Bone And Cinder: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Zapheads Book 1)

by Nicholson, Scott

  The blinds were open in the room, allowing bluish moonlight to filter inside in horizontal shafts, though hardly enough to illuminate the room. After Mackie’s eyes adjusted, his gaze darted around. He expected to see Herrera’s bulk propped in a chair, his wolfen smile glowing ghost-like.

  No one was there. Nothing but cheap, dusty furniture and carpeting. A flat-screen TV that would never again vaporize brain cells in the guise of entertainment.

  When Artiss came inside and shut the door, Mackie asked, “You must have seen that Zaphead outside. Why didn’t you kill it?”

  “He wasn’t bothering me none,” Artiss said. “Besides, a dead Zaphead lying around, that might have tipped you off that someone else was close by.”

  Mackie and carelessness had a long history together, most of it attributable to his pill appetite. But underestimating Artiss—-that was one mistake too many. And it looked like he’d pay for it with his life.

  “Where is he?” Mackie asked.

  “Where’s who?”

  “Herrera.”

  Artiss laughed again. “He’s, uh...well, he’s not here yet. But he will be soon.”

  Even with Artiss holding them at gunpoint, there was an extra layer of...wrongness here. The situation was coming into view like a slowly developing Polaroid; and there were still parts of the picture Mackie couldn’t yet see.

  “Artiss...what’s happening here?”

  The shadows that painted Artiss’ face still twisted his features into fright-mask contortions, but his expression seemed less demonic now, more wistful. “Maybe it’s time for a new plan.”

  Jason, confused, said, “Dude, what is he—”

  “Quiet, Jason,” Mackie said.

  “That would be a good idea,” Artiss said. “Mackie knows I don’t mind shooting somebody.”

  Mackie swallowed down the bile that was creeping into his throat. “What you told me on Faculty Hill...was any of it true? Does Herrera even know about any this? Taking over the campus...was that really his plan? Or was it yours?”

  “He doesn’t know about it yet,” Artiss said. “But he will. And I know he’ll like the idea. I mean, you think I can’t tell what’s going on here? That guy Krider...he’s obviously involved with the mob, right? Or, hell, maybe the mob doesn’t even really exist anymore, but that guy...he’s definitely involved with organized crime in some way. And a big Mexican walking around with guns and a bulletproof vest? We gotta be talking cartel, right? And look, I’m no expert on this, but I know prostitution is big business for cartels. If that was the case before all this shit happened, why does it have to be any different now? If anything, sex has become even more of a prime commodity. It’s not like money has any value.”

  Mackie laughed. “So you’re a sick little prick that’s okay with rape. Now you’re stuck here with all these beautiful women on campus, and there’s no law, no authority of any kind to tell you that you can’t do what you want to do. That I understand. But why bring Herrera into it?”

  “Because he’s a beast. He’s massive. So powerful, I can tell. He’s the one that needs to be in charge. Krider seems too much of a pussy for what this is going to take.”

  “So, if Herrera isn’t involved in this, how’d you get my Glock?” Mackie asked.

  “Just swiped it, man. The other guy that’s always with Krider and Herrera—”

  “McRae.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. He had it on him. He takes it out while he takes a piss. Goes off to get high with Todd and Emma, forgets the gun. Nobody was watching, so I took it.”

  “They’ll be after you.”

  “When you threatened to kill me, after that screw-up with Dante, I had to think fast.” Artiss’ voice softened. “I figured you’d come up with some plan to take out Herrera, and I was hoping you’d let me be involved. But the way you freaked out, I figured you were even more dangerous than Herrera.”

  “Because I am.” Mackie’s voice was cold, even though he was vulnerable at the moment. Artiss clearly didn’t want to kill him, at least not right away.

  “There’s only room for one top dog here. The only way this works is if all y’all are dead. You, Krider, anybody standing in the way.”

  “Your dream is a sick little fantasy. Don’t you realize the world is over? We’re all that’s left?”

  “What’s this got to do with me?” Jason asked.

  “Shut up.” Artiss’ voice rose an octave and became shrill and juvenile, like a psycho spoiled brat whose toys had been taken away. “I’m the one with the gun now.”

  “Where’s Kara and Meredith?” Mackie asked.

  “I got them here, man. They’re tied up good’n’tight in the back room. First I’m going to kill you and the retard here. Then I’m going to break them in a little for what’s ahead. And after I’m through, I’m gonna find Herrera and make my pitch, with your corpse as a token of good faith.”

  “And what makes you think Herrera’s gonna keep you around?” Mackie asked. “Maybe he’ll decide he likes your plan, but he doesn’t actually need you to make it work.”

  “He’ll go for it. ‘cause I’ll be his. I’ll do anything he wants. I can be useful to him. He’ll see.”

  Artiss smiled. It had a cold, serpent quality that was almost as predatory as Herrera’s. “And I’m sorry, man, but that cat of yours? When we start running low on food, it ain’t gonna be around for long.”

  Mackie wasn’t convinced that Artiss had somehow grown a big enough pair of balls to kill him, but the young man’s twitching and fast chatter made Mackie uneasy. The guy was close to losing it. Mackie would have to play this just right.

  “Okay, let’s say Herrera goes for your big plan. That still leaves Krider to deal with. And Krider might be a little pissed that you took me out.”

  “Yeah,” Artiss snorted. “I forgot you guys were best friends forever. But I like my odds.”

  “I never would’ve let you live, after what happened on Faculty Hill. I had no problem letting you think I would, so that’d you go along with this plan I had, back when I thought you were scared and sorry and wanted to make things right. But I would’ve killed you after it was over. Meredith, one of the girls you’re so eager to rape? She tried to talk me out of it. Think about that when you’re doing whatever sick shit you plan to do to her.”

  While he held Mackie and Jason at gunpoint and rambled, Artiss’ face had shifted in kaleidoscopic fashion from childish innocence to casual, stupid cruelty to predatory hunger and back again. Now his face changed into something Mackie recognized as pure, boiling anger, the shadows casting him as almost cartoonish evil.

  “I’m not a retard.” It was Jason.

  “What’s that?” Artiss said.

  “You called me a ruh-retard. I’m not a retard.”

  “Well, I don’t give a shit what you are. But if you were normal, you wouldn’t have ended up at Wendover.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Hush, Jason,” Mackie said. Anyone who thought the human race would rise to its best when facing extinction had been a fool. As far as he could tell, most of the survivors had devolved into craven, selfish sociopaths. At least the Zapheads had an excuse for their behavior.

  “Whatever you are, you’re gonna be dead in just a sec,” Artiss said. “Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to head over to Wendover and make sure no other retards are left crawling around over there. ‘cause I damn sure don’t want no more of y’all showing up around here. Well, no boys, anyway.” The grin was back.

  “And Mackie, when I get hold of your crazy zombie bitch girlfriend, I’m gonna do stuff to her that no one’s even thought of yet—”

  Thum thum thum.

  Someone pounded on the door, and a voice Mackie didn’t recognize called out, “I can hear you in there! C’mon out!”

  Artiss instinctively turned his head toward the door.

  Before he realized his mistake, Mackie was on him.

  Mackie twisted the rifle’s barrel to the right, out o
f harm’s way, and bulldozed Artiss backward toward the front door. Artiss’ finger squeezed the rifle’s trigger and a hail of bullets sprayed into the adjoining kitchen. Shots struck the stove and the refrigerator in a series of metallic pings.

  With Mackie’s weight driving him, Artiss crashed hard into the front door, with a wooden crack and the rattle of hinges. On the other side of the door, the voice called out, “Shit!”

  Mackie kept the rifle pinned to Artiss’ chest and drove his forehead into Artiss’ nose. There was that same, satisfying tomato-on-concrete splat Mackie remembered earlier from the first beating he gave Artiss, and trails of blood poured from Artiss’ nostrils to his lips.

  Beating this little prick just never stopped being fun.

  Mackie cocked his head back and plowed it into Artiss’ face a second time. Artiss screamed and then lunged his head forward, sinking his teeth into a piece of Mackie’s cheek.

  The pain felt like a face full of hornets. Mackie drove a knee up into Artiss’ crotch, but Artiss shifted his hips slightly so that his thigh took the force of Mackie’s knee rather than his ball sack.

  So the kid wasn’t a complete idiot after all.

  With a resounding crash, the door burst inward, the force sending Artiss and Mackie hurtling backwards. Mackie dug in his heels to stop the momentum.

  He hadn’t had time to shrug off the impact before charging at a briefly distracted Artiss. If he lost his balance and ended up on his back...well, that was it.

  A silhouette filled the doorway, backlit by the moon. The door hung loosely from its hinges. The light was too sparse to make out any features, but an assault rifle was part of the silhouette. The figure was definitely too small to be Herrera. And that hadn’t been Herrera’s voice.

  Sayles? McRae? Somebody else?

  Artiss had lost his footing when the door burst inward and pushed him forward. His teeth were still clamped onto Mackie’s cheek, and that was the only thing still keeping him upright.

  The figure in the doorway pointed his rifle and fired into the ceiling, the air turning bitter with gun smoke.

  Artiss’ teeth loosened from his Mackie’s cheek, warm blood leaking from around the gash, and his weight sagged against Mackie.

  Mackie pushed Artiss away and dropped him to his knees with a quick kick to the shin. Then, before Artiss could recover enough to reach for his weapon, Mackie moved behind him, snatched the Glock from the waist of Artiss’ jeans, and pressed it into the back of his skull.

  Another burst from the assault rifle peppered the ceiling, chunks of gypsum raining down.

  “That’s enough.”

  Mackie looked over his shoulder as the figure stepped forward, lean face, bright eyes, unkempt hair.

  McRae.

  “You gotta help me, man,” Artiss said. “This guy’s crazy, he’s—”

  “Shut up,” McRae said. “Mackie, put that gun down, let him up.”

  “Two girls, Meredith and Kara, he’s got them tied up somewhere in the back. He was gonna rape them and kill me and this kid here.”

  “That true?” McRae asked Artiss.

  “No! It’s bullshit, man, he’s—”

  “No, it’s true!” Jason shouted. “I heard him—”

  “Kid, I don’t know you, never laid eyes on you,” McRae said. “So how about you shut the hell up unless I ask for your side of things?”

  “It’s true, McRae,” Mackie said. “He wants to bump off Krider and get Herrera involved in a power play, take over the campus. He already killed one of us.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Artiss shouted. Mackie cracked him across the back of his skull with the Glock. Hard enough to hurt, but not quite hard enough to render him unconscious.

  “Mackie, you do that again and I’m gonna put you down,” McRae said. “You said he killed somebody. Who’d he kill?”

  “Dante.”

  “The Guardsman, the older one that went out with you guys?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t kill him!” Artiss wailed. The tears were back. Maybe he couldn’t help it. Or maybe he was just a manipulative little shit.

  “Maybe not right away,” Mackie said. “But he’s dead because of you.”

  “I’m gonna ask you again,” McRae said to Artiss. “Is any of what he’s saying true?”

  “You don’t need to take my word for any of it,” Mackie said. “The girls are tied up back there somewhere. Go look for yourself.”

  “I’d rather not do that while you’ve got that pistol pointed at someone’s head,” McRae said. “Everybody’s a little jumpy right now, and all the noise is probably drawing every Zaphead for miles around.”

  “He wants to kill you, too,” Artiss said.

  “What was that?”

  Mackie drove the Glock deeper into Artiss’ skull, pushing his head forward. “Artiss, you shut the hell—”

  McRae said, “Mackie, what the hell’s he talkin’ about?”

  “You, Krider, Herrera...he wants you all dead,” Artiss said. “That’s his plan. To kill you all.”

  McRae squeezed off another round into the ceiling. “I need you to put that gun down and back away, Mackie.”

  “I can’t do that, McRae. Like you said, Zaps might be coming.”

  “Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t worry about getting at the truth and just kill you both.”

  “If that’s what you need to do,” Mackie said. “But if you want to survive, you might want to hear what’s going down.”

  Artiss suddenly jerked to his feet and scooped up the weapon he’d dropped, dodging into the shadows of the room. Jason tried to tackle him, but Artiss elbowed him away and dove behind the sofa. Mackie squeezed the Glock’s trigger, but the round punched harmlessly into the carpet.

  Artiss fired off a burst, revealing his position with the bright muzzle flash. McRae dropped to the floor and returned fire, seemingly unconcerned with the possibility that Mackie or Jason could easily catch a bullet meant for Artiss.

  “Dammit, McRae, stop!” Mackie shouted. The bullets went wick-wick-wick against the furniture.

  Artiss fired once more at McRae and all was silent for a few long seconds, gun barrels ticking from the heat. Then Artiss exploded past Mackie and plowed into the window to the right of the television set. His plan, Mackie knew, was to have an Action Hero moment straight out of the movies—toss himself through a window and escape, something that looked deceptively simple on TV when a trained stunt man had practiced it beforehand.

  But in this instance, like most, Hollywood and reality were miles apart.

  The glass shattered, but rather than sail through the window in one clean, fluid motion, Artiss became tangled in the blinds. He screamed and thrashed trying to free himself, and the pain from glass shards shredding Artiss’ skin had to be unbearable.

  Mackie aimed the Glock and squeezed off a round, but his aim in the dim light was questionable. If the round found its way into Artiss—snared as he was in those blinds like a moth in a spider’s web—-Mackie couldn’t tell.

  And then the blinds pulled free from the window frame, and Artiss fell to the ground below.

  McRae dashed outside, and then came cursing and a burst of gunfire that grew more distant by the moment.

  Jason huddled in a corner, panting heavily. Sabbath wailed inside Mackie’s backpack. The sound was ghostly, but also oddly human.

  Mackie thought a stray round had hit the backpack and Sabbath inside. But a bullet from McRae’s rifle wouldn’t have stopped there, and Mackie himself would have been struck. Even so, he removed the backpack and took a quick look just to be sure. Sabbath was agitated but unharmed.

  He called out to Jason, “Are you hit?”

  Jason didn’t respond.

  “Jason?”

  Finally, he replied. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah...yeah, I’m fine.”

  Mackie felt his way along the wall past the kitchen and into a short hallway. The first door le
d to a dark bathroom that was empty, but Mackie found Kara and Meredith in the first bedroom he tried. Thick layers of duct tape were wound around their hands and ankles, and each had a piece of tape covering her mouth.

  In the dim light, they seemed to mistake him for Artiss at first, and they made frantic sounds beneath the tape until he said, “It’s okay. It’s me.”

  He reached for Herrera’s knife and then remembered that Artiss had taken it from him earlier along with the Glock.

  He said, “Hold tight. I’ll be back in a second.”

  Mackie returned to the kitchen and started opening drawers and feeling around. He found a utility drawer with the usual assortment of odds and ends: a mousetrap, a screwdriver, rubber bands, loose papers that were probably bills or receipts. Then his fingers hit a little cardboard square. A pack of paper matches. He twisted some of the papers together, struck a match, and made an impromptu torch, which he deposited in the sink.

  Using the flickering light, he spied a phone book by the refrigerator and fed pages into the fire until it was leaping up enough to light the room. He added a stack of cookbooks that were arranged in a row atop the refrigerator, and soon a blaze pumped forth oily smoke.

  In the silverware drawer was a scattering of cutlery. None of the knives looked sharp enough to cut through duct tape, and then he glanced to the side and saw a block of cutlery next to the microwave. He removed the largest knife in the block, put the chunk of wood on the garbage fire, and headed back toward the bedroom.

  “Check the cabinets for food,” Mackie ordered Jason, returning to the bedroom.

  He removed the tape from Kara’s and Meredith’s mouths first and then cut through the layers of tape binding their hands. “Thank God,” Kara said, gulping big breaths of air. “That creep...who knows what he would have done?”

  “You don’t have to worry about him anymore.” He sawed at the tape carefully, using delicate motions.

  As he cut through the last bit of tape wound around Meredith’s ankles, he asked, “Did he hurt either of you?”

  “My head hurts a little,” Meredith said. “He snuck up behind me, clobbered me in the back of the head, and took my rifle.”