Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  “What happened?” Victoria whispered. Whispering was far from necessary since the zombies were still below them and fighting just as hard to get at them, and the Spider Demon certainly hadn’t forgotten about them, if it was even still alive.

  Maddy shrugged as best she could in her cramped position. “There’s no way that guy lost. What was his name? Gay something?”

  “Grae-Zier,” Bryce said. “He’s a dick, but I guess you saw that. And yeah, I don’t think he lost, but I also don’t think he won, either. It must’ve run away.” It was a disappointing idea, strangely so. “What happened to honor? And all that?”

  “We have honor,” Grae-Zier said, walking into view on the other roof. “They do not. They are evil through and through.”

  Bryce wondered if that was true. The black demon that had tracked them across half the city seemed to have some sort of code. “Or it wanted to make me think it did.” Grae-Zier was looking at him closely and likely heard, but said nothing to him.

  Maddy had heard him, though it was not a subject she wanted to discuss while suspended over a mob of zombies. “Can you find us a rope or maybe some wire, so we can climb up?”

  “I don’t think so,” Grae-Zier answered. “Let’s first talk about your new mission.”

  “I can’t hold on forever!” Victoria said, vehemently.

  Grae-Zier’s eyes passed over her as they might pass over a mouse. He ignored her. “You will need to find the President and talk to him in person. You will talk him out of launching his nukes. These are your orders.”

  “And what do we get out of it?” Maddy asked. “I understand that we will be saving you and your precious Daniel. And ourselves, perhaps. But we will also be putting ourselves at great risk while Daniel is perfectly safe in his ivory tower. So, what’s in it for us? Why shouldn’t we just hightail it west as soon as possible.”

  “That is as selfish an answer as I’ve ever heard,” he said, haughtily. “Perhaps it’s that attitude which keeps you out here among the…others.” He was clearly going to use a different word to describe humans. Victoria’s presence deterred him. “You were chosen by Magnus, specifically. He knows many things that people such as yourselves cannot comprehend. Really, you should be thankful for the opportunity to serve the greater good.”

  For a long time, Maddy stared at him with hard eyes and a jaw set in stone, before saying, “So our reward is the opportunity to be thankful? That’s it?”

  Grae-Zier began to swell in indignation and was about to explode in anger; Bryce stepped in quickly, hoping to diffuse the situation. “We’re not against the idea of helping, but you have to admit that it feels very much like we’re being used in this situation. Even now you leave us hanging here to force us into doing what we’re told. Is this how Magnus operates? Is he king and we have to bow and scrape?”

  “Yes and no,” Grae-Zier answered. “He is not a king, and yet, every single one of the Chosen would die for him, would jump at the chance to do his bidding in any regard. Any. It’s why I am finding it beyond words that you two have so little gratitude for what he’s done for you and are being so pig-headed.”

  Maddy and Bryce shared the same thought: What’s been done to us. “Seeing as we were lab rats in a science experiment, without a say so in any of this, Magnus can hardly expect a great deal of gratitude from us,” Bryce said. “But I also don’t want to be flash fried, either. My problem is two-fold. Lack of any assurances on your part and I am already committed to helping this lady find her son. Now, if you want to give me your word, we’ll be allowed into Magnus’ compound when we’ve completed our mission...”

  “If we even want to,” Maddy interjected.

  “Right,” Bryce went on, “If we want to. And you’ll assume the protection of this woman while she hunts for her son, then I think we will be on board. What do you say?”

  Grae-Zier smiled broadly and even seemed about to laugh. Instead, he said, “I do not bargain or haggle like some sort of destitute fishwife. You have been given your orders. How you carry them out is your business.” He turned and walked away.

  “Hold on,” Bryce called out. “You’re just going to leave us here?”

  “You seem to crave your independence,” Grae-Zier answered, his voice retreating. “And now you have it. Good luck.”

  Chapter 27

  “Hey!” Victoria yelled over the sound of the dead. “You can’t just leave us here!” She looked desperately to Maddy and then Bryce. Her hands were close to losing their grip. Before the apocalypse the most work they ever did was cleaning a bathtub or stirring a pot of sauce. Her feet were worse off. The left one had already seized up in a cramp that she didn’t think she’d be able to ease without a quick massage. Her right foot was only slightly better off. “I can’t hang on much longer.”

  Maddy had her head cocked as she listened to Grae-Zier’s steps diminish. With each step her lips turned further down until at last the steps faded to nothing. “Is he coming back? Bryce? Hey.”

  Bryce stared outward in shock. “I don’t know. Maybe.” They waited in silence, expecting at any moment to hear the big man coming back with a rope or a long chain. There was no way he would leave them stranded on the side of a building. Minutes passed and the black of night was slowly becoming a dark navy in color before the truth struck Bryce. “He really isn’t coming back.”

  “Then what do we do?” Victoria asked. The two were looking at Bryce to do something—something stupidly dangerous in all likelihood, even though he was the only one who could sustain his present perch indefinitely.

  Under his breath he muttered, “Shit,” and craned his neck up and around. He inspected the wall above him, searching for anything resembling a handhold or even a fingerhold. There were a few but each was its own little island far from its nearest neighbor. The wall across from him was no better. With going up out of the question, his only chance was going down into a crowd of zombies ripping at the brick to get at him. There were a little over a hundred, enough to swamp him and bury him beneath a mound of grey flesh.

  “I don’t know,” he told them. But he did know. There was only one way for two of them to survive and that was for the third to sacrifice themselves. Victoria couldn’t do it, even if he would’ve allowed it, and Maddy…he couldn’t allow Maddy to do it either. The chauvinistic side of him saw her as weaker, a creature in need of protecting, and his newly discovered honor rose up.

  With a sigh, he raised his pipe and said, “Switch with me.”

  Knowing what he had planned, she wanted to argue that maybe Grae-Zier would come back. Or that if they just thought things through, they could come up with a plan. And the pipe wasn’t her sort of weapon. It was too long, too heavy, and too foreign for her to use. She didn’t waste her breath. Someone had to do something, and they had to do it quickly. She threw the axe and at the same time he threw the pipe. The weapons passed in the air and each caught the other’s deftly.

  Bryce asked, “Promise me you’ll go on?” She sucked in a breath, once more wanting to fight him on this. “Promise me.” This wasn’t an order. He wasn’t going to try and force her with his mind. Instead, he was going to guilt her, which felt just as bad.

  She didn’t argue, but she sulked and it took her a long few seconds before she whispered, “Fine.”

  He smiled his white smile and looked her in the eye, holding her gaze and during the long look that followed, he told her, “I’ll find you.” Choked up and unable to reply, she only nodded. He stuck the axe down into the shredded remains of his pants and yelled, “Up here! Look at me!” Power flowed out of him and the zombies stopped their clawing to stare up at him. He waited only a moment before he jumped. He didn’t jump straight down; that would’ve led to a very quick death. Instead, he jumped towards the other building across the narrow alley and landed with his feet angled so they had all the traction possible.

  Beneath him, the zombies roared and surged from one side to another, but even as they did, Bryce was leaping agai
n, this time at a diagonal down the alley, away from Maddy and Victoria. Once more the zombies howled after him. He jumped and jumped, landing for the tiniest fraction of a second before taking off. With each leap, he lost just a touch of altitude, until his fifth leap saw him only inches from the grasping fingers that tore at him.

  Ahead was an improperly placed gas pipe crossing the alley a bare eleven feet off the ground. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself grab it and swing powerfully upward gaining six or seven feet more vertical room to work with. Reality was not quite so perfect. His hands slapped hard on the metal and he heaved himself forward just as he envisioned, but as he did, the force actings on the bar were too much and it snapped on one end, sending him twisting and spinning to the ground.

  With his head passing beneath his feet, there was no way he could pull off a miracle of dexterity and land with any sort of grace. He hit a bare stretch of pavement like a thrown bag of laundry; hard on his shoulder and the side of his neck. The zombies, slow in almost every other regard, rushed in eagerly from every direction, ripping at him with their claws. But Bryce was still fresh from his rest and he bull-rushed the line where two of the closer zombies were skinny and deformed. Behind these two, the numbers were fewer and the pressure less than elsewhere.

  The pair reeled backward and fell, but as they did, long arms reached for him from all around and his shirt suddenly went tight from behind, choking him, slowing him so that it felt like he was trying to run through waist deep mud. Then there was a soft sighing shriek from behind and he was suddenly free, his shirt ripped completely from his body. He felt feather light and with a burst of energy, he leapt at the wall where the broken pipe fed to another that ran on a course parallel to the ground but some ten feet above it. A few feet above that, was a great rusting nail sitting half out of the wall. It was very nearly like a spike, and with no other choice, he reached for it and trusted his entire weight to it.

  His luck was against him and he could feel it begin to slide out. Still, it got him off the ground and high enough to make another jump over the heads of the zombies. In mid-leap he looked down the alley and saw that he had already cleared most of the zombies and that after another couple of leaps it would be okay to get back down to solid earth and run for it.

  A wild grin broke out on his face. I’m going to make it! he thought. In this, he counted one too many chickens. The amount of friction it took to keep him from sliding right down the wall after these leaps could only be calculated with the help of thirty-six separate mathematical terms. His next jump was far more easily boiled down in its simplicity. Fifty feet overhead a long-broken gutter had turned the wall into a slick field of mold and when his foot tried to plant itself, it had no traction whatsoever and shot out. He fell twelve feet and came down straight onto his tailbone. The pain was enormous and almost paralyzing; it was all he could do to stifle a girlish scream. With his throat locked against the pain and what felt like an electric current of agony running from his coccyx and up his back, he tried to stagger to his feet; however, the lower half of his body was useless and couldn’t bear his weight.

  The hot edge of panic began to creep over him as the zombies swarmed. Climbing was his only option and fortunately there was an old electrical conduit running up the side of the building he was propped against. It was held in place by bolts set into the wall every three feet. As they stuck out barely an inch, they were the worst possible option, and yet they were the only option left to him. He climbed using only the strength in his fingers and arms. Through sheer willpower he forced himself upwards as the bolts bit into his fingers cruelly. Still, the pain was nothing compared to the torture coursing from his tailbone and that agony would be a butterfly kiss in comparison to being eaten alive by the horde which swarmed beneath him.

  Bolt by bolt, he forced himself on and on. The tips of his fingers went red in seconds, formed blisters that popped, and then the flesh simply began to shred so that the bolts became slippery with his blood. He went on, ignoring the burning pain, satisfied that every zombie within sight screamed below him. The rest of the alley was empty. Maddy and Victoria were gone. “That’s something,” he muttered. He tried to convince himself that it made the pain worth it, but without much success.

  Ten feet from the roof top he was breathing in harsh ragged gasps. He was being so loud that he almost missed the lightest scrape of a shoe above him on the roof. Dread flowed through him as a dark figure loomed over the edge of the building. Very tall it was, almost impossibly tall and at first, he was afraid that the Spider Demon had slunk back to finish him off, then he saw the brick it held in its strangely small hands, and the long blonde hair that hung down towards him, and the twinkle of a silver earring. It was a girl or a young woman. A teenager most likely and despite her dominant position, she was more afraid than he was.

  He was on the verge of grunting a “hello” when she raised the brick high above her head. She’s going to kill me! Bryce was thunderstruck by the idea. Small and thin as she was, she could very well kill him. His position on the pole was so very precarious that a stray wind might pluck him off it. The brick would easily do the job of sending him plummeting to the pavement far below. “Hey! Hold on. Don’t do that,” he said. “I’m human.”

  The girl paused, her green eyes wavering between fear and confusion. “You…you don’t look human.” In this she was not wrong. He was torn and bloody, covered in sewer muck, zombie blood and the general filth of the city. His hair was a wild bramble and from where she stood, he appeared utterly naked. Zombies walked about naked. Humans did not.

  “But I am,” he insisted, his arms trembling. “I am human. I just had a run in with some of them.” He jerked his head to indicate the dead still scrambling below.

  “That means you’re infected,” she stated. Her lips, thin to begin with, drew in until they disappeared. “I think this might be for the best. You should close your eyes.” The brick lifted higher.

  “Stop,” he said, forcefully, blurting out the word without even thinking about it. Her eyes began to blink rapidly and she stepped back. As fast as his throbbing fingers would allow, he mounted the final ten feet and dragged himself onto the roof where he lay in a contorted heap, eyeing the girl, who eyed him right back.

  Slowly, she lifted the brick again, but it was almost an afterthought, as if her body was just remembering what it had been about to do. “Wha…what did you j-just do to me?”

  Mind control? Was that the term? He was afraid that it was, though he wasn’t going to explain it like that, not when he couldn’t even straighten himself without crying out. “Things are different now,” he told her. “And some people are different. Some…” As he spoke, he had tried to shift and it was like someone had shoved a spiked rod down his spine. His mouth opened and closed like a landed fish until the pain faded…slightly.

  “Different in what way?” she asked, lowering the brick. Her fear was receding quickly. Her name was Kathy Pierce and she had been a very average, and thus immature, girl of fifteen when all of this had started. She had grown into a resourceful person in an amazingly short time, and she judged that Bryce had never been much of a threat, except for that trick he had done with his voice.

  “Some of us have grown,” he told her. “A week ago, I was your size.”

  She took a step closer and squinted through the dark at him. He was definitely not her size. Not even close. She didn’t hide her skepticism. “Yeah? What else?”

  How could he explain about the demons and Grae-Zier to someone who had never experienced them? How could he even describe Maddy, properly? On the surface, Maddy was just a woman with a little gimmicky trick of knowing how screwed they were a little ahead of time; so far it hadn’t really been all that handy. Beneath that and beneath her newly attained beauty she was far greater—but in a way that was hard to describe other than to say she had vast potential. It wasn’t something this girl would find interesting. “Some of us can see the future a little.”

  Gestu
ring at him with the brick, she asked. “Is this the future you saw for yourself?”

  He tried to shrug, but even that hurt. Although he had not seen any of this coming, he had been aware of the gathering danger in a gut way that couldn’t be explained, and he didn’t have the energy to try. “No. There was too much happening at once. Things get jumbled when you’re constantly moving. And seeing the future isn’t my specialty anyway.” This felt like the perfect combination of a lame excuse and a poor explanation. “Could you do me a favor and get me some Tylenol or something?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m sorry but it’ll be a waste. You’re going to turn into one of them. I’ve seen it happen and the guy looked like you, mostly. You’re probably halfway there already. We can make it quick so that you don’t feel a thing.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Mr. Jennings has a bat and it’s major league sized. It does the trick. Bam! And it’s lights out. That’s the way I’d want to go out.”

  She started to back away from him, still clutching the brick. “Stop!” he ordered. She stopped. But only for a couple of seconds, then she twitched a shoulder.

  Kathy gritted her teeth and struggled to lift her right foot. It was as if it were rooted in place and she had to twist it to get it free. Once she got the foot moving, it was easier to get the rest of her free and when she could, she raised the brick again; she wasn’t going to wait for Mr. Jennings and his bat. Bryce held up a hand. “Just hold on. You felt my power. It’s a thing. What else is a thing is that I’m immune to the zombie virus. I’m not going to turn. I’ve been bitten and scratched for the last four days and I’m fine.”

  “How?”

  “You ever heard of Daniel Magnus?”

  She frowned. “The rich douchebag?”

  “That’s the one. He did this to me and to others. Most of the people he did this to died or became like the zombies except stronger. They’re demons and some of them don’t look human anymore.”