This Rotten World: Rally and Rot, page 20
He ejected his empty magazine and shoved it in a pocket to be reloaded later. It was then he realized most of his ammo was back at his house. He only had the one spare magazine. If he didn't go back home, his rifle would be worthless, and he'd be standing in the horrid new world with nothing but his dick in his hand. That was not a good way to be.
"This way!" one of the women yelled, and he rankled at first. He didn't take commands, never had, not even when someone asked him to do a job. Even then it was a deal, something he had to agree to. You didn't command Ernie Windham. But he found himself following the women anyway. There was really no place else to go.
He turned, placing his last magazine in his rifle. He still had the handgun to fall back on, but things were going to become a hell of a lot more precarious once his ammo ran out. If he needed proof of that, all he needed to do was look over his shoulder and stare into the blank faces of the dozens of mutilated fuckers trailing after him.
Underneath the streetlamp, he caught sight of the back of one of the women's jackets. "Cunning Stunts," he wondered aloud, and then he laughed a little bit. Cunning indeed.
Chapter 34: The Dark Alley
Heather made it to her car, the hunting knife gripped so hard in her hand she thought she would have the word "Huntsman" permanently imprinted on her palm. Behind the restaurant, men and women lurked, more men than women. She'd had enough of them all. She just wanted to go home, wanted it worse than anything else in the world.
She approached her vehicle, a somewhat functioning Honda Civic her parents had gifted her when she was in her thirties and she had become pregnant with Bobby's kid. The gift wasn't for her. It was for her daughter.
"You need a way to get Pamela around, get her to the doctor," her dad had said, the undertone being that there was no way Heather would ever be able to afford a car on her own. That she was a disappointment to her parents was a barely contained secret. They had envisioned her being a doctor or a lawyer, not some minimum wage waitress. But life didn't go as you planned, and even though she was a black eye on their otherwise perfect life, they begrudgingly supported her, or more accurately, Heather's daughter.
She rummaged around in her purse as men closed in, drawn to her movement. Her fingers closed on the metal key ring inside her purse, and with the knife in one hand and her keys in the other, she unlocked the doors with a press of the button on the fob. The parking lights flashed, and the car beeped. A groan came from behind her, too close. She slid into the car's driver's seat and slammed it closed just as a man began pounding on the window. How did they get so close? She must have paused for only a second, but in that time, the damn thing had caught up to her.
A jean jacket encased manly arms, and those manly arms hammered the glass. His beer belly, clad in a dirty western-style button up, pressed against the glass as she rammed the key home and started the car.
The radio blasted her ears, and a startled scream escaped her lungs. When she had pulled into work that day, she had been listening to one of her favorite songs, a Backstreet Boys jam from her youth. Now, the deep voice of a radio man warned her to stay inside and lock her doors. A small laugh escaped her lips.
The denim man cracked his knuckles against the window, and Heather jumped once more. She didn't worry about the radio, about the sound it made. Just get the fuck out of here already. She threw the car in drive, stomped on the gas, and spun the wheel as she pulled out into the back alley running behind all the businesses on Main Street.
The denim man lurched in front of her car, his jeans highlighted from the knee up as he held out his arms. She tried to swerve around him, but clipped him in the thigh, sending him up and over the hood of her car. For a second, she thought he was going to stick there, maybe hitch a ride all the way home with her. As she righted her car to prevent it from crashing into the back of Steak Dreams, the local beef restaurant, the man rolled off the hood. She left him in her dust, and though she didn’t mean to, she floored the accelerator, bouncing across the uneven alley, the bottom of her vehicle scraping roughly on the rough pavement.
Ahead in the alley, another man appeared, a rifle in his hands, his face grim. The barrel of the gun looked large and instead of skidding to stop, she honked the horn. But the man didn't move. Caught in an unexpected game of chicken, the man dove out of the way at the last second. She didn't know what he wanted, but she wasn't willing to find out. Not in this world, not with all this shit going on. Men were animals at the best of times. With all this shit going down, no man could be trusted, especially not a motherfucker with a gun in his hands.
She was fifty feet away from the man, getting ready to take a left onto Main Street when the back windshield exploded and the sound of gunfire hit her ears. She ducked low, losing sight of the street and yanking the wheel with her. The tires squealed as the car swerved. Then she crashed into something.
The airbag deployed with a snap, and everything went dark.
****
When she awoke, heavy hands pulled at her, and she fought instinctively.
"Relax," the man said in an accent she couldn't quite place. Her head spun, and she discovered she had a headache. In her mouth, blood dripped down the back of her throat from a gash in her tongue.
The knife.
She felt around in the car, and then, through the smell of her own blood, she smelled smoke, not like campfire smoke, but deadly-type smoke, the type of smoke filled with cancer-causing particles—kill smoke—the smoke from a car going up in flames.
"Relax. I'm just trying to help," the man said once more.
His hands were strong as he pulled her from the car and tossed her to the ground. It was the man from before, the man with the gun, and she wanted her knife even worse now.
She struggled to her feet, and the man aimed his rifle at her. Here it comes. Here comes the end.
Then he squeezed the trigger, and when the thunder faded, she heard the splatter of liquid on the pavement. Am I bleeding? She had never been shot before, so she didn't know if she would feel it right away, but as she patted her body down, she heard a thump behind her. When she turned her head, still wary of taking her eyes off the man, she found a dead biker leaking his life onto the pavement. Her head began to spin, and she collapsed to the ground, stars in her eyes.
The man with the rifle approached her and pulled her to her feet once more. He was Mexican or Latino. She didn't know the right term then and there. Her brains were too scrambled to be politically correct, and she still worried the man might want something else from her, something he'd be willing to take. No, you couldn't trust a man, not even one you were married to.
"Stupid ass," the man said. "All I wanted was a ride."
Then he turned and jogged away. On his back, a smiling joker face mocked her. Then he disappeared into shadow, leaving her entirely alone on the street with the dead all around.
To her right, the flames from her car grew higher and higher, the smoke pluming out of the engine compartment. The front third of her car was buried in the wall of one of the shops. Someone ought to call the fire department.
She felt around for her phone, for her purse, for her knife, checking the pockets of her jeans. But there was nothing there. Everything she had was in that car. There was no way to call the fire department, though she wondered if they would even be able to do anything.
An insane part of her thought she should stay there and wait for some sort of authority figure to show up so she could explain herself. See, it wasn't my fault. First, the dead started coming to life, so I had to kill some people, and then, when I was driving away, a living person shot at me, and I crashed into this wall. So, you see, it's really not my fault.
A groan behind her cured her of her temporary insanity, and then she was running, thankful she always wore sensible sneakers to work. Her head throbbed with each step, and she resisted the urge to vomit. The darkness of the alley creeped her out, and she felt woefully inadequate without the knife in her hand.
If she ever saw Wade again, she wondered if he'd be all pissed off about his knife being melted to slag in her wrecked car. Probably. There wasn't anything Wade loved more than his weapons. She remembered an argument Fat Jack had once had with his brother in the kitchen when he'd brought a samurai sword from home.
"You can't have a sword in a fucking restaurant, you idiot!"
"Fuck you. How's it any different from a kitchen knife?"
"It just is!"
After hours of screaming and a demonstration by Wade of how efficiently the sword could chop lettuce, Fat Jack had finally told his stubborn, sometimes clueless, brother to take the damn thing home. He had, but with a whole lot of cursing, and he'd been surly for the next week, not that he was a ray of sunshine any other time.
Ahead, she saw the joker walking; the gun in his hand made her think of a snake ready to strike.
"Don't you have a bike?" she called to him.
"It's on Main Street." He stopped in his tracks and turned to her. "Have you seen Main Street?"
She had, but not since the sun had gone down.
"It's a fucking nightmare. It's crawling with those things. I'd need twenty of these guns just to get to it." He sighed, and she saw he was tired. He was large, his brown head glowing in the dim lights that barely illuminated the alley. "Why didn't you just stop?" he complained.
"If you were a woman, would you stop for someone like yourself?"
"What? A Mexican dude?"
"No, a man with a gun."
He smiled at her. "I don't know what I'd do," he said.
"You'd try to mow the fucker down," Heather supplied.
At this he smiled. "Maybe."
"You know where we can get a ride?" he asked.
"What about your friends, your gang?"
"It's a club, not a gang," the man corrected her. It had the sound of something he said all too often. "And no, they're all dead, or hiding, or gone already."
Heather shook her head. "Then we're both fucked."
The man turned and walked away. "You can follow me if you want," he said over his shoulder. "I don't know where the hell I'm going or what I'm doing, but you're probably better off with me than anyone else."
"I need to get home to my kid and my husband."
"Is it close?"
"We can walk there."
"You got food?"
In her mind, she catalogued the pitiful amount of groceries they had left. "Some," she said.
"Well, I got nothing else better to do. Lead the way."
She walked past the man, happy to have found someone to join her quest to get home.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Carlos. But everyone just calls me Los."
"Heather," she said.
"Hola, Heather."
"Hola."
****
Panic is a monster, a many-toothed thing that, once it finds a place to perch, will gnaw and feast until there's nothing you can do about it. It'll start small, perch on your shoulder or the back of your neck, and then it'll bend down, its mouth as wide as its entire body. It's teeth, pointed and snaggled, don’t dig in. They pressed and needled, making hamburger of the flesh until the nerves were laid bare, and that's when it bit, sending a man into a rage or forcing them to curl up in a ball.
Los felt Panic on his neck now. The tightness running from his shoulders to his brain had given birth to a headache, and he was entirely alone. His crew was dead or gone, or dead and still around. He'd seen them get shot or bit, saw a couple stumbling around with blank faces.
Fucking Tattoo Juan. It was all his fault. Los had held a love-hate relationship with the man for some time, probably longer than he should have. He should have challenged the bastard years ago. Fight or bike, he could have taken him. But Los was something of a coward, didn't like confrontation. He just liked to belong. The Chistadores had offered him that, a place to belong.
Everyone in Los Chistadores looked up to him, mostly because he was the tallest of the group, but also because he knew how to handle the panic monster. He didn't pop off, didn't cause other people trouble. Not the most admirable quality in a president, but one that keeps everyone happy, and that’s all he really wanted… for everyone to be happy. Now no one was happy—because they were all fucking dead, and he hadn't been man enough to help.
Even as he and Javy had dragged Tattoo Juan away from the wreck and the shooting, he knew he could have stopped everything, could have kept his crew together. They had the weapons, and he could lead, but he had been too afraid in the moment, so Los Chistadores had split up, scattered like pieces of glass from a vase dropped out a second-story window.
And when the man with the pentagram patch on his back started shooting, he'd let the panic monster bite him, and this sent him into a thoughtless flight. When he was done, he was standing in a back alley, pulling a rifle from a man who had blown his own brains out. He supposed that dude had let the panic monster bite him as well.
The thought crossed his mind to do the same, to put the barrel of the weapon in his mouth and pull the trigger. But that was just the panic monster gnawing on his neck. He didn't really want to die, and so he tucked the rifle underneath his arm, pulled the strap over his head, and set about trying to find a way out of fucking town.
For the first time in a long time, he was truly alone. How much time did I spend with Los Chistadores? Ten years? Eleven? A long fucking time, any way you sliced it.
He stood in the dark alley, eyeing the other denizens who moved among the shady street, amongst garbage cans piled high with refuse and broken glass. They groaned at him, and he resisted the urge to flee into one of the buildings. He didn't know what was inside them, death or salvation. It was a coin flip, and a coin flip was a stupid thing to wager your life on.
As a tiny man still dressed in his riding leathers approached Los, the sound of an engine starting drew his attention. When a cold hand pressed against his face, Los swung the butt of the rifle hard. It cracked against the man's temple and sent him to the ground. A quick stomp from one of his steel-toed boots knocked the man out for good. In another situation, he would have felt bad. He didn't like kicking a man when he was down, but sometimes it had to be done. Fuck people who thought it was against the rules. When someone stepped to you, it was either you or them, and a boot to the lips would end most fights. It seemed even with these sick fucks it was still the same way.
He didn't know what was going on, but he'd seen enough horror movies to know this wasn't normal.
Headlights splashed his eyes, and he had to raise a forearm to keep from being blinded. The car, its engine rattling and unhealthy, turned into the alley, and he brandished his gun, hoping the person driving the vehicle would stop. But they didn't, and at the last second, he had to dive out of the way.
Los lost it. The woman in the car had almost killed him for no reason at all. Sure, he was large and brandishing a gun, but well… maybe that was reason enough. Either way, before he could stop himself, he stitched the car with a barrage of bullets, only stopping when he realized he didn't have any more ammo for the weapon in his hands. The panic monster had gotten him, he guessed.
His ears throbbed from the gunfire, and the car swerved, crashing hard into the back of a building forty yards down the road.
"Shit." He set off after the car, hoping he hadn't killed the woman inside. In mid-dive, he had seen her face, her eyes big and scared.
Now that same woman walked beside him. She had a family. Needed to get back to them. She also had food, something which he needed desperately. His body was large, and it burned through food the way a fifties muscle car burned through gasoline. If he didn't eat, he got real cranky. But even if she had no food back at her place, he would have helped her out of guilt.
The woman who led the way, her name was Heather, and she was a liability. Too small to fight off the dead, if one of those things got a hold of her, she was done for. The thought crossed his mind that, sooner or later, he was going to have to leave her behind. He just hoped she'd still be alive when it happened.
They hustled through the shadowy, no-name alley paralleling Main Street, and he tried to map the town of Monktree in his mind. Only problem was he hadn't seen enough of it. He'd only seen the strip, and even though this wasn't his first time in Monktree, the town wasn't big enough to merit exploration. Everything you needed was on the strip.
"What's the plan?" he whispered to Heather.
"We cut through this alley, head that way for seven blocks, and we'll pop out at the end of town. Less buildings there, more nature. Ought to keep us from getting penned in."
Los grunted. It was a solid plan. Anything was better than being stuck in this alley. Behind them, flames grew taller, Heather's car burning bright. It wouldn't be long until the building she'd crashed into went up as well. And then the whole row of Main Street would probably go. The buildings here were older, packed up against one another, the way people did back in the day. Stupid asses. Monktree would burn to the ground by morning.
"You have a phone on you?" Heather asked.
"Lost it in all the commotion. I felt it drop when I was running away, but when people are shooting at you, you don't go back to grab your phone, you know what I mean?"
It was a stupid way to end a thought. Of course, she didn't know what he meant. Who the hell would be shooting at some white chick in this town?
They crossed Fifth Avenue, the streetlights of Main Street splashing across their face briefly before they plunged back into the shadows of the alley once more.
Heather kept plowing ahead into the shadowy darkness, but among the crackle of the city, he heard something, and grabbed her by the back of the shirt stopping her in her tracks.
"Better let me go first," he said.
She didn't argue with him, but shrugged out of his grip. That didn't bother him. Los didn't like when people put their hands on him either.
A scream from Main Street hid the sound once more. As he tried to peer into the inky blackness of the alley, he thought he caught the sound again, the faint scrape of boots on uneven pavement and loose gravel. With his free arm, he shooed Heather behind him. He didn't want her panicking and running into his line of fire if something did go down.
