by Sean Platt
Sutherland stared into Piggy’s beady eyes. “Did you make me miss an innocent’s whimsy, or are you a lying pig who said something behind my back?”
The man’s jowls shook as he shivered. He managed, “I don’t know . . . Sir.”
“You don’t know if there were frolicking children, or you don’t know if you said something yellow when you thought I couldn’t hear.”
“I don’t know, Sir,” Piggy repeated, one heave away from tears.
Sutherland smacked the pig across the face and watched him tremble, too terrified to reach for his gun.
“I’m going to ask you both once more. Who was laughing?”
The two men exchanged glances. The candle bastard slowly raised his finger to Piggy. “He was, Sir.”
Piggy spoke quickly, “I was laughing at a joke, Sir!”
“A joke?” Sutherland said with an exaggerated smile, “Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me? I love jokes. Go ahead. Tell me the joke.”
Piggy shook his head and pointed at the skinny man. “Jim told me the j . . . joke, Sir.”
Sutherland spun to Jim’s face and stopped just inches from it.
“Okay, Slim Jim, make me laugh!”
Jim shuddered. He hemmed, hawed, and said nothing worth a damn. Finally, his eyes lit as if he’d conjured the perfect joke to cover the fib from his hog of a friend. “How can you spot a zombie whore?” He paused a beat, then finished. “Because she’s the one moaning.”
“What? Well, that’s not a very funny joke, Jim,” Sutherland said. “Which means that you, Piggy, have a horrible sense of humor!”
He jabbed his finger into Porky’s chest. “Now, please tell me the truth before I have to make you uncomfortable with something sharp. Was that really what you were laughing at?”
Piggy said nothing.
Sutherland turned to Jim. “Ten seconds: I want the truth or you’ll both lick shit from my throne before I cut you.”
“No, Sir,” Jim finally said. “He wasn’t laughing at a joke. He was laughing at the throne.”
“So you just lied to me, Slim? Why’d you go and make up a joke to cover for your fat friend?”
“I . . . um, don’t know, Sir.”
“At least you could’ve had the decency to think up a good one. Not that god-awful zombie whore joke. Tell you what, Slim. I’ve a guaranteed chuckle you’re both sure to love!”
Piggy and Slim Jim exchanged nervous glances.
Sutherland whipped out his blaster and fired it into the whoreson’s stupid face. His head puffed in a sick splash of blood and ash as the pig screamed like he was stuck. Piggy finally reached for his blaster.
“No, no, no,” Sutherland said sweetly, shoving his own in the man’s face. “Now, tell me who in the hell did this.”
“I don’t know, S . . . Sir,” Piggy said as his friend’s headless body spilled to the floor.
Piggy finally pissed himself.
Sutherland sighed as he shoved the blaster so hard past Piggy’s trembling lips he broke a tooth on the way into his mouth. “Once more . . . who did this?”
Piggy mumbled something.
Sutherland pulled the gun from his mouth.
“C—C—Connor Vinson!” Piggy spit.
“Who else?”
“I don’t k—know, Sir. Connor asked us to borrow the keys last night. Said he had a surprise for you; a gift.”
“Are you really that fucking stupid?”
Piggy said nothing and proved it.
Sutherland asked again.
Piggy nodded.
Sutherland shook his head in disgust, sighed, then reached for the man’s blaster. At first, Piggy’s fingers tightened on the gun. Sutherland met his eyes and the grip relaxed. Piggy closed his eyes in surrender.
“I’m going to give you a chance to redeem yourself. Would you like that?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I want you to dispose of Slim’s body, then return when you’re done. Got it?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Sutherland held up a finger, “No, that’s yes, King Shit.”
Piggy looked at Sutherland wide eyed, like he wasn’t sure if he should be prepared to die, or laugh. He did neither, frozen and mumbling. Sutherland loved it.
He laughed and smacked Piggy’s back. “Now, that’s funny!”
Gallus came walking up with Connor Vinson. Connor’s eyes were dead.
“Hello, Traitor.” Sutherland smiled.
CHAPTER 19—ADAM LOVECRAFT
Adam crept along the wide city street, running hunched from one hiding spot to another, trailing the coach as close as he dared. As he hid behind one of the many hunks of stripped cars shoved to the side of the street (trying not to tremble from the wind as much as from his fear) he was surprised that the noises of clopping hooves, turning coach wheels, and metal chains scraping on the ground were doing nothing to attract nearby zombies.
Adam wondered if whatever was keeping the swarm gathered at the base of the building ahead was responsible. The closer he inched to the carriage, the more certain he grew that the women were being used as zombie bait of some kind, even if they weren’t yet doing their job.
He wondered what the bandits did once the women were attacked. Was the purpose to keep the riders safe through the assault—give the zombies easy prey to distract them—or something darker?
Did the bandits sit and watch? Or maybe place bets? What happened next? How would they deal with the horde? Maybe that’s when they’d pour from the coach and start hacking undead, Adam figured.
He realized with an uncomfortably large lump in his throat (suddenly missing Colton more than he cared to admit) that this looked like something designed for sport.
What kind of sick bastards do something like this?
Bandits, of course.
Alone in a cell for more than a long half year, it was finally easy for Adam to figure out how much of his City Watch training was mere propaganda. Still, as Michael had said before his murder, every lie had truth inside it, otherwise lies were hard to believe. Adam had learned plenty about the packs of bandits that lived as subhuman savages, haunting The Barrens with murderous intent, so this sort of thing shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Crouched behind a wall of warped metal and ancient tires—now nothing but rims in the snow—Adam found it easy to accept the City Watch rules about bandits:
Never trust a bandit.
Shoot first. Ask questions later.
Never sympathize with one of their women or children, lest you be tricked and stabbed in the back by one of their men.
At the time of Adam’s training, he had secretly wondered if perhaps the antibandit stuff was just a warped City Watch perception. He had never been outside The Walls but figured that the people in The Barrens couldn’t be all that different from citizens living inside The Cities: people were people, after all. If you spent life on the lookout for zombies, without any safe bed to call your own, scavenging for limited resources in a dead land, any man could be turned into a savage. Still Adam had always figured there was something human left in them.
Not any longer.
No one who chained women and dragged them through the streets deserved an ounce of sympathy. They deserved to die in the worst way imaginable—shot but not killed, then left to be dined on by the undead.
Adam darted from behind his metal rampart to a slab of rubber and concrete that reminded him of the partitions that kept City 6 stuffed behind Walls. He made it to within 20 feet of the chained women, when he realized that his idea—using the blaster to separate the chains—might not work. Blasters fired energy strong enough to disintegrate men, but he’d never used one to shoot at inorganic matter. If he were wrong, and the chain didn’t break, he’d be forced to take out the bandits—as many as five—entirely on his own.
And if any one of them got a shot off with a Hellweaver, Adam would be a dead man.
He peeked around the partition’s sheared-off edge, making sure the bandit riding
atop the stagecoach wasn’t looking back, then launched himself forward to close the distance between himself and the women.
His heart slammed against his chest as he drew nearer, sucking in icy breaths that stung his lungs. Adam wondered how long he’d been chasing the coach, and more importantly, how much distance he’d put between himself and Colton.
He looked back, but the rotten buildings all looked similar, with one crumbling facade mirroring the next. Seeing everything lined in a row, Adam couldn’t remember—or determine—which building had held them for the night.
He cursed his impulsive stupidity.
Adam had managed to piss off Colton—the one guy in The Games who not only didn’t see him as an enemy but also was his path to possible freedom if they could find Zelle and make it to The Gardens, which might or might not exist.
Adam rechecked if the coast was clear, then darted to the left, crossing the street for a better look at the windows on the right, trying his best to see Colton.
Nothing seemed familiar. They’d barely glanced at the exterior as they ducked inside the night before, happy to find a place away from the screaming, a few alleys up and away from where Hooper had been feasted on after Colton put him down.
Even if everything looked different when cast under the bright morning light reflecting up from the snow, Adam didn’t think his memory was sharp enough to draw their particular hovel from the line.
Shit.
The coach pulled farther ahead.
Adam sprinted again and this time kept running until he pulled up even with the girls, some 70 feet behind the coach.
They looked at him, startled. The older woman cried out.
Adam put a hand to her mouth and shook his head.
“I’m here to save you,” he whispered, just above the icy wind, hoping like hell no one in front had been able to hear him.
The younger woman, the one who looked even more like Ana up close, seemed relieved. “Please, help us,” she whispered, looking ahead at the stagecoach.
Seeing her, some part of him wondered if this was his sister. It had been so long since he’d seen her that anything was possible. But then he noticed that she was shorter than Ana and had slightly different—fuller—cheeks.
Adam showed his blaster to the women. “I’m going to try and shoot your chains off. Once I do, run into one of the buildings and just keep running. Can you do that?”
The older woman looked like she desperately wanted to make words but just shook her head violently, as if that was the only way to rattle the words out. “They’ll k-kill us,” she finally managed.
“I won’t let that happen,” Adam said, surprised at his boldness and the unreasonable belief that he might be able to handle the bandits.
“Do it,” the younger woman said.
Adam aimed at the long thick chain linking body to collar, then angled down to the road, and back up to an iron rung at the stagecoach’s rear, figuring the chain was about 70 feet long.
He aimed at the ground, as the chain slinked this way and that. He had to aim low, or risk killing the women if the disintegration spread in either direction.
He fired and missed.
Shit.
Adam didn’t bother looking ahead to see if the driver had heard the blast, though it was hard to believe that he hadn’t, even if the horses weren’t spooked.
He fired again and this time hit.
A section of chain burned bright blue before it faded, leaving ash behind as the connection broke.
The girl’s eyes widened, relieved as she pulled up the remaining feet of chain still connected to her collar and ran toward the open door on the building to their left.
A yell came from up front. The clomping stopped and the stagecoach lurched to a standstill. Adam looked up front and saw the man in the black hat turn back toward him.
“Hey!” He screamed, then aimed a gun—a blaster, not his Hellweaver—at Adam.
The second woman, still chained, cried out, “I didn’t do anything!”
Adam fired at the driver. He missed, then dove to the ground, expecting the bandit’s shot to tear through his body.
Top Hat missed.
Adam had popped up, ready to fire another shot, when the carriage doors burst open and another three bandits poured out, all aiming their weapons at Adam.
The chained woman screamed, though Adam wasn’t sure if she was yelling for him to save her or because she was certain the bandits wanted her dead. Either way, he couldn’t look up.
Adam scrambled toward the same open door where the younger woman had fled. Dirt kicked up at his feet, chips of concrete sprayed his body as chunks of wall burst to dust around him.
He kept running, then dove through the open door and slid hard into a wall.
Pain splintered his head as he struggled to stand.
Suddenly, hands were on him, pulling him up from behind.
“Well, well, well, looks like we’ve got another member to the party,” the man in the black hat said before punching Adam in the nose.
Unbearable pain—like everything was breaking all at once—tugged at his consciousness. He considered the horror of what would happen to his body if his mind couldn’t fight.
It wasn’t enough.
Adam fell and knew he would die.
CHAPTER 20—LIAM HARROW
Liam watched as Katrina’s light bobbed along the stairwell walls. Without a light of his own, he was forced to keep close to her and Clark or risk getting left behind in a tangle of shadows, maybe missing a step. There was nothing he hated more than the idea of climbing stairs in the dark, one-eyed no less, with danger in wait above and below.
They’d climbed three flights so far but had yet to run into any more zombies. As they continued upward, Liam’s chest kept constricting. He hoped Katrina would choose the next floor to leave the stairs, yet she kept climbing and climbing.
“How high do we need to go?” he finally asked.
She turned, aimed her light at Liam, blinding his eye. “What do you mean?”
He raised a hand, and she lowered the light toward his chest. “Why are we climbing?”
“Because.” She spun the light from Liam, shined it up the stairs and kept walking.
“Thanks,” Liam grumbled, falling in step behind Clark.
The stairwell stank of death. They climbed another three floors, hearing scratching from the hallways past the stairwells, before they reached a quiet floor. Katrina insisted they climb another two floors to the tenth. Clark agreed—although he gave no indication why—giving Liam little choice but to follow and nod.
On the tenth floor she opened the door and held it open for Liam and Clark. The room was oddly empty. Most rooms Liam had seen, both this time and when he was forced to trek The Outback, were littered with Old Nation debris amid the few remaining relics of desperate survival. This room was barren except for dust like a carpet on the floor.
The room was relatively bright, lit by a long row of oversized windows displaying the city’s horrors below.
They went to the windows and looked out into the wasteland. Liam wondered if his face looked as hopeless as Katrina’s and Clark’s. He saw zombies, players, and orbs. No hope. From 10 floors up, in an office building that had managed to stay reasonably tall while so many of its brothers and sisters had crumbled to nothing, they could see much of the chaos.
An orb flew by the window, one floor below, then burst into a smoky plume lit by azure sparks. The broken machine swirled through the air on its descent to a few feet above the ground, where it was chased by a huddle of bandits.
Liam turned from the window to see that Katrina was gone. “Where did she go?”
Clark shrugged, still staring out the window. Liam stared with him, until a few moments later when Katrina returned.
“Floor’s clear,” she said. “There’s some stuff in the other rooms. I suggest we check it all out, see if there’s anything we can use. This area’s too neat. My guess is someone lives
here. It’s worth checking out. Agreed?”
Katrina said it like a question, but Liam knew it wasn’t. Clark probably knew too. Both men nodded without a word.
They split up and, as expected, Liam found nothing. He did think Katrina was probably wrong—the area had been someone’s home but had long ago been abandoned. He found a room lined with shelves and neat rings in the dust. Outlines were faint but Liam was sure they had once harbored cans. One shelf read Water. He swallowed to kill his sudden thirst.
“Find anything?”
Startled, Liam looked behind him. Katrina was standing at the room’s threshold, arms crossed, gaze and posture as sharp as her tone.
Liam could no longer hold it inside. “What in the hell is your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem.” She crossed her arms tighter, and her scowl seemed to deepen. Everything about her said the opposite of her words.
“Yes, you do. And if we’re all working together, it would be great to know what’s crawled up your ass.”
“Nothing’s crawled up my ass, Liam. I just want to get this over and done with.”
“Over and done with? You knew what we were going to do. You wanted to go find Adam. So why did you volunteer if you were afraid?”
“Who said anything about afraid?” she asked. “Besides, it’s not like I had much of a choice. What was my option, to let you go alone? Or go with Ana? You’d both be dead, and we still wouldn’t have Adam.”
Liam wanted to lash out, angry that she doubted him so much. Who was to say that he couldn’t have found Adam on his own or with Ana’s help? Liam wanted to argue but couldn’t. He didn’t know much about a past Katrina wasn’t willing to share, but he did know that much of her life was spent surviving the elements, predators, and zombies, while Liam grew up relatively safe behind City 6 walls.
No, he wouldn’t argue. He was ready to change the subject instead, until a deafening gunshot tore through the morning and took his chance. The first shot was followed by another immediate two.