The one thing she couldn’t allow was for him to leave. She jabbed the pistol against his spine.
“You won’t do it,” he said, confidently and yet he didn’t move either. His hands had come up to just below shoulder height. It must have been at least a little bit frightening to have a gun in his back. It was frightening to Sadie. She could feel the nub of his vertebrae against the stub of the pistol. It sent a chill along her arm. Her choices were crystallized inside of her: kill the guard or let Neil face who knows how many of the River King’s men on his own. One or the other. There was no middle ground. She couldn’t pull the trigger and blast out his spinal column, paralyzing him. That would be a criminal death. Nor could she shoot him in the leg and leave him. He would just drag himself downstairs and raise the alarm.
She had to kill him. That was her only choice. Suddenly, the weight of the choice caused butterflies to explode in her chest where their swirling became contagious. They caught in her stomach and shoulders, before passing to her arms and finally into her hands. Somehow the guard could sense a change in her however he didn’t fully understand what it meant to him.
“Hey, maybe your dad won’t be as mad as you think. Maybe he’ll let you off easy with just a spanking.” He tried to give a little laugh but it was strained and came out garbled like he was choking on it.
That he was suddenly not being an asshole made her job that much harder. “No!” she hissed, digging the barrel into his spine. “This isn’t about him; this is about what I have to do. If I don’t kill you, my friend will die.” The way her words struggled out of her throat, like they were crawling over broken glass, finally convinced him that she was serious. Slowly, he turned around, his hands held just a touch higher than before.
“Don’t do it. Don’t shoot. Look, I mean it, for your sake. They’ll hear the gun and then where will you be? If you kill me, not even your daddy will be able to protect you.” He tried on a new sort of smile, a sick one that made his face look misshapen, like a stone gargoyle leering down from a church ledge.
In her left hand, she held the pillow. It had been completely forgotten until that moment. She brought it up slowly, placing it in front of the gun. Both it and the pistol shook. It would muffle the shot, maybe not all the way, but perhaps enough to keep anyone from hearing.
The guard knew what the pillow would be used for and he tried to laugh it off, but it came across as bad acting: “Ha-ha.” When Sadie failed to smile his mouth began to twitch. “Please, I didn’t do nothing.”
“But you will,” she said, swallowing what felt like a pinecone the weight of a brick. “No matter what you promise, I won’t believe you.”
The guard was getting desperate. “But…but...you can’t do this in cold blood. It’s not right. And…and aren’t you supposed to be good? Aren’t you a good person?”
“Am I?” Just at the moment, she was sure she wasn’t. She had to kill; there was no other way around it, which meant she was a killer. Her hand knew the truth. It had become steady, like a killer’s would. The rest of her was confused. When she said, “Get on your knees and it’ll be over quick,” her lower lip jabbered up and down and her stomach rolled continuously, threatening to hurl.
Fear had grown huge in the guard. She could see it in his eyes. “Hey, come on. Please, please don’t.” He was practically blubbering. It was embarrassing for him and as painful as a heart full of thumbtacks for her.
“The back of the head is the best,” she said, outraged by her own words and hating her lips for speaking them. “It’ll be quick, lights out. It’s either that or I shoot you in the face.”
“Oh jeez, son of a bitch. Come on, Sarah, I didn’t do anything to you.”
Sadie blinked in confusion. Did he just call her Sarah? Was that on purpose? “My name is not Sarah!”
His face turned the color of very old yogurt. “Stacy? It’s Stacy right?”
She closed her eyes in a long blink. She was going to have to kill him. There was no changing it. When she opened her eyes again she said, “Yeah, it’s Stacy. Now get on your knees.”
Again, he tried to laugh, but it came out in a huffing sound that had no strength. His face contorted into an amalgam of expressions, all of which added up to him looking sick to his stomach. Sadie began to lift the gun and his expression changed; he screwed up his face so that the skin was tight on his cheek bones. It was his last bit of dignity, defiance, courage.
“No. Shoot me here, now, if you’re going to do it.” He had shoved all in and now it was her turn to put her soul on the line.
“This is for Neil,” she said. It was as if her stomach and nerves were tinged in silver that was running a current of misery up from her soul.
The guard began to whine, “I don’t know no Neil. I never done nothing to him or…”
Sadie screamed and pulled the trigger. The sound of the gun through the pillow was a muted bang-fump! Then there was a red mist that hung in the air for a brief second as the guard, the no-named, unknown man, who’d had the misfortune of being on duty at the wrong time, fell back with a bewildered look crossing his face.
At the exact moment she pulled the trigger Sadie went numb. Her hands might as well have been made of air for all she could feel of them and her feet were distant memories. Her stomach rolled over but in a way that made it seem like it was someone else’s problem, and her mind was flat, like a board. She had murdered.
“But I had to. It was a life for a life,” she tried to tell herself. “It’s a wash.” She was trying to convince herself that she was saving Neil, and that what she had done was simply a cancellation of two opposing forces: cat versus mouse, ice and fire, day and night. She tried to tell herself that she had killed so that Neil might live, but it wasn’t working.
Slowly she looked down at the guard; he wasn’t nearly as dead as she had expected him to be. There was a hole in his head that spat out blood in timed increments, like Old Faithful. Spoot! One, two, three, spoot. One, two, three, spoot.
The next little spout took a four count and the one after that made it to five. Then it was over. No more blood. There was only the guard staring up at her, blaming her with his dead eyes. “Life for a life,” she said.
First, the pillow fell to the floor, and then the gun. The sound of it clattering brought her around. She couldn’t just stand there, Neil had a plan to rescue Captain Grey and he needed her help, even if she was a killer.
She began walking for the door, snapping something under her foot. She was sure it was a bone in the man’s hand; she leapt away and cried out. Then she saw it was Eve’s monitor; the front face was broken off and cracked. The sight of it brought her around even more. “Shoot!” she said dropping to one knee beside the dead guard and picking up the pieces of the monitor. They wouldn’t go back together. It was forever broken just like the guard. “The one way to contact Neil and I go and step on it.”
As she tossed aside the pieces, her eyes fell on the gun.
The killing wasn’t over. The guard at the front desk would have to die, as well. She would slink down there, and let him see her, then she would run into one of the empty rooms and kill him when he followed her there. How would she justify that? “There was Captain Grey.” A life for a life.
But what if there were others?
She had no answer to that except to reach into the dead guard’s belt and pull out his pistol. It was a heavy .45 caliber gun and with it in her hand it almost seemed as though she didn’t need excuses any more.
Chapter 24
Neil Martin
“I feel ridiculous,” Neil said to himself. He was sure he looked ridiculous, mainly because fake mustaches all had one thing in common: they were stupid as hell. He had picked up the black, hairy thing beneath his nose from a costume shop in a suburb of St. Louis. It felt like a dead caterpillar glued to his lip and he was constantly wiggling it around trying to come to grips with the unnatural feel of it.
It wasn’t the only change in his appearance. Than
ks to three sweaters, which he wore one atop the other he filled out the stiff, black leather biker jacket he wore, while under a Hell’s Angels spiked helmet, his sandy brown hair was hidden beneath a black wig. It was made for a woman but he was sure that no one would notice with the goofy hat over the top of it.
There was one part of his ludicrous metamorphosis that he secretly liked: it was the fact that he was now four inches taller.
He was wearing lifts.
They were stupid and embarrassing. He had turned red in the face when Deanna had suggested them, but now that he was wearing his “special” boots he felt different, tougher. The world seemed smaller and easier to handle although driving in them did take some getting used to. At first, he felt like a fifteen-year-old with a brand new permit tucked into his wallet, out on his first go. The truck stuttered and shook around him; whenever he hit the gas he would accidentally floor it and when he tried to brake, he left skid marks trailing behind.
Deanna had let him drive all that day just so he wouldn’t look stupid when it came time to try to get on the base. There had been a lot of driving to do. First they had gone to St. Louis to change Neil’s appearance, then they had backtracked, heading south, passing Cape Girardeau for the next piece of the plan. They had to find Jeb.
He wasn’t easy to find. The last time they had seen him was at night at a nondescript farm off the side of a frontage road that stretched for hundreds of miles, and the reality was that all the farms in that part of the state tended to look alike. Deanna and Neil stopped at each, walking in circles around the barns looking for Jeb’s rotting body. At about three in the afternoon, they finally found him, covered with flies and stinking to holy hell.
“He looks awful,” Neil said holding his good, left hand to his face. “You would think he’d been dead for a week or longer.”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Deanna said, breathing harshly and looking green in the gills. Neil didn’t know what to say, so he gave her a shrug. With his arm still practically useless, she would have to do all the heavy lifting and Jeb was all dead weight.
Their plan was to pass dead Jeb off as a dead Neil. It wasn’t a bad plan; they figured the fake Neil would pass inspection unless they ran into the River King, something that they weren’t going to let happen. Neil and dead Jeb would go through the gates alone, after which Neil would meet Sadie beside the prison building and head straight in. After a quick rescue, they would book it, hopefully meeting Deanna at the gates.
She had the tougher job in Neil’s opinion. If Neil had to resort to shooting anyone, she was supposed to drive for the gates in the 4-Runner and either distract the guards until Neil arrived with Captain Grey or kill the guards, preferably in a surprise move.
A shudder ran up Neil’s back every time he thought about that option. By her own admission she wasn’t very good with guns and he had seen the proof in many missed shots. However, wounded as he was, Neil was sure he wasn’t much better. Still they couldn’t reverse their roles; they both figured that a man would be able to pass as a bounty hunter easier than a woman. And Dianna wasn’t just an average woman, far from it. She was tall and slim with long, long legs, natural blonde hair that traveled halfway down her back, and a stunning face, one that would attract far too much attention from the typical morons working for the River King. It would have to be Neil.
“But don’t worry,” he had said right before he left her. “I’ll be in and out and be done quick.”
“Just what a woman wants to hear,” she said, with a nervous laugh.
Neil hadn’t gotten the joke until he was driving away and even then he hadn’t cracked a smile. He was nervous as hell and ahead of him was his first test. The gates were just down the road and coming up fast. “Here we go,” he said wiping the sweat that ran from beneath his helmet. It was a warm night made hot by the three sweaters and the heavy jacket. Next to him on the seat was his pistol, primed and ready to go. He hoped to God he wouldn’t have to do more than just wave it around. His ability to shoot left-handed bordered on pathetically inept.
When he glanced up from the gun, he was shaken to see the gates looming out of the night. There were two of them, made of chain-link welded onto a frame. Between the two of them was a small 40 x 40 patch of dirt, while just beyond the second set of gates, stood a portable shed of about ten feet in height. It had been slapped over in a swirl of paint in an amateurish manner. Someone had been going for a camouflaged motif but it failed to such an extent that not even the zombies were fooled. The fact that the gate guards kept peeking out of a little square of a window to stare at Neil didn’t help.
Neil pulled up to the first gate, stuck his head out of the window and, when no one came out, of the shack, and the gate didn’t open, he spoke in a carrying whisper, “You guys gonna open up, or what?”
“Maybe if you move that stupid truck back a bit we will,” one of the guards said. “You’re too fucking close. The gate swings out, dipshit.”
“Oh yeah,” Neil said, feeling stupid and knowing he had just made a mistake that probably no one else on the base would make. It was step one to giving himself away. “So stupid. So, so stupid,” he whispered to himself as he backed up enough to allow for the gate to open. When it did, he drove in quick; the few zombies that were putzing around the outside of the fence were getting curious and Neil didn’t want to deal with them and the guards at the same time.
Two guards met him in the neutral zone between the two fences. The leader was tall and thick; he had a strong jaw and wore his long, greasy hair parted on the side, making it seem like he was an insurance agent on the “wrong side of the law.” The man next to them was average in every way: medium height, medium build, bland facial expression. The only thing that stuck out about him was that his breath stunk like onions. It definitely wasn’t pleasant when he bent to look in the car window, putting his face close to Neil’s and asking: “Alright, what do you got to declare?”
Declare? Were they expecting him to make an announcement concerning the fact that he had just captured a fugitive? That didn’t make much sense. So what was the onion-smelling man asking? “Uh, what do you mean, exactly?” Neil asked, nervously, forgetting that he was in disguise as a badass.
The two guards shared a look, one that suggested they thought Neil was an idiot. The leader came up to the driver’s side window. He was so tall that he had to bob his head down in order to see in. “He means, dipshit, what do you have to declare for the king? The man is gonna take his rake whatever you do, so don’t try any bullshit with us, because if I gotta tear this truck apart looking for shit, you is gonna be one sorry fuck.”
Strike two, Neil thought. They were looking for the River King’s payment to enter his base. “Oh, that,” Neil said, remembering this time to force his voice into a lower octave to go along with his extra manly disguise. “I ain’t got nothing but the fugitive he’s been after.”
“Which one?” Onion-breath asked.
“Uh, the man. Neil Martin,” Neil said. “Look, I got him in the back.” Trying not to grimace at the pain in his unslung arm, he got out of the truck and went to the bed where Jeb lay stiff and cold beneath a sheet. “Go on take a look,” Neil said, gesturing to the big man to climb up into the back of the truck and see for himself.
He did, grimacing from the smell when he pulled back the sheet. After a few seconds of looking Jeb over, and waving away the flies that crept up out of the holes in his corpse, the man said, “That ain’t him. You killed the wrong fucker.”
This was pretty much the last thing Neil had expected to hear and, as he began to bluster in fake incredulity, the smaller, onion-smelling man climbed into the bed as well. He squinted and made a face. “That dude is ripe. How long has he been dead?”
“That ‘dude’, as you put it, is Neil Martin,” Neil said. He pointed at Jeb’s face; his cheeks were sunken in as if he had aged thirty years in the last couple of days, and his eyes had fallen back so that you couldn’t tell the color of
them. Neil had chosen Jeb because of his slight stature and boyish looks. Unfortunately, death had aged the corpse, but Neil’s only recourse was to continue the charade. “Look at him. Who else could it be?”
“Don’t know,” the leader said. “But that ain’t Neil Martin. I’ve seen him with my own eyes. This dead guy is too…I don’t know, too something. But it ain’t him.”
This was taking way too long. Sadie was certainly on the move and there was no telling how long her escape would remain a secret. The alarm could be raised at any second and they would certainly slam that gate shut behind Neil, trapping him. “Maybe it’s not up to you to decide,” Neil said. “Maybe I should talk to your superior.”
The guard leader scoffed at this and hopped down from the truck to stand in front of Neil, menacingly. Even with his four-inch lifts, Neil barely made it to average height; he had to look up into the man’s face. “My superior?” the man asked, finding mocking humor in Neil’s words. “You wanna talk to my superior? What are you gonna do? File a complaint?”
Neil stepped back, almost tripping on his ungainly boots. “No, of course not. It’s just that this is Neil Martin, I swear. He…he told me so himself. We were, uh, I mean I was about 20 miles south of here in this barn, keeping a lookout, and up walks this little man. I could tell right away who he was, so I pulled out my gun and said: you’re Neil Martin, aren’t you?”
Onion-breath was fully into the story and asked with some excitement, “What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything at first, he just whips out his gun and starts blazing away. So I shoot back.” Neil’s left hand was cocked in pistol form, his pointer finger aimed at onion-breath. “Bam, bam, bam! And down he goes. I don’t know how many I put into him. It had to be a lot, but it didn’t matter he was tough. Tougher than you’d think for such a little guy. Even at death’s door, he wanted to take me out. His gun had fallen and he was reaching for it when I came up. I kicked it away and said: you’re Neil Martin and he said: Yep.”
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 23