by Ryan Harding
Is he wondering why it’s so bloody up here when it was dry downstairs?
As if cued by the thought, a blood trickle edged down her thigh from beneath the tourniquet and crested over the bone of her knee cap, down her shin. Her mouth opened into a startled oval and she sealed it shut. She stifled the impulse to pat it dry with the dress. She arranged the blood trail to keep him a couple feet away from her until he passed her, but he knew its destination by now. He was more purposeful in his stride, only interested in the door. He would pass within inches of her instead of a yard.
A tiny ball of tumbleweed rolled around in her throat, daring her to cough it away. Her nose became micro-sensitive to all the dust particles floating around the department store after years of deathlike silence, stirring her sinuses with the assurance of an easy way to clear it all out. Her eyes watered. She squeezed the handle tightly. If he was looking at her, he’d have seen her arm shake slightly.
If he bumps into me, he’s going to know I’m not a mannequin.
Gin had to remind herself not to shy away from him. Had she seen more than the waist down, she might have flinched. With the moment arriving, all the compelling arguments for a surprise attack seemed foolish and suicidal. Let him walk outside and she’d keep still, lay low in here until sunrise and hoof back to the lodge.
As long as he doesn’t wonder why the blood conveniently stops once he gets to the stai—.
He stopped barely a foot past her. She thought the sirens started back up, but it was only a screaming alarm in her head that the entirety of her existence would be reduced to the next few seconds. Her hand shook and the bundle stirred in her arms. He would have only heard wood or metal lightly brushing against fabric, but it triggered something; maybe an acquired sixth sense for stalking honed by decades of practice. He about-faced, already raring back with the mace, the chain rolling out to its full length.
In her panic she should have dropped her clippers and stood there staring blankly with a sweater draped over her arm until the ball decimated her skull and turned her into a mannequin as efficient as the one beside her. Somehow, she didn’t. It seemed to happen as a scene she watched from outside herself. The sweater dropped away as she lifted the clippers with the right hand, the left automatically enclosing the other grip as she thrust, the blades a united shape with a triangle tip. She wrenched upward, the area of his throat the only semi-vulnerable place with the protection of his mask.
The point of her blades caught him under the chin and seemed to punch through it as easily as a square of butter, albeit with an abrupt crunching as it speared through bone. He backed up and fumbled the grip of the mace, which thumped and rolled behind him. He tried to pull the clippers from her by turning and stepping sideways. It may not have happened if she hadn’t wounded that leg earlier, but his foot came down in spatters of blood and slid. He went down hard face first. Gin kept a hand on the clippers. Her grip kept his head pulled forward as he dropped. She went down with him. The floor met the bottom of the grips and pounded the blades deeper through his skull. More crunching, wetter now.
His hands flew to his throat, groping for her wrists. Gin wrested the blades side to side, mostly to avoid his grip rather than inflict more damage with the blades, but conveniently doing both. He fought his way to his knees, clawing himself upright for better momentum to fight. She knew he would win, too; petty things like a brain partially bisected with glorified scissors still wouldn’t cost him his strength advantage.
Gin pulled the blades open.
They didn’t give easily, even with all the additional divots she sheared through his gray matter, but she ripped both handles to either side, widening the arc of the blades in his cranium. She saw a hint of the blade poke through the right side of his head like a tiny horn. They cleaved through bone on both sides, within his head and jaw. He stopped moving instantly, dropped both hands to his sides. She heard a hard spattering sound, like rain water through a gutter. Blood sprayed her arms, surprisingly warm for a dead man. Clumps of mush dropped through the newly created divide as an exodus of brain tissue spilled to the floor with moist slapping sounds.
The hedge trimmers pulled from his head with the ease of car keys from an ignition. He settled back like a man who has committed seppuku, hollowed out. Gin didn’t hesitate. She stepped around and pushed him on his face. The adrenaline mercifully muted the fire of her arrow wound and she acted while she had the reprieve. She settled on his back and opened the jaws of the blades, pushing them against the back of his neck. It was much slower going here as she shredded through tough muscle, opening deep gouges until the clippers met the block of spine; then an additional struggle to saw through that block of resistant bone, aware of seconds ticking as though in a countdown to defuse a bomb (which in a way, this was). She stood up and put her lower body into the effort as a dark pool seeped out beneath his face. With a final snap, the blades clasped shut and the head sheared away. She rolled it awkwardly, a little superstitiously. It didn’t go far with the bulky mask, but she was satisfied.
She crawled away, still holding the clippers, not wanting to touch him another second. She admired the shadow of the blades in the weak light.
“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you more,” she said. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Gin imagined him talking to his weapons in Vietnam, and decided that was enough dialogue. She considered a look with the night vision behind the mask, but it seemed far too much effort at the moment. Weariness settled into her body with profound soreness in her arms and shoulders. She hurt all over as the shock of battle wore off.
It would be easy to let gravity do its work and drag her down into blissful sleep, but she remembered Patrick’s theory of a recovery team.
The countdown wasn’t over.
Eighteen
As it turned out, if they had tunnels they didn’t use them for the “recovery” operation. In a post-adrenaline stupor she hobbled down the road out of Morgan when a sharp skid and crash broke through the dull monotony of the distant sirens. Gin lurched into the woods seconds before a convoy of four white box trucks led and followed by two black Humvees rounded the bend without headlights. They didn’t slow down as they passed her on their way to downtown Morgan. She wondered if Patrick’s tracking device paranoia had saved her life.
On the road again, she picked up her speed to make the most of the new adrenaline burst. The journey was more bearable with a makeshift crutch beneath her armpit; she’d cut the bristles from a push broom, wrapped the head with a sweatshirt, and lopped a few inches from the handle so it would be the right height. The clothing store yielded other treasures with the help of the night vision goggles: a change of clothing, a first-aid kit, a map, and brochures about local tourist destinations. Thirty-year old Wrigley’s Doublemint gum practically dissolved in her mouth but when she spat it out it took the taste of Adam’s skull with it. She procured a backpack for all of this (minus the gum) and used it to stow the crossbow bolts, knives, and the giant-slaying hedge trimmers. She wore the goggles.
The store had been an anomaly in Morgan, a place practically untouched. She found unsent letters (the stamps cost twenty-two cents) on an office desk and bagged them for potential Stalker commerce. They suggested how immediate the desertion of town had been along with the entire shelved and racked inventory locked in a strange state of suspended animation, forever stuck between one work day and the next.
A rustling in the woods spooked her and she halted, unslung the crossbow and aimed into the trees.
It’s him. He’s back already.
She didn’t really believe that (she doubted she would hear him at all), but it was something sizable based on the snapping and swaying. After a moment she saw the ethereal glow of eyes staring back at her in a green haze. A deer attempted to rise but it was kept grounded by a broken foreleg and two rear legs that didn’t work at all. She swept her head toward the road and saw skid marks with glass debris from broken headlights.
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sp; What a difference context made. Survival turned you from a gawker into an active agent in securing continued existence. Her hands went for her reclaimed knife before she realized it. She could take a shoulder or shank from a foreleg and cook it with a fire once she got to Sandalwood. Her first few meals were assured. The ones afterward were an unknown, along with what she could find for her wounds along with the first aid kit, but at least she had this.
The deer struggled when she grabbed its head from behind and slit its throat. It thrashed against her, knocked her down, but she held onto it as wet warmth seeped into her clothes. The scent of blood seemed omnipresent; life’s precious commodity flowed freely here.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as concession to an act she’d have found appalling before today.
Gin held the animal as its life ebbed, two victims of the same machinery thrown together in the Kill Zone.
Ryan Harding is the author of Genital Grinder, the co-author of Header 3 with Edward Lee, and a contributor to the multi-author collaboration Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies Excitable Boys and In Laymon’s Terms, the chapbooks Partners in Chyme (with Edward Lee), A Darker Dawning and A Darker Dawning 2: Reign in Black, and the magazines Splatterpunk and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. You are probably reading this book because at too impressionable an age he saw Jason Voorhees slam a girl in a sleeping bag against a tree trunk.
Jason Taverner is someone you once knew. Now he writes fiction when he isn’t evading the dark elements that run society. He wants you to read this book and buy seven copies for your friends. You will do as Jason Taverner wills.
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen