One Blink From Oblivion (19 page)

Max sits, biding his time. Now that he has time to reflect, he’s trying not to dwell on the horror of the night’s events. He knows that no good can come from over-thinking what had to be done in the moment. He needs to keep his head clear and not lose sight of the tasks at hand. Step one is to find out if Big Mama was brought to this location. If she wasn’t, then next he must determine how he is going to get out so he can find his way back to her.

A sudden snapshot of bits of Lisa’s head painting the cell walls -like watermelon covering the stage in a Gallagher concert- invades his thoughts of Big Mama. He shakes his head to dispel the ghostly visage only to have it replaced by another. This time Vanessa devours Brooke on the floor of the cabin while both the eater and the eaten stare directly into his eyes -one begging to be saved and the other daring him to try. Max shivers away the waking nightmare and shifts his attention to the various other detainees standing about. Some are in animated conversations about their night’s experiences while others murmur to themselves, apparently too far gone for any rational social contact.

Max finds a thin balding man, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his head slung low and cupped in his hands, particularly intriguing. His body language tells Max that he has seen more than most of their cellmates, more than any single person should be asked to bear alone and yet his sanity remains. In him, Max feels a kindred spirit and decides that a lucid witness could provide him with the information he sought.

“Excuse me sir,” Max speaks in the least threatening tone in his arsenal, “are you feeling okay?”

The man neither stirs nor responds verbally.

Max –undaunted by the thin man’s passive dismissal- repeats himself with a bit more volume and inflection, “
Excuse me sir
?”

The thin man slowly drops his hands to his lap and lifts his head to reveal two red and extremely swollen eyes. His cupped palms had apparently been serving double duty as a tear reservoir and as a mask of his emotions. His cheeks are damp and nearly crimson in color. He regards Max somberly as if to say ‘can’t I just be left in peace’, but Max has no intention of complying. There’s something he needs to know and time is short.

“Hey, you look like you’ve had just about as shitty a night as I have, and I know the last thing you want right now is to be talking to me but I’m hoping you can help me with some info.” Max holds his breath and waits for a reply from the thin man who continues to stare at him blankly.

“I live up in the Chatsworth Hills but I was out of town when all this happened. I’ve got family up there. Do you know what happened to the people that lived in that area?”

A smile so thin, that his lips all but disappear spreads across the man’s face and he answers –with a bit too much enthusiasm for the setting, “Well, hello neighbor. It’s quite a pleasure to meet you,” the man’s voice is low and sinews of lunacy tug at each word as he over enunciates them. “What a small world!” he exclaims with wide eyes and apparent sarcasm.

Max is beginning to realize that he may have made a grievous error in rousing this man from his cocoon of despair. He raises his hand with the intent of cutting the man off and allowing him to return to his position of repose but a mercurial change in the thin man’s tone and expression as he takes a brief pause before continuing causes Max’s arm to wither back to his side.

“Dead!”
he exclaims loud enough to halt the conversation and turn the heads of many of the men standing nearby. “
Everyone’s dead!
Your family, my family, our pets, the
fucking
postman… they’re all dead,” the man’s voice and cadence of his speech –though harsher than before and without a note of derision- remain low and slow as though he is explaining the situation to an annoying child that has been repeating the same question for hours. “Those horrid creatures came from everywhere…nowhere and they bit and clawed and ripped and ate and drank and defiled every living thing they could see, smell or hear,” for the first time he looks directly into Max’s eyes, “what kind of monster could tear apart a puppy?”

Max sits silently, unable to unlock from the man’s gaze like a cobra and its hypnotized prey.

Still slow and methodical, “Do you know how much blood a body has in it? I never knew until today. The blood just kept coming like high tide. It never relented for a moment. Just wave after wave of blood spewing and splashing on the floor around the bed. The carpet soaked up so much that it just began to pool on the top, but through it all they just kept
screaming!”

Now tears begin to flow freely from the thin mans already red eyes and more people gather to listen, “Why couldn’t they just put them out of their misery? They’re just little girls, they never hurt anyone. Their eyes stared at me as I watched the last bit of life in them flicker out. Their eyes were asking me ‘why daddy… why didn’t you save us…
why, why, why!?
”

The man blinks and his spell over Max is broken. Max drops his sightline to the floor between his feet and fights being sucked into the emotional vortex the thin man has created.

“I hid there, under the bed until the soldiers came. A lot of the soldiers died but many of those things were set on fire or killed before they could escape. Some of the people that those things had attacked earlier got up and ran away too. The bodies that stayed down were thrown into trash trucks and brought here to be
disposed
of.”

The man spat the last few words in obvious disgust and immediately his weeping overtook him for good. Max, in his mind’s eye, envisions the man’s small daughters being flung limply into the back of a refuse truck in a scene akin to the nightmarish black and white videos of concentration camp victims. An image of two men struggling to lift Big Mama’s sizeable girth into the rear of a city waste truck brings a cramp to Max’s belly and he shivers the thought away. Could it be that Big Mama has been reduced to nothing more than a smoldering pile of ash and a few stubborn bits of heart muscle? Or worse, could she be wandering the night in search of human blood to quench an untenable thirst?

***

A loud rap on the storefront glass draws the awareness of those still awake.

The thin man –apparently once again in control of his equanimity- looks up from the familiar perch of his hands and nods his red swollen face in the direction of the interruption and asks Max, “What do you think this is about?”

Max turns to find Gilley’s friend (CPL Steward) standing on the other side of the glass and beckoning a particularly fearsome-looking detainee toward the door. The man in question stands about six-feet and seven-inches tall and is built like a side of beef. He’s bursting out of his grossly undersized scrubs and has torn the sleeves from his top to reveal a prison tattoo familiar to Max. The tattoo denotes his gang affiliation and years served –to date- behind bars. The beast of a man appears to have several other slightly smaller men orbiting around him –no doubt fellow members of his set.

He approaches the door, which has been cracked open just enough to allow conversation and stands for a while as CPL Steward engages him with whispers of dubious intent. Near the end of their conversation, the soldier points in Max’s direction. The behemoth turns and looks at Max for a moment. His incredible size gives him the illusion of moving in slow motion as he then turns back to the soldier and nods.

Max doesn’t need to be a lip reader to know what’s going on. He watches the rest of the exchange with loathsome anticipation and hopes that the skin color he shares with the giant will be enough to give the man a brotherly pause. But, he knows better. To people like that, the only colors that matter are red and blue. Back in the day, both sides had tried many times to recruit Max. Being the son of a respected enforcer gave Max a preceding reputation that he had never asked for. These assumptions that people made about him had kept him out of some fights but gotten him into others. As for linking up with a local set, he always refused and was only spared from reprisals because everyone knew and feared his old man.

As the conversation wraps, instead of B-lining toward Max the large man returns to his satellites and Max breathes a momentary sigh of relief… until he returns his gaze to CPL Steward who stands at the window, smiling ear to freckled ear in Max’s direction. The soldier pans his view back and forth between the group of men -that are now beginning to push their way through the crowd- and Max.

Max springs to his feet and searches his mind for a way to avoid the inevitable. To survive a nearly supernatural night only to be beaten to death by a gang of uninfected thugs seems like a cruel irony. Before he can formulate a productive thought the group of four -or four and a half as it were- are upon him. The leader is an oak. His feet spread out beneath him like roots planted firmly in the earth anchoring two solid trunk-like legs that ripple with sinews of muscle beneath his inadequate pants. A towering torso of bulging mounds that seem to jump and jitter remotely and without provocation is welded to the mighty trunk beneath it. His arms erupt outward like redwood branches, able and ready to support the very sky with all of its stars should it choose to fall. His neck is a nearly non-existent segway of leathery hide stretched drum-taught over slithering veins between his mountainous shoulders and steroidal-oversized head. A single dimple in his right cheek and a set of surprisingly dynamic eyes are the only remnants of his true origin. He is as daunting a figure as any biter that Max has laid his eyes upon this evening.

The big guy begins to speak, “Look here son, that little white dude over there tells me if I stomp you out I can get the fuck up outa’ here. So I hope you don’t take this beat-down personal but me and my boys are ‘bout to get in that ass.”

Max is paying less attention to what the man is saying and more to his -soon to be attackers’- movements and body language. He is attempting to ascertain the threat level of each individual so he can deal with him accordingly. The three cohorts flank the leader like extras in a Michael Jackson video and Max half expects them to break into dance. The one to his left is close to Max’s size and relative build. The man’s skin is dark enough to make reading of his expression in the dimly lit room difficult, but there is no mistaking his eyes. Unwavering and steadfast in their connection with his own, he likewise appears to be sizing up Max.  

The well-muscled man continues, “If you lay down and take it, we let you live, if not…”

Before the man can complete his last sentence, Max strikes him square in the throat with a lightening fast punch that catches all four men off guard, especially the big man who drops instantly to his knees gripping his throat and gasping for air. With the main threat -at least temporarily- out of commission Max turns his sights on the one who he considers to be the next most dangerous of the three that remain. Max had come to this conclusion not due to the size of the man but by the lack of fear in his eyes. He probably had at least a kill or two on his resume and appears eager for his third.

Max slides to the man’s left and toward his own strong hand effectively lining up all three of his attackers. Max is hoping it’s been a while since the man was jumped-in to his set and consequently he’ll be rusty with his hands. He is disappointed to find this is not the case when the guy lets loose a rapid combination of punches; left jab, straight right, followed by a right hook. Max dodges the first two punches leaning right and then left. When the right hook comes around he aptly ducks it, and plants a straight right of his own directly into the man’s solar plexus. All the wind the man has in his lungs is immediately and forcefully pressed out through his pursed lips and nose along with copious amounts of spittle and mucous. The man stumbles back into one of his two friends that remain upright who makes the mistake of catching him. Max goes directly from his coil into a jump kick over the breathless man and connects harshly with the underside of his savior’s chin. The man’s teeth crash together snipping the end of his tongue and before the two intertwined men can fall, Max follows up his first kick with a sidekick directly in the chest of the first breathless man again. He kicks with enough force that the two men are knocked off of their feet and down for the count. Out of his peripheral vision Max can see the big man beginning to rise and knows he only has a moment to deal with the last man standing before he has to address that situation.

Max saved this one for last due to the fact that when earlier they had approached him, he had been sure to stay a step behind the big man. A smallish individual, he was apparently the type that preferred to cheer-on his friends from a distance, or at least from cover. Until now, the big man had probably proved a more than adequate screen from any real violence. Max reads his fear and as it turns out, he isn’t wrong. While Max had been dealing with his buddies, the man had stayed in the background hoping for the best. Now it was his turn and Max can see the fear dancing across his face as it causes his eyebrows to twitch and deposits tiny beads of sweat on the coward’s upper lip. His eyes shift left to right and he clicks his teeth behind severely drawn-back lips as he looks for a path of flight.

The man retreats and Max stalks him like a panther tensed and ready to pounce. Max knows that once the big man reenters the fray the frightened man before him will regain his false confidence and be more dangerous than ever. He has to be dealt with immediately. The man stumbles backward, pushing innocents between he and Max as the distance between them closes. Observers who had previously formed a fight circle are now scrambling to get clear of the fray.