This Rotten World: Rally and Rot, page 22
He walked across the distance, feeling as if he were an explorer trapped in the snowy ice fields of Antarctica. Each step was a slog. His boot heel, sticky with blood, clung to the concrete.
The others started moving, and he followed along, feeling eyes upon him. Buildings burned, smoke filled the streets, and moving through those noxious clouds, he spied the shadows of the dead.
A sober thought flitted across his mind, perhaps the only one he'd had all day. Sometimes he could go a whole day without one. But today's was special, and he listened to it, the way a child stops and listens when their parents get pissed and scream their full name: first, middle, and last. That's the focus that Blackroot had right then. You gotta get out of here.
He didn't know what the plan was or what Thor had up his sleeve. He might just want drugs. He was like that, an addict, a junkie on the cusp of the downfall of the rest of his life. Blackroot knew if things were normal, Thor would already be in jail by now, for life most likely. He'd ordered people killed, filled a motel with bullets, and then walked away. If this dimension burst and ever went back to normal, they wouldn't be seeing Thor for a long time.
Still, he knew what was in the man's mind. With Blackroot's golden brain, he could reach into the soft lead of Thor's mind and pluck out his thoughts like a granny testing the firmness of apples at a grocery store. As they trundled down the smoky streets, he reached out with his brain, and riffled through the soft, spongey folds of Thor's gray matter. Drugs. All he wants is drugs.
Now, Blackroot was no prude. He didn't think drugs were all that bad, but they were like anything else in the world. Let it get a hold of you, and you stopped being a man. Then you were a chemical reaction, a puppet dancing on strings, bound in a prison of one's own making. Blackroot had never let a drug get control of him. But Thor, he was under its spell, and he was only looking to make his bars thicker, more unbreakable.
This wasn't about Anvil, not really. Oh, sure… riffle riffle… Thor thought it was, but it was really about getting everyone on the move so they could make another sweep through the motel, maybe find the drugs the Black gang carried. He didn't know it for certain, but Blackroot would bet his last eighth of shrooms on it.
Suddenly, Blackroot's feet stopped moving, bringing him to a jerking halt. He swayed in the street, breathing deep. The smell of burning wood, household chemicals, and charred flesh assailed his nose, sharp, stinging, like the first whiff of a match… only this lasted much longer. The street glowed orange, and he felt like he was a coal in the bottom of a fire, glowing, then fading, glowing and fading. But if he stayed here, there would be nowhere left to go, he would burn out, turn cold and grey, until the wind came along and carried his body away.
"I'm not ready for that."
"What?" Smilin' Rob asked from his side.
Blackroot just smiled at him. A smile for Smilin' Rob.
Smilin' Rob shook his head and walked onward.
Blackroot heard the scrape of shoes on asphalt. He turned his head, and behind him, the shadows stalked in his direction. In no particular hurry, he stepped free of the smoke.
****
As Thor emerged from the smoke, he found himself enveloped in a strange combination of orange light from fires and the bright blue-white of streetlights. The men around him were his arms, his hands, his weapons. They would do whatever he said or face his wrath, and they knew it. Ahead, walking with his back to them, Anvil stood head and shoulders above a group of people, some patched, some not.
The leader of The Misanthropes turned his head to the side, found Smilin' Rob standing there, a grin plastered across his face as usual.
"On three," Thor whispered.
The Misanthropes nodded their heads, took their stances.
Thor held his left hand up, one finger pointed at the sky. One.
He lifted his right hand parallel with the street, the pistol heavy at the end of his right hand.
He unfurled another finger. Two.
"Anvil's mine," he hissed.
He unfurled his third finger, and then squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Hot fire erupted from the muzzle, blinding him for a second, and then he brought his left hand around to meet his right and steady his aim. Blam! Blam! Blam!
Anvil was forty yards away, and though he expected the big man to drop to the ground, he saw him spin around instead, his face red under the streetlights from his own blood or someone else's, it mattered not.
An old man turned, and then the women, and then more gunshots filled the air.
Smilin' Rob screamed in pain off to his left, and Thor, faced with his own demise, dove behind a row of motorcycles.
Behind him, he heard the groans of the dead. But he didn't have time for them right now. They were nothing, speedbumps in the grand scheme of things.
Duckwalking across the sidewalk, behind the row of motorcycles, he tried to flank around and get a clearer shot at Anvil. If he took him out, it would all be over. The others would break and run. That's how it was with gangs. You had to take out the heavy, and the rest would fall along the wayside.
He popped up from behind a sleek, gun-metal-black motorcycle with a P.O.W. flag hanging limp from the back antennae and took aim, squeezing the trigger instead of pulling it the way he had done before. His ears rang from the thunder.
After he fired, he ducked down as a bullet pinged off the metal of his motorcycle shield.
"Woo!" he screamed. "We're havin' a good time tonight!" And he was.
Chapter 36: The Not O.K. Corral
Anvil, his body experiencing the first stages of fever as it fought off the sickness inside, spun at the first gunshot. His eyes were drawn to Thor, standing in the middle of the street, his legs spread apart and peering down the sight of his handgun, his drugged-out eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. He saw the fire erupting from the muzzle, even as he took in the other bursts from the people standing beside Thor—people he'd once considered brothers.
A woman to his right screamed and fell to the ground clutching her abdomen—a kill shot without a hospital.
To his left, the Black lady lifted her shotgun and fired off a hope. Two blasts, and then she scampered for the side of the street.
Anvil bent down as gunfire erupted all around him, felling a second Cunning Stunt.
The old man's rifle roared in the night, but Anvil, his body burning up from the inside as changes began to happen, could only hope to find cover. Gripping the gut-shot woman by the hand, he dragged her across the pavement, her jeans rasping across the street.
The steel knuckles in his pocket weren't worth shit when it came to guns. He hated the guns, thought they were a pussy's weapon, and he was no pussy. A bullet pinged off the asphalt in front of him, ricocheted and embedded itself in the throat of the woman he dragged. She began to gurgle, and he released his grip as her hands went to her throat. She'll be gone in a few.
He turned and rushed to the safety of parked bikes and the trunk of an old oak tree, thin for its age, but tall. Something punched him in the side as he fled, and he tumbled to the pavement, gasping for breath.
The smell of his own blood hit him, and he pulled himself along the street, hoping to get out of the shooting range Main Street had become. He groaned in pain. Soon after, a dead man mocked him with its own groan as the first of their tail appeared, followed by dozens more. More groans—a choir of them. They sang a song that made no sense to Anvil.
Behind the nearest motorcycle, he rolled over on his back and felt the place where he had been punched. His hand came away bloody. There was a lot of it. He avoided looking at the wound, didn't want to see if he was going to die, though he suspected it was the end of his road whether he looked or not.
He watched the old man standing in the middle of the street. Behind him, appearing out of a swathe of smoke came the dead—shadows in the night, heedless of the fact that living beings were having a gunfight. The dead would be on them in no time at all. The entire scene felt like something out of the Old West, only he had never pictured himself as one of the fuckers who would get shot. In his dreams, he had always been Wyatt Earp, not one of those nameless, faceless cowboys put there to pad the numbers.
The old man dropped to one knee, making his target smaller, and he fired into The Misanthropes. He showed no panic, even as the dead drew nigh.
Anvil coughed, and he felt the first pain from his wound as the hacking ejected more blood from his body. He leaned his head against the engine of the bike behind him, and then he saw the shot woman, the rounder one, sit up in the middle of the street.
"Fuck," he managed to say, his own voice weak in his ears. At the edge of his vision, blackness had moved in. He knew what that blackness was. Death. The sitting woman turned at the sound of his voice, and she began crawling in his direction.
Anvil did what any good cowboy would do. He stood. A true cowboy died on his feet.
****
Ernie Windham heard the first shot, and he knew it was meant for them. He didn't know how he knew it, but he had always known when he was under fire. That instinct had saved his life multiple times throughout his life.
Without hesitation, he spun and brought his rifle up. They're standing in the middle of the street. Dumbasses. He was too, but he was confident, unafraid of taking a bullet. His next bullet wound wouldn't be his first.
Through the scope of his rifle, he spotted a man, smiling at him as he drew down on Ernie. With smooth, steady motions, Ernie placed the crosshair over the man's throat and squeezed the trigger. He didn't wait to watch the man die. Instead, he pulled his eye away from his scope and found another hunched shadow, another target. Squinting his left eye closed, he leaned down to the scope, aimed, pulled the trigger, and then dropped down to the side, heading for cover. Two dead, or dead for a little while at least. He didn't know how long it took one of the dead to get up and start walking again, but he was curious about it.
Gunfire ricocheted off the pavement where he had been. He leaned out from behind a mailbox, peeking at one of the corpses in the road. The smiling man was still kicking, his hands over his throat. Ernie imagined the blood squirting out. Fuck him for smiling while he tried to kill me.
More gunshots thundered, bullets tinging off the metal of the mailbox behind which he hid. Patience. It was all about patience now. He had a good spot to hide, a prime spot. He spun around behind the mailbox, his knees complaining, and he leaned out the other side, making sure none of these fuckers were trying to flank him.
Then he heard the groans. In all the commotion, he had forgotten their tail was slowly, methodically catching up to them. Slow and steady wins the race according to the old fable. In this case, he was the hare. He didn't fancy winding up as a lucky rabbit's foot in the mouth of the dead.
He poked the barrel of his rifle out from beside the mailbox, intent on taking the attackers out as fast as he could. Around him, chaos reigned. The women, not as cool as they looked on the outside after all, ran and cowered. The big man, leaking life from his side, huddled behind a row of bikes. In the street, two bodies lay.
2 for 2. The score was even. But he was about to fix that. He leaned out, focusing on a series of gun shots coming from behind a row of motorcycles a block up the street. He saw the flash of a handgun, heard the thunder almost simultaneously, and he aimed in the general direction, spending a round or two on what was essentially a hope and prayer.
No dice. Return fire came his way, a bullet pinging off the blue paint of the mailbox. The bullet ricocheted away harmlessly, but a chip of metal or paint from the mailbox hit him square in the eye. He grunted and backed away, trying to blink away the chip of whatever the hell it was. It hurt like a motherfucker. What he needed was some water.
"You ok?" a voice called.
"Got something in my eye. Can't see."
"Hand it over," the voice said. The Black woman held a hand out to him, and he sighed.
Handing the rifle over, he asked, "Am I bleeding?"
The woman took one glance at his eye, and she nodded her head.
"Fuck."
More rounds. More fire. More groans.
"Switch me places," he said, and they duckwalked around each other, Ernie blinking the whole time.
He had to face the possibility his eye was ruined. He might not ever see out of the damn thing. Whatever was in his eye was really stuck in there. Every time he blinked, he felt the sharp sting of something against his eyelid. The real pisser about it was it was his good eye. His left eye had all sorts of shit wrong with it. Aged and faded, that eye showed the first signs of cataracts. If he stared at a white wall with his good eye closed, he would see odd shapes floating around. It was a part of aging, but not a part he could afford right now.
Then he thought of Olivia, her fingers bitten off.
The Black woman at his side fired off a round, and another volley of gunfire answered in response.
"Careful with that. Pick your shots. I don't have any more ammo on me."
The woman gave a barely perceptible nod.
"Where's Olivia?"
"Who?" the woman asked as she ducked back behind the safety of the old mailbox.
"The old woman."
Ernie peered around him with his injured eye squinted shut. The world was cloudier now, like one of those old soap operas filmed in soft focus, the ones his wife used to watch in the middle of the day. He spotted Olivia and knew something was wrong.
"Get down!" he yelled at her. But it was too late. A bullet ripped through her chest, flesh chunks and blood spraying out of her back. But she didn't fall. On she came, still walking… like one of the dead.
His heart fell, and he hated it. He'd spent most of his recent life trying not to feel anything, had been doing a damn good job of it too. Now, a random woman who happened to share the name of the love of his life had died, and he hadn't been able to do anything about that either. Helpless. The world loved to show you how helpless you were. Just when you thought you got a handle on how things worked, it would come along and slap you down.
He tapped the Black woman on the elbow. "You better save a bullet for her."
And then the two biker women dying in the street stood up, blood dripping down their bodies.
"Better save a few bullets," he amended.
****
Jaiyama turned her head to see what the old man was blathering about. Then she saw her, the old lady, a chunk missing from her chest. She should be dead, but she was coming toward them. Her fingerless hand dangled at her side as her sneakers scraped against the pavement. From the corner of her eye, more shapes moved in the street, moving with the tell-tale gait of the dead.
"Think you can hit 'em in the head?" the old man asked.
Jaiyama nodded. "With this rifle I could hit the pimple on a hobo's ass from a hundred yards out."
"Well, just aim for their heads," the old man said, blood from his eye running down his right cheek.
Jaiyama turned and spun. The gunfire from the other end of the street had stopped. She found this suspicious. "Keep an eye out for anyone trying to sneak up on us."
She winced at the phrasing, not sure if the old man had lost his eye for good or not. She brought the rifle up as the old woman closed to within ten feet of them. Despite all of her tough talk, the persona she put out to the world, Jaiyama had never killed a person before, not before tonight. Oh, she had wanted to kill people all her life, but she had never followed through. Usually, when she went ballistic, people backed down. But she knew the dead wouldn't back down. The dead wouldn't be cowed by tough talk and mean looks. All she could do about it was squeeze the trigger and hope the bullet flew true.
So she painted the woman with the crosshairs and squeezed off a round. The rifle barely bucked in her hands, and the woman dropped.
"Two more over there," the man said.
She turned the rifle, swiveling at the waist and taking aim at one of the dead white women.
"Stop!" a voice called.
****
Tarot saw the woman aiming at her friend, knew what she was about to do. Over the course of the last hour, she had lost half her gang and her partner. She knew Abyss and Tanya were dead, had screamed and felt their pain as they died on the asphalt, but something inside her didn't want the woman with the rifle to kill them again.
When Tanya had been shot, Tarot felt the pain in her head, as she had so many times before. Only the fear of her own life had kept her from curling up in a ball and trembling in the street, even then, she had to drag herself across Main Street to find cover.
The man, the cop-looking dude, saw Tarot struggling and had dragged her by her arms behind a row of toppled bikes. They had to lay on the ground which was fine by her, as she couldn't do anything but feel Tanya's pain, soon followed by the pain of Abyss as she too hit the macadam.
"No!" she screamed. But her screams didn't help anything, and Abyss' pain faded quickly because she was dead. But Tanya suffered still. She turned and looked at her friend. Across the street, behind the trunk of a tree, she saw Scabs staring in disbelief at the road. Behind her, one of the dead stepped out from the shattered door of a hardware store.
In her mind, she could feel herself dying, but it wasn't her; it was Tanya. Her screaming stopped, and Tanya, lying in the road, locked eyes with her. Beyond Tanya, one of the dead, the tall, willowy man from the hardware store, fell upon Scabs, and Tarot's pain began anew.
Tarot bucked upon the ground as she felt another of her friends being torn apart. The man who had pulled her to safety placed a hand upon her to attempt to calm her. She slapped at his hands. Tarot didn't care for strangers touching her, especially men. But the man didn't relent, and she lay on the ground crying as the tall man tore Scabs apart, peeling flesh from her neck with his teeth.
"No!" she cried again. Groans answered her, and her unwanted savior shushed her.
"Keep it down," he hissed.
