Dying to Live

by Kim Paffenroth

  "You got to," Jack rasped. "We can't see them, we can't shoot back, you got to."

  Jack dropped his pistol and raised his right arm, and his left arm part of the way, in surrender. I dropped my pistol and raised my arms, and the others did as well.

  Nine men emerged from the trees. All carried various hand-to-hand weapons like clubs and knives, as well as homemade bows. All were stripped to the waist. Most were covered with tattoos. What seemed to be their leader, a tall black man, picked up our firearms. The others hung back and kept their arrows trained on us.

  "Who are you?" the black man asked.

  "We were just out foraging for supplies, and we saw the smoke and followed it here," Jack wheezed.

  "Where are you from?"

  "There's a bunch of us holed up in a compound to the west," Jack said, lying about our location.

  "Well, you're not going back there today," the leader said. "You four, get going. That way." He pointed off to the right and toward the prison.

  "What about him?" asked one of the other men, pointing at Jack.

  "He can't move fast enough. Leave him." The black man bent down and twisted the arrow that was still in Jack's thigh. Jack winced and gritted his teeth through the pain. "If you do hobble your sorry ass back home, tell them not to mess with us." He got up and turned to the others in his group. "Get the deer and stuff," he said, and four of the others went back to the trees. When they emerged, they were carrying two deer, suspended by their feet from two long poles. Another pair of men went back and returned with large bundles of firewood.

  They made us walk along ahead of them. I managed to pull the arrow out of my chest, and I could apply pressure to the wound as I walked, so I wouldn't lose too much blood. The arrow was rudimentary—no real arrowhead, just a sharpened wooden shaft, so it didn't have any barb that would tear a bigger hole when I pulled it out.

  We walked along for twenty minutes, circling to the right, and they made us stop by a big drainage pipe that stuck out of the hillside under the prison. It was concrete, about four feet in diameter, and it had a metal grate across it. A stream of dirty water ran out of it and down the side of the hill.

  The leader approached the grate and unlocked it. He swung it up and held it open. "Get in there," he commanded.

  I got in first and started crawling along. It was foul, and after the first minute, it was completely dark. I had no idea how they managed to pull the deer along behind us, but I assumed they had done this before and were good at it.

  After a while, I saw some light up ahead. When I got to it, I could see that someone had dug through and smashed into the pipe from above. I stood up through the opening, so that my eyes were at about ground level, even with the edge of the hole that they had dug down into the pipe. I was surrounded by men like those who had captured us, and I immediately heard their catcalls: "Good hunting! Fresh meat!"

  They pulled me out of the hole, followed by Tanya, Popcorn, and Frank. The catcalls got really loud when the second two emerged. I shivered. Ironically, months of dealing with only non-human monsters had made us soft and naive. We had forgotten about the ugliness and brutality that humans could so gleefully perpetrate on anyone weaker than themselves, imagining that ours was the worst possible hell, when we should've remembered that it wasn't. Not even close.

  * * * * *

  When our captors climbed out with their other prizes, they led us across the field into which we had emerged. We were behind the walls of the prison proper, but not in the building itself, to which we were now being led. Most of the field here had been planted with corn, which seemed to be doing well. Not being a farmer, I forgot if, by the Fourth of July, corn was supposed to be as high as your eye, or knee-high. This looked somewhere in between.

  I guessed that the drainage pipe had really been an old stream that had been buried when the prison was built. It carried water down from the hills above, and supplemented it with the prison's filth before dumping it out where we came in. If the inmates had tapped into it, they'd have some water to stay alive and to cultivate their new crops.

  As we walked toward the large gray building, we stopped at a basketball court under the baking sun. The macadam of several other courts had been smashed up and hauled away to make room for more corn; the hoops still stuck out, incongruously, above the crops. But this court remained blacktop, though it had plenty of cracks with weeds growing out of them. The men hoisted the two deer up by their hind legs, suspending them from the backboards.

  "Better get started on these quick in this heat," the leader shouted to some other men who were just lolling about, staring at us.

  "I could get a good price for you all out here, but I guess I got to take you to meet the man," the leader of the group said as we continued walking.

  "Who's that?" Tanya risked asking.

  "Coppertop," the leader replied. "That's what the brothers call him. He calls himself Copperhead—some big, damn snake from the south, where his big, dumb, redneck ass is from. Thinks he's all bad and shit."

  "And he's not?" I asked.

  He shoved me on my right side, and pain shot through me from the arrow wound. "Oh, I think we're all plenty bad enough for you, little man. Now keep moving and shut up. 'Nuff of your stupid questions."

  We entered the main building and went through some areas that had obviously been checkpoints and entrances when the place had functioned as a prison; there were doors of bulletproof glass operated by electrical switches, where people had to be buzzed through, watched over by guardrooms with speakers and control panels. Now everything was just a smashed-up mess, and you stepped through the doors where the glass would've been.

  Where there was enough light from the windows, weeds grew in the cracks in the floor. The prisoners hadn't really bothered to sweep up the bits and pieces of glass from whenever this attack had taken place—which I suspected was soon after the zombie crisis had begun—but had just left them everywhere; over the months, they had been pulverized into a fine, sparkly dust where people walked regularly.

  Past these, we were into the main cell block. It looked like an old prison, with four floors of cells facing a central, open area. The roof had a row of large skylights down the middle. Not as organized or tidy as the people in the museum, the prisoners had nonetheless taken similar precautions against an undead break-in: they had demolished the concrete stairs where they led up from the ground floor to the second tier, so the zombies couldn't get up. It looked crude, as though they had smashed the concrete with a sledgehammer, then cut through the rebar somehow and curled it back like some weird, big plant or hairdo.

  The catcalls here increased, though it was obvious as I looked up at the leering faces that there weren't that many men living here, probably only a few dozen, in a place designed to hold hundreds. We climbed a rope ladder to the second tier, then walked from there up to the fourth and topmost one.

  We were led to a cell. The one wall had been knocked out to connect it to the adjacent chamber, and part of the roof and outside wall had been smashed out as well, all with the same careless demolition as the stairs and the pipe and the basketball courts, leaving dusty, crumbling holes with rusting rebar curling back like the eyelashes of giant Cyclopes. The hole let a breeze through in the heat of summer, and the room was much cooler and more comfortable than those on the lower tiers.

  All over the room sat large, one-gallon cans labeled "PEACHES" and "PEARS," and the room reeked of rotted fruit and yeasty fermentation, like a brewery or an ethanol plant. The walls were covered with pretty typical pornographic pictures, though there was a definite preference for blondes. A few firearms leaned on the walls and sat on the floor. To these, the black man who had captured us now added our guns. The entire floor was covered with deer skins. These guys must've lived on nothing but venison. For some reason, I suspected that it was barely cooked, too.

  In the midst of all these bizarre and hyper-masculine furnishings sat what I took to be Copperhead, a large, bald white man c
overed with tattoos, all of which were some combination of the Confederate flag, naked women, snakes, and flames. I remembered that Queequeg's tattoos were supposed to reveal the secret meaning of the universe. I felt sure that this guy's revealed the rather straightforward meaning of his own base urges and desires. And I was very sure that it would've been much better for everyone—himself included—if he had kept them secret.

  He saw me looking at the fruit cans and grinned. "Good old-fashioned pruno!" he crowed. "Best we can do—so far! I like to keep it close, or the boys'll be stealing me blind. Still is a might hard to take, but we're working on the recipe. Got some boys out back, working on a still—that ought to smooth it out real good, 'cause it's all the rot from the fruit that makes it nasty. And when that corn comes in—could be some corn whiskey, I'm hoping! That, plus the big tractor-trailer full of cigarettes we found turned over on the interstate—we'll be set!"

  Great. Our final days of being sodomized and beaten to death were going to be overseen by Boss Hogg's insane, inbred nephew. I'd been hoping for someone a little more Mephistophelean, but if the zombies had taught us one thing, it was that you don't get to pick your apocalypses or your devils—they pick you.

  "Couldn't you go out and find some regular booze?" I asked, without even thinking of the danger of seeming disrespectful and incurring some physical punishment for it.

  Copperhead apparently didn't think the question was impertinent, but just that it was kind of silly. "No, 'cause then we'd need cars and shit."

  "You could get them from the interstate. You said you were by the interstate."

  "Yeah, but then we'd have to have somebody guard the gate when they go out, and open it up when they come back, and fight all those dead assholes, and find gas! It's the same reason we only have a couple guns here, the ones we took from the guards—you can't just go out and get more!"

  He announced it in triumph, as though he'd found some fatal flaw in a plan that required only the barest of forethought and effort to make it work. He—and, I take it, the others, since they went along with it—would rather drink something that smelled like a dumpster than make the effort to get something else. It would be hilarious if I didn't know this guy and his colleagues planned to rape and kill all of us. I let the matter drop. No sense hastening the process.

  The tall black man who'd captured us explained how they had found us. Copperhead got up to inspect us, nodding approvingly. "Now that's nice, that's real nice, having company. We done just about used up all the old guards, hadn't we? Now we got us a whole fresh batch for the Pit! Oh, that's where you'll be staying when you're with us—it's what we call the first floor of our little home."

  His attention and nodding lingered especially over Tanya. "Now, isn't this a fine-looking gal we got here?" He put his hand on her hip and slipped it around to caress her buttocks. "Yeah, I might have to breed you, you look so fine, and not get out the old coat hanger like we did when we knocked up those guard bitches."

  "Killed three of them that way," the tall black man muttered.

  "Yeah," Copperhead said ruefully. "We should've been more careful, but we didn't want any brats running around here, messing things up." He went back to fondling Tanya, this time moving up to her breasts. "You know, my daddy wouldn't have approved, you being a nigger and all." He leaned close to lick her ear, whispering now. "That's not why I killed him with that hammer, of course. But still, I never believed all that racist bullshit, did you?"

  Tanya knew enough not to say anything belligerent, if for no other reason than that she didn't want Popcorn to see her raped and killed. But she also couldn't bring herself to say anything that was appropriately friendly.

  Copperhead slowly slid down her body, blowing kisses at her breasts and crotch as his flunkies cheered him on. Slowly, he brought his right hand across to his left hip, then he uncoiled and viciously backhanded her across the face. Popcorn, Frank, and I couldn't help but take a step forward, but there were hands all over us, and knives stuck in our faces almost before we'd moved. Copperhead showed he wasn't at all lazy when it came to meting out pain and degradation.

  As Tanya staggered back from the blow, he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her into the wall with his right hand, as his left hand grabbed her crotch. "You're gonna learn to be a nice nigger, little missy," he hissed, "for me and any other ugly-ass hump that has a pack of cigarettes to pay the Pit crew. The only choice you got is whether you learn easy, or hard."

  He turned to his helpers. "You tell them to keep the boys away from this one for a while. I'll catch up with her later on. I don't think she's had a real man for a while." He sneered at me and Frank.

  Copperhead let Tanya down and returned to his jovial, good ole boy routine. "But not tonight," he said expansively. "I say that tonight's the Fourth of July! Must be some time about now! Y'all have a calendar where you come from?" he asked, turning to me.

  I shook my head and shrugged. No sense ruining a twenty-four hour reprieve.

  "Yep—that settles it! It's tonight! And it'd be disrespectful to the good ole U. S. of A. to be carrying on like cats in heat when we should be showing our gratitude to this great country, what built us this fine, zombie-proof castle to live in and drink our fine hooch, and smoke all that fine tobacco, and thank God for our freedom!" A little cheer went up from his flunkies.

  He turned to Popcorn. "Except we really can't have no cavorting tonight. I'm sorry, son," he said with an icy, horrifying mock sadness and crocodile tears, shaking his head slowly. "No, we've never had a young 'un in here. And, you know, some of the boys here—well, we don't know exactly why," his eyes went heavenward and he really did seem to get dreamy and thoughtful, though I'd already seen that he was equal parts sadism and playacting, "but the good Lord gave them this powerful hunger for a special, little friend. And some of them been living with that hunger for years and years in here, with no way to satisfy it."

  He patted Popcorn on the cheek, and I could see the fear and anger in his eyes that he'd never shown, even when he was surrounded by ghouls who would kill and eat him alive.

  "And, son," Copperhead said, "you can help them with that—isn't that nice? Well, you can help the ones of them that would pay dearly for it." He turned back to his followers and went back to the jovial routine. "Because let's not forget, boys, the business of America—is business!" Another little cheer went up, this time with a chuckle.

  We were led away to our cells in the Pit, to await the festivities and horrors that their Fourth of July celebration would bring us. I had met the self-styled ruler of this hell, and he was a gruesome, swollen, little clown who thought he could dictate orders to time itself. God knows how much damage he could do if he weren't so damned lazy and stupid. But the damage he could do to the four of us would be more than satisfying enough to his stunted, twisted mind, and more than our exhausted, ill-fed bodies could endure.

  Like Sarah in her dentist's office, I found myself only hoping it would be quick, but doubting this time that it would be. The dead were capable of such a meager mercy, but I was sure that such living monsters were not.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They stuck Tanya, Frank, and me in three adjacent cells, near the end of the block farthest from the entrance. Across from us were Popcorn and the last two guards they hadn't worked or raped to death. They were a man and a woman, and from what I could see, they both looked pretty listless. They probably welcomed our arrival, as we would now absorb some of the physical abuse, but they looked too worn out to register anything.

  The doors to the cells couldn't be closed, I assume because the power was off. Actually, I don't know if they really were stuck open, or if the inmates were just too lazy to bother closing them manually. Regardless, it meant there was a rather sizeable number of men—what Copperhead had somewhat predictably referred to as the "Pit crew"—to guard us constantly. They were armed with pieces of rebar, knives, and clubs, but I saw that no bows were allowed below the second tier, and no one had firearms out
side of Copperhead's cell. I assumed they were imitating the rules that had been in force when the place was a regular prison—guards were not allowed guns when among the prisoners, lest one of the prisoners get a hold of a gun.

  I also suspected that the Pit crew were of low social standing, for they seemed slightly more depraved even than the rest of the inmates—scrawny, cowering little creatures, more interested in the financial gain that could be gotten from physical cruelty, rather than the actual inflicting of it. Pimps and panderers, in the old-fashioned meanings of those words. They were probably next in line for rape and abuse, should the bottommost rung of their society ever run out.

  Still, there were probably more than enough of them to beat us to death, should we ever try to fight back.

  I sat in my cell with such thoughts, sullen and glowering. I thought of improvising a weapon, but didn't have the right kind of imagination for such handiwork. They had left us with nothing but our clothes, and the cell was utterly bare, beyond a filthy mattress and a non-functioning metal toilet and sink built into the wall. I also had no idea how to come up with any kind of plan for escape.

  I thought that it might be possible that Jack might have made it back to the museum. But even if he had, it would take him some time to drive a stick shift back with his left leg hurt. And I also couldn't estimate how long it would take him to coordinate an attack on the prison, or how they would even be able to go about it. The people at the museum were set up for defense, not for mounting massive assaults on fixed positions. And they were used to fighting zombies, not this band of crazed sadists, armed with bows and guns.

  And how much would Jack risk to save the four of us, who, for all he knew, were already dead? I knew him well, and we were good friends, I thought, but I also knew how logical he was, and how much he valued the community over any individual.

  After a few hours, the odor of roasting flesh filled the prison. I have to admit, it was the one aspect of the prisoners' communal life that I found far preferable to that of our people.