Crisis Event: Black Feast (10 page)

Sadie straightened as the big man staggered backward, his feet tangling in his own guts. She was ready to run, but there was no need. The man was already dead on his feet.

Great red gouts of blood and gelatinized lungs and kidneys and stomach had splattered over the girl and the tanning frames. The mixture now coated most of the cabinet’s interior.

Less than three seconds after she fired the gun Big Jim crashed down, his head smacking into the bottom of the wooden tanning frames and toppling them over and onto his body. His legs bounced up and came down on top of the terrified girl, who had curled into a ball on the floor and begun to wail.

Sadie, still hurting from the shotgun grip to the gut, wheezed and coughed as she staggered over to the girl. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about what she’d just done. She couldn’t afford to kneel down and cry over it.

“Come on,” Sadie wheezed. “Get up.

“Don’t hurt me,” the girl wailed. Her eyes were closed and she’d tucked her face into both her elbows—as if not seeing some horror could protect her from it.

“Get up,” Sadie said again. “We’ve got to go.”

The girl opened her eyes. Her lips quavered when she spoke.

“You’re not...going to…?”

“Anyone else around?” Sadie asked, pointedly not looking at Big Jim’s legs, both of which were covered in blood and gore. “Who’s Bryce?”

After a quick sideways glance, she kicked out at Jim’s massive boot and sent his leg rolling off the girl. When the girl sensed the weight had lessened she squirmed out from beneath the big man.

“Who’s Bryce?” Sadie asked again, trying to remain calm and patient. She’d seen behavior before, from crime victims in shock. The girl had probably been on the verge of dissociating during the trauma and torture.

The girl pushed herself up to her hands and knees, then stood and stared at the dead giant.

“Where’re your clothes?”

“They…” she looked around, noticing the dead woman on the table for the first time. “Oh my God!”

She closed her eyes and shoved her hands over them, the way the blind cop had covered his burned eyes.

“You know her?”

“That’s Jenna,” the girl said. “From the Alamo.”

“Where’re your clothes?” Sadie asked again.

She broke open the shotgun. Both shells popped out and clattered to the floor.

Sadie scooped them both up and tucked them into the pocket of her parka. She glanced longingly at the candles and the propane torch beneath the boiling pot of vinegar and human flesh. Wax and some chunks of sodium might make a good shell load, but she abandoned the idea of refilling the shells at that moment.

“They took our clothes,” the girl said, and looked down at her own nakedness. Her breasts and belly were covered in Jim’s blood and gelatinous blobs of his lungs and heart, all of which were dribbling down over her thighs. “They thought we wouldn’t run off if we were naked. But we would’ve. I ain’t afraid of being naked. I’m afraid of being eaten up and havin’ my skin put on one of them things.”

The girl pointed at the stack of frames that had fallen down over Jim’s head and chest.

“Who’s Bryce?”

“Jim’s brother.”

“Where is he?”

“He went with his boys to get water,” the blonde girl said. “They got a big water tank at the gym. That’s where they all stay.”

“Who?”

“The bikers,” she said. “They all got motorcycles. They ride around and grab people so they can fuck ‘em or eat ‘em.”

Sadie winced.

“That’s what happened to Jenna.” she said. “I told her things was different now and she better do whatever she had to do to keep from getting eat up.”

“How many?” Sadie asked. She slipped her pack off her shoulder and dug into it. Now that the adrenaline was ebbing, her fear was back. She dug out the other two shotgun shells and shoved them into the gun’s breech. Then she snapped it closed and pulled her pistol out and tucked it into a pocket inside her parka.

She wished she’d brought the cop’s .357, but then stopped herself from wishing. It was a bad habit she needed to break.

Sludgy gray water under the bridge.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Ten. Fifteen.”

“Jeez,” Sadie said as she pulled out her MIT t-shirt and tossed it to the girl. “How long you think before Bryce gets back?”

The girl ignored her.

“It smells like pee,” the blonde girl said and wrinkled her nose as she shoved her arms through the sleeves.

“Sorry,” Sadie said. She dug out a pair of tight blue workout shorts and gave them to the girl. “What’s your name?”

“Callie Draybek.”

“Okay, Callie Draybek,” Sadie said, “How long before Bryce gets back?”

“Any time,” Callie said.

Sadie grabbed a dozen unlit candles off the canning table and dropped them into her pack. Then she pulled a propane torch out from under the pressure cooker and took it to the wooden cabinet.

“Where do they keep the bikes?” Sadie asked as she tossed aside the tanning frames that had fallen over Jim.

“At the gym,” Kim said.

Sadie nodded and lay the torch on the cabinet floor so that its blue flame licked at the back of the cabinet and Jim’s shoulder. The wood turned black almost instantly, though it resisted catching fire. Jim’s hair crackled and his shirt caught on fire immediately.

Sadie went for the potassium nitrate then, and she carried the whole bag to the cabinet and poured it over Jim’s chest and face and hair. Then she spilled it out all over the cabinet floor around the butane torch and emptied the rest of the bag onto the pile of tanning frames and the human hides stretched inside them.

The potassium nitrate wouldn’t burn immediately, but once it melted down a little, the room would go up in a blaze too hot to stop.

“What’re you doing?” Callie asked.

“Giving these morons something to think about,” Sadie said.

“Oh,” Callie said as Sadie shrugged her pack onto her shoulders, picked up all three fire extinguishers and carried them over to the door blocked by the tub of blood. She tossed the extinguishers behind the door, into the supply room. Then she took Callie’s hand and they ran out into the hallway.

Chapter 8

Sadie wasn’t sure she ought to trust Callie.

Not the way the world appeared to work now.

Trusting strangers you just met was gambling with your life.

Killing strangers, on the other hand...now that appeared to be the most rational course of action anyone could follow. Humans had turned into vicious monsters, it seemed, and existence had become nothing more than a Prisoners Dilemma for psychopaths.

Still Callie didn't seem capable guile or deep deception. She appeared to be who she said she was, which was a girl trying to get home.

The same as me
.

“Where’s home?” Sadie asked. They were sitting inside a dust-entombed pickup in an otherwise empty parking lot.

The windshield and top of the pickup were coated with a thick layer of dust, but that didn’t stop the falling gray balls of mud from splattering down on them with heavy thumps—like the trampling of a zombie herd across a hardwood floor.

The lot where the truck sat was next to the back side of a recreational center with a gymnasium, a weight room, a game room, and a cafe. The kitchen in the cafe was the source of the gray smoke.

“They built a barbecue pit in the kitchen,” Callie had said and shivered.

Behind Sadie and Callie was another building, about a hundred feet away. It appeared to be a dormitory.

Mostly it was dark out, with random, long and short flashes of lightning and a nearly constant rumbling thunder. Callie was watching the rear entrance to the recreational center. Sadie had turned to watch the Allen Science Building through the passenger window. She’d wiped it clean before climbing inside, but the gray mud balls had recoated it.

Sadie couldn’t help but think the guys running this operation were tactical idiots, considering that they’d left the truck where it was. It was like telling your enemy: “Here’s a nice camouflaged forward observation post right next to our headquarters. Enjoy.”

“West Virginia.” Callie said after a while. “My grandparents are there. If they’re alive.”

Sadie had given Callie a dust mask to wear before they’d left the science building, and the short run they’d made over to the truck had already left the bulging white bubble covered in gray dust.

“I was taking Jenna 'cause her family’s dead. We were three miles south when the bikers got us.”

Callie had been a student at Blaine, she told Sadie, but since the Crisis she’d been living in the courthouse and jail at the center of town.

“We called it ‘the Alamo,’” she said. “Because this professor said that’s what it was like.”

"What about your parents?" Sadie asked.

Callie shook her head.

“Colorado,” she said.

It was all she needed to say. Even in the early days of the Crisis everyone knew that Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah were gone.

“Thar she blows,” Sadie said, as the black smoke she’d been expecting puffed upward from the science building, then expanded to a big black column. Seconds after she saw the smoke, a big man in blue coveralls came running toward the recreation center. Two younger, smaller men were running behind him.

“That’s Bryce,” Callie said through her teeth. Sadie glanced at Callie, who had the sawed off shotgun in her hands. Her fingers were wrapped around the forestock and grip so tightly that if it had been someone’s neck she’d have snapped it. “And his sicko sons.”

Sadie was relieved to see the men weren’t tracking her as they ran across the ashy ground. The two girls hadn’t exactly attempted to disguise their tracks when they’d come to the truck.

“Guess they didn’t bring enough water to put it out,” Sadie said, “and some jerk stole their extinguishers.”

Callie didn’t laugh, and nodded instead.

Some people don’t get irony.

Seconds after the three men had run into the recreation center, a dozen others came running out. They moved like a herd of wild animals toward the fire, though by the time they got to the science building it was obvious there was nothing they could do. They stood and watched it burn. A few men ran inside but came back out almost immediately.

“That’s our cue,” Sadie said.

She looked at Callie. The girl’s lips were trembling. “You want to stay here?”

“I do,” Callie said, nearly crying.

Sadie got a jolt of panic to her guts. She was terrified, but what she was about to do seemed less scary knowing Callie was going with her. She sighed with relief when Callie opened the pickup door and said, “Let’s go.”

    They ran up the handicap ramp to the automatic doors. The doors were unlocked, but Sadie and Callie had to work to pry them apart so they could get inside.

Sadie could see why the bikers had chosen to enter and exit the rec center from the rear doorways, which was a pair of standard hinged glass doors with locking bars across them. The two girls pushed the sliding doors closed again once they were inside.

Sadie had left her pack in the truck and brought only what she’d needed: her pistol, her multitool, a tiny LED penlight,  the vial of of potassium permanganate, the bottle of glycerine, and the silver foil.

She had a plan, and the cannibals here at the college weren’t going to like it.

The entryway was nothing more than a wide hallway with a check-in counter on one side. It had once been the place where students stopped before they went to the gymnasium, the weight room, the basement bowling alley, or the game room, with its rows of pool tables, ping pong tables, and foosball tables.

Little light made it inside, and an old boxy flashlight sat on the check-in counter, probably something the bikers used to light up the room when they were taking their bikes out on a raid.

The part of the building they’d entered was empty, but they could hear voices echoing down hallways, moans and cries, bumps and bangs that seemed to vibrate the walls. There were several barks and howls, like dogs that had been left penned too long, and the clanging and scraping of metal.

Along with all the sounds of life was the constant crackle of thunder.

An odd odor pervaded the building too, something like fresh mushrooms and B.O.

Sadie grabbed the flashlight and whispered, “Let’s go.”

According to Callie, the bikes would be in the student cafe, which was on the other side of the building. So she and Sadie passed into the darkness beyond the check-in counter.

“Ohhhh,” someone groaned. Someone else—a girl from the sound of it—giggled in response.

“Git your ass over here!” a man yelled, and the sound of flesh being slapped echoed down the hallway. Then there was a clang, as if a heavy weight had been dropped on a concrete floor.