Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (31 page)

He gave them the particulars about the
assault, leaving out who his companions had been at the time. He
told them about the gunfight on the first floor, and then the pair
they'd turned into human-flavored jelly on the second.

“And I'd do it again
.
Anybody who
tortures people for fun, or for the color of their skin, deserves
it. And
pussies
who like to screw the unwilling deserve it
more
.”
He raised his eyes to the unrepentant, blonde
bombshell at Milo's side. “No matter who they are. Or who they
think
they are.”

The chorus of angry murmurs that went through
the men listening on the raised slab proved to Jake he'd simply
wasted his breath.

Poole raised his hands for silence. “My
friends, you've all heard this man’s confession. Even though we
must not allow the unprovoked murders of our people to go
unanswered—”

“
You. Attacked
.
Us!
You
fudge-packing, little turd-eater!” Jake pointed at Poole through
the fence. “For all your well-rehearsed arguments and pacifying,
political double-speak, the fact is you're really nothing but a
limp-wristed, wanna-be. No matter what you wear, and no matter how
you want to spin your radical, racial, hate-mongering, you're
nothing but a piece of
shit
.”

The Purifiers all stood there looking daggers
at him. No one had previously shown enough intestinal fortitude to
call their leader out, right to his face. Usually, they were too
busy begging for their lives.

“Jacob, I get the feeling you're upset about
something,” Poole said dryly.

“Gee, you think so, Betty?
”
Jake
replied. Voice dripped with sarcasm. “I've had enough of your
Rah-Rah-Rah, Team! Go-Fight-Win!
horse shit. Get Karen out
here, so I can put her in my Hummer and send her off. Afterwards,
if you feel like reading
Mien Kampf
or
The Manifesto of
Bigotry
, I'll happily sit and listen to you rant your way
through the entire damn thing. Before I tell you to go fuck
yourself, that is.”

Poole gave him a level gaze, while Tompkins
continued to fume. Nichole's face broke into a wide smile and she
folded her arms under her breasts. The Nazi's leader considered
Jake's remarks.

“Very well.” He nodded to the pair of men
who'd walked Jake into the yard, and they headed unhurriedly down
the fence-line.

The other Purifiers grew more animated as he
paced behind the chain-link, and they began to cluster together
making gestures in his direction. Jake was willing to lay odds the
bastards thought he and Karen had been intimate at some point and
were betting on whether or not he'd take her behind one of the
utility sheds for a goodbye quickie or something.

The two guards had turned the corner and just
walked out of view behind one such shed, when Poole spoke
again.

“Jacob O'Connor. You, by your own admission,
have committed crimes against the Purifier Brotherhood. You've
assaulted our people,” he waved at Nichole, “you destroyed our
installation in Mulberry, and you've killed our members.”

This was bad. The writer had hoped he'd be
able get the bastards to kill him, but
after
he got them to
release Karen.

“What's worse, you've contributed to the
corruption of our race. You thwarted our efforts to increase our
numbers, through the release the two individuals we gained during
your attack on the Mulberry facility.
That
is
unforgivable.”

The door to the shed behind which Poole's
pair of cronies had vanished began to rise. Jake could see the pair
of guards as they worked a chain and pulley system at the corner
farthest from the main building. The shelter had originally been
used to house a scissor-lift. Jake could tell because said lift
sat, covered in dust and debris, slowly rusting beside it.

As the door rolled up on its track, he saw
the interior was actually empty. There were some strange looking
stains on the concrete floor's surface, but...

No. Not stains.
He realized, and fear
began to clench coldly around the base of his spine.
Smears.

Oh shit.

*******

The light was coming back.

It got brighter as the barrier rose away.
That was loud, but it wasn't food.

There was food outside. It was moving. There
was a lot of noise from somewhere out there too.

Move towards the light and sound.

Hungry...

*******

Jake had always heard people use the
expression they'd been so frightened, that all the hair on their
body had stood on end. It was common enough. A figure of speech to
be used when telling a story about something stupid you did that
had ended badly. Like the moron everyone heard about a few years
back, that was jerking it over a belt sander and accidentally
ripped his balls off.

At least that's what the writer had
thought
, until the moment that shed door finished rising and
a handful of the dead stumbled into the transformer yard. It wasn't
the number of creatures that sent his brain into a tailspin. It
wasn't the rotting form of Tracy Dixon, still clad in her bathrobe,
looking like a semi-attractive mummy. It wasn't the man in the CGEL
work shirt and name tag that read Dwain. It wasn't the pair of
ghouls, so skeleton-thin that you couldn't tell whether they'd been
male or female prior to their deaths.

It was Karen.

The writer's knees hit the gravel covering
the yard and he stared brokenly at the once lovely, brown-haired
young woman. She was most certainly dead. Her skin was the grayish
hue common to all the creatures, and the yellow of her irises
confirmed it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fatigue bottoms she
wore were shredded all the way up to her hip on the right, and
multiple bite marks contrasted clearly against the pale flesh of
her leg. Her right boot had also been stripped away, revealing a
missing chunk on the side of her calf. That would account for the
pronounced limp she displayed as she moved her awkward and
unresponsive form through the shed's doorway.

She noticed him first. It only stood to
reason, since she was the one in the best condition. The others
were all in pretty sorry shape. The CGEL employee was missing one
of his eyes (along with the left side of his face), both the
skeleton-ghouls were pretty much blind, and Tracy had some serious
stab wounds from where her friend Carly had tried to hold her off
with a cheer-leading trophy. He saw her eyes slowly register that
he was a living, breathing human, and then the hellish expression
her face took on. He witnessed the precise moment when what was
left of lovely Karen's brain told her to feed.

His eyes were having trouble focusing through
the tears. Everything he'd done. Those men at the water treatment
plant, leaving the misguided group Rebecca let to be consumed,
torturing information out of the lone survivor of their assault on
the sewage plant, turning himself over to Poole... It had all been
for nothing.

He could read the story of Karen's death from
the awful damage her body reflected. There were a lot of bruising
under her armpits and ribs, which looked like it could've been
caused by the links of a chain. Said chain was currently piled
carelessly on the deck of the scissor-lift. They'd bound her with
it, hooked her to the lift, and lowered her down to be infected. He
couldn't imagine the despair she must have felt as the grasping
hands first closed on her ankle. Worse, all the while she would've
believed her friends would come save her.

The thought of it folded him in half over his
knees. They... he...had failed her.

“I finished her, after they chewed on her a
bit.”

Jake turned his head slightly against the
horror and, though bleary eyes, saw Nichole near the fence. She and
Tompkins had moved to within a few yards of it after coming down
the set of steps at the south-west corner of the cafeteria's
courtyard. The blonde was on her hands and knees, staring intently
at his face as Karen and the other creatures began their slow
shuffle towards his position from forty yards off.

“I did it. It was
me,”
she said, eyes
dancing in insane glee. “Stupid little kike whore was going to die
anyway. So, Milo let me use his pistol.”

Jake's teeth ground together as his jaw
clenched.

She saw his reaction and smiled. “I had him
chain her to the lift. You know, to keep her still? Then I just
walked right up and emptied my man's gun into her, from about two
feet away.”

The writer's eyes left her to look at the
approaching dead girl's chest. Sure enough, the distance and all
the gore had obscured a ragged patch of holes, dead center in her
upper torso.

The creatures were maybe thirty yards away.
O'Connor just knelt there, almost unable to keep himself from
collapsing to the gravel with unfeeling arms.

“It was easy,” she said with a wide smile.
“Pop-pop-pop-pop! She jerked as the bullets hit her, kind of like a
bug on a hot stovetop. Then, after looking down at the Swiss cheese
I turned her ass into, poor, widdle Karen just slumped right down.
For about two minutes that is.”

Jake lunged at the fence, causing the blonde
to fall backwards onto her butt as his sudden movement startled
her. Tompkins moved to crouch beside her scowling at him angrily,
but the writer was beyond all care. Flames were going up behind his
eyes. Nichole and her bald-shaven beau watched in shock as his
hands clinched around the chain-link, compressing the steel and
crinkling the diamond pattern noticeably. The creatures were twenty
yards away.

“You'd better pray I don't get out of here,”
he said quietly, as the Purifiers began cheering and hooting in
anticipation up on the dining slab. “Because if I do...
no
matter what
... I will kill the both of you.”

The dead were ten yards away.

Jake turned, pulled the crowbar from its
sheath over his shoulder and ran to meet them. A cheer went up from
Poole's men as they realized he was going to give them a show
before he got turned into maggot chow.

What those gathered didn't know, was that he
(with a lot of help from Kat) knew how to handle small clusters of
the creatures. Their nightmarish fight in the alley behind Foster's
safe-house—while nerve wracking, terrifying and utterly
disgusting—had been better than a year of paying some
overly-aggressive jerk (who couldn't even
spell
Kung Fu) for
self-defense classes. Most normal techniques wouldn't work with the
dead anyway, due to their inability to feel pain. All that
Brazilian Jujitsu, rolling around on the ground, trying to choke
your opponent out stuff was utterly useless when it came to
zombies. If you tried using a guillotine choke hold on one of
them?
While you were worrying about the one gnawing on your
arm, the other twenty you'd attracted (by rolling around on the
ground with the first), would be chewing your ass up into handy,
little bite-sized chunks.

The infected CGEL employee was a big, burly
bastard. That one would pose the largest threat, so Jake circled
around the group, determined to take him out first. The Dwain
creature gave the zombie-trademarked, bubbling, signature moan and
reached out towards him. It was missing everything on the right arm
from its elbow down, allowing the writer to dodge its clumsy,
grasping lunge. He slammed his crowbar's hook end against the
creature's temple and Dwain went
down.

Running a dozen yards past the pack, he
circled back again and shattered one of the skeleton-thin ghoul’s
faces. His whipping, sidearm swing sent its teeth flying through
the muggy, afternoon air. O'Connor then jogged left around the
other, pencil-thin creature and smashed the rising Dwain's
posterior fontanel (back of its skull) in, putting the
broad-shouldered zombie out of the fight permanently.

Karen and the other female were stumbling
against each other, attempting to reorient on him as he hurried
around one of the transformer units, but the second emaciated
creature was already on the way. It followed Jake closely, grasping
at the air in its eagerness to taste his flesh, until it rounded
the far corner of the unit and he kicked it in the chest. The
creature's back hit the machine's steel housing and he spiked it
through the eye with the chisel-tipped end of his weapon. Its mouth
stretched wide as it convulsed, then its arms fell limply to its
sides and the ghoul's dead lungs expelled their foul, final
breath.

After pulling the crowbar out of its skull,
allowing the body to fall to the gravel, Jake continued to circle
the transformer. The second painfully-thin zombie was fumbling
around blindly, thanks to all the damage sustained to its eyes. Its
corneas had been abraded by months of exposure to the elements.
Dust and dirt and insects and wind had turned them milky with
scratches, and only provided the creature with intermittent visual
images. That one was his next target.

He didn't even try to stop as he barreled
into the shambling rotter. Jake threw his shoulder into it and sent
the zombie flying away into the chain-link fence. The gathered
Purifiers cheered or booed respectively, depending on whether
they'd placed bets for or against his survival, but all of them
were clearly enjoying the show. The thing bounded off the fence
just in time to catch the crowbar's hook—swung with all of the
writer's fury, fueled strength—right between its eyes. Hardened
steel met dead bone and the creature's head split like an overripe
Durian fruit. A third of its rotted skull was taken away with the
weapon's strike, and it flopped back to slide messily down the
fence.

The bastards outside were going wild. Some
jeered, some called out encouragement, but all of them wanted Jake
to keep going. After all, there were two more left.