Taking advantage of the chaos, Daphne rolled to her left, behind a group of three sadists who were gathered near one another. With one hard swipe of her knife blade, she cut four out of six of their Achilles tendons. Two of the three suffered the injury in only one foot, but the third unlucky sadist found both feet afflicted, dropping to the ground never to stand again. Daphne dragged her blade across his throat, ear to ear, as she stood.
One of the two who were left, a few feet away, was reaching for his rifle with his right hand, his weight on his rear end and his left hand at his side. He breathed sharply in his acute distress. Daphne lifted a knobby chunk of rock weighing around ten pounds, closing the gap between herself and the sadist as she lifted the rock above her head with both hands. She hopped up slightly as she brought its weight down onto the injured man's skull, using all of the strength in her body to channel through her fingertips and into the unyielding hunk of earth. As it made contact with the victim's skull, it crushed down the entire top of the cranium, ultimately coming to rest cradled inside the cavity that had been created. The sadist, his lifeless eyes bulging free from his distorted face, fell to the ground along with the rock, both discarded by Daphne as she continued her rampage.
The last of the three sadists with the slashed tendon, standing on her left foot with her right hanging limp, reached for her holster. Just before she could fire her revolver, Daphne grabbed hold of another sadist charging at her with a wood-cutting axe. She crushed his right wrist, squeezing until bones broke, blood vessels ruptured, and he dropped the axe to the ground. Daphne ducked and picked up the weapon. She threw it at the revolver-bearing sadist, watching it spin end over end, its blade coming to a halt as it wedged into the woman's trapezius muscle between the shoulder and neck, breaking the collarbone and producing a snapping sound.
Shots continued to be fired in Daphne's direction from those sadists who were still alive, roughly a dozen. She disappeared into the nearest tree, swinging her slight weight around and upward, then into the next tree, entering deeper into the woods.
"Why the fuck should we even bother?" snapped the sadist with the broken wrist, the one who had wielded the wood-cutting axe confiscated by Daphne, as the gunfire paused upon the aggressor's disappearance. "This is Red's mess. It's time we left him to clean it up."
"Fat chance of that," another one said. "I could see his cowardly ass getting away, somewhere safe. Then he can start all this shit over again, with a brand-new set of people."
"If he went north," the first one said, "I bet you he's headed up toward the mine just south of Viburnum, right on the highway there."
"Why do you say that?" asked a female.
"Me and Red both came from there," the male replied. "We worked the mill back in the day. There's a big, cement block building, pretty secure. I don't know for sure, just an educated guess."
"Let's hope so," said another of the sadists as they started north. "At this point, I really want to see him get his ass handed to him."
"You hear that?" one of them called out into the woods, unsure of where Daphne was lurking in its unlit depths. "If you don't kill us, we'll try to take you to him."
Daphne understood enough of the intention and tone, albeit without interpreting the individual words. She followed them along 49, heading toward the next town about 2 miles further to the north.
After a couple of minutes, Daphne heard rapid footfalls approaching from behind. She was on a stretch of road that ran through a sizeable clearing. The sadists, about 50 yards ahead, had already run through the open space, re-entering a heavily wooded stretch of road. She noted that whoever it was running in her direction, they seemed to be closing in quickly. She looked around the dark road thoroughly, noting that the only place to hide was thirty-five feet up, at the top of a utility pole. She climbed up, then sat perfectly still and breathed shallowly, her gaze down the road.
Seconds later, two figures came into her field of vision, followed a moment later by another. Daphne could tell by the movements that they were undead, paying no heed to the damage they did to their limbs as they tore down the road. As they got closer, she recognized them as freshly killed sadists, some she had taken out herself and some killed unintentionally in the spray of automatic gunfire.
She continued to sit, silent and motionless, at the top of the pole. As the zombified sadists passed her on the pavement below, they seemed to sense her presence. After a moment, however, they apparently confused it with that of the living sadists heading down the road, who were making much more noise than Daphne. She observed from her perch as the trio of undead came and went, then she slithered down and continued up the road.
She heard chaos begin to unfold as the undead sadists caught up with their living counterparts. There was screaming, joined a moment later by shotgun blasts and the barking of pistols. Daphne quickened her pace, drawing toward the treeline. She had to make sure that the entirety of the group wasn't wiped out, because she needed them to take her to Red.
Slinking off of the road, she cloaked herself within the shadows of tall pine and walnut trees as she came near to the conflict occurring between the sadists and their strong, fresh undead adversaries. Several beams of LED light bounced around the area as the panicked sadists wielded both flashlights and weapons.
Daphne flitted from branch to branch until she had a good view, crouched upon a limb stretching over the southbound lane of 49. From her perch twenty-five feet above the highway, she watched the action. A stocky sadist with jet-black hair and a matching goatee swung a twenty-pound sledgehammer at the chest of a male zombie who towered around six inches higher than he himself. The head of the sledge connected with the undead man's chest, knocking him down onto his back on the pavement. There was a distinct cracking sound as the back of his skull made impact, but he struggled still to get onto his feet. The short but sturdy sadist planted his feet to either side of the undead man's legs. He brought the sledgehammer up briefly above his head, then dropped to one knee, bringing the weapon down squarely onto the face of the zombie sprawled and dazed in the road.
For some reason upon which Daphne couldn't be bothered to reflect, she smiled in amusement as the head ruptured beneath the sledgehammer like a piece of fruit. Pieces of brain and bone rose momentarily above the road before raining down onto the corpse with the neck stump and the satisfied, goateed sadist.
Daphne glanced around, surveying the extent of damage done to the sadist party. One to her left was attempting to cover a gaping bite wound to the neck by raising the hood of an oversized sweatshirt. In the very low light, the gushing blood was like black crude bubbling out from inside the sadist. No sooner had the garment obscured the wound, than a .50 caliber round was discharged in his direction. The back of the cranium shattered upon impact as the bullet ripped through the skull, exiting the front of the face and leaving very little of the head in its wake.
Behind the headless corpse, a Desert Eagle-wielding sadist lowered their weapon, turning and tripping over a well-aged zombie who lay in the grass. From what Daphne could make out, the undead person was little more than a weathered heap. As its body was jostled by the sadist, likely for the first time since the onset of the previous winter, it released invisible waves of partially composted stench which escaped in all directions, reaching Daphne's nose. Under normal circumstances, she would have gagged as a reaction to the repugnant odor. In her current state, though, she merely wrinkled her nose as she rose and strode down the branch, where she had a more direct view of the revenent in the grass. As she reached into her bag for a stick, she perceived a myriad of smells floating to her on the breeze. There was the rotting fetor of human flesh, but also the smell of men's hair gel from the sadist who had tripped over the winter-weathered zombie. Daphne watched as he stomped down into the face of the undead individual. Having flattened its already ruined features into the ground, the sadist lifted his pant leg, crying out in despair as he felt with his fingertips, sensing a faint raised outline of the zombie's top middle teeth, which just barely broke his skin.
Daphne looked away, becoming aware of another odor riding in on the breeze. It was the smell of a fire, but not just a campfire. It smelled of dozens of materials burning all at once, many of them toxic. It was like a house fire somewhere to the north, carried by the southerly breeze. She threw the sharpened stick in her hand, aiming for the last zombie left standing. She was ready for the minor spectacle to be through so that the journey to Red could resume. In addition to the three bodies of the previously undead, there were three sadist corpses in the road. There were also at least two who had sustained bites but managed to hide the fact from the other members of their group. They and seven others continued up 49.
She chased behind them like a sheep dog guiding the flock to the slaughterhouse, hopping from the branch to the asphalt below. As she followed on their heels, she began to feel increasingly feral until she had a vague realization that she was running on all fours. The muscles of her limbs and trunk rippled and twitched rhythmically, sliding smoothly over her well-aligned skeleton. For a moment, she was sure that she could smell Red, that she was picking up the residual scent of his unique chemical signature left behind as he had traveled through the area not so long ago.
After a minute of four-legged running, Daphne lost consciousness entirely , though her body continued without her. For several minutes, she trailed just behind the sadists, barely more cognizant of her surroundings than a zombie. As the outskirts of Viburnum came into view, she began to come back into herself. She became aware of her own heartbeat and then, one by one, the sounds around her. She saw a small, burning building to the west of the road, almost surely set by Red's group. Ahead and to her right, even in the little light available, she could make out the northern edge of a dark, hulking gouge in the face of the earth that was the result of an open-pit lead mining operation. The very presence of the leaden wound was enough to make Daphne intensely uncomfortable, and compounding matters was the fact that Red's essence reverberated and echoed through the canyon carved deep into the forest floor.
She rose and straightened to a proper
homo erectus
stance, leaving the highway as she followed the others down a long gravel drive. At the end lay a large steel and concrete building surrounded by several metal pole barns and quonsets. To the north of the main building was a series of conveyors and raised mill structures. The forms of the buildings were a striking black against the moonless tapestry of swirling, nighttime clouds stretched above the chasm around which the facility was situated.
In the main building, Daphne saw LED lights through the windows, some moving and others stationary. As the sadist group approached the building, someone from inside threw the large front doors open. A shaft of cool, blue light poured out in the shape of the doorway. Daphne was already slinking away, heading for cover, as the first of the surviving sadists reached the porch. The rest of the group arrived behind him, panting and catching their breath. They regarded the shadowy figure in the doorway, lit from behind. The one on the porch began to babble in a near-delirious state, relating to Red's group what had transpired in the woods and on 49.
After a moment, a larger figure appeared in the doorway, a hulking shadow blocking the bluish beam of light. Daphne glanced down from her position on a conveyor stretching up diagonally 100 feet to a mill. She could tell by the size and shape of the form standing in the threshold below that it was Red. He came to stand by the side of the sadist on the porch, taking him by the elbow and leading him to the edge of the poured concrete stoop in front of the other assembled sadists. He mumbled something to someone inside, and a moment later the entire yardsite around the building was bathed in glowing, orange sodium vapor light.
Red stood silently with the confused man for several seconds before he spoke.
"You guys ever get the feeling that maybe--I don't know--maybe you're not wanted?" He ran a hand over the top of his head, releasing more of his scent to the breeze and allowing it to drift up to Daphne's attuned, highly perceptive smell receptors. She had already been able to smell his presence, but now the odor was concentrated. She narrowed her eyes as she glared down at him, her muscles tense and wishing for confrontation. Her enlarged pupils remained trained on him as he continued. "Hmm? And not only do you show up--
uninvited
--but you also drag her here with you? You understand it's me she's after?"
"We understand that she killed a lot of us trying to make sure she got to you," countered the sadist standing beside Red.
With no warning, Red's left hand dove for his holster, his right arm still crossed over his torso and holding the sadist by the right elbow. Behind the nameless sadist's head, Red raised a handgun and fired four times into the man's lower skull. His legs went limp, and his body collapsed onto the porch.
"The rest of you," Red's voice boomed, "if you can bring me her head, you've got a place with us. Otherwise, do yourselves a favor and get the fuck outta here as quickly as possible." He turned and entered the building, slamming the door closed behind him.