Two more dead men, a police officer and a young man in a sweat suit, both shot through the forehead, bore down on Max, pinning his arms against his chest. He kicked and kneed them, breaking bones and joints, but not getting to the vital essence Rithisak had planted inside them. He lunged forward, bit the nose from the policeman. The sour taste of dead flesh curled around his tongue. He drew the creature closer until he could use his teeth and tongue on its eyes. The packed matter broke apart in his mouth, filling his throat with bitter herbs, tangy earth, oily chemicals. Max freed one of his arms as the dead man jerked back, then shoved his fingers into its eye sockets. Holding on to the skull, he forced the cop into the youth, knocking them both down and freeing his other arm. The pregnant woman stepped forward, along with a gray-haired woman and a broad, big-bellied man.
Max went down on one knee and let the corpses get to the Lincoln over him while he finished the policeman, then the youth, his fingers beginning to ache with the effort of dragging out the odd mixtures of substances and materials from body cavities. The corpses collapsed into their natural state under his ministrations. The Beast cried out in triumph. While not as satisfying as murdering the living, the work had its pleasures. The Beast understood ruined meat and gore-stained hands. The suffering was missing, but the result was the same: What moved stopped. Taking what it could from bodies, the Beast rose to the task of butchering the dead.
Max moved without thought, riding the swelling wave of the Beast’s urgency, which eclipsed all other shadows and desires inside him. Deep in the heart of devastation, the circuit joining the Beast and Max closed. The Beast’s appetite was his action, as it was in his best moments. The Beast’s power and joy and cruelty were his, and Max savored the intoxicating rush of life he felt in death’s embrace.
The big man’s belly knocked Max back into the Lincoln’s bumper. Max bounced off metal, swung out of the way of the dead man’s relentless approach, pushed back and tripped several of the walking corpses approaching the car. The gray-haired woman, hanging on to Belly Man’s shirt, stepped into Max’s crotch with an oversize orthotic shoe as she attacked the trunk. Max trapped a leg with hands wrapped around its ankle, then shoved his shoulder into the shin. Gray Hair fell backward, arms reaching for the car, and landed with a crunch. As she tried to get up, a teenager in baggy clothes stepped onto its chest, the heel of a reflective-surface sneaker sinking into the hole through which the dead woman’s heart had been taken. Gray Hair’s head snapped back, cracked against the street. Rice sprayed up in miniature geysers from her eye sockets.
Max drove his shoulder into Belly Man’s groin, nearly lifting him off the ground. Delicate structures snapped and burst within the bubble of the dead man’s body, but his mass and Max’s broken balance forced them both onto the back of the car. The weight of Belly Man’s body, along with the corpses behind him, again pinned Max against the trunk. This time his arms were at his sides, and the press of bodies and Belly Man’s arms held him in check. The pregnant woman flailed against the hood on one side of him; the business-suited woman smashed her knapsack against metal as if it were a sledgehammer.
Max stretched forward and closed his teeth over Belly Man’s throat, ripping flesh and working the trachea loose as he worked his hands down into Belly Man’s pants. Fingers curled into claws. Wound-ruptured skin oozing cold organic sludge parted under his pressure. He forced his way into the corpse’s body, ripping through scrotum and belly, curling up into the enormous stomach where he pulled back from burning acid and worked through jellylike fat and decomposing organs, under ribs and spine, until the stretched rents he had made in the skin tore and the reservoir of the dead man’s insides gushed out with a wet gurgle, as if a drain had been opened in a backed-up toilet. Belly Man collapsed in Max’s arms, reeking of a lifetime’s bad habits. Max released its throat, reached into the heart’s cavity, and pulled out the magical detritus Rithisak had planted to replace the life-giving muscle. The dead man slid against Max, lighter for the release of inner organs. Before the dead thing fell to the ground, Max poked out its bottle-cap eyes.
Baggy Teenager appeared before him, Gray Hair hanging on to his leg. Max lashed out with kicks, breaking hips and knees and spine. The teenager fell on top of Gray Hair in a twitching heap, and Max did not bother severing their ties with Rithisak, turning instead to the women by his sides.
He intercepted Suit Woman’s knapsack as it followed a lazy arc to the car, redirected the bag’s momentum, and sent it smashing into several of the dead behind her. The woman hung on to the knapsack as if it were her only connection to what she had once been. She spun with the change of arc and crashed into a wall of the walking dead.
Max whirled around and punched Baby Woman in the jaw, trying to draw her attention. He went for her eyes first, but her fingers closed over his face and mirrored his attack, digging at his own eyes. He broke her hold, kicked back a pair of closing corpses, stuck a hand in the slit across her throat that had killed her. He rammed his hand up into her skull and poked out the dog shit and tiny plastic drug vials replacing her eyes. He poked his other hand through the same, stinking mire in her chest hole and reached for Rithisak’s magic in her viscera. Baby Woman drooped.
Another set of hands shot out from the torn fabric over her belly. Tiny fingers fastened on to his belt. Baby Woman threw herself into a final, frantic seizure as her infant fought its way out of her womb, as heartless and blind to the world as its mother. As Max fended off the woman’s final spasmodic assault, the baby emerged from the widening rent that split her from between her legs to her chest. White, luminescent fluid spilled from the rent. An umbilical cord danced in the air. The baby closed in on Max, shooting for his genitals, striking and lashing at his manhood with pudgy arms and legs. Max took the infant by the skull, scooped the shit and vials from its eyes and chest, and threw the dead husk away.
The dead crumbled in his hands, faceless, nameless, no longer individualized in his mind by sex, body type, or clothing, as the Beast swept everything away in its path. Riding the Beast, their appetites synchronized, Max’s killing moves fell into an easy rhythm of destruction, a tactical routine that hardly changed since his prey offered no variety in their behavior. Mindlessly, they went after their objective, tucked away in the Lincoln’s trunk. Mindlessly, Max tore out the glimmer of animation Rithisak had planted in their bodies after killing them. He had reached the purity of state Mrs. Chan encouraged him to attain through focused meditation and practicing chi kung and t’ai chi. Mind and body, in harmony with the world and the Beast within, fused to commit a single, repetitive act. Time vanished and the killing went on forever.
But the narrow focus of forever scattered into a kaleidoscopic burst of now as the number of walking corpses dwindled and survivors proved more difficult to destroy. A soup of blood thinned by luminescent white fluid slicked the street. Smashed bodies, limbs, heads, and organs littered the ground, ready to betray footwork. Max struggled to keep his balance, which broke his killing rhythm and disrupted his communion with the Beast. The need for calculated thinking and caution collided with the clean fury of appetite’s fulfillment. In the background, the wail of sirens intruded on the roar of raging spirits, drawing him further out of his perfect moment. And then, when only one enemy remained, the routine of closing with a corpse and reaching into its guts was shattered when the body danced out of his reach, screaming, and swung a machete back and forth as if it were more concerned with fending him off than reaching the prize in the Lincoln’s trunk.
Reluctantly, the Beast yielded to the danger of change and left him to handle the threat of a shifting world. The wave of its power crashed. Max surfaced, stripped of the Beast, running with nothing but mortal spirit in his body and mind again. Training and human instincts took over, carrying his exhausted body into a probing stance as the figure in front of him whipped the machete around in a defensive pattern. Max slipped, fell. The figure shouted at him, holding up a hand. Max rose, the reality of night and cool a
ir and stinking corpses crashing down on him. He staggered, wiped gore from his eyes. Sirens pierced his awareness. Time sprang up around Max, walls contracting, nearly crushing him with the need to get away from the street before authorities arrived and the last vestige of control over the situation crumbled. He sucked in air, aching for the feel of the Beast coursing through him even as it rattled its cage of flesh. The Beast’s ride left him feeling empty, frustrated, and he could not remember the last time that had happened.
Max heard his name.
Lost it as the Beast, unsatisfied with its feast of dead flesh and thin blood, cried for the delight that usually followed the infliction of pain. It wanted something to rape. Max glanced at the bodies, whole and in pieces, scattered across the street. Too far gone, he decided. There was no more pleasure in the remains than there had been pain. He heard his name again.
“What the hell’s wrong with you? Max, it’s me, Lee. We have to move out. Stop fucking with me, Max!”
Max squinted, focusing on the face in front of him. Features, lit by the last of the small flickering fires consuming garbage and dead men’s clothes, coalesced into a familiar visage.
Lee. Guns and harness gone. Clothes ripped and stained beyond recognition. Skin torn by a dozen cuts, covered by a film of the dead’s running fluids. But still Lee.
Max relaxed his guard. Lee lowered his weapon. The machete’s edge dripped with the luminescent substance from Rithisak’s agents. He had hacked the dead apart to reach Max, who had done his best to kill him.
Relief in finding Lee and overcoming the enemy mingled with a faint touch of shame over endangering his comrade with the Beast’s blood rage. He had lost his professional composure and endangered the mission, something he had never done before. But stronger than shame was the sense of a missed opportunity. A part of him had wanted to kill Lee.
How much of the feeling found its root in the Beast’s relentless appetite, his own ambivalence toward close companionship, or in Mani’s subtle, covetous presence within him, Max was not certain. Only the unknown strength of the last source of emotion disturbed him. One Beast gave him strength. Two could kill him.
Lee stepped forward, eyes blazing, and took hold of Max’s elbow. They ran for the Lincoln. The nearly silent wash of a stealth surveillance helicopter sounded from overhead, almost drowned out by the chorus of sirens rising from the neighborhood. Max made out a gray shape hovering above, faintly illuminated by the city’s night lights.
“I called in as I came down,” Lee said, breathing hard. He looked at his watch. “Police are on hold, but the situation’s too fucking hot. Gang war, they’re saying. People got their fingers on the trigger. We’ve got under a minute left to clear the fuck out.” He shoved Max toward the passenger side of the car.
Max threw himself into the passenger seat. Lee startled him by already being inside, breathing hard on the driver’s side. The engine rumbled, the car rolled toward the intersection. “I should drive,” he said, slamming the door. Lee, his face red in the soft glow of the dashboard display lights, gunned the engine, spun the Lincoln around, and raced out onto the avenue with a squeal of tires. Max bounced against the door, then nearly popped out of the front seat as they sped over the sidewalk curb and the carpet of bodies.
“You almost bit my fucking balls off, you fucking maniac!” Lee screamed as they hit the intersection. “Are you in-fucking-sane? You want to get us killed? You lost it, Max. Lost it all, and I’ve seen you do some crazy shit. What the fuck did that bitch do to you?”
Max tuned the car radio to the police and emergency bands. Looking past Lee, he saw one of the surviving ambush cars turn a corner. As static crackled and nervous dispatchers cluttered the airwaves, Max pointed at the escaping vehicle. “We should finish the job,” he said, the Beast speaking the unwise choice.
“With what?” Lee shouted, his voice cracking. “We’re hot, we look like shit, we’re out of firepower, and the shit we had was no fucking good anyway. This was not a clean fucking hit, in case you didn’t notice. We almost got taken by a bunch of dead-ass motherfucking zombies. What the hell was that? I mean, have you ever seen shit like that? I been through weird shit, we both been through it, but fuck this, this was straight out—I don’t even know what. I mean, it’s one thing talking about ghosts and ESP shit, but it’s a whole other game when I can’t see nothing through my scope and I know I got targets walking around, and when I hit them they don’t go down, and they ain’t wearing no fucking armor. Hell, those were mostly fucking civilians back there. I don’t know which was more fucking nuts, those dead motherfuckers walking around or you so far into your zone you were coming after me. You never come after me, no matter how kill crazy you get. What the fuck was that? You ain’t been right since that bitch looked at you, you know that? You going soft on me, Max? Or are you losing it? ’Cause if you are, you better get the fuck out of ops before you take me down with you.”
Lee’s words shot through Max but did not touch him. They were truth, but the truth did not matter to him. He had the Beast. He had his hungers. He thought of Mani in the trunk.
Red lights strobed in the distance. White search beams from the sky swept across building facades. The cacophony of sirens was growing louder, merging into one voice. Fear’s chill warned the Beast. Pain lancing through his temples alerted Max of the enemy he could not fight or consume.
A raspy voice rose out of the back of the car. Max reached for the glove compartment gun, remembered it was gone when his fingers closed on nothing. The radio squawked unit numbers, response codes, street names. Buried in the dispatch instructions, posted with recognition sequences, was their escape route. Lee stopped the car.
“You heard the radio,” Max said. “We don’t have time.”
Lee remained frozen behind the wheel. “You fucking check that out.”
Max turned on the ceiling light to investigate the voice in the back, but the real danger was outside the car, closing in. Razor-wire threads of pain laced Max’s head. Time collapsed into a single, frantic, cutting here and now. The Beast’s instincts drove it to fight, kill. Max’s needs tempted him to surrender to the Beast one final time. The Beast’s eruption was as certain as a death sentence if they were captured. Coupled in the heat of their blood lust, they would die, a rogue hunter-killer taken down by a pack of scavengers.
The Beast convulsed like a snake caught in the jaws of its enemy. It wanted to kill. It did not want to acknowledge the certainty of its own death on the teeth of authority, consequence, and punishment.
Max controlled his breathing. Following Mrs. Chan’s meditation techniques, he cleared his mind. Mani’s living shadow fell over his passion for killing. He welcomed her intrusive presence within him. Instincts and appetites calmed, leaving cold professionalism in charge of surviving.
He looked into the back of the car. He saw the outline of a plan in the play of what lay on the floor of the car, and in shadows, assumptions, fragments of knowledge.
“Shit, what a dumb-ass pair of stupid motherfuckers we are!” Lee glared at Max, sat up suddenly, and followed Max’s gaze. He moaned. “No fucking way.”
The voice gargled wetly.
Lee stared, then continued in a monotone, as if parts of him had been left behind in the dead-end street battle. “We didn’t even check the car when we got in. Fuck me, but we’re going to die from our own stupidity. Look at that shit back there. Should have smelled them, if I didn’t have so much of that stink on me already. Fucking kids and their mom….”
As Lee babbled, Max considered bolting from the car and leaving Lee and the woman for the authorities. But he needed the car to get through the escape route. And there was the plan, an endgame gaining reality even though they had not yet survived the immediate danger.
“Drive. Let’s get to Omari’s. You heard where the opening is?” Max counted down the seconds until he had to kill Lee and take the car. The Beast trembled, ready to pounce, desperate to take control and kill someone not already
dead.
Lee slid back into the seat, stared straight ahead, nodded, drove off.
“Give her up,” a little boy said from the floor of the backseat. It had taken a few seconds for whatever had taken over the corpse to gain control of the body’s breathing mechanism and vocal cords. If the boy had been alive, his raspy words might have warned of serious illness. Dead, Max knew the words were not the boy’s.
Max studied the bodies huddled together like the remains of a modern ethnic cleansing crowded into a shallow grave. The older girl’s jaw was broken, her mouth ruined by the blunt object used to kill her. The boy, still in his Catholic school uniform, his dark locks and high cheekbones casting him in the same feminine frame as his sister and mother, wore mottled bruises around his neck to show that his death had been slow, and perhaps enjoyed by his killer. The mother bore the familiar lipless mouth across the neck marking the majority of Rithisak’s corpses. Pieces of their flesh hung on the shredded leather and padding ripped away from the rear of the car, and the armored trunk wall was scratched by their effort to get to Mani.
Three sets of eye sockets filled with tacks, crumpled aluminum foil, rat poison pellets, broken glass, torn name tags, and cigarette butts fixed on Max. Three chest holes blocked by tightly woven twig and dried-leaf walls torn from squirrel nests invited the Beast to smash through and rip out the magic mechanism of their afterlife. Their fingers, nails torn off and tips scraped raw from raking the trunk wall, were splayed across the seat cushions and doors, bracing the bodies for the ride. Rithisak’s white animating fluid beaded on pale skin, reddish-brown meat and protruding white bone.
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