He paused, looking for the right words.
“Let’s call them ‘consequences’. I can’t tell you yet how bad those consequences will be, but rest assured, you will pay for every drop of blood, every rape, every murder or inhuman treatment you have committed. Surrender now, and I promise that you will at least survive to atone for what you’ve done, and maybe even see your debt paid in full. Fail to surrender, and you will die.”
He eyed Chugger with distaste.
“Chugger here was a dead man from the minute we stepped into this place. Based on what I’ve heard, if Luca hadn’t killed him, then it would have been me blowing his head off. The rest of you are being given a chance. Make the wrong decision, and it will be the last one you ever make.”
“Yeah?” Stan shouted, pointing a finger at Marshal. “Well fuck you, and fuck your consequences. Who the fuck do you think-”
Marshal calmly pulled a second, hidden gun from behind his back and shot him through the forehead. The report was virtually silent, marking the fall of Stanislav with little more than a stunned expression and a whimper. His body toppled over and fell still.
“That should make your decision easier,” Marshal added, with the smoke still curling from the gun barrel. “I was probably going to have to kill him anyway. As far as I’m concerned, he’s most to blame for what’s happened here. More even than Chugger.”
He looked around with a hint of impatience.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
The clattering of weapons hitting the floor was instantaneous. Brock and Vito took only a few seconds longer, each having to flick off the safety, remove their straps, and throw their guns to the ground.
A couple of minutes later, Eric Vandermeer’s squad arrived. They had close to thirty sets of handcuffs with them, more than were necessary.
And it was over.
Danny followed Amber through the dark shadows of the slaughterhouse’s labyrinthine back rooms, up a darkened stairwell to the second floor. Follow these back far enough, she said, and they reached street level up on Commerce Street. It was just one of the topographical peculiarities of Toronto’s make-up. Built on a geological bowl, stretching up from Lake Ontario, elevation increased the further you went north.
Amber led because Amber had spent days wandering these back halls, looking for useful information, memorizing their layouts, preparing just in case such a day arrived. That it would be humans, and not undead, overrunning the slaughterhouse was an irony that had never occurred to her in her wildest imagination. But then, Amber had long ago accepted the notion that irony was the most powerful force in the world.
Danny had woken her up and helped her walk until she got her feet back. She felt no sense of obligation for this assistance, and could have left him already, but he might still have uses. There were people in riot gear wandering around out there, and Danny could be left out to dry while she slipped away. And if things didn’t go down that way, she could always lose him again later.
Or she could kill him. The little bitch, Angie, must have taken her favorite knife, but Amber had three others sequestered on her person.
“How much further?” Danny hissed.
“Close,” Amber whispered back.
Then, she stopped, staring into the darkness ahead of her. Something was wrong!
She started backing away, bumping into Danny.
“Whoa! What the fuck?”
“We need to find…”
Her heart sank as a tall, imposing figure in riot gear stepped from the shadows, his assault rifle laser sight striking her dead center in the chest.
“… another way,” she finished. “Shit.”
“Fuck!” Danny snapped, raising his hands.
Amber did also. Whoever this person was, they had them dead to rights.
The reflective helmet looked them up and down.
Then, the gun lowered.
“I thought you’d come this way,” the voice from behind the mask said. “I radioed the others that I thought I saw you several hallways away from here. Everyone else who’s looking went that way, and I’m keeping a rear guard over here. Come on and follow me.”
Amber and Danny looked at each other in surprise.
“You’re not… taking us in?” Danny asked, lowering his hands in confusion.
“You can’t escape that way,” the voice answered, gesturing the direction they’d been headed. “We have guns trained on all the exits. Your only hope at all is to follow me now and keep quiet. I’m taking a huge risk on you two.”
Again, the two fugitives exchanged glances.
“What choice do we have?” Danny asked.
Amber said nothing, but didn’t argue. She got a knife ready, just in case.
Heartened by the fact that the gun was no longer on them, they followed the masked figure deeper into the darkness, edging steadily southwards.
Amber frowned. This was the wrong way. The further south they went, the further they got from street level. It was all second floor windows up ahead, supply rooms, processing floors and cold storage. And yet, she reminded herself, there was no denying that their guide could have shot them, or at least taken them prisoner. It was possible, she supposed, that there was a way out that she hadn’t discovered yet.
Unlikely though, she thought, keeping her knife safe.
“Through here,” the masked figure said, waving them through a doorway into the room beyond. Though he still wore a mask, it was clear that he was watching the way they had come for any signs of pursuit. She briefly considered plunging her knife into his chest as she passed, but hesitated as the mask flickered her way.
So. Whoever it was, they weren’t completely oblivious to the danger she represented. For some reason, that made her feel better.
Amber entered the room first, seeing the long lines of freestanding, metallic shelves holding four-gallon sized pickle jars, most of which were empty. Like most places, the floor was littered with debris and broken glass from the many second floor windows that studded the walls. Sunlight streamed in over the low-rises and condominiums to the west, glittering against the glassy jars.
Feeling almost dreamlike in the mid-day sun, Amber felt drawn to the window. She gazed down at the city street below, a twenty-foot drop, too far to jump. In the distance, she could see lurching, twisting figures of zombies slowly making their way back in the direction of the slaughterhouse.
A strange feeling of sadness overtook her.
“What the fuck was the point of this?” Danny demanded as the man in the mask set his gun down in the hall outside the room. “How the fuck are we supposed to escape from here? Just what the fuck were you – urrgk!”
Amber whirled around to see that the man in the mask had somehow managed to grab Danny’s neck in both arms from behind. His height was an advantage, and Danny clawed and grasped at the man’s arm helplessly.
Danny was no weakling, and long hours in the weight room had given him prison muscles that rippled from neck to toe. They rippled now under his tight shirt as he fought to escape the man’s chokehold, pulling at the arms that held him with all his strength.
The man, however, handled Danny as easily as a kitten.
Krak! The low, eerie sound of Danny’s neck snapping broke the silence.
“There,” said the man in the mask, allowing Danny’s body to slump to the floor. “That’s done. He really didn’t belong here, did he? With us. Now that he’s out of the picture, we can have our short time together.”
Amber gazed at Danny’s body, and brandished her knife, putting her back to the window.
“That’s good,” the man said, reaching up to remove his mask. “I’ll need some nasty cuts to show them when I explain how you managed to escape past me. So what do you think of this room? Our room. Lovely, isn’t it. The sunlight in particular is… beautiful? Yes. It is beautiful. A perfect day.”
Paul smiled at the young woman as he stepped forward.
From his belt, he drew an eighteen-
inch carving knife.
“Found this a few rooms back,” he said, gazing at the knife lovingly. “I’d hoped to get the chance to use it. Your name is Amber, isn’t it? At least, that’s what the radio said it was. How appropriate. Well, Amber, let me first tell you first how beautiful you are. So… perfect, with your dark hair, dark eyes, and perfect lips. Are you a talker? I sure hope you’re a talker. Talk to me, Amber, so that I have some frame of reference.”
Amber took a step backwards. A sudden chill rippled down her spine, and despite having spent the last months in association with sociopaths and rapists, for the first time in a long time, Amber felt truly afraid.
“Well, you’re… you’re going to let me escape,” she stated defiantly, holding up her knife. “If… if you don’t, I will cut you open, and gut you like a fish. Even Chugger didn’t have the stones to try coming near me.”
“Do you know,” Paul said brightly, as he moved towards her, “I’ve been in this room before. It’s one of the few places a man like myself can buy the right size jars and not have it turn up on an inventory list somewhere. Can’t be leaving paper trails, can we? And there’s preservative! A nice bonus, though usually, I prefer formaldehyde. Still. In a way, I owe some of my best memories to this place.”
He smiled at her.
“So pretty,” he said warmly, closing in. “I sure hope you’re a talker.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Day 38: T-Bone
T-Bone waited, and while he waited, he thought about his predicament, checked his handcuffs and waited some more.
It had been four days.
He hadn’t expected five-star treatment, of course, not after his shared responsibility for the events at the slaughterhouse. He rather imagined that threatening to rape Albert hadn’t helped his cause either. When the Son of Winter had offered life with a chance of parole, he’d half-expected to be rewarded with a broken promise and, after that, a broken skull. After all, when the positions had been reversed, he hadn’t been all that merciful to his prisoners, and while most of that particular stain could be laid at Stan and Chugger’s doorstep, T-Bone knew himself to be far from innocent.
He certainly hadn’t expected to be driven through ‘Zombieland’ in the garbage-mobile, right up to First Canadian Place. Nor could he have imagined being ushered into a working elevator, whisked up to the sixty-fifth floor, handcuffed to a metal post in an abandoned office, and then ignored for two days.
Well. Not entirely ignored. There were the video cameras, and the visits from silent, angry-looking Spooks – that was the collective word T-Bone had invented for the non-slaughterhouse people, since they seemed to be able to ghost their way through the city – bringing food, water, and on one occasion, a stack of pocket books.
“What’s going on?” he’d asked one of them, a tall, chunky guy who’d brought him a bowl of cold pasta, a plastic fork, and a coke on a tray. “Are they gonna let us go? That… that Marshal guy. He said we’d get a chance to atone for our badness. When’s that gonna happen?”
The guy hadn’t so much as twitched. He just put the tray down within reach and left. No amount of shouting after him got a response.
Not that T-Bone shouted for long. He wasn’t dumb, and he’d seen what a zombie could do to a human being on that first day after the escape from the prison van. Shouting was a bad idea.
So he waited. Waited to be punished, released, killed, or remembered. If there was one thing prison taught you, it was how to wait. He perused the books, and found that most of them were chick-lit, the trashy, romance novels that office tower women might read on their lunch breaks. But there were also a few interesting ones, including a Grisham novel which looked promising.
He’d read about a third of the book when, a little after lunch on the fourth day, an attractive, middle-aged woman entered, carrying a briefcase, a tall cup of coffee, and the grim expression of a woman whose duty has forced her to take a walk in the sewers.
Behind her, the hottest woman T-Bone had seen so far appeared, dressed in a form-fitting turtleneck top and tight black jeans. It took him a full ten seconds to notice the gun and taser strapped onto either hip, not to mention the ‘cop mask’ expression that he’d come to recognize early in life. She stood with her arms folded underneath her not so inconsequential breasts, and watched him silently.
T-Bone considered himself bisexual, omnivorous, or even more likely, gay, when he considered the issue at all. In his life spent in and out of prison, sex had been about power so long that sexual orientation had become almost incidental. As such, he wasn’t one to let a little thing like gender come between him and the opportunity to make someone uncomfortable.
“Nice welcome,” T-Bone said, leering. His eyes flickered back and forth between the two women with a shit-eating grin. “It’s like I died and woke up on hot chick island. Which one of you is going to blow me first?”
The opportunity for either of the women to respond was cut off as a third person entered the room, a tall man carrying a folding table and three chairs. Wordlessly, he set them up on the floor directly in front of T-Bone. The ex-con examined the man with contempt, noting the man’s slumped shoulders and placid disposition. He was a big man, sure, but projecting an aura of softness and weak will, just the kind of red flag that would have made him a target in prison. T-Bone noticed the stitched-up, fresh, knife cut across the man’s cheek and took a wild guess.
“Had a run-in with Amber, eh?” he said with false sympathy. “I know how you must feel. Don’t worry. She grows on you.”
The man looked up as he finished his work and gave T-Bone the strangest smile that, for some reason, made the ex-con shiver.
“Your friends Amber and Danny escaped,” the middle-aged woman said, sitting down in the middle chair. “Paul here was cut trying to stop them.”
“Good for them,” T-Bone said, pulling his eyes away from the smiling man.
The women scowled at him, and then flipped open her briefcase.
“Not good for them, Mr. Bonham,” she said, putting on a pair of reading glasses. “They were last seen escaping from a second story window using a twenty foot length of plastic tubing tied to some metallic shelving. Unfortunately for them, the undead were returning from our diversion, and the two were probably consumed. If they did manage to survive, they will experience the joy of hiding, scavenging, and starving out in a zombie-infested wasteland, until they are either eaten or shot on sight by one of our people. Their only hope for a better life would have been to follow in your footsteps, Mr. Bonham, and surrender. If you knew our leader, you’d know he’d be a hell of a lot more forgiving than I would choose to be.”
“Lucky me,” T-Bone said, trying to sound bored as he considered the news of Danny and Amber’s escape.
Then, he blinked in surprise.
“How did you know my last name?” His gaze switched over to the man, who was about to leave the room, and then over to the third empty chair. “And where’s he going?”
Paul glanced over his shoulder at him and paused at the door.
“Mr. Smith isn’t staying,” the woman answered as she selected a file folder from the briefcase and studied it. “He’s rejoining the construction crew working three floors up. Thank you for your help, Paul.”
“My pleasure, Liz.” the man replied, smiling. “Just let me know if you guys need anything else, okay?”
“We will,” Elizabeth said, giving him a smile. She turned back to her folders, set the one she’d been holding aside and grabbed another.
The other woman spoke up.
“Paul? If you’ll hold on for a moment?”
The tall man hesitated at the door. “Yes, Kristine?”
“Now that we have more people,” Krissy said, “Marshal suggested I might want to expand our new police department. Eric Vandermeer seemed like the logical choice, of course, but he’s going to be on special projects here with Elizabeth. I’m looking for someone a little more permanent, and your name came up. I wanted to see if you�
��d be interested in something like that.”
The man looked startled. “Me? A policeman?”
“You seem to be the best qualified,” she said. “You’ve got some size, brains, and people seem to like you. It’ll just involve night patrols, help breaking up fights, taking complaints and making sure that Elizabeth is informed, that sort of thing. I spoke to Marshal and Elizabeth here, and both of them think you’ll be perfect.”
“Not that we had a big pool of candidates,” Elizabeth said, finding her file. “Ah. Here we are. But really, Paul. We’d all really appreciate you giving it some thought.”
“I’d train you,” Krissy added, “and I might even be able to convince Marshal to give you your own squad car. Or squad... Crapmobile, just as soon as one’s ready.”
“Thank you,” Paul said, looking bemused. “I… I promise you, I’ll think about it. But yes, I think that sounds great.”
“No. Thank you, Paul,” Krissy said, looking relieved. “I’ll catch up with you later, and if the answer is still yes, then we’ll start working out the structure of it.”
The big man left.
“That was so sweet,” T-Bone said. “All loving family-like. Now, answer my question. How the fuck did you know that my last name is Bonham?”
Elizabeth ignored him. Instead, she seemed engrossed in reading the documents from the folder in front of her.
“Bonham?” she said at last. “Terrence Edgar Bonham? That is your full name, isn’t it? Age twenty-six. Born and raised in Halifax, your father left when you were six. Your older sister, Bethany, left when you were fourteen and became a prostitute here in Toronto, before disappearing for good about three years ago. Your mother was an alcoholic. Hmm. It says your first offence landed you in youth crime before you were fifteen. Shoplifting infraction and drug possession.”
“Where the hell did you get all that?” T-Bone demanded, lunging as far forward as his shackles would allow.
Elizabeth shook her head, frowning unhappily.
“You were, it says here, sexually assaulted in juvenile detention,” she continued, “and then again at the age of nineteen, when you served two years for car theft and assault. After that, another six months for sexual assault on a student...”
From Oblivion's Ashes Page 46