The last one left was Dwayne Johnson.
“Please,” Dwayne Johnson said. “Please, wait. I didn’t mean it, really. You seem like a good guy. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Haws smothered him with the pillow and splattered his brains on the concrete floor.
“Punk,” Haws said.
Haws looked for more guns.
He saw a meat hook on the wall and scowled.
Captain fucking Hook, he thought. I’ll show these motherfuckers Captain Hook.
He grabbed it, took off his belt and tightened the hook onto his stump.
He laughed at himself.
“Why the fuck not?” he said.
Chapter 8: The Kennels
The man who threw Pocahontas back in the kennels, she didn’t know his name, but he was the kennel master. She was sure of that. He was obese, wet with a thin layer of sweat, and dressed in a leather apron over a boiler suit with steel-capped boots. He stripped the clothes from Pocahontas with a knife and shoved her to the floor of her dark, damp cage in the small enclosure around the back of the house.
“Nice to have you back, princess,” master said.
He kicked her in the stomach and she curled up into a ball and whined in pain. She ached all over. She could still feel the sting of the cut on her neck where Munday had threatened to open her up. She shivered in the lashing rain and the biting wind through her cage which, like the others, was exposed to the grim weather. The kennel master slammed the door shut and locked it.
“No food for you tonight,” master said. “Bad doggy. You’re supposed to be an attack dog. Instead, what do you do? You get your owner killed. Bad dog!” The kennel master spat on her through the cage and walked away.
Pocahontas was in a blind panic. She had thought she was free. She had thought that it was all over. When her owner was killed, she didn’t understand right away. When she came to understand, she was deliriously happy. Her life, for the past six months, had been nothing but a series of violent acts inflicted upon her. She had come from Ireland, brought over by an American man who said she had promise as a model. He’d taken photographs and sent them to all the top modeling agencies. They were all in a bidding war. Tom Cruise had even seen her photo and expressed an interest in meeting her. That’s what she was told. The reality was first pornographic videos, just to make the right friends, and then captivity and torture when one of those friends, Mr. Torrento, really took a shine to her. She remembered every kick, every punch, every cut, every broken bone, every moment of every day and night she was forced to go without food, and every assault. They filed down one tooth every day until she had the fangs they wanted. Each tooth took hours. She had never experienced pain like it and could imagine no pain worse.
This house was a living nightmare to Pocahontas, who was so badly damaged she couldn’t even remember her real name. And now she was back again.
She could hear zombies outside the walls, hammering on the back gates. The truck had drawn them. It sounded like hundreds. There was no living outside, for Pocahontas, and she couldn’t bear to live inside.
Her life was over, in her mind. She was so afraid she couldn’t string actual thoughts together very well, but the overriding feeling was one of finality, of doom. Being back meant, for her, that she could never leave. It re-affirmed everything she’d been told since she arrived at the house: she was their property, and she always would be.
Pocahontas had fought for the first two weeks of torture. She had done everything in her power to stay sane, to try to recover in the brief breaks between the pain. She tried to focus on the absence of pain, rather than the pain. These moments were few and far between, but they gave her hope. What would it be like, she used to think, to live a whole day without pain like this? Pocahontas’s fight had left her, as everyone’s does after such enduring such violence. She first went through a phase of complete withdrawal. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She didn’t look at anyone. Her eyes were closed most of the day. This last for two months. The torture continued in this time. Next came the final stage, the masters’ end goal, the stage of utter fear, of complete obedience. And this became her existence for the next three or so months. She had done everything she had been asked, however horrific. She had never once even looked at one of her masters in an unpleasant way, never mind struck out at one.
She understood that this would be her only weapon, this prior obedience. They saw her as weak, dumb, a stupid animal.
That would be her way out.
She was curled in a ball in the corner of the cage, looking defeated, but Pocahontas was pressing her tongue against the tip of each of her fangs, remembering how sharp they were, remembering how much damage they could do and how much damage they had done before. She didn’t know how many people she had killed for the masters, but it was too many.
There was a hunger in her belly now. It was a hunger only for destruction, her own and theirs. She knew she would die. She couldn’t fight her way out of the house by herself. However, if she could make a dent in the house, if she could take with her some of those people who had taken everything away from her, she would feel a little less afraid before she died. And, she thought, that’s the best she could hope for.
Pocahontas saw the gate. It was beginning to buckle under the pressure of the hundreds of zombies outside.
Pocahontas looked around at the other cages. A young man was the only other dog left. Torrento’s men went through the dogs quickly as most died under the strain of torture. The men lasted longer than the women because they attracted less interest from the soldiers. Pocahontas tried to get the other dog’s attention. He was cowering. Pocahontas did something incredibly risky to get him to look at her. She stood up. It took considerable effort to do it – she’d been beaten half to death every time she was caught walking only on her legs – but it felt right. She was filled with panic, being exposed like that, but she knew it was how she was meant to be. She almost remembered.
The other dog must’ve been quite new. He still had his words. “Sit down,” he whispered. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
She looked for words to answer. “Kill,” she said. She was surprised by the sound of her own voice. It was gentler than she imagined it to be. She hadn’t been allowed to use words for months either and her memories of using them had been almost totally overwritten by memories of pain.
Pocahontas walked to the door of her cage and said it again louder.
“Kill,” she said.
The other dog tried to shush her. “You’ll piss them off. Please, stop! I can’t take it anymore. Please, don’t bring them back!”
Pocahontas shouted, “Kill!” She rattled her cage and screamed, “Kill!”
A flashlight appeared near the wall at the foot of the garden and a guard ran over. Pocahontas remembered his face. He had visited her a lot.
“What’s got your panties in a bunch?” he said.
Pocahontas looked at him. She was terrified. She mumbled, “Kill.”
“What are you doing on two legs?” he demanded. He holstered his gun and rolled up his sleeves. He took a key off his belt and unlocked the cage. Stepping inside, he said “Two legs bad, Pocahontas!”
He hadn’t holstered his gun right.
He hadn’t banked on Pocahontas knowing how to use it.
He swung for Pocahontas and she ducked, grabbed the pistol from the guard’s belt and fired into his crotch. He hit the floor screaming.
Pocahontas nearly dropped the gun. She remembered how she’d seen the other men hold it and she copied her memory. She crouched down and walked out of the cage. The man tried to grab her, so she fired the gun into his head and he stopped.
The other dog shouted. “Wait!” he said. “Let me out!”
Pocahontas walked over to him.
“Please,” he said. “My name’s Duke. Just let me out. I’m a good guy, I swear. Don’t let them torture me anymore. I can’t take it.”
Pocahontas thought about it.<
br />
“Please,” he said. “My name’s Duke McBride. What’s your name?”
Pocahontas shot him through the throat and walked away, leaving him bleeding to death, naked and cold in his cage. “Kill,” Pocahontas said.
Pocahontas walked over to the giant, sliding steel gate.
“Two legs bad,” she said to herself, showing her fangs in a wide grin.
She climbed up onto the wall and opened the gate.
The yard was suddenly swarmed with zombies, all headed for the house as the sun came up over the hills around it.
Pocahontas was feeling less afraid already.
*
“What the fuck was that?” Munday said.
“Gunfire, from the other side of the house,” Barcomb said.
Ash and Munday were stood above the pit with the dead guard’s bleeding corpse in their arms. Barcomb had his gun drawn, keeping watch.
“What is this fucking place?” Barcomb said, looking down at the pit.
“We passed it on the way to find you,” Ash said, “after we got out of the truck. We heard one of them call it The Pit.”
The Pit was a hole in the ground about six feet deep and twenty feet wide. It was a mass grave, but the bodies were standing upright and kept away from one another with leashes tied to spikes in the ground. They were muzzled with pieces of wood which had been tied around the backs of their heads with old string. The wood in their mouths was wet with spit and blood and pus and rotten lips. They all leaned into their leashes which were attached to the back of the wooden gags.
Barcomb noticed one of them, a woman with broken glasses in a once-flowery, now-shit-covered dress, was clawing at the wooden gag with its hands.
“Why are they keeping zombies here?” Barcomb said. “What’s the fuckin’ point?”
“I didn’t notice the fuckin’ gags,” Ash said. “I thought they could eat this guy.”
“Fuck it,” Barcomb said. “Throw him in. He’ll blend in. Judging by the sounds of gunfire coming from over there, it doesn’t look like we’ll have to worry much about going quiet.”
They threw the body in and it landed with a thud. The zombies around it immediately started reaching for it. They got down, pulling at their leashes, and started tearing it apart with their bony fingers, dragging the flesh off in wet strips. They shoved it to their mouths but couldn’t eat. But that didn’t stop them destroying the body. In their frenzy, they reminded Barcomb of pigs. They ripped through flesh and muscle like it was nothing.
“Someone’s coming,” Munday said.
“Quick,” Barcomb said. “Get in.”
“Get in?” Ash said.
“Now,” Barcomb whispered.
The three of them ducked down and swung their legs over the side of the pit. They stood inside and pressed themselves against the wall. The nearest zombies reacted immediately and pulled on their leashes to get to them. Their claw-like, skeletal fingers were inches away from Barcomb, Ash and Munday. Ash faced them with her back to the dirt wall. Barcomb turned around. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She looked at him. He made a shushing motion. The morning light cast shadows into the Pit as two men stood at the edge and looked inside.
The first man was French. “Who do we want, doctor? We’ll pick you out a pretty one.”
“It’s enough that I have to put up with your childish perversions. Don’t ask me to take part.”
“It’s the end of the world, doc. We all gotta get a little something.”
“Well, you stay up here and indulge in your necrophilia. While you’re porking dead women, I’ll be in the basement saving the world.”
“You really think there’s a cure?”
Then there was silence.
“You better not be holding out on us,” the Frenchman said. “You said there was a fuckin’ cure, doc.”
“There might be,” the doctor said. “Not a cure, exactly, but some kind of vaccine. These people are dead. You can’t cure someone of being dead. But maybe we can interrupt the process if we find out what triggers it.”
“Let me fish one of these geeks out for you, then, so you can carry on saving the world.”
A hand reached down into the Pit, trying to grab the leash of the nearest zombie to the side.
Oh, fuck, Barcomb thought. He’s gonna let it loose.
The hand was close to the leash.
Gunshots sounded from the house. The hand stopped, mid-reach.
“What the fuck?” the Frenchman said.
Barcomb grabbed the hand and pulled. The Frenchman yelled out as he fell head first between the zombies. He turned over and looked back and saw Barcomb. He went for his gun, but a zombie grabbed his hand and started scratching through his shirt, tearing his skin open. Barcomb lifted the AR-15 and with one well-placed shot knocked the wood from the zombie’s mouth. Its teeth didn’t hesitate in clamping down on the Frenchman’s screaming face. Its jaws locked on the Frenchman’s cheek and he squealed in agony as the zombie tore a hole in his face. The others clawed at him until they made holes in his stomach large enough to pull his intestines through.
Barcomb pulled himself out of the Pit. He trained a gun on a scared-looking doctor and said, “Help me get them out!”
They both pulled Ash and Munday out. The Frenchman screamed and screamed until the zombies tore out his lungs. After that, his face still screamed but he made no sound. The noise and the thrashing of the Frenchman drove the zombies into a mania. They screeched and pulled at their leashes. The spikes were beginning to come out of the ground. They saw the wooden gag come out of the other zombie’s mouth and they were starting to all scratch at their own wooden gags.
Fuck me, Barcomb thought. They’re learning how to get out.
Then Barcomb saw a horde of zombies numbering in the hundreds coming around the side of the house.
Oh, fuck, he thought. Someone must’ve opened the gate.
“Inside!” Barcomb shouted at everyone. “Now!”
Running for a sliding glass door, Barcomb heard a shot whizz by his head. He looked up to a higher floor balcony and saw a guard firing. Beyond that, he saw the roof.
Barcomb saw a helicopter.
Forget the fuckin’ chopper for now, he said to himself.
Barcomb raised his rifle, fired two rounds, both landing chest shots with a spray of red mist. The guard span and tumbled over the railing and landed on the ground beside them as they entered the house. They shut the glass door and saw as the zombies devoured the dead guard on the floor.
Barcomb grabbed Ash by the arm and pulled her behind breakfast counter as they found themselves in a kitchen. Munday dived down too as plates exploded on top of the counter and the sound of gunfire echoed through the house.
Barcomb glanced in a mirror on the wall and saw three armed guards adopt positions on the other side of the kitchen behind the appliances. The zombies at the door hammered on the glass. It was beginning to crack. The guards fired again, one shot puncturing the glass, weakening it.
“Show your face, motherfucker!” one of the guards shouted.
Barcomb popped up and fired a handful of rounds into the wall behind the guards. Plaster and brick clouds burst into the air.
“I guess the quiet approach is out the window,” Ash said.
Barcomb nodded. He took a moment and winced from the pain in his chest.
“Are you OK?” Ash asked her.
“I’m peachy,” Barcomb said.
He leaned over and kissed her.
Ash looked surprised.
Barcomb span around and popped up above the counter and sank three bullets into the neck and head of the first guard to pop his head out. Half of the guard’s head disintegrated and he felt to the floor convulsing. Barcomb jumped back down. He looked at Ash. She still looked surprised.
“Sorry,” Barcomb said with a shrug.
Munday fired blind over the counter with her pistol. She looked at a huge crack developing in the sliding glass door as the rabid zombies punched and
kicked at it. “We gotta get out of here,” she said.
She sat back down with her back to the counter and tried to catch her breath. It evaded her. She gasped a few times and coughed, producing blood. She swallowed it down. She looked at Barcomb. He was staring right at her. He frowned. He blind-fired the AR-15 and said, “Stay here.”
Barcomb jumped onto the counter and the wall behind him popped with bullets as the two other guards fired at him. Barcomb leaped forwards off the counter towards the floor as bullets sped past his head. He fired a mid-air sweeping burst of bullets towards the two guards and the other side of the room exploded in a haze of white plaster and red mist. As Barcomb hit the floor, turning to break his fall, the two guards had hit the floor with a half-dozen new holes in their chests and heads.
Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead Page 17