Empire's End

by David Dunwoody

  Tripper knocked the other door open and sprayed them with Uzi fire. They kept coming—even those whose legs were sawed off by bullets simply pulled themselves along the floor, screaming ravenously.

  Halstead grabbed Lily. “Downstairs! C’mon!”

  Logan pushed past her and into the room. The chainsaw roared to life over his head. “Get back!” he yelled.

  The girls surged at him. He tore into them at head level, cleaving through their little skulls with a metallic snarl. Brain matter gushed into the air. Their tiny hands clawed at his legs. He plunged the saw straight down into their chests, splitting them open and knocking their bodies back.

  One girl leapt onto his arm, jaws snapping. He hurled her to the floor and cast the saw blade through her face. Logan turned away to avoid the rain of infected blood.

  Downstairs, Halstead pushed Lily toward the bar entrance. “We’ve gotta get back into the tunnels!”

  She threw open the trapdoor. “Go Lily!”

  The girl looked toward the door through which they’d just come. The saw’s whine and Logan’s mad screaming could still be heard. “I want to wait!” she insisted.

  Halstead started down the ladder. “Lily, I want you to come with me—”

  Her foot slipped on a greasy rung and she toppled out of sight.

  Lily looked down the hole and saw Halstead lying prone on the tunnel floor. She backed away, fear overtaking her. Gunfire erupted upstairs. Lily ran for the door on the other side of the room—the door leading out to the street—and started pulling chairs and tables away from it.

  She had to get out. The children were going to kill Cam and Tripper and the soldier and then come spilling downstairs and into the tunnel. She had to get out of there. She jerked on the door handle in a panic. “Open! Open!”

  It did.

  She plunged into the snow.

  Wading through the drift that had piled up against the building, Lily stumbled into the street and surveyed her surroundings. Distant booms could be heard; distant screams too.

  A man ran toward her. She shrieked, thinking him undead, but he cried, “No! No! I’m not one of them!”

  He reached out for her. Then something dropped onto his back from a ledge overhead and he fell, and Lily saw it was a hideous four-armed rotter, flaying the man’s back open with its black claws, making a terrible rattling sound like corpse-laughter and then the Geek’s eyes settled on her.

  She ran down the middle of the street. Her fingers and toes were already numb. The wind drove tiny needles into her face, and as she turned her head away from it she tripped over a dead woman’s leg. Slamming into the asphalt, Lily rolled over to see the Geek lumbering after her. It was slow, relaxed, confident. Its arms swayed from side to side and it licked its lips with half a tongue.

  Lily rose to her knees, her face covered in a thin layer of frost, expression blank, and waited for the end to come. It had always been coming, always right on her heels, a cold shadow nipping at her soul; and now it had her. It hadn’t mattered that she’d fled the dead girls. No escape, ever.

  The Geek threw its arms open and howled.

  The horse’s hooves kicked up a violent flurry of snow as Adam drove it down the street, the street from his dreams, slapping the side of the scythe against the ribs of his steed and hollering “EYAH! EYAH!”

  She saw him. His skin was black and his cloak was white but it was him, her Reaper, and he was hurtling toward the Geek like a locomotive.

  The rotter turned. It saw what was bearing down on it and crossed its arms before its face in mortal terror.

  Adam swung down, clinging to the side of the horse with his legs, and drove the blade into the Geek’s stomach, lifting the undead off the ground and sending its dead body spinning through the air before it landed headfirst with a spine-shattering impact.

  Adam swung to the other side of the horse and snatched Lily with his left hand, depositing her in front of him. He wrapped him arm securely around her waist.

  “You came,” she said breathlessly.

  “You knew I would,” he said.

  “I know.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “You look different.”

  “I am.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “First, I’m going to get you to safety,” Adam said, eyes on the road ahead. “Then I’m going to kill them.”

  Thirty-Nine / Torture Porn

  Meyer had found the rest of Tripper’s rope, and Voorhees was now secured to the chair in the living room, blind eyes looking out on a smoky sky through open windows.

  “Smell that?” Meyer called, rummaging through the kitchen. “They’re never gonna find you. You’ll be ash... they’ll never know what happened today. But we will.”

  He walked into the living room with a stack of ragged towels bearing various pieces of cutlery. Setting them on a small table beside Voorhees, he knelt and slapped the cop across the face. “You haven’t gone deaf now, have you?”

  “You’re going to die,” Voorhees snarled.

  “Strong words for a cripple.” Meyer picked through the selection of knives he’d brought out. “Quick story. When I was a lad up north, my father used to take me to a place where you could pay to carve up rotters. They’d have ‘em strapped down to a table or lashed to a post, and you could put your name on a snapping undead’s forehead or carve a heart into his backside. They had old buggers tied down with years of abuse cut into their flesh—it was a way to let off steam, you see, to turn the tables for a change.”

  “Sounds like your father was as sick as you,” Voorhees said.

  Meyer smiled and, holding his hand out, flicked his wrist. A long gash appeared in Voorhees’ cheek. The cop gasped in pain.

  “Back when they still printed books,” Meyer continued, “a lot of folks predicted this sort of thing. Using zombies for torture and sex—entertainment. Some said it could never go that far, that we were better than that. Boy, we showed them. Mankind hit rock bottom pretty damn quick.

  “But, as I was saying, we used to go down to this place and we’d buy a few hours with one of the fresh rotters. My dad used to carve limericks into their backs. It was fun, sure, but there just wasn’t anything satisfying about parting that bloodless flesh. It split under the slightest pressure and nothing came of it. You could plunge a knife right through a rotter’s adam’s apple and it would keep grunting and fighting and trying to get at you with its teeth. They didn’t feel what we were doing.

  “I guess that’s why I started cutting myself. I wanted to see blood, you see. I’d slash up my arms and suck on ‘em. Sometimes I’d cut my tongue just so I could taste the blood without anyone noticing. I had to hide it, because the old man would never have understood. I started cutting my toes—he wouldn’t spot that—and I’d fill my shoes with blood as I walked to market with him. I loved him, I did, but he just didn’t get it. Man lived every day of his life in the same miserable shithole, doing the same old thing. Downing a few pints and slicing up rotters didn’t cut it for me, pardon the pun. After a while, bleeding myself didn’t do it either. I wanted more. And I got it, didn’t I?”

  He pressed a paring knife against Voorhees’ neck. “I won’t go back to the existence of my childhood. I’ll get out of here, get to Chicago. But first, I want to watch you bleed.”

  He drew the tip of the blade straight down, spilling only a tiny amount of blood. Voorhees gritted his teeth and fought the urge to scream.

  “Hmm.” Meyer dug the blade into the flesh beneath Voorhees’ left eyebrow. He started peeling the eyebrow away. Voorhees couldn’t hold it in any longer, and he howled and thrashed in the chair. Meyer straddled him and held his head still until the job was finished.

  “Got a lot left to go,” Meyer breathed. “Lots of blood left in you.” He stabbed the knife into Voorhees’ forehead, grinding it against his skull. “Bleed!”

  He tossed the paring knife aside and selected a serrated blade. “Here we go.”

  He began
sawing into the bridge of Voorhees’ nose. The cop screamed loud and long, his voice becoming a nasally rasp as Meyer sliced down through his nostrils and peeled the nose away, leaving a gaping red cavity. Voorhees choked as blood poured down his throat. He spit up on Meyer’s chest. The gangster laughed.

  Getting off of Voorhees, Meyer wiped himself off and contemplated the severed nose in his palm.

  Voorhees leaned forward to let the blood run down his face. “FUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUU!”

  “You really are tough as nails, Officer,” Meyer said. “Gonna take a lot more work to break you.” Cutting a small strip away from one of the towels, he wadded it up and stuffed it into Voorhees’ nasal cavity. Voorhees swooned from the pain. “Stay with me,” Meyer cooed.

  “Hmm.” Without so much as a flinch, he slashed the top of his own wrist. He pressed the wound to Voorhees’ lips. “Taste it. Go on.”

  Voorhees bit into Meyer’s flesh and wrenched his head to the side. A chunk of skin was torn away. Meyer yelped. Then a grin spread across his face from ear to ear.

  Voorhees spit the flesh from his mouth and screamed again. Meyer held his bleeding arm up to the light. He watched the blood run for several minutes, as Voorhees’ sounds of agony became more subdued. Then he went back to work.

  He stuck the knife through Voorhees’ upper lip and pinned the cop’s head to the back of the chair. “No struggling now. I want this to be a clean cut.” He pressed his full weight down on Voorhees and sliced the pink flesh away.

  “Now for the bottom one.”

  Voorhees swung his head violently, and the chair rocked beneath himself and Meyer. He growled like an animal, even as Meyer’s knife found purchase and dug through his lip into his gumline.

  Meyer tossed both lips aside with a triumphant yell. He threw the knife across the room and staggered back. “Oh! God!” He ran over to the table and looked over his remaining knives. “We’re having fun now, aren’t we?”

  The cleaver was small for what it was, not too unwieldy. He pressed the razor-sharp blade against the lower knuckles of Voorhees’ left hand. “What do you think? All of ‘em? Just the first two? Maybe just the whole hand.”

  He raised the cleaver high and whooped as it came down. CRACK! As the blade bit into the wood of the chair’s arm. Voorhees’ four fingers flew into the air.

  The cop’s head sagged. Meyer slapped him hard. “Stay awake! It’s no good if we can’t both feel it!”

  He licked the wound on his wrist and chopped playfully at the remainder of Voorhees’ hand. Blood speckled both their faces and rained on the floor. Voorhees’ head came up, and he moaned; then it dropped again.

  “No!” Meyer grabbed him by the chin. “You stay awake, you hear me? I’ll fucking wait for you if you pass out on me! Fuck!” Meyer wrapped a towel around the ruin of Voorhees’ hand. “You’ve hardly lost any blood, you pussy. I thought you were harder than this, Officer!”

  Meyer stalked back and forth across the room, muttering to himself. Then he ran at the cop and slammed the cleaver into his leg, just above the knee.

  Voorhees sat bolt upright with a shriek. The fabric shot out from his nasal cavity, followed by a shower of blood. He spat and gagged and gnashed his teeth within a lipless mouth. Meyer withdrew the cleaver. He started cutting the ropes.

  “This’ll make things interesting, yes?” The ropes fell to the floor. Meyer pulled Voorhees from the chair and cast him onto the floor. “Now GET UP! You’ve still got fight left in you! Get on your feet!”

  Voorhees just lay there, panting. Blood pooled around his face and leg.

  Meyer hacked into the meat of his buttock. “UP!”

  Voorhees barely made a sound. Meyer was losing him.

  “Fuck it then.” Meyer threw the cleaver at the chair and sighed. “Guess I was wrong about you.”

  His teeth clenched. He swung his foot into Voorhees’ stomach, again and again and again, causing the cop to cough up more blood before falling still.

  “Fuck you, man.” Meyer opened the apartment door. “I’ll just leave you for the rotters.”

  He left. Voorhees lay utterly still, in silence, the only sound a whistle as blood bubbles formed in the hollow of his face.

  Please let me die. Take me. Please, God.

  But that just wasn’t God’s style, it seemed, nor Voorhees’. He knew that.

  He pushed himself to his knees. With his good hand, he reached under the back of his coat and pulled the widowmaker free.

  Meyer hadn’t overestimated him at all. In fact, he’d made a grave mistake.

  Now it was time to pay.

  If it was the last thing Voorhees ever did—and he knew it would be—Meyer was going to pay.

  Forty / Losses and Gains

  “Where’s Lily?” Cam demanded.

  Halstead got to her feet in the tunnel and looked around haplessly. “I don’t know. She was right beside me, and then I fell...”

  “She must have taken off down the tunnel,” Tripper muttered. “Lily!”

  Taking Meyer’s lanterns from the floor, they began the search. There wasn’t a sign of the girl anywhere. She didn’t return their cries. And she didn’t have any reason to fear them—did she?

  “Wait.” Logan pointed up ahead with his gib-covered chainsaw. “Movement.”

  He motioned for everyone to move over against the wall. Logan crouched and squinted, fighting to keep his balance, still drunk.

  “We’re human!” came a call. Three figures appeared in the lantern light.

  “Dalton!” Logan yelled.

  A soldier, a cop and what looked like a doctor. Could’ve been worse, Halstead thought to herself. Could’ve been saddled with three lame geriatrics.

  That, of course, made her think of Voorhees. She’d been trying not to think of him this entire time; indeed, as Cam had so succinctly put it, she had concerned herself solely with saving her own ass. Now the girl was missing because Halstead had gone down the ladder first. And her partner, a good man, an honest man, was lying bound and blind in a building that would soon be in flames.

  I’m shit. I couldn’t even finish the job Thackeray entrusted me with... and now Gaylen burns. Somehow it’s all my fault. It must be. I’ve let everyone down.

  “Logan,” Dalton said, “we’ve got an evac route through an old rail system. Do you have any other survivors down here?”

  “Maybe.” Logan burped. “Trying to find the kid.”

  “Are you drunk?” Zane asked in disbelief.

  “I wish I was,” Rhodes grumbled.

  Logan pointed down the tunnel behind himself. “There’s a bar up there—”

  “Shut up,” Tripper snapped. “We’ve gotta find Lily. We can’t leave until we find her.”

  Dalton eyed Tripper’s guns with suspicion. “Where’d you get your hands on those?”

  “Soldiers traded them,” Tripper answered.

  “What for? Why would anyone trade away arms? That’s a crime.”

  “Ask him.” Tripper angled his thumb toward Logan.

  Dalton grimaced. “Logan. You didn’t.”

  “I’m a man. I have needs.”

  “All right,” Cam shouted, “back to Lily. She’s about thirteen with long brown hair. She couldn’t have gone far.”

  “Then let’s find her,” said Dalton. He turned to lead the way.

  * * *

  The search was fruitless.

  They backtracked half a dozen times, screaming Lily’s name until they were all hoarse—no response.

  “What if she didn’t even come down here?” Halstead gasped.

  “Then we left her up there with what was left of those kids,” Logan said. “Sorry. I really am.”

  “We can’t just write her off like that!” Cam cried. Tripper put his arms around her.

  “I hear something.” Dropping into a crouch, Dalton crept toward the next corner. He heard the snapping of bone. A grunt. Blood splattering.

  Dalton leapt around the bend and trained his rifle on th
e figure hunched there.

  It was a man—a living man. He looked elderly, but based on the rotter at his feet, he still had some strength in him. The man had torn the undead’s head clean off.

  “Are you okay?” Dalton asked. Bit? he thought.

  The man held up his hands and said softly, “Okay.”

  “We can get you out of here. Are you with anyone else?”

  “No, alone.” The man looked down at the rotter’s twitching remains.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Dalton said, taking the man by his elbow. “It’s not going anywhere. Nice work.”

  The man nodded absently. Dalton led him back around the corner, checking him for any bites or scrapes in the lantern light. “Survivor!” he called to the others.

  “What’s your name, pops?” Tripper asked.

  “Eugene.”

  “Well Eugene, we’re getting the hell out of here. You with us?”

  The old man nodded. Halstead frowned at him.

  What was he chewing?

  * * *

  Like a shadow on the wall, Adam stole into the West Avenue Church of Christ and, kneeling behind the pulpit, set Lily on the floor.

  “I want you to stay right here until I return.” As he spoke, Adam surveyed the enormous room with its rows of pews and ornate stained-glass windows, newly restored since the establishment of the Great Cities. It was filled with dark places—but also silence. He didn’t sense a threat. Maybe God’s presence still had some potency after all.

  “Where are you going?” Lily asked.

  “To take care of the undead,” he replied. “I’ll be as quick as I can. Just stay here—don’t make a sound, and wait for my return.”

  He stood up. “Reaper!” she cried.

  He knelt back down. “What is it?”

  Leaning forward, Lily tenderly kissed his fire-scarred face.

  “Thank you,” he whispered.