Running With The Horde (Book 2): Delusions of Monsters (8 page)

The Present

We were back at Chelsea’s. I was in the office with Mark and the boys. I was sitting in a comfortable chair with my feet up. They would keep an eye on me during my experiment while everyone else game planned and got supplies ready in the main room. We were all bundled up like it was Antarctica. It might as well have been, it was damn cold in that building.

I could hear them bickering through the closed door. A ragtag bunch of folks with very little in common other than surviving up until this point. I had admonished them to be as quiet as possible being there were most certainly soldiers still out searching for me. But it was like telling the wind not to blow, they didn’t listen. I did my best to tune them out. I only hoped they would be vigilant in lookout duty in case we had to make a run for it.

Mark, Sam and Jacob sat in silence on the carpet around my chair wrapped in blankets we’d scavenged from nearby houses. From the outside looking in it must have looked like a death vigil in some village camp. I was the wizened old shaman waiting to give my spirit back to the Earth.

Relaxing as best I could, I closed my eyes and focused on nothing. Soon the darkness behind my eyes became a real thing like the blackest void on a starless night. The emptiness seemed to stretch into eternity but then in a heartbeat I was connected to the undead.

A vast array lit up in my mind from the hundreds of thousands of zombies in my vicinity. So much blue light that the darkness vanished completely and the light engulfed me. I thought of memories and I was bombarded with so many life flashes of the walking dead that I’m sure I briefly lost my mind. I went everywhere and nowhere, met a million souls and lived a million lives. It would have gone on that way forever or until I had a stroke but then I heard someone calling my name. It was a child’s voice as faint as the final sound in an echo and I almost ignored it but then it came again much closer and much louder. It could only be Jacob screaming into my ear. I remembered myself then, who I was and why I was in this bizarre dimension of other people’s memories.

I began to filter the thoughts coming at me and with that came clarity. I eased out a sigh of relief, I was back in control. I filtered by tunnels and rivers and that led to nothing useful. I tried the flour company and watched some riveting tunnel maintenance happen sometime during the 1960’s but again it didn’t really help. On a lark I searched for Riverplace, the Northeast Minneapolis hotspot that had thrived in the 80’s and then made a comeback around the turn of the latest century. It wasn’t a huge surprise when the search garnered a ton of results given the area I was in.

One by one I eliminated useless memories as quickly as I could which I thought was pretty quick given how slow I had been on a computer during real life. Nevertheless, my patience with this wearisome process expired after the first few minutes and I was about to call it quits and see what the group had come up with for a Plan B when I struck gold. I was in the mind of an ancient woman named Eva Goldstein. Evidently, there had been a speakeasy behind the front of a riverside bakery in the mid-1920s. I was enjoying a whirlwind evening of flappers, wise guys, jazz and cocktails on a forgotten smoky Saturday evening in 1927 when Eva was sent down to a dungeon-like storage room for a secret stash of absinthe held for a special customer.

This particular high roller kept two bottles of the emerald head scrambler on consignment at the illegal club to enjoy at his leisure when he was in town which was apparently tonight. In the process of retrieving one of the bootlegged liquor bottles, both of which had been hidden on a shelf behind a row of wooden casks, something startled Eva so badly she slipped off the footstool and landed rather hard on her ass. She said something quite unladylike as she sat in a growing puddle of green liquid and waited for her tail bone to stop smarting. She was pissed. I could tell her tears were angry rather than scared as she figured she would get fired for dropping the bottle, which was awful because the money was good here. She was at least going to give the source of that noise a piece of her mind. She leaned back on her arms, let out a disgusted sigh and closed her eyes.

“Eva, you okay, doll?”

It was that damn creep, Manny Tulio. He must have been in the back of the almost pitch-black room for some reason before she’d come down. Figures it’d be him down here scaring folks just trying to do their jobs. Him with his wandering eyes and hands. She had been careful around him since she started the job three months ago, recognizing what kind of man he was from day one.

Life in a speakeasy was one entered through connection only. It wasn’t like a person walked in the front door and answered a help wanted sign from the window. Her connection was her roommate Jasmine. She was nobody’s niece or cousin, nobody’s daughter, which meant she had no protection from the criminal element that both ran and frequented the joint.

She opened her eyes to find Manny leaning casually on the shelf leering down at her mid-section, his tuxedo pristine and his smile lecherous. Eva glanced down to find her dress had crept high enough during her tumble for Manny to get a good gander at her mystery parts. She grunted and shot a hand down to her thigh to address the problem. Then came the attempt to stand in her high heeled shoes which ended in failure, green goop sluicing through the air as she slipped again. Her hands and legs were a sticky mess and she’d nicked her thumb on a broken piece of glass. Manny only chuckled and stood there another beat doing nothing until he sauntered forward.

“Let me help you, doll,” he said in his choppy tough guy accent. The help wasn’t optional as he reached down and yanked Eva to her feet with one meaty paw. She winced but tried not to show it.

He used both hands to steady her and then wiped his soiled palms gently down the sides of her dress along her ribcage, menace evident in his beady dark eyes. She willed herself not to tremble but it came anyway, a slow shiver originating from her toes and ending just at the shoulder blades. They both knew he was in control in this dank cellar. Even if the folks upstairs knew, no one would come because nobody cared. She wasn’t connected.

“Gotta be more careful, doll,” he whispered into the gloomy silence of the storage room. “See, you’ve gone and dirtied up your pretty dress. We can’t have you upstairs looking like a ragamuffin, can we? Nah! The boss wouldn’t like that, we’re gonna have to take this one off, doll. Get you a new one. Besides, you’ve been avoiding me for weeks now, don’t ya think it’s time we got better acquainted?”

She began to fidget but Manny’s grip just got tighter. Her arms were starting to hurt. The big man drew her in closer and moved an arm to the small of her back. Eva felt her heels slide through the spill. With his left arm firmly around her waist, he used his right index finger like a letter opener starting at her neckline and moving south. The delicate black pearl buttons of her one good dress began popping off like traitorous little sailors abandoning ship.

“Manny, don’t!”

“Don’t?” he chuckled. “Don’t, she says!” he said this to the room as though there were an audience around to appreciate his outrage at Eva’s insolence.

He didn’t stop until all the buttons were gone and she was standing there in her undergarments, her dress hanging on her shoulders like a flimsy open robe. His finger was just above her panty line making tickling circles on her abdomen.

“Please,” she stammered. Her body was in full revolt mode by this point and she was shaking like a leaf.

Manny wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room, not even all that cunning for a bad guy. He was interpreting Eva’s pleas and shaking body for someone who was terrified and therefore harmless, hoping someone would come to her rescue.

He was wrong.

He leaned forward and took a big whiff of her musk and then she felt the giant hand around her waist relax just a little as he used his free hand to unbuckle his trousers. Perhaps it was the excitement of what was to come but for a moment poor old Manny forgot about Eva as he wrestled with the stubborn clasp on his pants. That was all the time she needed as she jammed the broken end of the bottle top she’d been holding into his exposed neck. There was so much rage and fear directed into that swing, the broken glass sliced through skin and cartilage like it was nothing, severing Manny’s jugular in the process. He bled out on his feet staring into Eva’s hate-filled eyes with an expression of stunned surprise. His knees buckled and he was dead before he hit the floor.

Guilt, revulsion and relief all flushed through Eva’s mind as she stared down at Manny’s corpse. His eyes were still open, still surprised. She stood there frozen, unable to fully grasp what she’d done. Transported back in time to another terrible memory in the kitchen of her childhood home. Only that time it was her mother who’d done the cutting and her father lying dead on the floor. The words her wild-eyed mother spoke to her that night came flying back to her from across the void
,
he ain’t nothing but a cold dead pig now, girl. Don’t trouble yourself no more ‘bout him, you hear?

She did hear. She heard then and she heard it again now as she snapped out of her daze and spit on the lifeless body.

“Just a cold dead pig,” she said to no one in particular.

She turned, almost fell again and stumbled toward the rickety wooden stairs. It was then she looked down and remembered her dress and general state of appearance. After a moment of panic she calmed herself with a few deep breaths
.
I can fix this long enough to walk out of here alive.

If she pulled it off, she would leave the club and never come back. Maybe head south and start over where it was warmer. But first things first.

Fetching her lantern where she’d left it by the shelf she did a quick damage assessment. The body, the broken bottle and the absinthe blood stew, all things she had to make disappear. First the body.

The feeble light wasn’t much but it enabled her to explore the cellar which turned out to be much deeper than she thought. Row after row of shelves filled with wooden casks and glass bottles led to a rear wall with a small but solid looking door. A secondary storage room perhaps? Eva had to admit she was deeply curious, cats be damned. This most likely was where Manny had come from and, if she had her way, where he would be laid to rest at least until he was discovered. She tried the door. The heavy bronze knob wouldn’t budge. Leaning an ear against the wood she tried to discern if there were any sounds coming from the other side. It wouldn’t do to open it up to a room full of wise guys counting money. There were no voices but she thought she could detect running water as though someone were drawing a bath.

She hurried back to Manny’s body and rifled through his pockets until she found a large iron key. Back at the door she slid it into the hole as slow as possible which wasn’t easy because the locking mechanism was stiff. The bolt finally gave with a satisfying thunk and she turned the handle and eased the door open. A cold, damp breeze greeted her as she stood in shocked silence on the threshold of the room. Only it wasn’t a room, it was a long, dark, earthen hallway lit by the occasional torch.

The wavering light seemed to go on for quite a ways into the distance and she couldn’t tell just how long the hallway was. The immediate area by the door was wider than the passage beyond and did indeed appear to serve as a secondary storeroom filled with barrels. The air was almost tangy with an aftertaste of dead fish. The sound of running water amplified as she stepped further inside. A quick investigation revealed a large pile of burlap sacks moldering in one dark corner behind the barrels. The sacks would suit her intended purpose for Manny. She took a few steps further down the passage before she realized she should go no further. It was only a matter of time before someone came looking for Manny or for her. After all, that prized customer wouldn’t wait all night for his libations. With a sad sigh she turned her back on the passage and hustled back out to the body. Kicking off her shoes, she did her best to avoid the spill and the glass, grabbed Manny with both hands around the shirt collar and began tugging him toward the open door a few torturous inches at a time.

By the time she had dragged him through the door and sufficiently hidden him under the pile of burlap sacks she was an exhausted sweaty mess. Eva took a moment to breathe and thank her lucky stars nobody had come down the stairs or through the mysterious cave-like passage yet. Back in the main storage room she snagged a big push broom from a dusty corner and hastily swept the glass and the goop under the nearest shelf. The hard packed dirt floor looked damp from the blood and the liquor but perhaps nobody would notice unless they looked closely. Another moment was spent retrieving the second bottle of absinthe and her shoes. Then she stopped at the base of the stairs and fixed her hair the best she could under the circumstances. One hand held her dress closed while the other held the liquor bottle in a death grip. After one last look of longing toward the door at the back of the room she inhaled and began hustling up the stairs. It was time to act the part of a timid, but fun-loving cocktail waitress, at least for a few more minutes.

I popped out of my Eva trance with a profound sense of triumph and more than a little melancholy, startling Mark, Sam and Jacob in the process as I scrambled out of the easy chair. I would have dearly loved to see how Eva Goldstein got out of that speakeasy in one piece. Clearly she did as she was a very old woman before the Sickness turned her into a zombie in the very same neighborhood she’d once shilled drinks during prohibition. I was triumphant because my hunch had been right! There was a tunnel under the river or at least it was very likely. There was really only one way to find out.