crowded in on the road from either side. A road marker a mile back had informed her that she was on route 18, five miles shy of Big Bear Lake. All things considered, they’d done pretty well.
“Hey kiddo,” she said, glancing across at Pearl. “You up for a little moonlight stroll?” The child said nothing, stared fixedly through the windshield. Pearl had spoken little on the drive from Carson City, but she had spoken, which was a start. Ruby’s heart ached at the sight of the frail little girl, lost in the Impala’s bucket seat, the seatbelt slack across her bony chest. Just what did this kid have to do to get a fair shake in life? Bringing her here to Big Bear Lake, to a place where she’d have a real family, was a start. Maybe Pearl would finally have a place to call home.
Ruby got out of the car, fetched her katana from the back seat, and slung it. Then she walked around to the passenger door and got Pearl, lifting the child into her arms.
“I’ll walk,” Pearl said.
“You sure?”
The child gave an earnest nod and Ruby set her down on the tarmac. She held out her hand and Pearl took it.
The evening was cool and well lit by a full moon. Ruby set of at a comfortable pace, walking straight down the middle of the road. She soon had her bearings. The road she was on would eventually become Big Bear Boulevard and carry her right into the center of town. But, it was a far from direct route, running as it did in a series of wide deviations that mirrored the lakeshore. She figured she could trim a mile off their walking distance by cutting through the woods. Matter of fact, the route she had in mind would take them within striking distance of Hooley’s place. She could stop by and bum a ride. Hooley could even radio ahead and let her father know she was coming. That would take some of the hoo-ha out of the occasion. She was looking forward to seeing her family. She wasn’t looking forward to the fuss her arrival was going to kick up.
She was fifty yards shy of the logging road she needed to take, when she spotted her first Z. The creature blundered out onto the pavement, staggered across the road and re-entered the woods on the other side. Ruby thought nothing of it. Z’s were everywhere.
But then another creature appeared and another, then a whole group of them, shuffling forth like competitors on the final lap of the world’s most grueling marathon.
Where the hell were they going? More to the point, what were so many Z’s doing up here in the mountains, where you could go weeks without spotting a single one?
A thought occurred to her, a dreadful thought that set alarm bells jangling in her head. Had Big Bear fallen? Had her family been killed? Had they fled? If they had, would she ever find them again?
She pushed those thoughts out of her mind. It was pointless speculating on such things when a twenty-minute walk would bring her to Hooley’s place and the answers she sought.
She reached the logging trail and left the road, entering a forest that was by now alive with shifting shapes.
thirty one
Joe woke lying on the cellar floor in a tangle of broken woodwork, his brain telegraphing messages from numerous pain centers. For a moment he was uncertain where he was, how he’d got here. Then Creed Dumfries started to scream and it all came rushing back to him. The staircase had collapsed, plunging him into the cellar. Had he been knocked out? He thought he had. How long? He wasn’t sure, knew only that he had to get Hooley to the hospital. Hooley was hurt.
“That hurts! Ah, Jesus God that fuuuccckking hurts sooo baaaad!”
Joe ignored Dumfries’ complaints, took quick stock of his own injuries. Clay Dumfries’ bullet had run a crease along the side of his head that felt stiff and sticky with blood. It stung like hell, but he’d had worse. A layer of skin had been removed from his chin where he’d rasped it along one of the wooden steps. His shoulder felt like it had been bruised in the fall. None of those was going to slow him down. His ankle, though, hurt like a motherfucker. Something was seriously wrong down there.
He pushed aside a couple of planks and levered himself up into a sitting position, triggering a shard of pain.
Creed Dumfries lay just a few feet away, his chest rising and falling in rapid breaths. One of the rungs had splintered into a stake that had skewered Creed’s side, more than likely rupturing some vital organ on its path.
“Help me, oh Jesus God. Help me,” he panted. “I don’t want to die.”
Even if Dumfries had been his concern, Joe figured that Creed was beyond help. He looked to where Hooley lay on the mattress, lay so still that Joe wasn’t even sure he was still breathing. That got him moving. Whatever his own injuries, he had to get Hooley out of here and to the hospital.
He stretched and got a grip on one of the planks lying across his ankle, gritted his teeth and pulled it away. A lance of pain shot up his leg but he bit back the cry that tried to escape his throat. He wasn’t done yet. He grasped the second plank and pulled. The pain this time was like molten lava poured straight into the wound. A wave of nausea washed over him and he lay back on the ground and tried to steady his breathing.
Half a minute ticked by, Joe hurting but acutely aware that Hooley’s need was greater than his own.
“Quit being a pussy, Thursday,” he grunted and pushed himself into a sitting position again. Then he looked down at his ankle and instantly wished he hadn’t. The plank that lay across it was studded with nine-inch nails. Several of those had penetrated flesh, quite possibly bone as well.
Joe was no stranger to pain. He remembered quite clearly the machete that had hacked through his shoulder in Sierra Leone, the torn ligaments he’d suffered in Washington D.C. This particular variety of agony fell somewhere between those two.
He cast another quick glance towards Hooley to steel himself, reached and got a grip on either side of the board.
“Help me,” Creed Dumfries whimpered.
Joe gritted his teeth, sucked in a breath, tensed his muscles. He yanked upwards with every ounce of his failing strength. The scream that escaped him rivaled anything Creed Dumfries could muster.
Joe lay back on the cellar floor, his breath coming in rapid expulsions. Waves of agony pulsed out from his ankle and seemed to vibrate through his body, all the way up to his jawbone. His leg was free but he was far from certain that he could stand on it, much less lift Hooley, carry him out to the truck and drive him into town.
“Piece of cake,” he muttered.
A crash from above alerted his attention. Joe angled his gaze towards the cellar door, now seeming to levitate in mid air with the staircase gone. A figure appeared there, a ragged thing with green-tinged flesh rotting away from the bone. Now another appeared behind it, and another. The first of them dropped into the cellar.
thirty two
The road ran off into the moonlit distance, houses to either side hunching in the dark like cowering minions. John Messenger, striding at his familiar distance-eating gait, followed it, a slow burning anger building inside him. He’d been duped, suckered, dragged up the mountainside on a fool’s errand of his own making. Skye wasn’t here. No one was. He’d been lured to a ghost town.
Yet even as he raged, Messenger knew that it couldn’t be so. Every instinct, every twisted strand of DNA within his rotting corpse of a body, told him that he wasn’t wrong, that Skye must be here. All he needed to do was find her. As he had in El Centro, so he would again.
He elevated his face towards the sky and picked out his guiding constellation. Yes, she was here all right.
“Hands in the air motherfucker!”
If Messenger had been capable of being startled, the voice might have startled him. The figure had appeared from the cover of the trees in the road ahead, a decrepit old fart standing in his underwear clutching a rifle that looked about big enough to bring down an elephant.
Behind Messenger the horde shuffled restlessly. He backed them off. This should be amusing.
“I said hands up,” the man said.
Messenger allowed the semblance of a smile to creep onto his haggard face. So the town wasn’t empty after all. It contained at least one old fool with a death wish.
“Who sent you? That cocksucker Rolly Pendragon?”
Messenger took another step, his reptilian brain tingling with the anticipation of the kill. An easy kill admittedly, one unworthy of his talents, but you took what was on offer.
“Well you can tell him from me. I ain’t guarding no goddamn VIPs at no goddamn Beverley Hills Hotel.”
Messenger stepped again.
“I told you to put your hands up and stand still. Stand still, goddammit!”
Messenger kept coming.
“Mister do you want to get shot.”
The rifle bucked suddenly in the old man’s grasp, boomed in the stillness. Messenger saw the bullet come spinning towards him and deflected it away.
“That there was my last warning shot,” the old man said and fired again.
Messenger, just three feet away, easily evaded the bullet. He shot out a clawed hand and dug his fingers into the man’s neck, twisted and opened his throat. Warm blood spattered across his fingers as he flung the man across the road, sending him skipping off the tarmac like a pebble off water. The old man slammed into the sidewalk with an impact that splintered every brittle bone in his body. The horde surged forward and Messenger let them feed.
Sticky blood dripped from Messenger’s fingers. He brought his hand up to his mouth and flicked a blackened tongue at the fluid. The old man tasted of nicotine and cheap liquor and a disease that would have killed him within the year. Then came his memories, a rapid-fire slideshow that replayed his insignificant life in Messenger’s brain, slowing to near freeze-frame as the man’s most recent remembrance was served up.
Messenger saw him standing on the porch of a rundown old house, pointing that elephant gun of his at a man who crouched in the weeds. The picture widened, taking in a black car parked at the curb. A young woman cowered in the passenger seat.
thirty three
Creed Dumfries was screaming, his voice reaching a high-pitched crescendo in the moment before one of the creatures ripped out his voice box and woofed it down. A spurt of arterial blood spattered the faces of the zombies as they closed in. Then the room was filled with the revolting sounds of them tearing the Dumfries brothers apart and eating them.
Joe tried to blot out those sounds, to blot out the agony his mutilated ankle was inflicting upon him. He had only one aim in mind, to drag Hooley to the storm door and out into the yard, to load him up into the truck and get them both the hell out of here.
He backed away, sliding on his butt until he bumped up against the mattress where Hooley lay.
At the doorway another of the creatures dropped through the gap. There were more of them out there, jostling each other like metalheads in a moshpit. Another dropped through. How many was that now? Seven
? He looked wistfully towards his AR-15, trapped under the rubble. No way could he get to it without suffering a bite. His best bet was to get out of here while the Z’s were snacking on Creed and Clay Dumfries.
He backed past Hooley, worked himself onto his knees and looked down at his friend.
The slug that Dumfries had pumped into Hooley’s chest would have put most men half his age in the ground. His shirt was black with blood, his fingers stained with it. Not only that, but the Dumfries boys had gotten to work on him with fists and boots after they’d shot him. Hooley looked like he’d gone twelve rounds with Big George Foreman. And yet Hooley was still alive, his breaths coming in short, ragged gasps through his broken lips and smashed nose.
Moving Hooley was probably not a good idea, but the alternative was infinitely worse. The Z’s were already losing interest in the Dumfries, already done squabbling over the choice bits. One of the things had its head buried deep within the gaping hole they’d ripped in Clays’ gut. Another was gnawing chunks of flesh from Creed’s calf. A third was bashing Creed’s head against the ground, trying to open the skull and get at the brains within.
Joe steeled himself, leaned forward and lifted Hooley’s head. He hooked an arm under Hooley’s armpit and grabbed a handful of Hooley’s shirt. One of the Z’s picked up on the movement and turned its gore-stained face towards him. It cast aside the rib bone it was chewing on and shuffled a couple of paces forward.
That provided Joe with the impetus he needed. Calling on every ounce of strength he still possessed, he rose into a crouch and dragged Hooley into a sitting position. Now, he got both arms under Hooley’s armpits and locked his fingers together across Hooley’s chest. He did a mental count of two and started straightening up, grunting with the effort. Inch by torturous inch, he pulled himself upright, and Hooley with him.
