by Kirk Alex
“Please hurry. My baby will die from the smoke even if we get out in time. . . .”
Monroe crawled out of there on his belly like a crab on speed, the way he had been taught in the Marines; not exactly in tip-top shape, and all that, but he moved. Made it out of the tunnel and was back inside the main basement. Did his best to hurry up the stairwell without slipping on the oil by holding on to the handrail and shining his flashlight on the steps in order to avoid the ones that had glass shards and nails.
CHAPTER 633
Fire was spreading. Reached the entrance to the tunnel.
Biggs needed to unlock the locks that the traps were chained to. Not only did the trap hinder his sight, but blood and crud practically left him in the dark. He also knew before he attempted anything of the sort he would have to relinquish the duffel—if for no other reason but the boxes of ammo within that would be igniting pretty soon. Fire was moving in.
Hated to do it. Hated it. It destroyed him inside to have to even think about having to leave his treasured belongings behind.
Biggs stuck the top end of the duffel downward, jamming it between some boards in the floor. It felt far worse than having lost a good chunk of his right ear—which is clearly what had happened. Add this pain to what the traps were causing him; it was unbearable. If he yanked too hard on the chain attached to the trap that had his face, he risked taking half of his face off. Had to be a way. Time was of the essence. Had both hands wrapped around the end of the chain closest to the cinder block and pulled, yelled out, and pulled hard with what diminished strength remained—and he managed to free the cinder block and had it out of the earth and past the boards.
Gasped with relief. Nearly weeping, only he was in far too much pain. Needed a second, maybe two, to attempt to summon some strength and do the same number on his leg.
Gripped the middle of the chain with both hands, wrapped them about, tight as could be—and drew the chain toward him. He gasped at the top of his lungs—and continued to do so until he had the other cinder block up and out of the dirt, yanking until he had it up through the boards. Fell back, unable to keep from collapsing. Only the fire didn’t care that he was thoroughly weak and at death’s doorstep.
Pick yourself up, Cecil, he urged. Get up. Do it. Move. You must. Only quitters quit. You’re no quitter. You never quit. Quitting is for vics. Pussies and pansies. Quitting is for faggots and cunts. You mustn’t.
He sat up. Made it to his knees. He needed to pick up the cinder blocks, find the strength and willpower somehow, and pick them both up and make it toward the stoop at the other end of the tunnel. But how? Could hardly make it to his feet. Can hardly stand up. You have to.
Gave it his best effort: placed both hands on the one cinder block, a hand on either end, carried it over and lowered it on top of the other—then attempted, in this awkward, bent-over fashion, to lift them this way . . . and could not, COULD NOT do it. . . .
Tears and blood streamed down. . . . Too weak to do what needed to be accomplished here, too weak. Exhausted. They sapped his strength. Did it to him. The enemy. Muck and the rest. Having had to deal with Muck and Flinger had drained him to near-exhaustion. . . . Backstabbing backsliders had nearly put him under. . . .
Do it again. Fire was moving in: consuming, destroying things in its path. Loved lumber. Fire was like that. Seeking, craving oxygen; feasting on pillars and boards. . . . The only reason it didn’t move any faster and deeper into the tunnel was because the hatch hadn’t been opened yet. . . . When, if it happened . . . the goddamned blaze would move swiftly toward it. . . .
This was what it needed, desired, to stay alive. . . . Fucking fire. There was that love and hate with it. . . . Love and hate. . . . Right now, he wasn’t certain how he felt about it, only that he wanted to get out of its path of destruction . . . and before the caps inside the duffel started popping and doubling his dilemma.
There was no way that he could lift the cinder blocks. . . . Not in the condition he was in. . . . Drag them along, then. Drag them. Drag them both toward the trap door at the other end. And do it without losing a good section of your face and chunks of your leg down there.
He pursued it. Gritting his teeth, then howling and raging, he went with it. Dragged the cinder blocks along until he reached the short steps that led up to the escape hatch.
Mr. Fimple was there—wounded, no doubt—shoved Patience out of the way, pushed Biggs off the steps, to go after the hen.
Biggs refused to stay down. Mr. Fimple stomped him about the head with his good foot, even though Biggs kept coming back, fighting him. Norbert punched at the man until he went down and stayed down, incapacitated by smoke. Fimple, hurt by the process, was hurt enough himself, and was lying on his back, unable to get up or see properly, no matter how fiercely he needed to do both. Vision was greatly impaired due to the pig mask that had been glued to his face. Trapped sweat and thickening smoke continued to sting the eyes, while dirt and other alien particles underscored his overall state of general frustration and anguish.
The fire continued to spread. Reached the pillars inside the tunnel, the rafters above, the floors and walls that consisted of boards, planks, two-by-fours. Couple of bullets in the duffel went off. No one was hit. This didn’t lessen Biggs’s concern, or Patience McDaniel’s even. No way did it make them feel better about any of it.
She held the hen in one arm, while pounding away at the trap door with the free hand and pleading to be let out.
Patience thought, was convinced, she had heard voices up there, someone moving about, making noise, and she desperately needed for them to know that she was below them and in a bad way.
CHAPTER 634
Above her, in the garage, the old man, although having lived through his share of battles during the war, froze upon seeing the gruesome sight: various bodies rigged to dowels by the ankles with strips of rawhide, hanging by chains via iron hooks in the rafters above.
To a one, they were headless and female, with the single exception being a portly, close-to-middle-age bald-headed male who had a diaper twisted tightly about his neck and an ice pick stuck in each socket.
Like the others, the body hung upside down: genitalia and the rectal canal having been eviscerated and the entrails extracted and the blood drained.
The male body had words, etched in blood, across the torso that would have been difficult to make out under normal lighting conditions, let alone without proper illumination and a flashlight that could not decide if it wanted to shed light on the situation, or detract from it. It was a strain on the old man’s eyes. What were the words? What did it mean?
GOOD
FOR
NOTHING
He couldn’t stand to look a moment longer than he had to. Shifted the flashing beam away from it. A hole the size of a larger than average grave had been dug in the garage floor along the back wall, another had been dug along the left side of the garage.
Lloyd’s belly tightened, as he stood doing what he could to compose himself. Wilburn seemed to be experiencing nausea this second time around.
Smoke that wafted up through cracks in and around the trap door in the floor, through the threadbare carpeting that covered it, drew the old man’s attention, as did the white industrial freezer on his right, against that side of the garage wall.
He gestured that someone lift the lid open. They did, and discovered mounds and piles of viscera, genitalia, and the like, belonging to the hanging dead, no doubt, jammed tight in there. Watched the helpers turn away and fail to stifle vomiting.
The old man crossed himself. Lord, what was next? He turned his attention back to the smoke rising up from the trap door.
He got his hands on one end of the motor oil-stained piece of carpeting that lay over it, was in fact glued to it. Yanked up on the square piece of carpet, and tossed it aside. Smoke was more pronounced. Banging against the trap door from below could be plainly heard, banging and screaming, a woman screaming and crying for help. There were
other sounds made by a man, possibly two. A chicken clucked frantically. Wilburn suggested that the woman was probably Pearleen Bell’s friend Patience.
Lloyd went at the door, attempted to pry it open. Trap door was solid, and it was locked. There was a handle there that you lifted up, but what good did it do them? Door was not budging. Lloyd pulled up on the handle repeatedly. Got nowhere. He considered shooting the lock out for a brief moment. Risked hitting whomever was down there if he did that.
CHAPTER 635
In addition to the scissor jack and a pair of wire cutters, he carried a fire extinguisher. Only wished he’d had them earlier with him when he was so desperate to get in and save his brother.
Monroe Perez choked back sobs, did his best. He wiped his face, and went at it. Cut away at the mesh. He jammed the jack in between two of the middle bars and began cranking the long jack handle until he felt he had the bars bent back wide enough apart. He reached in with his hands and yanked some of the planks off the window frame, shattered the pane with one of them. He had his face up against the other planks that were on the inside of the window. Yelled down to Tillie Biggs to watch her head and the baby’s, as additional planks had to be either yanked off or knocked out of the way—some of which were bound to land inside the cell down there as a result.
As he proceeded to do this, and just as he had anticipated it would happen, the solid panel swung down from the ceiling on the inside of the window. With nary a moment to spare, planting both hands and using all the force that he was able to muster, he pushed in on the jack to free it up, away from between the bars, and held it, length-wise, against a portion of the frame on his right and the panel itself in time, thus not only preventing it from coming down completely and locking into place, but stopping it at about the halfway point.
He stuck his head in. Urged Tillie Marie Biggs to climb up on the refrigerator. She had difficulties with the baby in her arms. He suggested she attempt to stand on the cot first, then take it on further. Fire and smoke were moving in.
“Here.” He reached out with the fire extinguisher. “Can you use it? Know how to use a fire extinguisher?”
There was no way, not with that baby in her arms. Fire and smoke were coursing in, were, in fact, past the gate, and way too close.
“Gimme the baby.”
She held the baby up in her arms. He yelled for her to duck. Sprayed the fire with the extinguisher. Handed the extinguisher to one of the people standing next to him. Reached down with both arms and took the baby from her. Pulled the child in through the wrought iron bars, and handed it to Brenda, Wilburn’s stepsister. He picked up the fire extinguisher, yelled once again to Tillie to duck back, while he aimed it at the fire and smoke and sprayed and sprayed hard. Fire was kept at bay long enough. If he could have, he would have squeezed through the bars himself, only nothing doing. Bars could not be bent apart far enough.
Tillie held her hands up to him. He dropped the fire extinguisher, grabbed her by the arms, then her waist, and heaved her up and through the bars.
Woman, the sobbing woman, was saved. She clung to him, shaking all over. Looked up; looked around. Needed to hold Honesto. Brenda handed him over and Tillie Marie hugged her infant son, kissing him and weeping.
The fire had progressed to the ceiling, engulfing it. At least the woman and her baby were safe. There was someone else who needed rescuing. He was desperate to figure out how to go about it.
CHAPTER 636
Since there was no way to pry the trap door open, Lloyd had Wilburn help him pick up a door from a stack on the floor and carry it over.
They held it above the trap door, at an angle, lengthwise, and hammered it repeatedly with the corner until they finally cracked it and created a wide enough gash to get it open—and saw what was taking place down inside the tunnel.
They kicked out the wood fragments. Wilburn Claude and his grandfather stuck their heads in. The fire, craving oxygen, went where oxygen was available. Led by it, began to make its way deeper inside the tunnel.
CHAPTER 637
Cecil had little choice at this point: he either summoned the strength to pick the cinder blocks up or he roasted—or got shot—or both, in that other bullets blasted from within the duffel.
He did it. Howling. Raging. In pain. In agony. Lifted the cinder blocks. Would he be able to carry them long enough? Had to. Just as he had himself convinced of it, they slipped from his grasp.
Then it occurred to him: in all this struggle and strife, why hadn’t he thought of it before? One. Do one. Just the one.
Lifted it, and allowed it to drop against the top of the other. Repeated the process, until it began to crack and ultimately break off into a bunch of chunks.
Now, do the other. Get the other. Ignore the back pain and the rest of it. Fight it out. Will it through. You’re on your own. The way it’s always been. You against the world. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. . . . I can’t budge. You have to, then get the key to the escape hatch in back of you. Same escape hatch Peach tried but could not open. What she could not have known, had she been able to get it open somehow, she would have been home-free. He would not have been able to stop her in time. Would not have been able to have his people waiting at the other end where that tunnel ended. Only you’ve got other things to deal with right now, before you can move on to the next step.
CHAPTER 638
Lloyd saw that the behemoth Fimple, with the most disgusting Halloween type of wild pig of a mask on his head that he’d ever laid eyes on, was after the woman down there, and felt he had no choice: might be forced to shoot. Didn’t want to. Was against this sort of thing. Saw too much death during the war. What made it worse: heard shots down there. Couldn’t tell where they came from. It all tended to underscore his edginess.
Wilburn screamed at him to do it.
“Shoot him, Grandpa! Shoot him! He’s no good.”
“Go play with your dead squirrels! No two-bit pigmy orders me around!”
“Get him!”
“I was infantry! Awarded six Medals of Honor!”
“Give me the Luger! I’ll do it. I can do it.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
Fimple, who appeared to be a deranged half-human/half pig type of blood-thirsty creature had Patience cornered. She had no place left to go. Smoke was choking: at them, around them. Fimple had that cleaver raised, as he had so often in the past—and Lloyd pulled the trigger. Missing. Fired again.
The WWII Luger PO8 jammed. Someone else stepped in from behind them. Fired a shot into Fimple’s belly. There was no ricochet this time. Bullet remained among the nuts and bolts and silverware. It did, however, cause Norbert to whirl away, hit the wall and tumble against the tunnel floor—where he would not remain for long.
Lloyd and Wilburn reached down to help Patience climb up, out of the tunnel. As she did, Biggs appeared, clinging to her, groaning to be rescued, pleading muffled cries, the steel claws of the trap digging ever deeper into the horrifying hog mask on his own face, while the other trap remained heavily rooted in his ankle at the other end.
He pulled her down, just as other bullets, inside the duffel, blasted their way out to add to the intensity and hellishness of it.
Lloyd cursed to himself. Wilburn yelled to shoot.
“It’s the cocksucker! It’s Biggs! Get him! Cap his ass!”
“I can’t tell who that is! How can you be so sure?”
“It’s Biggs, Gramps! Cap his butt!”
Lloyd shoved Wilburn out of the way. Warned the other man standing beside him not to do anything. The bystander cursed them both, and walked off.
“And hit the woman? There’s shots being fired down there as it is! You can’t hear that? Want me to shoot an innocent person? That what you want? You’re sick!”
Wilburn rose to his feet. Looked up. Flames had made their way up through the carpeting, fed off motor oil stains, travelled along to either side of the garage, and wound their way up, reaching the roof. A ball o
f fire had separated from the rafters and landed on one of the dowels, leaving the rope on fire and the body that hung from it dangled from a single ankle now, about to drop down on them.
Wilburn looked back down. Wouldn’t bother to explain what was about to take place—since the old man hardly ever had any respect for anything he said.
“Never said to shoot no woman.”
Lloyd swung his cane at the baddies. One of them grabbed it, and yanked it away from him. The old man cursed.
“Get me a club or something!”
The fire above travelled to the other end of the dowel, the rope burning. And it was not long before the portly male body with the ice pick hilts for eyes and diaper for a necktie dropped on them, knocking both grandfather and grandson to the floor.
Mr. Fimple was back at the stoop, inching his way up with a renewed determination. He refused to allow his many trials and tribulations to prevent him from doing what he needed to do. He certainly had suffered his share of setbacks: there was the perforated belly full of silverware that a few nuts and bolts were dropping out of now; he was missing toes and the pig mask added to the woes—and everything else he lived through; but he was still at it, intending to climb up—when the body continued on its way down into the tunnel, pinning him to the floor and crushing a number of squealing rats in the process.
Wilburn grabbed at the dowel, on fire—burning his hand. Rubbed the dowel in rapid succession against the carpeting and tossed it to his grandfather. Dowel was too hot for the old man to hold on to and he let it go. Pulled the cuff of his sleeve down to cover the palm of his hand, picked it back up, and swung away at Mr. Fimple, who had made a comeback, attempted to.