Authors: Brian Keene
Chuck, Drew and Dave were halfway up the second landing. Drew and Dave were side-by-side. Chuck was just behind them. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Drew’s face was flushed, and his lip was swollen and bleeding. Apparently, Dave or Chuck had convinced him to turn around again. They faltered when they saw me with the burning rag. I held it out, letting it dangle in the air. The flames climbed higher, singeing the hair on my knuckles and hand. I didn’t care. In truth, I barely felt it.
Without a word, I nudged the bucket forward with my foot and sent it rolling toward the stairs. I dropped the flaming shop rag into it and jumped back. The effect was instantaneous. There was a loud ‘whoom’ and a bright flare as the gasoline caught on fire.
“Shit,” Dave yelled. “Get the fuck back!”
His warning came too late. The mop bucket reached the top stair and tilted over with a loud crash, spilling flaming gasoline toward them. Fire raced down the stairs, licking Drew and Dave’s feet and flowing toward Chuck. He jumped to the bottom of the landing, rolled, and fled down the next flight of stairs. Drew and Dave tried running, too, but they couldn’t outrun the fire creeping up their legs. Both men screamed. Drew tripped and fell, pulling Dave down with him. Their shrieks grew louder as the flames engulfed them. The stairwell filled with smoke and the stench of burning flesh. Their hair caught fire next. Despite everything, my stomach grumbled. I closed my eyes to block out the horrible sight, and the smell changed. The stench of burning human flesh became the aroma of roasting pork. I thought back to the day that Alyssa and I got married. The caterer provided an open pit pig roast for our wedding reception, which was held outdoors. All of the guests had agreed that it was a great meal. Whenever anybody talked about that day, the first thing they invariably mentioned was how good the food had been. Alyssa’s father had eaten three servings of roasted pork, and would have eaten more if the disc jockey hadn’t called him front and center to dance with Alyssa to “Daddy’s Little Girl”.
Drew and Dave were both fully engulfed in flames now. They rolled down the stairs, shrieking and beating at themselves. The smoke made my eyes water.
The smell made my mouth water.
The fire alarm began to wail. A second later, the bunker’s automatic sprinkler system kicked on, showering the stairwell with water. Drew and Dave popped and sizzled. I stood there at the top of the stairs, stretched out my arms and tilted my head upward, letting the spray wash over me. I opened my mouth and drank greedily. I groaned in pleasure as the water ran down my head and chest and back. It felt like a baptism. I wondered what Eisenhower’s bronze head would have thought of me, had it been able to see me at that moment. Would it have been proud? And what about Alyssa? If she could have seen me at that moment, would she have seen me for the man I really was? Would
she
have been proud? Would she have regretted her decision?
I decided that I really didn’t care anymore.
“Fuck her and fuck them. Fuck them all.”
I was tired of being the prey. It was time to become the hunter. Nodding in satisfaction, I ducked back into the power plant and made preparations for war.
SIX
The bunker’s sprinkler system was fairly advanced. Only the sprinklers in the stairwell were activated. The alarm bleated for several minutes, though. The shrill wail was audible even over the generators. I knew that Jeff and Mike would hear it, so I hid behind one of the tanks and waited for them to arrive.
I didn’t have to wait long. Jeff came hurrying along at a trot a few minutes later, looking bewildered. There was no sign of Mike. I wondered if perhaps they had already reached the bodies, and decided that Mike should stay with Clyde while Jeff investigated the source of the alarm.
In his hurry, he didn’t see me hiding behind the tank. I waited until he’d gone past me. Then I slipped out from behind the tank and sneaked up behind him. I didn’t have to worry about him hearing me. Between the fire alarm and the generators, there was no chance of that. The extreme heat in the power plant had already dried most of the water the sprinkler system had sprayed me with, so I also wasn’t worried about him seeing puddles.
Despite my caution, Jeff paused. He raised his head slightly and sniffed the air. His back was still turned to me. I assumed he’d noticed the smell coming from the stairwell. Before he could move again, I pulled the box-cutter from my pocket, extended the blade, and rushed up behind him. I looped my arm around his forehead and slashed at his throat with my other hand.
Cutting someone’s throat isn’t at all like it appears in the movies. When you see Rambo or Michael Myers slit somebody’s throat, it’s always quick and easy and arterial blood immediately starts spraying from the victim’s wound. It wasn’t like that at all with Jeff. I don’t know if I cut too low or too high, or not deep enough, but there was no crimson geyser. He screamed, more from surprise than pain, I think, and tried to pull away. I was surprised that he was still able to make noise. He slipped my hold on him, got free and spun around. There was a thin, red line on his neck, almost like the indentation from a necklace chain that had been worn too long. I don’t think he was even aware of it at first, but then the pain must have kicked in. He reached up slowly and touched the wound with his fingertips, probing it gently, experimentally. When he pushed on it, a few red drops leaked out. Jeff pulled his hand away and looked at his fingertips. More blood began to flow, but it was nowhere near what I’d imagined.
“You cut me.”
I couldn’t hear him, but I understood him just the same. I leaped at him, slashing with the box-cutter. The razor sliced him just below the shoulder. When he reflexively reached toward the wound, I swiped the blade across the back of his hand. Jeff tried to turn and run, but I jumped on him, stabbing again and again with the box-cutter. He thrashed and kicked beneath me, but I managed to stay on top of him. I just kept jamming the blade into his back and shoulders and neck and head. Sometimes, the razor got pushed back up into the sheath and I’d thumb it out again, even while I struck him with my other fist. We went on like that for a long time. I don’t know how long, exactly. I know that his struggles weakened, and then ceased, and even after he’d stopped moving altogether, I kept on stabbing and slashing at him. It was exactly like what had happened with George, except that this time I had a knife. My hands, legs and face were splattered with blood, and my clothes were sticky and wet again.
When I stood up, blood dripped from my fingertips and the edge of the knife. I put the bloody weapon back in my pocket. Then I rolled Jeff over and searched him for anything useful. He had nothing on him except for his car keys and a black leather wallet. I ignored the keys and gave the wallet a cursory examination. It contained a few one, five and ten dollar bills, totally useless in the current environment, unless you were using them to start a fire or as toilet paper. In one of the wallet’s pockets, there was also a round wooden token with the slogan
IT IS WHAT IT IS
emblazoned on it. That made me grin.
“It is what it is,” I muttered. “Do whatever you have to do to survive, and if the situation changes, adapt or die.”
The other side of the wooden coin had the name of what I presumed was a strip club—The Odessa, Lewisberry, PA. After a moment, I stuck the token in my front pocket. Then I rifled through the rest of the wallet. All that was left were some pictures of a woman and two kids. The children looked exactly like Jeff. I didn’t linger on the pictures too long, because looking at them made me feel bad. I closed the wallet, but not before noticing that I’d left bloody thumbprint smudges all over Jeff’s family’s faces. I dropped the wallet on his corpse and stood up. When I walked away, the soles of my shoes stuck to the floor, and I left red footprints in my wake.
The fire alarm ceased wailing as abruptly as it had begun. The roar of the generators seemed almost subdued in its absence. There was no way of telling how long I had before Mike came looking for Jeff, or how soon Chuck and the others would recover from my attack and launch a new strike. I hurried over to the stairwell door and jammed my spear through the door handle. Not satisfied with that, I wheeled one of the heavy toolboxes over to the door, as well, and shoved the toolbox against it. Satisfied it would hold, I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and sighed.
Moving the toolbox was hard work. It was heavy, and would have been difficult even if I wasn’t weak with hunger. When I was finished, I had to resist the urge to sit down and rest. Instead, I rummaged through the toolbox until I found a pencil and a small, pocket-sized tablet. Then I returned to my hiding place behind the machinery and began making a list of everyone that had been inside the bunker when the siege had begun. I crossed off Annie, Ryan, Milo, Rachel and everyone else who had died before the decision to resort to democratic cannibalism had been decided upon. That left a population of seventeen, not counting myself. Seventeen people who had voted to eat me, except for Drew—and possibly the Chinese guy, who might not have understood what they were voting on. But while he might not have understood everything that was happening, he’d stood by Chuck and the others earlier. That made him an enemy. The same went for good old Drew, who had sold me out in the end like some cheap prison snitch.
I stuck the pencil in my mouth and chewed on the eraser, working up some saliva to ease my thirst as I pondered the situation.
Seventeen enemy combatants. I crossed off the ones I’d already killed—Krantz, George, Jim, Jeff, Dave and that back-stabbing son of a bitch Drew. True, Dave and Drew could have survived my attack, but if so, they were badly burned at the very least, and shouldn’t be much trouble. With those six out of the way, that left Chuck, Mike, Clyde, Chinese Guy, Emma, Phillips, Nicole, Damonte, Susan, Ritchie, and Charles. I’ve already told you about half of them. Nicole Baez was twenty-five who did body-piercing at a tattoo studio in Lewisburg and had worked at the hotel on weekends. Ritchie Giffen and Damonte Williams had also been Pocahontas staff. Susan Fremont was a local who had been at the Pocahontas to arrange her daughter’s wedding reception. Finally, there was Charles St. John Smith III, or Charles the Third as he’d insisted we call him several times. Charles was from Philadelphia, and worked in the music industry. He’d supposedly been, at various times, a disc jockey at WKDU 91.7, a promoter at punk clubs like House of Conflict and Stalag 13 (which I’d heard of even down here in West Virginia) and had played in a hardcore band. Charles had been passing through when the zombies attacked. He hadn’t even been staying at the hotel. He’d been gassing up his car across the street and fled here when the shit kicked off. None of them were people I’d have expected to go along with Chuck’s insane plan, but evidently, all of them had.
Ten enemies remained. Ten people that I had to kill in order to survive. Eleven if I counted Clyde. I had tried to reason with them, to negotiate mutually agreeable terms that we could abide by, but Chuck and his people wanted none of that. And they were Chuck’s people. None of them had spoken up in protest when he called them that during our argument. The only conclusion I could draw from their behavior was that the others felt the same way Chuck did—and therefore, fuck them. I considered writing their names on my forearm, the same way Bruce Willis had done in the first
Die Hard
movie, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have a magic marker and the pencil wouldn’t write on my skin. Pity, that. I would have enjoyed crossing their names out one by one in their own blood. I wished I had an iPod loaded with nothing but Motorhead songs. I’d have stalked the corridors of the bunker, slashing throats and smashing heads to the left and to the right, grinning a rictus grin and bathing in blood with “Orgasmatron” and “Killed By Death” on repeat providing the perfect soundtrack for slaughter. If I closed my eyes, I could picture it all. Even better, I could hear the music in all of its ear-splitting glory. I could smell the blood, feel its warmth as it sprayed across my skin. I could taste …
At that moment, I realized I’d been laughing, and the razor knife was back in my hands. I’d been fondling it. Worse, the crotch of my pants was stiff, and not just from the quickly-drying blood encrusting it. I had an erection, the first one I’d had in several weeks. Before, I’d thought that perhaps starvation was effecting that part of my body. Yes, I still got horny. I got horny all the time, especially when sitting in the movie room. But I’d been unable to muster much of a response in the past few weeks. Now I realized that it hadn’t been that I lacked food or nutrition. The reason had been that I lacked the proper motivation and visual stimulation. Now I had them again, and my body responded in kind. I remembered that something similar had happened to Dave right before I’d had to kill him. Maybe Dave hadn’t been such a bad guy, after all.
I became aware of a feint sound, nearly inaudible beneath the noise of the generators. It had a deliberate cadence, but no matter how hard I listened, I couldn’t figure out what the sound was. A voice, possibly? If so, I’d find out who they were and where they were soon enough. It was time to go to work. My first step was to find Mike. After I’d taken care of him, I’d finish Clyde off. Then I’d take care of the others.
As I walked toward the exit, bloody box-cutter in hand, I heard that strange sound again. This time, I was definitely sure it was a voice, but it was still too faint and disjointed to figure out who was speaking. I tried humming to make it go away, but it remained, ethereal and persistent.