Revenence (Novella): Dead Red

by M. E. Betts

  Daphne looked away, becoming aware of another odor riding in on the breeze. It was the smell of a fire, but not just a campfire. It smelled of dozens of materials burning all at once, many of them toxic. It was like a house fire somewhere to the north, carried by the southerly breeze. She threw the sharpened stick in her hand, aiming for the last zombie left standing. She was ready for the minor spectacle to be through so that the journey to Red could resume. In addition to the three bodies of the previously undead, there were three sadist corpses in the road. There were also at least two who had sustained bites but managed to hide the fact from the other members of their group. They and seven others continued up 49.

  She chased behind them like a sheep dog guiding the flock to the slaughterhouse, hopping from the branch to the asphalt below. As she followed on their heels, she began to feel increasingly feral until she had a vague realization that she was running on all fours. The muscles of her limbs and trunk rippled and twitched rhythmically, sliding smoothly over her well-aligned skeleton. For a moment, she was sure that she could smell Red, that she was picking up the residual scent of his unique chemical signature left behind as he had traveled through the area not so long ago.

  After a minute of four-legged running, Daphne lost consciousness entirely , though her body continued without her. For several minutes, she trailed just behind the sadists, barely more cognizant of her surroundings than a zombie. As the outskirts of Viburnum came into view, she began to come back into herself. She became aware of her own heartbeat and then, one by one, the sounds around her. She saw a small, burning building to the west of the road, almost surely set by Red's group. Ahead and to her right, even in the little light available, she could make out the northern edge of a dark, hulking gouge in the face of the earth that was the result of an open-pit lead mining operation. The very presence of the leaden wound was enough to make Daphne intensely uncomfortable, and compounding matters was the fact that Red's essence reverberated and echoed through the canyon carved deep into the forest floor.

  She rose and straightened to a proper homo erectus stance, leaving the highway as she followed the others down a long gravel drive. At the end lay a large steel and concrete building surrounded by several metal pole barns and quonsets. To the north of the main building was a series of conveyors and raised mill structures. The forms of the buildings were a striking black against the moonless tapestry of swirling, nighttime clouds stretched above the chasm around which the facility was situated.

  In the main building, Daphne saw LED lights through the windows, some moving and others stationary. As the sadist group approached the building, someone from inside threw the large front doors open. A shaft of cool, blue light poured out in the shape of the doorway. Daphne was already slinking away, heading for cover, as the first of the surviving sadists reached the porch. The rest of the group arrived behind him, panting and catching their breath. They regarded the shadowy figure in the doorway, lit from behind. The one on the porch began to babble in a near-delirious state, relating to Red's group what had transpired in the woods and on 49.

  After a moment, a larger figure appeared in the doorway, a hulking shadow blocking the bluish beam of light. Daphne glanced down from her position on a conveyor stretching up diagonally 100 feet to a mill. She could tell by the size and shape of the form standing in the threshold below that it was Red. He came to stand by the side of the sadist on the porch, taking him by the elbow and leading him to the edge of the poured concrete stoop in front of the other assembled sadists. He mumbled something to someone inside, and a moment later the entire yardsite around the building was bathed in glowing, orange sodium vapor light.

  Red stood silently with the confused man for several seconds before he spoke.

  "You guys ever get the feeling that maybe--I don't know--maybe you're not wanted?" He ran a hand over the top of his head, releasing more of his scent to the breeze and allowing it to drift up to Daphne's attuned, highly perceptive smell receptors. She had already been able to smell his presence, but now the odor was concentrated. She narrowed her eyes as she glared down at him, her muscles tense and wishing for confrontation. Her enlarged pupils remained trained on him as he continued. "Hmm? And not only do you show up--uninvited--but you also drag her here with you? You understand it's me she's after?"

  "We understand that she killed a lot of us trying to make sure she got to you," countered the sadist standing beside Red.

  With no warning, Red's left hand dove for his holster, his right arm still crossed over his torso and holding the sadist by the right elbow. Behind the nameless sadist's head, Red raised a handgun and fired four times into the man's lower skull. His legs went limp, and his body collapsed onto the porch.

  "The rest of you," Red's voice boomed, "if you can bring me her head, you've got a place with us. Otherwise, do yourselves a favor and get the fuck outta here as quickly as possible." He turned and entered the building, slamming the door closed behind him.

  "What a dick," a female sadist muttered.

  "Gee, you think?" another one said. "Well, I guess we should get the fuck outta here, as he so eloquently put it."

  "I want to get my hands on her," said a male who appeared to be in his thirties. He removed and re-donned his green ball cap with a graphic of a yellow tractor on its front. "She's ruined too many people I care about."

  "Have at it, buddy," one of his group members said, clapping him on the back as the rest of his party started back toward the highway. "But some of us want to try and live to see the sunrise."

  "I won't be seeing too many more of those, anyway," the man with the ball cap said, pointing the beam of his flashlight at his arm. He pulled up the sleeve of his baggy hoodie and showed the others the mild bite marks on the swell of his bicep. The marks were light, but adequate enough to ensure that he would turn.

  "Tough break," said the oldest female of the group as they turned again to 49.

  "I'm staying, too," a young woman in pink camo said, turning to join the male bite victim. "I got bit on the back of my neck." She was oddly calm as she concluded, "I'm done for. And I want to kill her."

  The elder female, whom Daphne now assumed to be the young woman's mother, convulsed with sobs. "No! That can't be true. Not my baby, not my baby...." She brandished her flashlight, shining its beam onto the back of her daughter's neck. "Why? God, why?" The two women hugged, both sobbing and tear-streaked. "I'm not leaving, either. This is all because of that little bitch, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna let anyone hurt my girl and get away with it."

  "The rest of you coming?" asked the dark-haired female at the head of the group, looking ahead of her as she started down the driveway once again.

  "Have some respect," admonished a male, pausing to embrace the two women before he left. "These ladies are on the same team as you, you know."

  The female scoffed, still facing straight ahead as she continued. "Hey, man," she said with a laugh, "this is a hell of a time and place to count on respect. And for the record, I'm on no one's team."

  "There's no 'I' in team," concurred a bearded male as he started behind her, "but there's a fuckin' 'I' in survive."

  The two remaining members of the embarking group said their final good-byes, then headed up the driveway with the other two. It was now down to Daphne and the three sadists who had stayed behind, the male bite victim and the mother and daughter.

  "So where's the little freak hiding?" growled the elder. "I swear, I'm going to tear her limb from limb when I find her."

  Daphne lay prone on the conveyor, within the shadow provided by the raised sides, in a slithering stance. She slid down to the middle of the incline, which put her around twenty-five feet above the ground. Her simpering, upturned face was tilted downward toward the woman. The bag with her few remaining sticks lay at her right hip. Her hand was inside the bag, and the tips of her fingers caressed the shafts of the wooden weapons as she watched the trio of sadists below.

  From the main building, Daphne could
hear at least a dozen frantic voices, all shouting over one another. A deep voice, that of Red, struggled to drown them out, gaining volume until the final boom rang out, escaping the barrier of the walls and reverberating through the mill yard and mine. When the conversation continued, it was at a much lower volume.

  One of the three sadists, the younger woman, wandered beneath the conveyor upon which Daphne waited. The latter woman rose slightly to a raised push-up stance, taking care to avoid entering the light. She lifted herself momentarily as the sadist passed directly underneath her, grabbing onto the side of the conveyor with both hands. She straightened her arms, hoisting herself up and off of the raised surface without making a sound. She dropped twenty-five feet, unsheathing her knife as she fell, followed by her long red hair pulled straight above her head.

  As her feet made contact with the unprepared sadist, she pushed down on the woman's shoulders with her bare soles. Her body reacted before she could cry out. Straddling her body as she lay face-down in the shadows, Daphne pointed the blade of her knife between two of the woman's back ribs, behind the heart. She plunged the knife inside of the chest cavity, reaching around with her other hand to cover the sadist's mouth. It was unnecessary, however, as the death seemed to be quite instantaneous. Daphne kept her hand still as the body went limp, falling flat against the ground and freeing the knife.

  As the young woman's mother approached, swinging the beam of her flashlight as she went, Daphne grabbed the dead sadist by the ankles. She dragged the body into deeper cover as the older woman whispered for her daughter.

  "Lacey?" the sadist hissed as Daphne ducked into the nearby treeline, pulling the corpse in beside her. For the time being, it was still quite lifeless. Daphne knew, though, that it was only a matter of minutes before the former sadist was up and running, with the complexity of her cognition replaced by the drive to eat human flesh without discrimination.

  With the body safely stored for the moment, Daphne focused her attention on the other woman. She came in close behind, close enough to feel the woman's fear and body heat radiating from within the pink camo suit which matched that of her soon-to-be-undead daughter. As Daphne crept just behind her, she brandished her knife again as her gaze zoomed in on the spots where she would be applying the blade. She turned the pommel in her fist so that the pointed side of the knife was protruding from the pinkie side of her hand.

  Bending her elbow and bringing her hand momentarily near her chest, she turned her right side slightly toward the woman. With a sharp straightening of her elbow, she forced the blade first into the sadist's left lung, then the right. The woman tried fruitlessly to gasp for air, then cry out. After a few seconds, her legs gave out and she fell forward into the gravel with her shoulder-length hair, a mixture of white and pale blonde, fanned out around her head.

  Daphne glanced toward the final remaining sadist of the three, the male. Noticing the absence of his two companions, he called out quietly for them.

  "Holly? Lacey?"

  Daphne glared toward the man, annoyed by his proximity to her. Since he was within about five feet, Daphne knew that the act of dragging the body would create too much noise on the gravelled surface, most surely alerting the surviving sadist. To resolve the situation, Daphne lifted the corpse from the armpits, hoisting its weight up and slinging it over her shoulder. The former sadist's dead weight was substantial, as she more than doubled Daphne in pounds. The girth, however, was nearly meaningless to Daphne as she trudged with her burden through the shadows and into the treeline, down a bit from where she had deposited the last corpse.

  From inside the building, the voices of the sadists began to ramp up again as Red and his doubting followers yelled back and forth to one another. Daphne turned to the last sadist left in the yard, her eyes thin slits. The corners of her mouth were slightly upturned, revealing the points of her small, stunted upper canines, which tilted slightly outward and rested on her lower lip. It was a rare look on her, as she didn't often smile with an open mouth.

  Because he was the last of his group, Daphne barely had to sneak as she approached him. She strode up to him from behind, sneering and palming her knife. When she was a few feet away, the sadist turned and spotted her. His face contorted into a masque of horror, and he opened his mouth to scream, inhaling deeply first and filling his lungs with air. His eyes were wild with fear and fixed on Daphne's deranged visage.

  In the space of only a fraction of a second, Daphne raised her hand and used the outer edge as a wedge to chop the sadist in the throat, cutting his scream off before it could escape his body. She then unleashed a flurry of strikes to the torso, cracking ribs and rupturing organs as she focused on the areas containing the sadist's lungs and spleen. She finished with an uppercut under the sternum, knocking the stunned enemy slightly off of his feet and backward. He came to rest on his back with blood bubbling from his mouth and his dead gaze fixed upward.

  Daphne dragged the body within the edge of the woods, leaving the three corpses fairly well-spaced on the length of woods neighboring the main building. Since she was alone for the moment, she did a quick search of the each body, mostly disregarding all but the weapons. The male was only carrying a pistol and a spiked mace, neither of which interested Daphne. She stalked to the next body, the mother. In the left jacket pocket, she found several small, steel throwing spikes. She placed them into the bottom of her messenger bag with the three wooden throwing sticks she had left.

  Finding nothing else of value, Daphne made her way to the last corpse, the daughter. A search of the dead sadist's person yielded two items that caught Daphne's eye. The first was a high-quality steel dagger, unnecessarily fancy with gold accents studding the black pommel, but still quite sound and sturdy. She discarded Cynthia's knife, placing it into Lacey's sheath in favor of the dagger, which she pocketed.

  The second item was a small, flat metal box. Intrigued, she opened the box via a clasp at the front, studying what she found inside. She realized she was looking at an antique compass made of brass with a fold-out sundial. She gazed at the device for a few moments with a look of child-like wonder on her dirty, blood-smeared face before closing it and placing it into her bag.

  The round of spirited shouting continued from inside the building, so Daphne continued to survey the yard site. Behind the conveyor and mill building nearest the driveway, she found a massive burn pile. Atop a bed of ashes several inches thick sat several dozen logs which had been singed but not burned away. As Daphne approached the pile, one particular log caught her attention. It was a length of local ironwood roughly six feet long and two inches in diameter, more or less straight and uniform from top to bottom. One end was exceedingly sharp but jagged, presumably having been snapped away from its parent tree as the yard site was cleared to make way for more milling. Daphne lifted the length of tempered ironwood timber, which weighed around twenty pounds. She stood sharpening the charred, unevenly pointed end with the dagger until the loose, blackened outside was stripped away, revealing the chestnut-colored interior. The end result was, effectively, a six-foot-long spear.

  She held the implement vertically, tossing it from one hand to the other and getting a feel for its heft. Spear in hand, she stalked around to the back of the building, staying just within the treeline. She peered in through a narrow window in the back door, but the view yielded her no information on the whereabouts of the sadists inside. Glancing around her, she made her way to a nearby tree. She scurried up its trunk, then onto a branch about 40 feet off the ground, as high as tallest peak of the roof. She walked across the length of the branch, her left arm relaxed at her side and the other clutching the spear, towering more than a foot above her head. Standing near the tip of the limb, she gauged the distance to the steel roof. Confident that the jump could be made, she leaped from the branch, sailing six feet through the air and landing softly on the blue, metallic surface.

  On the other end of the building, Daphne heard the front door being opened. She made her way, w
ithout a sound, to the point where the roof to the building joined with the covered porch. Crouching low in a shadowy spot, she trained her senses on a group of enemies below, pouring out into the orange light.

  Daphne watched them, her pupils tracking their movements, and smelled each of their individual scents with her enhanced olfactory capabilities. She observed the sadists below, amused as they searched for her, inspecting the yard and pointing their flashlights at the gaping, leaden hole nearby. Surveying those who had exited the building, Daphne got a rough idea of how many there were outside. Having concluded that she could hold her own, she laid the spear down on the roof to return for it later, then advanced to the edge of the roof on the shadowed side of the structure. Her gaze zoomed in on a cluster of several sadists near the treeline.

  Clutching a drainage pipe between her hands and feet, she slid down to the ground. She went straight ahead into the edge of the darkened wood rather than to her right, where the boundary of sodium vapor light from high atop the pole met the darkness. Fondling the black-handled knife with a firm but erotic lover's touch, Daphne crept through the edge of the woods toward her targets.

  As she neared them, she took careful note of the positions and placements of each one. Crouching with her pelvis hovering just inches above the ground, she rushed the closest target, who was facing away from her and unaware of her presence until he was too close to avoid certain doom. Daphne's wrist, wielding the fine steel dagger, flicked out and unleashed the blade between the lower thighs and deep into the femoral artery of the male victim. A pressurized plume of blood shot out at once from the man's leg, momentarily spraying Daphne's face and hair until he spun around to see what had hit him, inadvertently hitting his comrades behind him with his vital fluid.