The air that leaked out at us through the shutters smelled awful, far worse than it had in any of the cottages. Part of it might be that the spilled food on the floor had begun to rot—unnaturally, considering the short time it had taken. A quick peek suggested that it was mostly staple items, flour and sugar and so on, but it had been slimed with something yellow and puslike, and the resulting mixture had a pronounced odor of decay.
“Ewwww,” I complained, but very quietly. Nothing rushed out at us, but still Ambrose waited another ten-count.
Finally he went to the door and eased inside. He hadn’t told me to stay out so I followed close on his heels, my left hand clapped over my mouth and nose. We were careful not to track through the mess on the floor as we headed for the storage room. As we got closer, I began to hear a sound that was at first difficult to place because it was so oddly juxtaposed with the cacophony of blowing sand, thrashing flora and agonized waves that were pummeling the nearby beach.
It wasn’t until I smelled something especially vile, a cross between rancid oil and rotting meat left in the sun, that I placed the noise. Someone had turned on the microwave (a shameful time-saving device, Ambrose explained later, that they kept in the pantry where food critics wouldn’t see).
Ambrose stepped into that storeroom and made a place for me in the doorway. He didn’t attempt to keep me from seeing what had happened in the pantry, though I could tell he didn’t like being so equal-minded; if his cottage had been left as a sanctuary, he would have locked me up there. I didn’t hold this whole protect-the-little-woman attitude against him, first of all because it came with the era he was born into, but also because I wanted to be protected. He was the superman, not I. Let him catch the speeding bullets. Or zombies.
“The evil bastards.”
“Oh good God.” My eyes latched on a red blot that had crusted against the glass door. I don’t know what had been put in the microwave, but it had exploded, and clotted gore and bits of bone were glued to the small window. I prayed that, whatever it was, it hadn’t been living when it went in there. The act was malicious and required thought—not what I had come to think of as standard zombie activity. The average zombie seemed about as bright as a Mr. Potato Head doll.
Eventually I pulled my eyes away from the glass window and noticed that every cupboard large enough to be used as a hiding place had been emptied with violence; canned goods were smashed and the shattered glass of jars spilled onto the floor. A part of me wondered who was going to have to clean this mess up and whether the damage would be covered by insurance. Could you get a policy that covered fire, flood and zombies?
A small beep announced that the microwave was done cooking, but neither Ambrose nor I reached for the door. This was beyond weird, beyond explanation, beyond psychosis or any ring in Dante’s Hell.
But it was not beyond Saint Germain or his ghouls. And besides, if something was still alive in there, we didn’t have the tools to deal with it.
Shaking his head in disgust, Ambrose began picking out a path through the glass to the walk-in freezer at the back of the room. This time, I didn’t follow. It was a dead end, and if there was anything living—or undead—in there, I was going to let Ambrose cope. I was busy trying not to toss up the hollow part of my stomach where my nonexistent breakfast should have been.
Reaching the brushed metal door, Ambrose laid his ear against it and stopped breathing. For a moment he was as still as a statue and appeared almost as lifeless. Looking back at me after a moment, he nodded his head once. It took me a split second to realize that he was signaling there was something moving inside the freezer.
Unprompted, my hands brought the Colt up and my body braced itself. Theoretically, cold should make a zombie slower, but I was taking no chances. I nodded back.
Try not to use the gun. The sound might attract others.
I nodded again, in response to Ambrose’s mental words, but didn’t lower the weapon.
Ambrose wisely shifted to one side, drew out a spike and then opened the door. Something huge and hissing and inhuman filled the opening and spilled out into the room.
At the same time, something just as large came up behind me and bit my shoulder.
For those who share my typical twenty-first-century academic resumé, which does not include a self-defense class, gang-banging or any practical experience with hand-to-hand combat, let me explain the physiological changes that happen in the body when it is assaulted or even just threatened with physical violence. Reaction time in a deadly encounter can be divided into a trifecta of critical responses. The first is when the mind recognizes that it is in danger. Many people die at step one because they don’t even realize they are in peril and fail to react.
The second step is to formulate an appropriate response to the threat. Again, very difficult when one has no training or experience with violence.
The third is to carry one’s plan through without hesitation. All of this happens faster than most crises in one’s average daily life when you face different sorts of non-life-threatening emergencies, like a backed-up toilet or a flat tire, or even something large and dangerous like a blizzard or hurricane. Unlike normal life, there is rarely time for cogitation in a combat situation. Nor do you get to phone someone for assistance with your problem. We had no AAA or 911 to call.
Had we been outside and standing downwind, the smell or sound might have warned me sooner that evil was near. As it was, the only hint of danger I had was the fall of a hulking shadow over my left shoulder. My subconscious—which thinks faster than my conscious does when my life is at stake—said that giant shadows in an abandoned building on an abandoned island could only belong to something dangerous. Moving out of its way seemed the correct response to this threat, and I did so with all the speed my adrenaline-laced muscles could give me. I moved very quickly indeed—know this—but it still wasn’t fast enough. The zombie was on me before I could twist around or shoot it. In less than a second, I was involved in a life-and-death struggle with a monster that was twice my weight and a foot taller, and who was doing his level best to bite through my clavicle. The pain was excruciating.
It shoved me against a counter. I shoved back and spun hard, managing to get my back to it again. My shoulders hunched down tight, trying to make me as small a target as possible for clawing fingers and teeth. I had the tiniest instant of hope that Ambrose would turn and rescue me, but then I heard a terrible screeching from the freezer and the sound of bodies hitting the floor, and then more of those dismembering-chickens sounds that had turned my stomach. Someone or something was getting ripped limb from limb. Ambrose was busy and I was on my own.
Most of you won’t know this—and pray to whatever god you worship that you never do—but this kind of fighting is very personal. You look into your enemy’s rotting eyes, smell his rancid breath…and in this case his decomposing body. This is horrible beyond description, but it does do one thing for you; it makes you focus. It also makes you angry. No, more than angry. Enraged. My very soul was offended by this thing. I was so filled with revulsion and wrath that I had no trouble forgetting about babying my damaged heart, and giving my full attention to dealing with the creature trying to chew on my shoulder.
Fortunately for me, its lower jaw was mostly torn off, so it was having trouble getting a grip with just its upper teeth through my thick shirt. Evidently realizing that this tactic wouldn’t work, it next tried to gets its bloated hands around my neck. Again, fortune favored me. Several of its digits had fallen off and, as it squeezed, more of the skin sloughed away and its finger bones poked through. Not that this ended the assault. Zombies have no off button. They just keep doing what they’re told to do until they fall into little pieces, and then the little pieces still keep trying to kill you.
I felt the wiry hair on his swollen forearms as he wrapped those about my face when his hands failed to get a grip. He’d seemed to be going for a snap of the neck, or perhaps to bend me back far enough that he could tear m
y throat out with his few remaining fingers, but I’d dropped my head in time and he only got my face. Three long, filthy fingers wrapped around my chin, and strips of dead skin slipped on my cheek as he tried to turn my head in a way it was never designed to move. In spite of the shedding skin, inch by inch, he was succeeding in forcing my neck around.
Knowing it was dangerous, that I might actually kill myself if the gun slipped even an inch, I brought the Colt up and aimed it as best I could over my shoulder. I felt the barrel enter rotting flesh—was it the creature’s face?—and pushed a bit harder until I met with bone. A human would have backed off at this point, but not the zombie. It wrenched its head from side to side but didn’t let go. It was much more difficult to pull the trigger in this position, but fear and anger lent me strength. I didn’t even flinch when I felt the flash of heat on my cheek and the explosion deafened my left ear. Only later did I find that I had dislocated my index finger when the gun bucked.
The first bullet removed about a third of the creature’s skull. This didn’t kill the thing, but stunned it enough to loosen its grip. I shoved backward hard with my elbow, using the creature’s toppling body to launch myself toward the freezer where Ambrose and some other monstrosity were wrestling. Not that I wanted to get close to that fight, but it was the only open spot I had in the pantry. My abused shirt tore at the sleeve when the zombie refused to let go. I didn’t like leaving my skin exposed, but at least I was free to move.
Turning, I took aim at the thing that had assaulted me. It was standing there, almost naked, holding my shirt sleeve in its right hand. My vision began to darken at that point but I ordered my body to do what it must. Feeling like I was being guided by unseen hands, I switched my middle finger to the trigger and followed Ambrose’s instructions. I put the first bullet in the thing’s heart and then a second in what was left of its head. Thank God it did what was expected and fell to the floor. It kept twitching but didn’t get up.
I glanced up at the door to be sure that no other creatures had followed us into the kitchen—I did not want to be surprised twice—and then spun around to help Ambrose with whatever was hissing like a giant snake.
The spirit was willing to keep fighting, but my body was ailing. It was an off-balance spin and I fell to the slimy floor, banging my left knee. My clumsiness was partly because the floor was covered in slop, but it was also my damned heart, once again failing to pump enough blood to my lungs. I could feel it shuddering, jittering in my chest. At least I didn’t drop the gun when I hit the tile, though the Colt was now useless because I couldn’t see clearly enough to risk a shot.
I lay there and wheezed while the nasty sounds went on.
Gradually my vision cleared and I got an up close and way too personal view of the mortal—or maybe I mean immortal—struggle between Ambrose and another of the monsters that had invaded the island. It was hard to tell at first what was happening because there was blood everywhere and my more or less horizontal angle presented me with a limited view of the freezer’s mostly dark interior. I could see by the one remaining light that the stuff leaking out of Ambrose was a normal blood color. The ichor running out of the creature was a nasty dark brown.
It took a moment for me to realize that not everything on the floor was blood. A great deal of the mess was the creature’s intestines. That didn’t stop the creature’s giant claws from ripping into the metal of the door, though. No wonder Ambrose was bleeding. Human flesh would shred like silk under those claws.
Ambrose was on top of the beast, and as I watched he reached for his belt and pulled out another of the spikes he carried. Drawing back his arm, he drove it into the thing’s chest. It went through the body and punctured the floor of the freezer, causing some kind of gas to swirl up around them.
Swearing, Ambrose reached for a second spike and this time drove it upward from the beast’s lower jaw, pinning the lower teeth to the skull. The thing kept thrashing, but Ambrose refused to be unseated. He pulled out the first spike and threw it aside. With a deliberation that was chilling, he drew his arm back and, making a fist, drove it into the thing’s chest, shattering the bones of the ribs and sternum. More gore spattered him as the ribs exploded, rendering him all but unrecognizable. He finally jerked out the thing’s heart and the thrashing eased.
Ambrose rolled off of the body and looked at me. He had a hole in one cheek, about an inch-long tear through which I could see his teeth, but as I watched, the wound began to mend.
“Joyous?” His voice was rough.
As though responding to a tug by invisible hands, I sat up straighter, managed to stay upright with the help of the wall. I was covered in canned cherries, which at first glance looked alarmingly like blood, but I seemed to have avoided the glass of the broken jars they had been stored in. My face and shoulder hurt, but a quick glance showed me that the zombie hadn’t broken my skin with its teeth.
“Joyous—damn it! Are you all right?” he demanded.
I laughed once. The left side of my face protested, and I couldn’t hear out of that ear, but all things considered the news was pretty good.
“Oh yeah. Never better.” My voice was weak. I found that annoying but couldn’t think what to do about it.
“You look gray.” He crawled toward me, ignoring the shards of glass. It crunched under him but he never flinched.
“You should see the other guy.” I tried to smile but failed. My left cheek wasn’t cooperating.
Not taking this for a joke, Ambrose looked past me and spied the zombie. I glanced back briefly. It was a mess. I had done a fairly thorough job of ruining its head and chest.
“Good clean hits. You’re getting better. Did it bite you?”
“No, it tried. But I killed it first. Ambrose…would it be okay if I took a nap for a minute?” I asked as the world again went black and fuzzy. “I need to rest. Just for a minute.”
“Go ahead,” he said, and got there in time to ease me down to the floor. I felt it as he pushed my dislocated finger bones back into place but was too weak to cry out. I was also aware of being bathed in heat and feeling my heart synching up to a new rhythm that was not its own. My grateful lungs finally filled with oxygen that finally began to circulate to the rest of my body.
When I came round again a few moments later, Ambrose was dragging the freezer corpses outside. He didn’t retrieve the spike he had driven through the second thing’s jaw and out the top of its head. Maybe he had plenty of spikes left in his belt, left over from…an old tent? Actually, I couldn’t think where these spikes were from. Again I thought that they looked rather a lot like bayonets, only with handles. I think they must have been designed for killing, not camping.
“Are they like vampires?” I asked, looking away as he dragged the body past. I didn’t like to think about the strength necessary to drive that thing through so much bone—and floor. Ambrose was one of the good guys, and I had to be glad for whatever had changed him into this inhumanly strong person, even if it was very, very weird.
Ambrose turned to stare at me. He had rinsed his face. I got a distracted smile. His head was cocked and he was listening. I remembered then that I had fired my gun and that might have attracted other monsters.
“In what sense?” he asked. He didn’t say anything about how I shouldn’t be silly, that vampires weren’t real, and I made a note to ask about this later, along with how it was he could sometimes talk to me without using actual words.
“Do you have to leave the spike in…like a stake in a vampire?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t a lot of experience with ghouls. I know they’re harder to kill than zombies. The main thing is that this one kept trying to bite me even after I destroyed the heart. I’m afraid it rather pissed me off and I got a bit violent.” He winked. “I don’t want that stake back. It’s covered in blood and brains now.”
One thing processed. “That’s a ghoul, then? I thought it was.” I noticed the creature’s teeth and malformed jaws. It was like someone
had taken a set of large teeth and stuck them into a smaller skull. I could have pulled back the lips to check on this, but even with the spike in place that action seemed the dumbest risk since Icarus thought: Why not fly to the sun?
“Yes. Look at its legs.” Ambrose dragged it farther down the passage so I could see its lower body. From the hip bones down they were warped, roped with muscle and covered in dark hair.
“They’re…What are they?” I shuddered. It was a weak effort but I was still very tired. The skin of my chest was sore and I looked down, unsurprised to see a handprint. Had Ambrose had to give me heart massage?
“Not human. Maybe gorilla.”
Gorilla. I pulled my eyes up from my chest and looked at the face again. That’s what this was. The lower half of the head was ape, the top half human. Those weren’t tattoos on its cheeks; those were staples holding the two halves together. A wave of nausea rolled through me, but I was getting better at accepting horror. My chest hardly hurt at all now.
“Why the hell would anyone do this?” I meant Saint Germain, of course. There was no need to use his name. There couldn’t be that many corpse raisers in the region.
“Because he can. Because he’s insane.” Ambrose shrugged and confessed: “I don’t know. Dippel was evil but his son is…I don’t have a word for him. ‘Demon’ maybe. Except, demons are controlled by overlords. I don’t think anything controls the Dark Man’s son. There seem to be some people out there attempting to keep him in check, but the best they can manage is stalemate after stalemate.”
Not the best news he could have shared at that moment.
“Can we do any better?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” This wasn’t the comforting response I had hoped for either.
He went on to relate: “By the way, I checked the lobby and dining room. The radio has been smashed. The satellite phone, too. Not that I could have used them, but maybe you could have. I don’t suppose you can fly a plane if anything happens to me?”
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