The rooster took that second to challenge her, leaping into the air and flapping at her with its wings aggressively. For a second, Angie was alarmed, surprised by the attack. Then, with a flash of anger, she kicked it square in the chest like a soccer ball. The rooster squawked in outrage as it slammed up against the wall of the pen, but it did not approach a second time.
“Stupid bird,” Angie muttered, returning to Jackie’s side.
She didn’t try to speak to Jackie. She only squeezed the cloth, using the water droplets to continue washing the injured woman’s face, all the while wondering where Albert was.
A rough hand held Albert’s jaw in a painful grip, holding his head upwards, as if readying it for a kiss. Glasses, bent and shattered, and trembling with fear, the sixteen-year old offered no resistance as his assailant looked down into his eyes with the cold, unblinking stare of a reptile preparing to devour a mouse.
“That’s very good, sweetheart,” the man said, his voice soft and soothing. “You’ve done well. I know it’s been a long and difficult interrogation, but it’ll be over soon. Trust me, okay? I told you that I’d be looking out for you, didn’t I? Once Stan learns everything you have to tell him, the two of us can go off, grab a bite to eat, and maybe get some rest.”
The man holding his chin called himself T-bone, and he frightened Albert more than anyone he’d ever met. He was two or three inches taller than Albert, built like whipcord of lean muscle, with spiky, black hair, cold, hungry eyes, and finely etched, almost pretty features, over a square jaw and a five o’clock shadow. His grip was like iron and his voice was like velvet.
“Give him some space, T-bone,” the man called Stan said in a faint, Russian accent. He stood with arms folded across his prodigious chest as he examined Crapmobile. “I need to know what this little squirt of piss knows, and he’s already scared shitless. He won’t talk at all if you keep licking at him. Danny’s already ruined the other one, battering her to shit. If I had her talking, then you could take the little twinkie away and do whatever you want with him. Until, that time, shithead, back the fuck off!”
“Just trying to offer some encouragement,” T-bone said, his eyes locked on Albert’s. Nevertheless, he let go of Albert’s chin and backed away.
Albert sagged, his wrists stinging from the cords that secured his arms around the back of the chair. He didn’t know why they’d restrained him so thoroughly. There wasn’t one of the six men, or even the two women, in the room that he’d have a hope of overpowering if he were free. It was like eight tigers tying a gerbil to a chair. It felt redundant.
A shadow looming over him caused him to look up, and he gazed into the interested face of Stan, or Radek Stanislav. Stanislav was the leader of this seemingly impossible group, the Neanderthal glue holding a pack of savages together. How had such a group evolved after only one month of the apocalypse? Albert could only wonder. But while Marshal’s community was functioning, pulling together and working for the common good, this place was a little slice of Hell, with its demonic denizens indulging themselves in every way imaginable.
Stan considered him, cocking his head to one side, then crouched down to bring his face closer to the captive boy. He was a big man, with powerful muscles and brutal combat skills, capable of killing someone with his bare hands. This, however, was not what kept him in charge. Beyond his physical capabilities, Stan was highly intelligent, cunning, and had an almost eerie ability to measure a person with a glance.
“Listen, kid,” he said in an unthreatening voice. “You seem smart. Even without T-bone drooling all over you, you’ve probably figured out the kind of trouble you’re in. Here’s the thing, though. T-bone doesn’t run this place. I do. And if I tell him you’re not to be touched, or anyone else for that matter, then you’re in the clear. You see, there’s only two types of people around here: my people and the animals, and it’s up to you to decide which of those two groups you’re going to belong to.”
He reached out and put a friendly hand on Albert’s shoulder.
“You’re in the position to do me a favor,” he said. “Ever since we captured you yesterday, my smartest guy – Leonard over there. He’s kind of a mechanical genius – has been going over your transportation, trying to understand why it works. The three of you were able to travel through a city filled with zombies, power it electrically, even though the grid’s been down for over a month, and you look as healthy as the day you were born. How? Were you? Able to do that?”
Albert looked down into his lap, and thought back to the moment when Marshal had asked him if he wanted to join Jackie in forming ‘Team B’. His first impulse had been to decline. Exposure to the outside world had never been his strong point, even before it came to be populated by flesh-eating zombies. Getting the job at the bagel shop had been the single greatest act of courage of Albert’s lifetime.
But everyone else was so brave. Albert wanted to be brave too. When Luca had invited him to help him and Brad on the move from the wreck yard to the gymnasium, his heart had thumped in his chest like a kettledrum, but he’d agreed. In Albert’s experience, it was like being called up to ride shotgun with Captain Kirk and Han Solo. Despite his fear, it had been an exhilarating experience, and he’d found himself wanting more.
Teaming up with Jackie, who was friendly and funny and kind of sexy, was like half the sci-fi books and comics he’d ever read. Okay, so she was a lesbian, and he wouldn’t ever go there, and even more, wouldn’t want her to think he wanted to go there, because it would be kind of pathetic… but! Who cared? Who better to be your wingman in meeting other girls than a lesbian? They couldn’t all be gay, and to the ones that weren’t, Albert would look the coolest of the cool. And besides, he was being acknowledged for his skills at flying the drones, and it was good to be an ace pilot, albeit, a different kind of ace pilot.
And now? Now, it had all come crashing down, and he was Albert the loser again. The last thing he’d seen before something caught him hard across the head, had been Jackie and her valiant attempts to defend him with the taser. She’d been so brave. She got two of them, he knew, but the last thing he’d heard as the lights went out was her squeal of agony.
So much for comic book dreams and bitter realities.
Stan sighed in response to Albert’s long silence, smiled a half-smile and shook his head. Behind him, T-bone’s gaze could have been a spear gun.
“Albert,” Stan said, reaching out to scoop another chair so that he could sit across from him. “Do you know who we are?”
“No,” Albert answered, looking around at the other people in the room. “Bad guys?”
Stan laughed, and leaned back in his chair. Other than Stan and T-bone, there was Danny, just credited with ‘ruining’ Jackie, and who looked like he was having the time of his life. Then, there was the man Stan had called ‘Leonard’, smaller than the rest, wearing glasses and a bird’s nest hairstyle. He was inside Crapmobile, alternately fidgeting with the gadgetry or tapping away at the keyboard. He ignored everything else around him, engrossed with his tinkering. And then, there were two other men whose names Albert hadn’t learned yet. One was a stocky, lumpy-looking Italian man who looked like a bulldog with a buzz cut. The other one looked like a Viking biker, tall, built like a wrestler in torn denim, and big, leather boots, with thick, blondish hair, tied back in a ponytail.
The two women in the room were as different as night and day. One, who Albert had come to think of as ‘knife-girl’, was always slumped or leaning against something, and playing with a knife of some kind. She was thin and good-looking, with tight, black jeans, black T-shirt, jacket, jet-black hair and a creepy, half-smile. The other could easily be mistaken for a man, except for her massive chest. Thick-bodied and heavy, with fat arms, short, reddish hair, and tattoos on her neck.
Albert had been watching all of them since he’d been hauled into this room and tied to the chair. He’d spent the night in a pigsty with three mid-sized pigs, dangling from his wrists, bleeding from
the cut on his forehead. Sleep had overtaken him only in short bursts, and he’d been awoken several times by nightmares of a pig eating his junk off.
Then, there was the giant, a hairy, fat one called Chugger, who patrolled the pens. It was Chugger who’d come to get him. Six foot six, four hundred, maybe four hundred and fifty pounds, he’d grabbed Albert like a doll and held him pressed up against his flabby belly as he untied him from the pen. The strength of the man was casually terrifying, and he’d flung Albert with his hands still tied together over his shoulder without even a grunt of effort.
Smack!
An open-handed slap across the face made Albert’s world spin.
“Focus, Albert,” Stan said, like he was instructing a child. “Did you hear my next question? No? Well, let me help move this along then. You know my name already. Most people just call me Stan. On the day of the outbreak, I was shackled to a table in front of a federal appeals judge, hoping for leniency on my life sentence. Right in the middle of the appeal, news arrives that some kind of natural catastrophe was taking place, and people were being evacuated.
“Everybody wanted to run, of course, but there were a lot of guys like me there that day, see, and decisions had to be made fast. Some of us, they just let go. Fuck it, they said. We’ll just ‘re-catch’ them later. But guys like me were a different matter. They were worried about us, so they rounded up the worst of us, along with a few they didn’t have time to separate out. They stuck us on a prisoner bus, and sent us off to Mimico South Detention Facility until further notice. No evacuation for us. Just more prison.
“Funny thing, though. The bus got hit after only a few minutes on the Gardiner Expressway. One of the undead got in the way, and the collision knocked our bus clear off the viaduct, over the rails and down into this neighborhood. About a third of us got killed just making the landing, including one of the guards. I got his keys off him, and while the other guards were trying to fight off the zombie, I started getting everybody else free. Then we stole some clothing, and when things kept getting worse, ran like shit for this slaughterhouse I used to work in. See, I was thinking that it was a good place to lay low and hide because of all the hidden corners, hallways, basements, and rafters.
“Turns out that it was the smartest thing I could have done, and me and my people are alive today because of it. The monsters don’t want animals, and the fact that this place is so packed makes it hard for them to find us. All we had to do was climb into the pens, hunker down, and the things would pass right by us. Maybe it was the noise or the smell, but whatever it was, it kept us alive while the rest of the world got eaten.”
He laughed harshly.
“But do want to know what’s really funny, Albert? We escaped prison, survived the apocalypse, lived long enough to learn that the legal system that put us in jail has collapsed, and guess what? We’re back in prison! Not one of us dares leave this place, so after all that, we’re back to square one again, bouncing off the walls and just trying to survive. Hilarious, isn’t it? I guess you’d call that karma.
“Of course, other people eventually ran here to hide also, and we let’em in. Rich, poor, fat, thin, male, female, especially female. At one point we had, like, a hundred people hiding in here, only most of them didn’t like how we were running things, so they ran off. Probably dead now, I guess. Anyway, we started incarcerating the others, only this time, it was us who were the prison guards and them that was the animals. Funny, eh? Well, we thought it was funny. Some of them – the ones who were willing to see things our way – we let them become one of us. It’s all about whether you can prove yourself, Albert. Show us that you’re able to contribute, and you go from animal to teammate.”
“Just put a knife to his throat, Stan,” knife girl said, sneering at Albert like he was something she’d had to scrape off of her shoe. She gestured at him contemptuously with a knife. “He’s just another pussy-boy! Threaten to cut his balls off and he’ll sing like a canary!”
There was a general rumble of laughter at this.
Stan met Albert’s eyes. “You see how it is, Albert? Even Amber has your number. That’s Amber who just spoke, by the way. She cut up her own mother in a fight over a half-bottle of vodka. That’s her story, anyway, and since she’s cut three of my boys who tried to take a piece of that sweet ass, I’m inclined to believe her.”
He turned his attention to Amber.
“Thanks for pitching in, sweetheart. You know I love you, right? I do. But if you speak out of turn one more time, I’ll have the boys run a train on you, knives or no knives. I need this kid, all right?”
Amber flipped him the bird, but didn’t say anything more.
Stan pulled his chair around next to Albert’s, allowing him to put his arm around him.
“You see, Albert, she can’t give me what you can: our freedom. I get it, that you and those two ladies that traveled with you were able to move around in this mobile junk pile, but I don’t understand how. Why don’t the zombies attack it? How do you get in and out without being spotted? There’s undead everywhere. We got lucky when we stormed your vehicle, but you seem to be able to come and go as you please. How? And where in God’s creation are you finding electric power? Leonard tells me that you have some sort of wireless computer link, but that someone disconnected it the second it was discovered. Who did that? What other people do you have working with you? How many of you are there? I want to know everything. Think of it this way, Albert: change sides, and I’ll make you one of us. You like women? We have plenty to share. Boys? They’re yours. Power? Like I said, you’ll be one of us, untouchable and entitled to anything that we can take. Help make us free, Albert, and you can write your own ticket. Or don’t…”
He used a hand to force Albert to look up at T-bone, who blew him a kiss.
“… and find out how the other half lives, then wind up telling us anyway. Thing is, it would take time to do things that way, but I’m not willing to wait. One-time offer, Albert. Take it or leave it.”
Albert was drunk with fear, and his mouth opened to speak, almost of it’s own volition. In his mind’s eye, he could see his parents, flanked by Rabbi Weinstein, who were the only people who’d ever really cared about him, urging him to talk. Don’t defy them, son, his father seemed to say. His mother just looked on, her tears flowing for her little boy, and more than anything, Albert wanted to run into her arms and know that everything would be okay. Tears welled up in his eyes as he remembered they were dead.
“What is it with this kid?” the one called Danny said out loud to the room. “Look at him! He’s crying! Hey, kid! Answer the questions, or T-bone will really give you something to cry about!”
A general rumble of laughter followed, hissed back into silence by an impatient Stan. The door opened, and a young, limber-looking black man entered with purpose. When Stan speared him with a glance, however, he held his tongue.
“You… I…” Albert managed to start. Here it was. He remembered Eric, pulling him from the rubble of the bagel shop near Queen Street Subway station. He pictured Marshal and Luca, and their hopes for the future. He pictured Angie and beautiful Krissy, and Cesar, who promised to teach him to play an instrument if Albert would only help him form a new band. He pictured Jackie, the other half of the dynamic duo he’d tried to be a part of. Stupid dreams of being a hero never seemed more absurd then they did now.
He pulled himself together, and looked Stan in the eye.
“Suck. My. Balls,” he said, offering up a beatific smile of triumph. “I’d rather die a pussy-boy, than sell my soul to a piece of crap like you. You and T-bone and everyone else here can kiss my butt. I hate you for what you did to Jackie, to Angie, and to these people. I’ll never follow you. I hope you all die horribly.”
And that, he decided, was what made heroes what they were. Not riding around in trucks with hot babes, or being a crack pilot at flying drones. Heroes died, or were willing to die, for the things that mattered. They died for their friends. They
died for their principles of right and wrong. They died because, sometimes, human sacrifice was the only thing that would cause the Gods – or just simply, God – to sit up and take notice of just how shitty he’d let the world become.
The look of shock on Stan’s face was a tiny reward. In the stunned silence that followed, no one spoke, and even Amber looked surprised, fumbling her knife so that it slipped out of her hands. The sound of it hitting the floor with a metallic clatter was alone against the silence.
Seconds later, the silence was broken by an explosion of laughter, as the young black man who’d just arrived cracked up.
“Oh shit,” he heaved, trying it to swallow big gulps of air. “That shit’s the funniest thing I ever heard. Stan! The looks on all your faces, man. You gotta give this dude to us. This kid is awesome! Don’t let T-bone go messing with him.”
“Shut up, Jerome!” Stan said, standing up from his chair and looming over Albert.
Without warning, he punched Albert in the face three times, shattering glasses, teeth, and bone with a fist like concrete. Albert didn’t have even a chance to wail and the brutal blows ruptured his face. Three gurgling, high-pitched yelps were all he could manage, and then the blood was flowing, down his chin, his eyes, and the hamburger flesh that had been his face.
“You made a mistake, Albert,” Stan said in a calm, cold voice, pulling a rag from his pocket and wiping down his fist. “Don’t worry, though. You’ll have a long, rich lifetime to consider where you went wrong. Rest assured, this is just the beginning.”
“Hold up! Hold up!” Jerome shouted, stepping up and into the center of the room next to Albert’s chair.
“You looking to take his place, Jerome?” Stan snapped, whirling on him. “You want to see what a sense of humor gets you?”
From Oblivion's Ashes Page 41