Rooster (Road To Babylon, Book 3)

by Sam Sisavath

  Keo might have laughed again, because Pressley gave him a quick glance just before she dropped her rifle and pulled out her handgun and they both simultaneously bumped into a wall as they came to the end of the corridor.

  “Go go go!” Keo shouted.

  This time Pressley obeyed and hobbled down another stretch of dark hallway while Keo trailed behind her. He tossed his empty AR and pulled the Glock. He reloaded it in one second and began firing it a second later.

  And still they came.

  Unrelenting, unhesitating, even as they fell one by one by one in front of him.

  Click!

  He threw the Glock into the surging hell of pruned black flesh in frustration, and one of the creatures actually leapt to snatch the empty pistol out of the air like it was a prize. Too bad he hadn’t tossed a grenade instead!

  Keo was reaching for Brett’s revolver when he saw it.

  Twin blue suns appearing above the quivering mass of flesh and clacking bones and black eyes. The sudden presence of it made Keo pause for a second, and that was just enough time for the creature to pounce. It was all the way across the hallway from him one moment, then driving Keo into the floor and knocking the revolver out of his hand in the very next heartbeat.

  No no no!

  It perched on top of him, grinning down. A razor-thin mouth, more malleable strings than actual lips, forming something it probably thought was a triumphant smile but looked closer to a grotesque recollection of one.

  “I told you I’d find you,” it hissed, its voice simultaneously icy cold and uncomfortably hot (How is that even possible?) against his face.

  The rest of the ghouls had stopped on the other side of the corridor without warning. They milled about the floor now, like toddlers waiting for scraps of a meal from a parent. Black eyes watched Keo back even as they pushed against one another, filling up the narrow space—climbing on top of one another’s backs, heads, and almost stretching up to the ceiling—with their seemingly unending number.

  Keo stared up at the elongated face, at those eerie blue eyes lording over him. Seeing its kind up close always sent a shiver through his entire being, a reminder that he’d rather deal with an army of the creatures than one of these blue-eyed devils.

  “You didn’t think you could run from me forever, did you?” it hissed. Every word that came out of its mouth had an unnatural hissing quality, a stark reminder—as if he needed one—that as human as they still looked, they were far beyond that now.

  But as strong and fast and smart as they were, they could still be killed. With a knife, with a gun—

  The gun. Where the hell was Brett’s six-shooter?

  He pulled his eyes away from the monster to search the floor around him, but he couldn’t find it.

  Where the hell is that gun?

  “This is the end,” the ghoul hissed. “But it won’t be fast. It won’t be easy. It’ll be long and hard, and it’ll hurt. We’ll have a lot of fun, you and I. Oh, the wonderful games we’ll play.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Keo was going to spit back, when the bang! of a gunshot thundered first, and Blue Eyes’s head twisted as a chunk of its cheek tore free, flesh and inky blood spraying the wall nearby.

  Keo turned his head as a dark figure moved up the hallway toward them.

  Pressley?

  She hadn’t kept going like he’d told her. Instead, she was back and she fired again—bang!—but this time the creature was expecting it, and it jerked its head out of the bullet’s path and Pressley’s second round struck one of the black-eyed ghouls farther down the hallway instead.

  “The brain, Pressley!” Keo shouted. “Shoot it in the brain!”

  He had a feeling she already knew that, and that was why she’d hit Blue Eyes in the cheek with the first shot. It wasn’t her intended target, but maybe the combination of whatever pain she was suffering and the suffocating darkness made it difficult to put the bullet where she wanted it.

  Pressley had gotten two shots off, and she managed to squeeze out a third and a fourth, but Blue Eyes was already moving (Jesus, it’s fast!) and bounding up the corridor toward her. And yet Pressley kept firing, her rounds missing and ricocheting off the ceiling.

  Keo sat up and shouted, “Run, Pressley! Run!”

  But she didn’t—or maybe she would have, had Blue Eyes not been almost on top of her. She staggered back and fired again, and the bullet punched through the creature’s chest, and like the others before it, bounced harmlessly off the ceiling. The creature never stopped moving, and the last Keo saw of Pressley was her body being pummeled to the floor.

  He scrambled to his feet and searched the floor for Brett’s revolver. It couldn’t have gone very far, but without any lights he resorted to crawling around on his knees and groping the concrete with his hands like a blind man.

  Where was it? Where the hell was that gun? There were six bullets in it, but he only needed one to end this. Just one would do it.

  He knew he looked pathetic but didn’t care. He had to find that gun. He had to put a bullet in Blue Eyes’s head. Into its brain. It was the only way to kill them. Silver only hurt them, but it didn’t kill them the way it did the black eyes. They were too fast, too strong, but if you got them in the brain, none of it mattered. Keo had seen it work in person. Up close and personal.

  Shoot it in the brain. Shoot it right in the fucking brain.

  There was a blood-curdling scream, so loud that Keo abandoned his search and looked up while still on his hands and knees, just in time to see Blue Eyes raising itself off Pressley’s prone body. The monster seemed to keep rising and rising, as if its bony form were ten feet tall and its domed head would scrape against the very top of the corridor.

  Oh no. Oh no…

  The ghoul turned to face him, bright red blood trickling down its chest.

  I told you to run, Pressley. Why didn’t you run like I told you?

  It was holding something in its right hand, blood dripping from between its fingers. The object in the creature’s palm was slightly misshapen, and Keo swore it was still beating…

  Twenty-One

  Fuck…

  Pressley’s heart seemed to glow in the darkness, even as bright blood slipped and slid and dripped between the skeletal fingers clutching it.

  …me...

  The creature stood over Pressley, who lay behind it, unmoving. Which made perfect sense, because how exactly was she going to move with her heart literally ripped out of her chest? Even the strongest man in the world would have a little trouble getting their limbs to do anything after that.

  …over…

  It grinned up the corridor at him. Or tried to. Those barely-there strings of rope it was trying to pass off as lips forming an obscene…something. The cut along its cheek that Pressley’s bullet had made was already healed, taking away any evidence that it almost nearly lost its life.

  ...and over…

  And he couldn’t find the damn gun. The pistol that he’d dropped when it pounced on him and drove him to the floor. The one he had grabbed off Brett’s dead (Just like you’re about to be) body.

  …and ten times on Sundays.

  “What’s the matter?” the ghoul hissed. “No jokes for the occasion, funny man? No smartass comments? Cat got your tongue?”

  It tossed Pressley’s heart at Keo—nonchalantly, as if it were playing hacky sack. He was still on his knees, and he scrambled out of the way. Blood from the artery sprayed him in the face as it passed and landed with a disgusting plop! on the hard concrete floor behind him. The wall of ghouls scrambled forward, grabbing and kicking and biting each other to be the first one to have what was left of Pressley.

  Keo looked away. He didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to acknowledge the sickening sound of teeth shredding—

  The monster was there, standing in front of him.

  How…?

  The question popped into his head before he could really think about it. How? Because they were fast. They were inhuma
nly fast, that was how.

  “Well?” it hissed. “Say something funny.”

  He hit it in the side of the face with a balled fist, putting everything he had into it. It was a world-class swing, the kind that would have knocked out anyone, especially from barely a foot away. Except, of course, he wasn’t hitting just anyone.

  The creature turned its head slightly—very slightly. If it felt the punch at all, it didn’t give him the satisfaction of letting it show on its impossibly gaunt face. Its eyes never left him, and he was pretty sure it even smirked.

  Before Keo could get in another swing, it grabbed him by the throat and threw him into the wall. It did it so effortlessly, like a dog playing with a chew toy, that Keo was still marveling at how chilling and at the same time soothing its fingers were when they were wrapped around his neck when his back collided with the concrete, and then he wasn’t thinking about much of anything anymore.

  He bounced off the wall and landed in a pile. He might have grunted, but he couldn’t be entirely sure with the sledgehammer pounding away in his ears and the searing pain from his neck where it had grabbed him.

  Keo slowly pushed himself up onto his knees.

  “Look at them,” it hissed. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  It was looking at the ghouls feasting on Pressley’s heart—or the chunks of it still left after being pulled and fought over by the horde. Only a few had gotten a taste, and the rest watched with envy. If they could feel anything at all, that was. Keo wasn’t sure. The blue eyes were different, but the black-eyed ones were simple, base beings. Did they even still feel? Did they understand jealousy?

  Shut up, because you’re about to be next!

  Keo lunged at the creature in front of him, swinging with both hands this time, and driving everything he had with his body. The monster’s head snapped back, but the rest of it remained firmly rooted to the floor. It might have even laughed at him—or what it probably thought was a laugh but came out more like a…something else entirely.

  He couldn’t follow through with the attack because its bony fingers had somehow cupped his forehead and it was pressing so hard Keo thought his skull would turn to dust and crumble under the assault. It pushed down, and Keo’s legs began to buckle under the intense pressure.

  No…

  He was a helpless child battling a grown man who had spent a lifetime in a gym lifting weights and getting stronger with every passing year while he wasted away.

  Not like this…

  Except the blue-eyed ghoul didn’t look anything like a gym rat. Not with its long slender frame, its rail-thin limbs, and hairless domed head. It shouldn’t have been so strong, so impossible to hurt. It should have been brittle (Like your bones are right now?) and weak (Like you are right now?) and easy to break (Like you’re going to be soon?).

  But it wasn’t. It was none of those things.

  His vision blurred from the crushing pain coming from his forehead, and Keo imagined its fingers digging into his flesh and easily punching through his skull and into the brain underneath. Was that what was happening? Because it certainly felt like it.

  Not like this…

  Despite his difficulty focusing on any one thing, he couldn’t deny its presence as it pushed him down to the floor. The outline of its slim waist, its muscle-free frame, was all he could see. The heat that radiated from every pore of its flesh, comingling with freezing cold, threatened to engulf him. It defied all sense of logic.

  No, no, no…

  He wanted to fight it, to resist it, but it was so strong, and continued resistance would only snap his neck like a twig and maybe his spine right after that. His knees continued to give, until they finally slammed down on the hard concrete floor, sending a shot of pain through both legs.

  Not like this…

  He didn’t know why, but as he kneeled before it, Keo thought about Lara. She was somewhere out there, maybe even preparing to fight Fenton right now. That is, if Gaby had survived Axton and managed to reach her. And if Peters had delivered his intel. If she even decided to act after hearing everything.

  If.

  If, if, if.

  Not that what Lara would or would not do in the coming days was going to matter a damn to him in the here and now. Not here, kneeling in front of an abomination against life itself, looking down at him with that satisfied smirk on its face. There was nothing natural about its very existence, and yet, at the same time, there was something so, so very natural about the thing’s smugness.

  It was so inhuman, and yet at the same time, so human.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” the creature hissed. “You won’t have to surrender your friends to me. I’ll take them from you. Here.” It touched his forehead with the forefinger of its other hand. Uneven fingernails, jagged in places, scraped against his skin. “Everything you are, everything you were, everything you wish to be; they’ll be open to me. Your secrets, all your secrets…”

  He gagged at its presence, its very being. It didn’t really stink, at least not compared to the horde that waited like loyal children at the back of the hallway.

  “Such a novelty,” the creature hissed. “It amazes me that you were able to survive all this time. You meat suits are so weak, so easy to puncture, to break. Why couldn’t you just stay in your place? Why did you have to be so difficult?”

  Keo had something to say—a zinger that would make even Danny proud—but he couldn’t open his mouth to deliver it. It was the pressure from the monster’s fingers; it was clenching them, bringing them inward, knowing how much it was hurting him. His vision continued to blur, and his teeth began chattering. It had stopped pushing down, maybe because it knew it would break him in half if it didn’t, and it didn’t want to kill him.

  Not yet. Not yet…

  He closed his eyes. It was far easier than fighting the losing battle to keep them open. Besides, he was pretty sure his eyeballs were going to pop any second. How could five fingers, smaller than the smallest chopsticks, have so much strength in them? It was unreal. And yet, they were going to be the end of him. They were going to take everything he had.

  No.

  No, no, no.

  Not like this.

  Not like this!

  He didn’t know where it came from, but it surged through his body from his toes to the shins and upward, upward until it was coursing through his body. Keo fired up from the floor like a missile. The creature lost its grip on his head—maybe from shock, maybe because he really was that strong all of a sudden—and Keo burst through its defenses and punched up with everything he had.

  Crunch! as his balled hand made contact with its jaw.

  Its head snapped back. Really, really snapped back this time, just before it staggered, taking one, then two steps back.

  Look, ma, I can hurt it! I can hurt it!

  Keo didn’t give it a chance to regroup. He lunged forward and hammered at its head with both fists clenched together into one weapon. The monster’s cheek shattered against the impact, and coagulated blood splashed Keo’s knuckles.

  Go down, you bastard! Go down!

  He hit it again, and again, swinging both hands like they were one fist instead of two joined at the fingers. Blue Eyes kept moving back with every blow, blood flitting across the space between them from open gashes and splashing the floor, the wall, even the ceiling.

  Hit it again! Hit it again!

  And he did, striking it over and over, raining punches on its cheeks, its jaw, its nose, its forehead—anything he could target.

  It was backpedaling, but it wouldn’t go down.

  Why aren’t you going down?

  Go down, damn you!

  Keo didn’t let that stop him and continued hitting it and hitting it and hitting it. He would have let out a ferocious scream with every swing if he could summon the energy, but he was putting everything he had into his fists. Into his legs to drive forward. Into his body to keep charging.

  He struck it again, and again, and
again.

  And it laughed.

  The undead thing was laughing at him.

  Keo had to stop to gasp for breath. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have any choice. He was drained, and his heart pounded in his chest and his legs were stuck in molasses. His hands, still welded together into one balled instrument, hung in front of him, so heavy for some reason, and he wasn’t sure he could even lift it again if he wanted to.

  Not…good. Not good at all.

  His struggled breaths echoed in his ears, but it didn’t stop him from hearing Blue Eyes’s laughter. It laughed at him even as the new cuts along its cheeks closed, even as it continued to stand tall (You’re not human, motherfucker!) and watched him, eyes pulsating in the blackness as if each had an entire unexplored galaxy of their own.

  It smiled that painful smile and hissed. “Are you done? Did you get it all out of your system, meat suit?”

  Keo stumbled back, his legs threatening to give way underneath him. Mercifully, the wall was there, and Keo slid down its length. He finally released his hands and let them drop to the floor at his sides.

  He was spent, and it was gone. Whatever reservoir he had drawn the energy from seconds ago, it was now depleted. There was nothing there anymore. He couldn’t even summon the strength to stop his chest from heaving.

  “Did you really think it would work?” the creature asked.

  Yeah, I kinda did, Keo thought, but he didn’t put his thoughts into actual words. He couldn’t, anyway, not while struggling for every breath.

  “Did you really think you could beat me with your fists?” it continued. “You’re pathetic.”

  Don’t rub it in, asshole.

  “But you’ll make a fine toy. We’re going to have lots of fun.”

  Well, at least one of us will be having fun.

  “You’ll see.”

  Not if I can help it.

  “You’ll see…”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Keo spat out.

  Whoa. Where did that come from?

  His chest was slowing down, and he was able to lift his hands and make fists out of them at his sides again. Maybe he was stronger than he thought. Maybe, if he concentrated hard enough, he could get off another Hail Mary.