Jacques felt his throat constrict. He flapped his hands.
“I have come to see Paulette,” he choked the words out stiffly.
The blonde arched an eyebrow. It could have been a gesture of amusement, or perhaps a challenge. She pursed her lips and ran her eyes down Jacques body, letting her gaze linger when it reached the man’s crotch. Jacques felt somehow violated by the brazen hunger in the woman’s eyes, unaware that it was the skillfully rehearsed theatrics of her trade.
“That is a pity,” the blonde fluttered her eyes and pouted like a spoilt child. “I could have been very, very good to you…”
Jacques shook his head with a jerk, and then turned, startled, as the door behind him was thrown open and a young man in a gendarme’s uniform came into the waiting room, fumbling clumsily with his buttons. His face was flushed, his eyes glazed, and he grinned idiotically.
He muttered something unintelligible, then put his head down and made for the apartment door. A wash of stale cheap perfume and the aroma of sweat drifted into the room.
Paulette came from the bed with a cigarette clamped between her lips. She wore a black bra and panties.
“Hello, Paulette,” Jacques called, his voice low and quivering.
Paulette stood at the foot of the bed. Her lipstick had been smeared and her hair tousled. A fine sheen of perspiration made her body glisten in the candlelight. She regarded Jacques with slanted eyes and gave him a petulant, dismissive huff of derision.
“What do you want, Jacques?” Paulette drew deeply on the cigarette and blew a thin feather of smoke at the ceiling.
“I wanted to see you,” Jacques muttered. He felt acutely awkward and uncomfortable. He dabbed at the nervous sweat across his brow with the back of his hand.
Paulette grimaced a cold little smile and dismissed the blonde with a flick of her eyes. The woman in the far bedroom doorway disappeared without another word.
“I know what you want, Jacques,” Paulette thrust the glowing tip of the cigarette at him in accusation when they were alone.
Jacques’ eyes were as black as coal, beady in their dark sunken sockets. He licked his lips guiltily – an involuntary reflex beyond his ability to control. Paulette straightened her stance and pushed her shoulders back so that her breasts were firm against the flimsy lace of her bra.
“I… I have money,” Jacques thrust his hand into his pocket and brought out a fistful of crumpled banknotes. “Lots of money, Paulette. It’s yours. You can have it all in exchange for one more night together…”
Paulette threw back her head and laughed. The sound was scornful and cruel. “Money?” she shrugged her shoulders dramatically. “What use is your money, Jacques? It is the end of the world! Money is worth nothing to me. I cannot buy the things I need. I cannot buy food or clothes. Keep your money!”
“But Paulette!” Jacques felt a flush of sudden panic, like a drug addict denied. “Just one more night…”
“Non,” she shook her head, and the long tresses of her hair swished across her shoulders. “I am giving myself only to the brave soldiers who fight to defend us,” her darting tongue flicked pink between her teeth. She stubbed the cigarette out into a brimming full ashtray and turned back to the bed to gather her discarded clothes, bending at the waist provocatively. Jacques felt his breath catch and a lump of lustful desire choked his throat. He averted his eyes guiltily.
“Paulette!” he wheezed.
She glanced over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed into sly little slits, and pouted. “I said non, Jacques. I am only for the soldiers now. The brave boys deserve some pleasure in exchange for risking their lives.”
“But I am a soldier too!” Jacques’ voice rose to a squeak.
Paulette looked bemused. She laughed in a scornful, mocking tinkle. “You?”
“Oui,” Jacques nodded his head earnestly. He came into the bedroom and reached for Paulette. She danced away, taunting and denying him. He went on, his voice wheedling. “I guard one of the small gates on the western wall. I am responsible for the security… and I have a gun.”
Paulette stopped and scrutinized Jacques’ face for long seconds. All men were liars, she knew, and they would say anything to a woman for sex. But there was something raw and desperate and utterly earnest in Jacques’ expression that made her pause.
“Is this really true, Jacques?” she asked in a soft little breath.
“Oui,” he nodded his head, sensing the change in Paulette’s tone. “Look. I have the key on me,” he produced an old brass key from his pocket as evidence. “And the gun is at my apartment.”
“Which gate?”
“Poterne Raspail,” Jacques named one of the narrow wicket gates built into the western wall. It was an arched stone gateway near one of the bridges over the Rhône, secured by a heavy wooden door. A path connected the gate to a pedestrian crossing. Paulette knew the gate well. In the summer months she often sat on a wooden bench near the Poterne Raspail gate to meet clients. “I am on duty from eleven o’clock tonight until sunrise.”
Paulette glanced at the small clock on her bedside table and made a quick calculation. A perverse devil’s chill of mischief ran up her spine. She had not seen the infected; but the young gendarmes she comforted in her bed had told her gruesome, chilling stories of what they had witnessed from the walls. Paulette had become wickedly aroused by depraved, sadistic fantasies. Now she licked her lips with sudden elation. Her eyes slanted lasciviously and felt her own body overwhelmed by raw sexual arousal. Her fear mingled with her lust, and the brew of those emotions made her reckless.
“Very well,” she could feel her heart trip and race, but her tone stayed contemptuous. “Then I will meet you at Poterne Raspail later tonight, Jacques.”
Lejeune looked uncertain. “At the gate? But I want you, Paulette.” He reached for her again but she stepped teasingly away from his groping hand.
“Not yet.”
“But Paulette. I ache for you…”
“And you can have me, darling,” she promised. She came into his arms at last and lifted her face to his. Jacques felt himself swell hard. Paulette melted in his embrace and he inhaled the musky sensual scent of her, his fingers hungry on her smooth, soft body. “You can have me until you’re exhausted, Jacques… but first I want you to prove your bravery to me. I want to watch you shoot one of the infected.”
* * *
The undead broke through the fourth-floor fire door in the early hours of the morning. The hotel was blanketed in pitch darkness, but Camille had found a box of scented candles in a tourist’s luggage. The survivors sat in the fifth-floor corridor clinging to their small flickering lights, and listened to the infected ghouls in the stairwell below. The undead were trying to clamber up the internal staircase, past the ragged jumble of furniture that had been thrown in their way. Camille heard high blood-lusting howls amidst the nightmare sounds of furniture breaking. It was like listening, shivering in fear from an upstairs room, while burglars ransacked a home.
“They will be here soon,” Camille said softly. She felt exhausted. Her hands trembled with fatigue and her face had been drained of all color by relentless hours of fear. Hopelessness had crushed the last of her resolve. Help was not coming – she realized that now. They had been abandoned by the soldiers in the city and left for dead.
It was just a matter of time.
She looked slowly at nearby faces. There was no more weeping. Everyone sat grim and fatalistic, hunched in forlorn little groups. No one spoke; they stared vacantly at the walls or at some point in space, lost in their own misery and despair while they waited for the gruesome inevitability of death.
“They will be here soon,” Camille said again. No one even looked in her direction.
Camille flicked a glance at the heavy steel fire-doors the undead would soon burst through. She could see the faintest flicker of light from the gap between the carpet, and she wondered idly whether perhaps the hotel was on fire. Either way, death was inevitable, but
she spent a few lethargic moments considering whether it would be better to burn to death.
She got wearily to her feet and clutched at a wall to stop her from swaying.
“We’re moving up to the sixth floor,” her throat rasped raw when she tried to raise her voice.
In ones and twos, the quiescent elderly tourists staggered to their feet with bovine obedience, groaning and weak with vertigo. The oppressive dark was disorientating. One woman dropped her candle and cursed under her breath.
Some of the elderly had fallen asleep and had to be roused. Camille shook one man’s shoulder, feeling the frail brittle bones beneath the fabric of his shirt. He was lying on his back, snoring softly with his mouth open and his hands twitching at his side. He came alert slowly, his eyes vague and unfocussed, and a tear squeezed from his eye and rolled down the withered parchment-like flesh of his cheek.
“Leave me,” he said in a hoarse rasp. “I can’t…”
Camille shook her head stubbornly and sniffed back the tears of her own misery. She wanted to lie down and die too. The weight of her despair felt like a heavy burden strapped to her back. It made her knees sag. She clung to the old man’s hand and wouldn’t let him go.
“Come on, Mr. Davis,” she whispered. “I need you to be brave,” she provoked him by appealing to his pride. “A lot of the ladies are very scared and they look up to you. If you give up, everyone else will too.”
Their eyes met for a moment and silent understanding passed between them. Mr. Davis struggled to his feet and straightened his back. He was an Englishman who had been visiting family in Europe when the spreading undead infection had trapped him in France. He gave Camille a ghost of a smile and then lifted his voice above the desolate murmurs of the others.
“Follow me, ladies,” the old man filled his voice with perky optimism and suddenly became as spritely as a London bus conductor. “Everyone to the stairwell, if you please.”
Camille watched the elderly survivors limp and struggle towards the stairs, then, when she was alone, let her tears come. They welled along the rims of her eyes and spilled over her lashes like glistening drops of morning dew. Her lips trembled, and she had to bite down hard to stop herself from being overcome. She sniffed, drew a deep shuddering breath, wiped her face with the back of her trembling hand, and pressed her ear to the fire door.
She could hear the horrible, hideous sounds of the undead just a few feet away from where she stood. They were mindless with the insanity of their infection. Camille heard throaty growls and sounds like demented giggling as they smashed and crashed their way higher up the stairs.
Camille turned and ran for the doors that lead to the top floor of the hotel.
* * *
Chuck Gudinski’s world had telescoped down to the few feet of ground that lay directly before him. He lost all sense of time, suspended in a place of fear and pain. Every inch he crawled closer to the walls of Avignon cost him strength and blood and sanity.
The agony of his wound turned each movement into white-hot torture and he began to fret about blood loss. Twice in the open ground near the river he rolled onto his side and looked back between his legs. He could see a dark trail on the grass.
He crawled on, pausing every minute to put his head down and rest. His fingernails had been ripped from his fingers so his hands were a mess of raw bloody flesh, and his chest, through the tattered rags that remained of his shirt, was bruised and grazed by the coarse ground he crawled over.
But it was his mind that worried Chuck the most. He could feel the threads of his sanity beginning to unravel, like a loose strand of yarn in a sweater being relentlessly pulled by the unimaginable fear of crawling through the undead horde.
The first ten yards had been easy, but as he crept closer to the shoulder of the four-lane road, the undead became more numerous. They staggered and skulked from one abandoned car to the other, tearing loose seats and smashing windows in their crazed lust for fresh blood. They crept in the night like stalking panthers and ran in maddened frenzied circles; they were unhinged with insanity and unpredictable. A dozen ghouls ran straight past Chuck as he lay, holding his breath and trembling. He felt spatters of blood and mud from the passing undead fall upon his head like rain. They were howling and snapping. One of them leaped onto the hood of a wrecked car. It had been a woman before infection. It was dressed in the tattered remains of a skirt and blouse. Its legs and arms were streaked with mud and the wiry tangle of hair on its head was falling out in clumps. The ghoul seemed to taste the air with its tongue, eyes rolling dementedly in the sunken sockets of its skull. Then it lifted its face to the dark sky and bayed like a dog. The ghoul had bite marks along the dead grey flesh of one arm, and around the injury were blisters of puss-weeping sores. Chuck pressed his head down into the gravel and lay still as a corpse.
The ghoul slithered off the hood of the car and dropped to its haunches, scratching feverishly at the ground just a few feet from where Chuck lay. All Chuck’s senses were sharpened to compensate for his lack of sight in the darkness. He heard the sawing hiss of the ghoul’s foul fetid breath and inhaled the oily sickening stench of its corruption. He felt the jagged little stones of the gravel stabbing into his flesh as he lay perfectly still while quailing fear squeezed his chest.
The ghoul suddenly threw itself down on the roadside and reached under the chassis of a car. It cried out an intelligible shriek of triumph and in its gnarled disfigured hand squirmed the black shape of a river-rat. The ghoul bit the vermin’s head off and went scurrying away into the night, retching and screeching its triumph.
Chuck let out a slow careful breath. Then the shock hit him and he began to tremble like the victim of a car crash in the aftermath of an accident. His bloody mangled hands shook and the nerves along his legs jangled in uncontrollable spasms.
He gaped with incredulity. How had the ghoul not sensed him?
Carefully, an aching inch at a time, he rolled onto his side and stared back towards the dark clump of reeds by the riverbank. He frowned. Had the thick swampy mud he had lain in somehow concealed his scent?
He rolled back onto his stomach and braced himself for the next arduous challenge. Ahead of him were four wide lanes of blacktop, littered with wrecked cars, dead bodies, marauding ghouls…. and rats. He flexed the bloody stumps of his fingers and winced. He weighed up the hours of agony and fear that stretched before him against the blinding few seconds of gruesome torture that would accompany his detection and death. He could end it all right now, he knew, with a single scream. The infected would run him down and eat him alive before he could flee ten yards.
He drew a last shuddering breath to fill his lungs… and then crawled the next few inches forward onto the verge of the darkened road.
He wouldn’t give up. He wouldn’t surrender to death. He thought about Sherry and her memory galvanized him.
He lifted his head off the tarmac to get his bearings. Between the tangle of wrecked vehicles and the milling undead that surrounded the city, glowing flames and torchlight illuminated the façade of the Avignon wall. Directly ahead, and now less than fifty yards away, was the small arched gateway he had first noticed from the reed bank.
He could make it.
* * *
The wooden door was ancient, weather-worn, and unguarded. Kane put his shoulder to the timber and the door blew inwards on its hinges. He stood in the entrance for a long moment, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness of the palace. He had a cigarette lighter in his hand. The glow from the tiny flame showed him a stone passage leading to a glass door. He kept his voice low and urgent.
“Follow me. Make not a sound.”
There were twenty-two followers gathered around him in the shadows of the Palace of the Popes. They shuffled under the archway of the vast building and inhaled the cool dank air. Two of the men carried boxes in their arms. They followed the small glow of light, bumping into each other in the narrow passage. Kane paused.
The glass door befo
re him was new and wired with an alarm. Kane took a hammer from one of the boxes and smashed in the glass. The alarm tripped but it had been wired to the electrical power. Apart from the jarring sound of shattering glass, the night stayed eerily silent.
Kane grunted with smug satisfaction.
They were out of view from the rest of the city. Kane took a flashlight from the box and swung its beam over the door. In the reflected light that bounced off the close stone walls, the faces of the people who followed the preacher were drawn and tight with tension.
“Do you remember the way?” Kane whispered. He saw grey faces nodding.
“Good. Then light your candles and gather in the great chapel of Clement VI. Mary and I will join you soon. Have everything ready,” he hissed.
He reached his hand through the broken pane and unfastened the lock. This room – once part of the original palace – had been converted into the reception area for tourists who travelled from all parts of the world to marvel at the medieval home of Christianity. The Palace of the Popes was the town’s most famous landmark, and on a nearby countertop were maps, brochures and a cash register.
The followers lit their candles and went like a solemn procession of feudal priests down the long labyrinth of dark passageways, light leaping along the walls and the sound of their footsteps scuffling on the smooth stone floor. Kane held Mary back until they were alone. He lit a candle, then took her by the hand. Tucked under his arm was one of the two boxes.
“Follow me,” he led her through a different door and up a tight spiraling set of stone steps that had been worn down by thousands of feet over hundreds of years. At the top of the steps, the tiny flame from the candle showed the dark mouths of open archways on either side of a long stone passage. Their steps echoed in the cavernous silence as Kane hurried.
Last Stand For Man Page 18