“You don’t have any extra lives, this is it. Game over. Any last words, motherfucker?” he yelled, preparing himself for what came next, the boat rocking with the movement, the sound of the running motor nearly stealing his words away.
“Aff you considered whuh is ‘appening to your fambly while you fuck around ‘ith me?” the kid cackled. “One down, dree do go, you know?”
Panic tried to override his rage, to force him to face what the kid was saying. There had been four drunken assholes and one was dead, where were the other three? He had assumed that they’d died, at least enough not to be a problem, otherwise why hadn’t they joined their fallen buddy in the attack? Carrie was armed, she could handle it. What she couldn’t—shouldn’t—deal with, is this kid coming back for round two.
“My wife can handle it,” he snarled, grabbing the youth by the front of his shirt and yanking him upward with his left hand. Then he shoved him on top of the motor, the kid’s screams turning into terror and pain as the blades began digging into his back, vibrating the small, maybe thirteen-year-old body in his hand.
“Not so fucking tough now, are you?” he hollered, his vision red and throbbing as he applied more pressure to keep the kid in place, not letting the blade pull him sideways as it dug into his back. “Maybe I’ll let you keep your head intact, let you come back with only half a body. Ever see the Walking Dead’s pilot episode? You can crawl up the hill towards the road or fall into the lake for all I care. You deserve far worse.”
He didn’t think the kid was hearing a word he said, but he didn’t truly give a shit. The blade had eaten through the psychopath’s body, blood spraying forth and covering him in gore as it finished tearing him in half, blood seeping out of the corner of the kids mouth; the gurgling screams slowly beginning to die out.
Before he could give it a second thought, he pulled the upper half of the body free and tossed it on the floor of the boat. Hopping out before the fucker could reanimate, he bent down and undid the mooring line. He tossed it on top of the fresh corpse, hands twitching alongside the kid’s feet, spasming in its final death throes. Then he pulled the motor down into the water, the bloody mixture spraying him even further as the blades caught and started to thrust the boat out into the nearby lake. He doubted the undead version of the kid would be able to get out of the boat, especially with that broken arm; sentenced to a solitary existence in death upon the lake with no innocent bystander to feed upon.
A fitting end, all things considered.
He watched as the boat struck the edge of the boathouse, then got a second wind as it burst into the sunshine and out of sight.
With a smile, he turned to leave and stopped in his tracks.
Carrie was standing in the doorway, her rifle held limply at her side, her face frozen in place, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. Her eyes were staring through him and he shifted around to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing there.
“Carrie?”
Nothing.
He reached out to grab her shoulder with his good hand, but she jerked away, taking a step back and giving a noticeable shiver. “What—?”
“Huh? I took care of the kid that killed Melanie’s family and tried to take us out next. He was a delusion lunatic that thought he was playing a damned video game; we were a source of entertainment. He got what he had coming to him.”
The look she was giving him was unlike any he’d ever seen directed his way and it broke his heart; she was disgusted with him. “I saw your face, you enjoyed what you just did,” she uttered, taking another step back.
Had he? He couldn’t remember. The rage had controlled his every move and now that it was passing, his memories of what happened were as well. “I didn’t enjoy anything,” he denied; it was a lie. His heart was sure of it. Shaking his head, he tried to clear the thoughts away, a word or two the kid had uttered drifting free and causing his breath to catch. “Did you take care of the three assholes in the other cabin?”
“What?” she asked, trying to switch subjects but still wrapped up in whatever she thought she saw, unable to focus on what he was saying.
“The other three drunken asswipes. Did you kill them?”
“I grabbed the rifle and came after you. Didn’t want to let him get away. Now I wish I hadn’t.”
She had left their kids alone, defenseless.
“I told you to stay there and protect our children!” he hollered, forcing himself past her and back onto the path leading up to their cabin, praying it wasn’t already too late.
Chapter 20
I
Running up the hill was a lot harder than his trip down and despite his need, his body would only allow him to do so much. He’d already pushed himself past his limits chasing down that fucking kid. Now that he was going uphill towards the cabins, he could do nothing more than walk quickly, and even that was getting to be impossible.
Carrie, however, had passed him some time before, having not even looked back to make sure he was okay as she raced to get back to their children. Well, she shouldn’t have left them in the first place. He’d fucking told her to stay put.
The gun in his left hand was starting to feel heavy, but his right was still pretty much useless, even more so after the exertion he’d been putting himself through, so there was no way to holster it; he was not going to stick it in his waistband. The chances of shooting himself in the crotch were just too high to even consider that; safety or not.
He was half-way to the first cabin when he heard the sound of a rifle going off.
Carrie.
He no longer cared what happened to him when this was all over; if he keeled over and died from pure exhaustion and blood loss, so be it, he had to get up there and save his family. He ignored the burning in his thighs, the wailing of his shoulder, and the numbness of his right hand, as he broke into a job once more. The top of the hill was like that hallway in the Shining, appearing to zoom away the harder he pushed himself forward.
The rifle went off again, followed by another round swiftly after.
Why was this trail so fucking long? Why hadn’t his father built it closer to the lake?
Coming up on the backside of the drunkards’ cabin, he noticed the backdoor was ajar, something he hadn’t noticed on his flight down the hill. Had one of the undead occupants gotten out that way? Were they capable of opening doors? How intelligent were they?
I hope I don’t learn the answers through first-hand experience, he thought, as he pushed himself around the corner and within view of his cabin. Carrie was standing next to the mini-van, the rifle pointed towards the front door of the cabin, a six-foot redneck with a shaved head wobbling in her direction.
She fired two shots, what the fuck was she shooting at?
“Shoot it in the head!” he hollered, working his way forward, his labored breathing and dizziness threatening to put him on the ground.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” she snarled back, the rifle bucking again as she fired once more. It struck the dead man in the left shoulder and spun him around, pitching him against the living room window and shattering it.
He walked straight into an overweight man with long brown hair, a jaw of bone and missing flesh, and wild eyes that burned with hunger as they reached the corner of the house at the same instant. The man’s black shirt and leather vest were covered in bits of flesh and blood, his stomach having an engorged look that he may not have had in life.
Hands landed on his shoulders and began pulling him forward.
After the trip back up the hill, he had very little strength left to resist the frenzied strength of the undead monster about to snack on him. He pulled his weapon up as fast as he was able, jammed it beneath the creature’s jaw and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
He did his best to pull away, his finger working to undo the safety, cursing the fact that it hadn’t been made with left-handed shooters in mind. He nearly dropped it as the zombie shoved forward and g
rasped him harder, the man’s bony jaw inching ever closer to his exposed neck.
Click.
Got it.
He was no longer able to get it up between them, as the nearly three-hundred-pound man wrestled to get closer, so he fired blindly at the man’s legs, hoping he wasn’t shooting the soil, ensuring his death.
The body before him crumpled, the head driving forward, arms still reaching, gravity and momentum throwing both of them towards the back of the cabin, his ass striking the ground just feet from where the raving lunatic landed. Unaware of the injuries the monster had suffered, it dug its fingers into the ground and began pulling itself forward, reaching for the legs only a foot or so away.
Kicking himself backwards, he felt the hardened soil burn his open palm, his left coming up and pointing the gun, the barrel wiggling as he struggled to keep it steady. Panicked, he fired three shots in secession. One finished the job on the man’s jaw, another went wild, but the last luckily slammed into the man’s head just an inch over the left eye, the body instantly going still and falling flat on the ground; dead for good this time.
A smell assaulted his nose; he had pissed his pants.
He looked across the dirt road at where his wife had been, but she wasn’t in sight. Had she killed it and gone in to check on the kids? There were supposedly three others, one was for sure dead, where was the last one hiding?
With trembling knees, he got up once more, feeling the uncomfortable wetness of his thighs and doing his best not to think on it, to focus on what mattered.
He put his hand on the corner of the cabin for support, then looked around at the front porch and the road beyond. There was a body lying on the ground before the porch; the redneck she had been shooting at. That was good, she had finally hit the fucker.
The trucks obscured the view of anything other than the right side of his cabin, so he slowly made his way forward, his eyes studying his environment for any movement, not wanting to be caught unawares again. He didn’t know how much more luck he had in him, the next time might be for keeps.
I’ve got to be smarter than this if we are going to survive.
As he cleared the back of the truck, he saw a figure hovering off to his left. His wife was standing in front of Randy’s cabin, rifle held limply at her side, her other arm up as if she was holding her face. He couldn’t see what she was staring at and wondered if the Osprey had attracted her attention, pulled her over to the corpse she’d created the day before. There wasn’t time for that.
“Carrie, we need to check on the kids. There’s one more of these bastards,” he croaked, probably not loud enough to hear.
He looked at the door of the cabin then at his wife, which should he check on first?
Though he briefly considered leaving his wife in her supposed stupor, he might need her assistance inside; he was on the brink of collapse. “Carrie?” he called, moving in her direction. She had her head down, was focused on whatever was on the ground before her, and he began to worry that it hadn’t been the dead man being picked apart by carrion birds.
If that was the case, then what was she looking at?
Feeling his heart freeze in his chest, he saw the exposed arm of a child, blood on the elbow and forearm, tiny fingers twitching and causing terror to paralyze his mind; they’d been too late after all.
Why hadn’t she just stayed behind like he’d asked?
His heart was breaking. His feet were heavy, his gait slow as he stumbled to the right and got a good look at what his wife was seeing.
The last of the known undead lay on the ground sprawled before them, a screwdriver driven into his right eye, the handle protruding with only a slight bit of the shaft visible through the blood. Randy’s body lay nearby, Melanie lying on her stomach just to the left, her arms at awkward angles, her throat and upper left shoulder ripped apart, a bundle of daisies gripped in her tiny hands. It was truly horrifying, but neither of these things is what made his wife stand there in shock nor break his soul, it was the young boy trapped beneath the undead monster, glazed eyes glaring at him in accusation, tiny hands reaching, body unable to move as the larger corpse held it in place.
Ralphie.
He heard sobbing and thought it was his wife, but it was softer and lower. He reflexively looked in that direction in a half-assed unseeing manner and noticed that Penny was pressing against her mother’s hips, a thumb in her mouth, eyes closed, Carrie’s hand on the back of her head but not doing anything but lying there.
He looked back at his undead son, the fire in his eyes snuffed, the life and love that he had been born and raised with gone; replaced by an uncaring creature that wanted nothing more than to tear them apart and feast on their flesh.
His heart broke, his strength giving way as he fell to his knees, the gun dropping to the ground at his side, his brain overloaded by the sorrow and pain encompassing his being. “Ralphie,” he whispered, his voice breaking.
“Gugh,” his son answered back, trying to claw himself free of his oppressor and embrace him once more.
Maybe he should let it happen, join his son in the life of the undead. Why not? He had failed. His neighbor’s whole family was wiped out, his son was dead; nothing he had done had meant anything. Why continue on?
“Daddy?” Penny’s voice whimpered, a small hand pulling at his neck.
He didn’t look at her. “Yeah, Sweetpea?”
“Melanie just wanted to leave flowers for her Daddy and Mommy. We didn’t know the bad man would come for us,” she cried, her voice hitching, her chest spasming with how upset she was. “He’d have got me too if Ralphie hadn’t distracted him. Is he okay? Ralphie looks angry.”
His left hand reached up and pulled his daughter close, eyes fixed on his dead son’s face. “He’s not angry Honey. Ralphie is gone. That’s not your brother.”
“It looks like him,” Penny’s small voice protested.
She was too young and innocent to understand, and he didn’t have the heart to make her. “I know, but he’s gone on to heaven with Melanie and her family. He did what he needed to, he protected his sister.”
He could have said more, but he just didn’t have it in him. His own thoughts were leaning towards joining his son on that stroll through the afterlife and the only thing keeping him from acting on it was the little girl that threw her arms around his neck and nestled her swollen face against his neck. “I’m sorry Daddy. I should have stopped them.”
“It’s not your fault Sweetie,” he comforted her.
“No, it’s mine,” Carrie said and before he could turn to look up at her, the 9mm went off and Penny began screaming in his ear; the combination deafening as he caught a glimpse of his wife’s lifeless body hitting the ground at his side.
II
He threw the last of the supplies in the truck bed, his arm aching from the strenuous work, but better than it had been two days before. The left-handed stitch job he’d done was horrible, would definetly scar, and hopefully wouldn’t get infected. If it did, he had some antibiotics he’d gotten from the Wal-Mart Pharmacy. He just wanted to wait for signs that they were needed before taking them; waste not want not.
He had for a few seconds contemplated just ending it all, of not carrying on in this post-apocalyptic hell-hole, but his daughter needed him and there was no one else to look after her. Murder suicide was not an option, he could never harm her, so he couldn’t play the selfish card and abandon her to this murderous existence of teeth and claw. For her sake, he had to push on. He would have said it’s what his wife would have wanted, but right now, he could give two shits what that bitch would’ve said.
Hard feelings towards her self-inflicted gunshot wound, her cowardly retreat from this life, were being nurtured in his soul and he had yet been able to forgive her for it, much less think of her in a kind way; his heart full of hate. That he had been considering it himself didn’t matter, he hadn’t acted on it. He hadn’t abandoned them to their fate so as to not face the grief of what hi
s actions had caused. His son was dead, Melanie had died, all because she hadn’t listened to him and stayed behind to watch the kids. If she had, they never would have gone outside and fallen prey to an undead fiend from the depths of hell.
The kids had understood that they were going to be leaving and not coming back. Melanie had wanted to do the sweet thing for her parents and sister, gather up flowers and lay them on their chests as she’d seen done in a movie she’d once watched. She had talked Ralphie into going with her, his son insisting on taking that screwdriver; he hadn’t been a complete idiot. Still, he had gone out there with her, knowing what the world had turned into, his only oversight being that he hadn’t known there was a cabin of zombies across the road waiting for prey to come within their sights.
With his right arm in the state it was, he hadn’t had it in him to dig graves for his wife and son, so he had gotten sheets from their bedroom, wrapped them up carefully, and drug them up and into the neighbor’s cabin, laying them to rest in the master bedroom side by side. After making sure that it was shut up tight against the outside world and its creatures, he’d stumbled back over to their cabin, his daughter waiting where he’d left her on the living room couch and had proceeded to get drunk and try to patch up his arm.
He’d passed out a few times, he knew that, the pain had been too much. Each time he faded, he had wondered if he’d ever open his eyes again, at least with himself behind the wheel. But he was still there when he woke next, and slowly his strength had begun to return, his arm to clot and heal, the feeling in his fingertips gradually returning as his body fought to stay alive.
The following day had been spent in bed, Penny bringing him food as he drifted in and out of sleep, a bottle of Jack on the nightstand, the anguish and sorrow engulfing his soul never loosening its grip for an instant.
Penny had shared in his grieving, lying next to him, barely eating herself, curled up in a ball and crying throughout the day until exhaustion finally took her into slumber’s embrace.
The Rotting Souls Series (Book 5): Charon's Vengeance Page 20