The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades (25 page)

“Look,” Ron said, gesturing with one of his raised hands at a square pillow sitting just up the stairs from the body and the lake of blood. One side of the pillow looked as though a dog had shredded it up while the other only had holes with burn marks around them. Sadie had used it as an improvised silencer. It was smart, but heart-breakingly sad; she had come to kill. That wasn’t like her and Neil was afraid to find out what had caused the change in her.

Had she been threatened? Probably, but she was personally brave to a point that sometimes she acted as though her life was worthless. A threat hadn’t done this to her. Perhaps rape or torture had turned her. Yet she was the River King’s daughter. Who would dare? No one. Which left only one thing that would cause her to go on a rampage: a threat to her loved ones. Neil hadn’t shown up on time: maybe she had thought he’d been killed; Grey was fighting for his life on a daily basis; Jillybean had tried to hijack a boat that later exploded, and Eve had been taken from her. From a certain point of view, Sadie didn’t have much to lose anymore.

“Come on,” Neil said once more to Ron, who had stopped in place and again resembled a tree, and, like a proper one, had rooted there.

They went up, Ron leading the way and casting nervous glances back over his shoulder. Neil followed along feeling even more anxious than his prisoner. What would he find at the top of the stairs? He figured there’d be more and more blood.

Just shy of the third floor, he heard sharp voices speaking just above a whisper. Sadie’s was one of them. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to shoot. And you know what? I don’t care what you do. Now, put the gun down or else.”

“No, you’ll fuckin’ kill me if I do.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Sadie shot back.

Without even seeing the third floor lobby, it was obvious to Neil what the score was; he knew that guns were drawn and nerves were frayed down to the nubs. Anything could set them off and little could come between them peacefully. A subtle, deft hand was called for, which might have been Neil’s strong suit.

“Sadie.” He spoke her name like a disembodied spirit, silencing the people in the lobby. Neil paused for effect and then added, “Do I have to kill him?” The staircase was painted over concrete; it conducted the words adding a depth and richness to Neil’s otherwise reedy voice. It made him sound
big
. 

“I-I don’t know,” Sadie said, uncertainly. “Do you want to?”

“I do,” Neil answered, louder now, letting the word echo up and down the stairs. “When I come through this door, I’m coming through shooting. Ask him if he wants to die.”

Sadie didn’t have to. The man volunteered, “No. It’s cool. I’m putting my gun down right now.” There was a clunk of metal dropping onto wood. “I did it, ok? There ain’t no reason to shoot.”

Neil pushed Ron in ahead of him, hiding somewhat in his flickering shadow. There was a single candle lighting the lobby; it sat on the same desk that had been there three days before when Neil had been a prisoner—the two guards were different. Their features seemed overly large and sinister but other than that, they were hard to make out from the flame of a single candle that was being batted back and forth by the heavy breathing of the closer of the two.

On the other side of the desk stood Sadie, brandishing a pistol in each hand and looking crazy in the eyes. They were as dark as night and cold as iron. She was plank-faced, stony to the point of seeming inhuman. Her trigger-fingers were stiff and her knuckles were white. She was still in kill mode.

“Sadie,” Neil said, softly. “Lower your guns. They don’t need to die.”

“They’re part of this,” she said. “They’re broken men. They’re unfixable.”

Neil stepped out from behind Ron, lowering his own gun. “They’ve done some wrong, I’m sure…”

“I killed people,” Sadie interrupted. “The guard wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t let me save you and so I shot him and he bled all over the place, but it was nothing like the other one.
He
had an ocean in him and it just kept coming and coming. I didn’t think it would ever stop. I kept thinking that it would flood the first floor and everyone would drown in blood. And that would be ok because they deserved it. Just like they all deserved it.”

Next to Neil, Ron began to shake. His hands in the air trembled. He glanced back at Neil and his eyes were begging.

“Ok Sadie,” Neil said, calmly. “Lower the guns, please. Maybe these guys deserve some sort of punishment, but we don’t have time to be their judge and jury. Someone’s going to find the bodies soon.”

The guns in her hands didn’t budge an inch. One unwavering barrel was trained on each of the guards. “I didn’t think it would be like this, Neil,” she said. “I never thought there’d be this much guilt. I mean,
they
are the bad guys! They are the guilty ones, not me, but look at them. They were playing cards!”

“I see,” Neil said. There were cards on the desk arranged in a manner that was unfamiliar to him. The only card games he knew were forms of solitaire. “They were only playing to pass the time. I don’t see why…”

“Yes!” Sadie said, taking a step closer to the men under the threat of her guns. “Passing the time while we are being killed and sold and blown up. And hunted, Neil. They’re hunting you and Jillybean like you guys did something wrong. But you didn’t. You were just trying to pass through and these men are just fine with that. They couldn’t care less if you live or die. So why should I be different? Why should I care who I kill? Why should I care about the guy on the stairs or the guy who went out for a smoke…he recognized me and I thought he was going for a gun but it was cigarette. I shot him because…”

“Sadie!” Neil said, sharply, jarring her enough for her to blink. “We don’t have time for this. I’m sorry but we have to get Captain Grey and go. We are running out of time. Someone can find those bodies at any time.”

The one blink turned into a hundred. She looked like she was fighting tears. “Yeah,” she said, lowering the pistols. She put the larger of the two on the desk and stared down at the other. Neil recognized it as Jillybean’s. It was small enough to fit into Sadie’s back pocket. When it was stowed away, she turned to look
up
at Neil. There were tears in her eyes but also a smile on her lips as she gawked at his new and improved height. “What did you do?”

Neil felt a warmth of blush on his cheek and pointed Ron to go stand with the others. “Never mind that. We need to get the keys. Which one of you…”

There was a sound on the stairs! Voices! People were coming up. Neil turned to put his face to the cracked in the door and then, almost too late, realized that no one was minding the store. One of the guards, seeing that Neil was distracted and Sadie unarmed, grabbed for the gun on the desk.

In slow-motion hell, Neil turned, bringing his gun around, however Ron had froze, directly in Neil’s line of sight. The guard seemed to be fighting the sluggish nature of time as well; he fumbled for the gun, which suddenly seemed as slippery as a live fish. Sadie had heard the voices as well and had been turning toward them. Like Neil, she was slow to realize that danger was so close and she didn’t begin to react until the guard’s fingers were on the gun.

Her black jeans were loose on her slim figure and her hand small enough to fit into the back pocket easily. The .25 came out like a line of silver, but too late! The guard had his pistol: a Glock 17, out and pointing square into Sadie’s face. He pulled the trigger.

Anyone else would’ve quailed, but Sadie stared into her death with a look that suggested she had died already that night.

The guard pulled the trigger once. Nothing happened. He looked at the weapon in a panic until he saw that the safe was still on. He nudged into the off position with his thumb and then died as Sadie shot him in the eye.

The cell was only gradually cooling off. Earlier it had been a torture, one that a few of the fighters hadn’t been able to endure. One man, who couldn’t stand the heat and the stench, had passed out, falling like a lone tree in the forest. When he smacked his face on the cement a tooth had shot right out of his mouth and had dribbled right up to Grey’s cell.

Grey had stared at it with dull eyes for the better part of two hours. It was too hot to sleep and too dreadful to live through. Everyone agreed that the fights were far easier to tolerate. Even losing, or so they all guessed. Most fights were over in minutes and the loser lay in a beaten pulp as their life’s blood seeped out of them. But the days—hundred and ten degrees, ninety-five percent humidity, and the scent of liquefying feces permeating everything—were worse.

With a low groan, Grey stood. His broken right hand ached. In the dark the bruising and swelling were all but invisible but the pain was still there as a constant reminder that he couldn’t last forever. If he fought every day, he would be nicked and scratched into his grave. No matter how good he was, and he was better than all the rest, he’d catch a bad break eventually. The laws of probability demanded it. The same was true of the other men languishing in the dark. There was one fellow who would lose his left arm soon; he’d been bitten by an opponent he’d been strangling and now the wound was infected and smelled worse than the shit-buckets that were hardly ever changed out. Another had puss dripping constantly from his right eye. His cornea had been scratched. At first he’d complained about “something” being in his eye, now he was half-blind.

Gently, Grey opened and closed his hand, grimacing slightly. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t use it to strike with, his grip was weak, limiting what Ju-jitsu moves he could attempt. For that reason he began to limber up his legs; he would have to rely on kicks more than he liked. It was one thing to set up an opponent by chopping at his legs, but to rely on kicks as a mainstay wasn’t the best practice, especially against an opponent who knew it was coming and everyone in the prison knew about Grey’s hand problem.

Across the prison, Grey’s next opponent watched from his bunk. He was one of the River King’s rivals. He was a tough one, having survived two fights with only a few scratches to show. Word was that he was a scrapper, good with his hands but unsure of his ground-fighting skills until he had softened up his opponent with punches.

Could be worse, Grey reasoned. He went through a series of light stretches and as he did he visualized the fight: one-handed, and without the ability to grapple or wrestle, it was going to be a doozy.

“When’s dinner?” someone asked. They were fed twice a day, morning and night, which was just as well since none could stomach food in the midday heat.

“Soon, I hope,” Grey’s opponent said. “I always get an appetite before I kill.” This sort of bravado was normal and Grey didn’t take it to heart. He rarely said anything in reply. This time was no different. His legs were splayed out and he was bending at the waist, touching his chin to his knee, feeling the long muscle of his hamstring stretch.

“I’ll be making you kiss your own ass soon,” his opponent went on, confidently. “I’ll bend you over and spank the…”

“Hush!” Grey ordered suddenly. He had heard something from deep in the building and felt it rise up through the floor and into his leg. “That was a gun shot,” he said.

The cell went as quiet as it ever had with men practically holding their breath trying to catch the slightest sound. Over the past few days, since the bridge had been destroyed there had been talk of rescues or coups or a new power gaining control of the base at Cape Girardeau. The talk had escalated with the destruction of the barge the night before. They hadn’t known what it was of course, but all of them had heard it and speculation had been rife until breakfast had been brought in the morning when the man who doled out the sludge, whispered the rumors.

There had been many rumors: the renegades had escaped to Colorado, the renegades had been blown up or drowned, the renegades were planning to attack. In a lot of these, Jillybean was given credit for all sorts of outrageous things, most of which was tamer than the truth. One thing was certain: she was still free. The fantastic amount of the bounty on her head was proof of it. Grey hoped to God that she wasn’t being foolish…but now there was a gunshot. Its timing, just after sunset, when most of the King’s men were flung to the winds hunting a seven-year-old, suggested a rescue was in the works.

“It could be a coup,” Grey’s opponent said. His name was Norman; however Grey didn’t like to personalize the people he was going to kill, but that no longer seemed to be in the works.

“If it’s anything, Norm,” Grey said. “It’s a rescue attempt. If it was a coup they’d be shooting up the building across the way. That’s where the king is after all.”

“Don’t call me, Norm,” Norman snapped. “It could be they’re coming to get a few of us, more important people, before the actual fighting starts. This isn’t all about you, Grey.”

“I hope it’s not about me,” he whispered back. After a few minutes he began to think that it wasn’t a rescue. After all, who would attempt a rescue at such an agonizingly slow pace? He had just said to himself, “Neil, that’s who,” when there came a second gunshot from just outside the prison door. This had everyone sitting up and staring expectantly like dogs at the pound that can smell the humans coming.

“Get your shirts and shoes on,” Grey barked to the room at large. He was already dressed and had been after that first muffled gun shot. The prisoners all started dressing in a hurry and then paused as Neil Martin came bustling into the prison, heading straight for Grey’s cell.

Grey was going to quip in a nonchalant manner: what took you so long? However, Neil hardly looked like himself. He was bigger, taller. His head seemed small on his suddenly broad shoulders. His appearance made Grey choke on his words and it was Neil who joked, “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”

“Yeah,” Grey replied, confused. “What’s with you? You look…weird.”

Before he could answer, there was another gunshot from the hall. “Oh boy!” Neil said, trying to work the key into the lock.

“You’d better hurry,” Grey said. There was another blast from the hall just as the lock snicked open in a pleasing manner.

Neil yanked the door open and tossed him the keys. “Free the others, I gotta go help Sadie.”

He took only two steps before Grey snatched him back and shoved the keys into his hands. Before Neil could even blink, Grey also ripped a pistol from the holster at his side. “You got that backwards. I think I know my way around a gun better than most people, including you.”

Grey then began to sprint for the doors. Behind him Neil called out, “Who do I let out?”

“All of them!” Grey yelled, above the cracks and bangs of more guns firing. It was starting to sound like a battle, a mostly one-way battle with the predominance of the firing coming from the north end of the hall and only a few return shots coming from the lobby.

He found Sadie cowering behind a desk, peeking around it every once in a while to take a shot down the hall. There were three others with her: one dead guard flopped across the desk, and two cowering against the wall and blubbering like a couple of babies. During a lull in the firing, Grey took a quick glance to see what kind of numbers he was up against it—judging by the sudden explosions and the twinkling of pistol fire he guessed there were at least a dozen.

“Looks like it’s getting a little sporting in here,” Grey said to the girl.

“Huh?” she asked, cocking her head. She was shooting with the pistol very close to her body and he was sure she was becoming deafer with every pull of the trigger.

“Hold your fire!” he yelled at her, before leaning into the line of the bullet’s trajectories in the hallway. As the air hissed around him, he saw the king’s men were firing from doorways along the hall, inadvertently making themselves prime targets. The first man was barely exposed however the man in the next doorway had to lean out further not to accidentally shoot him in the back and the next man had to expose himself even further still. Better still, they were all crouched at about the same level. Grey fired three times in the space of a second, killing two and wounding one.

“We need to watch our six,” he said to Sadie, pointing in the opposite direction in which she had been shooting. “Can you handle it?” There was a second hallway at their rear which, for the moment, was quiet. It wouldn’t stay that way. They would be flanked from that direction; it was practically a guarantee. And they had other problems. There were two other floors to get by and it wouldn’t get any easier once they made it outside. There was still the electrified gate that was guarded by at least three men, to overcome.

But first he had to suppress the fire coming from the hall. The wall next to the stairwell door was coming apart from the hail of bullets striking it. He gave it a glance to judge where they were shooting: it was like looking at a pitcher’s strike zone—for the most part they were hitting the inside part of the plate at chest height.

He slunk low, stuck his right arm around the corner and fired five shots. His reward: the screams of at least two men and the tapering off of the shooting. “We just want to talk,” Grey shouted down the hall.

This seemed to confuse them and a whispered conversation passed among the men down the hall. Finally, one asked, “What do you want to talk about?” Obviously Grey didn’t want to talk about anything, he wanted to kill time until the prisoners were freed. The first of whom, the man who had lived in the cage next to Grey’s, had just stuck his head out of the door to see if it was safe.

Grey grabbed him and pulled him down to his level. “Get to the second floor, quick! Try to keep people off the stairs. Tell them that a fist-fight has escalated into a gun battle and that it isn’t safe.”

“You want me to do it? Look at me! I’m a cage fighter. They’re going to recognize me.” In the dark, the man was relatively non-descript in Grey’s opinion.

“You’ll be fine. It’s dark; no one can see jack.”

“Uh-uh, no way. Use Norman. He was one of them. He’ll know what to say.”

If there was something that Grey couldn’t abide it was someone questioning his orders. He snatched the man’s shirt with his left hand and pulled him in so they were nose-to-nose. “Get your ass downstairs or I’ll stick you back in that cage myself. And don’t even think about trying to run off. You’ll never get off the base alive if you leave us.” Without regard to the field of fire he threw the man bodily at the staircase.

Two bullets chased him but were too slow to hit their mark. “I said we need to talk,” Grey yelled again to the men down the hall.

“What do you want to talk to them about?” asked Norman, suspiciously, from behind him. He and a number of others cage fighters were crunched together in the prison doorway. They were dirty and their fear-sweat made them stink even more than usual. Behind the group, Neil was rushing to free the last of them.

Grey was struck by confusion over how quickly they were being freed. How long had it been since Neil had stepped into the prison? Thirty seconds? A minute? Time seemed to be blazing by.

“Don’t be an idiot, Norm. I’m trying to buy us some time you…” Grey’s sentence was cut off as Sadie began shooting in the south hall. There was a smattering of return fire which began to escalate with every passing second. To make matters worse, the firing on the north end began to pick up as well. Grey knew the sound, the cadence of the shooting: they were making a move. It wasn’t subtle and, judging by the bullets skipping off the tile or plunking holes in the ceiling tiles, the shooters weren’t interested in aiming. It was pure distraction and a big mistake.

When it started again, Grey didn’t cower as they had hoped, he stepped partially out into the corridor and began firing. Embarrassingly, it took four shots to drop the three men who were charging. He blamed his broken hand; the barrel shifted to the right almost a quarter of an inch with every squeeze of the trigger.

“You’re bleeding,” Norm said, pointing toward Grey’s neck.

Norman received a shrug in reply. As there weren’t any competent medical personnel among them and he wasn’t impaired in any way, Grey ignored the wound. “We got to move. Neil! Let’s get going!” He was there seconds later, still looking strange to Grey. “Do you have an actual plan? Or are we winging it?” Grey asked.

“Winging it,” Neil replied, cringing at the sound of the guns going off in the south hall. “Is that Sadie?”

“Yes. She’s fine. Here’s the new plan. Neil, lead the men outside. I’ll get Sadie and cover our retreat. Try not to shoot anyone and if at all possible don’t act like you’re escaping. Act like you belong.”

Neil waited for Grey to fire down the hall and then he ran for the stairs, unfortunately the others rushed right behind him in a group. Two were hit, sending blood spraying over the rest. One man fell with a bullet in his brain and the other with his guts shot out. The latter stooped and looked to be picking up great strands of ugly spaghetti that kept slipping between his fingers.

He only stood for a few seconds before he was transfixed by a cascade of lead flying down the hall. It seemed malicious that they would keep gunning for him and yet the man had been doomed regardless. His death made a grotesque mess of the floor in front of the stairs that Grey would have to get by if he wanted to escape. First, he had to make sure Sadie got to safety. There was no way in hell he was going to leave and have her cover their retreat.