Biting back on her fear, she pulled herself from her cramped spot and raced to where Cole and the creature were fighting. Neither even knew she was there until she fired the Crown into the thing’s ear and drilled a hole right through its black brains. It fell over Cole just as another of the creatures ran up to the edge of the gaping hole. This one had been a female back when it was human, and as such, Corrina foolishly had even less fear of it.
She fired at the thing three times. Once while it was in the air leaping across the chasm, once when it landed and rolled in a ball and once as it came rushing at her as fast as a cheetah. She knew enough to go for a head shot, but knowledge could not take the place of practice and she missed with all three bullets. A fourth would’ve missed as well. By then she was barely aiming and jerking the trigger back, causing the barrel to rise and rise.
Whether she would’ve hit it or not was a moot point. After the fourth shot, the beast was too close and moving too fast. It had its beady black eyes so squarely fixed on Corrina that it didn’t see Cole come flying in from the right. The collision was terrific and once again, Cole’s greater mass served him well. He drove the smaller Dead-eye into the wall, which partially collapsed on the two. Cole pulled back as broken chunks of furniture fell over him.
Mixed in it all was part of a window from a skyscraper. The glass was an inch and half thick, and was still embedded in part of its frame. It took no imagination on Cole’s part to realize he was staring at a barbaric guillotine. He grabbed the metaled end just as the Dead-eye pulled itself into a sitting position. In one motion, he slammed it back down using the make-shift guillotine. The edge of the glass was razored and bit through the flesh with ease. In seconds, its windpipe was cut, its jugular veins were slit, and its carotid arteries were twin gushers.
Too late it reached up a fist and smashed the glass, something no human could’ve done. Still, the damage was done. Its head was half-shorn from its body and Cole wasn’t about to let up. He grabbed the thing by the jaw and the temple and twisted. And twisted. And twisted until the head came off with a sound reminiscent of a drumstick being torn from a Thanksgiving turkey.
Black handed, Cole tossed the head aside and looked around for the next attack. He thought there was one more of the things out there, but he was wrong. In the silence broken only by his gasping, they could hear carrying whispers coming from somewhere beneath them. There were two!
Quickly, he checked his remaining pockets and found only a pair of magazines for the Forino and a radio. The Mega was gone, perhaps kicked off the edge during the struggle. It was just as well since without bullets, the thing was worse than useless. If any taxman found it on him, there’d be trouble…or rather, there’d be more trouble. “How much ammo do you have?” The Crown had three rounds in its magazine and in her pocket was a spare mag with seven rounds. Ten underpowered bullets to take on who knew how many more of them. “No,” he muttered under his breath. He had done his part, he decided. He had taken luck to an extreme and to go further would risk death for nothing.
Julius Fantucci wanted something flashy to take down Ashley, and Cole couldn’t imagine anything worse than the black scaly thing. The only question was whether to leave it where it was or try to bring it up with him. Both sounded unlikely. He didn’t think he could drag a body that far under the conditions and he was sure that the remaining Dead-eyes would hide it somewhere impossible to find if he left it behind.
“I could always do both,” he said, grinning and stepping over the severed head of the last Dead-eye. Using the remaining part of the glass, he went to the scaly creature, and while Corrina stood guard, green-faced beneath her tattoos, he cut off the thing’s head. Next, he hacked away the head from the first zombie that had leapt across.
If he lived long enough to drop these in McGuigan’s lap, he figured that three heads were better than two.
He tied them by the hair and slung them over his shoulder where they bounced and dribbled black goo all over him. How he was going to pass through the building like that, he didn’t know, especially as the goo was alive with millions of Com-cells, the odd “virus” that was behind the creation of the zombies. It was true that probably everyone in the factory had been given the semi-vax vaccination, which was a mandatory inoculation given just after birth, but it wasn’t exactly a guaranteed prevention. Even after getting the shot, people who came in direct contact with the blood of a Dead-eye had a one in four chance of contracting the disease.
Although Cole was just about awash in the stuff, he had received a booster after his last run-in with zombies six months before. Corrina had as well, but she wasn’t about to trust the shot. In her mind, shots were one-time deals. If you had a downstairs problem, you got a shot and things cleared up. Shots didn’t make a person better forever.
Spreading the disease wasn’t his main concern, however. Someone was bound to notice the heads. He considered the problem as he and Corrina scurried along the tunnel. With the ambient light filtering through, they found the going not nearly as impossible as either had feared. It was true that in places the tunnel was pitch-black and they had to feel their way forward, inching along as the Dead-eyes kept pace below them. Overall, the two moved along quicker than Cole had thought they would and they managed to keep just ahead of their pursuers who were forced to climb through, and around, and over the mountain.
Had it not been for the heads, the two would’ve gotten away cleanly. They were unwieldy and awkward, and were always snagging on protruding shoots of metal. When they had to leap from stable point to stable point, with gaping holes all around them and a terrifying plunge into darkness if they fell, the heads became too dangerous to justify carrying them any further.
Squinting around, he quickly saw an old filing cabinet jutting partially from the trash. It was on its side and stove in on top, crushed by a chunk of cement and rebar. Cole put one of the heads in it, and a little further on he found an ancient electric oven that was lying on its back with its door flung open. It could have fit the remaining two heads, but he only placed one in it. He kept the black scaly head and tied it to his belt loop with its own hair.
They were able to move much faster and it wasn’t long before they left the whispering Dead-eyes behind and emerged from the mountain, sweating and feeling like they had just re-entered the “real world.”
“Now what do we do?” Corrina hissed, looking up at the platform high above them. The walls of the pit were nearly sheer and there was no way she’d be able to scale them.
Cole went to the harness he’d tied off and pulled it down. “You’re going to go up and make that bastard bring me up as well. Threaten him with the gun. Shoot him in the leg if you have to.”
“What if he just drops me?” she demanded.
“Trust me, he won’t,” Cole said, throwing out words without believing them for a second. He lifted first one leg and then the other into the harness and cinched it tight. She stared upward, wild-eyed and frantic as he gave the rope a series of hard yanks. As he guessed it would, the rope went taut and she slid upward. “Don’t let him see the gun,” he warned, just as the dark swallowed her features and she became nothing but a slowly rising shadow.
He gave it a fifty-fifty chance that the slag would bring her all the way up. It was a flip of the coin whether or not she lived through the next minute. Still, he figured her chances were far better than his own. The slag would’ve dropped him without question. And down here, weaponless, he didn’t think he would fare much better. Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the mountain, struck again how very much like a cathedral it was—a warped, evil, hellish version, but still a cathedral.
Shadows moved, darting to the left and right.
“Here we go,” he growled. Striding forward, he picked up a broken hunk of two-by-four. Having been sheared away from something larger, it had a bit of a point, but Cole held it like he would a rifle. Dead-eyes had poor vision under the best of circumstances.
“I guess watching me
kill five of you wasn’t enough. Who wants to be first?” His bravado stopped them. Two of them hunkered down behind mounds, leaving the largest of the three to face Cole alone. Cole stepped forward to meet the Dead-eye and saw that it was another of the scaly things. “What are you?” he asked. It was something of a rude question, though he figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask.
The creature stopped ten feet away. “I am you. I am human.”
Cole laughed harshly. “Is that right? Humans don’t go around killing each other for fun. We’re not like…” The pit echoed with a gunshot from above. A surge of electric shock went through Cole as he jerked his chin upward in time to see a falling body. It struck behind him with a sickening thud. It was the slag and Cole felt a moment of giddy relief that it wasn’t Corrina. “Well, at least humans don’t eat each other,” he said with a laugh, backing away from the scaly creature.
“You’re welcome to this, by the way.” He indicated the dead slag. “I know he’s not exactly grade A, but he won’t fight back.” To get at Cole who was easing backwards, the Dead-eyes had to pass the still warm body of the slag and it proved too much for the two smaller ones, who attacked the body with hideous slurping sounds. The scaled one looked back and came as close to a wistful look as it could before it too, joined in the feast.
“Corrina!” Cole hissed up at the platform. “The harness! Send down the fucking harness!”
“I can’t,” she hissed back. “It’s stuck and I can’t get it to…oh, got it.” The harness came down in odd jerks, moving terribly slowly. The Dead-eyes had already eviscerated the slag. The heart was gone, as was its liver and kidneys. One was trying to crack open its skull, while the other two were rooting around in its intestines like a couple of boars.
They’d be done in seconds. “Come on. Come on,” Cole muttered, impatiently. He leapt for the harness when it came close, shoved both legs in and was still tightening it when he called out, “Go!” He pictured being whisked upward out of range of clawing hands. Instead he went up an inch at a time with tiny jerks. “Fuuuuck! I’m going to be a fucking piñata down here if you don’t hurry!”
“You’re too heavy!” she snarled back.
Thankfully the slag’s head burst open at that point and the three made a scramble to eat the brain, resulting in a battle that raged across the face of the slag. By the time the brain was gobbled up and the spleen and the small intestine ripped out and sucked dry, Cole was twenty feet up.
One of the Dead-eyes threw a rock at him but missed badly. They stood beneath him hoping he would fall or would perhaps accidentally cough up a lung or a tongue. He did not fall. Corrina slaved away at the hand winch until after twenty minutes he got high enough to reach the platform. She was wet with sweat, her spikes, now fallen and draped once again on her slaggy side, giving her that slightly unbalanced look that Cole was used to. It suited her better.
“He…came…at me,” she said through her ragged breathing. “Was gonna…throw me…off.”
“It’s alright,” Cole assured her as he pulled himself out of the harness. “He was an evil man.”
She didn’t want to be assured. The slag was another sin on her record. When she pictured her soul on a white to black scale, it was decidedly dark. She had saved Cole a few times, but it always seemed as if she were saving him only because she needed him to be saved. Whatever goodness was produced by her heroics was always tainted by her selfishness.
“Yeah, he was evil.” She knew all about evil. “You know you can’t walk around like that. You look like…” She had been about to say he looked like a demon, but the analogy struck too close to home. “I don’t know what you look like ‘cept it ain’t good.”
“It’s not like we have to get through the front gate again. There’s the passage.” It was on the third level down in the garage craftily hidden behind a used oil container. He remembered perfectly when Ashley had shown it to him; how, even with blood leaking out of her, she had stood back to keep her ruined black “fighting” outfit from getting grease on it.
She hadn’t cared about either blood or grime on her when she had kissed him goodbye. The kiss hadn’t been faked. She hadn’t been using him…or rather, she hadn’t been just using him. And here he was about to stab her in the back.
“We still have to get from here to there,” Corrina said, bringing him back around. “You need a new outfit. I have an idea.” She held out the Crown. “That other Tier guy is on all this, too, I know it.” He looked at the gun, thinking she wanted him to kill the guy, but she had another idea. “I’ll go tell him there’s a problem over here and when he comes you make him take off his clothes.”
The fight with the Dead-eyes had left him lethargic and wooly-headed. He shrugged. “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll find something to tie him up with.” It was a simple plan that fell into place exactly as Corrina had foreseen, except that the wart-covered Tier 3 was more afraid of the blood covering Cole than he was of the gun. He also wasn’t surprised by the black head lying off to the side.
“You knew,” Cole said, his voice low, bristling with fury. “You knew and you let people go down there.” He had to fight the urge to throw the man from the platform. “Who else knows?” When the man hesitated, Cole advanced on him.
“No. Please. Only a lady named Mindy. She pays me extra and I only did it cuz I needed the money. Please. Please don’t touch me, I got a family.”
Corrina was, if possible, more outraged than Cole. “What about me? Huh? Did you care that I had a family, too? You were gonna feed me to those things.” She turned and looked up at Cole, her grey eyes looked malevolently dark. “I don’t know a lot about a lot, but I know he can’t just walk outta here. He’s as bad as the last guy.”
“We’ll let the police deal with him,” Cole decided. “It’s not our job to decide guilt or innocence. That’s what judges do. It’s the right way.”
A shiver went up her spine. “No. It’s not. Look what the judge did to you; and the police, too. Were you guilty of anything? No! And what happens if that dick, Hamilton shows up? You’ll be sent to the hangman’s noose and this guy will walk away and he’ll go right back to doing this. Killing people by feeding them to those.” She pointed at the head lying off to the side. “Besides, we know he’s guilty, he’s admitted it.” She felt unseemly satisfaction pointing the finger of blame. In every way the man was way worse than she was and for some reason that made her feel better about her own sins. At least, she told herself, she’d had reasons and excuses.
“It’s not how we do things,” Cole told her. “We follow the law.”
She planted her balled fists on her hips. “Maybe you do, but I don’t. The law is stupid. It was made by bad people and it’s enforced by bad men. Gimme the gun. If you won’t do it, I will.” This felt right to her. Unlike with the other people she had killed, murdering the Tier 3 wouldn’t be selfish, it would be just. He needed to die.
Cole shook his head, sadly. “The answer is no. We’ll tie him up. First, he’ll get naked. Come on, I need your clothes.” While Corrina stood close by, scowling up a storm, the man slowly undressed, watching Cole closely, as if afraid that if he took his eyes off the big man, he’d suddenly change his mind and shoot him when he wasn’t looking.
When he was naked, he stood back cupping his genitals. Cole wore a sneer of disgust as he picked up the clothes. Only the overalls were clean. Everything else smelled of ass.
Disgusting as it was, Cole used the man’s greying t-shirt and underwear to wipe as much of the black blood from his hands and face as he could. He then started to struggle into the green overalls and as he did, Corrina suddenly darted to where Cole had set the Crown. She snatched it up and pointed it at the Tier 3. “You are guilty of murder,” she announced in a high, quavering voice. “Pray if you wanna. You have thirty seconds.”
“Corrina!” Cole shouted. He was three steps away. Too far if she was serious about killing him, and she was. The knuckles on her tiny fists were white, as was her face.
Her mouth was a thin, hard line and her eyes were dark and dangerous. “For your own sake, Corrina, don’t.”
“I’m gonna do it for the sake of everyone he killed. And I’m doing it for you. He’s dangerous. We can’t leave him behind, just tied up. He’ll get free and then everyone in the building will be after us.” With every word and with every passing second this felt more and more right to her. The warty Tier 3 couldn’t be allowed to live.
But killing a naked man in cold blood wasn’t the easiest thing for a girl who was not yet in her teens. It took either a total lack of emotion or burning righteous anger.
She was somewhere in between both. With a snarl, she thrust herself at the Tier 3, her arms locked and jutting out as if she meant to run him through with the small gun. She meant to pull the trigger however her trigger finger seemed frozen and refused to budge. Still, the man cried out and took a step back, his right hand leaving the warmth of his shriveled manhood long enough to show her his warty palm. Then he was falling back. The back of his foot had struck the low ledge that ran around the platform and now he was pinwheeling his arms, and falling. The last thing he saw was Corrina’s look of satisfaction.
“I didn’t even have to kill him,” she said to Cole as she handed over the gun. “He killed himself.”
Chapter 18
There was no point arguing with her, at least not just then. And maybe she was right. Maybe the guy deserved to die. In fact, he certainly did, but…
There was always a but, and this one resided in the look of satisfaction on her face. Gone was the stark fear that had stamped her features in a perpetual grimace while they had been down in the pit. Now, she seemed almost herself and wasn’t the well-being of the girl he had adopted more important than the life of a murderer?
He had to think it was. He gave her a strained smile, which she returned easily. “That was a close one down there,” she remarked. “I saved your life. Again. You ever get tired of bein’ saved by a girl?”
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 17
