Plebs

by Jim Goforth

  "What?"

  "Shut it. Learn some fucking manners."

  "How's this for an idea Raven, you treacherous cunt?" Another voice rang out over the gathering of vicious freaks, coming from a higher location.

  CHAPTER 40

  As heads turned towards the source, eyes looking to see who spoke, including Corey and Desiree from their spot close by the church wall, they saw Blaise standing high on top of the trucks trailer, a rifle slung low in her hands, pistol holstered at her hip.

  "You let them all go," She proposed.

  Abruptly, beneath Blaise's feet the trailer began shaking profoundly, rattling and heaving with cacophonous thumps and bangs from inside, the resonance of her challenging voice evidently stirring the up until now silent Plebs into agitation.

  "Let them go?" Raven snorted contemptuously like some crazy echo, penetrating Blaise with her malevolent staring eyes. "Deluded Blaise, deluded. Tell me why the fuck would I consider letting these pitiful sacks of shit go anywhere."

  "For me," Blaise responded bluntly. "Them for me. Simple trade."

  A murmur of interest floated around the congregation and Errol Haskell's gleaming gloating mug had his reply to that offer plainly written all over it.

  For him it was a no brainer and even for many of the other guys too, swapping two girls and a guy for just the one solitary woman sounded spectacular, stacking this goddess up against the catches they’d already succeeded in snaring.

  Unfortunately some of them must not have cottoned on to the fact that this one here was one Haskell already claimed as his, otherwise they might not have been so eager to jump at the deal.

  "What's she doing?" Corey wondered to Desiree. "Is she insane?"

  Desiree shook her head and said nothing, keeping her eyes on Blaise's defiant stance atop the wildly rocking trailer.

  "Shit, she's even getting the mutant fucks all riled up," Haskell sneered. "I'm all for that deal, you bet your ass."

  Raven wasn't going to be so easily persuaded.

  She pointed her knife up at Blaise like it was an accusing finger.

  "Three for one Blaise? That doesn't sound like an equal trade off now does it?"

  "You know I can do far more damage to you and yours than any of they can, you dense cunt," Blaise snarled. "Let them go and take me."

  Upon Blaise saying these words an eruption of chaos suddenly engulfed the scene.

  The long locked doors of the Pleb prison truck burst open, the bar across it flexing and bending at an acute angle before flying free with a metallic clank, and a tsunami of highly agitated mutated monsters stampeded from the containers bowels.

  Myriad things happened at once.

  Any neutral bystander just watching the entire scene as a mere spectator would have been hard pressed to keep up, wouldn't have known exactly where to look.

  Wailing a litany of 'No's!' Dennis King raced from the far side of the church, heading towards the communal in the centre of the field.

  One of the outside men constantly wandering the outskirts watching the woods raised his rifle, took aim at Blaise and pulled the trigger.

  She was clipped, tumbled backwards and vanished over the back of the truck; dropping like a sinking stone right into the very midst of the suddenly free mass of bloodcrazy Pleb beasts.

  "You motherfucking dumbass sonofabitch!" Errol Haskell literally screamed with pure wrathful rage, his eyes flashing with an unholy vitriol, veins bulging and popping in the sides of his neck.

  He ran like an attacking silverback gorilla, tearing the rifle from the shooters hands.

  "I wanted her alive, you fuckbrained cunt motherfucker! She was mine you piece of fucking shit! I wanted her alive!"

  He smashed his own man in the face with the butt of the rifle, slamming him down to the earth then in a frenzy of hate, loss and pure savage ferocity battered the dropped shooter to death in a matter of seconds, not even stopping when blood drenched him and he was just hammering the weapon into red mush.

  Desiree was up in a flash, Corey stumbling up with far less grace, mind spinning and recoiling from the onslaught of brutality that literally exploded and continued as a series of random figures came out of the woods around the field.

  There was Jess, Pete was there too, from the right came Melissa loaded up for vengeance with a pistol in each hand.

  In a quandary of indecision Corey was torn between throwing himself out onto the bloodied field to try and rescue Lee, or go to where Blaise had been shot to fall into the pit of Plebs, either one pretty much a suicide mission as far as he could tell.

  Desiree had already chosen where she was heading. She was already dashing towards the rear of the truck with its battered doors hanging arbitrarily open, regardless of the mass of inhumane brutes that had forced their way to freedom.

  They came out of the trailer in a frenzy, gone insane in their confines and were fighting and attacking each other as they did; clawed hands slashing ribbons from one another, great teeth filled maws ripping at sections of anything.

  Very few of them were clad in the simple rudimentary garments of clothing they had been wearing back at their original ghastly dwelling, most of them wore nothing, making their wild primeval nature even more feral and affronting.

  While hordes of them stayed around the rear of the vehicle -presumably tearing savagely into the remains of Blaise- many more of them streamed out into the clearing with the blood scent in their nostrils penetrating their hungry brains.

  One of them brandished the misshapen metal bar from the back of the truck; another wielded the rifle obviously appropriated from Blaise.

  It demonstrated in the blink of an eye that it didn't have a clue how to use the firearm, for it held it like a club and then somehow managed to discharge the weapon and gutshot itself.

  Tumbling with a howl to the earth it was trampled by its bestial brothers.

  This might have been hilarious on any other occasion, like some grotesque comedy of errors, but since it was happening amidst a nightmare of epic magnitude the comedic value was lost on anyone who witnessed it.

  As the group of Plebs who rampaged into the clearing approached, some of them dropping to all fours and their haunches at the prime location of the gory pile of flesh that was Blaise's shooter, Raven grabbed Serena, swinging her around in front of her.

  This didn't just put the screaming girl between her and any approaching Plebs too bloodcrazed to acknowledge who she was, but also utilised her as a human shield from the likes of Melissa.

  Melissa herself halted just on the fringe of the woods, her dark eyes blazing with an enormous simmering rage.

  Not everyone was afforded the luxury of a human shield.

  Melissa squeezed the trigger of one gun, then the other.

  Spikes Hardface took the first bullet and her face wasn't so hard after that, it pretty much shattered in a shower of crimson.

  One of the roving guards caught the second in the chest and tumbled over on the grass.

  As the swarming Plebs started milling into the clearing Melissa turned some attention to them, as did other shooters.

  Still torn between Lee and Blaise, or more importantly Desiree, Corey swallowed a huge chunk of fear and followed Desiree, who unusually had barely been noticed by the Plebs still behind the trailer.

  These feral beasts were squabbling with one another, splashed with blood and the earth beneath their misshapen black nailed feet was equally blood soaked.

  Desiree could see nothing of Blaise, perhaps there was nothing left.

  As Corey screeched to a halt behind her, he too observed that the ground was saturated in gore, but witnessed no mangled body.

  Was the hunger of the fiends so severe by the time they had ultimately burst free of their confines that Blaise had been ripped to shreds and entirely consumed in a horrendous matter of split seconds?

  Maybe that would explain why the seven or eight still loitering here biting and clawing at each other were displaying no interest in attac
king Desiree.

  She seemed at a complete loss and the way she just stood motionless in the face of terrible danger, maybe oblivious, reminded Corey of that desolate moment she and he returned to the girls camp to find it a charnel house in smoldering ruins.

  How could she have almost lost Blaise then only to find she hadn't, and then again lose her so totally right now in such a horrible fashion?

  She turned to Corey.

  "She's gone," she said simply. "She's not there. Where did she go?"

  Corey really couldn't believe that she wasn't on the same page as him with this, that she couldn't be entertaining the same tragic gruesome thoughts as he was, but now wasn't the time to be putting them in her head.

  Better to have her bewildered than devastated.

  Better that she remained in confusion than accept the terrible inevitable.

  Especially now.

  Things were insane, the whole Spot and its surroundings were ablaze with violent activity.

  Out in the field with the horrendous pack of Plebs encroaching on those still out there, again a series of events occurred virtually simultaneously.

  Though Raven still clasped the hapless Serena, attention on the other two captives lapsed, stolen away by Blaise's strident interruption and the ensuing melee, the escape of the Plebs.

  The threat to everyone that was now presented, firearms or otherwise.

  The window of opportunity was not wasted on Lee.

  He scrambled the short distance to Tasha, grabbed her by the hand, pulled her up.

  "Control these fucking mutants!" Haskell was yelling at Raven. “I thought you could control these motherfuckers, call 'em off! Keep 'em away from us!"

  He had his bloodied weapon, the rifle snatched from the pile of mush that was now a seething mass of Plebs, some of them lapping at the wet ground, but he held its fire.

  Other felled bodies sprawled across the land were prime targets for the escaped beasts, the coppery bloodscent attracted them to the dead or dying, the easy pickings and so this is where they went first.

  Sooner or later, those bodies would be devoured. Gone.

  The living would come next.

  "I said I could control them up there. Up where they live!" Raven fired a response to Haskell. "Told you I didn't know about down here. See why I said it was a bad fucking idea to let them loose?"

  She backed slowly, but steadily from the centre of the clearing, dragging Serena with her, moving away from the corpses there, the figures dropped by Melissa's guns.

  Melissa herself was gone, vanished back into the woods once the mass of Plebs began to swarm like a fiendish plague.

  Not enough bullets to drop them all.

  "Shit, you better work out how to control them pretty quick then!"

  "I don't think I can you idiot!"

  "You better fucking try or we're all fucked!"

  Tasha looked dazed, eyes not quite with it as Lee desperately tried to snap her awake to the gravity of the situation, tried to galvanize her into flight.

  She had taken one of the kicks Raven callously dealt out as she strolled around the three grounded victims and the blow connected and collected her on the temple.

  Very possibly she had little recollection of the trigger-happy lout jumping the gun and trying to rape her before Vickerman broke up the party.

  That same fellow still lay prone on the grass; he himself had been clipped by a bullet from one of those who’d emerged from the forest in the ensuing confusion and chaos of the Plebs breaking free.

  Though he wasn't dead, he looked in no great condition to move.

  Lee took that window of opportunity presented to him as well.

  He swung a mighty arcing kick up between the guy’s legs and the wannabe rapist crumbled into a foetal ball with a terrible girlish shriek.

  Halting for a split second, Lee was contemplating dropping his knees into the wailing thugs chest and pummeling his face into a bloodied mask then thought better of it.

  The guy was leaking blood from the shot he'd taken in the shoulder.

  He was food for the Plebs.

  No eyes were on Lee and Tasha. Any of Haskell and Ravens murderous troops left were keeping their attentions on the Plebs, probably gauging how long they had to split, escape somewhere, anywhere, or whether they should get prepared to empty their guns and hope they stemmed the flood.

  Dragging Tasha in a dazed stumble Lee bolted for the woods and plunged them both into the tangled undergrowth.

  "Talk to these fuckers!" Haskell bellowed at Raven. "Let them know who is boss!"

  The beasts were done with the corpses of the dead. Like a school of deadly piranhas the ravenous mutants, obviously driven mad with hunger inside their trailer prison and not particularly liking the taste of each other, had torn the bodies to shreds, ripped flesh from bones, cracked open skulls, swallowed innards.

  Some of them in their clumsy bestial efforts to get to the meat had taken great bites of clothing, almost choking on fabrics, bits of leather, pieces of jewelry.

  On any other occasion they surely would have stripped the clothing and superfluous items from the bodies -'they're more cunning than you might think'- but now their hunger and bloodlust drove all semblances of logic and cognition from their animalistic brains.

  Now they loped and lurked around the clearing, some hoisting guns and other discarded weaponry, their own lack of primitive clothing seeming to have cut any links to humanity they might have once possessed.

  Most of them were extensively covered in blood, faces nightmare sanguinary visages with horrid eyes in masks of red, snouts splattered, hands dripping crimson.

  There must have been close to thirty, forty, maybe fifty of these horrors in the clearing. They seemed to fill the region, stark white primate like bodies in the moonlight except where they wore dark blotches and splashes of gore.

  Eyes fixed on Raven, Serena, Errol Haskell, Dennis King, Gordon Cooper, all the others who remained on the side of the woods Desiree and Corey originally crept through, many pairs of deep-set evil eyes.

  The eyes of hungry beasts. Still hungry.

  Driven so hungry in their long long hours of forced fasting that they were now insatiable.

  "Hey!" Raven barked at them, trying to lodge a serious note of authority into her voice. "Hey, you know me. I'm your saviour. Remember me? I'm your fucking god!"

  The beasts milled around. They stalked back and forth, blood dripping from their faces.

  If acknowledgement sparked in their primitive brains, or of those that spoke or understood rudimentary English, now there wasn't much indication of it.

  Their vindictive eyes stared down the congregation of people before them.

  Three of the biggest creatures, their pale torsos and long arms rippling with muscles, gathered at the front of the pack, asserting dominance.

  Unlike the majority of their flat nosed simian featured fellows, these giant burly brutes had long doglike snouts and points to their ears, more canine in appearance than the hominids.

  Captured in Raven's ruthless hold with the knife to her throat, Serena wore an expression of utter abject terror, eyes bugged out impossibly large as she gazed at the Pleb army with their three mutated leaders a triumvirate of horror at the head of the pack.

  "What are they doing?" Errol Haskell shouted at Raven. "What are they doing? Are they listening to you?"

  "You hear me?" Raven barked at the trio of beasts and their thronging gang of grotesqueries by way of answer. "I saved all of you from your tormentor, I set you free and now I've brought you here to feed. But not on me and my people. You understand?"

  If they understood they chose not to display it. They skulked; they gibbered and growled in their guttural menacing tongue.

  Then they charged.

  Raven whipped her knife down and punched the blade into Serena's stomach just under her navel.

  Serena's breath gushed out in a strangled scream and her eyes bugged even impossibly further from her h
ead as Raven dragged the knife upwards.

  She split Serena open and a geyser of blood jetted from the gaping wound.

  A curl of bloody intestinal snakes came out as Raven yanked the knife out.

  She let go of Serena and forcefully shoved the girls mortally wounded body straight at the barrage of Plebs.

  Then she turned and bolted into the woods.

  Errol Haskell squeezed the trigger of the rifle he wielded, but in using it so savagely as a battering ram on the body of his former mate he'd fucked it somehow, no shot was forthcoming.

  With a curse of despair he flung the useless item at the Plebs and took heed of Raven's departure, following suit.

  The others were already doing likewise or had already done so.

  The three Plebs at the head of the monstrous posse caught Serena's blood spewing body with a series of outstretched claw tipped hands.

  They ripped and tore, one plunging its snout into the rend in her stomach, seeking the entrails before they all flopped out on the ground.

  One of the lesser Plebs had already snaffled that trophy and loped away with it.

  It was fair to say Serena was probably still alive while this was happening, but not for long.

  The second of the dog snouted fiends closed jaws around her throat and severed her jugular.

  As more of the Plebs swamped the scene and swarmed around the bloody chaos attempting to snatch segments the three alpha brutes tried to cuff them away and keep the lions share to themselves.

  Discouraged, many of the brutes didn't bother arguing and chased the dual lunatic leaders and their departing cronies into the dark woods while others decided to press the issue and fight for some morsels of flesh.

  Yet others elected to look for prey still around the clearing.

  Malignant eyes of the hungry found Desiree and Corey, transfixed by the horrific violence, over by the truck that formerly imprisoned them.

  "The church!" Desiree blurted. "Into the church!"

  She broke into a run, snatching for Corey's hand though he didn't particularly need much prompting.