This is the End (Book 2): Not Dead Yet (24 page)

“I think you missed a few of my sins there,” I answered while trying to catch my breath past the pain in my back.  Again, a poor word choice as the Wench brought the whip down harder and faster this time.  She didn’t stop there; she just kept whipping me over and over and the Preacher just kept reading more versus from the book.

The pain was exquisite and it was all I could do to remain upright through the blows.  Blood was trickling down my shoulder and I watched with interest as it made its way down my arm and formed a little puddle on the floor. 

After more blows than I could count, he finally stopped reading and looked down at me.  I was on all fours by that point just trying to stay alive.  “Have you found God, Angie?”

I coughed and spit onto the rug at his feet.  “Ya know, converting people would go better if you used cookies and tickling.”

I tried to laugh but only ended up in a coughing fit as I watched the rage play out over his face. 
Evil
.  I was staring into the face of evil as all of his hatred for me twisted his normally calm features into a loathing sneer.

“I guess we’ll just have to work harder with you, won’t we?” He grabbed my chin and spit the words into my face, grinning like the madman he was then nodding at the Wench. 

She grabbed my arm roughly and yanked me to my feet and out of the room.  I tripped enough that the Ogre had to grab the chains from her and drag me through the house.  He pulled me down a flight of stairs into a basement, making sure my bones hit everything they could on the way down.

We reached the bottom and he picked me up and threw me against a cement wall in the corner before grabbing my chains and looping them through rings in the wall.  He chained me standing to the wall, not leaving enough give for me to even kneel.  The pain was such that I ended up projectile vomiting all down the front of his shirt, which only earned me a few punches to the face.

The last thing I saw was a fist coming at me and then there was nothing.

Moaning
.  I could hear moaning although I wasn’t sure if it was coming from me or not.  The only light was coming from a few small windows high on the walls but there was enough moonlight for me to get a better look at the basement through my swollen eyes.

My entire body hurt so bad I had to fight not to throw up again as I looked around trying to place the sounds.  Panic exploded through me when I realized there were fucking zombies chained up on the other side of the room to the walls like I was.

Oh fuck, this was bad;
really bad
.  I started yanking on the chains in earnest looking for even a little bit of slack but the damn things were infallible.  I focused on taking deep even breaths and taking stock of the situation at hand.

There were four zombies chained to the wall across from me, all in various stages of decay.  I counted two men, one woman and one child, which really made my skin crawl.  They were all wearing the same sort of clothing all the other freaks around here were so I figured they were family who’d been infected but instead of putting them down like a normal goddamned person, they kept them chained up down here like animals.

The smell of my blood was driving them into a frenzy and I couldn’t contain my fear as they fought vigorously against their restraints in their pursuit of my blood.  If they got lose and bit me, sure, I wouldn’t turn but I could still die while being eaten alive which was the exact reason I didn’t camp or surf; bears and sharks.

After a scary-assed eternity, they settled back down to just moaning and hissing at me, which was leaps and bounds better than trying to break free, but it still meant I was in for a long night.  The adults weren’t so bad; they were just dirty and bloody but the little girl, she freaked me out to no end.

I’d seen my fair share of disturbing things up to this point but she looked like several things had used her as a chew toy before giving up.  I doubted she’d been more than 8 or 9 with rosy, cherub cheeks and golden hair.  Now part of her cheek was gone, exposing bone and her skull hung open, giving me a great view of the circus of insects feasting in her cranium.  A beetle scuttled out of her skull and down her face and I threw up all over again.

Everything was already out of my stomach so I just continued to dry heave, which made the pain worse, which made me heave harder; it was a vicious cycle but I didn’t dare pass out with corpses so uncomfortably close to me.

Instead I closed my eyes and focused on taking short, measured breaths and trying to calm the fuck down.  I could already feel the muscles and skin in my back trying to fuse themselves back together which was good, but fuck it hurt.  When I got free I would raze this place to the ground and kill everyone.  I wouldn’t normally take pleasure in killing anyone that wasn’t already dead but these people made me miss Ian which was a sure sign I was losing my grip on reality.

Hours passed in a haze of pain and delirium.  I could no longer tell if it was night or day and frankly didn’t care anymore.  I watched the dead in front of me still focused on making me their next meal and giggled at our fate.  I fell into complete hysterical laughter when I looked down to see blood dripping down my ankle and onto the ground below.  Either my period had chosen that very moment to start or I had some relatively serious internal injuries.  On the bright side, at least I was pretty sure I definitely wasn’t pregnant, which was always cause for celebration.

A fever raged through me making the blood still spilling from my veins feel like liquid lava, but it meant I was still alive, which meant there was still hope.

To pass the time, I’d been singing to the zombies, which only fueled their rage.  I sang the entire soundtrack to ‘South Park: The Movie’ and apparently they weren’t fans.  I was just finishing up the score to ‘Hello Dolly’ when I heard the door at the top of the stairs creak and the sound of heavy footsteps descending into my Hell.

The Ogre stopped at the bottom of the stairs with something large in his hands and stared first at me, then the zombies.  He must have finished his visual inspection because he started towards them without further ado.

I watched as he held   something that looked suspiciously like a dead cat up to their mouths and started heaving all over again as they tore into its flesh like rabid dogs.  Grinning over his shoulder at my discomfort, he made quite the show of feeding them.

When there was little left but bones, he sauntered slowly over to me and waved the carcass in my face.  “You want some too?” He exploded in laughter at his own hilarity as I glared at him between dry heaves.

He held it close enough that I could smell the dead flesh and fur and all I could do was turn my head away and press myself further against the wall trying to escape the noxious aroma.

Yelling from upstairs interrupted his game and he quickly made his way back up the stairs, stopping only to throw the carcass on the ground near me before disappearing.  I looked at the fresh blood trailing down the faces of the zombies then down to the dead cat and prayed fervently that animals couldn’t turn.  Then I thought about Roscoe and prayed he was ok.  No one had seen him after we’d been captured so I could only hope he was alive and unscathed somewhere out in the wilderness.

It wasn’t long before rats came out from somewhere in the walls to finish off the cat and in a sudden burst of clarity I knew I had to find a fucking way out.  I was losing it and if I stayed down here much longer any humanity left in me would be wiped out.

Trying to block out the sound of tiny mouths tearing at what was left of flesh and the moans of the zombies, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall, mentally revisiting every idea of escape I’d previously had and dismissed in the event I missed anything.

Chapter 12:

The door creaked.  I opened an eye at the startling sound and tried to swim to the forefront of consciousness.  I’d been chained to the wall in the basement for days without food or water.  It had been so long since anyone had come down that I’d started to wonder if they’d forgotten about me, but apparently not.

The footsteps at the top of the stairs were little more than a whispering wind as the girl who’d bathed me so long ago floated to the bottom of the stairs.  She walked over to me and the sympathy on her face was more than I could deal with.

She held a bottle of water to my parched and dry lips and I drank greedily, choking on the warm liquid but grateful nonetheless.  Moonlight was streaming in through the little window which at least told me it was nighttime, although I still had no idea how many days I’d been down here.

Producing a key from her skirt, I closed my eyes and steeled myself for movement as she went about unlocking my chains.  Finally free, I fell to the ground with great gasps.  Everything in my body protested at the movement after being chained upright for so long but I languished in the pain I once resented.

Kneeling, I took a few deep breaths, fingers closing around the item that had been my focus.

Sometime before, I’d managed to grab a hold of the femur of the dead cat after the rats had finished with it and had been using my foot to first break it then drag the jagged edge across the cement floor to sharpen the broken end.

I took a final breath and shot to my feet, lodging the bone deep into the girl’s throat and watched the surprise play out over her plain features.  I’d hit the larynx just right, preventing her from calling out as blood flowed freely from the artery, spraying my face and the wall behind me. 

When the light faded from her eyes, I gently lowered her body to the ground and pulled the bone out of her neck and rammed it through her ear, effectively destroying her brain just in case.

The zombies chained to the other wall went wild with bloodlust and hunger which only made me hurry considering all the noise they were making would draw attention.

I ran over and stabbed all four of them repeatedly with my crude weapon until they were undead no more.  Relief flooded through me as I watched the little girl cease her flailing and fall lifelessly against her chains.

I stood there panting from effort for a few moments, staring at the five corpses surrounding me; if I didn’t count the cat.  I was now covered in more blood and gore that had splattered me from the zombies, but I frankly couldn’t care less.

Turning back to the girl I’d killed; I pulled the keys from her hands and tied them to my own dress.  I used the femur to shred the bottom of my dress until I could rip it off from below my knees so I didn’t trip.

Standing, I looked to the door she had come from then to the window.  I had no guns, no knives and fuck only knew where my beloved machete was so the window was my best bet.

The window was too high for me to reach and I looked around frantically for something to stand on.  The only things in the basement were me and the bodies.  I walked over to the now dead zombies and started unlocking their chains and dragging them over to the wall, where I proceeded to stack them on top of each other.  I grabbed the girl who’d been alive and threw her on top and hoped it was high enough.

Barefoot, I climbed the mountain of rotting flesh I’d created and tried not to give too much thought to whatever was squishy between my toes.  Reaching up, I could just reach the window so I jammed the bone underneath and started to wriggle it loose.

It wasn’t locked, but definitely hadn’t been opened in a while and it took a lot of jiggling to get it loose enough that I could slide it up.  A chill of night air hit my face, causing tears to slide down my cheeks from sheer joy.

Not wasting any time, I tucked the bone into my dress and grabbed the sill, pulling myself up.  Under normal circumstances it would’ve been impossible for me to pull my weight up to the window.  After being injected, it would’ve been slightly inconvenient.  After being beaten and starved for days it was a struggle.

I placed my toes in the cracks in the concrete and used that as a foot hold to launch myself up until I could pull the top of my body out of the window.  I stopped and hung there for a minute, trying to catch my breath and take stock of my surroundings.

The window faced the back of the house and I could see the entrance to the cells they’d kept us in when we’d first arrived, but there thankfully wasn’t anyone around.

Dragging myself the rest of the way out of the window, I grabbed the bone and rolled onto the grass with a heavy ‘thump’.  I lay there and stared at the stars through the tears still falling from my eyes and let my anger build until I had the strength to keep moving.  Pulling myself to my feet, I half ran, half stumbled across the great lawn in a mad dash for the fence. 

There wasn’t anyone patrolling this area at the moment, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be around sooner or later.  I reached the fence and threw my body against the chain link, desperately searching for a way out.