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

by Nicholson, Scott

  And then Meredith was directly behind Herrera (Holy shit, how did she move that fast?) and at the exact moment Krider became aware of her presence, she was on Herrera’s back, the letter opener plunging into the small swath of flesh visible above his Kevlar vest, the sounds coming from her mouth frenzied and primal.

  “FUCK!” Herrera lifted his arms and spun. He aimed the 9mm behind his back, but before he could squeeze off a shot at the thing clinging to him and tearing pieces of his back open, Meredith punched the letter opener into his forearm. His hand opened reflexively, and the 9mm clattered to the ground.

  Krider’s gaze fell to the 9mm and his eyes widened, telegraphing his intention to lunge for it. But before he could, Desiree sunk the needle into Krider’s arm, grunting with effort.

  She pressed down on the plunger with her thumb. The liquid in the syringe invaded the muscle beneath Krider’s skin before he shoved her away. He glanced at the needle stuck in his arm, then at Desiree, and then he sent her to the ground with a right hook.

  “Black bitch,” he muttered. “What the hell did you put in me?” He plucked the syringe from his arm and threw it to the ground.

  McRae leveled his weapon at them, but indecision clouded his features. Mackie hoped his words had hit home enough for the man to remember who the real enemy was.

  But Mackie couldn’t wait for McRae to roll back from the dark side. Ignoring the screaming agony in his body, he scrambled for the 9mm. Taking down Krider was his primal instinct, but Krider wasn’t the immediate threat. And the approaching Zaps were still a hundred yards away.

  Sitting on his ass, Mackie lifted the 9mm and sent a pair of rounds at McRae. One went wide to the left. The other punched through his forehead.

  Mackie swung the pistol toward Krider, but Krider jerked Desiree up from the ground and held her in front of him as a shield. One arm snaked around her waist, the other clutching her hair and pulling her head backwards.

  “You can take me out if you want,” Krider said, his voice sounding thicker now, “but your little nurse won’t be here to wipe Allie’s ass and give her the ‘Calm the Hell Down’ drugs she needs.”

  He heard the wet, meaty sounds of Meredith struggling with Herrera, and she seemed to be holding her own for the moment. Dr. Lehman made a feeble attempt to help, but Herrera knocked him to the ground with a thick forearm.

  Mackie couldn’t risk a shot at this close a range, not with the tangle of bodies around him. And he didn’t know how many bullets he had left, so Krider should be his first target. Assuming he could squeeze off a round past Desiree.

  “What did you give him?” Mackie asked her.

  “Haldol,” Desiree said, wincing. Krider’s punch had hurt like hell. Hearing that, he gave her another, right in the kidney.

  “So how you feeling, Lucas? Having trouble keeping those eyes open?”

  Krider’s eyes jittered a bit inside their sockets, and the cool intensity usually present in them, as still as a summer pond’s smooth surface, took on a hazy cast. “I think I’ll be just fine.” Krider shoved Desiree at Mackie and ran.

  Before Desiree crashed into him, Mackie attempted to get a solid lock on Krider’s fleeing form with the 9mm, but then Desiree’s weight fell on top of him, jolting his grip on the pistol. He squeezed the trigger anyway, hoping for the best, but after three rounds flew wild and failed to connect, there came the familiar click of an empty magazine.

  Shit. Plenty of that going around.

  At first Mackie thought Krider would go for McRae’s rifle, but as it was some distance away and would bring him in range of the Zapheads, he seemed to think better of it and took off across campus. The Haldol was slowing his movements, but the drug hadn’t reached its peak yet, and Krider was still able to jog at a faster clip than Mackie expected.

  Mackie pushed Desiree off of him and lunged toward Herrera and Meredith. Herrera had finally gotten her off his back, and he straddled her now, his large ape hands clenched around her throat. The letter opener stuck out of his back, oozing blood around the metal. Meredith clung to his rifle barrel with one hand so he couldn’t swing it into firing position.

  Meredith bucked and thrashed beneath him, clawing at the Mexican’s cheeks, but she had maybe seconds before her windpipe collapsed in Herrera’s hands.

  Mackie’s muscles burned and ached, resisting his silent orders for them to function. He wished he could curl into a ball and shrink away from the pain.

  He wobbled to his feet and stumbled over to Herrera, wiping blood from his eyes. He waited for Meredith to squirm away enough for an opening, and then launched the handle of the 9mm into Herrera’s temple.

  Herrera’s head cocked slightly and he fixed Mackie with a cloudy stare that said, This was going to hurt before, pendejo, but you can’t even imagine how bad it’ll be now.

  He removed his hands from Meredith’s throat, and as he did, she grabbed for the assault rifle that slid from his shoulders and down his arm.

  Mackie tossed down the empty 9mm, moved behind Herrera, and yanked on the rifle as well, but the strap prevented him from tearing it free. He locked the crook of his left arm around Herrera’s throat, feeling the knot of Adam’s apple bobbing beneath his tensed muscles. Mackie dug the fingers of his right hand into the gooey, burned flesh of Herrera’s face.

  Herrera screamed and rolled free of Meredith, lifting Mackie off the ground as he did so. Mackie tightened the chokehold as much as he could, even though his feet were no longer touching the ground.

  Meredith rose from the ground along with Herrera and Mackie. She clung to the assault rifle, but Herrera held his arm duck-winged against his body to prevent her from freeing it.

  Still, she tugged at the weapon with all the strength left in her arms.

  Herrera threw a knee into her gut and all her energy went into sucking the next breath.

  Herrera bent forward at the waist and spun, attempting to dislodge Mackie, but Mackie clung to him like a burrowed tick and had no intention of letting go until the son of a bitch was fully drained.

  Dr. Lehman sat cross-legged on the ground, head down, hands clamped over his ears.

  He had completely shut down. Was useless to everyone at the moment.

  Desiree hadn’t moved from where she had fallen, either. Mackie couldn’t tell whether she was unconscious or dead. The Zapheads had closed to within fifty yards now.

  No cavalry riding in. Better finish this now.

  Herrera bucked and wriggled. Mackie wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. He pulled his fingers from Herrera’s facial burns and slid them toward Herrera’s eye socket.

  But Herrera had decided that enough bullshit was enough, and with a roar he fell flush onto his back, pinning Mackie beneath his weight.

  A broken rib speared somewhere in his abdomen, probably a vital organ. Hopefully not his heart.

  Breathing was a massive boulder that Mackie was rolling uphill.

  Breathing was something Mackie’s lungs would never remember how to do.

  Breathing was a bitch.

  Herrera raised himself, began to stand. And as he did, Mackie’s hand found the handle of the letter opener still sunk in Herrera’s back.

  Mackie had been too focused on maintaining his chokehold to consider the letter opener as a viable weapon.

  Mackie clutched the implement’s handle, and the blade slid from Herrera’s back as he stood.

  Herrera smiled down at Mackie’s weak hold on the now-useless weapon.

  “What’s that they say about bringing a knife to a gun fight?” Herrera shucked his rifle and pointed the muzzle down at the wheezing Mackie.

  Just wait. Wait for it to be over.

  Nothing else to do.

  Nothing here for me, anyway.

  It won’t even matter if there’s pain.

  At least I’ll be feeling something for a change. Not a bad way to go out.

  And then there was Meredith again, hurling her body into Herrera’s.

  It was weak.


  But Mackie loved the hell out of her for trying.

  Herrera grunted and spun around as a cluster of shots went wild. Meredith gripped the smoking barrel of the rifle, attempted to pull it away from Herrera while keeping herself out of firing range.

  Mackie only had a moment before she would be hamburger, and then his turn would come. He crab-crawled toward them and swung wild, driving the letter opener into the back of Herrera’s knee

  There were other places Mackie could’ve aimed, but there was no time for calculation. Steel piercing flesh...that had been Mackie’s only objective.

  Herrera howled and plummeted downward as his leg buckled. Instinctively, he tried to use the rifle’s barrel to break his fall, and for a lighter man, that might’ve worked. But with Herrera’s massive frame bearing down on it, the barrel bent beneath the momentum of his fall.

  On one knee, he looked down at the useless gun beneath him and he laughed.

  At first it was a few soft chuckles, and then the laughter turned loud and raucous. Soon, Herrera was wiping tears from his eyes. “Oh, ain’t this some shit.”

  Meredith stumbled toward him and Herrera threw another kick—from the same leg with the letter opener protruding—into her stomach, this one actually lifting her off the ground before sending her to her back.

  It was the hit that finally took her out of the game, vomiting and coughing. She wasn’t getting up from that one any time soon.

  Herrera pulled the letter opener from his leg. He looked at it, chuckled again, and gave it a toss.

  Then he lifted his pant leg and removed a Blackhawk tactical knife from a sheath strapped to his ankle.

  Son of a bitch.

  “Now this is a knife.” Herrera had seen no reason to go for his hidden Blackhawk when he had an assault rifle in hand. But now the gunfight was over and the Mexican gladly adapted to the new rules.

  Something Mackie should have expected.

  Herrera managed to stay on his feet, even with considerable pain from his wounded leg, and he surveyed the fallen and wounded around him. He could have been Genghis Khan after a Mongol massacre, General Santa Ana at the Alamo, Pol Pot enjoying a Khmer Rouge purge. The reptilian smile was back, adding cold illumination to a face grotesquely scorched, one eye bloodshot and swollen.

  He stood over Mackie and pressed the tip of a finger against the Blackhawk’s blade. “I don’t want to waste my energy killing you yet.”

  “Haven’t...done a great...job of it so far.”

  “Think I’ll leave that to the Zaps while I pay your girl a visit. And I’m going to do awful things to her. She won’t even understand what’s happening...but you’ll get to see it all. Unless you get there first and stop me.”

  And then Herrera turned and jogged in the direction of Linvale, limping slightly as he took care to keep as much weight as possible off his injured leg.

  The Zapheads were now thirty feet away. Mackie shouted at Dr. Lehman to rouse Desiree and Meredith and get them to safety. Meredith was already on her hands and knees, recovering, but Todd and Emma were hopeless.

  Mackie considered trying for McRae’s rifle, but more Zapheads had appeared—six or seven of them. He’d never reach it without a fight, and by then Herrera would have plenty of time to—

  No choice.

  Mackie tried to stand, gravity and crushing pain making the task all but impossible.

  27.

  His battered body moved far faster than he had any right to expect.

  Still, the distance to Linvale seemed impossibly far, the stone and glass of the dorm taunting him.

  He hadn’t even made it to the front door yet, but surely he’d been limping along for hours now, his shattered ribs scooping into the meat of his chest. His body felt like one big bruise. He even felt purple.

  And time had stretched as he fought for each breath, and he wondered if he’d blacked out for a minute. Dr. Lehman called him but he didn’t respond. All that mattered was the next step.

  He turned at the door, saw Dr. Lehman and Desiree half-dragging Meredith to the student union.

  They’re going to make it.

  The Zapheads reached Todd and Emma, who gave out weak screams as they vanished beneath a mass of writhing, scrabbling limbs.

  Mackie turned away. All that mattered now was staying awake and on his feet and covering the distance between his next step and Allie’s room.

  The stairs.

  Just enough daylight spilling through the stairwell windows to illuminate the stairs and push back a layer of the suffocating dark. But now Mackie’s vision was starting to blur.

  He’d never be able to climb the stairs, and it was an act of foolishness to think he could even try.

  He couldn’t spare a second, and yet he still had to step carefully as he climbed, clinging to the rail like a drunken freshman after a Friday Happy Hour.

  Mackie tried to regulate his breathing. If he hyperventilated, he’d pass out for sure.

  If he fell, it was over.

  He passed the site where he’d been attacked by Zapheads on his first ascension, when Artiss had refused to help him. The Zap blood still painted the stairs, sticky with flies. He climbed past and reached the landing.

  Of course, Herrera could just lock Allie’s room from the inside and there wasn’t shit Mackie could do about it.

  But no, the door stood open.

  He wanted Mackie to see this.

  Buckets of sweat seemed to be spilling from every pore in Mackie’s skin, and it smelled of rust and poison and smoke.

  He stumbled into the room and found Herrera with Sabbath in his arms.

  Allie was on the bed, not still, but not thrashing as spastically as Mackie had seen recently.

  Her eyes were wide, always so wide since the Big Zap, so alien that he couldn’t remember what they’d been like when he’d once gazed romantically into them.

  “McRae wasn’t lying about you havin’ this cat,” Herrera said. He stroked Sabbath’s head with a beefy thumb. His touch was gentle, but applying enough force to crush the life from Sabbath would require no thought and little effort.

  And even if his body wasn’t battered and exhausted to the point of collapse, Mackie probably wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

  “Put her down,” he wheezed, the lack of air behind the words making them even more pathetic.

  “Y’know, everything’s different now, bro. Be hard enough to find the resources to take care of ourselves, much less all of God’s other creatures.” He gripped Sabbath beneath her shoulders and touched his nose to her nose. “You bringin’ an animal here...that’s just not responsible.”

  He dropped the cat, and she scurried under Allie’s bed. Herrera jabbed Mackie’s backpack with the tip of his Blackhawk. “She’s pissed all over your bag, too.”

  Herrera bent over to Allie and ran a scarred palm across her hair and face. “I’ll stroke your other pussy now, just because I can.”

  “Don’t...don’t touch...her,” Mackie said.

  “You came up here to have a hero moment. To stop the bad Mexican from doing all the bad shit he wants to do. Like you think that’s gonna make up for everything you’ve done.”

  “God damn you.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve to call upon God, pendejo. The shit you’ve done? Besides, He lit the sky on fire and walked away. Left us on our own.”

  Herrera stood in a light crouch, his knife held with the top of the handle pinched between thumb and forefinger, his other three fingers wrapped loosely around the remainder of the handle. The tip was forward, the edge cocked at a slight angle.

  A saber grip—a common choice for trained fighters.

  Mackie had come here to die in the first place, but in his fantasies, Allie would be whole and Krider would be dead. He would get no satisfaction here.

  At best, he’d get the fleeting illusion of martyrdom and the cold finality of the grave.

  “I think I’ll cut the tendons in your arms and legs, le
ave you sitting there like an ass-end-up tortoise,” Herrera said. “Then I’m gonna make you watch everything I do to her. After I kill you, I’m not gonna send her on to be with you. I’m gonna keep her alive for a long, long time. And I’m gonna enjoy her in every way I can think of. Having a Zap might be wild, man.” He thrust his hips lewdly. “I like it when they got a little fire in them.”

  Taking the bait and rushing at Herrera would end this too quickly. Mackie didn’t plan to survive this, but he wouldn’t let it be that easy for Herrera.

  Nothing to do now but wait for the first strike. Wait for the bleeding to start.

  Herrera grinned and leaned in with a quick jab of the blade. Mackie sidestepped, stumbled over his feet, and nearly fell. The room was cramped and there was so little space to avoid an assailant, especially one as large as Herrera. Herrera’s rush of movement shot a quick blast of cool air into the stale humidity.

  He wasn’t even trying and Mackie knew it. Just toying, teasing. His advantage was unshakable, immutable, and he was just taking a victory lap before the checkered flag.

  Like Sabbath with a crippled mouse.

  And then the playfulness was gone, and Herrera jabbed the knife with purpose and intent, eyes bright with a mad bloodthirst. Mackie held his forearms up, the outsides facing Herrera, as the blade punctured flesh like the stings of monstrous hornets.

  He knew that much about facing a knife attack, at least: Protect your body with the outsides of your forearms. Tougher skin, no major arteries to nick or sever.

  If you have to get cut—-and you will—-that’s the best place for it.

  Mackie glanced down at his arms, noted the angry splotches of red that were beginning to ooze.

  He threw a kick at Herrera’s right knee (is that the injured one?) hoping to blow it out, but he couldn’t load the strike with enough force to make that happen.

  Herrera charged ahead with the tip of his Blackhawk. Again, Mackie’s arms took most of the damage, but a few thrusts of the blade slipped through and jabbed into Mackie’s pectoral, missing his neck by less than an inch.