The Damned (4 page)

“You can’t do this,” Scott said. “It just isn’t… right. Where’s your humanity, for chrissakes?”

Warren
chuckled, laughing out the words, “
Humanity?
Look around, Scotty-boy.” He nodded at the pathetic looking creature holding a gnawed-on piece of leg in its lap. “Look at
that
. That’s where our humanity went—seven weeks ago while you were sleepin’ like a baby down at your rehabilitation center.” He paused for a moment, looked up at Lila, and then back at Scott. Finally, he said, “You’ll see, eventually. Whoever you were before all this happened, you won’t be for long.”

Dub sat on the edge of a three-foot-high concrete wall, the top of the wall level with and bordering what once had been the finely manicured lawn of a real estate office, covered now by dust and ash and brittle pieces of dead grass. On the sidewalk before him, his four companions busied themselves with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and rations of roasted flesh carved from the burned and blackened corpse that had been laid out like an unholy sacrifice next to Dub on the flat surface of the wall.

Dub wasn’t happy about losing those men, and he sure as shit didn’t like it that no one had paid a price for them. Four men splattered from here to Sunday—by what? Hell, they didn’t even know who’d done it. Whoever it was must have been some brave motherfuckers. Not brave enough to stick around to face them, though. Too bad—he’d like to have gotten a good look at those cocksuckers, get a little up-close-and-personal action going so they could see what grabbin’ the horns does for you. See what happens when you fuck with The Devil’s Own. Maybe what was left of the spics showed up while they were busy with the woman, caught them by surprise and threw a little payback on their asses. God knew they had some paying back to do. Dub sure as shit knew it. He just wished he could have sniffed out their hiding spot while he and the boys were inspecting the carnage. Somewhere close, he was sure of it. They hadn’t time enough to get very far—the blood was too fresh, the invigorating scent of death too new. Too bad the midget wasn’t around to give ‘em away. Give ‘em away like he’d given that woman up—sure as hell served her up when his balls were on the line. Served her up and Dub kept his word and let him walk away.

This time.

Four less in the army of Dub, the warrior king of The Devil’s Own, fresh off a seven-year-stretch when the shit hit the fan. Thank God for that day—or the Devil. Whichever of those cocksuckers tossed down the fire sure did Dub a favor. A huge goddamn favor. Seven years into Life-without, the doors popped open and out walked Dub. Hell on earth, baby. Dog eat dog and the strong survive, the winner gets the spoils and the meek fall to the back of the line for a good old fashioned ass-fucking.

If they’re lucky, that’s all they get.

No more shuckin’ and jivin’, hiding their activities from the cops. Hell, the cops were on their side now. What was left of them. What happened and why, he didn’t know and didn’t give a shit. He was glad all those people disappeared, and couldn’t have cared less where they’d gone, or who had taken them. God? More power to ya. The Devil? Muchas gracias, baby!

Out of the slammer and into the seat of power he’d left when that rat-bastard Sammy Figgs fingered him for those kids. Two college-boy motherfuckers too smart for their own good, who happened to have some high-powered ambulance chaser’s daughter along when Dub finally caught up to their asses, long after the blow and the money had run out.

Dub’s blow.

Dub’s money.

Dub and Figgsy and Rock-steady Teddy, and three punk-ass kids in the middle of the woods on a cold December night—a Crème Brulee torch and a razor-sharp knife, a shovel and a chainsaw and a Colt ’45, all combined to give those rip-off bastards a night they’d never forget. If they lived through it, which they didn’t. Who
could’ve
lived through something like that?

Dub took a hit off the whiskey bottle one of the boys had left tightly nestled in the inverted V below the corpse’s burnt patch of pubic mound, shaking his head at two of his men about to come to blows over a piece of ass—a blackened hunk of ass, to be precise. Bert and Ernie, whose names were not Bert and Ernie but were as empty as the two
Sesame Street
Muppets, moving aimlessly along until they found the hand of God shoved up their asses, propelling them forward with a dutiful purpose.

Dub’s hand.

Dub looked up at the same cold grey sky he’d seen every day for damn near as long as he could remember—no sun, no moon, no blue sky or fluffy white clouds, or stars at night. Nothing but that dreary grey haze settling over them like a death shroud. For the umpteenth time, he wondered what exactly had happened, what had caused this mysterious phenomenon.

When the cell doors flew open, half the screws up and disappeared. Those who didn’t were torn to shreds by the shrieking masses of inhumanity pouring forth from their six-by-ten cages. Dub didn’t hang around for any of that shit. The doors clanged open and the riots started, and Dub walked his ass straight out of D-block, down the corridor past damn near every act of depravity known to man as he made his way through several wide-open, unmanned checkpoints, stopping only long enough to run a sharp-ended piece of metal flange through the eyeball of Ike Forsham, a particularly nasty guard who’d taken it on himself to make Dub’s life a living hell. (Like it wasn’t already.) Too bad for Ike he didn’t vanish with the others. Too bad for Ike somebody strung him up naked, upside-down with his guts lying across his bruised and bloodied chest.

Too bad for Dub the son of a bitch couldn’t feel the metal gouging his eye socket. Didn’t stop Dub from giving it a good twist once it was in, though. Didn’t stop him from spitting on the prick, either. Dub just wished he could’ve been there to see what else had been done to Angry Ike. He left Forsham swinging over a slick pool of coagulating blood, suspended from a set of handcuffs looped around a metal beam, buried deep into the prison guard’s swollen ankles.

Down the hall he went, weaving through bands of stunned revelers, who seemed to have no idea what they should be doing, other than brutalizing guards and going at each other and anyone else they could get their hands on like roving packs of attack dogs… through the mess hall and into the kitchen, where he found three black inmates pinning a guard with a butcher knife buried in his gut against a blood-soaked wooden counter, the guard shrieking while a fourth inmate hacked off his fingers and tossed them into a pot of thick, crimson liquid that bubbled up like a frothing witch’s brew.

Blood Feast,
thought Dub, as he left the laughing inmates to the gruesome business of seeing how much of the guard could be chopped away before the screams stopped and the life was bled from him.
Blood Feast,
he thought, and wondered if they would actually eat from the pot.

Out the back door he went, navigating the grounds until he suddenly found himself staring in stunned disbelief at the unguarded prison entrance—unguarded and unlocked.

Dub found an unoccupied police car parked at the curb, keys in the ignition, the engine still running, as if the cop had pulled over and… vanished—yes, vanished, just like Dub’s cellmate, the poor bastard he’d been brutalizing long and hard for the last six months; disappeared right in front of Dub, seconds before the cell-doors clanged open and the screaming and shouting began. Dub had no time to consider what that had meant when he hopped into the police car and roared away from those cold, stone prison walls, but he’d had plenty of time to think about it since. Was it true, what he’d been told, that some kind of biblical Rapture had occurred, plucking all the righteous people from the face of the planet? And what did that mean, that Bernie the forlorn accountant with calluses on his knees for constantly blowing Dub the past six months really
was
innocent, framed by the so-called ‘crooked son of a bitch’ who’d been banging Mrs. Bernie on the sly? So-called by Bernie every time he exploded into a raging, fitful tirade—usually in the middle of the night, hours after Dub had bent him crying over the edge of his bunk. And what about Figgsy? Dub would’ve bet just about anything
that
cocksucker hadn’t been swept up to… to where? Heaven?

Dub took another swig of whiskey, returning the bottle to its resting place as he stared out across the grey horizon. He didn’t know if he could get used to that concept, didn’t know if he actually believed it. Maybe they were in the middle of a nuclear holocaust or something, maybe all that fire raining down had been warheads soaring across the sky. Maybe the rag-heads had finally dug up Sadaam’s weapons of mass destruction and loosed them against the world. But Dub didn’t believe that, not really. He’d seen Bernie wink out of existence like a turned-off television, leaving behind nothing but the space he had occupied. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t. He’d been told about the guards, but he’d actually
seen
Bernie. Whatever it was, it wasn’t some nuclear rag-head bullshit, and whatever it was didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now except staying alive and keeping the wolves at bay.

Dub picked up his machete from a patch of dust and ash by the concrete wall, stood up and said, “You boys about ready?”

“Yeah,” said Bert.

“Sure,” Ernie said, as the other three nodded their agreement.

“Well, let’s get going then. We’ve got business tonight.”

Ernie’s eyes grew wide as Dub raised the machete. Bringing it down in a high-arcing swing sent the corpse’s head thumping like a misshapen medicine ball down the rough concrete stairs it dropped onto. He picked it up, fingers through the eyeholes like a bowling ball, and carried it to his Harley Davidson Sportster, parked at the curb in front of four more Harleys that had been taken fresh off the showroom floor six and a half weeks ago when the thumb in the dike of civil law gave way and the shit spinning through the fan blades of a crumbling society finally stuck to the wall. Commandeered by Bert and Ernie and pals, and Charlie K., the reigning leader of The Devil’s Own.

Dub’s sawed-off shotgun was in its leather sheath, strapped to the hog like the legendary buffalo hunters two hundred years before. A chrome riser tipped with the iron cross of
Germany
rose from the back of the bike, the cross welded in place by Dub himself when he’d taken possession of the Sportster. He lifted the head, jamming it in place atop the iron cross—just as he had slammed Charlie K’s freshly severed head down the day the prick insisted that he, not Dub, would rule The Devil’s Own.

They left the bizarre scene behind and made their way back to the
Park
West
Rehabilitation
Center
, where they happened upon a police car parked right outside the place. This took Scott completely by surprise, because he didn’t remember seeing it when he’d staggered away from the building. But who could blame him for missing it after witnessing that bizarre creature squirming up the sidewalk like a giant tadpole?

There it was, sitting directly in front of the walkway that lead up to the entrance, covered by the same grey ash that seemed to be spread over the entirety of this dreary landscape. Scott leaned in through the open window and popped the trunk, and the three of them proceeded to the rear of the car. There in the trunk was the box of shells Scott had hoped he would find, along with a bullhorn and jumper cables, billy-clubs and citation books, an old first basemen’s mitt and a couple of bats. Several scuffed-up baseballs also lay scattered throughout the wide-open compartment. Scott wondered how long it had been since they’d last seen action, and what had happened to the people who may have used them.

Lila leaned against the car while Scott opened the box of shells and began feeding them into his weapon.
Warren
stood at the curb, looking up and down the street for a moment before glancing over his shoulder at Lila, who was staring directly at him.

“What?” he said.

She smiled—more smirk than smile, really—patted her shoulder holster but said nothing.

Scott, finished with loading the shotgun, had leftover shells but no pockets to store them in. So he turned to Lila, who opened her backpack and held it out to him. He spied a package of Hostess Twinkies when he dropped the remaining shells through the opening, and the thought occurred to him that he had no idea when he had last eaten. And that thought led him to a place he really didn’t want to visit, a dark place full of unavoidable questions, like: had he really been vegetating in that room for seven weeks? He didn’t see how that could be. How could he have survived with a hole in his head and no food or water, or any nourishment at all? And what about the guy in the bed next to his, how long had it taken for his corpse to reach that level of decay? The nurses, the doctors and staff who had kept him alive—where were they? Surely he didn’t just lie there with the needles and the tubes and a dead man rotting in the bed next to his. It didn’t make any sense. None of it. That was not how the universe worked. He wanted the whole thing to be a dream, a nightmare brought on by his sudden dismissal and the subsequent fight that surely had come about the minute he’d walked through the door that evening. He wanted to wake up in his comfortable bed and find Sandi snuggled up next to him. But that wasn’t going to happen, because he was not asleep. This was not a nightmare. And that led him to the darkest, most horrifying conclusion of all, that he was dead and this was Hell. How else could he have survived all this time without eating? The answer was simple: he couldn’t have. He didn’t.

“Hey.”

Scott looked up at Lila, chuckling. “They were right.”

“Huh?”

“About Hostess Twinkies surviving a nuclear holocaust.” He plucked loose the snack cake and tore open its brittle plastic wrapping. “That’s what it looks like around here, you know. Like a bomb went off somewhere in the distance and nuclear winter settled in. Unless I’m dead.”

Warren
snickered. “You back on that shit?”

Scott took a bite of his Twinkie, surprised at how fresh the thing seemed, the tantalizing taste as he chewed and swallowed, took another bite and chewed and swallowed some more. “God, I’m so hungry,” he said, and then popped the rest into his mouth.

“Yeah,” said Lila. “Me too. What kind of food you got stashed, little man?”

“Just a bunch of canned shit. You know: Spam, soup, sardines. Mostly Spam.”

“Well, let’s get to it.”

“Follow me, sister.”

“What about the car?” Scott asked, already weary from walking, even though they hadn’t journeyed very far.

“It won’t work,” Lila told him. “Even if we had the keys, it wouldn’t start. If it would, it wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Yeah,” said
Warren
. “Let’s just get outa here before somebody wanders up and starts some shit.”

Back up the street they went, toward the human barbecue pit Scott most definitely did not want to revisit—fortunately for him, they veered off to the east several blocks before reaching the place. Lila kept an eye on
Warren
and, Scott, who felt much more secure with a fully loaded shotgun in his hands, kept a watchful eye up and down the street. Once, he thought he saw something moving in the shadows between a couple of buildings they were passing by, but nothing materialized as they continued on their way, and he finally came to believe that after everything he’d been through today, his eyes were simply playing tricks on him. But his hands stayed firmly gripped on the shotgun and his finger wrapped the trigger, ready to cut loose at a moment’s notice. And that was what he figured he would have: a moment's notice before some psychotic freak of nature came swarming up out of the woodwork, or maybe a band of brutes with their spiked bats ready to do God only knew what to Scott and his traveling companions.

They walked up the street a ways, through the dust and swirling ash that seemed to be materializing out of nowhere… past a bus and a van, and a burnt-out shell of a Honda Accord someone had left upended on its side in the middle of the roadway. Scott wondered briefly if it was the same vehicle that had set this whole sorry ball of wax into motion with a tap of its breaks on a congested highway on a blistering hot August day, so long ago now that Scott barely remembered it. What he might do to the guy if he ever got his hands on him, he didn’t know, but walking down this desolate street at the ass-end of the dreary universe he found himself in, he thought he might like to find out.

They followed Warren for another fifteen minutes or so, down the streets and over the curbs as they passed through what appeared to Scott to be a block of long-abandoned businesses: a doughnut shop here, there a dress shop; a jewelry store with a wide-open door, the front window beside it smashed out and nothing at all in the display case it framed. In the distance, the charred and burned-out remnants of a gas station reminded Scott of how bleak his situation was, and for a brief moment his mind went back to
how
. How could his town have been turned into
this?

They had distanced themselves from the shops and were moving along at a steady clip when
Warren
came to a sudden stop at the entrance to an alleyway. A row of warehouses stood on either side of the narrow, one lane strip of asphalt stretching out before them.

“This way,” he said, and Lila said, “I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“
What?
What do you think? It’s too narrow, too confined and too many dark doorways. Something happens in there, we might not make it out alive.”

“Seriously,”
Warren
said. “I go this way all the time. Believe me: this is much better than circling around the main roads. That route, I
have
run into trouble.
Biker boys and trolls, all kinds of fucked-up shit.
I dodged it all, but I’m little and I can blend in with the scenery. The three of us, though? Let’s just say I don’t like the odds.”

“Yeah, and I don’t like the alley. Like I said: it’s too confined. And it’s not like we’re defenseless.”

“What? You think you’re the only people packin’ firepower around here? Damn near everybody I’ve run into is. We just got lucky with those behemoth motherfuckers back there. Don’t mean our luck’s gonna hold up, though. Not by a long shot. I know
I
sure as hell don’t wanta chance it. C’mon, let’s do the smart thing. Down the alley and through a couple of yards and we’re home free.”

Scott didn’t want to go into the ally. There was no telling what might be lurking in the darkened entryways scattered between here and where the thing ended, and, shotgun or no shotgun, he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what was down there. But into the alley they went, Scott chambering a round while Lila freed her weapon from its moorings, and
Warren
strolled casually along as if he indeed had passed this way before and it was no problem at all. A smattering of dumpster bins lay like miniature barges along the way. Several aluminum trash cans scattered up and down the block stood sentry in front of their darkened doorways.

A distant rumbling brought the trio to an abrupt stop.

“Over here,”
Warren
said as he ran to the backside of a dumpster, and Lila and Scott followed, the three of them peeking around the flat metal surface as the roaring—which Scott now recognized as the sound of motorcycles—grew closer. The shotgun, and the fact that Lila was beside him, weapon in hand, made him feel safe, as safe as he could feel, anyway, standing in a deserted alley with a hole in his head and a razor-toothed midget, who most definitely would have left him for dead on the side of the road had Lila not happened along. He figured they’d be okay, though. Even if somebody looked up the alley, they wouldn’t see anything—Scott hadn’t seen much when he’d peered into the narrow entrance.

Unless they pulled into the alley.

Might see plenty, then, if they roared down the alley and one of them spotted Scott and his companions, or sensed they were there. There’d be hell to pay then, Scott knew, and as his finger once again snaked through the trigger-guard, he resolved that if there was trouble then let it come. If there was
hell to pay,
he’d
be the Paymaster.

Five riders roared by on their bikes, so fast that Scott barely caught a glimpse of the tricked-out chrome frames supporting their massive girths. But he did get a look at the jackets they wore, the same sleeveless garments he’d seen back at the pit with
The Devil’s Own
emblem on its back.
The Devil’s Own,
an apt name for a group of sick and twisted Neanderthals whose depravities included burning women at the stake and happily crunching their charred nipples. A chill went through Scott as the roar of the bikes once again grew distant—if they’d do that to a woman, what in the hell would they do to him?

“Glad y’all followed me in here now, aren’t ya?”

“No shit,” Scott said, and Lila nodded her agreement, the gun resting against her thigh as she turned to look up the alley. “Better get going,” she said, and
Warren
said, “Yep.” He stepped away from the dumpster and started up the middle of the narrow passageway, Lila and Scott at his heels, both their weapons held at the ready.

“So, Lila,” Scott said. “What’s your story?”

“You don’t want to know my story.”

“Sure I do. I want to know everything I can. I
need
to know everything I can so I can work out what’s happening here.”

“Look, all you need to know is: right here, right now, we’ve been thrown together in a fucked-up situation, and as bad as it is, if we don’t keep our eyes peeled and our minds sharp, we could end up a lot worse off. A
lot
worse off. As far as my story goes: I’m not telling you shit about me. It’s a horrible mess and it’s none of your fucking business.”

Lila quickened her pace, leaving Scott and Warren behind as she hurried up the alley, swiping a hand across her cheek. Scott wondered if she was brushing tears off the jagged scar he’d seen running along her face, and how in the hell the thing had come to be there in the first place.

“Bad,” said Warren, and Scott said, “
What?
”

“Whatever she did, it must’ve been pretty bad, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. Like I told you back at the pit: all the decent folks are gone and the damned are walking the earth. She’s done something she isn’t proud of. So have I, so have those woman-roasting Devil’s Own pricks—or maybe they
are
proud. Hell, I don’t know. I do know I’ve done some fucked-up shit I wouldn’t tell anybody about, much less you. What
I
want to know is: what the fuck did you do to end up in this shit?”

What
had
he done? If
Warren
was right and some kind of Rapture had called the chosen flock to Heaven and left the sinners behind, what had he done that was so bad he’d be denied passage? Had his job as a claims specialist sent him into this hell-hole, all the lying and conniving and getting over on ill-informed and inexperienced customers, people who had relied on being treated fair-and-square by one of the nation’s largest trucking companies, only to find themselves snagged on the shit-end of some asinine corporate policy, holding hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in liability for freight American had damaged, or flat-out lost?
Thou shalt not steal
. Well, Scott may not have stolen, but he and his mealy-mouthed bullshit excuses had put a dent in many a person’s income. Or was it what happened back on the Interstate? Surely beating that guy on the side of the road hadn’t sent him here. Hell, the guy
shot
him, for chrissakes. Maybe it was the women.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Like nobody ever did
that
shit.
Just him and about a billion other guys roaming the planet.
And there were just two… Those were the thoughts running through Scott’s head when a trashcan rattled and the shotgun rose up, Scott firing before he even knew what he was doing while Warren took off running with Scott dead on his heels, the shotgun blast ripping away a patch of aluminum leaving an old black guy who’d been hiding behind the receptacle shouting, “WHAT THE FUCK!”