Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
A dozen deadheads ambled down this corridor, spaced out in an unintentional hunting pattern, led by sight and, in some of them, smell. Every step they took fouled the pristine carpeting. One zombie nudged a table, and the lamp tumbled to the floor with a startled, glass equivalent of
oh
before shattering in a burst of fine slivers. Another deadhead stumbled into a wall, dragged its shoulder across an out-of-focus cliffside painting, and left a nihilistic barcode of grime. The dead did not care what they fouled with their presence.
They didn’t care about much, really.
But when a bedroom door opened not ten strides ahead and a piece of living meat stepped into view, confronting them with a short club, which quickly elongated into a dented bat…
The dead cared very much.
They ambled toward this challenger with surprising vigor.
Gus stepped to the middle of the carpet, the overhead glow giving the cathedral-like hall an almost joyful feel. Christmassy. It truly was a beautiful home—fit for a king, an emperor. Talbert had been right about that.
Gus slapped his visor into place and brought up his bat, scowling at the approaching dead.
A real shame to fuck it all up.
The closest deadhead had its entire head slugged from its shoulders. The bony bauble bounced off a resplendent oil painting, rattling the frame. The body of the zombie fell as if the very floor had given out underneath it.
Gus took the legs out from the next gimp, a butler with its uniform in a shameful array of tatters. He crushed the skull under his boot, stomping it twice into the beige carpeting.
Then he tore into the rest.
Perhaps it was perfect spacing or the pace of the attacking deadheads. Maybe it was the lack of numbers or just the familiar grace he’d acquired over the years in combating the undead.
Probably a combination of everything.
Whatever the reason, Gus ripped through the remaining zombies, killing each with devastating accuracy and oftentimes spectacular blows. Skulls exploded in sprays of chalky fragments and spoiled brain matter. Some heads flew from shoulders or simply caved in with a black spatter. Gus marched through the corridor of dead fuckers like a two-legged wrecking ball, destroying each corpse as it entered his range. He never tired, never uttered a single curse, his focus as keen as a surgeon’s scalpel. He lined up each decomposing face as it came toward him and smashed it into the next week.
A part of him dearly hoped that Mortimer was watching on his closed-circuit surveillance cameras…
And shitting his goddamn diapers.
When the last gimp fell in a dusty tumble, only one figure remained, framed in the archway, wearing what looked like a jumpsuit of white.
Gus’s visor muted the glare, but there was no mistaking the grinning face of the Korean mask. Worse, Donald had his bow up, an arrow readied and aimed. A dark eye lined up the visor of Gus’s helmet, freezing him in his tracks.
But Donald did not release that steel-tipped shaft.
Instead, he eased off on the draw and lowered the bow. With infinite care, he placed the weapon on the carpet before straightening, his gloved palms facing out in a gesture of
See? I’m unarmed
.
“You must fuckin’ think I’m all for fair play or something,” Gus seethed and immediately stepped forward, gearing up with the bat.
Donald snapped his right leg up and out, front-kicking Gus in the solar plexus hard enough to propel him back onto his ass, into that nasty carpet broth of spilled headcheese and rancid blood. Gus released the bat and rolled onto his stomach, audibly attempting to draw air into a paralyzed diaphragm. The corridor became a blurred plane, shifting and distorting before reforming. He gasped, wheezed, dragging in air that seemed to cling to his remaining teeth, refusing to go where it was most needed. The bashed head of a gimp resting on its squashed side smiled with inhuman mirth. The whole scene wavered as if Gus had plummeted into deep water. The impulse to get to his feet and defend himself was there, but his body refused to obey, refused to refill on air, panicking him. Donald came into view, fitting metal to his hands, taking his time in adjusting the nightmarish upgrades.
Finally, Gus’s lungs allowed a sip of oxygen. It rushed to his brain. He got up and regarded his foe, standing in a martial-art pose, fists held low to his body, his legs spaced apart just a little more than his shoulders. His knuckles shone like chrome nightmares, and it took Gus a moment to realize that old Donald had put on brass knuckles—or at least the equivalent…
Complete with spikes.
Grunting, pissed off, Gus stood.
Donald blurred into a spin and slammed his boot heel into the side of Gus’s helmet, sending him into the wall. The world went lopsided, spilling him off a flat edge. When he opened his eyes, he was on his back once more. Helmet saved him that time. Puffing and groaning, Gus sat up with the help of an elbow, considered Donald’s wide-footed stance, sighed, and shook his head.
“My fuckin’ luck. A goddamn ninja.”
The smiling mask didn’t answer.
Gus climbed to his feet and got his guard up, his head clearing with every second. He stepped toward his adversary, jabbed and missed. Jabbed twice more before swinging a roundhouse for that grinning face. Donald dodged them all and countered with a pulverizing combination of strikes, knuckles machine-gunning Gus’s body and head with deadly force.
Gus’s visor flew off.
His head got jacked to the right and left.
Each punch tenderized his torso and stuttered him back into the wall––the only thing keeping him up.
Seeing his prey falter, Donald spun and torpedoed his heel into the lower abdomen of his opponent.
Gus dodged it at the last split second, and Donald’s foot hammered through the wall, halfway up the shin.
Seizing the opportunity, Gus barreled into the off-balance man, shoving him backward and hearing a yelp of pain from the grinning mask. He punched that smiling face twice, the wooden facade splitting under hard knuckle plates. The third punch torqued Donald’s head into the wall. The mask fell, revealing a black ski mask and stunned eyes.
Gus kicked the foot Donald stood upon, and the snow-camouflaged killer dropped awkwardly, his other foot still trapped. Remorseless and remembering every arrow bounced off his ass, Gus stomped on the ski-masked head, repeatedly striking his target until he placed both arms against the wall and didn’t bother looking.
When Gus couldn’t make Donald any more dead, he backed off, chest heaving, and ignored the mess at the base of the corridor. His chest sore and heaving, Gus looked left and right, saw no other threat, and wearily retrieved his bat from where he’d dropped it. Something drew his attention to the ceiling, where the dark snow cone of a surveillance camera gleamed at him.
“That’s two,” Gus muttered and walked unhindered to the landing. He peeked around the corner and saw a heap of zombies blocking the opening he’d made in the first barricade. Gimps shuffled along the edges of the rotunda’s ground level, but none tried climbing the stairs. He reckoned the corpses he’d just killed were the last few crawling through after Talbert.
The chainsaw lay on the landing, and Gus picked it up, not knowing why but catching a whiff of grand destruction on the air. Tool in hand, he walked away from the rotunda, over the unmoving bodies in the corridor, and followed the carpet to wherever it took him.
The kitchen lay at the end of the hall, just before a set of double doors that opened into a games room. The area reminded him of a few favorite bars back in the days of his youth, when he roamed Annapolis on Friday nights, frequenting two-for-one happy-hour sessions and guzzling his share, making moves on the cutoff-jeans honeys and their tanned legs.
Happier times.
Unlike the vengeful shit he was about to wreak.
Why the hell Mortimer had a fully stocked kitchen on the third floor
before
the zombie apocalypse simply befuddled Gus’s commoner’s sensibilities. If the old man had foreseen the end of the world, well, that was different. But to build a mansion the size of a Hyatt Hotel and then decide it was too much effort to walk all the way downstairs for a midnight snack didn’t justify the decadence.
He dropped the chainsaw and bat on a flat countertop and stopped in front of a shiny sink, realizing how parched he was. The cupboards above held coffee mugs. He pulled one down and filled it with water from the faucet. The mug filled slowly, revealing the water pressure at that level wasn’t the strongest.
Once finished, he removed his helmet and downed his drink, leaving the mug on a tidy dish rack.
Gus studied the ceiling and saw a water distributor hung almost over the stove and its four burners…
For a sprinkler system.
Sniffing, Gus grabbed his bat and test swung it twice. The nearest camera was outside the kitchen, so he pulled a chair out from the island and used it to climb up onto the granite countertop. Once there, he studied the sprinkler before bashing it free of the ceiling. Water trickled from the remaining metal stub.
Satisfied, Gus dropped to the floor and inspected the cupboards once more, finding stores of freeze-dried food and a bottle of cooking oil. He palmed the cooking oil and hefted it thoughtfully. Fire was an old friend of his—he knew it quite intimately—and he wondered…
The oven drew his attention.
“You seein’ this, Mort?” Gus asked as he flicked on the oven and hiked the temperature to its limit. He opened the metal door and squeeze-sprayed oil over the exterior and interior, drenching it in canola gold. Some dish towels hung off a rack, as well as a roll of paper towels, and all that got heaved inside. A round wooden table and chairs filled one corner of the kitchen, and Gus shook his head at the convenience of having such combustibles nearby.
The furniture quickly fell to the chainsaw’s teeth, and Gus relished the smell of sawdust and smoke. A
whoomp
made him turn around just as the fire alarm went off. The oil had reached its flashpoint, and a great orange lick of fire filled the oven’s metal mouth. Smoke spiraled from its depths. Gus approved. He gathered up his bat and sheathed it.
Fuel
. The word got him moving.
He tossed a chunk of table wood into the oven and jogged around a corner to the nearest bathroom. The facecloths and hand towels came off in hard yanks and got fed to the flames.
All except two.
Gus gathered up a chair leg and tied one end off with a towel. The other got stuffed as far as it would go into a pouch on his Nomex jacket. He didn’t care if it caught fire eventually. The Nomex had saved his life more times than he could remember, and he trusted its protection completely.
“What are you doing?” Mortimer asked from beyond the kitchen, yelling to make himself heard over the high-pitched droning of the alarms.
The old guy sounded fearful.
Gus returned to the oven and held his makeshift torch inside the blaze. The towel caught and burned brightly in the overhead lights, which Mortimer seemed content enough to leave on.
“You’re burning my kitchen!”
Quick. For an asshole. But no one ever said assholes were universally stupid. They weren’t. They were just assholes.
A frenzied whine erupted from the speakers then, as if Mortimer were searching for something lost among a pile of rubbish. Gus didn’t care. Hefting his torch, he left the kitchen and decided to take a walk—to explore this magnificent castle.
As he walked, he applied the torch to anything that would burn: curtains, oil paintings, even the clothing of unmoving zombies. The bedrooms on either side of the hall contained a rich source of combustibles, and Gus applied flame to thick duvets and wall-length curtains. Some of the towels in the en suites he used to replenish his torch, but once done, he left the bathrooms in flames and smoke. He ignited fine-smelling linen closets filled with summer sheets of silk and winter cotton blankets. One door hid a walk-in station used for storing chemical household cleaners, all wonderfully flammable. Shelves contained cleaning utensils, rags, and roll upon roll of toilet paper. It all went into a clothes hamper of flame, doused with whatever fluids the servants had stored there. He left the area before the acrid smoke from the cauldron of burning chemicals could cause him harm.
“You’re insane.” Mortimer’s voice grated through his microphone, sounding close enough to swallow it whole. “Simply insane. How can you––how can you live here if you burn it all? How? The destruction… You’ll never be able to repair it. Listen.
Listen to me
. If you want me, I’ll tell you how to find me. Just stop burning everything. Here, I’m in a safe room on the top floor, just come on up and you can kill me easily. I’m just an old man.”
That was something to consider, but Gus had no interest in ever seeing the face of the owner. Mortimer was smart. No telling what manner of booby traps or pitfalls he protected his inner sanctum with, and listening to the old bastard’s voice, dripping with ill-hidden desire, only prompted Gus to continue on his current course of action. He much preferred listening to the panic in Mortimer’s tone, which was as fine a tune as any. Feeling surprisingly serene, Gus walked from bedroom to bedroom, burning as he went. He kept ahead of the growing blaze, however, and
tsked
upon discovering a substantial fire hazard in the third-floor library. Not even a sprinkler in the ceiling, but then, with the low water pressure on the upper level, having one wouldn’t have made a difference. He emptied shelves of paperbacks and textbooks onto the floor, some appearing notably old and probably worth a considerable amount of money. The flames devoured it all.
“You can’t
do
this!” Mortimer droned on. “My books, oh sweet Jesus, my books! You have no idea of what you’ve done. I’ve collected them since… oh
stop
! At once! Stop! What do you want? I’ll give you whatever you want! You want food? Medical supplies? Cars? Anything. Wait! What are you… that painting cost
thousands
. In the name of Christ, what is it that you
want
? Name it, and I’ll direct you to where you can find it. Wait!
Wait! You’re destroying private property!
”