by Jacob Rayne
The people carrier stopped reversing about thirty feet from them. Somehow the fat man’s grin widened further.
Then the people carrier set off towards them again.
Janet struggled to get the door open. Her hand was sweaty and covered in blood and kept slipping off the handle.
‘Come on,’ she screamed.
As black and unforgiving as death itself, the people carrier continued to race towards them.
Cheetah shoved Janet’s hand off the handle and pulled hard. The door flew open.
‘Brace yourselves,’ Billy shouted.
The people carrier shunted the side of the car again, sending them flying back towards the passenger side doors.
The impact made the body move closer to Billy once more. He shoved it away, wiping his hands on his trousers in an attempt to remove the feeling of the clammy skin.
The people carrier reversed again, making the mangled metal cry out in distress for a second time.
‘He’s gonna keep ramming the car until there’s nothing left,’ Cheetah said.
He took the hatchet out of Janet’s hand, cut her seatbelt and shoved her out of the car.
The people carrier stopped reversing and again started its journey towards them.
Paul waited until he couldn’t hear the three women. By the sound of it, the gruesome trio had joined in the unnatural acts that were taking place in the first room in the corridor.
He shuffled out from under the bed, glancing all around him like a meerkat on amphetamines. He peered around the door frame, and, seeing no lunatics, set out onto the corridor once more.
After everything he and his wife had been through today, he thought he’d have gotten used to a little blood, but the feel of the cooling blood on his feet made him queasy.
It was unavoidable, as the entire corridor floor was drenched in it. He peered over the balcony and saw unspeakable scenes. He was glad he’d come up here where it was relatively quiet.
While he made his way along the corridor, he found himself wondering what was causing people to go on these murderous rampages. Unable to think of an answer, he shook his head, wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow and carried on to the end of the corridor.
He had to get downstairs, pass the final gauntlet of crazies and then he was free. He waited by the corner of one of the walls while he gasped in breaths of hot air and prepared himself for the run.
The third crash of the people carrier sent Cheetah tumbling out of the car onto the sidewalk. The impact of the huge vehicle was moving the car back towards the building on the corner of the crossroads.
Cheetah gathered his senses and called out to Billy.
‘I’m fine, mate,’ Billy replied. ‘But I don’t know how long that’s gonna last.’
The people carrier detached itself from the mangled side of the car and once more started reversing back.
Janet stood on unsteady legs and tried to pull Billy’s door open.
‘Billy, the door’s stuck, you need to climb out of the window,’ she shouted.
Billy nodded and started to make his way to the broken driver’s window. The dead weight of the body pinned him and he struggled to move. The people carrier’s bulk struck again, knocking the car further towards the wall and shaking Billy’s body.
‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take,’ Billy said. He lay for a second, trying to get his senses back.
‘You’ve got to get out,’ Cheetah said.
The people carrier started reversing.
Billy kicked out, trying to get the corpse off his legs. The movement tipped the body onto its side. Billy jumped as it grunted and opened its eyes to reveal pupils that were black islands in a sea of red iris. The man stared at him for a long second then lunged forward.
Unprepared for this new turn of events, Billy let out a cry.
The people carrier drew nearer and Cheetah squeezed off a couple of shots that punched holes in the windscreen. One caught the driver in the shoulder, spraying a plume of blood over the car’s interior.
The vehicle didn’t stop its charge.
The body dived onto Billy, its jaws snapping at his throat. He wedged a hand into the hollow at the base of its neck, but the man had a berserk strength and started to collapse Billy’s arms.
The people carrier smashed into the small car with the hardest impact yet. The passenger doors were buckled into the car now, letting in warm air where the metal was torn away from the frame.
The driver grinned and started to reverse again.
‘One of us needs to create a diversion,’ Cheetah said.
‘What do you mean?’ Janet said.
‘One of us needs to distract the people carrier while the other gets Billy out.’
Janet’s face went visibly white.
‘I know. Rock and hard place,’ Cheetah said.
‘I’ll get Billy out,’ she said. ‘You’re much quicker than I am.’
Cheetah nodded and moved round the car to the passenger side, waving his arms and shouting to attract the driver’s attention.
The driver’s face snapped to the side and his eyes seemed to bore into Cheetah. The vehicle shot forwards in pursuit of Cheetah who had set off up the middle of the road at a hell of a pace.
Janet tried to open the passenger door but it was stuck. She felt helpless as the corpse attacked Billy.
Holding the body at arm’s length was weakening Billy. The ordeal had drained him of most of his remaining strength and his arms trembled with the effort. He felt like he was on his last rep at the gym, his arms utterly exhausted.
The crazy pulled up and dropped hard, bending Billy’s arms. The man’s face appeared next to his neck. Their position trapped Billy’s hands by his sides.
Janet hit the blunt end of the hatchet into the window, showering Billy and his assailant with broken glass. She leant through the jagged hole, trying to land an effective blow on the writhing lunatic who was hell-bent on sinking his teeth into Billy’s throat.
The people carrier’s horn sounded so startlingly loud that it was all that Cheetah heard, even blotting out the sounds of his own ragged breathing. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the vehicle was almost upon him. He quickly made the sign of the cross and threw himself to the left.
The people carrier’s front bumper clipped his legs and sent him spinning anticlockwise. He landed in a heap on the road, too stunned to move.
Janet almost had her strike lined up when the whine of a ricocheting bullet hit the car door near her right leg.
She started, banging the back of her head on the corner of the roof, and turned to see the grinning gunman from the alley. He fired another shot, smashing the wing mirror of the car. She cursed and dropped to her knees and crawled to the back of the vehicle.
The crazy’s teeth finally found Billy’s neck and tore a ragged hole to the left of his throat. The bite stung like hell and was bleeding profusely.
Billy knew that the wound wasn’t deep enough to be fatal, but what did concern him was that the crazy seemed to have grown more powerful with the taste of blood. It wriggled on top of him, trying to get to the bleeding wound.
Cheetah stood, his legs in agony, but he counted himself lucky that they weren’t broken. The people carrier was reversing for another run at him. The driver’s relentless grin was starting to unravel his thoughts.
The people carrier stopped and lurched forwards.
The gunman moved around the car. Janet kept on her knees and crawled away from him.
The crazy bucked when Billy’s finger jabbed it in the throat. It made horrid wheezing sounds as it gasped for air. Billy knew that this was the only chance he was going to get before the lunatic killed him. He slapped his left hand hard onto its ear.
The crazy cried out in dismay, lifting enough pressure off Billy to allow him to squirm out from under it and head for the broken window.
Janet stopped, looked under the car to see the gunman’s legs at the rear of the vehicle. She was
at the front, desperately trying to think of what she could do.
Cheetah stood by the wall, waiting for the people carrier to come for him. He planned on diving away again at the last minute. Hopefully the car would hit the wall and injure the driver a little.
The people carrier loomed, and he dived to the right this time. The vehicle missed him and slammed headlong into the wall. To Cheetah’s dismay, the vehicle was hardly even damaged.
Billy put his hands on the roof of the car and used his grip to lever himself out. He drew his legs across the back seat towards the window.
Janet was still peering beneath the car, watching the gunman’s legs. She let out a scream when he leaned down and looked under the car, meeting her eye. He let out his low, ominous chuckle then stood.
Billy cursed as he nicked his right leg on a shard of glass remaining in the frame. The crazy in the car lunged at him. He lashed out, smashing its cheekbone beneath his foot. It fell back, screeching.
The noise made the gunman turn away from Janet. His grin widened when he saw Billy. He aimed and pulled the trigger. The bullet took off most of the left side of Billy’s head. Spatters of blood and brain and skull hit Janet in the face. She let out a horrified scream as the blood started to make trails down her cheeks.
Billy slumped back out of the car window, his shattered cranium spilling blood and gobbets of brain onto the sidewalk below. His single eye bulged sightlessly, seeming to silently blame Janet for his death.
Janet put a hand over her mouth to catch her scream. The gunman seemed to have forgotten her, for now more than happy to survey the damage he’d done to Billy.
The hatchet in her right hand, she crept to the driver’s side of the car.
She glanced beneath the car and saw a stream of blood pouring from the top of Billy’s head, pooling on the sidewalk and dripping off into the gutter.
The gunman stood over the body, laughing. He fired another shot, removing what remained of Billy’s face.
Janet crept around to the rear of the car. The gunman had his back to her, laughing as he emptied bullet after bullet into Billy’s bleeding corpse. The body twitched like an epileptic at a strobe party.
Her hands shook with the effects of adrenaline. Suddenly an image of Paul writhing naked on top of his lover flashed into her mind like a subliminal message. It was exactly what she needed. She drew to within three feet of the gunman and now her fear had been replaced with rage.
Lifting the hatchet above her head in a double-handed grip, she ran at the gunman. He turned just in time to see the blade drop towards his face.
The blow cleaved his head clean in half, showering Janet in blood and pieces of brain. The remnants of the gunman’s brain pulsed, sending blood cascading down his face. He stood for a second, his mouth working soundlessly, then he fell, hitting his head off the car on the way down. His blood mingled with Billy’s on the sidewalk.
The crazy in the car shot out of the window at her like Satan’s own jack-in-the-box. She dodged the attack and crouched, seeing the gunman’s gun on the road at her feet.
Cheetah stood up. His entire body ached. The people carrier was reversing back for another go at him. He groaned when he saw the grin on the driver’s face. The sight of the vehicle speeding across the road once more sickened him.
Janet struggled to get the gun out of the gunman’s hand. Even in death he was causing her anguish. The claw-like fingers were seemingly welded to the handle of the gun. The crazy in the car screeched at her, blood spraying from its mouth.
She tried to lever the gunman’s fingers open again then came to her senses and slammed the hatchet into the dead hand. The fingers came off in individual sprays of blood. She lifted the gun and aimed it at the crazy who was swinging out of the car’s broken window.
She had never fired a gun before but she knew she couldn’t miss at this range. The gun bucked in her hands, sending shockwaves all the way up to her biceps. The bullet drilled into the crazy’s forehead, spraying the back of its skull across the shattered remains of the driver’s side doors.
She heard a distressed cry and turned to see the people carrier again lurching towards Cheetah. The huge vehicle was moving fast and Cheetah seemed to move out of the way just by sheer luck. The car’s front bumper met the wall with a thunderclap of sound. Through some miracle Cheetah seemed unharmed.
Janet ran in, not knowing what she intended to do, only caring that she didn’t see Cheetah die like Billy.
The people carrier stayed against the wall for a few seconds. There was an angry mechanical noise, which Janet realised was the driver struggling to get the gear in place, then a furious string of ramblings from inside the car.
She reached the car and pulled the back door open. The car suddenly lurched backwards as the driver found the correct gear. The effect of the driver’s sudden braking threw her back against the seat. Her breath escaped her in an anguished cry. The driver turned to smile at her.
The smile on his face didn’t drop, not even when he saw the gun in her hand. Again, at point blank range, she couldn’t miss.
The bullet tore a ragged hole through the driver’s left eye, scattering the left side of his head across the windscreen in a dripping curtain of gore.
Her breath came fast and hard as she tried to take in everything that had just happened.
Paul descended the staircase after waiting a long few minutes to pluck up his nerve. The sounds of the crazies drilled through his ears and into his brain, making him want to curl up in a ball and let them take him.
The thought of seeing Janet again and making things right was the only thing that stopped this being his course of action.
At the bottom of the stairwell was a pile of body parts, from which a river of blood flowed into the gutters on either side of the floor. A severed head stared up at him, the eyes seeming to follow him as he moved past into the corridor.
He smelt smoke and saw that one of the apartment rooms was on fire. Tongues of flame licked at the wooden walls, belching black smoke into the hot air.
He saw bodies writhing, their skin already blackening. A few crazies kept the people on the fire by poking them with long jagged shards of wood.
It was like a scene from hell.
He carefully moved past the burning room, grateful that the psychopaths had something other than him to occupy them. Despite the fear and revulsion he felt, he found it hard to take his eyes from the contorting, burning forms.
At the end of the block there was a gap then the final row of apartments. After that he was clear. He drew in a deep breath and stepped into the gap.
As he did so, he saw a large group of lunatics, most of whom had their backs to him.
They were in a circle, surrounding something which Paul couldn’t see. They were taking turns to go into the middle of the circle and do something that was also hidden from Paul’s view. A morbid sense of curiosity again drove him forwards.
The crazies were taking it in turns to bludgeon, stab and slash a wounded teenager. The lad’s face was contorted with pain, tears mingling with the blood that coursed from a split in his scalp. One of the men ran in and kicked the stricken youth in the head. The lad cried out as his front teeth came out in a rush of blood.
Paul felt curiously unmoved by the scene before him. He supposed that all of the violence he had seen that day had desensitised him even to a horrific spectacle like this.
He moved forward, watching the events with a strange detachment.
After a female lunatic ran in and stabbed the boy in the eye with the sharp end of a pool cue, the rest of the crazies laughed at the resulting scream of pain.
The laughter suddenly stopped. Paul realised that this was because one of the group had seen him.
Inexorably, the crazies turned to face him.
NINE
Janet rolled out of the people carrier, wincing when her body slammed onto the hard asphalt. She crawled to her feet and staggered across to see Cheetah, who was still lying on t
he floor.
‘I’m ok,’ he said, his face twisted into a mask of pain.
She helped him to his feet.
‘Say, looks like we’ve found our vehicle of choice,’ Cheetah said, nodding his head towards the people carrier.
Janet smiled.
‘You did great there,’ he said.
‘Thanks. You weren’t bad yourself.’
Janet helped Cheetah to pull the body out of the driver’s seat then shuffled round to the passenger door. The pain in her leg had flared up again after her encounter with the road. She stifled a sob as her thigh froze.
‘I thought it was all sorted out,’ she said.
They both took in deep breaths of the hot air.
‘Let’s go find your husband,’ Cheetah said, revving the engine.
As he did so a group of lunatics shuffled around the corner towards them.
The group of crazies stared at Paul intently, and he was just waiting for one of them to break formation and all hell to break loose.
The moment never came. The crazies watched him for long minutes. Paul stared back at them, his heart feeling like it was about to stop beating.
The crazies didn’t move towards him, nor did he move towards them. They just continued to watch each other.
Paul became bolder with each second they stood off. Eventually he plucked up the courage to move forward. He managed one step before his mind told him he was crazy. He stopped, his bulging eyes flicking between the crazies who watched him.
The crazies remained still, just watching him with their sadistic grins hewn into their blood-spattered features.
He took another step and another.
Another.
Still, the crazies watched but didn’t move. He took two more steps then his nerve broke and he sprinted past the group. This, he felt sure, was bound to get them out of their trance. They turned to watch him but did little else.
Once he was fifty feet past them they turned back to tormenting the teenager.