Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  With a hideous grin on its broken face, it picked her up by the neck and dangled her over the alley.

  “Don’t!” Bryce commanded. The order was juiced by his personal power and the demon hesitated, but only for a second. Then, with its grin growing ever more hideous, it opened its hand and dropped the old lady off the roof. She disappeared in complete silence.

  The last thing Bryce wanted to hear was A-Yeoung’s frail body with its twig-like bones strike the concrete a hundred feet below, and partially to cover the sound, a scream of rage howled up from his throat. He charged the demon, scooping up his pipe as he came on. Fury filled him with an unholy strength and when the demon caught the pipe in its palm, it was not strong enough to stop the force in Bryce’s arms. The momentum of the metal carried through to strike the demon in the forehead hard enough to snap its head back.

  Still, it did not relinquish its grip on the pipe. This did not matter to Bryce who lashed out with a kick to the side of the leg, dropping the demon to its knees. Now, Bryce spun the pipe, giving the demon the choice between having either its grip or its wrist broken. Bones snapped and ground together as the demon held on. It knew that death would come quickly if it let go—Bryce was in such a fury that a slow death was just fine with him. He rained punches and kicks on the once great creature, reducing it to a long stretch of shattered bone and bloody flesh.

  Eventually, the demon could not hold the pipe any longer and Bryce raised it up, his eyes blazing a wild blue. Without ceremony or hesitation, he drove it down through the creature’s skull.

  Finally, it was dead, and he stood over it in triumph. But for Bryce, it was a joyless victory, however. Hundreds of innocent people had died miserable cruel deaths because he hadn’t been strong enough to slay it alone the first time they had fought. The feeling of triumph faded quickly. Hundreds had died because of the demon, but he felt the greatest pain over the loss of A-Yeoung. She had sacrificed herself, not for Bryce and maybe not even for the people in the building, but because it had been the right thing to do. Her death had been necessary, and she had faced it without hesitation.

  “That is true honor,” he whispered and then jumped as Kathy cried out.

  “Yes!” Her excitement was not for him. She stood on the edge of the roof, panting, staring down as the main body of tenants suddenly broke out through the back door. There were zombies here as well, though they were fewer in number, and perhaps because of her high vantage, they seemed smaller than the usual. The creatures attacked and screams floated upward.

  There were not many screams, thankfully. The rush of tenants bulled over the zombies in their way and fled, leaving only a handful of people behind.

  “Your mother is not one of them,” Maddy assured Kathy, whose eyes had been at squints trying to see if her mom had made it safely away.

  With the death of the Spider Demon, Maddy’s mind had cleared, and she was able to stand. Seeing its deformed body lying there lifeless, she had expected the darkness surrounding her to lift, but it was even heavier, now.

  “What do we do?” Other than Kathy, there were only two “normal” people left on the roof; both had been wounded by the zombies. Maddy saw that they did not have mere scratches. The flesh of their hands had been deeply scored and they bled without let up.

  Kathy saw the blood as well. She glanced around at the zombies still fighting to get to the roof and said, “We die.”

  “Hold on,” Bryce said, walking past her and to the edge. He smashed a zombie that was wriggling onto the roof and then gazed about. There was one way off the roof and that was the thin little pipe he had climbed up on. Maddy might be able to climb down it, but he didn’t think the others could. Still, it was their only chance. “We’ll go down here.”

  Kathy took one look at the inch-wide pipe and went pale. The other two people were thick and older, and with their bloody hands they knew they would never make it. Both shook their heads and turned back to the zombies. “We’ll hold them here,” one said, his voice rough with emotion.

  “Thank you,” Bryce said. Quieter, he went on, “Maddy will go first, then Kathy, then me. Don’t look down. Concentrate on the pipe, and…”

  Maddy’s lips pursed as she saw the outcome of the plan and slowly her head went back and forth. Kathy’s face drooped and she suddenly looked twenty years older. Blinking back tears, she asked, “I fall, right?”

  Before Maddy could nod, Bryce said, “We still take the chance!” There was no chance, Maddy knew. Kathy’s fall was a dead certainty. Bryce saw Kathy’s fall from Maddy’s mind. She lacked the grip strength. He considered having her climb on his back, but she was nearly twice A-Yeoung’s size and it was a certainty that she would pull him from the pipe. “Maybe she should go first.”

  “So, I don’t knock her off when I fall?” Kathy snapped. She rubbed the tears from her eyes with her balled fists. “No. I’ll stay and fight.”

  “Kathy…” Bryce started to say.

  She shoved him aside, hissing, “No! It is what it is. I knew how this was gonna end from the start.” She swung Mr. Jennings’ bat and caved in a skull. Next, she stomped on grey fingers that had clamped onto the brick edge. Without looking back, she whispered, “Will it hurt?”

  Maddy saw the moment of her death and, unexpectedly she wasn’t sickened. “No. You do it right. It’ll be like floating.” Three minutes from then, Maddy saw the girl, surrounded by the dead, toss aside her bat and dive from the roof, turning over in mid-air so she was looking up when she hit the alley. Dead in a blink.

  The vision shifted to Maddy’s own death. Two minutes from then she was still scrambling down the long, long pipe when the zombies pour over the edge. They would come crashing down on her and in turn, she would crash down on Bryce. The fall, a mere thirty feet wouldn’t be what kill them. It was the hundred or so zombies that would jump from the roof that would do it.

  Chapter 42

  Bryce saw his death, his rather ignoble death, playing in her mind. “It’s the door,” he said. “It’s not going to hold.” The zombies were beating on it without let up and when the lock failed, they would be neck deep in the creatures. “What if we barred it?” The roof was not barren. Off to the side was a battered old picnic table with peeling paint and various whittled inscriptions and initials. Next to it was a rusted folding chair and a coffee can of ancient origin, filled with gnarled cigarette butts.

  Maddy turned to stare at the table; however, she saw only her death being replayed over and over.

  Seeing his own death once was enough for Bryce, who grunted and ran for the picnic table. Right away he saw that over the years it had been repaired five dozen times. There were screws in every inch of the thing’s legs and where these had split the rotting wood, duct tape served to maintain its shape. The flimsy table wouldn’t last a minute.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Maddy said. The darkness that had followed them from the moment they had awoken in the hospital days before was swelling. It wasn’t just her and Bryce’s death that she felt coming. It was something greater. The nukes, she supposed. “But I’ll be dead, so I guess that’s not my problem.

  “Don’t talk like that!” Bryce barked. He heaved the picnic table to the door and slammed it in place with a loud bang, causing one of the two tenants to look back from where he had been hammering away at the zombies. Bryce ignored the man and his twitchy fear. “Hold the table,” he ordered Maddy.

  She went to it, knowing it was a waste of time. Little besides her fall was coming through to her, but it didn’t take a psychic to see that neither the door nor the table would hold for long, and in fact, the door’s lock burst at that very moment. She called out to Bryce, who was once again at the edge of the building overlooking the alley. He was desperate for an idea, but the flat brick walls were no help.

  A braid of rubber-sheaved wires called to him. Like a cable, it ran from their building to the next across the alley. On his side, the wires snaked into a two-inch wide metal tube that formed a “J” w
hich went into the side of the building. Both the pipe and the brackets holding it in place were corroded beyond belief, held together by a lattice of rust through which sunlight streamed. “But what of the other side?” he wondered. He pictured himself swinging Tarzan-style across to the other building with Maddy clinging to his back.

  Taking a grip of the wire cable, he heaved on it. “If it’s secure, maybe Kathy can come…” He was suddenly on his ass, the limp wire in his hand; the support for the cable on the other side had been just as flimsy.

  Still, he had a rope of sorts and yes, it was a mere twenty-six feet long but that was better than nothing. Unfortunately, the idea of using it to climb down the building carried with it the same falling zombie issue as climbing down the pipe. And worse, there was no place to anchor the wire near any of the edges. The closest was a vent pipe that was set eleven feet from one edge, which would leave him with a fifteen-foot rope and an eighty-five-foot fall.

  “Bryce!”

  Maddy was planted in front of the door—the lock had failed, and she was doing everything she could to hold the horde back. Across from her, the two tenants were no longer hacking down at the zombies; five of the beasts were now on the roof and more were scrambling up. Kathy was at the other fire escape, which hadn’t collapsed yet. The V-shaped chasm between it and the wall had filled with zombies; they were already at the level of the roof.

  Kathy turned and gazed at Bryce, a far-away look in her eyes. It was time. Their fight had not been in vain, but it was over.

  She was seconds from jumping to her death, in what would be a graceful swan dive with a slow twist. Bryce struggled to find something to say to her, something that would make the situation okay, or even the slightest bit better. “You saved your people,” he told her, tapping his pipe down for emphasis. This was his highest compliment. She had done what a leader was supposed to and now she was facing death better than most adults could dream of. He gave her a nod and a sad little smile. She shocked him by returning it.

  “Bryce!” Maddy again. Unlike Kathy, Maddy hadn’t accepted her fate. She was still afraid, which was no wonder as death in a dozen forms kept playing across her mind. She was caught in a vortex of them, unable to see any other possibility.

  In a way, Bryce was lucky as he lacked the foresight to see his own death. For now it meant he thought he still had a chance despite the obvious. His blue eyes swept over the roof. The fact that it was mostly barren helped center his mind. Clutter would have left him with too many possibilities, and with the zombies raging up onto the roof, he had time for only one. He ran for the folding chair.

  “Come on!” he barked at Maddy as he swept it up. The two tenants were being swarmed. They were screaming in fright and pain, and for the next few seconds the zombies that had made it to the roof were centered on them.

  “What are we going to…” Maddy started to say, but was interrupted as Kathy gave them a last look before diving from the roof. Just as Maddy had foreseen, zombies were all over the girl, but she held her fear back with magnificent courage and when she dived from the roof it was with poise and its own sort of beauty as her blonde hair rippled back from her face.

  Maddy gasped and had to turn away. Bryce’s chin dropped as a crushing sadness fell across him. In nearly every way, Kathy and A-Yeoung had been opposites. In death they shined.

  Swallowing his pain, he shoved his pipe into Maddy’s hands and began to yank her to the roof’s edge, not far from where the zombies were burying the last two tenants. She stared hypnotically at their hideous demise, seeing her own future in their deaths.

  “Hey!” Bryce cried.

  She blinked and faced him, confusion vying with her mounting fear. He had tied one end of an inch-thick cable of telephone wires to the folding chair. All she could say was, “Huh?” as he began to tie the other end of the cable around his waist. “What the hell are you going to do with that?”

  In answer, he stepped to the edge so that the toes of his home-made boots jutted over the drop and pulled her right behind him. “Jump when I jump,” he told her.

  “Do what?” she screamed. The roof had become very loud. Roaring zombies were pouring onto the roof from three directions and now that the two tenants were being pulled to pieces, the creatures were racing for Maddy and Bryce.

  He didn’t seem to notice them or her perfectly rational question. His mind was taken up with distance, arc curvature, drop speed, and most of all timing. “Now,” he said, in an absurdly calm voice. Although she was emotionally and mentally unprepared for leaping off a roof, she trusted Bryce, and her foresight allowed her to jump at exactly the same moment he did. He leapt outward and together they seemed to be flying in tandem, her just a couple of inches over his back.

  Dropping the pipe, she swung her left arm diagonally over his shoulder while at the same time she slid her right hand up under his right arm until her hands met; she clenched them together with all her might. In free fall, they hurtled at the ground passing floor after floor. As they sped past the third, he whipped the folded chair at the fire escape which was covered top to bottom with the swarming zombies. With so many squirming bodies, it was a tricky shot, but all he had to do was hook one of the legs of the chair.

  Bryce, who viewed their fall in slow motion, was able to see a slim opening between a stumbling zombie and the edge of the structure. His aim was spot on. Now he adjusted how much of the cable to extend. Too much or too little and he would be eating a brick wall for breakfast. That reminds me, I haven’t had breakfast, he thought, letting out just a little bit of cable.

  Then the two were subject to an immense gravitational pull as the chair hooked on the railing and the cable went tight. Maddy’s legs flung out and even with her new strength, she barely kept her grip. The cable bit into Bryce’s hands but he didn’t notice; he was purely focused on hitting his “landing” target squarely. His target was someone’s bedroom window and there would be no landing in the strictest sense. There would be a crash and likely a lot of blood.

  “Tuck up!” he cried. His center of gravity was around his waist and tucking into a ball was easier for him. She was stretched out as long as could be and there wasn’t time to tuck much of anything. With a shattering explosion of glass, the two hit the window dead center. Bryce blasted into the apartment; however, Maddy hit the sill with her hips and her locked hands separated. She began to fall only just managing to catch the edge of the window frame that was still embedded with glass.

  “Bryce!” she hissed, feeling her warm blood flow.

  “I’m right here,” he said, appearing at the window. Other than a fine crystalline powder in his dark hair, he looked as if he had just left the elevator instead of jumping off the roof. Taking her by both wrists, he lifted her straight up and into the apartment. Despite the pain in her hands and possibly because of the narrowness of their escape, she wanted to throw her arms around him and the idea of kissing him played itself out in her imagination.

  Then she pictured Kathy diving off the roof…and A-Yeoung being dropped over the side…and Victoria having her neck twisted so far around it looked like the demon was unscrewing her head. And other deaths sped past her vision: Victoria’s daughter Tessa, who had been taken by the train in the blink of an eye, odd Sid Pits who had been both the reluctant hero and a determined drunk, and so many, many more until her mind conjured up Agent Plinkett who maybe wasn’t even dead.

  He’s dead, echoed up from somewhere deep.

  She stepped back from Bryce who hadn’t realized he had been close to being kissed. They were not out of danger yet and his eyes were flicking about the bedroom, looking for a suitable replacement weapon for his pipe. Like so many apartments in the city, it seemed to have been made for tiny people. The walls crushed in and the ceiling smushed down. The four-poster bed took up so much room that the drawers of the dresser in the corner could only open half-way.

  With a sour look, he went to one of the ornate posters rising from the bed frame, took it in two
hands and snapped it off. Now he had a very fancy club. The sour look deepened when he smacked it into his palm. The club was poorly weighted, its balance was off, and because of the way the wood spiraled, it wouldn’t last in a prolonged battle.

  “I’m hungry,” he remarked as if they were a normal couple and they weren’t trapped in a building that was filling with zombies. “Do you smell bread?”

  For the most part, she smelled meat that was going grey and milk that was rancid. “Yeah, it’s got a few more days to it.” She followed him into the kitchen which was small but looked positively tiny with his large frame taking up so much space. The discovery of three full loaves brightened his features, and in no time, he had six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches laid out.

  “Two or three?” he asked and then wished he hadn’t when she took three.

  They ate quickly, efficiently; not wasting their breath on idle conversation. The images from on the roof kept haunting them, stealing any enjoyment they might find in being alive. Only when she had finished did Maddy ask about his back; he seemed to have healed faster than was possible, even for him. “A-Yeoung, that little Asian lady did something to me.” Embarrassed, he added, “Acupuncture.”

  “Really? You know there aren’t any reputable studies that show acupuncture has any medical value, right?”

  “She was different. That’s all I can say.”

  If this had come from anyone else, Maddy would’ve been unable to resist cocking a disbelieving eyebrow. Showing, what for her was amazing restraint and maturity, she let the topic go. There was a more pressing issue. “How are we getting out of here?” They were still surrounded by an army of zombies. The death of the demon hadn’t changed that.

  “I don’t know,” he said, going to the living room window. It let out a high squeal as he flung it up. “The fire escape is an option.” Without the Spider Demon controlling them, most of the zombies had begun to mill aimlessly about. The ones on the outside of the fire escape were a little different; half of these had fallen and the other half were still climbing. There was plenty of room for a pair of fast climbers to make it down…maybe.