The Undead World (Book 8): The Apocalypse Executioner

by Peter Meredith

  “What the hell?” he whispered. The scope was broken. The bullet which struck his gun had kicked off of it and now glass rattled uselessly inside.

  He bit back a curse and began slinking along. The dark beneath the trees was like velvet, hiding his enemies, and it was a moment before his eyes adjusted. By the time they did, he was in their midst.

  The River King stood ten feet away, a guard at his side. To Neil’s left was the executioner and another guard. The executioner was a giant of a man and at his feet was Captain Grey, the blood on him catching the starlight and shining slightly.

  They saw Neil at about the same time as he saw them. Both the River King and the guard fired their guns in a brief burst. The sudden firing shocked Neil and he froze as the bullets sped past him, missing by inches. His shock turned into amazement that he was still alive and it was with shaking hands that he fired back.

  Two bullets struck the guard who went down with a cry and one bullet missed the River King—and then Neil ran out of ammo.

  He wasn’t the only one. The River King’s men had not been ready for a fire-fight and they had burned through their ammo. The king himself had a second magazine and as Neil fumbled in his pocket for his own ammo, the king calmly slapped his fresh magazine home.

  “Stop,” he growled, “or I will shoot you. I’ll shoot you in the gut. You know, to keep you alive and in pain.”

  Neil stopped one hand in his pocket—the wrong pocket. This one held the radio. In his fumbling, he had pulled the wire from it and now it crackled: “Cat? What’s going on? I saw flashes.”

  “That’s that little bitch, isn’t it?” the king snarled, coming closer. “And you’re Neil fucking Martin. I should have known and I should have killed you a long time ago. Any last words?”

  The pistol was pointed square into Neil’s face and once more he was altogether without fear. He had fought his fight and he had fought well and the truth was, he wasn’t at all afraid of dying.

  Chapter 40

  Captain Grey

  Grey had walked into the outdoor arena spiritually and mentally drained. He had watched his entire squad brutally tortured to death; unlike Sadie, who had closed her eyes, he had forced himself to watch. He had led his men into the simple trap to begin with and he deserved to feel as much of their pain as he could take.

  His own pain would be less than theirs. Not only had he not eaten or drank anything in the last day and a half, he had also exercised past the point of exhaustion and to a level where his body could no longer produce a drop of sweat.

  A man could go three days without water and although it had only been a day and a half, he was so dangerously dehydrated that he could hardly stand and he feared he wouldn’t be able to make it to the arena.

  He had to summon all of his energy just to make the walk—he was regretting his plan now. With an attack occurring on a scale that suggested there was at least a battalion of soldiers out there, Grey wished he was at full strength.

  Not that he could do much with his hands cuffed in front of him. Still, as he was dragged through the streets he had looked for an opportunity to escape. Unfortunately, the executioner kept him on a leash like a dog. Seven feet of heavy chain kept him from getting away.

  And perhaps more unfortunate was the discovery of who was behind the attack. “You brought Jillybean here?” Grey demanded before Neil could make his final statement. “What were you thinking? My life is not worth hers or yours.”

  “But what about Sadie’s?” Neil snapped. “Both Jillybean and I loved her. I loved her like a father.”

  “Is that supposed to sting?” the River King asked. “Because it really doesn’t. The truth is Neil, you were a horrible father. You turned her against me and worse, you turned her against reality. She was living in a dream world where everything was ice cream and cotton candy. But now she’s getting some tough love. She’s going to learn some valuable life lessons in New York.”

  “New York? Do you mean she’s alive?”

  Grey answered: “She went out as a slave with some eastbound traders this morning. You should have gone after her.”

  The River King grinned wickedly and cocked the pistol. “You really should have. You might have lived.”

  “Wait!” Neil cried. “What about my last words? They’ll be short, I promise. Here goes: the street is wide open. Just drop down and head straight in. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  The king’s eyes glittered with sudden fear. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just that,” Neil pointed as a small machine hummed down the street. Grey was taken back to see it was a four-engine helicopter that, if not for the bomb hanging beneath it, looked like a toy. “Jillybean is controlling that and she has no problem releasing the bomb and killing all of us.”

  “It’s true,” her little voice said over the radio. Neil pulled it out as she went on. “You are evil, Mister River King, sir, and that’s what means you should die, if you don’t let my friends go. And I think we all know I’ll do it.”

  The River King was backing up from the machine, the gun now pointing at it instead of Neil. “Look. You can have them. They’re nothing to me. Just call off the rest of the attack.”

  “Put down the gun,” Jillybean ordered.

  “But how do I know you’ll keep your word…”

  The River King had continued to back up and now he was fifteen feet away. “Hey, stop moving!” Neil ordered. The king did the opposite. He turned and ran, dashing across the street and into a house.

  Jillybean’s copter hesitated, not knowing what to do. “Get the River King!” Grey commanded. He knew that if the king got away there would be no escape for any of them.

  The drone buzzed off toward the house with every eye following it—every eye but Captain Grey’s. With Jillybean’s bomb gone and Neil out of ammo and his owns hands cuffed, Grey saw that things could go from bad to worse if he didn’t act in the next half-second.

  He pivoted and snapped a roundhouse kick square into the executioner’s throat, sending him reeling back. It hadn’t been the fastest or strongest kick of his life, but it did the trick. Skinner dropped his axe and the chain, his hands going to his throat.

  To Grey’s left, Neil and the last guard were slower to react. They both watched Grey’s first kick and then his second, a driving front kick that whooshed the air out of Skinner.

  Then something must have clicked and the two charged each other. Neil was at a great disadvantage in size, speed, strength, skill, and training, and yet, he was full of holy, righteous anger and taking the M4 in his hands like a club, he swung it with all of his might. Grey wasn’t surprised when he missed.

  Neil spun in a circle, looking like a complete moron. Still, he was smarter than he looked and he didn’t bother checking the spin he had thrown himself into and came around faster than the guard expected. Before he knew it the rifle was at him in a second wild swing. This time Neil connected and the guard let out a howl.

  Grey didn’t see where the blow landed. He was too busy with Skinner who was a giant of a man whom he guessed had to weigh over three hundred pounds. The front kick had felt as though he had kicked an elephant in the side and already the man was recovering. He lunged at Grey with both hands, each the size of dinner plates.

  Regardless of his mass, had this been a fair fight, Grey would have won, easily. Perhaps because of his size, the giant was slow and lumbering, telegraphing his moves in advance. Grey dodged to the side, flailing with the chain to keep the man at bay.

  He had to keep the metal flashing in the dim light. It was basically useless at rest. Skinner knew this too and he kept just out of reach, waiting for Grey to tire or make a mistake.

  Grey tried his best to connect with the chain but it was an imprecise weapon that required perfect timing. Five times he swung and five times he missed. In the breather before his next attempt, he glanced over at Neil and saw that the smallest man there was already down, with the guard on top.

  “Son o
f a bitch!” Grey cursed and swung the seven-foot chain. This time he purposely made the swing so obvious that Skinner would have plenty of time to react.

  He stepped back out of range and instead of following up the attack, Grey whipped the chain over his head in a blur and charged the oblivious guard who was busy pummeling Neil senseless.

  As the guard was a stationary target, Grey couldn’t miss and smacked the chain into his head, the end breaking the guard’s cheek bone and ripping off a chunk of his face. Grey could only hope that was good enough because Skinner had rushed in as Grey tried to get the chain moving again.

  The executioner wouldn’t let him; he came on swinging monster haymakers, each as heavy as sledgehammers. One punch landed awkwardly in the dark, striking Grey on the side of the neck—he went sprawling from the force of the blow.

  Right then would have been a perfect time for Skinner to leap on Grey and pound him into bloody chuck, however, the executioner had found his axe and he picked it up with a grin on his face. “I kilt all yo pussy soldiers and now I’m gonna kill you. You gonna whine and cry like them?”

  Grey’s strength had been sagging, but Skinner’s vile words revived him enough to make one final push. He swung the chain at Skinner and so useless had his previous attempts been that he didn’t care if the chain hit or not. The metal blur was only a distraction for his real attack, a second front kick, this one delivered with the entire weight of his two-hundred pounds behind it.

  Skinner had been confident when he spoke, but he had also been winded. Fighting was an exhausting business and Grey knew if he could land a few more good kicks and not die in the next thirty seconds that Skinner would be reeling. The heavy axe would feel as though it weighed a hundred pounds instead of twenty-five.

  The kick landed with a thud that almost jarred Grey’s femur out of its socket. He stumbled while Skinner stepped back, folding inwards from the force of the blow. The axe came down where it was far less of a threat. Grey danced to his right, and then lunged in, not bothering to feint with the chain.

  He went for Skinner’s knee, hoping to get in a crippling shot but missing by the barest of margins and only managing to wobble the giant who swung his axe backhanded, driving Grey away.

  Again, Grey went right. The axe was most effective moving from the right to the left in the natural swing of a right-handed person. He feinted twice with aborted lunges as Skinner’s breath grew heavier and heavier. Grey also kept the chain going in slow circles, getting more and more of a feel for the weapon.

  Each time the metal whirred by, Skinner leapt back. He was slowing, Grey noted and worse for the giant, he was reacting only when the chain passed his nose. His reactions had slowed by half a second and Grey took full advantage.

  With the next pass of the chain. Grey stepped very close, betting his life that Skinner would again take a step back. Almost as though they were dancing, the pair move in sync with Grey a foot closer and instead of the chain passing harmlessly by, it whipped into Skinner’s face smacking him across the bridge of the nose.

  Blood splashed as Skinner cried out, flailing with the axe, one-handed while the other went to his suddenly gushing nose.

  Grey went with another kick, stepping in, inches from the axe to land another ferocious blow to Skinner’s wide open midsection. It folded the man square in half giving Grey a beautiful shot with the chain on the top of Skinner’s head.

  The horrible beast of a man collapsed at Grey’s feet, the deadly executioner’s axe dropping with a clang on the street. Grey picked it up. With his hands cuffed together, it was an awkward weapon and yet he felt the need to administer some much-needed revenge as well as a little poetic justice with it.

  “You deserve far worse,” Grey said and hefted the axe above his head.

  It was then that the last guard ordered Grey to: “Put it down! Put it down nice and slow.”

  Neil had lost his fight. He laid on the ground groaning, bleeding as badly as Grey and Skinner were. The guard had a few scratches and a dangling arm from where Neil had hit it with the rifle, but he was more or less whole and he stood with Neil’s M4 in his good hand, having slapped a fresh magazine into place.

  Grey appraised the situation and saw that he had lost. He was twelve feet from the guard. He would need cheetah speed to close the distance before he was blown away. “You can kill me if you want, but Skinner dies.”

  “Okay, sure, but he’s not the only one who can whip a man to death,” the guard said, nodding to himself. “When I bring you two in, the king will probably let me do it. I can be the new Skinner.”

  “That would be a neat trick, seeing as you’ll be dead.” Grey pointed at Neil. “He’s got a second grenade.”

  In a blink, the guard swiveled the gun to Neil, who only had the strength and the wit to roll over and was now blowing blood bubbles up at the sky. Even with the dark, it was clear that his hands were empty.

  “He doesn’t have a…” the guard said just as Grey threw the unwieldy axe. A movie version of Grey would have had him splitting the guard’s head open, followed by the cheesy line: Who axed you?

  The actual version saw him missing horribly. The heavily weighted end spun directly at the street and sparked off of it, seven feet from the guard! It clanged with a harsh embarrassing sound and then whizzed past the guard, who was shocked and frightened at first, but then laughed as the axe handle hit Neil causing his moans to grow louder.

  “That was pathetic…” the guard began to say but couldn’t finish his sentence as Grey came flying at him. He hadn’t expected a miracle with the axe. The best he had hoped for was a distraction and it had been lucky that Neil had been hit. It had given him that extra half-second that allowed Grey to close the distance.

  He couldn’t take the chance on a kick. He had to get close and stay close. If he gave the guard any room, he’d have the gun turned on him in a flash. Grey crumpled the man with a flying knee to the midsection. An inch higher and the guard would have had his diaphragm paralyzed. Still it was a heavy shot and in a fraction of a second, the two of them were down and grappling.

  Despite of having his hands cuffed, Grey was easily the better fighter, able to use his legs to deadly effect even while he was flat on his back. For him it was the perfect position to put the guard in a simple jiu-jitsu move called the “triangle.” It was a choke hold using the strength of the thighs to crush inward on an opponent’s throat, and Grey’s thighs had lost little muscle during his long convalescence.

  In seconds, the guard was unconscious and seconds after that, he was dead. Grey did not extend mercy to a person who wanted to be the next “Skinner.” Rolling the dead guard off of him, Grey went to the axe and hefted it. Somehow it felt even heavier as he advanced on the real Skinner who was still out cold. It took Grey two tries to separate the pumpkin-sized head from its beefy shoulders.

  Exhausted, Grey crumpled down next to the body, but did not say a prayer. Skinner didn’t deserve it and Grey didn’t have the strength. He hadn’t stopped bleeding since the whipping and now his head began to spin.

  “Please don’t pass out,” he whispered as he dug in the folds of Skinners odd wrappings. The huge man had the key to the cuffs somewhere on his person and yet, there was so much of him and the key was very small that Grey simply couldn’t find it.

  Giving up, he fell forward and rested his head on his arms which were propped up on Skinner’s barrel of a chest. Blood came off of him in trickles and ran onto Skinner’s corpse. He didn’t care.

  “Try this,” Neil said in a slurry whisper from behind him. Neil held a tiny silver key in right hand. The hand swayed back and forth just as Neil did. He looked like he had been through hell and when a new explosion flashed in the night, he didn’t even blink.

  “Jillybean,” he whispered and dropped the key. It tinkled on the ground and Grey searched for it with dull eyes as Neil went to find his radio. “Did you get him?” he asked.

  Her voice, such a small thing that Grey pictured her
as a four year old sitting at a school desk, whispered into a radio: “No, I was really, really close,” she said. “I’m getting another drone.”

  Neil began shaking his head. “No. Forget the River King. We need you to guide us out of here. We’re basically defenseless.”

  “But…what he did, Mister…sir,” she answered, the radio cutting in and out. “He’s real…evil. He has to die…Ipes thinks so.”

  For once, Grey had to agree with the stuffed toy. His heart felt black as he pictured the River King still alive, still king and still killing whoever he wanted. He had to die.

  Neil added a different perspective. “Yes, but think about who would replace him—everyone here is evil. It’ll be the same no matter who’s in charge. And besides, Sadie is still alive. She has a day’s head start and we can’t rescue her if we’re dead. Remember, Jillybean, life is more precious than death.”

  “I can have both,” she said, curtly. “I have one more bomb.”

  Neil glanced over at Grey who had just managed to twist one of his hands around to get the key in the lock. He let the cuffs fall away saying: “Can we get off the base without her help?”

  “No. I might pass as a blast victim, but we can’t take the chance that someone will recognize you. Look.” He pointed to where dozens of people were rushing about with flashlights. They were stopping everyone they ran into.

  Seeing the lights, Grey felt his energy draining from him. He couldn’t fight his way off base with one rifle, a handful of bullets, and a head that wouldn’t stop spinning. “Yeah,” was all he could say.

  “Grey’s on board, Jillybean. Your first priority is to guide us out of here. Do you copy?”

  There was a long pause before she said, “I copy. I guess I won’t be needing this bomb.”

  “Hold on,” Neil said, “where do you plan on dropping…” The night went white once more and Grey squinted into the glare, enjoying the light that burned into his dark eyes. A grim smile played on his face as he watched the light bloom a second time, turning orange and then black.