Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  Maddy had gone a light shade of green and there was a fluttering in her stomach. She did not have the luxury of jumping. “Hey!” she said, sharply to bring them around. “Man the walls. They’re coming.”

  And they were. Grey hands and bloody nails gripped the edge of the roof, while behind them the door was being subjected to a terrific assault, one that had that strange mind-meld coordination Maddy had witnessed before. The creatures rocked back as one and then hurled themselves forward as if they were one giant creature. With each thud, the hinges bent, and the jam cracked.

  Despite all this, no one moved.

  “I said move!” Maddy ordered. She turned from them and gazed down at the fire escape ladder that ran to the roof. A putrid grey child stared up with blank eyes as it struggled with the rungs. Maddy punched a hole in its head with the ice axe and watched it fall. The small body did not splat. There were too many zombies carpeting the street for this to happen. Seeing her drove the creatures mad and those not on the ladder launched themselves from the railings to grab the edge of the roof.

  Like she was hammering nails, Maddy began pounding the grey hands as fast as she could, barely keeping up.

  Seeing her fight woke Kathy from her daze. “Come on!” she yelled and ran for the edge, hoisting Mr. Jennings’ chipped baseball bat over her head. The charge she led was weak and sad. Most of the little group of fighters wouldn’t get close to the edge or if they did, they leaned well back from it. They would whack at the hands or heads with their random weapons, but there was no great intensity in their attacks. They were going through the motions only. Their deaths were a foregone conclusion, and each was more concerned with dying than they were with fighting.

  “Don’t let up!” Maddy roared, hoping to motivate them. For some reason she couldn’t pinpoint, she felt it was important to die on her feet, fighting, and she lashed about with her axe in a fury until everything was a blur. The dozens of grey faces and the hundreds of black nails reaching for her became one. The roars and growls became only background static. The pain and exhaustion within her turned to a blessed numbness as she fought.

  Even seeing her going wild against the dead did little to buoy the spirits of the others. It wasn’t until Jon Falconer was caught by the ankle and pulled from the roof with a long, drawn-out scream that they woke from their daze. Inexplicably, jumping from the roof seemed at least somewhat tolerable to them; being thrown or pulled off was another story altogether. Now they began to fight, and for a time they kept the creatures back. Even the door, which appeared to be always on the verge of coming to pieces, held.

  Of course, the situation could not last. Even if the army of zombies were not so unrelenting, there was the demon to consider. Its vile presence hung in the back of Maddy’s mind and she felt it waiting, although at first she could not understand why. Then she heard the crack of a faraway gunshot and she understood. It did not want to face a gun. The demon was going to wait to make its appearance until things got to the breaking point, when a gun would have to be used.

  By then, Maddy knew she’d be too exhausted to put up any sort of fight. The demon had been forcing her to play its game for too long and that had to stop.

  Leaving the fire escape, she ran for the door where the superintendent’s key gleamed dully in the lock. When she reached for it, one of the two women guarding the door grabbed her hand and screamed, “What are you doing?”

  “Take my place at the fire escape,” Maddy commanded. When the women didn’t move, she supercharged the order: “Now!” This got them moving. Ignoring their backwards looks, Maddy took a breath and flung open the door. Once more, it was like looking down into Hell. Hundreds of hideous faces flinched from the sudden, blinding rays of the sun. Before they could recover, Maddy was in among them, her axe flashing silver.

  She went for the big ones and the whole ones, killing a half-dozen of them before they even knew she was there. Their rancid corpses began to pile quickly, making it difficult for the others to get up at her. After a minute of savage butchery on her part, the stairwell was basically blocked and it was another minute before the Spider Demon understood what was happening. It had been lurking a floor below, biding its time and conserving its energy.

  Presently, it would order its army to drag away the corpses as they had been. Before it could, Maddy roared out her challenge, “Face me!” She wanted to fight it in the stairwell. Although it seemed her best chance against it would be up on the roof where she had room to move, she had seen how a fight there would end.

  If I can take out its eye, it’ll be blind…and I’ll still lose. And maybe Bryce could finish the job. That’s how she looked at her fight with the demon. Win or lose, she had a duty to fight it.

  The idea of blinding it gave her an idea and without hesitation, she slammed the door shut behind her, cutting off all light. Until their eyes could adjust, they were all blind, though she did have her second sight. Her future vision was such that in a fight, it was like looking at a constantly shifting mosaic of overlaid versions of three seconds from the present. Sometimes ten or more possible futures blurred over themselves, each changing depending on her own reaction.

  Just then, everything was agreeably black. Into that darkness she leapt, her axe held high. She knew precisely where the demon stood hunched on itself and knew within an inch where its remaining eye was. One swing could end the fight. The spike of the axe was a narrow point and that one inch meant all the difference between blinding it and hacking uselessly into its eyebrow. She had missed the mark; still the attack had been unforeseen by the demon and its reaction to it was slow, giving her another chance and she whipped the blade at its face.

  An eye, even the eye of a large demon, was a small target and the spike, just at the furthest extent of her reach, caught the bridge of its nose, hacking out a pinky’s width of flesh and bone. Now, it was the demon’s turn. Its night vision hadn’t fully returned, but to a demon with arms the length of Maddy’s entire body that wasn’t much of a problem and before she could swing the axe again, it raked the air, its claws extended wide, hoping to snag her and pull her close.

  With so many zombies both alive and dead underfoot, it was like standing in a bog of corpses. Her speed was half of what it was, and she couldn’t risk attempting to get in close. Flailing back, with its claws passing frightfully close, she retreated to the top of the stair with the demon charging after. At the door, she hesitated as the vision returned of it standing on her throat—nothing had changed. Still, there was no way she could stay there and fight. Her current visions showed only the same outcome and she had no wish to be eaten alive in the dark.

  No one even noticed as she slammed open the door. Little had changed on the roof and everyone was fighting desperately against the mounting hordes. Maddy threw her shoulder against the door, hoping to shut it in the demon’s face, but one arm managed to snake through. A moment later, the demon hurled its bulk at the door and Maddy was sent flying backwards. She landed with her momentum on her heels and went into a ball, turned a tight back somersault and was on her feet again in a blink.

  The demon was on her a split second after that, attacking without let up, giving her no respite. Her second sight was now something of a hindrance. All she saw was the outcome: the strangely elongated foot coming down. On the top of its foot it had the pallor of a corpse; on the bottom it was black with the city’s grease and grime. No matter which way she turned, her future was set and the final sequence played out in a whirlwind of spinning arms and ripping claws.

  In an open fight, she proved unequal to the creature. Its reach was a puzzle she couldn’t figure out. With one step it could be halfway around her, and it had begun to use its brutally hard and sharp elbows to counter any in-fighting. In half a minute of going back and forth, twisting, turning and lashing out, she was done. One long arm finally snagged her flowing hair, yanking her back. She was then picked up by the hair and slammed down, sending pinpoints of light flashing across her vision and c
ausing a thudding echo to bounce around her skull.

  This was her second concussion, and the effects were cumulative. A heavy lethargy struck her, and she couldn’t force herself to care when the demon’s long-foreseen foot came crushing down so hard that her air was cut off and the blood flow to her brain was halved.

  I’m going to die, she thought without emotion. She had known her fate for too long to be surprised, and the damage to her brain muted any sadness for herself. All she could manage was a fleeting thought of Bryce. In her broken mind, he appeared as he used to: small and nerdy, wearing an overly large sportscoat to hide his thin chest and scrawny shoulders. She had secretly liked him back when he had been vulnerable but strangely feisty. That was something she would never admit, and now she would never have to.

  With her last act, she hacked the axe into its leg and then everything went grey and her body sagged away into a haze so that it felt like she was floating. All things considered, it wasn’t a bad way to die.

  Chapter 41

  On the verge of drifting into utter nothingness, Maddy heard a hard voice command, “That’s enough.” She was too far gone to recognize Bryce’s voice and nor were her eyes capable of opening let alone focusing, and so she missed the oddest spectacle. Garbed in his blue and gold and carrying A-Yeoung on his back like a little monkey, Bryce climbed the same very narrow pipe he had ascended earlier the night before.

  The pain in his coccyx was gone, though he didn’t know if that meant he was healed. It was all the same at the moment; he could fight and that’s what counted. He bent and allowed the tiny woman to scramble down. During the climb she had been without emotion, completely fearless and he had marveled at her. It had not been easy and more than once his fingers had been within a nail of slipping. But she knew a fall would be easy compared to what they would be facing when they reached the top. It wasn’t just the demon they would be fighting, but death itself. Bryce’s mind was filled with the specter of it.

  “You are here for me,” he said to the demon. “We both know it.”

  The Spider Demon grunted and all at once, the crushing sensation on Maddy’s throat ended. She laid there, pebbles embedded in her flesh, too far gone to attempt to stand at the moment. Lying there, she watched the battle begin and saw that the two opponents were far more evenly matched now. This was mostly due to her. Yes, Bryce had regained his strength and confidence, but it had been Maddy who had whittled away at the creature.

  The battle did not begin with an explosion of violence. Instead, in something that resembled a ceremony, Bryce put out a hand and the little old woman demurely, without looking up, placed the long pipe in his palm. From then on, the battle raged in peculiar silence. Neither opponent so much as grunted. The same could not be said for the battle surrounding the pair. Although the demon was no longer controlling the thousands of zombies, they still attacked with unrelenting fury. The door, slammed shut by an astute Kathy Pierce, was being hammered on, while at both fire escapes, the few defenders were on the verge of being overrun.

  But all that was secondary. The fighting seemed inconsequential and far away to Maddy. She was spellbound by the contest between the hero and the demon.

  The Spider Demon possessed the great size and strength, and its reach, as seen from her point of view, was nothing short of amazing. Bryce’s strengths were less obvious. He was quicker, sometimes moving so fast that he was a blur of blue and gold. Despite his speed advantage, he was also more reserved, moving only enough to avoid the ripping claws, or reaching out with his metal staff just enough to strike flesh, and no more. He never over-extended himself.

  Unlike Maddy’s frenzied battles with the creature, Bryce’s attacks were pinpoint and had a single goal in mind. He fought to cripple the creature by using its own length against it. Never once did he try to reach inside those long arms to try for a head shot, instead, the whistling pipe struck repeatedly at arms and legs, elbows and knees. At first, it looked like a losing strategy as he had flesh ripped from his shoulder and chest from savage claws, while the demon seemed unaffected by the pipe as it thudded into it, but gradually Maddy noticed the demon was slowing and that it had begun to drag its left leg and that its right arm hung crookedly and couldn’t stretch fully out.

  As she watched, it seemed like the scales were tipping in Bryce’s favor, and yet Maddy’s nerves began to jangle alarmingly. Unfortunately, her second sight was as uneven as her real sight. In fact, it seemed to be mixing Bryce’s battle against the demon with the tenants’ fight against the zombies because she saw a zombie attacking Bryce and the demon out on the fire escape.

  A glance over at the closest fire escape showed the fight there was near an end. Two parka-clad men, both average—meaning years out of shape—were stumbling with exhaustion from the tempo of the battle. They were endlessly hacking and hacking, one with a fire axe and the other with twin meat cleavers. By the slow, two-handed way the man swung the axe it looked like it weighed a hundred pounds.

  A splash of sunlight filled her psychic darkness and she swung her now pounding head back to Bryce and saw him finishing the demon with a series of blows, each striking faster than the eye could follow—Crack! Crack! Crack! Left knee, right forearm, cranium just above the left ear, all fractured in the span of a single second. Then Bryce stood over the Spider Demon. It reached up from the ground, its extended arm nearly as long as Bryce was tall, and he seemed very tall indeed, as if he had grown during the fight.

  Bryce swatted the arm away and then crushed down with his soft leather boot on its wrist. The two locked eyes as Bryce raised the pipe to drive it down into the thing’s head. He was so focused that he didn’t notice that the axe-wielding man had fallen. The man’s foot had come down in a puddle of black blood. The pool looked like old motor oil and was slick as oil as well. The man’s foot went out from beneath him just as he was swinging, and before he knew what was happening, he was falling towards the fire escape and a thousand gaping mouths.

  He screamed and disappeared into the grey mass, leaving one man to hold back countless zombies. He didn’t stand a chance, especially as he was using such impractical weapons like meat cleavers. Three of the beasts got past him and raced at Bryce.

  “Behind you,” Maddy whispered. For now, it was all she had the strength for. With everything going on, he couldn’t hear her; however, just then the fire escape let out a deep groan as the weight of so many zombies pulled screws from the walls and the structure began to bend.

  Bryce turned at the sound, and saw the rushing zombies. They were on him quickly, moving in a small clump, which made it difficult to kill them easily. He smashed the middle one right on top of its crown, dropping it immediately. Then he sent the end of the pipe on a short arc to the right smacking one on the side of the head and then sent the pipe to the left, hitting the third, also on the side of the head. One went down, blood spurting from its ear as if there was a hose behind it. The other was merely knocked sideways.

  It could be ignored, and Bryce was about to finish the demon when he saw a pale-faced Maddy pointing an unsteady finger at the fire escape. She had seen the fate of the man with the cleavers. A second from that moment he was about to get caught around the ankle by a grey hand and pulled down and when he did the zombies would flood the roof by the dozens, killing them all.

  For a split second, Bryce and Maddy locked eyes and he saw all this, too. Fast as he was, Bryce knew there would be no way he could save the man with the cleavers, and yet he tossed aside his pipe and tore in his direction as fast as he could. He had barely taken a step when the man went down screaming bloody murder. Bryce kept running and then, fifteen feet from the roof’s edge he leapt in a great bound, one that Maddy saw would carry him well past the edge of the roof and out into empty air.

  Her mouth fell open as she watched him seemingly try to kill himself, only he landed directly on the far railing of the fire escape. The structure had been slowly pulling free of the wall, but the shock of his two- hundred and for
ty pounds hitting it at just the right angle sent the entire structure screeching away from the wall. Without pause for a breath he jumped to the nearer rail and then leapt for the roof, catching the edge with both hands.

  When he looked up, the Spider Demon stood over him, one enormous, pale foot raised. Grinning, it slammed its foot down on Bryce’s hand and ground its heel. Bryce bit down against the pain, but that was all he could do. He couldn’t attack; the moment he let go with his other hand, the demon would lift his foot and he would fall into the chasm between the teetering fire escape and the wall, a gap that was already filling with zombies.

  The demon squatted down, its long legs looking cricket-like as its knees jutted far out. It reached for Bryce’s free hand—Maddy saw it slowly break each of his fingers. She tried to stand, only the world kept teetering up and down. She crashed to her knees and could only crawl, blood leaking down from somewhere within her mass of chestnut hair. She would never make it in time and, even if she could, she didn’t know what she would do. She could not beat the demon. She was too small and too weak.

  A-Yeoung, who had faded into the background with everything going on, was even smaller and weaker but that didn’t stop her from walking right up to the demon. With it squatting, they were much the same height and the two impassively gazed into each other’s faces. Then they both reached for the other at the same time.

  In her hand was a needle, three inches long, with a fine red feather piercing the eye. She planted this in the crook of the demon’s elbow just as its immense hand threw shade across her face. It should’ve been able to swat her off the roof, but the arm froze an inch away. The Spider Demon stared at the needle in its arm without comprehension. Then it then stood so that it towered over A-Yeoung.

  Still with that unnerving calm, she stuck a second needle in its hip with and now its right leg would not bend. She backed away from it as it roared. Dragging its leg, it came after her, and digging for the needle in its arm with its teeth. Spitting out the needle, it was able to move its arm; the second needle was pulled free and now that it could move, it easily caught her, just as she reached the furthest edge of the roof.