“Oh. I see. You've been outside for a long time.”
Daniel seemed to think on it for a few moments.
Then he lunged.
Chapter 2. Denial Ain't Just in Egypt
Daniel came at him with the grace of a trash truck. His broadcast of intentions was accompanied by a shrill “kill me!” Liam saw the suicidal look in the broken man's eyes and had a full two seconds to think about the order but hadn't reached a conclusion as the man slammed into him. They fell out into the hallway and tumbled to the hardwood.
Liam's back slammed the floor and the musty carpet released decade's old dust. In one of those odd moments of clarity he noticed the smell reminded him of Grandma Marty's house. He longed for the basement where he spent part of his summer with her, even though it had the same musty stench. At least the only zombies he knew back then were in his books and video games.
The impact left him breathless, but otherwise unharmed. Except-
Something warm and wet burned his stomach and chest. A sharp pain began to grow ...
I've been cut.
He let out a breath and tried to still his racing heart.
Figures. I cut myself with the knife.
Liam wondered if the pain of a knife wound in the belly would keep growing but after several seconds of waiting he decided it wasn't that bad. That made him second guess the whole thing.
Daniel had ended up on top of him, looking down. The whites of his brown eyes were red and glazy. Whereas he was previously sad and a little crazy, he now appeared calm and happy. A half-smile radiated from above.
“Thank you, my son.”
“For what?” Liam wheezed under the man's weight.
Still not positive he hadn't been stabbed, he pushed Daniel, so he dropped to the floor next to him. The pain receded from his abdomen-it was the hilt of the knife, not the blade. It had been pointed up when they impacted, though he had no recollection of holding it in any particular direction. It could have just as easily been pointing down.
The blood from Daniel's wound had spilled out profusely, ruining his already-distressed black honey badger T-shirt. There was a time he would have puked at the sight of so much blood on him, but this only caused him to thank his luck it wasn't his. The reverend was on his side, looking at him with dying eyes.
“Thank you for kicking me out of Purgatory. I deserve ... worse for what I've done here.” He continued with a weak sob. “I'm so sorry,” he let out a wet cough, “for what god made me. I'm so-”
His eyes stared forward.
Liam was still pissed. “What god made you? Screw you, dude. Those were your choices.” He pushed off the dead man and got to a crouch. “I hope you can still hear me in there, sicko.”
Daniel must have done terrible things if he wanted to die, but part of him wished he could have kept the man alive because his death was pretty fast. If Liam found out he'd hurt any kids he would have done more to make him pay for his crimes before letting him off the hook, but he was sort of relieved, the more he thought about it, to be free of such an evil person.
“Good riddance,” he said to the body.
At that moment, the main thing of consequence from his encounter with Daniel stuck out of the man's stomach.
When he pulled at the knife, more blood squirted over his arm like it sought one last chance to survive.
“Yuck.”
He stood up straight and was horrified to see thick blood streaking down his pants. The coppery smell was something that seemed to follow him everywhere.
“I'm in a horror movie,” he said, as much to bolster his spirits as to state the truth.
He was ready to put it behind him when he noticed a small black book sticking out of the man's front pants pocket. Liam instantly knew what it was because he'd been looking for one for a long time. He bent over to pick it up.
“New Testament.”
Well, that just figures.
He held it there and studied it like it was alive. The bible belonged to a man who invoked god's name to do unspeakable things. Did he learn those lessons inside the pages of the sacred book? Was it really the same book Grandma used when she sought comfort from the disasters of her life, like the death of her daughter? Could he even take a book that was in the possession of such an evil guy?
Liam couldn't make up his mind. If he gave it to Victoria, would he have to tell her where it was from? More importantly, could he or should he hide that from her? Wouldn't that be wrong? He would always know.
He went back and forth for longer than he felt comfortable standing in that hallway. In the end, he took the little bible because he was sure he could get rid of it if he had second thoughts.
There was nothing else he wanted to find on the dead man, so he got moving.
His foot slipped in the pooling blood before he'd gotten two steps away. Though he didn't fall, he spun around and walked backward, suddenly aware Daniel might rise up as a zombie. Some books he'd read suggested every dead person had to be skewered in the head to prevent their eventual rise as a zombie. That was an unsettling thought.
He stepped backward several more times, watching for movement ...
“You sent a boy, Margaret!” a man screamed from inside the next room down the hall. “I wanted Elise.”
Liam tried to keep an eye on Daniel as he looked inside the room, but once he saw the people in there he felt way less threatened by the dead man.
Like the other two rooms, this one had a single dirty mattress on the floor toward the left side. However, this place wasn't ransacked and destroyed to the same degree as the others. A few pictures hung on the walls, there was a tiny nightstand still next to the mattress, and a plastic chair sat by itself in front of the rear window.
A portly man in sweatpants reclined on the mattress with his patio-umbrella-sized shirt unbuttoned so his stomach could bulge out. Tons of empty blue beer cans littered the bed and the area around it. Liam felt repulsed in a primordial way-as if he wasn't just ugly but his soul was rotten as well. After meeting the damaged Daniel, he expected this guy to be totally broken.
Since the farmhouse was quite large, all the rooms were much bigger than what he was used to in his modest suburban “ranch” home. He guessed each bedroom was about twice as large as his own living quarters and it was at least twenty feet from the door to the back window. The mattress had been tossed on one side of the spacious room, but the man looked at something Liam couldn't see because the other wall was blocked by the half-open door.
“Margaret!” the big man shouted with clear anger. “Get your ass up here or it'll be your turn.”
When there was no reply, the man turned to Liam with obvious distaste. “Did she send you as a joke? What's with all the blood? Did the priest order up some more fun?”
Liam fumed but he didn't know how to respond. There was no hiding the fact he was covered with blood from his stomach to his shoes and held a knife covered in the stuff. The continued droning noise from outside the house couldn't be overlooked, either. And yet the man remained calm.
“I-I, uh, was sent up here to tell you she was working on getting what you need.”
“She's dressing up my doll?” he said with a disgusting smack of his lips.
“Sure,” Liam replied.
“I see. Was that the noise out in the hall? Was there a problem in the other rooms? Did one of the others take my special girl?”
It disgusted him to play along, and as much as he wanted to shut the door and go save Victoria, he still didn't have a proper weapon, nor did he fully understand what was going on in the farmhouse. Every detail would help him plan his rescue.
“Margaret said you'd be pissed with her, but she got messed up with some intruders. Said to help keep you company until she sorted things down there. And no, I checked on the others. They're fine.” The lies came easily in front of the sleezy man.
“And the blood?” He nodded to Liam's pants because they were saturated with sticky blood.
“I'm n
ot supposed to tell you ... ”
“Out with it, boy, or you'll be sorry.” As emphasis he reached behind his mattress and wielded a tiny revolver. He made a show of breaking open the chamber and spinning it. Then he slapped it shut again and pointed it at the far wall out of Liam's line of sight.
“A zombie. One of the other, uh, visitors, must have been bitten. Margaret sent me up to take care of it.”
“A cleaner, huh?” He put the pistol back where he'd got it. “I can appreciate that.”
“Really”? he said with as much innocence as possible.
“Yeah. You and me are the same, boy. We clean up the messes.”
Liam faked a smile and somehow found himself even more disgusted with the man.
2
The man motioned him inside. “Come on in, cleaner.”
Liam stuck the knife in his front pocket-blade down-because he didn't want to seem like a threat. He'd heard the phrase about how stupid it was to bring a knife to a gunfight but there was no way out.
“Okay,” Liam replied while trying to stifle his cringe response.
He went in because he had no alternatives. The two hostile women downstairs would not be happy to see him, he was sure of that. This big man had some kind of relationship with at least one of the women, so none of them were his friend. He also went in to get out of the line of sight of Daniel's body. If he reanimated, it would be better for Liam if he wasn't the first morsel of food in the new zombie's vision.
He took three steps in the room and stopped cold. He glanced behind the door, then he looked at the man, and once again to the wall. He felt the disgusting man's eyes sizing him up. Trying to see how Liam would react to what could very well be described as a science project.
In that instant his eyes seemed to say. “I'm watching you, boy. One wrong move and you're dead.”
Despite knowing the risk, Liam froze and absorbed the scene. There was a foreign-looking but very pretty middle-aged woman, a similar-looking teenaged girl with thick glasses, and a plump little girl with brown hair draped over her eyes, like she was hiding. They were bare-footed and wore dirty white gowns that had the feminine sensibilities of garbage bags. The three of them were bound upright against the dingy wall by a thick rope net-like something used to catch fish on the high seas.
His gut reaction was the woman on the right was the mother of the two girls on the left, so he focused on her. She had long wavy brown hair and olive skin. He imagined she was Greek or Italian. She was top-heavy and very curvy, despite the effects of the bag she wore for clothing. Even in the brief second he observed her, the woman's fierce brown eyes warned him not to look at her daughters.
“I, uh, ... ” He didn't know what to say. He had to figure out what the hell was going on.
It appeared as if someone had sacked a jewelry store and dumped the contents of entire cases on top of them. The mother wore several tiaras, a few dozen necklaces, innumerable bracelets, and her ears were pierced all over with earrings. They'd been on this wall for some time, because the blood had dried around those piercings.
The floor under them was littered with rings and gems as if they'd been placed on the mom and her daughters, but then fell off over time.
An empty space signified someone was missing from the net. Between the woman and the younger girls there was an opening where the net hung freely.
The two young girls had the same hair color and olive skin, looking very much like their mother. They were also saddled with gold jewelry like their mom, but their ears hadn't been ravaged as seriously.
The dresses ruined it all, because someone had painted the word, “SLAVE,” on all three of them.
What reaction does this deserve?
He forced himself to say nothing. Turning back to the man, he did his best to steady his voice-and soul. “Can I get anything for you while you wait?”
“You bastard! Help us!” cried the mother.
“Don't mind them. They are my worst enemies. They're gonna get what they deserve.”
He thought of the person missing from the net, hoping he could sound intelligent. “Did we get rid of the husband?” His thumb hooked back toward the wall behind him.
The big man looked around him with a smile. “No, that was her oldest daughter. She had three daughters. Can you believe it? Eventually, I'm going to kill each one while she watches.”
Liam shivered, which the man noticed.
“You have a problem with that?” he said in a dark voice.
“No, I, uh, just remembered all the zombies outside coming this way. Hard to put that out of the mind, you know?”
Thinking of them did cause him to shake again.
“Please help me. Kill me, but not my daughters. Pleeeassse.” The woman's plea was like fingernails on the chalkboard. Every ounce of his being wanted to knife the man and free the family, but he had to know what was going on, first. He couldn't risk that gun.
Keeping his back to the girls, he tried to engage the man in conversation.
“I'm Sam by the way. Sam from St. Louis.”
“St. Louis Sam? I'm Sikeston Wilder,” he laughed.
“Margaret wouldn't want me getting involved, but you know kids and all. I can't help asking about your visitors.” Liam asked his question with a double heaping of indifference.
“They are my worst enemies.”
He almost laughed because he had plenty of enemies and none of them were little girls. Elsa. Duchesne. Hayes-sort of. The government traitors his mom and her patriots were fighting. The mindless zombies. Those frames of reference were high on his mind as he tried to reply. The woman didn't look like an Elsa-fit and predatory-though the flowing pillow case made it hard to determine if she was a physical threat.
Unable to guess intelligently, he said the first thing that came to his mind. “Did she steal your mail?”
Grandma Marty sometimes asked if Liam saw someone steal her mail. She spent a lot of time penning letters to members of her family because she refused to use email. Looking back, Liam understood why relatives didn't always write back in a timely fashion, but grandma was convinced the letters were poached by thieves.
“Steal my mail? Are you insane, boy? No. Of course not. This woman has been a thorn in my side for ages. She ruined me. Now it's her turn to pay.”
“You deserved it!”
“Shush woman. Don't make me tell you again.”
Liam refused his urge to turn around and look at her with sympathetic eyes.
The woman shook in her net. Her jewelry jangled and a few pieces fell to the floor. He imagined her defiantly resisting his command by making noise in other ways, though none of it made any sense. Even the reverend was easier to understand.
Wilder sighed. “Well, this all has been a letdown. If I have to wait for Margaret to get Sabella's daughter ready, I might as well rub her nose in it,” he chuckled with an ugly gurgle in his throat.
The man glared at the woman in the net. “Yes. We've known each other for a long time.”
3
“I run a medical clinic out of this house.” He pointed at the floor. “And I did my damnedest to keep people alive as the plague swept through the area.”
The woman on the wall laughed but didn't otherwise respond.
“Sabella and her ilk made my job twice as difficult, even when the undead crawled down the roadside where they protested. The biblical Apocalypse itself didn't get them to quit. In fact, it encouraged 'em, I think.”
The giant of a man pushed himself from the soiled mattress, so he could stand. It took him a good long time to right himself, giving Liam plenty of time to study the layout. Gun. Bed. Nutjob. Girls. He also had time to look out the window on the back of the house to the continuing dust devils swirling out there, though he remained guarded in his glances at the woman and her kids.
With heavy panting the sweaty man stood and moved toward the woman, so he could be close to the netted wall. He seemed to gain satisfaction from smiling at the girls.
Sabella shook her chains, but Liam didn't look at her.
“Okay, maybe they got that one right, but not for the reason they think. I had to shut down the main clinic because we ran out of everything. We also got robbed early on. Probably it was her and her friends,” he said as if he were plumbing for answers. “But the joke was on them.”
Wilder walked on bare feet and yelped when he stepped on one of the pieces of jewelry, but he kicked his foot so whatever it was went flying. He got right next to Sabella. Now Liam had no choice but to look at her. He was surprised at her defiance, even in the face of such an imposing and disgusting man.
“I wanted them to think we were out of business,” he said with a deep laugh. “I had backup supplies in my back garage.” He pointed out the window. “And they kept on coming to me. Wanted me to take care of their 'issues,' same as every other damned day. And things were peachy until you-know-who comes back and holds signs at the end of my driveway again. Do you think that's right, Sam?”
Liam played along, shaking his head.
“Of course not. You don't bother a man at his home.” He got super close to Sabella and spoke softly. “The whole world has gone to hell. Why did you come back and bother me? You should have left well enough alone and we could all be dying in our own happy ways, don't ya think?”
Sabella didn't speak, but she shook her head forcefully and angrily left and right.
Wilder's face reddened, and he took a swing at her. Liam flinched, but held still. The attack was clumsy due to his size and health, but his hand was so large he couldn't help but hit his target. Only after her head was turned forcefully to one side did Liam notice she'd already been deeply bruised on the face. Her skin color helped hide it.
The woman spit blood on the floor and seemed ready for the next one.
“She thinks if she stops me, God will shine down on her, or something. Whatever these people believe I don't really care. I know what I do is right, and that's that.”
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 179