Dead South Rising (Book 2): Death Row (25 page)

Two more passes. That’s all it took to finish the job. There were still five or six shufflers that had managed to avoid the massive roller. They were spread out, keeping their distance as if an inkling of self-preservation pervaded the rot that had conquered their brains. David had no intentions of allowing them to escape his wrath, but he wasn’t going to chase them all night with the machine, either. No point in using a shotgun when a flyswatter sufficed.
 

He’d made a promise to himself earlier that day—
finish what you start
. His new mantra going forward. He wasn’t about to renege on that commitment now.
 

David twisted the key, and the massive engine shuddered to a stop. His ears still beat with the sound, a constant ocean wave of ringing, sparing him from the curses of those still clumped together in horror behind the wounded fence.

Dismounting the machine was much easier now that the dead were disposed of. Feet firmly on the ground, he could still sense the vibrations radiating throughout his body. He felt electric, and very much alive. Quickly, he surveyed the gruesome scene, taking note of the undead threats still lumbering about.

He counted seven. Only seven left of the two-hundred plus that had escaped the confines of the tennis courts. There were still those holed up in the pool to contend with, but he’d tend to them shortly. First, these seven. And damn anyone who tried to stop him.

David tugged his Walther P38 from his hip, racked the slide, walked up to the closest roamer. The mashed-up mess beneath his heels teased his balance as he skated across bits of bone and muscle and blood, sickening stowaways hitching a ride on his boots.
 

He raised El Jefe, his hand sure and steady, and squeezed the trigger. The shuffler’s head rocked back, and it crumpled into the minced-up goo. David turned to the next closest one, squeezed off another round. The 9mm projectile punched the being’s cranium, and the beast dropped in a heap.

Yelling. From behind the fence. David turned to face the frantic voice.

“Stop it! Dear God, stop it already!”

Luz. Her voice buzzed like a mosquito in his ears. She was pressed up against the gate, bloody bars be damned, her white lab coat a crimson-striped mess.

Lenny managed to get the gate swung open at the same time the Janitor rumbled up in the Dodge dually.

David ignored all of them, focused on his single-minded task of eliminating each and every last shuffler. He dared anyone to try and stop him, tossing sidelong glances at those behind the fence. Sauntering up to another ambling corpse, he raised his gun, the pop ringing loud and long in his ears. He could barely hear the thump of the body as it met the gut-churned earth.

“David,” Lenny called, carefully stepping through the carnage, trying hard not to slip and impale himself on a protruding bone. “Bro.”

“In a second,” David said, turning on his heel and walking up to another groaning shuffler. No one else—and nothing else—mattered at that moment. He was making a statement. A damn memorable one. A statement that all present were certainly never, ever going to forget as long as they remained alive. David knew
he’d
never forget it.

He popped off another round, falling another of the supposed ‘sick.’

“Please, bro, listen.”

“Not now, Leonard.”

“It’s important.”

“So’s this.” David started toward another shuffler farther away.

Lenny sidled up to David, towering over him. Their boots squished on the gore-choked ground.

Lowering his voice, Leonard said, “That Doc fellow?”

Immediately, David halted his march, tilted his head back so he could look the big man in the eyes. “What did you say?”

Lenny’s eyes darted around, as if he’d just been reprimanded for some serious violation. “Doc.”

“Doc Holliday?”

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

Leonard nodded a hesitant nod. “Yeah.”

David exhaled a snappy breath. “Do you
think
so or do you
know
so?”

This time, Leonard held the other man’s gaze. “Don’t know who else it could be.”

A shuffler in denim overall’s approached. Nonchalantly, David lifted his arm, and fired a shot straight into its skull. The beast teetered backward, finally landing with a splattering thump. It quivered, twitched, then lay still.

“Did you see him?” asked David.

Lenny shook his head, eyes darting at Randy, who was still inside the fence. “Them three we sent away?”

David looked at him, his expression unknowing.

“Right,” Lenny said, “you wasn’t part of that. They was three drug-heads we sent packing earlier today. When they left, they was alive. Next time we seen ‘em, they was moaning and groaning with the rest of them rattlers outside the fence.”

“Okay. So what does that have to do with Doc?”

Gabriel and the four other men now joined David and Leonard, listening in on the conversation.

Lenny continued. “Well, them three had notes attached to ‘em.”

“Notes? What kind of notes? What did they say?”

A gunshot blast rang out, and all flinched. Except for the Janitor, who held a snub-nosed pistol and was now lowering the weapon. About fifteen feet away, another shuffler crumpled to the concrete drive in gurgling death throes.

“Go ahead,” the Janitor prompted, gun now dangling at his side.

David almost smiled.

Lenny said, “They all had paper taped to they chests. One word on each: Deliver to David.”

David glanced around, expecting the notes to be right in his hands. “Deliver what?”

Pursing his lips, Lenny shook his head deliberately. “Don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” David could feel the surge pushing through him, the impatient irritability beleaguering his brittle emotions.

“Got a hunch, though. There was a box.”

“A box?” All at once, David’s body trembled uncontrollably, his mind already filling the box with body parts. Natalee’s parts. He just knew it. What else could it possibly be? Doc was playing a cruel, hurtful game. One that could drive a man to do terrible, horrid things.

Like run down tens of hundreds of walking corpses with heavy construction machinery.

His prized weapon was slipping from his sweaty grip. He choked down a swallow, the next and most obvious question hiding behind reluctant lips, desperately wanting out. Wanting to know—

“What… where’s the box?”

The large man’s eyes gleamed sympathetically, then landed on a spot about thirty feet away, smack in the middle of the decomposing muck.
 

David could barely make it out, but it was there. The flap of cardboard, poking up through the fresh gore, slicked with scarlet. Before he’d fully processed what he was seeing, his feet were moving.

Lenny laid a hulking hand on David’s shoulder. “I tried to stop you, before you run ‘em down, but—”

“Don’t,” Gabriel said, laying his own hand on Lenny’s arm. “Let him be.” He squinted his eye at Lenny, lowered his voice. “The demons…” he added with a dip of his chin.

The Lumberjack nodded knowingly.

David was on another single-minded mission, hearing nothing, seeing only the flap of cardboard. A blood-spattered road sign on the gruesome highway he’d just paved.

He’d almost reached it when someone stepped in his path, shoved his chest. “You son of a bitch.”

Luz’s voice was a low growl, angry with sparks, belying her svelte stature. Her brows dipped low on her lids, her lips pressed to a pale scar that threatened to cut off her breath. In her right hand, a gun.

“You had no right—
no right
—to kill all those people.”

David didn’t have time for this, not now. Doc had been here. Again. And he needed to find out what he’d brought. Right now.

“Move, Luz.”

“I will not.”

“I said move.”

“Are you threatening me?” Her pistol hand twitched.

Still clutching his own weapon, David said, “Luz, you either move it… or I’ll move it for you.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“You’re right, Luz. I wouldn’t
dare
.”

A smug arrogance replaced the intense glare that had twisted her features. But his next statement would have her reeling.

“I’m a doer, not a darer,” and he simply stepped around her, his shoulder brushing her, and started toward the mangled box.

“Hey!”

He ignored her, his back to his enemy. A potentially deadly mistake. A mistake taught only once.

“Stop, right now!”

“Fight with someone else, Luz. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

The click of a revolver’s hammer forced him to pause.

Don’t you fucking do it, Luz. Don’t you do it. I don’t want to hurt you. I really, really don’t.

“You move and I blow your head off.”

David forced heavy breaths through his still broken, still tender nose, his teeth clenched to the breaking point. His body vibrated with the residual tremors of the compactor machine and anger once thought resolved.
 

He performed a slow turn, El Jefe grasped in a gnarly death grip.
 

“Luz,” the Janitor told her, “ain’t a good idea.”

As David pivoted slowly on his heel, he spied those still inside the fence, terror washing over tear-streaked faces. He wasn’t sure how much of it stemmed from his human mashed potato experiment, and how much of it was derived from the potentially deadly drama now unfolding before their very eyes. Either way, they were getting their money’s worth.

“Doc G., these is confusing times,” Lenny said, playing peacemaker. “So much we don’t know yet. David, well, he was just trying to do what he thinks is right. Can’t fault a man for that. Least he’s doing something about it. Helping keep folks safe.”

Luz faced Lenny. “At least he’s doing something about it? Keeping folks ‘safe’? That’s what you call the mass slaughter we just witnessed?” The pistol trembled in her hand, drawing Lenny’s wary gaze. She turned to the residents huddled behind what remained of the fence, and said, “Do you all feel safe now? Huh? Did this killer make you feel better?”

She turned to David again. Glowering at him, sparks of rage streaking from her dark eyes, she measured her words, delivering them like spoon-fed cough syrup. “You’re… a… killer. A murderer. And you’ll reap exactly what you sow. In Hell.” She said something else, incomprehensible to David, followed it by crossing herself.
 

David assumed it was a Catholic prayer in Spanish. Didn’t recognize any curse words. Gills had taught him a few of those, and David knew them when he heard them.

“You done?” David said, a biting sarcasm oozing like the crushed corpses underfoot. “I’ve got shit to do.”

“I will shoot you.”

Gabriel interjected. “No, Luz, you won’t.” The old man gripped his own pistol hard, the metal still warm and dangling at his side. His gaze grabbed the doctor’s, then he flicked his eyes to his own weapon, and back. A silent—and serious—warning.

David noticed, too, and the alarm firing up his fight-or-flight response wound down like an old-school police siren. Gabe had his back. Literally. For this, he was thankful.

Movement in his peripheral vision prompted him to look away from Luz. A straggling shuffler. One of the very last to survive his twisted roller derby. David chewed on this a moment. One of the last to… survive. To
survive.

Survive.
 

In the next instant, Lenny yanked his hatchet, prepared to dispatch the shuffler about to stumble into the fray. He hoisted the blade high.

“No, Lenny. Wait.” David holstered his sidearm.

Lenny shot David a dubious glance, his axe hanging in the air. His gaze shifted back and forth from the shuffler to David.

David said, “Just keep it from biting anyone for a minute, okay?”

The Janitor sidled up to Lenny. “I think I know what he’s up to.”

In the next moment, Lenny and Gabriel flanked the shuffler, each man snatching one of the being’s wrists and pulling him like a Stretch Armstrong doll. The restrained dead man snapped at them with grimy, mustard-colored teeth.
 

Though addressing Luz directly, David spoke plenty loud so all the Infirmaries could hear. “You keep preaching to everyone that these… things… are simply ‘sick.’ You insist, in front of all these people, that I’m a murderer. A killer. That I killed Roy. That I killed Scotty. That I ‘killed’ all these ‘people.’” He paused a beat. “Well I can assure you, Dr. Gonzalez, that I’ve never killed anyone in my life. At least not anyone living. Not yesterday, not today, and not now. Not ever.”

“You are a liar.”

David actually smiled. “You know what, doc? You’re right. I am a liar. I’ve lied. To myself, to others. And I’m working on it. But this? I’m telling the truth about this.”

“I don’t believe you. You just admitted to everyone here that you’re a liar.”

“Then believe this.” He unsheathed his knife, whirled around and drove the blade straight into the shuffler’s chest—and into its non-beating heart. The ghoul flinched, even took a step back. But it did not drop to the ground, nor did it stop trying to advance. It only hissed angrily, unfazed, wearing the knife’s protruding hilt like a badge of honor.

David studied the doctor’s reaction of silent surprise and horror. “Still don’t believe it?” He grasped the handle, yanking out the blade, and immediately impaled the beast again. Still, it stood, growling, legs churning.

He looked at Luz. The corners of her mouth dragged the ground in a furious frown.

“C’mon, Luz. Are you blind? Are you not seeing this?” he said, his palm upturned toward the agitated dead man.

David let his hand drop to his side, slapping his thigh. “I can do this all night, Luz.” He tugged out the knife, speared the ghoul’s torso again—and again and again, puncturing every vital organ the blade could reach.
 

Luz just stood there, arms crossed and eyes darting, desperately trying to disbelieve.

The gored shuffler slowed, its mobility hindered, but it did not go down. Did not stop. Even mortally wounded and with two men detaining it, the staunch creature struggled against the living clutches that bound it.