Something grabbed me, yanking me forward, pulling my arm through one of the holes and outside into the zombie swarm.
I screamed. How could I not?
Phin wrapped his arms around my waist, and we both strained to get me free.
Then I felt it. The worst possible thing a person could feel in a zombie apocalypse.
Teeth on my bare skin.
Unfortunately, this one had two jaws, both upper and lower, and when it bit down on my wrist I felt my skin break.
Oh no…
Oh no no no…
Chapter 14
T-minus 61 minutes
Talon
I ducked out of Rocket’s reach, backpedalling until my ass hit the counter behind me. My arms hung at my sides, useless. I was so scared I’d completely forgotten how to fight.
Rocket snarled and took a step toward me.
I tried to remember the last time I’d encountered Rocket, what I’d done to beat him, and it came to me in an uncomfortable flash: I’d had weapons and had gotten ridiculously lucky.
But maybe there was something I could learn from the past. I dug into my pocket, my fingers grasping the FMN pill Phin had given me.
It went under my tongue, tasting a lot like memories, with a hint of spearmint.
Then I thought of my previous bout with Rocket.
The effect was amazing. I had full visual, aural, and even sensual recall of our fight. I even remembered my own thoughts. It all played out in my head like it was happening for the first time.
Rocket throws a roundhouse, much too fast for a guy so big. I manage to pull away from the brunt of it, but he catches the very tip of my chin. The blow spins me, and I drop to my hands and knees, trying to discern up from down. My eyes gravitate to the counter. In one spring, Rocket leaps on top of it. His combat boots are almost as long a the antidote for the nanopoisonamCan you matter“Yes.”s my arm.
I crawl in the opposite direction, feeling the vibration as he jumps to the floor. Moving as fast as I can, I scurry under a heavy, faux-wood table, and try to remember where the front door is. From under the table it is tough to judge.
Several people laugh, and I realize I am the source of their amusement. This isn’t the first time Rocket has put on a show for them.
The table suddenly disappears. It reappears on the other side of the room, crashing into the wall twelve meters away. I stare up and see Rocket looming over me.
I cleared my mind, hopping out of the memory and back to reality. Incredibly, Rocket was still in mid-step; though time had ticked by in my brain, it hadn’t in real life.
It made a weird sort of sense. A thought is pretty fast—it is just electrochemical signals travelling a very short distance from neuron to neuron. So recalling thoughts with the Forget-Me-Not pill was almost instantaneous.
Rocket loomed over me. If he did what he did before, he would throw a roundhouse and knock me down.
I anticipated his move, ducking before he swung, threading through his legs and darting under the counter, coming up on the other side just as he began his leap.
I reached out, pushing one of his gigantic boots while it was in the air, shoving with all I had to knock him off balance.
Rather than land on his feet, Rocket landed on his hands and knees. I caught him in the nose with a palm strike, bursting it like a ripe tomato. But that didn’t seem to bother him, and he backhanded me so hard I spun around twice before smacking into the floor.
He stepped off the counter, looming over me.
Again I concentrated, trying to remember a similar situation in our previous encounter.
I twist onto my back and thrust my foot at the one place I know he doesn’t have muscles, right in the balls. My kick bounces off, harmlessly. Then Rocket raises a size thirty-eight shoe of his own. I can picture my rib cage and pelvis being crushed, and don’t much care for that picture, so I tuck in my arms and roll sideways.
His stomp makes the floor shake. After a few revolutions I get on my hands and knees and stand to face him.
Rocket has a smile on his face, obviously enjoying himself.
“This is the part where you beg me not to kill you,” he says.
“Does it help?”
“No. I’ll kill you anyway.”
He steps closer. I step away. I try to run left. He gets in front of me. I feint right, then left, but he blocks each attempt, gradually boxing me in. It takes less than thirty seconds for him to herd me into a corner of the room. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to run.
“You gonna beg?” he asks, his over, unconscious.
os staggerGexpression playful.
“Please don’t beat me to death.”
“That’s not very good.”
Back to reality. A kick to the balls didn’t work. Begging didn’t work.
So what worked?
Back to the memory.
He throws an easy jab. I take it on the shoulder, and it knocks me back into the wall. The impact makes my eyes water.
Another jab. I bring my arms up to block, and it feel like I tried to stop a bus. Rocket is just playing with me, like a deranged child who pulls the wings from butterflies. I’m nothing more than a toy for his amusement. Something harmless, to be used and then forgotten about.
That pisses me off.
I latch onto the anger, using it to push back some of the fear. Rocket lobs another jab my way, but this time I sidestep it, grab his shirt, and ram the top of my head up under his chin.
The roider staggers back. When he regains his balance, he jams two giant fingers into his mouth. He pulls something small and blo
ody out from between his lips, then looks at me, amazed.
“You knocked out my—”
I repeat the maneuver, cracking my head against his jaw so hard I see stars.
Rocket yelps—probably the first time he’s ever made a sound like that—and then spits two more teeth onto the floor.
I got to my feet.
Rocket advanced, threw the expected jab.
I slipped the punch, grabbed his shirt, and head-butted the fucker.
The roider staggered back, then repeated the same action as before, reaching into his mouth and pulling out a tooth.
I repeated my prior action as well, cracking my head against his jaw.
He spat onto the floor, then said the obvious, the expected.
“You knocked out my teeth.”
I put up my fists.
Cut to the memory.
I clench my hands and raise them.
“Just shut the fuck up and fight, bitch.”
For a fraction of a second, Rocket appears uncertain. Then he comes at me.
He swings. I duck. He feints. I dodge. I swing. I connect. No effect. I kick. I connect. No effect. He kicks. I jump away. He punches. I dodge. I punch. I connect. No effect. I punch. I connect. No effect. He punches—
too much woman for that.”
“m went slack.
ke—catapulting me off my feet, flipping me end over end until I come to rest on my belly, sucking air and exhaling pain, my cold hands and shaking legs the first symptoms of going into shock.
I unclenched my hands. Going toe-to-toe with this guy was suicide.
Instead I reached around my belt and tugged out the knife Grandpa gave me.
The blade was no more than ten centimeters long, and pointing it at Rocket made me feel all kinds of inadequate. I might as well have been holding a child’s toy. Even if I stabbed him to the hilt it couldn’t penetrate anything important. The guy wore his muscles like a thick suit of armor.
That’s what I needed right now. A suit of nanotube armor. That stuff could even repel the Nife on Rocket’s hip.
But I didn’t have nanotube armor. All I had was Phin’s little buck knife. So I did my best, thrusting it forward like a fencing foil, putting all of my weight and strength into the blow, burying the blade in Rocket’s waist, hoping to puncture his kidney.
Rocket took a quick step back, yanking th
e knife handle out of my hand. He stared down at it sticking out of his belly, then at me, blood dripping down his face.
A terrible, deep, throaty sound came out of his mouth. Low and rhythmic.
Rocket was laughing.
“Let me show you a real blade,” he said, going for his Nife.
I remembered how this played out.
Rocket reaches behind him and grabs something in his belt.
“You know what this is?” he asks, waving the Nife in front of him.
I scan the floor around me for weapons, then realize it doesn’t matter. The Nife will make easy work of a thrown chair or a plastic table leg. If I had a chainsaw, it would make easy work of that as well.
I’m fuct.
“It’s a Nife,” Rocket says. “I’m going to use it to slice off your eyelids, so you can’t look away while I skin you alive.”
I think of something tough and flippant to say back, but I don’t trust my voice not to quiver.
Rocket strolls toward me, taking his time. He waves the Nife in front of him, knowing I can’t take my eyes off of it, knowing I’m imagining how it will feel when it cuts me. According to all accounts, being sliced with a Nife doesn’t hurt at first. Being only a few nanometers thin, it is so sharp a person doesn’t feel it going in. It’s only after the body part drops off that the pain begins.
Escape is impossible. Rocket stands between me and the exit. I move left. He mirrors it. I move right. He mirrors it. Even if I run for it and try to dive past him, all he has to do is extend his arm and the Nife blade will open me up like a zipper.
Rocket moves ?” Talon’s wife asked.at
Chapter 1
, which pin closer, wiggling the Nife at me. Like before, he’s backing me into a corner. I hold up my hands, picture all of my fingers being lopped off, then keep them at my sides. The only chance I have, if it can even be called that, is grabbing his wrist when he lunges. I’ll have to time it perfectly.
All too soon my heels hit the wall. I can’t retreat any farther.
“Okay, you win,” I manage to say. “I surrender.”
Rocket barks a laugh. I watch his eyes. His eyes will telegraph his move a millisecond before the blade flashes.
I wait, zoning out a bit while also maintaining full concentration. It’s a bit like timecasting. Letting instinct guide me, telling me when he’s going to—
His pupils widen, his hand blurring. I dodge left, slapping my hand on top of his wrist as the Nife cuts empty air.
I try to execute an arm bar, getting my other hand under his armpit and pushing him forward, using his elbow as leverage against him. But in this case, it’s like putting a judo hold on an oak tree. He ignores the attempted joint lock, lifting up his arm and me along with it, shaking me off. I land on my back, my head bouncing off the floor.
I don’t know I’ve been nicked with the Nife until I see the blood seeping out of my knuckles. I make a fist, witness my white bones peek through the split in the skin.
Then the pain hits, accompanied by a slow, sickening roil in my stomach. The roil becomes a full-blown tsunami when Rocket straddles me, sitting on my legs.
“Which eye first?” Rocket says. “Left or right?”
I stare at him, unable to speak.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” Rocket cackles, and the Nife flashes alongside my head. Rocket reaches down, then holds something next to his mouth.
Shit. He’s got my ear.
“Can you hear me now?” he says, into my severed ear.
I didn’t want my knuckles slashed, or my ear cut off again, especially since I’d just had it reattached.
I went back to the memory, but it didn’t help.
I hadn’t beaten Rocket. McGlade had saved my life by grabbing the Nife.
But Harry wasn’t here right now.
I tried rewinding the memory, looking for some weakness, some opening.
There was nothing. This guy was unbeatable.
“It’s a Nife,” Rocket said, waving the invisible blade in front of me. “I’m going to use it to slice off your eyelids, so you can’t look away while I skin you alive.”
I scanned the floor for weapons, know over, unconscious.
os staggerGing it didn’t matter even if I found something.
The banana began playing Chopin’s Funeral March.
Rocket advanced.
Chapter 15
T-minus 60 minutes
Talon 2
“Help!” I cried, frantically trying to pull away from the zombie munching on my arm. “It’s biting me!”
With strength fueled by raw fear, I yanked my arm free, and Phin and I muscled the bookcase back up against the door.
Then I lifted my arm up and stared at the bite wound, watching it gush blood. Grandma came up behind me, gently touched my cheek.
“Grandma? What do we do?”
Her face pinched. “Only one thing we can do.”
Then she threw an arm over my shoulder and around my neck, getting me in a headlock and forcing me to bend over.
“Grandma…?”
“It’s extremely virulent, Talon. I’m sorry.”
She dropped to her knees, and I heard a CRACK! that I realized was my neck snapping.
I flopped onto the floor, unable to move, unable to breathe. Darkness came from all sides, and the last thing I saw before I died was Alter-Vicki, crouching next to me, tears streaming down her face.
Chapter 16
T-minus 57 minutes
Talon
Rocket took another step toward me.
I was about to die, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I’d almost died so many times in the past few days that it was becoming a cliché.
But now I had a unique opportunity.
This time, rather than my life figuratively flashing before my eyes, the FMN pill gave me the chance to have it literally pass before my yes.
Phin said the Forget-Me-Not lasted thirty seconds. Even though I’d already relived several minutes of memory, I hadn’t used more than a second or two of the pill’s duration. Which meant, if I swallowed it, I wouldn’t have to imagine Vicki’s face before I was killed.
I could actually see it one last time.
This was an opportunity to go back to when I first met her. Experience the joy and excitement on our wedding night. Relive the last vacation we t the antidote for the nanopoisonamCan you to his d at the same time.
ook, the romance and the sex and the laughter and the love. In twenty-eight seconds of real time, I could have minutes, maybe even hours, of Vicki, re-experiencing my fondest memories as if they were happening all over again.
It was an intoxicating idea.
I shifted the pill from under my tongue to the back of my throat.
Rocket stared down at me. I stared up, my legs shaking.
“You scared, you little bitch?”
Fuck yeah, I was scared. I almost swallowed the pill right then.
But instead I had an idea. It was a long shot, and might screw up my chances at a happy death, but the slim hope at someday making new memories with Vicki outweighed reliving all of the good times we’d had in the past.
“What?” I said.
He bent down lower.
“I said, you scared, you little bitch?”
“I can’t hear you, shit head. Can you speak up?”
Rocket’s hand lashed out, grabbing me by my throat with one hand, easily lifting me up to his height. He brought his face so close to mine we could practically kiss.
“I said, are—”
With his mouth wide open, I spat the FMN pill back into his throat, hard as I could.
Rocket’s eyes bugged out, a retching/gagging sound escaping his throat and bathing me with hot, fetid breath. I reached both hands up, clamping them over his lips even as the vertebrae in my neck began to crack and pop under his squeezing. Then I began to kick wildly, hoping to connect with the knife handle still protruding from his side.
I got lucky
. Real lucky.
My toe touched the handle just as he started to cough, and I cupped one hand and slapped it into his ear, popping the eardrum, just as I used the knife like a rock climbing pylon to push myself away from his body
The roider dropped me, and I fell onto my ass, the stars coming out. Rather than give in to the pain, I rolled to the side, Rocket’s giant foot slamming into the floor where I’d been.
I glanced up, seeing his face red with rage, the Nife thrusting toward me.
“Remember your Aunt Zelda!” I screamed.
A millisecond before the Nife touched my neck, Rocket froze, still as a digital photo.
I crab-walked backward, amazed I wasn’t dead.
Rocket remained paralyzed in that lunging position, eyes wide but focused on something that wasn’t me.
He was, quite technically, lost in thought.
I had no idea how long he’d stay like that, so I pressed my advantage. It took three big t flamethrowerEARetugs to get the buck knife out of his side. Then I hacked and pried at his fingers
, trying to free the Nife.
Rocket stayed perfectly still, not flinching, not breathing, even as I chopped off his pinky.
But like the rest of his body, his fingers were ridiculously corded with muscle. It was akin to sawing through steel cables, and I knew my time was running out.
Abandoning his fingers, I attacked his wrist. That way, even if I couldn’t cut off his hand, maybe I could damage him enough that he’d bleed to death.
The banana switched from Chopin to Tom Traubert’s Blues by Tom Waits, and did a pretty good imitation of the singer’s gravelly voice.
Rocket poured blood like he was a city park fountain, but even though I hacked through much of the skin on his wrist, his bone was too thick and my knife was too small for me to have a shot of severing his hand.
“Shit! Is that a singing banana?”
I recognized McGlade’s voice, but didn’t bother acknowledging him. At least twenty seconds had passed, and when Rocket snapped out of his trip down memory lane he was going to be seriously pissed off at what I’d been doing to him.
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