The Holocaust Engine, page 12
The group ran up to Eaton. When they turned onto Eaton they could hear the screaming. When they reached Simonton they could see the hotel.
None of the businesses had power, but several of the bystanders had flashlights and one held a Coleman lantern. A group of men, standing in little knots of three and four, everyone of their faces covered with bandanas bulging over surgical masks, were out in front of the gift shop. Others stood further down street. Hardly anyone was paying attention to the screams. A woman her mother’s age was yelling as she walked, “Is anyone in contact with the mainland.” Vera had seen this before. If two people met in the street they did not know whether to say hello or run. But if enough people met out in the open the paranoia vanished, and it turned into a big, open-air, meeting. This one had screaming.
Hunter Grant rounded a pickup left in the middle of the street and hailed the closest group. Inside of the gift shop, in the back, they could hear the sounds of someone crying out in pain. Maximus stared straight into the shop and paced from side to side. Vera had to hold up his leash to keep it from tangling in Cleo’s. He was smelling something he did not like.
A tall man with a scoped hunting rifle rounded on the group. Shawn’s flashlight went to his face and a pair of eyes that crinkled in confusion while looking over the Wharf Rats and their equipment. “–the holy hell are you supposed to be?”
“We’re here ‘cause of that!” Hunter said, terse as usual, and pointed to opened-air gift shop. Part of the awning had collapsed. None of them could see inside. But somewhere in there, someone was howling his death cries
“Yeah, up top,” the man said, nodding to the second floor of the little two-story hotel. “A couple dozen were staying up there. A little while ago this guy starts ripping up the door to get in. Big fucker. Biggest fucker you ever saw, yelling something about how they stole his cross.”
“Where are they now,” Hunter Grant blurted out, clearly losing patience with the man’s easy delivery.
“They’re all out, kiddo.” He waved to a half dozen little groups, one with children. “And a big group of guys are in their taking care of business. That’s the dude with Bontrager’s you hear getting his ass dead. We must have shot him a dozen times. They’re finishing the job with clubs.” He looked them over again and chuckled. “So, you can take the Partridge family back to wherever you kids are holed up.”
“Dozen time?” Said Lacewood in wonder. “Did you get him in the head?”
A scornful laugh. “What do you think?”
Hunter Grant turned to the others. He started to ask a question then stopped. He arched his head, listening. Between high pitched fits of screaming they could hear a man’s voice crying out. “Stop! Stop! You’re killing me!”
“I could hear him down the street?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s still going.”
“Are you even listening,” barked Face’s big brother Carl. “This guy says it’s done. And he’s got a gun. You know, with bullets. So, you can turn around and run the rest of the Hitler Youth back to the compound.”
Hunter Grant made no move.
Face had walked away from the others. He now stood in the doorway to the gift shop, next to where part of the awning sank down to the sidewalk. Positioning himself to see past sets of fallen shelves, he pulled a mini Streamlight out of the pocket of the naval surplus shirt he always wore on runs.
“They’re killing me! Help! Help me!”
Hunter Grant started past the man with the rifle to where Face was turning on the light.
“Hey.”
Hunter Grant did not turn back. “We won’t get in the way. We’re just going to look.”
“I’m dying! Dear God! Dear God!”
Vera stayed next to Hunter Grant. They could see broken bits of gift shop kitsch, magnets, snow-globes, ceramic fish and turtles, fly up over a set of precariously leaning shelves as they approached. Face held his light still.
Bontrager’s. Vera had heard the word. Hearing it then made her remember that this was a disease, that they were people who had done nothing worse than get sick. And that’s what this man was. Sick. Not undead. Everyone knew it. This was a sick man who was being killed just for having a disease.
The screaming stopped. All at once. Not because someone had run out of breath. It did not fade out. It stopped. Every head on the street turned. Then Vera saw Face. His body – there in the entryway – seemed to go slack. He turned. For a fraction of a second Vera saw eyes that had stared straight into the abyss.
“Hunt—” his shout suddenly cut off, Face pitched forward, landing hard on the sidewalk. Shotgun and minilight bounced out of his hands and onto the cement. Then his body disappeared as if a great white shark had ripped it back into the dark waters just out of site. The dogs went mad. Maximus was pulling Vera to the very mouth of the black entrance.
“Go! Go! Go! Go!”
Hunter Grant ran inside. Carl and Thyroid followed close behind. All down the street, lights were bobbing in approach.
Shawn ran for the angle to get light on the scene. Lacewood went for the shotgun. Vera could hear the sound of a struggle. She pulled herself hand over hand up Maximus’ leash while Cleo jumped at her legs. The German Shepherd’s body was taut. He did not seem to notice Vera except in the very back of his thoughts. She was almost close enough to free his leash when he started forward.
“Max!”
He muscled her sideways. She pulled on his leash, rearing him up like a horse. “Max!” Vera could feel the strain of Cleo’s leash now pulling the other way. She let go of Cleo. She heard the loud clang of metal hitting metal. She looked up.
Shawn’s light quivered in the frozen boy’s hand. In front of them, in that light, through a cavern of battered store shelves, they saw the battle. And they saw the bodies.
Vera did not move. She began to quiver, just like Shawn. Her mind could not make sense of the scene. It was too much – Hunter Grant flailing with his bat. Face on the floor behind him. Carl laid out over the counter. The bodies. The bodies and the pieces of bodies and the blood. And the thing.
Its head nearly touched the ceiling. It was not human. It could never have been human. It was covered in blood. Not streaked. Covered. Carrie-with-the-bucket-poured-over-her-at-the-prom covered, a vampire emerging from a pool of the drained fluid of all its victims. It had Carl’s metal pole and was swinging it, and with every vicious arc blood splattered off of its hair, its face, its arms, its shoulders.
Vera’s whole body had gone numb. Another clang of metal faded into a constant ringing. Hunter Grant was dying. Right in front of her eyes. They all were. She was vaguely aware that she had let go of the leash and Maximus had broken into a run. Vaguely aware that Thyroid, holding the side of his head, was trying to round Hunter Grant as Hunter Grant was knocked backwards. Vaguely aware of a gunshot and a dropped flashlight and Shawn shouldering into someone who was standing next to her for some reason, and the flashlight, rolling on the ground, and the last of the direct light on Face as he crawled over a shredded torso that’s ribs steepled out of the skin as if a steel girder had punched through its back, then darkness, then lightning and the split-second image of Maximus tearing at the creature’s outstretched arm and Hunter Grant rearing back to throw his bat like a giant boomerang. Blackness in front of her. Moments, long or short she did not know. Then another flashlight and Hunter Grant bringing down Defiance again and again, his eyes feral. The bat striking the creature’s head. Its body sprawled on the ground. Maximus ripping at a leg. Thyroid holding up a hand and shouting to someone next to her.
She blinked away the fuzziness.
“You’ll shoot them, you shit!” Shawn was being pulled off of the man with the rifle by the man’s friends.
Lacewood stood near, holding the back of his head, in front of him, masked in shadow, someone was pointing the shotgun at him.
Now, the bandana men were holding a pair of flashlights over the scene. Hunter Grant’s chest was heaving, standing atop the monster. “Sweet Mother of God.”
“It’s over,” Hunter Grant was calling. “He’s done. Grab the dog.”
“Hunter,” said Lacewood, not moving from the man in front of him. Someone next to Vera vomited.
“We need to get the blood off,” Thyroid shouted.
“Face, can you get up?”
“The blood, Hunter. We’ve got to get it off of us.”
The men holding Shawn had let go. A woman ran into the shop, a cry strangling her throat. Looking for loved one. Not knowing where to even begin. Face got up. He looked like he would cry too. He stumbled forward to Vera and Shawn, then said to the men next to her, and the crowd gathering around, “it was all by itself. Just rolling around in the blood and guts and flailing its arms and yelling and throwing up its hands like it was being attacked. But there wasn’t anybody else left in there but him. The rest were all dead. They were all torn to pieces and that thing was just screaming in there by itself. Having some kind of hallucination. Then it saw me.”
“We need to go,” Thyroid called out between gasps. “We need to run to the harbor and jump in the water. Let’s get Carl and go. Keep your hands away from your eyes or your mouth!”
Hunter Grant moved over to the counter.
“Hunter,” Lacewood called again.
Now Face saw as well. He backed away from Lacewood and the shotgun trained on him.
Hunter was still focused on Carl. Carl was lying on top of the counter in exactly the same position that Vera had seen him moments before. Her eyes darted from the sidewalk to the counter and back again.
“We can get him to the hospital,” Hunter said, lifting him gingerly onto his shoulder. “They still have an emergency setup out in front of the building. I’ll carry him. The rest of you get rinsed off.”
Thyroid picked up Defiance. He now saw Lacewood and the man with Lacewood’s shotgun.
“C’mon Carl. Carl?”
The rifleman watched Hunter Grant and the limp body in the boy’s arms, the scene now lit by a score of lights. He lowered his gun. His breath came and went in quivers. “Sweet Jesus.”
With lights all around, but none on the man with Lacewood’s gun, Vera still could see nothing but a shape. She did not know if he had a bandana or not. He was panting, shaking.
The man in the shadow said excitedly, “this is mine.”
One of the people in the street turned their light on him. Forties, bald, his head and face sunburned and peeling. No bandana. Lips cracked, but still pink. The one with the rifle pointed it over Lacewood’s shoulder. The barrel quivered beside his ear. Another one was now standing next the bald man. This one lifted a pistol to the other’s ear.
“Give him back his gun.”
Then the bald man turned to the street. At least ten guns were now trained on him.
The bald man gripped the middle of the shotgun with both hands, then after a moment’s hesitation, handed it to Lacewood. Lacewood looked down at it. Then he looked back at the shop entrance. “What do we do?”
It was at that moment that Vera saw Hunter Grant emerge from the ruined store, holding the lifeless body of Carl Waldron in his arms.
Hunter looked at each of them in turn. For a second Vera thought she saw indecision.
“Chris is right,” he said, and Vera wondered what he meant until she remembered that Hunter Grant never called Thyroid, Thyroid. “We need to get this blood off of us.”
All around her the crowd was taking turns pushing forward to see the massacre, crying, screaming, getting violently ill. The man who had tried to take Lacewood’s shotgun pushed his way out into the darkness. Vera looked down. Maximus stood in front of her. He panted, his mouth open in what looked like a satisfied smile. She could see blood around his lips. The dead zombie, laid out on the floor, the back of its head crushed, had to be seven feet tall.
“Good boy,” she said, gentling patting his head. “You did it. You did it.”
Then she started to sob.
Welcome to the Conch Republic
Key West, Old Town
June 3
I’d been making daily tours of the confines, just to keep up with the latest intel. Wisdom usually rode shotgun, peeking out through his scope from the back seat as we passed the food drops and the choke points artificially created by the various neighborhood groups vying for control. This time, it was an inspection, a close-point look at Key West, at my home and my island, because I was about to give a report to the remaining municipal authority, the mayor and the commissioners. They were the real power now—at least, that’s what all the civilized folks wanted to believe.
A nice couple had put up a valiant stand in the old pink house on Ashby Street. The old man, a Vietnam-era Marine, had stockpiled enough food and water in a spare bedroom to give them a shot. We found his wife outside, near an overturned laundry basket, dead beneath three freshly hung linen sheets on a cotton laundry line. The blood stains on the bottoms of the last one suggested she’d tried to run, and almost made it. Sadly, the viciousness sweeping the island offered no respite for the weary, and no mercy for a woman who just wanted to wash the sheets and feel normal again.
We found her husband inside the makeshift food pantry. There was a bloody footprint on a manila file folder, which contained his detailed plans to turn three months’ worth of canned goods into a year’s supply. He must have driven the attackers off before succumbing to blood loss. The food was a gold mine, and we tagged it for later use. The neon orange “KW” I spray-painted on the mailbox was too small to be noticed by anyone but the scroungers who would come by later.
We finished our tour of Atlantic Boulevard, heard some gunshots, and raced back toward the north. I left Wisdom and Sidula to park the car, and went inside. I had wanted some time to change clothes and generally freshen up before meeting the Council, but intel and information mattered more now, and I wanted the latest before I faced them.
Our elected officials normally rested in over-stuffed leather chairs, arranged in a semi-circle around a polished mahogany conference table. Behind them, photos of our city’s past leaders lined the walls of the Commissioners’ Chambers. Malone Madison would sit stone-still, barely moving, blinking and glaring right through you. Giri Maniot, the eye-candy widow and inheritor of “new” money when her banker husband died, was more animated, but the constant chair-spinning and finger-picking indicated when she got bored. Mayor Upton seemed the most sincere, always listening and leaning forward, as if her presence alone could help solve your problems.
Those tells and habits mattered more before, but now the rules had changed, and the people were changing with them. Now, the heart of the island was tucked inside the main courtroom of the Monroe County Courthouse. The Harvey Government Center, one-time school, served as one of two evacuation shelters on the island, complete with metal guards on the windows and reinforced walls to withstand tropical storms. We battened down the hatches when things got rougher, and scrounged enough trucks and debris to form a make-shift fence around the courthouse and the park, all the way to the police and fire stations. It wouldn’t keep out all of scavengers, but anybody in the final stages of infection would probably lose interest before scaling over.
I cracked the double doors like a schoolboy reporting to the principal’s office. Before things fell apart, I’d been in meetings with the mayor and commissioners a dozen times—mostly policy reviews or budget issues. The hardest decisions had been a request for a new uniform contract, amending a vendor ordinance, and once when I wanted to use a grant to buy upgraded computer hardware to help digitize and store old police reports. This time, we’d be discussing the state of the island. I’d provide an overview of what had happened so far and, hopefully, what we would do about it. I owed it to my own men to make their sacrifices count, to keep things going, but everyone had bosses, and I was determined to make sure the elected officials, the last bastions of democracy in this town, had their say.
Instead of the plush seats at City Hall, the four remaining commissioners and the mayor were seated behind the dark oak railing of the County Judge’s chambers, their makeshift Commissioners Court sitting two feet above the floor. Mayor Upton waved me forward, hastily rolling up the map and setting it beneath her desk.
As I approached the makeshift podium in front of a tiny chair in the center of the room, the others took their seats, forming the familiar semi-circle around me. In old times, this was how local governments worked. In even older days, it was how tribunals worked. I was fighting for a democracy, but well aware that the other thing could be watching me from behind the eyes of those in power.
The two absent commissioners had been missing since this started, probably sunning themselves on the mainland, waiting for nature to takes its course with the rest of us. To my right sat the newest players in town. At the edge of the curve sat Gian “John” Peduto, a Jamaican-Italian hiding his heritage in a mask of “local,” even though he never really got it quite right. Beside the mayor sat Malone Madison, the “Architect of Old Town,” who’d been leveraging his business into rebuilding the oldest parts of Key West while maintaining the heritage of the past.
To my left sat Giri Maniot, always fighting with her hair, but ready to support even the wildest utterances of the man beside her. That man was Elmond Hutchins, mayor pro tem, the self-proclaimed “heart of the island ,” inheritor of old money and old politics. A fourth generation politician, he boasted a laundry list of boards and commissions on his resume, all building toward his eventual coronation to the mayor’s office. The people had picked the mayor, but it was clear where the real power rested, and it was not on the shoulders of our well-educated, elected mayor.
Dr. Upton had beaten Elmond in a close race. The “good girl come home,” she’d run on her father’s name and surged past Elmond in an election shaped by prosperity and hope. Dr. Frances Upton had the skins on the wall to prove her expertise in Public Administration, but she was still new to politics and Key West. She could fill the seat of highest power just fine, but her father’s name on the door to City Hall meant more to how our city ran than anything she brought to the table. Her father’s legacy gave her power, but some legacies don’t last forever.
