The King of Clayfield - 01 (21 page)

I saw old Mrs.
 
Gordon in the crowd. She'd donated items to the museum, and was a big part in our last fundraiser.
 
Toward the end of the group I saw three men in ripped and burned military fatigues. One of them was
 
wearing a helmet like
 
the ones pilots wear.

Then I
 
saw two people that
 
got me closer to being a believer
 
in the whole
 
undead hypothesis. On the ground, dragging
 
himself along,
 
was a man with only one leg. His right leg was gone just above the knee. It was a bloody stump leaving a trail behind him. He didn't act
 
like he was in pain; he was just trying to keep up with the others.
 
The second man was the rapist.
 
The
 
right side of his face was gone from Jen's shotgun blast. He was
 
up and walking. He was having trouble, though, and kept veering away from the others and bumping into things.

I felt a chill that wasn't from the air.
 
A wave of nausea hit me, and I opened my door and puked up my sandwich.

When most of them had disappeared from my line of sight, I cranked the truck and crept forward to get a better view. I watched all but the one-legged man go around the corner at
 
7th Street. The rapist Jen shot
 
was the last of
 
those still on two legs
 
to go,
 
his meandering causing him to fall behind.

I pulled the truck up in front. It was a three-story
 
building
 
that was part of the
 
old downtown businesses. It was
 
even in one of those photographs
 
from the 1920s that were hanging in city hall. It might
 
have been
 
older than that. It had been difficult to keep businesses downtown since
 
all the big chains
 
constructed their super stores on the south side of town. Everybody wanted to be part of the little strip malls that sprang up around the giants.

The right side of the old building was home to an antique store, but the left side of the building
 
had been
 
vacant for several months.
 
We'd seen the movement on the second floor of the vacant side.
 
The building itself was situated between two other buildings
 
similar to
 
it in age and architecture. One side
 
was occupied by a photography studio and the other by a pawnshop.

The one-legged man was past the pawnshop when he
 
heard and saw me. He looked back at me, then to the corner where he'd last seen the others. He decided I was more attainable, and turned around, dragging himself with his hands.

It would be a while before the
 
mob got to their destination, so I didn't expect Jen and Mr. Somerville back for several minutes. Rather than wait for them, I decided to go on inside and see who was in there. I pulled up my mask, and got out of the truck.

CHAPTER 21

This
 
could
 
never have happened in real life--me going into an old
 
building off the court square wearing a mask and carrying a .30-06 while
 
a one-legged
 
monster crawled
 
after me. Never in a million years. If I'd been told the week before that this
 
was what I'd be doing—

Then I remembered what I'd been doing the Sunday before and laughed a little to myself. Exactly one week before, about the same time, I'd been sitting on my couch in my sweatpants with a game controller in my hand playing a first person shooter.
 
The game was set in World War II in France in a town about
 
the size of Clayfield. My weapon
 
had been
 
a 7.62 mm
 
Mosin-Nagant, and
 
my targets were
 
Nazis,
 
but still, the similarities....

The one-legged man had made it to the front of the antique store, just a few feet away. I didn't want to attract more of them
 
by firing the gun, so I just let him be.

Unlike my video game, I didn't get extra lives; if they got me, I'd just
 
start fighting
 
for the other side.

The man hissed at me.

I stepped up onto the sidewalk in front of the building and tried the door. It was locked. I stepped back a little and looked up.

"Hello, up there!" I said.

The man hissed again.

"Come down! We're here to help!"

The man tried pulling himself up on the sidewalk but slipped and hit his chin. He growled.

I stepped back to the door and knocked. Nothing. I went to the truck and got out my bottle of water. It still had a little in it. I threw it at the window on the second floor. It hit then bounced down to the street. I heard a noise from inside. It sounded like a bell or a gong.

"Hello?"
 
I said.

The curtains moved, and then the bell sounded again.

I was going to try again, but the one-legged man was already chewing on the bottle.

Then I decided to
 
walk around the photography studio on the corner and go to the rear of the buildings to see if there was a back door.
 

The back door was locked, but there was a fire escape. I couldn't reach it from the ground, so I ran back to get the truck.  On my way back, I met the one-legged man coming around the corner--the little engine that could. When I ran past him, he changed direction again to follow. I pulled the truck around underneath the back windows.

I slung the rifle over my shoulder and the binoculars around my neck,
 
climbed on top of the cab of the truck, then pulled myself up onto the rusted fire escape stairs. The metal was so cold. When I climbed up on the fire escape, I could see a mass of people south of my location
 
coming from the direction of
 
Bragusberg Road, headed to the siren. Good.

I was right there--the second floor. I
 
got down on one knee. The window was curtained, so
 
I tapped on it.

"Hey!" I said. "I'm here to help you!"

The gong sounded inside. I knocked on the window again. I heard what sounded like a strangled scream. I knocked louder.

"Are you okay?"

Nothing.

I tried to open the window, but it wouldn't budge.

"I'm going to break the window! Step back!”

I stood and hit the window with the butt of the rifle. It shattered the first time. I cleaned away the remaining shards with the gun, and then I pushed the curtains aside. I squatted down and looked inside.

The room was filled with old furniture. There was a door to my left that was open to a staircase, and another door beyond that that accessed
 
the other side of the building. It looked like maybe the antique store was using the second floor of this side of the building for storage. There was a lot of old bed frames stacked up in the middle of the room and
 
leaning against a couple of wardrobes that were standing back to back. The stack of furniture sort of cut the room in half crosswise. To the far left was an old claw footed bathtub set at an angle. It was dirty and
 
missing all of its hardware.
 
A couple of chests of drawers were between me and the
 
bed frames. It created a
 
little maze in the
 
room with a narrow walkway winding through the furniture to the window on the other side.

There was
 
a woman in there on the other side of the furniture near the far window. She was sick. I could tell that she had been beautiful once, but now, she was a mess. She stank. Her
 
clothes were torn and dirty. She paced,
 
looking for a way to get to me. When she would get near the bathtub
 
the gong would sound. I looked down and there was a
 
pile of loose bed slats on the floor, and she was stepping on the end of one of them causing it to pop up and hit the tub.

I
 
eased through the window onto the broken glass and old hardwood floors. I had no intention of getting any closer to her. I just wanted to leave the building via the front door.

Then, three honks in a row. Jen and Mr. Somerville were in trouble.

"Shit."

I stepped back out the window to the fire escape and looked through my binoculars to the southwest. I couldn't see anything because of the trees and buildings blocking my view. I was tempted to go up to the third floor, or even up on the roof to get a better view, but I didn't. If they were honking, then they needed me to come get them.

The gong sounded inside again, only louder and different. I parted the curtains with the barrel of the gun, and there she was. She came out of the building fast. The end of my rifle caught her in the chest and
 
snagged
 
on her blouse, and as she came forward against the tip of the gun, she pushed me back. I got as far as the railing and stopped, then went down in a crouch to keep from being pushed over the side. She kept on coming, and the muzzle slid right up her chest and under her chin. Her fingers were inches from my face, and I pulled the trigger.
 

The rifle jumped out of my hands, and the top of her head came off.
 

One one thousand, two one thousand....
Then bits of her rained back down.

The horn honked again just as the woman's body slumped down. I pushed her, and she fell backwards through the window and landed hard. Her feet and
 
legs, in black shoes and gray tights,
 
still
 
hung outside over the windowsill at her knees. One of her shoes
 
had fallen off as she fell. The
 
tip of her
 
big toe poked out of a hole in her tights. The red polish
 
on
 
the nail was chipped. Something about that made me feel this overwhelming compassion for her the same
 
way I had for the man I had to shoot at Brian Davies' house. It was those little things--those
human
things--that got to me.

I couldn't keep doing this to myself.

The curtains sucked out
 
of the window
 
and fluttered in the breeze, and the horn honked again. I picked up my rifle.

There were little
 
bloody pieces of her head
 
all around me and on me. I would need a bath, and I'd probably have to drink again just in case. Much more of this and I
 
might become an alcoholic...for more reasons than one.

Climbing down was going to be harder than climbing up. It seemed like no matter how I situated myself, I couldn't get in a good position to drop down to the top of the truck.

The horn honked again followed by two gunshots.

I'd
 
have to go through the window after all. I tried to
 
step over her, but I wound up stepping on her. The way her body felt under my feet was sickening--firm, yet
 
soft at the same time.
 
Once inside, I ran down the stairs and out the front door.

When I got to the truck I found the one-legged man underneath the fire escape and right next to the door of the truck.

"Figures," I said.

I went around the passenger side, but it was locked. The keys were in the ignition.

Four more gun shots. They were a mixture of the .22 and the shotgun, clustered together and overlapping one another. I could
 
still hear the police siren, too.