Love Lies Bleeding (13 page)

Today, when she heard the bolts sliding, she stood and, stumbling over scrambling bodies, moved to the very center of the sty. Trapped here, she was losing all sense of being. It was time to make her stand. It was time to try to get through that door. She’d rather be dead than immobile.

She’d been told, before this, that she was beautiful, that her eyes were striking, so she ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head. Harsh light struck her eyes, but she struggled to keep them wide, perhaps even coy, if she could remember how to be so. Silence fell, and even more so than before, she felt their stares.

Two men loomed in the doorway with — heard more than seen — one of them. The Infected, all chain-rattling and snuffling great gobs of green snot. There had to be an ever-present danger of the hunter mutinying against the master — they didn’t even keep the chains taut — but right now, she didn’t give a fuck about anyone’s life but her own.

“Hello, sweet thang,” he, with the shotgun, purred. ”Remember me?”
 

Over his shoulder, the Infected groaned in an odd, soft sort of pleasure, at the smell of so many of the Immune so near.

She wouldn’t reply, not to him, not as if he had a soul, but she did suck on her lower lip to strike a thinking pose and keep them distracted.

Yeah, asshole, I remember. Your dick is so insignificant you use a shotgun instead.
She wouldn’t scream, so you pulled the trigger three times.

“We were just coming to get ya. Lucky girl. The Boss wants a taste, so no chains and chair for you. You get to ride the biblical way.”
 

Great, he thinks he’s funny — maybe even charming — but the fucking prick screamed his own name as he jizzed all over that fucking shotgun
.

They reached for her, but she stepped forward so their fingers just brushed her bare arms.

The Infected growled at her nearness.

She dropped her eyes. She hadn’t been this close to one since… since it was someone she had known before. It reeked, worse for having been dying for months.

“Look out, sweet,” Asshole cautioned. “Any bites out of you the Boss wants, he’ll take.” The two of them yanked harshly on the Infected’s neck chain.

What the fuck was his name?
She couldn’t remember and she wanted to shriek it in triumph when she bludgeoned him with his own shotgun.

Their caution hinted that they wouldn’t hurt her, not too badly, unless forced. A woman was rare. A woman of childbearing age was precious. So her full lips and wide hips would keep her relatively safe, until… Well, there wasn’t going to be an until, not like this, not here, not if she could do anything about it.

They guided her down a concrete hall. She could hear generators whirling nearby, but didn’t see what they powered. Shadowed stairs led up. She could smell dampness; not the ever-present seeping rusty water mixed with piss and puke, but actual fresh rain.

The stairs led out. Outside.
 

She swallowed her hope so they didn’t feel her energy blooming.
How much of the city did they control? All of it?
If so, she was fucked.

More men at the top of the stairs equaled more staring. She hoped their Boss scared them dickless, otherwise she’d miscalculated. She could already feel pricks coming to attention, ready and willing to plunder her abyss. Except the Infected, of course; it just wanted to eat her.

She paused to consider that she might be crazy. She’d been in her head for days now.
What if this was all some sort of massive psychosis brought on from some brain tumor?
But then she quickly discarded this theory as unhelpful and irrelevant. It’s not like this was some movie, and even if it was all in her head, she still had to be herself, and react like she would. She still had to be in control.

They reached for her because she’d stopped, so she jerked away. They laughed.
Men. Laughing.
The virus had really shit-kicked women’s lib. She hadn’t grown up with four brothers not knowing how to handle a man. They were dogs and she was nobody’s bitch. Her bite was worse.

Cool air lifted her hair; she breathed like she hadn’t had oxygen for days, and looked to see that they were in a glassed space, like an atrium. It was night. More underlings held the door open expectantly, so she headed that way. Outside, the street was wet enough to reflect the moon.
 

The Infected, already highly riled, lunged at the door guys as it followed her. They’d been stupid enough to lean in as she’d passed by, perhaps hoping for some contact, perhaps hoping for a whiff, or a smile.

Shotgun Asshole got tangled in its chain.

Yelling and beating commenced. The Infected roared in response even as it tried to cower between the neglected dried husks of the indoor palm trees.

The street was empty.

She felt the sure grip of her Merrell soles as she sprung ahead, and was fucking glad she’d salvaged them from an outlet mall only days before they captured her.
 

These men had grown accustomed to, and lazy with, their dominance. She was a hundred feet away before they gave chase. She hit side streets and turned often.

The Infected could track her, of course. It loved a hunt.
 

She darted into an alley where they had obviously been clearing cars, though they hadn’t bothered dealing with the rotting corpses. She forced her brain to see these just as obstacles, to be climbed and dodged. If her hand sunk into some soggy chest cavity or her ankle twisted in mushed brains, she just ignored it. Her heart beat firmly in survival mode.

As she hit a relatively cleared section, some other person or people cut across her path — perhaps deliberately — twice.

The effort to breathe quietly used too much air. She couldn’t soften the slap of her shoes on the wet concrete. She wasn’t going to make it.

She pressed behind a dumpster to listen to the chase. The men, and the bellowing Infected, were a couple of streets off as best as she could gauge in the dark confusion. She pondered that she hadn’t seen any dead bodies for a couple of streets now, but then chided herself to focus.

“Left, left, and right,” a voice cut through her labored breathing. She tried listening to source him in the dark, but stopping breathing wasn’t currently an option.
Was that heavily shadowed brick doorway concealing someone?
The darkness was too deep to be sure. “Go,” he insisted. Someone else darted from the doorway and headed right.

She ran left.

“I see her, heading towards the park,” a woman, from a window above and behind her, yelled.

Needing to trust the first voice, she veered left again and then right. A tall chain-ink fence, pushed by unseen hands, suddenly closed the alley behind her.

There were people here.
People helping her escape. Her brain clicked from image to image. The crisscrossing of her path had been to confuse the hunter, to whom any immune blood beckoned. Then the guiding voice and now the gate, but she couldn’t seek haven, couldn’t risk that this new group wasn’t just like all the others had been. The disintegration of humanity seemed utterly complete.

She continued to run through alleys and back lanes until she realized she was completely alone and compelled to stop. She tucked into some shadows. Her stomach revolted; nothing came up.

•••••••••

She might have passed out there. If so, that wasn’t good because she wasn’t sure how much lead time she’d lost. But then she heard barking.

Savage barking. A dog. Here?
She’d only seen maggot-ridden corpses in yards and ditches since… since everyone who was going to die had. She instinctively followed the barks.

The barks led in a direction she knew she shouldn’t go, but the dog’s pain and desperation drew her, and then… then she heard the laughter.

More men. Laughing.

Before she even located them, she picked up a heavy piece of metal, some rusted length of plumbing that had deadly weight. Turning the corner, she found them clustered in a basketball court nestled between derelict high rises.

They were baiting the dog, a powerful Rottweiler, against one of the Infected.
Fuck, how many were they keeping alive?
One less, if she had her way.

The dog is fatally hurt
, her brain argued.
You aren’t going to save it, even if you sacrifice yourself.
But her feet kept moving.

She smashed the pipe down to split the nearest head, and then on the reverse stroke, probably sent nose bone shards into a second brain.

In the following confusion, she flipped the pipe lengthwise and drove it into the Infected’s back. Their skin was saggy, soft, a bit like butter.
 

She easily skewered its heart.

In its dying rage, it grabbed the nearest man and tore off an arm.

Clawing hands were all over her now.

“Fuck, hold her!”

By the screams, it sounded like the Infected was eating one of them, but two others had her down.

Her skull smacked the pavement.

Blackness engulfed.

She realized they were trying to undo her jeans. Her self-rigged chastity belt was holding them off, but not for long.

Though she’d lost the pipe, she lashed out with fists and feet and received another blow to the head. But the dog wasn’t out of the fight, and it tore at the throat of the one on top of her.

With her upper body freed, she managed to smash her heel through the teeth of the one on her legs, and she was up, slipping in the blood, fleeing, once again, for her life.

•••••••••

After a block, she chanced a look back. They weren’t following, but the dog was, barely. With each stride she took it fell farther back.

She couldn’t stop. She could hear them shouting into walkie-talkies, and the Infected’s dying bellows. They’d be reinforced and all over her soon.

The dog went down, then managed to get up again. Its left flank was torn, the skin dragging, and maybe the leg was broken or dislocated.

Even in this dark, they’d be able to follow the blood trail.

So with her brain warring with something she hesitated to identify as her heart, she stopped and turned back.

The dog made it a few more feet before collapsing: down for good.

“Hey love,” her voice sounded harsh and she flinched, “I’ve got you, do you trust me?”
Weren’t Rotties supposed to average a hundred pounds? Though this one was terribly emaciated, so maybe — Fuck.
Don’t fucking think, just do, Rhiannon.

She approached. The dog laid down its head, and, taking that as submission and acceptance, she hunkered down and somehow rolled it into a fireman’s lift and up.

With the dog across her shoulders, she took a step. “We can do it: first a pharmacy, then food.” She always felt better with a solid script to follow.

She smiled, the feeling of which was foreign and freeing.

HIM

He wasn’t too sure how many bodies he’d lifted onto the pyre, but he was damn sure they weren’t going to burn like well-aged firewood.
 

‘Course, he’d never burned a body before.

He didn’t count. Didn’t want to count. He’d done everything he could before he’d dealt with the bodies. Cleared the cars, boarded windows, even swept the main street.

There weren’t more than thirty houses in the township, but they’d been prolific people. The bodies of the children particularly bothered him.

He wasn’t one of them originally, but he thought they might have accepted him eventually despite the twang in his accent and his permanent tan. He’d never know now; every last one of them was dead or, if there had been survivors, they hadn’t stuck around.

He didn’t mind the quiet.

His life before hadn’t been so labor intensive, though he’d painted his father’s house one summer during high school: brown with brown trim. It still bothered him, not using a contrast color for the trim. ‘Course it didn’t much matter; who knew if the house was even still standing?

But he enjoyed feeling his muscles stretch under his skin. He felt powerful here; this town was something he could control among the chaos.

It was getting warmer, so he had needed to deal with the bodies. He was pretty sure that “immune to the virus” didn’t mean immune to everything, and he wasn’t interested in dying because he’d been too much of a coward to clean.

He didn’t like to think about immunity, because that just brought up thoughts of self-worth and why he was still here when others weren’t.

Others.
What a nothing of a word to use, even in his own head. People. People, who he’d never loved, couldn’t love, like they’d deserved.

He stopped shifting bodies. He’d tied them all, one by one, in sheets from the homes he found them in, hoping that they wouldn’t break apart too badly on the way to the fire. The back of the pickup was almost empty. It wasn’t time for a break, but he could feel the darkness pulling him.

He cracked a can of cola, Coke, of course, though he couldn’t really tell you the difference. The bubbles always somehow lightened his mood.

He’d spent months dwelling, wallowing in wretchedness, hopping from survivor group to survivor group, until all the dead had finally died.

All the wants, needs, and desires of all the other Immune, even though so few of them remained, crowded and controlled his own.

He grew tired of not knowing which woman had crawled into his sleeping bag and, come morning, the tense grins from their chosen mates. As far as he knew, he never impregnated any of them. Their need to breed when surrounded by death was almost instinctual, but it wasn’t his instinct. Their eyes grew dim and sunken as each month passed. Hunger gnawed more than bellies.
 

When spring made mountains passable, he’d moved on from the final group. He thought they’d been sorry to see him go, his able body and all.

He crushed the empty pop can, but placed it carefully in the blue bin in the truck bed; you never knew these days what you’d need tomorrow. Though he couldn’t quite figure what he might need a crushed soda can for, making the world worse than it already was wasn’t his first choice.