You don’t mess with the Jupiters, not anymore.
Darlene’s movement is choppy, she is trying to judge the distance between here and the freedom of the outside. It’s a jump not even I could make, and she realizes this at the last moment. So instead of jumping, she steps on the great, squishy back of the fat zombie, pressing him down on top of the screaming soldier, and then she hops off into the dirt arena beyond the steel cage.
With Sal behind me, I make my own move. The fat zombie is momentarily distracted from his meal after Darlene uses him as a stepping stone, but I go anyway, step right on his face, feeling the exposed inside of his broken-jawed mouth squish beneath my feet. As I am in the air, the cheers from the crowd rocking me, spurring me forward, I see the younger soldier is nothing but a mess of blood and bone. The zombies have stripped most of his meat from his body. He has managed to kill a few, but just one is enough to rip him open. The hot smell hits me like an uppercut, but then it’s gone, and my boots are slamming down on the dirt floor and into a warped form of freedom. Before I turn and run, I grab the metal door and try to slam it shut. It does, but I don’t hear the latch fall into place. It’s enough for now, at least. It will slow them down while I kill the rest of these Eden bastards.
Spike is off his chair now. He looks angry, but he also looks bored.
“I have to do everything myself, don’t I?” he says.
I make a move for Butch Hazard’s assault rifle which has skittered close to the opening of the steel cage. I go with my right hand, feeling a stab of pain in my ribs.
Darlene is to my right, she is trying to pull Abby off of the female soldier, who is no longer fighting back, but just laying there and taking Abby’s barrage of hits.
Stand, I think to myself, stand and take whatever comes to you like a man.
But I’ve come this far.
The AR15’s metal is cold in my grip and as I pull myself up — to stand — Spike’s gun goes off.
The crowd gasps. It’s like we are performers in a play and they are the audience who is supposed to laugh when something is funny, cry when something is sad, and gasp when tensions are high. They’re right on cue. Tensions are really fucking high.
The bullet smacks the metal of the gun, blowing it out of my loose grip, sending it dancing twenty feet across the dirt. The vibrations are like bee stings in the palm of my hand.
He shoots again. His movement is a blur, much too quick for the naked eye, and another slug punches the gun away from Abby and Darlene, sending it flying farther than the one I almost had.
I look to Norm and Butch, anticipating where the next shot will go, but when I look, I see the roles have reversed. Butch is now pinning Norm down. Norm is grunting out, his arms up to block his face from the blows that are raining down on him. Butch grabs his gun, which isn’t an AR15, but the chrome Desert Eagle.
“Should I kill him?” Butch says.
“No, they’re mine. They’re all mine,” Spike says, “‘cause I gotta do everything myself, don’t I?” His accent wavers somewhere between southern and Brooklyn. He is like a malfunctioning robot.
Abby and Darlene are frozen now, looking at Spike.
The crowd buzzes.
“Quiet,” Spike says. And they listen. “Quiet, y’all. I want you to hear every last one of their screams and cries, I want you to hear Jack Jupiter yelling for his momma when I put a bullet in his gut and he’s leaking out all over the dirt.” He hops down off of the platform, one gun in hand, looking at me, and he says in a softer voice, the southern drawl in full swing. “You really picked the wrong town to mess with, pard.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
He smiles.
Butch Hazard has his gun pressed against Norm’s temple, and even he cracks a smile. It’s an odd sight, seeing a man with a gun in hand, blood running from his nose and mouth, smiling. Nightmare-inducing, really.
Spike seems to look past me.
The crowd’s quiet lessens. Hushed whispers ruffle through them like the wind though the leaves. I hear someone shout, “Look out!”
But as I spin around, it’s too late. Sal the mechanic and his buddy, the Broke Kneecap Convict, are on me, driving me to the dirt. I see the door I couldn’t close all the way hanging open, cracked enough for two curious zombies to come through.
Damn it.
As my head thumps the ground, I hear Darlene scream.
45
Sal still smells like grease and stale cigarettes. His mouth his wide open and I’m trying to block him with my arms crossed into an X, problem is if he bites me, I’m fucked. Plain and simple. I don’t have any armor on, my arms are bare in this dingy t-shirt I’ve been wearing since God knows when.
I’m not ready to go. Not yet.
But I don’t know if I really have a choice. My body is betraying me. I am weak.
The mechanic chomps down at my face. Black spit dribbles from his teeth, hangs low right in front of my eyes. The smell is terrible. If a bite doesn’t kill me surely the stink will.
He shifts his position, sliding his chest up my arms, sticking his head closer to my face. I turn but can’t really go anywhere.
The Convict, grapples at my boot. I feel his teeth clamping on the leather. I kick out, feel the thud of boot hitting meat, and Convict pinwheels his arms and topples over.
The crowd oohs and ahhs.
Now all I have to worry about is Sal. His jaw is opening and closing, teeth gnashing against each other.
“Stop it!” Darlene screams.
From the corner of my eye I see her lurch forward to come after me, but Spike says, “Move again, wench, and I blow your tits off.”
She freezes on the spot.
Abby grabs her, holds her in place.
I hadn’t noticed before, but I’m screaming, grunting in pain. My bullet wound is on fire. The muscles in my arms are screaming. I am dying. My body is giving out.
The Mechanic presses down on me. He is lumpy and hard. There are knots beneath his coveralls. Hard knots of bone, of…
Metal?
I let my arms give out. The Mechanic crashes down on me.
A sharp burst of pain explodes through my sternum as one particular knot in this zombie’s chest bites into my flesh.
What is it?
Spike is laughing. “Look at him struggle. The great Jack Jupiter, Carnivore and murderer! Struggling like a common man. See? He’s just like the rest of us. He ain’t no one special! They’re all like this. We don’t have to fear ‘em.”
No, not Carnivores, but you have to fear me, is what I want to say but can’t.
The crowd explodes into cheers.
Then Herb’s voice is running through my mind, drowning out the sounds of the crowd and the screams and the snarls of the zombie.
Salvation lies within the heart.
Another of his cryptic messages that shouldn’t mean anything, but I’m grasping at straws (zombie limbs) here.
Salvation lies within the heart.
Remember Sal!
Sal…Salvador…Salvation.
It’s a long shot, but what the hell? I got nothing else to lose. I’m dead either way, and I don’t want to just keel over and die without a fight like the old Jack Jupiter would’ve done. No, I’m Johnny Deadslayer now.
I press my hand up against Sal’s chest. He is soft, mushy beneath his coveralls. My hands find his collar and I rip it open.
The shape of a gun pulsates from this mechanic’s rotten flesh, right where a heart that no longer beats lies. There are jagged and loose stitches around this patch of sewn flesh. Dried, crusty blood, too.
I can’t believe it, but I almost can.
Salvation lies within the heart, Jacky! Herb’s voice again.
I am like a man on the top floor of a burning skyscraper, looking out at the certain doom below me, while flames lick at my back and push me toward the open window. I don’t want to jump, but there’s no other choice. I might survive the leap. I might not. I certainly won’t survive
the flames and being buried beneath thousands of pounds of rubble and ash.
I have to plunge into the unknown, or I have to die.
It’s that simple. It’s that complicated.
With my left forearm pressing into Sal’s neck, his slobber spraying and dripping all over my face, his rattles momentarily choked off, I take my right hand and peel away the skin like some demented Christmas present.
I am plunging.
I am falling off of the skyscraper. The blazing heat from the flames is disappearing. Smoke is no longer filling my lungs. I am tasting the sweet air of freedom.
Of salvation.
The stitches pop easily enough and Sal doesn’t even notice I’m tearing him apart.
“Stop it!” Darlene says. “You fucking rat bastard, stop it!”
I am still screaming, but I no longer hear my own screams. I just feel the burning in my lungs, the serrated blade grinding against my vocal chords like a violin’s bow hitting frayed strings.
What I see first is a plastic container. A good, old Ziplock bag meant for leftovers and keeping food fresh.
Herb, you clever son of a bitch. I could kiss —
Thunder claps twice.
Red rain showers my face.
Bits of mushy gray brain find their way into my mouth.
I am coughing. My ears are ringing. A shadow consumes me, eclipsing the floodlights like the moon blocks the sun.
It’s Spike. His gun is smoking and he smiles.
Salvador the mechanic is lifeless on top of me. His dead weight pins me to the ground and my hand digs deeper and deeper into his open chest. I am screaming in pain. My wrist has broken or at least suffered a really bad sprain.
“I think you’ve had enough, Jupiter,” Spike says. His voice is calm and steady, neither a Brooklyn accent or the clichéd cowboy one. I hated both, but at least they don’t upset me to the very core of my existence like this unwavering voice of insanity does. He chuckles. It’s a humorless chuckle, then he says, “Time to put you out of your misery, Jack.”
He levels the big revolver a mere three feet from my face.
46
If he pulls the trigger, it’s not going to pretty.
Cold blood drains onto the dirt behind my head, dampening my hair.
I am Johnny Deadslayer I am Johnny Deadslayer I am Johnny Deadslayer goes off in my mind over and over again.
Salvation lies within the heart.
Darlene screams.
“Jack, no!” Norm says, his voice muffled and pained.
Abby is sobbing.
The crowd is revving up again. “We want blood! We want blood! Kill him! Kill him!”
“Guess we won’t get to that shoot-off after all,” Spike says.
I smile, tasting my own blood on my teeth. “That’s where you’re wrong,” I say. And my cramped hand inside of Salvador’s chest wraps around the warm gun, plastic baggie and all.
I slide my middle finger on the trigger and lift up with all my might. A momentary look of confusion passes Spike’s features, then like the quick-draw cowboy he is, he finally notices what I’m doing.
The smile vanishes.
I pull the trigger with my middle finger — a final fuck you to this psychotic bastard. And as the gun claps and my eyes blink with the sound, I see Tony and Brian Richards, I see Herb, and Darlene and Norm and Abby, their pained faces in my mind all easing.
A hole the size of a plate rips through Salvador’s back in a spray of black blood and white shards of spinal cord. I feel the thunder shake my body, hear the sound of the crack reverberating through the quiet of the stunned crowd.
The bullet hits Spike like a bolt of lighting.
But it’s not a clean hit, at least that’s not what it looks like at first. A chunk of his face is missing. From the ear to the lower left of his jaw is practically blown out. He now looks more like a zombie, no longer the rootinest, tootinest cowboy this side of the Mississippi. His left eye hangs from its socket. His hair singes, maybe even it’s on fire. And the thing I like the most — yeah, this is good — is that his stupid cowboy hat is gone, blown off somewhere behind him.
Spike stands there stunned, rocking on his heels. This goes on for a long moment. His hand comes up to his face, his free hand. Most of his fingers disappear into the hole. When he pulls them out, they are slick and dripping with scarlet blood.
He screams.
It is the scream of a man who is covered in flames, of one who is dying.
The crowd no longer chants. They are as quiet, as stunned as Spike, as me, Darlene, Norm, Abby… as everyone.
With his right hand, Spike brings up the gun. It is shaking and it looks as if he can barely hold its weight, let alone pull the trigger.
“Think that’s funny?” he says, the words coming out slurred and painful. His tongue moves like the surface of a pond catching a light breeze. “Think you can shoot me? Me!”
The one good eye has gone into red alert mode. No longer does that eye say murder. It’s somehow moved past that point to darker intentions if that's even possible.
I try to squirm my way out from under the lifeless Salvador, but I’m having no such luck.
“Think it’s funny? I’ll…I’ll show you what’s funny, you no-good, dirty-rotten, pig — ” Spike is cut off. But he is not cut off by another shot or zombie attack.
No. None of that.
Spike is cut off by death.
He falls down to the dirt in a growing pool of his own blood. Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
And I fall with him, my head thudding against the dirt hard enough to send a field of black stars across my vision. The gun skitters away to my right.
I might be half-dead with a leaking zombie on top of me, but I’ve never felt so good in my life.
47
The crowd is stirring now, realizing their great — and late — leader is dead. They start to move. Where they are going, I have no idea.
“He’s dead! He’s dead!” someone in the stands shouts. I can’t tell if it’s joy, surprise, triumph, or even shock, but right at this moment, I don’t care. They don’t have guns. They aren’t zombies. I am alive and Spike isn’t.
“Jack!” Darlene says.
She runs over to me — well, more like limps. Her face is wet and shiny, I reckon it’s sweat and tears. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sweaty, too. Florida is hot as hell as it is, and even hotter with a dead guy laying on top of you. I might be crying, too. I won’t lie. Seeing Darlene, seeing her in one piece, still alive, with a faint smile on her face just makes me sob. So yeah, I’ll admit it.
Darlene says, “Oh, Jack, oh, my God!” She kneels down in the dirt and blood, then as our eyes lock together like two lovers who’ve not seen each other in years, she says, “That was fucking awesome!”
The crowd seems to be growing restless, buzzing back and forth, trying to find a way out like birds trapped in a one-window room. Or, like chickens with their heads cut off. They are lost without their leader.
I look back to Darlene and smile. “Can’t take credit for it. All of that goes to Herb, that son of a gun — ”
“Jack! Watch out!” Abby shouts.
Darlene snaps her head toward her, and as she does, I see Butch Hazard, aiming his Desert Eagle at Darlene and I. Some of the crowd behind, those not worried about getting out of this crumbling safe haven, stop and start to point. A few cheer. A few jeer.
The faint chant of, “More blood! We want more blood!” comes from the stands.
Butch has Norm in a headlock. He is squeezing so tight, Norm’s eyes bulge out and his face is a beat red which is shocking compared to the ashy gray hue his skin had taken on as of late. But the worst thing is Norm isn’t fighting back or even struggling. I’d never thought I’d see the day where my hard-ass, big brother stops fighting.
It’s fitting that the day I see it is the day I die.
Darlene is slowly shifting herself closer to me. I can see how rigid she is
out of the corner of my eyes. There is one soldier still standing. He is the fatter one. His face is bloody and he looks like a man who’s frayed rope of sanity has snapped, too. He holds his weapon on Abby and watches us from the corner of his eyes.
“Impressive,” Butch says. Two streams of blood run down from his nostrils. When he talks, red mist sprays the air. “I’m glad you did it. Someone had to do it.” He shivers. “Wouldn’t be right if it was me.”
“When did you ever care about what’s right or wrong?” I ask.
Butch smiles. “Good point.”
The chrome of the Desert Eagle does not sparkle anymore. Its shine is muted by dirt and blood.
“I hate to have to thank you this way, Jack Jupiter, but I’d never feel safe knowing you are out there somewhere, looking for a place to call home. A place like this.”
“I wouldn’t stay here if you paid me,” I say.
Butch shrugs, but I almost can’t tell since he is so tense.
I’m trying to form my plan, my last stand. I’ve not come this far to lose anyone else, to die at the hands of a grunt after I’ve slain the Black Hat.
I want nothing more right now than to at least be able to stand and shield Darlene, to protect her.
“You won’t have to,” Butch says. “You won’t have to stay anywhere.”
My eyes scan the situation. There’s the emptying bleachers and the few stragglers who have not yet had their appetite for death and destruction satisfied. There’s the soldier with the AR15 trained on Abby. The dead Spike. Salvador on the bottom half of me, pinning me to the dirt with his cold blood spilling out. Me, half-propped up and in pain. The beaten female soldier. What’s left of the zombies Spike shot.
Butch grins, and lets go of Norm, who drops to all fours in a heap. He kicks Norm in the ass, sending him sprawling out in the blood-muddy dirt. “Line up, all of y — ”
I shove with all my might at the zombie on top of me, my eyes bulging worse than Norm’s were. The pain in my body is unreal, but it’s nothing as bad as getting shot. I manage to lift Salvador off of my legs enough to wiggle out from beneath him. The slick blood and guts also helps. I try to ignore that, though.
Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope Page 19