“Family is everything to me,” Torrento said, nodding. “Let her come to me - come to me, Ava - and I’ll let you through.”
Barcomb ducked down behind a marble statue and raised his AR-15 as he let Ava walk across the room and around the desk to her father.
Torrento hugged Ava tight. He looked over her shoulder to Barcomb. “There’s no more to be said,” Torrento said. “I have my daughter… my blood.”
Torrento pulled a knife from his belt and span Ava around to face Barcomb.
“Look at what you’ve done to me!” Torrento screamed.
He held Ava hard by the hair, pulling her head back. “Daddy, please!” she screamed.
Torrento jammed the knife into her exposed neck.
“No!” Barcomb shouted.
Ava’s eyes rolled into the back of her head and she convulsed violently. Torrento twisted the knife and opened her throat up, sending her blood spilling all over the floor.
“You did this!” Torrento screamed at Barcomb, completely unhinged, his face red and his eyes wide. “You fuckin’ did this to me!”
He stabbed Ava in the throat again, nearly decapitating her.
Barcomb fired, full auto, into Torrento’s body, shredding his chest and disintegrating the top of his head. His brains hit the wall. He and his daughter hit the floor.
Haws, Ash and Munday rushed inside. Gulley followed sheepishly.
“Motherfucker,” Haws said. He fired a shot into Torrento’s corpse.
“Son of a bitch,” Ash said, looking at the twitching corpse of Torrento’s daughter.
“Oh, God!” they heard from the doorway. It was Mrs. Torrento. She backed up away from the scene. She started screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Wait!” Barcomb shouted.
She turned and jumped off the balcony, hitting the tiles two floors down with a crunch. She screamed, not quite dead, and was alive when the zombies set upon her and started tearing her apart.
Ash went to the window and looked out at the world. The sun had come up completely. It almost looked normal beyond the walls. Within them, zombies swarmed. The gates were still open. “What are we gonna do, Darren?” she said.
“We have to leave,” Barcomb answered.
Barcomb turned and saw Munday, barely standing and with blood dripping from her mouth. She raised her glock and fired. Ash was thrown back through the window and disappeared below its frame before she could even begin screaming. When she hit the ground outside, then she started screaming.
“No!” Barcomb shouted. He instinctively ran to the window and looked down. Ash was sprawled out below, bleeding from her stomach. She writhed in agony and screamed.
Barcomb drew his gun and turned to face Munday. Haws drew on her too.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!” Barcomb shouted.
Munday had her arm around Gulley’s throat, choking him while she held the barrel of her glock to the side of his head. “I’m taking the fucking helicopter,” she said.
“You fuckin’ crazy bitch,” Haws shouted, “what’s wrong with you?!”
Haws ran out of the room and started firing at the zombie. “I’ll get Ash!” he shouted.
“Munday,” Barcomb said, his aim wavering as he fought through the pain, “you’re fucking us. What the fuck is the matter with you? We’ll be fuckin’ fine! We can all go together!”
“We won’t be fine!” she screamed. “Have you looked out that window? Have you seen what’s going on out there? We’re all fucked, all of us! The only thing left to do is run. Maybe it’s better somewhere else.”
“It’s not better,” Barcomb said. “Everywhere else is just as dead as here. You heard the reports yourself. This shit is world-fuckin’-wide! Where are you gonna fuckin’ go?”
“An island,” she said.
“A fuckin’ island? How much fuckin’ fuel do you think this helicopter has?”
“Look,” Gulley said, raising his hands, “that fuckin’ thing’s got fuel for days, but it’s old as shit. I can fly it, but if that thing breaks then I can’t repair a fuckin’ thing. If that thing dies in mid-air, we die in a big fuckin’ fireball when it hits the ground, because there’s not a goddamn thing I’ll be able to do about it.”
“It’s a risk I have to take,” Munday said. Munday started dragging Gulley back towards the rear door which led to the roof, stepping around the bodies. Barcomb fired into the wall behind her head.
“If I have to,” he said, “I’ll fuckin’ kill both of you just to stop you fuckin’ us over. Look, you’re sick, Munday. You fuckin’ need people or you won’t make it. You can’t fuckin’ make it on your own. I swear to God, I’ll kill you both!”
“No,” Munday said. “You won’t.”
Barcomb took two steps forward to follow them. Munday was hidden behind Gulley, ducking down slightly.
“You’re too fuckin’ soft, Barcomb,” Munday said. “You won’t make it, I can tell you that.”
“I’m soft?” Barcomb said. “How the fuck do you figure that?”
“You won’t do what’s necessary. You won’t kill an innocent person to save yourself, to save the group. You’re dangerous, because you don’t take the matter of survival seriously enough. The world isn’t the same. We’re not cops any more. There is no fucking law.”
“There’s law if we want it. We can’t just decide to throw everything away and live like animals.”
“If we don’t, the animals will be the only ones left!” Munday walked backwards through the door, muttering to Gulley, “If you put a single fuckin’ foot out of place I’m going to blow your fat fuckin’ head off.”
Barcomb growled and shook his head, aiming his gun at Gulley who was placed much too much in the way.
“Munday, don’t you fuckin’ do this. You walk out that door – I’m telling you – there’s no coming back from that. I will put you down.”
Munday shifted to the side of Gulley and fired. A bullet whizzed by Barcomb’s head and he dived for cover behind a bookcase. Munday fired two more times and paper exploded around Barcomb’s head as he waited for his moment. Munday’s third shot was dry: she was out of ammo. Barcomb ran out from cover and saw her heading out the exit, onto a steel staircase outside the building, dragging Gulley along with him still placed in the way.
“Motherfucker, stop right there!” Barcomb barked.
Munday kept going.
Barcomb lifted his weapon and fired. Gulley’s kneecap exploded in a fine red mist and he dropped instantly to the floor with a deafening scream. Munday pulled him up and he started to drop again.
“Fuck you!” she screamed, and pushed him over the railing and down to the ground below with a sickening crunch. She stopped and turned and looked right at Barcomb. Barcomb aimed at her face and pulled the trigger.
Barcomb was out of ammo, too.
“Son of a bitch,” Barcomb said.
Munday turned and ran up the steel staircase.
Barcomb couldn’t hear Ash screaming outside any more. He followed Munday out the door and up the stairs to the rooftop.
The sun blinded him as he climbed the stairs. His chest was bleeding, he could feel it. He felt the stitches had come loose. When he reached the top he saw Munday stood on the edge of the rooftop, just beyond the helicopter.
“Where the fuck are you gonna go now?” Barcomb inquired.
Munday turned around. She was in tears. She was bleeding from her mouth and sweating and sickly. She could hardly stand.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Barcomb asked.
“I’m Rachel,” Munday said. “I’ve put up with people like you all my life and tried to make something of myself and this is where it gets me.”
“People like me?” Barcomb shouted. “I’ve saved your fuckin’ life!”
Barcomb could hear the zombies coming through Torrento’s office now, banging and barging their way through in a violent rage.
“Some fuckin’ life you saved!” Munday screamed
. “I was fuckin’ tortured for days until you fuckin’ showed up! What do we have now?! We’ve got nothing!”
“A hard past is not an excuse being a fucking piece of shit in the present,” Barcomb said. “Ash has always had your fuckin’ back and you fuckin’ shoot her so you can fuck off in a helicopter and die on some pretty little island all by yourself? Fuck that.”
A single zombie came up onto the roof.
“If you’re gonna kill yourself,” Barcomb said, “fucking do it. I ain’t gonna stop you. I always knew you were a fuckin’ coward.”
The zombie got closer and Barcomb saw its face.
“Fuck me,” he said.
“No!” Munday screamed. “Not him!”
It was Duke McBride, his skin pale white, his eyes unfocused and his jaw hanging open. There was a large open wound below his chin, a great big hole with flaps of skin hanging off.
Duke seemed to look past Barcomb. Barcomb swore he could see a hint of recognition in his eyes when he locked onto Munday.
“No!” Munday screamed.
Barcomb scowled at her and stepped aside.
Munday screamed hysterically as Duke jumped onto her and clawed at her throat. His teeth sank into her skin and clamped down on her windpipe. She screamed and drowned in her own blood as Duke tore at her windpipe like a dog with a toy, shaking his head and freeing it from her neck.
Rachel Munday was thrown into a dark seizure from which she would never emerge. Every last ounce of energy in her body was expended in her violent convulsions. Every thought her brain would ever have again flashed through her head at lightning speed. She had no idea what was happening to her. She had only sensations of pain and thoughts of pain and then, when she had lost enough blood and couldn’t get enough air, Rachel had nothing.
“Hey, Duke,” Barcomb said.
Duke stood up with Munday’s blood dripping from his lips. He growled at Barcomb.
“Thanks for the assist, asshole.”
Barcomb kicked Duke hard in the chest and sent him toppling backwards off the rooftop to a second, much messier death below. His head popped on impact with the concrete.
Barcomb scowled at Munday’s corpse. He rolled her off the rooftop too and watched her body splatter below.
A sounds started up. It was the six-wheeler truck.
Barcomb rushed over to the other side of the roof. Haws plowed the truck through a dozen zombies and parked it right in front of the gate. The numbers were thinning now. He looked down at the ground below for Ash. There was no sign of her.
“Ash!” Barcomb shouted.
Gunshots sounded behind him from inside the house. He ignored them.
“Ash!” he shouted again.
He looked around for her. He started looking at the faces of the zombies, praying she hadn’t turned. She wouldn’t want that. Suddenly, he heard something from behind him.
“You looking for me?”
Barcomb turned. Ash grabbed him and hugged him.
“Not too tight,” Ash said, pulling back. “She nailed me right in the shoulder.”
“I thought you were dead,” Barcomb said.
“That seems to be going around,” Ash replied with a smile.
“How did you-”
“I fucked up my leg pretty bad,” she said, “but it wasn’t so bad. I landed on a car, too. That was fun.”
“You landed on a car?”
“It’s still drivable.”
Ash and Barcomb held each other and looked down at the yard. Haws got out of the truck and started picking off the few remaining zombies.
“What do you think about this place?” Barcomb asked.
“What about it?”
“Is it livable?”
Ash touched Barcomb’s face and kissed him.
“Anywhere’s livable,” Ash said, smiling, “as long as we managed to stay the fuck alive.”
“Damn fuckin’ right,” Barcomb said.
Chapter 10: No Place Like Home
Six months later, there was barely a trace of death within the walls of their new home. Barcomb, Haws and Ash had taken every corpse ten miles down the road on the back of a borrowed flat-bed truck and burned them in the middle of the afternoon. Munday was thrown in there with the others. She was given no special treatment. She was the same as any other corpse. Nobody got upset and claimed otherwise. She was thrown on the ground just the same and her decaying corpse burnt just the same, too. It took a long time to gather enough paint to repaint the walls, to get rid of all the pink stains, but they got there. After three months, they had picked their own rooms and settled down. Barcomb and Ash took the master bedroom. Haws liked it best in the basement, down with the equipment and the firearms. He took to working on the Humvee most days, to get her back to her best. He’d done it before and he’d do it again, that’s what he kept saying. He was slower with one hand down for a while, but he was learning new tricks. The missing hand still tickled sometimes. Lauren, which they later learned was Pocahontas’s real name, slept in the pantry. It took a while to get her to sleep anywhere but the kennels and to walk on two legs, but they got there. Barcomb sat with her for hours every day, talking to her about the world, about the things he’d seen and done before the world changed forever. He talked only about the good things, about fishing trips and birthday parties, game days and fight nights. At first, he did it only for her benefit, but he came to enjoy it. The house on the side of the hill had seen a lot of horror, but slowly, like the fading tide, that horror subsided and was replaced with something else. The walls kept them safe from the outside world. It took longer for them all to feel safe from their thoughts and memories. They spent long nights sat up drinking and talking about all the things that they’d seen and done. They could repaint the walls, but they could never cover over the mental scars the end of the world had given them. But that was OK, Barcomb thought. They were lucky.
To be alive was to be lucky, that was Barcomb’s conclusion.
It was a Saturday in November when Barcomb woke up with the sun shining through the curtains and felt beside him and discovered that Ash had already gotten up. He checked the bathroom. She wasn’t there. The morning sickness was getting to her recently. The idea of bringing a baby into this world didn’t sit well with Barcomb, but maybe that’s what the world needed, he thought. They made the decision together. They carefully plotted out all of the supplies they’d need, all the supplies they had, and the reliability of the house’s defenses. They judged the odds of their deaths. They accounted for everything: zombies, raiders, the military, animals, everything. Nothing was getting through their walls. Nothing was getting into their house. Nothing was getting into their lives. They had complete control.
Barcomb sometimes felt it was too good to be true.
He slipped on some pants and walked out of the bedroom. The sound of static reverberated throughout the house. Confused, Barcomb wandered down the hallway and looked down at the lounge from the balcony. The TV was on.
Static.
Barcomb walked down the stairs and turned it off. He still heard it.
Static.
The radio was on.
“What the fuck?” Barcomb said. He walked over to the radio and turned it off. “Ash?” he called.
A faint hissing sound came from the door to the basement. Barcomb opened the door and walked down, his bare feet slapping on the tiled floor along the way. He scratched the back of his neck. It was the only pain he could get rid of easily. His battle scars - the bullet wounds, the stab wounds, the broken bones, everything - they ached and burned and itched alternately. The cold made some worse; the heat bothered the rest. It took him a while to come to terms with it, to be anything other than constantly irritated. Walking down the steps into the basement, his knee was shot with sharp pain with each step.
“Haws, man,” Barcomb said. “You down here?”
The hissing grew louder with each step. Barcomb reached the bottom and the static was all around, from every car radio and ham r
adio in the room, about a dozen in all. Haws and Ash were crowded around the long distance radio. They both turned and looked at him at the same time.
“What the fuck is going on?” Barcomb said. “Turn off some of these fuckin’ radios, for fuck’s sake. What are you even doing?”
Neither Haws nor Ash spoke.
Barcomb shrugged. “What?” he said. “What is it?”
“The radios all started up about ten minutes ago,” Ash said.
“Something big is going down,” Haws said.
Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead Page 19