by Anton Marks
“You don’t bomboclaat keep secrets from Darkman,” he muttered. “Then try to keep me from what is my birthright, pan top a dat.” He snorted derisively. “Death for you will be the easy part, my friends. Trust mi.”
The threat hung languidly in the confines of the van, as if waiting for its activation into the real world was dependant on tonight’s outcome.
As far as Enoch was concerned the night was pregnant with promise and his concerns could be unnecessary. He closed his eyes and let the anger maintain its grip on him and waited for his puppets to do his bidding. Soon his minions would be returning with the severed head of one of the Guardian bitches and he would be one step closer to what was his.
Surrey Heath, Victoria Park Nature Reserve
Saturday July 20th
22.35
“Hey ma, you aight?” Patra directed the question to Suzy who had materialized beside them from a jog.
They had left the nature reserve and were heading across another small park that would connect them to the main road and Millionaires’ Row.
“What were you doing back there?” Patra asked. ”Find something interesting?”
“Something found mi instead. We were being followed,” Suzy said flatly.
Patra stopped in her tracks.
“By whom?”
“Don’t stop,” Suzy insisted as she dragged her to pick up pace.
“Let’s just get back to the yard now and we can talk there. Oh, an’ it’s not a who but a what.”
“You spooking the shit out of me girl. What do you mean a what?”
“Nuh time feh no long explanation P, I’ll tell you everyting when wi safely inside. Just keep moving.”
The message understood, they picked up speed, starting to jog across the low grass when just on the verge separating nature from asphalt the shadows congregated, the figures looking hazy and bent as the light from the street lamps diffused through the heat being exuded from the ground. Then ever so slowly five, ten, fifteen rambling figures joined the original set. The girls slowed down but did not stop. Instead Suzy turned back dragging Patra and Y with her. They slid down the hill and once they hit the bottom they took a sharp left and headed deeper into the shrubs.
The thought that they could out-run them kept Suzy focused but so far they were everywhere. The park was a big place and the shambolic shuffling of the shadows stalking them could not or were not inclined to follow for very far. But soon it became clear that what Suzy was feeling was Darkman’s attempt at destroying the threat they posed to him. He had recruited a horde of malcontents drugged or under his dark magic’s to coral them in the park and then take them out. So far every escape route they had tried was compromised with unexplained energies that were vibrating high on Suzy’s psychic Richter scale. She was trying not to have to explain Darkman’s plan to her sisters, just get them to safety as quickly as she could. Suzy didn’t want to explain how she was receiving a multitude of echoes from the figures stalking them. Ugly, oily, empty and hungry. A ravenous hunger that emanated off them and was smearing and clogging her headspace like a mad painter throwing excrement onto the canvas that was her mind.
Movement was good, taking her attention away from the emotional onslaught battering her mental defenses. This was not the time to be stopping but Patra had something to say and she could be very forceful when she wanted to express herself.
Patra suddenly brought them to a stop, holding their hands and dragging them to their knee’s
“Now is not the time, sis.” Suzy said. “Trust mi pan dat.” They breathed heavily.
“I do trust you Suzy. It’s not that but I want to see these motherfuckers. Who are they and who sent them?” Patra paused.
“Don’t answer that I know who did this, I just wish he would show his punk ass. I get antsy with the idea of being trapped.”
“We’ll get out, I promise but we have to keep moving.” Suzy said.
“Why aren’t we taking the fight to these crack heads? You ain’t telling me you think we can’t breakthrough these assholes?” Patra said he voice a harsh whisper.
“That’s not what your saying is it Ms Wong?” Y asked. “You don’t want to try, do you?”
Suzy didn’t confirm or deny Y’s observation.
“Let’s just keep moving, ladies. I don’t like what I’m feeling and I don’t want to find out I was right to be afraid, yuh understand mi?”
Patra nodded her lips stretched tight and her eyes wide.
Y intervenes with a calm tone that belied her concern for Suzy’s weird behavior.
“Ok, lets keep trying to get out of here without any contact with these people. But if were cornered……?
“We taking niggas out!” Patra spat.
They kept moving on a track that wasn’t so well used, an alternative route cut from necessity or convenience by the feet of someone who required change on his own terms. Overgrown foliage encroached on the path but it didn’t much matter to Bad II the Bone. They followed it where it led using Patra’s smartphone as a light source. Suzy was being guided on instinct alone and nothing was making sense except the overriding impulse to get home. They kept pushing forward. The ground was hard from the drought that had been news in this part of Sussex for a while. The smell of sappy green and soil was pungent as they disturbed the air as they moved, movement that was brisk at first but slowed as they burrowed deeper into the thicket, a foreboding mental fog shadowing them like a rain cloud. But just as suddenly the bushes became less dense and more easily traversed and shafts of light bore through from what they hoped was civilization.
“Damn do you smell that, shit?” Patra asked bringing everyone to a stop as if an invisible wall had suddenly erected before them.
“Like something died, man.” Y concluded. “Lots of them.”
Then the moans floated up into the sweetness of the night air, amplified by the silence.
Suzy grabbed Y’s arm, like vice grips, her hands trembling, her heart thundering in her chest.
“We can’t go any further sis, there out there, all a dem.”
“Them who?” Patra snapped.
“I don’t understand Suzy.” Y absorbed some of Suzy’s fear her voice shrill. “Who’s out there? We can’t keep doing this all night. We got to face them.”
“She right, sugah. I’m done running around in circles while these crack heads spook the shit out of us. We are the Guardians right? We ain’t scared of no man and anyway hiding just ain’t cool.” Patra grabbed her crotch obscenely. “If they think scare tactics is gonna keep on working, they can suck my dick.”
“You nuh feel what mi feel.” Suzy said. “An emptiness I want to shake but can’t. A kind of hunger where every part a yuh a scream feh food. A nastiness countless showers nah guh cleanse.”
“We’re together,” Y reassured her. “Whatever it is that’s making you feel like this, you won’t face alone. Do you understand me?”
Suzy nodded and all three held hands.
“For all this drama, I think I need to give them a piece of my mind or my blade, whichever works better.”
“Preach!” Patra encouraged with a nervous grin.”
They kept moving through the smell of death and decay that hung languidly like an ethereal dirty curtain. The smell stuck in their throats and soiled their clothes, adding a note of urgency to their step. They hurried through a copse of trees at the bottom of the small hill and headed up a slight incline that quickly plateau. Ahead of them is an open field and beyond that the glimmering lights of the main road and cars traversing the country lanes.
Sweet escape.
Then they paused, their focus now on the immediate distance, their hands falling to their sides, staring on with an unexpected awe.
Suzy’s face looked like a cold granite frieze of an ancient warning etched into some Roman temple. Her mouth was moving but her words were heard by no one.
Patra flinched; a nervous tick suddenly appeared at the corner of her mouth. She was havin
g difficulty understanding the picture her eyes were showing.
Y is shaking, her spine goes cold, her heart pounding behind her ribs, only her grip on the sword slung on her back kept her from discounting what she was seeing as a waking nightmare.
But it was real.
“Duppy.” Suzy said.
“Say what?” Patra exclaimed.
“Walking dead.” Suzy expounded in a deadpan tone.
“Motherfucker!” Patra whispered, her mental clarity returning. “You got to be fucking kidding me.”
Together the tableau they saw would be fire branded into memory for a lifetime.
A throng of dead things were materializing from the wispy mist on the left and right flanks, their stench carried in the air. A riot of moving corpses, thirty or forty of them maybe more were dragging their dead asses towards the startled girls. The walking dead were in varying degrees of decomposition. The clothes they wore were caked with mud as if they had clawed themselves out of fresh graves, gooey splashes of decrepit body fluids stained them, shit smeared with fresh blood splashes as if something warm and alive had got in the way and paid the price with their lives.
A lumbering cadaver dressed in a green soiled and ripped shell suit led the ponderous charge. Another that looked like a school teacher in an advanced state of decay, black drool dripping down from cracked lips, the side of her head caved in and body parts falling from her. Some of them were clad in their Sunday best, shirts untucked, hats still atop heads, innards exposed and dragging. Some of them dressed for more leisurely pastimes but lacked arms and legs. Some were slivering and hopping towards them, their blackened teeth chomping at the prospect of life giving flesh. Milk white eyes gleaming in the moonlight devoid of all intelligence and overcome by an insatiable hunger. The thought had occurred to Y to go back to where they had come from but the rustling of the bushes at the bottom of the incline put paid to that idea. Suzy looked back to where they had come from longingly too, knowing with an uncanny certainty that trouble was on its way from behind also.
Y had her samurai sword unsheathed and was gripping it in both hands, a nervous tightening and relaxing of her fingers around the hilt between her digits. Y let reason fall like a stone in a pond, watching the ripples in her mind’s eye, spread and diminish to nothing.
Y charged the fifty yards between them, the sword singing through the air and in a heartbeat she is amidst the shuffling hordes in a controlled frenzy of violence. The katana was a silver blur, cutting through moldy neck and spinal cord, putrefied sinew and rotting muscle, hollowed bone and poisoned marrow that should not be able to accommodate life – no not life, anti-life – but did. They kept coming and Y kept hacking, hyper aware of her surroundings.
Separate the head from the neck, because nothing else would do.
The remainder of Bad II the Bone stood their ground.
Patra eyed a broken tree limb that had been snapped by excessive weight or overzealous swinging. She ambled over and picked it up. With a flick of her wrist, she spun it in her hands nimbly and then swung it both sides of her with a fierceness that could break bones. Her show of aggression done she let the weapon rest easily at her side.
Suzy took off her light jacket and slipped out of her blouse ripping it in two. She got back into her windbreaker and then bound her fists with the torn blouse. After minutes of controlled slaughter Y backed away from the horde, rejoining Suzy and Patra. She wiped the blade on her sleeves, her movements lethargic from sore muscles, her chest heaving from the exertion of battle and her clothes drenched in black blood and guts.
“I can’t get through…them alone. We have to do this together.”
Y nodded.
“You stink,” Suzy said to her, all three backing into each other.
“If we get out of this alive, you can chastise me for my slipping personal hygiene later, okay.”
“Deal,” Suzy said.
The atonal moan of the zombies approaching them suddenly swelled and Bad II the Bone looked on with a mixture of puzzlement and fear.
The shuffling mass of figures parted.
A group of five men approached. Covered in white dust from head to toe streaked with their own blood seeping from their eyes, nose, mouth and ears. If they were the living dead, they died recently because they looked intact, free from rotting flesh and their clothes lacked age or deterioration. But whatever covered them was luminescent and seemed to provide a gross attraction that kept them close together like clusters of single cell bacteria and as they came closer motes of dust sprang up as they dragged their feet. Murmurs trickled from open mouths in a strange unified groan from a collective awareness.
Stranger still, as they drew nearer moonlight glinted off swords and machetes they carried loosely between stiff and gnarled fingers. They shuffled towards them in a tight group like stroke victims whose movements were uncoordinated but still had the capability to hold on to sharp edged weapons.
Suddenly the teeming dead stopped in unison like blood splattered AWOL soldiers trapped in a force field, watching.
Waiting.
The crooked silhouettes shuffled towards them.
Suzy smoothly moved into the praying mantis stance, her fists up and clenched.
“Could do with my butterfly swords right about now.” Suzy muttered. “Not looking forward to putting my hands on dem nasty skin.”
Patra nodded an agreement and as if to say that’s why I have this, grabbing the tree limb with both hands and swinging the wood back and forth to test its suitability for what was about to come just for reassurance.
Y marked the air with her samurai sword and held her stance.
“Never leave home without it, Ms Wong?” Y said.
Their banter falling on deaf ears.
“What’s the deal, motherfuckers? Y’all never hear of us before?” Patra bellowed. “Well you sure as hell gonna find out now.” She paused seemingly considering her response. “Tell that asshole, Darkman from me, he can kiss my ass. You know what scratch that; I’ll tell him myself, up front and personal.”
The zombies eyes showed a deep emptiness as if their souls had been sucked from the bodies and what remained could only take care of locomotion and nothing more. But Patra’s provocation seemed to spark something in them that suddenly spread like wild fire. It was almost as if an invisible puppeteer was pulling on their strings and stoking them to a white hot frenzy. Only when they reached boiling point the tether of spell or suggestion was snipped and the men with new found energy, ran at the girls screaming like banshees from hell.
“Fast zombies,” Y muttered. “I hate fast zombies.”
Red Ground Estates
Surrey
Several hours later Patra stood naked, her skin being bombarded with what felt like a Shangri-La of lilac scented steaming water. The shower was mirrored on every side and combined with the shower head’s LED mood lights she felt as if she was in a surreal disco for swingers. Naked wet swingers. She admired herself in the mirror through curtains of steam with the tired expression of someone who had had just experienced a jump in initiation for some South Central gang bangers and she had come out the worst for it. She looked exactly how she felt – exhausted and beaten and covered in cuts and bruises. Her fingers came up to gently touch her shoulder that was nicely scrapped, a lucky deflection from a blade. Even hovering over the area with her fingers transmitted a warning of pain to come.
She was lucky – that was her gift after all. No broken bones or gashes especially to her face. Patra protected her looks fiercely. The bruises on her body would smooth out and the battered blood under her skin would dissipate. And in time her body would repair well but she wasn’t so sure about her mind.
Her gift had turned up to maximum against tonight’s threats and she was glad. Her Luck Factor was like an old dog she had back in Atlanta when she was growing up. Old Grover did things in his own time, whether it suited you or not. He had to go do his business according to his needs and if you wanted to come
along for the ride – be his pooper-scooper - then that could be arranged too. But Grover could surprise you and would bite your ass if you jangled a mean streak in him and usually that was a reflection of the meanness in you. So tonight the quantity of meanness was of such a degree her gift came out to compensate.
She winced.
The most significant throbbing came from both her thighs and she could see the discoloration from the bruising showing through her caramel skin. She had to beat off some sly attempts from that disgusting desiccated, nasty smelling, and ravenous cock sucker with no legs that had crawled up in the frenzy to take a chunk out of her thigh. Maybe opening up its head like a dry coconut on an anvil wasn’t a good idea after all because she was paying for it now.
Thai boxing used the thighs a lot in attack and those things they had been up against earlier tonight may have seemed insubstantial, rotting, facsimiles of humans but they were tough like old leather, meat fossilized to rock, bone ossified, unyielding and hard.
But she had given as well as she took from those motherfuckers and they had led her down a road she never knew she would ever take. Patra shivered. A quake starting from the pit of her stomach, radiating outwards and feeling like it resonated bluntly with the gold piercing in her clitoris. Shivering even amidst the steam, Patra let the water wash through her cornrows and sluice down her body carrying with it blood, dust and chewed up gore.
No woman and especially a black woman after having her hair ‘Did’ the way she liked it would allow the elements to taint it. Rain, showers even vigorous lovemaking can flip the switch from good girl to crazy bitch because it was important to keep the myth of female perfection alive. Patra propagated that belief but tonight was different.
Tonight she was washing away blood from her skin some hers, most others’, watching it flow from her and swirl away down into the sewers, not caring about her coiffure.
She braced herself on the mirror, looking at her hands and her cracked and shattered nail extensions and swore. She needed as complete overhaul, hair and nails. And then she wondered about her state of mind. Patra’s eyes caught a wash puff made from some kind of mildly abrasive synthetic material folded into itself to form a cute ball and thought this wasn’t the kind of thing Spokes would use on himself. Then she saw the store label and smiled weakly. He had tried his best to make them welcome, his angels, Spokes Angels. Maybe taking the job in the first place was a mistake? Things weren’t going so well and yet Patra had felt truly alive through it all. If her risk free attitude could possibly be ramped up then knowing Spokes had done just that. It was just the consequences of that rush she had conveniently decided to not think of. No biggy, life had chosen to show it to her anyway. She plucked it from the sucker attached to the wall, soaked it in liquid soap and began to scrub herself.