Death and Biker Gangs (19 page)

“He leads ’nother group, but he and Blair have made an alliance. Keeps us all safer from Mal.”

“Mal,” I repeated. “Who’s Mal?”

“Crazy sonofabitch. Thinks he rules the place. You don’t need to worry, though, we’ll protect you.”

Oh, great. More crazy sons of bitches. They reproduced faster than gerbils.

“Yeah, we’ll take care of you. Although I tell ya, some of the boys are mighty pissed over what you did to Blair.”

His zig-zagging around topics made me dizzy. “Who’s Blair, and what did I do to him?”

“You know, when you tried to feed him and Rory and Patrick and the boys to the groundhogs. Only Blair got away, though we’re not sure he’s gonna make it.” Ronald looked at me, his brow furrowing into an expression of true confusion. “Why the hell would you do that, lady? That’s just fucked up.”

Oh, shit. Oh 
shit. 
This had to be karma, or maybe I’d died and this was purgatory, or…

Something thumped outside the bedroom door.

Ronald got pale. “Shoot, I thought he was in bed.”

The door banged open, and a hulking dude with bandages swathing his upper right arm and half his face came storming in. The bandages were saturated with pus and blood, and when he waved a hand at me, the stench of dying flesh almost knocked me off my feet.

Oh, this is not good. 
I recognized the feverish stare and the beady eyes—he hadn’t had his bites treated properly.

“Hey, Blair,” Ronald said.

Of course. Of 
course 
it was Blair.

He had the same reddened, festering sores on his skin as the boys at the massage parlor. Yellow-green pus oozed from the ruined bandage, ran down the side of his arm, and dripped onto the carpet. 
Holy shit, what are those lesions? 
The sores looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place them. 
What the hell causes that…

“Blair,” Ronald said, a hint of nervousness in his voice. “I was just talking to the gal here, and…”

Blair crossed the room in three steps. “How about you give me a few minutes alone with the little bitch, Ronnie?”

No, Ronnie, stay here. 
I didn’t think leaving me alone with the leader of the biker gang I’d fed to the undead would end well for me.

“Uh…I’m supposed to help her acclimate n’stuff…”

I nodded at Blair’s upper arm. “You need medicine for that. Stitches. Revenants clamp down hard, so they get through the outer layers of tissue pretty eas—”

THWACK. 
The back of his hand collided with my face, and I landed in a heap amidst the guns. Stars swirled around in front of my eyes, and everything in my head screeched to a horrible, crashing stop. Blair’s big hand closed around my wrist and jerked me up off the floor.

“Hey!” Ronald’s head blurred in front of me, but whatever attempt he made to rescue me was swiftly rebuffed. “Don’t touch her!”

My vision cleared slightly, although I was pretty sure I had tears streaming down my face. 
Oh, hell, that hurts.

Blair snarled at me, revealing bloody gums surrounding otherwise excellent teeth.
Well, at least one of them flosses. But the virus has really set in. He succumbed fast. 
Maybe he had a preexisting condition. Heart palpitations. Blood clots. The doctors hadn’t worked out why the virus worked fast or slow, beyond hesitant connections to age, general health, and lifestyle. It’s kind of like acne that way.

“You killed my boys,” Blair said. Sweat beaded on his brow, clumping up beneath strands of thinning blond hair. “I saw you on that fucking roof.”

I wiped at my nose, and almost jumped when I saw the red smear across my hand. I wasn’t crying, I was 
bleeding. 
“I was trying to warn them!”

“Blair,” Ronald said, “you leave her alone. Arthur said we need women!”

“Arthur won’t mind if she’s got a few more bruises. What’s your name?”

“Vibeke,” I muttered, because I wasn’t clever enough by half to give him a fake name. My ears were starting to ring again.

“Well, 
Vi-beck
, if I had my way, your head would be on a fucking stick to warn off intruders.” He gave me a sickeningly dark, bloody smile. “But I guess we can think of other ways for you to make up for your sins, can’t we?”

That didn’t sound ominous or anything.

Ronald edged closer to us, his voice coming out in a squeak. “You hit her again and—”

“And you’ll what, you little shit?” Blair grasped Ronald’s neck with one meaty hand, squeezed just enough to make the kid squeak, and shoved him several feet away. “Last I checked, I was still in charge, at least until Arthur got here, and he ain’t due until evening.”

Ronald evidently knew a threat when he saw one and scrambled backward, his fingers catching the doorknob. “I’m gonna get help, Vib…whatever the hell your name is.”

He fled, slamming the door behind him.

Blair didn’t seem to notice. “The guys’ll like having a woman around. Makes things a lot more pleasant.” He eyed me critically, the way Clive did when I tried to weasel my way out of the Blood Nuts concert. 
Go do your job, Vibeke.
 “Well, once you’re fixed up, anyway.”

“You should talk,” I muttered. Big, ugly splotches of purple and red stood out along his lower arms, further signs of the virus setting in, or the pathogen hosting a party, or whatever it was that turned normal people into zombies if their bites weren’t treated. I was so busy staring at the splotches and the burns that I didn’t really register the muscles in his right hand bunching, nor the fist as it blew toward my face and cracked against my cheekbone.

“What are you 
staring at?
” he snarled.

I landed next to the pile of firearms, gasping for air. Blair might be dying on his feet, but he still hit hard, and didn’t seem to care that I was half his size. Tony had been warning me right along about assholes like this running wild after the end of the world, but I’d been spared any actual encounters with them.

Blair coughed and hacked behind me, sounding like he was bringing up something wet. I reached out to the right, and my hand closed around cold metal. I explored it briefly: a smallish pistol. I’d gotten used to using a rifle, but Tony had given me a decent primer in smaller firearms. I switched off the safety.

Blair must have heard it. “What the fuck?”

I rolled over, pointing the pistol at him. “Oh, shit, look what I found.”

I squeezed the trigger over and over again, aiming in the general vicinity of his head. The shots roared out, and the pistol jerked in my hand four times...five...six...

Click. 
Empty.

I stumbled woozily to my feet, my ears ringing. Blair was on the floor, clutching his right knee, emitting a high-pitched shriek any death metal vocalist would take pride in. Blood spurted out around his fingers, drenching the carpet.

Holy shit, I’d shot his knee out. And his shoulder, by the looks of it.

I let the revolver slip out of my quivering hands. “Sorry,” I croaked. “I’m used to bigger guns. I thought I’d just get you in the head…sorry.”

Why the hell am I apologizing?

Blair flopped toward me, reaching out with a bloodied hand.

I fumbled around for a more familiar-looking firearm. I settled for the biggest, meanest-looking shotgun in the bunch and pointed it at him, not sure it was even loaded. “Now,” I said, pumping it to show I meant business, “you’re going to tell me how the fuck to get out of this house.”

The door hinges creaked loudly, and I jerked around, expecting to find Ronald gawking at me from the doorway.

Tony leaned against the doorframe, holding a silenced pistol in one hand and my elderly assault rifle in the other. “Take the stairs straight down and head out the front door,” he said, as if directing me to the bus stop. “Pretty easy.”

I stared at him, not entirely sure he wasn’t a hallucination of some sort. People hallucinated under stress, right? Maybe I’d dreamed up Tony right when I needed help most. 

He leaned slightly away from my stare. “You okay, Vibby?”

Am I okay?
I ran a quick check of my facilities and decided I was indeed okay, at least physically. I cleared my throat. “What are you doing here?”

“Rescuing you?” His gaze drifted down to Blair, who had a puddle of blood forming around his leg. “Should I let you get back to what you were doing?”

The gun shook slightly in my hands. 
Rescued? He’s rescuing me?
 Tony McKnight was trying to save my ass?

He didn’t forget about me.

He stepped inside, fixing me with a stare. “Vibeke?”

I wanted to hug him. No, I wanted to throw myself into his arms and be held for a good long while—but now wasn’t the time. “I’m really glad to see you,” I whispered, forcing the words out one by one. “How did you get 
in
?”

“We watched the house until a bunch of them left. You started shooting, he started screaming, I came inside and shot his buddies as they headed for the stairs.” His mouth turned up when he saw the guns in the corner. “Hell 
yes
, parting gifts! Here, trade you your rifle for that shotgun.”

Oh, my precious, I missed you.
 I snatched the rifle back a little too quickly, relishing its solid heft. This was probably akin to what guys felt for their muscle cars. I kept it trained on Blair, who was keening softly to himself, his arms and legs twitching.  “Hurry up,” I said to Tony.

“We’ve living the video game dream, Vibeke. Just let me savor it for a sec.” At last he straightened up, several guns and one sack of ammunition heavier. “You’re in luck, they’ve even got rounds for your gun. Wonder where they dug those up.” He gestured to Blair with his pistol. “You want to finish him off, or shall I?”

I looked at the blood around Blair, at the bandages concealing rotting wounds. “He’s fucked already,” I murmured, trying to sort through whether I actually felt bad about shooting him or if what was left of the world was better off without him. “He got bit and the virus has set in. And those burns…and he’s losing plenty of blood.”

Tony maintained his façade of nonchalance. “Yeah, I noticed…you do that on purpose?”

He was there at the massage parlor,
I wanted to say. 
I killed his boys and he was going to kill me, and I tried to aim for his head…

There probably wasn’t a way to answer without making myself looking either completely inept or batshit crazy, so I took the simpler route: “He hit me.”

Tony started for the door. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

Ronald lay askew on the stairs. One of his compatriots was sprawled across the living room. I stopped in my tracks and grabbed Tony’s arm. “What happened?”

“What does it look like?”

“You 
killed them?
”

He swung around, his dark eyes boring into mine. “What else should I have done, Vibeke?”

I stared down at Ronald. He’d landed on his back, his hands well away from any of his weapons. “You just killed him! He wasn’t doing anything, he was trying to help me when Blair went after me—”  

His hand landed on my shoulder, and he shoved me back against the wall. “They didn’t seem interested in reasoning with us when they snatched you,” he said, “and the guy on the floor was already going for his gun when he saw me. Hell, 
you 
tried to empty a pistol into that poor fucker upstairs.”

But I only hit him twice
. I didn’t actually 
say 
that; then he’d just lambast me as a poor shot.

He leaned in close—too close. “You can tell me what a brutal shit I am later, okay? Let’s get out of here before their buddies come back.”

My mouth was too dry to answer him, so I just nodded.

“Damn fine timing on that kneecapping, by the way.” We stepped carefully over Ronald and his blank, staring eyes. “They were already heading up to investigate whatever you were doing, and they just looked so 
surprised
…”

Sorry, Ronnie. 
I looked away from the kid’s blank eyes. He hadn’t seemed all that bad…well, comparatively.

“Think I got five of them,” Tony went on. “I need a new magazine, but that’ll wait. The one on the left, he just looked up when I walked in, got him in the eye…”

He paused his killing spree rundown to stroll out the front door—

—and promptly dove back inside when a cluster of bullets sprayed the porch.

“Of course,” he grumbled, hefting the shotgun, “we can’t catch 
one 
break.”