Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  He still looked like himself, only he was more rugged, more manly, and his blue eyes…she found herself staring and when he looked at her, she felt her cheeks flush and she quickly looked down at the block of cheddar she had been carving slices from.

  “Uh, we also have cheddar.” It was a stupid thing to say. He could see and smell the cheese as if it were an inch from his nose. “It’s good,” she added, even though she felt Havarti would’ve been better. “They didn’t have Havarti. Isn’t that weird?”

  Now, she was simply blathering on because she could feel his eyes on her and he was not just staring at her sudden embarrassment. He was studying her, much the same way she had been studying him only seconds before. She too had grown. Her legs were now shockingly long and slim, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn she was only a few inches shy of six feet. Her hair had kept up with the rest of her growth and it was now a wild mane that flowed over her slender shoulders and down her back.

  She looked back at him through the mane, her silver eyes glinting. The two looked at each other until each second stretched out longer and more uncomfortable than the one before it. I should say something, Maddy thought to herself. Anything! Something! “Havarti used to be my favorite.” That was stupid! I should’ve said anything but that!

  “Yeah. Havarti is good.” He could’ve kicked himself over this completely useless reply. Havarti is good? What the hell was that? he cried inwardly. He tried again, “It…it’s one of my favorites, too.” He sounded like an idiot and his smile dipped as he wondered: Why am I having so much trouble spitting out a coherent thought? Of course, deep down, he knew why. Maddy had become beautiful and worse than that, she had become nice. With her intelligence and her new-found bravery, she was no longer remotely like the Maddy of old. She was now a woman well out of his league.

  Victoria saved them both from their own foolishness by whispering: “Not under there, Tessa.”

  Guilt hit both of them and they looked away at the same time. Maddy held out the cheddar. “Should we give her another couple hours? She needs the rest more than us.”

  “I don’t think we should wait any longer than a quick breakfast,” he answered. “It’s still dark out and that favors us. Also, I don’t think I can last too much longer in these clothes.” He made a face, knowing that he stunk to high heaven.

  Maddy had been down in the same sewers and was desperate for a change of clothes, as well. “I would kill for a shower. I don’t care if the water is freezing. Just as long as there’s soap and shampoo, I’ll be happy.” And she would be, too. She knew better than anyone that they had a rendezvous with Death, and this should have made her gloomy at a minimum. For some unaccountable reason, when she wasn’t fighting for her life, she found herself surprisingly content.

  She sat back and watched Bryce pile meat onto bread. “Maybe some more roast beef?” she suggested when he started eyeballing the cheddar. Maddy had meant it to be a joke since the sandwich was already half as high as his head and she had no idea how he was going to get it into his mouth. He grunted, considering the great height of the sandwich, and deciding it wasn’t great enough, added another slice of meat, which had her laughing loud enough to wake Victoria.

  “People are trying to sleep here,” the woman groused.

  “I think it’s time for you to get up,” Bryce told her. “It’s still dark and we can put quite a few miles behind us before the sun comes up. What do you say to a sandwich? Are you hungry?”

  Victoria peeked out from under the tablecloths and eyed the immense construction of meat and cheese. In the dark, with its protrusions and humped middle, it looked like he was holding some sort of an odd turtle. “Maybe not.” She groaned her way to her feet, where she grimaced and balled her fists into her spine, bowing out her back. This did little to help the ache that had settled there sometime during the night. It was just another misery for her to have to suffer through. Her entire body was one big pulled muscle, or so it felt.

  She wasn’t about to say anything, not to these two, at least. Not quite twenty-four hours before, Bryce had been on death’s door with a gaping hole in his chest, and six hours before, shredded, bit and bleeding, he’d fallen from the side of a building. And now he was perfectly whole. No. There was no talking to “people” like this. They wouldn’t understand how it was for Victoria. They couldn’t know her pain, either physical or mental.

  Bryce found a cloth bag and filled it with more sandwich fixings. Slinging it over his shoulder, he told her, “If you change your mind, we have you covered.” He even smiled at her. She could see his teeth gleaming in the dark. They were as unnaturally white as his eyes were electric blue.

  Feeling small and worthless around them, she muttered a thanks, then offered to carry the bag. It only made sense. The bag would only make him a less efficient fighter and he was their tank. Maddy was their recon and their light fighter, and Victoria held the bag. When the two turned away, she reached over to where knives gleamed in a rack. She took a thick bladed one and found it wickedly sharp. It went into the bag.

  As she was beautifully built for recon, Bryce let Maddy go first. Her senses were other-worldly and she led them out the back to a narrow little street. Above them black smoke roiled across the sky, turning the dark night even darker. The zombies on the street were little more than moaning shadows and difficult to spot. Maddy sniffed them out with ease and guided the group away.

  They ate up the blocks and Victoria grew hopeful that they would be able to make it most of the way back to her home before sunrise. With every step north, both Maddy and Bryce became convinced that would never happen. It was just an inkling at first; however, it grew to a certainty in their hearts, though neither knew why.

  It wasn’t the general uptick in the numbers of roving bands of zombies, though that should have clued them in that things weren’t right. It was when they were dashing away from three of these bands at once that they found themselves in trouble yet again. An empty side-street beckoned so alluringly that Maddy took it without thought.

  Almost as if directed by an unseen force, zombies poured onto the street behind them, while more moved to cut them off in front. Their choice from here was to run up into an apartment building where people were hiding and chance killing them all or slip into an alley. Experience and guilt sent Maddy into the alley where the buildings rising above them were windowless so it felt like they were slinking down a canyon. The doors along the man-made crevice were without handles and were of thick metal and it was with a sinking feeling that Maddy realized they had basically trapped themselves and if there was trouble, they would have to fight their way through.

  Trouble came quickly in the form of a pair of raggedy zombies. The first had been an eighteen-year-old would-be gangster. In life, the runt of a man had never left home without a gun. His weapon had done him little good, not even when he’d been infected and raving with a fever. His last bullet, saved for exactly that scenario, had gone unused and now he was an it, but not a completely mindless it, like the others. No, it was a sniffer. Although it did a great deal of sniffing and snuffling about, its sense of smell was only little better than it had been when it had been a man. What really drew it was strong emotion.

  Love, happiness, sadness, all registered on its senses, but it was mainly fear that pulled it near. There were few outbursts of love left in the city—other than a desperate sort of love that lacked true intensity—but there was a great deal of fear. The heavy aura of it surrounded a person and went out in waves that crested and ebbed.

  At midnight, it had been sniffing out humans hiding in the burned-out remains of the Chrysler Building. Although it had been a zombie for not quite two full days, it understood the way of things. Fear was great and all, but that didn’t make the fearful human altogether harmless. In fact, at times in the face of soul-crushing fear, they performed feats of heroism beyond all measure.

  Perhaps because of its expanded empathy, the sniffer was singular among its zomb
ie and demonic brethren in that it alone was aware of its own mortality. Because of this the sniffer had worked out a system in which it was as protected as it could be. It sniffed the humans out, called in the horde to reduce them to shrieking, pathetic creatures, and then feasted on their misery. Yes, it was emotion that it craved. Like all zombies, the sniffer ate only enough flesh and drank enough blood to sustain it for the moment. It could not see beyond the next street let alone the next horizon and after a few bites, it was full.

  The zombie army grew only because of this tendency.

  Bryce knew nothing of this. He saw the creature only as a skulking grey lump and figured it was only hanging back due to some disfigurement. His mind went to killing the creature racing in at Maddy, who was slow to respond, her silver eyes unfocused. She was being inundated by the strangest set of possible futures. Good, bad, great, and terrifying were all spinning around in front of her forming a twisting knot and she couldn’t find the right thread in time before Bryce dashed past with his pipe raised.

  “No,” she said, “the other…”

  Too late, he leveled the on-rushing zombie with a devastating blow to the head, sinking his pipe three inches deep. The beast stood with its eyes wide and its body failing—then a screech erupted into the air. The sniffer had tilted back its head and let out a howl that rolled down the man-made canyon. In the quiet city, it was such a shocking sound that Bryce was stunned for a second, before he yanked the pipe back, spun it about and threw it into the face of the creature, silencing it forever.

  The three stood there, listening, hoping that the mob from earlier had dispersed and that only a few zombies were around. Then the shadows in front began to undulate as though some great monster was crawling towards them. Slowly at first, then quicker and quicker.

  It was not one monster, but a hundred. Behind them were even more. They filled the long alley and now their gibbering and moans turned to the sick laughter that Bryce hated.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. There was nothing else to say. They were already back at it.

  Chapter 26

  There were too many, far too many. Bryce rushed forward to grab his pipe only for Maddy to stop him. “There’s no time!”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  She ignored him and stood looking up at the walls. They were not uniformly smooth and nor were there any ladders. Along the wall to their left were pipes jutting out and an odd lip where a new build had taken place sometime in the past.

  Maddy thrust Victoria at the wall. “Right there. Those pipes. Go!” As Victoria started climbing, Maddy took a run at the wall and jumped higher than either she or Bryce expected. She managed to grab a pipe ten feet off the ground and haul herself into a very uncomfortable hunched position with her toes crammed between the wall and the pipe.

  No matter what she said, Bryce couldn’t leave his only weapon behind. He raced into the face of the horde, grabbed the pipe and ran for the wall with grey hands reaching inches from his back. A little ways down from where Maddy hung crabbed against the wall and where Victoria clung to a gas line, was an air conditioning unit that seemed to thrust from the wall seventeen feet off the ground. With little thought he leapt and went up the side of the alley, his sneakered feet finding two little rough protrusions. Then he hung from the AC unit one handed while he slid the pipe onto the machine only to have it roll right off.

  He caught it, frowning. The air conditioner had been perfectly flat. Now his weight was slowly pulling it from the wall. He dropped the pipe, caught it with his feet and then went hand over hand, getting as close to the wall as possible before climbing up. To keep the machine from falling, he had to straddle it with his back flat against the wall.

  “Well, this is a hoot,” he said.

  “It’s not!” Victoria raged. “I hate this! God, please. I’m trying to be good. I’m just trying to get back to…” Maddy put out a hand to shush her. Victoria only glared at the hand. “I’m trying to get back to my family, God. That’s all; please help me. Please. Please.” She went on mumbling a bit.

  Maddy smacked the wall, hissing, “Quiet. Something’s coming.”

  It wasn’t a something at all, as she knew very well. Both she and Bryce felt the coming of the Spider Demon. They looked up towards the roof across from them. It appeared further down the alley; its sickly pale head sliding silently into view. Victoria saw it as well and went dead silent and utterly still, foolishly hoping it would miss them in the dark and move on. With a hundred zombies below them scraping at the brick, it was impossible not to see the three.

  The Spider Demon’s black eyes centered on them and it grinned. This ugly creature could not have been more aptly named and just like the biggest, most horrifying spider ever spawned in Hell, it began to crawl down the wall, head first.

  “Christ,” Bryce whispered. They were in a terrible position. There was no way to fight the creature. Any slip and he would fall and be torn apart in seconds. And unless it leapt across and came at Bryce at just the right angle, he couldn’t even hurl his pipe at it. The best he could hope for was an ineffectual jabbing…unless it moved directly opposite of him.

  “Then I’ll pin it to the wall.” Bryce would launch himself directly at the thing, with the pipe aimed for its gaping mouth. His chances would be fifty/fifty and he would probably die in the attempt, that was a given. It would be worth it. “You’re going to have to make a dash for it,” he said to Maddy as he slowly pushed himself upward, scraping his back along the wall as the AC unit shifted beneath him threatening to come crashing down. “If it gets a little closer, I’m going…”

  The demon chose that moment to fling itself across the narrow alley. It landed above Bryce and some twenty feet over. Pinning the thing was no longer an option. In fact, Bryce was now completely out of options. He could only stand on a teetering hunk of metal and hope the demon would do something stupid. But it did not. The creature crabbed across the wall, its nails scraping into the tiniest crevices along the bricks.

  “Bryce,” Maddy hissed, and there was a strange mixture of hope and fear in her voice.

  It took Bryce a second longer to pick up the new vibe in the air. He craned his neck past the demon which was even then feeling the sensation of something powerful above it. With a hiss, it leapt back across to the other building where it clung, looking over its shoulder as Grae-Zier’s handsome face appeared. In the last of the night sky, he appeared to shine down from above. His eyes flashed silver and his teeth were the brightest white in his dark face. His dazzling smile was ruined by the contempt within it and the snort that came next was derisive and had Bryce going red in embarrassment.

  “You have been treed like a cat,” Grae-Zier remarked, glancing briefly at the demon and then at Bryce, arching an eyebrow to add to his demonstration of utter disdain. “How does one of the Chosen come to be treed like a cat?” Bryce fumbled about trying to formulate an answer that didn’t make him sound like an idiot, something that proved to be impossible. Grae-Zier shook his head saying, “Maybe it’s because he or she is not one of the Chosen. Maybe they haven’t earned the distinction. That would be my guess.”

  “We did what Magnus asked of us,” Bryce shot back. “We went to the FBI and the head man talked to the President. We did our job.”

  An indifferent shrug. “Not very well, apparently.”

  Bryce bristled, almost causing the air conditioner to fall out of the wall. “We were hunted by demons. Look at that thing!” The Spider Demon, with its impossibly long arms was backing up the wall, wary of Grae-Zier and the great sword strapped to his back.

  Grae-Zier appraised the demon. “An odd specimen, indeed,” he said, “The arms might give you a little trouble, but as skinny as it is, it should not be much of a challenge for the two of you.”

  Maddy’s awe at the sight of the giant man with his green hair and exotic looks turned to anger. “For the two of us?” she cried. “Didn’t you just make a crack about how we were treed? How do you expect us t
o fight the damned thing, while we’re stuck up here?”

  “That is not my concern,” he answered, blithely. “I’m here to remind you of your duty. Missiles are even now being readied. Your job is to stop them one way or another.”

  “And if we do, do we get a cookie?” Maddy asked in her snidest voice. Bryce had been on the receiving end of that voice too many times to count and it was with some satisfaction that he watched Grae-Zier’s eyes widen in shock and then narrow in anger. As if she were sitting behind a desk with her feet up, instead of clinging to a pipe above a raving, blood-thirsty horde, Maddy smiled with thinnly veiled superiority.

  Grae-Zier’s thick lips drew into a line. “You get to live. That’s your reward.”

  She glanced down at the zombies, casually indifferent to his idea of a reward. “Really? That’s what you’re offering?” He opened his mouth but she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to hear it. We ran around risking our lives for you once already and what did we get for our troubles? We have the privilege of you looking down your nose at our predicament instead of doing the right thing. You do understand what the right thing to do is?” She spoke very much like a teacher might to a kindergartener.

  He growled in his throat before standing straight up, the toes of his dark boots hanging over the edge. He looked very much like some alien god to the three, and maybe to the Spider Demon as well since it backed from the edge of the far building before suddenly dashing away sending gravel flying. Grae-Zier grinned at the idea of a chase.

  “I will kill this creature and then you will do as I say. As Daniel Magnus says, I mean. All orders come from him.” He didn’t wait for a reply. Bunching his powerful legs, he sprang across the alley and was gone. They expected to hear sounds of a battle; however, after a brief scurry, there was silence.