Stu took the AR-15 and Mike had the Sig Sauer. Jenn was only armed with her growing apprehension as they climbed down to searched along the banks of the river for a place to hide the boat. The Chehalis was not a boating sort of river. They hadn’t passed any docks, boat ramps or abandoned trailers on the way so Jenn figured that it would be a miracle to find one now.
She was right. Luckily, they did find an almost perfect little arm of water that stuck out from the river. They crept forward to inspect it and found it was heavily shrouded by bushes, a hairy growth of jungle-like vines, and a few cherry trees that leaned over the water like pretty maidens hoping to catch a glimpse of their reflections. Jenn was just imagining them in the spring when their branches would be clothed in white blossoms, when she heard a growl.
Her ingrained survival instinct kicked in and she froze, holding her breath, while she tried to peer through the morning shadows and the thicket of wild bushes to their right. On either side of her, Mike and Stu did the same. In their scrounged and mismatched clothing, they were both terribly conspicuous—instead of blending in with their surroundings, the three stood out, obvious even to half-blind zombies.
The growl came again and this time the bushes and reeds began to move. Branches snapped like brittle bones. One of the dead was very close; no one said a word, and no one moved a muscle, but it did not matter. Suddenly, there came a tremendous crashing and roaring. The ground seemed to shake as a great, grey beast blasted through the thicket, charging at them.
Jenn felt the shock of its charge right down to her core and she was perfectly paralyzed at the sight of the zombie. It looked as tall as an elephant and seemed almost as strong as it laid one of the cherry trees on its side with a single smash of its fist. The creature’s immense mouth hung open showing a black tongue the size of Jenn’s forearm, which it ran along jagged teeth. Its eyes were nightmare red and filled with rage.
Calm and cool as the morning, Stu shouldered the AR-15 and fired round after round into its huge head. Mike did the same with the Sig Sauer.
The zombie’s rage and power were such that it took fifteen shots to finally drop the beast right at their feet, where it twitched and jerked as if connected to electric cables.
Jenn found herself panting and swallowing convulsively and was just reconsidering her stance on boats when there came more growls and crashes through the underbrush. She should have run, she should have hidden, she should have done something more than stand there as two more zombies broke through the thicket, with a third hurrying behind.
Mike fired first, putting a neat but very tiny hole in the first zombie’s cheek just below the eye. The eight-hundred pound beast didn’t even seem to notice it. Mike went to fire a second time only to discover he was out of bullets. Stu’s gun emptied after his third shot blasted away chunk of the beast’s scalp.
Even before the greasy chunk of flesh and hair splatted against a tree trunk, Stu knew they were in trouble—they were out of ammo and the only weapon they had left between the three of them was Jenn’s hunting knife.
“Run!” Stu ordered, giving Jenn a shove and pulling Mike behind him. There’d be no running for Stu. With his hurt leg, he knew he had no chance.
Chapter 26
Stu dodged around a tree and, to give his friends a few more seconds to get away, he cried, “Over here!” The beast, which had only one eye, heard Stu, but lost sight of him. It saw Jenn perfectly.
With horrid, dream-like slowness, she turned to run, only to stop in her tracks as something almost as frightening as the zombies came rushing right at her. It was a fiendish, hideous brute of a man…no, it was a hideous Corsair, wearing not just the usual head to toe black, but also a scrap of cloth across his face and a long cloak made of dyed animal furs and crow’s feathers.
With one huge arm, he swatted Jenn aside, sending her sprawling in the mud. He was past her in a dark blur, bowling Mike over in the process. Mike had still been half-turned and didn’t see what had hit him until the Corsair was charging at Stu.
“Look out!” Jenn screamed.
Stu ignored the scream. The closer zombie was the size of an ogre and was tearing apart the tree he was hiding behind. It was literally shredding it limb from limb. It was a young pine and it came apart like kindling. Stu went flailing backwards, falling to the damp ground as branches struck him on his bad arm and more raked across his face.
He wondered if he’d been hit on the head by something as a man with the wings of a crow flew over him. In his right hand was a four-foot long, double-headed, dead black axe that had been forged to hew flesh, not wood.
One-handed, the man swung it in a high arc so that it came down on the crown of the beast’s head and buried itself half a foot deep. The strength behind the blow was fantastic. It stopped the monstrous zombie in its tracks and it collapsed where it stood.
The man had no time to retrieve the deeply embedded axe. The second of the three zombies was on him too quickly. This one was a female, not quite seven-feet-tall. Her form was that of an exaggerated egg. The girdle of her hips had to be five feet across while her shoulders were a little over three feet. One of her arms was long and strong, while the other was a feeble ragged stump that ended above the elbow.
Because of this weakness, the man dodged to her weak side, keeping low, causing her to spin awkwardly. At first glance, the Corsair had appeared tall and strong, but now he seemed just as awkward as the zombie. Although he moved quickly, he did so with a limping, sideways, crab-like gait. His body was deformed with one leg twisted and shorter than the other; his left arm was encased in black metal from his elbow to his wrist. The metal was capped, ending abruptly; there was no room inside it for a hand. His torso was hunched and humped.
When he dodged away from the grasping hand of the female zombie, the cloth covering his face blew back, revealing a visage that made Jenn gasp. What flesh he did have was pocked and scarred. He had no lips and only two slit-like holes where his nose should’ve been. Half his head was covered in mottled scar tissue from the same long-ago fire that had eaten his face.
It was no stretch to say that he was almost as gruesome as the zombie he was fighting.
On the plus side, he was lightning fast and as strong as he was deformed. The bicep of his good arm was huge, and his forearm was knotted with muscle.
From somewhere under his cape, he ripped out a foot-long dagger and plunged it through the back of the creature’s right knee. When he dodged away a second time, the beast grabbed wildly at him only to fall flat on its face as its leg buckled.
Without a pause, he leapt on its back and stabbed at the base of the skull. The beast nearly bucked him off. He stabbed downward again and was about to stab a third time when the last of the zombies came stomping up towards him. It was even larger than the first one had been and when it swung its enormous arm at the man, there was a CRACK! The man went flying.
Stu didn’t think a person could sustain such a blow and live, and yet the man was just getting to his feet as the beast rushed over and picked him up as if he were little more than a child. He had held onto his dagger, but Stu had no idea what good it would do against such a monster. It was one thing to use an over-sized knife against a smallish, crippled female, it was quite another against a giant like this thing.
It also didn’t look like he was going to be able to use the dagger at all. The zombie opened its mouth and was all set to bite the man’s neck wide open when he shoved his metal-encased left arm down its throat. When the beast bit down, shards of teeth went flying. The zombie looked confused and the look, an odd one on any zombie, froze in place as the man drove the dagger into the thin bone of its temple.
The two went down in a heap.
“Well, that sucked,” the Corsair growled as he struggled up; the words sounded as if they might have come through a mouthful of rotting wet cabbage. Right away he adjusted the veil of cloth making sure that it covered his disfigured face. As he did, he gazed at the three of them, his eyes linger
ing on Jenn the longest.
Mike stepped in front of her. Aggressively, he puffed out a defiant chest to which the man only laughed. Like the rest of him, the laugh was harsh and ugly.
“Don’t bother to thank me,” the man said, sarcastically.
“Sorry, thanks,” Mike muttered.
Jenn stepped around him. “We really do appreciate it. And Mike didn’t mean to be rude. It was just such a shock. All of it.” She almost pointed to his face and stopped herself just in time.
“I suppose it was a close one. You three look a bit out of place. You guys lost?” The question was not difficult unless one was deep in enemy territory talking to the strangest of strangers. Mike looked to Jenn, who looked to Stu, who only shook his head. “Okaaay,” the man drawled. “Do you at least know your names. I know this one’s name is Mike and you are?”
He had asked Jenn. “J-J…” She had been about to say her real name, which didn’t seem prudent, then she had almost said Jillybean’s name. It had just popped into her head. In the end, after a three-second hesitation, she answered. “Julie.”
His eyes crinkled over the mask. He was smiling, though what a lipless smile looked like she didn’t want to know. “Okay, J-J-Julie it is. And you?”
“Steve,” Stu answered. The two men appraised each other and as they did, Jenn appraised them both. From the eyes up, they could have been father and son. They both had smoldering dark eyes and almost black hair, though the stranger’s was streaked with grey, where he had hair, that is.
“My name’s Gunner.” He didn’t hold out his good hand; it was wet with black blood. He seemed to notice it for the first time and went to the edge of the river to wash it off. Now that the fight was over, his crabbing, sideways walk was more pronounced, and he settled deeper into a hunch. “You guys will probably be needing some help hiding your boat.”
“What was that? A boat?” Mike asked, in a voice of pure innocence.
Gunner snorted laughter. “Oh, so that’s not your boat back there. Then I guess I’ll claim it as my own.”
“It’ll be the last thing you do,” Mike said, going over to the corpse with the axe sticking out of its head and yanking it out. It was surprisingly heavy, and he held it in both hands.
When Gunner turned around and saw this, he brayed laughter. He laughed so hard he had to sit down in the mud. Honest tears formed in his eyes and he used his little veil to dab at them—Jenn had to look away when she caught sight of bone showing through at his jaw.
“Stop! You’re killing me,” he said, his voice pitched high as he struggled for air. “You should see yourself, kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” Mike said, planting his feet, and giving the axe a trial swing. It was ungainly and wanted to twist in his grip. Still, he figured he could make mincemeat out of the Corsair if it came to blows.
Gunner sighed. “Well, you aren’t a man, son. At least not a smart man. A smart man would know when he’s overmatched.” He stood and swept back the mottled fur and feather cloak. Underneath it he wore military style armor that had been reshaped to fit his misshapen physique. At his hip was a Glock as scarred and ratty as its owner.
He caressed the butt of the weapon, his eyes narrowing into menacing slits. A second later he shrugged his cloak back into place, hiding the weapon. “Then again, I don’t need a gun to kill the lot of you. All of you look like warmed-over death; scarred and beat up. It must be quite a story you have to tell. Let’s get that boat hidden and then you can tell it.”
The three of them stood there in something of a daze as the man scrambled sideways back to the main section of the river.
“Do you guys think he’s a Corsair?” Jenn whispered.
Stu shook his head before shrugging. He had no idea what the man was, other than dangerous, that is. Gunner had just killed three zombies as if it were nothing. He could have killed them as well—or taken them prisoner, just as easily.
“He’s crazy is what he is,” Mike answered. “Who fights zombies with an axe when he’s carrying a gun? Maybe he’s out of ammo. Either way, I don’t want him touching the boat. He’s not the gentlest of persons, that’s for sure.” Mike could picture him climbing aboard and scraping The Wind Ripper’s paint with his odd armor. It gave him a chill. “Come on.”
Holding the axe near the double-bladed head, Mike hurried after Gunner, catching up to the semi-crippled man just as they came abreast of the boat. “Oh, look at her,” Gunner said, with a gleam to his eye. “Torn up sails, bullet holes, and what’s going on back there? Did you get rammed? Ooh, and a splash of blood! An adventure on the high sea! That’s gotta be some story.”
“Uh, it’s actually not,” Mike lied. “It was really more of a, uh, an accident than an adventure. And that blood was, uh, mine. I cut myself on the uh…”
“Stop it, son,” Gunner growled. “You owe me a story. If you want, you can change the names to protect the innocent. Oh, right, you already did!” He cackled at this as he untied the mooring rope. The sound coming from beneath the cloth across his face was strange and wheezing. It wasn’t a good or merry sound by any means.
He gave the rope a tug with his one good hand and dragged the boat along as if he were taking an exceptionally large dog for a walk.
Mike said nothing, even as some low-hanging branches got caught up in the torn sail and ripped it even worse. He did cringe, which had Gunner cackling again. “Ah, I bet she was a beauty when you first got her. Where was that, exactly? Alcatraz? Caramel? Maybe Coos Bay?” Gunner’s dark eyes were all over Mike’s face, looking for clues.
“That’s enough,” Stu said as he caught up. “Our past and our stories are our own and we don’t have to share any of it with you.”
“Yeah,” Jenn agreed. “Thank you and all for saving us, but there is a matter of trust. This is the wild after all, and we just met you. You could be a Corsair spy for all we know. Are you?”
Gunner grinned behind his veil. “If I were a Corsair would I have saved you?”
“Maybe if you…I mean just maybe.” Jenn had been about to say: Maybe if you knew who we were. She recovered, saying, “Maybe this is how you get people to talk.”
“By saving their ungrateful lives? Yeah, that’s how we do it, missy. We Corsairs go around battling zombies and saving morons just so we can figure out they stole one of our boats from somewhere. Jeeze! I have half a mind to turn you over to them. You know how much I can get for you guys?”
More than you suspect, Stu thought. Aloud, he answered with his own question. “How would you know how much? Maybe you aren’t a Corsair. Maybe you just work for them.”
“And maybe I’m an independent contractor,” Gunner replied. “I work for myself. I do for me, first and foremost. Yes, I could’ve taken you even before the stiffs showed up and I can still take you, and I just might seeing as you aren’t being exactly sociable. They’d give me a thousand for the boat, alone. What you three should be doing is changing my mind. All I asked for was a story. Really, it’s not like we have cable anymore.”
“When we put a few miles between us and the Corsairs, then we’ll talk,” Stu said.
Gunner’s eyes crinkled again. “Do I have your word that you aren’t just going to run when I’m not looking?”
Stu glanced at Mike and Jenn, who both nodded. “Yes, we won’t run or try to hurt you.”
“Ha-ha!” the man cackled. “You’re from Alcatraz. I knew it.” He started hauling the boat again, shaking his head and laughing. “Those Guardians in Caramel wouldn’t have sworn to anything unless it was on a stack of bibles five feet high, and anyone from Coos Bay would’ve said yes faster than a man could spit. Lying comes second nature to them, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” Stu said, feeling suddenly stupid.
“Oh yeah, it’s a fact. They are born to it. Never trust them, is my advice.” They were at the opening to the inlet and Gunner casually waddled into the water to heave the boat away from the shallows. The icy cold water didn’t seem to bot
her him for a moment.
Mike nodded in approval, his mind taken up with the boat. Next to him, Jenn wore a pinched, nervous look. She didn’t like how any of this was going and she especially didn’t like the look or even the name of the man. A person named “Gunner” could clearly not be trusted.
She arched an eyebrow, giving him a cool look reminiscent of Jillybean. “You seem to know quite a bit about the Corsairs.”
“I know a lot about a lot of stuff. Now how ‘bout you lend a hand. We’re going to have to get her up this little tributary a ways and she’s going to want to get stuck in the mud.”
It took all four of them, standing shoulder deep in the cold water and straining at the lines, to get the boat into the arm of water. The water was too shallow and the boat sat canted over. Mike wanted to add more rope to keep her from washing away in case of a flash flood, and weights to counterbalance her, and more fenders to keep her from sinking.
“It’ll be fine,” Jenn said, giving him a wan smile. It was now close to eight in the morning and, other than Gunner, they were all tired from the long sleepless night. They couldn’t rest, however. They were far too close to the lair of the Corsairs.
“Which way?” Gunner asked, a knowing smile mostly hidden by his veil. When Stu only said northeast, the smile grew as if the direction had never really been in question. Gunner had his own pack which he put on under his cape, giving him an even greater hunch. It was hard not to stare as he led the way.
Although his gait was crab-like, he made even less sound than Stu as he went from shadow to shadow, from one tree to the next, his eyes always up and his head cocked on its gnarled neck as he listened for any sound that might mean danger. He marched them nonstop for an hour, winding up into the hills to a small home hidden by the overgrown forests. Nature had also devoured the long driveway.
Generation Z (Book 4): The Queen Unthroned Page 26