'Til Death Do Us Part (78 page)

I heard hammering blows on the door. “I’ll fucking kill you!” Adam’s brother screamed. His fist blows kept raining down. The
y
eventually began to subside and were replaced by a quiet sobbing. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

I can’t lie
,
I did have enough humanity in
me to have that tug at me a bit.
I just had to keep reminding myself of what t
hey had initially come here for:
the destruction of my family.

“You willing to trade?” I asked him.

“What do you want?”
c
ame his cautious reply.

“I want all of your weapons
,
then you can take his bleeding ass out of my basement.”

“
Fine,
” I heard him say quickly.

“Fuck no
,
Chaz, I’
m not giving up my gun.
Not
here
, not now,
”
o
ne of the attackers shouted. “That bitch will cut our throats if we go back with our tails between our
—
”

A shot rang out.
I waited for the echo of it to die down before I spoke. “Chaz
,
you still there?”

“Anyone else got a problem with us giving up our weapons?”

I didn’t hear any other dissention.

“Now what?” Chaz asked.

“After you’ve put down all your weapons, with your hands raised I want you to step back from the house so that someone on t
he deck will be able to see you,
” I told him.

“How do we know you’re not going to kill us?”
h
e asked.

“Simple, I’m not you. Better hurry up
,
Adam is looking mighty pale.”

BT was at the bottom of the stairs
with everything I had asked for.
I looked over to him.

“Man
, I just got down here,
”
h
e told me.

“The exercise will do you good, it looks like you’ve been hitting the MRE oatmeal cookies a little hard lately.”

“Fuck you
,
Mike.” He turned and went back upstairs to check on the status of the gunmen.

“I love you too
,
man.”
I told him.
“And stay low
,
the damn snipers are still out there.”

“Yeah
, mom,
”
h
e told me.

“We’re waiting!” Chaz yelled impatiently.

“
You can wait another minute,
” I said under my breath.
Or maybe not
,
I thought as I looked behind me at Adam. He was about as pale
as I once figured vampires were;
I now knew that wasn’t the case, but just last year that was what I thought. Adam’s breathing was shallow and anything less than a world class hospital wasn’t going to do him much good.

“B
T says everything is good to go,
” Angel yelled down the stairs. “He also said you were an asshole.”

“Angel!”
h
e
r
brother R
yan
shouted.

“Well that’s what he s
aid,
”
s
he
defended herself.
It
kept going
,
but the door upstairs closed and the rest was lost to me.

I grabbed my rif
le and took a long look at Adam.
I wasn’t completely sure
,
but his dilated pupils gave me the impression he was no longer focusing on anything on this plane of existence. In fact
,
they were so wide
,
they looked like the last thing he had witnessed had scared the shit out of him. I wondered if that would be the last ex
pression I would have when the Dark One came to claim me. Wait…
could he claim me? I had no soul to lose? If I made it through the rest of the day I was going to grab some beers and think on that for a little while.

I made sure I was ready to fire and opened the door. Five men peered intently back at me, it was easy to determine who Chaz was by the worried expression on his face.

“
All of you turn around,
” I told them.

“See! I fucking told you he was going to kill us!”

“I’m going to check for weapons, I’ve been burned by the
honor system
before
,
”
I told them.

BT was again in the basement. “Can you cover me?” I asked him.

“You want me to do anything else? Maybe get you a glass of water, shine your shoes, do a little tap dance?”

I looked over at him questioningly.

“Sorry, little amped up. Go ahead, I’ll cover you.”

“
Gee thanks,
” I told him as I put my rifle up against
the house. I checked Chaz first;
except for a fingernail clipper he was clean as a whistle. The second man had a
n ankle pistol and a B
owie knife, the third had two grenades shoved in his front pants pockets, I was wondering if he thought I might think these were his balls and just leave them alone. The fourth was also clean, the fifth had a sawed off shotgun shoved down his pants.

“You’re kidding right?” I asked. He shrugged. “Take it out nice and slow
,
please.”

I jumped when
his gun went off. D
umb ass had wrapped his hand around the trigger, when he pulled up he fired
,
neatly obliterating the front part o
f his right front from his body.
He
toppled face fi
r
st not even attempting to break his own fall. I could hear Gary’s retching from above us.

“Whatever you do
,
Gary, don’t raise your head over the railing to puke!” I warned him. Brown bile began to leak through the floorboards above and slightly behind us.

“
So fruggin gross,
” Gary said around a mo
uthful of semi-digested lunch; a
nd it was
. T
he man’s boot had ripped in two at the top, tendons and muscles had curled up and over the exposed skin, blood drained out so quickly it was easy to see the delicate smashed white bones underneath it all.

“Don’t worry
,
man
,
you can hold on to the gu
n,
” I told the fallen man.

He was grunting in misery.
It was better than shrieks…
but not by much.

“Can I get my brother now?” Chaz asked.

“
One more thing,
” I said as I put the barrel of the second man’s ankle pistol to his head. I ripped his chain off as I did all the rest excluding the now Shoeless Joe Jackson. “
Get him,
” I said
,
stepping to the side. “Just you
, though,
” I said when two of the others turned.

Chaz ran in to the house, his cry of agony came immediately. “He’s dead!”

“
He is
?
…now
get him out of the house. And the other two, hell get t
hem all out of here, including S
tubby.”

“What do you want us to do with them?”
Steel B
alls asked.

“Drag them over to the pit, I don’t care.”

“But...but you took our vials.”

“I left Adam’
s and Stubb
y’
s on. Y
ou guys can fight for them, grab a body and get off my land.”

“Mike?” BT asked.

“No room here for mercy
, buddy
.”

“Mike?”

“BT
, if we had a jail…maybe.
Try
to hold on to the reason why they were here.”

“You’
re killing us,
” Steel Balls, said as he hefted the man Chaz had shot.

“I’m doing no more or no less
than you would have done to us,
” I told him.

The other man went over and helped Stub
by
get up. Chaz was still in the basement rocking his brother back and forth in his lap.

The other men including one of their de
ad were heading across the yard. T
hey were looking at the zombies that were eyeing them back. I wondered how large the sphere of influence for the vial would be. If they got into a tight enough huddle
,
it should protect the three of them. 

I went into the house and dragged the other three dead men out of the house as BT covered me. Their blood had mostly stopped leaking
,
but I still left a trail a blind man could follow.

The man that had been shot through the head was the worst, dropping bits of brai
n matter of the floor.
I tried to imagine it as something different
,
but I was staring straight at his head as I pulled him from his arms.

Two of the men were coming
back to gather their dead, Stubby
was sitting alone, the dead man was now burning in the kerosene at the bottom of the trench, black smoke was wafting up from his burn
ing cloth
e
s and hair. The zombie
congregation pac
ked a little tighter where Stubby
was sitting, either he looked delicious or they really liked smoked meat. A few were jostled into the trench below.

“Let’
s go,
” I told Chaz when I got the last man out.

His eyes were red-
rimmed. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

“Yeah
,
and all those people you were going to kill upstairs, they’re all I’ve got left. Get out.”

He did without any further words, hefting his brother up over his shoulder. He brushed by as he left. Within a few more minutes all of the dead raiders were now permanent fixtures with the ground. The men were looking at the gap and the zombies
,
trying to figure out how they were going to get back across. BT and I watched as one of them actually turned and began to
come back. I raised my rifle up and
he turned back to the zombies.

Steel Balls and the man who had turned
around
began to talk rapidly, their voices
rising
to a peak. It looked like Steel
Balls won. I could see Stubby
begging, his hands were up in the air, he was shaking his head back and forth and trying to scoot back as fast
as he could. Steel kicked Stubby in his bad foot. Stubby
stopped moving immediately as his scream of pain pierced the
silence
.
He
paid no attention as Steel Balls moved and grabbed the chain off his neck.

“Help me
,
please!”
Stubby
begged.

I went back inside;
BT stayed out a moment longer before joining me. I grabbed a bucket and some water out of the utility closet and had already started cleaning up stains that would never vanish.

“What happened out there
,
man?” BT asked me.

I looked up from my scrubbing. “What would you have done differently?”

“At least I
would have left them the vials,
” BT said
,
rubbing his face with his ha
nds like he was
trying to scour away the grime of the event.

“I’m going to walk you through my thoughts.”

“
Go on,
”
h
e said
,
pulling up a folding chair that I did not think was up to the task of holding him suspended in space.

“They weren’t here to borrow sugar
,
BT.”

“I get that
,
Mike
, I do,
but
that’
s cold-
blooded.”

“I’m not done.” BT motioned for me to continue. “I let them leave intact
,
they go right back to Eliza, regroup and try again
. S
he’s not just going to pat them on the shoulders and say, ‘Nice try fellas’. Maybe we stop them again, maybe we don’t
.
I’m not willing to gamble the lives of those people upstairs at all, no matter how good the odds may seem in our favor. Money is gambled, not lives. Now
,
as an added bonus
,
we have seven
more
vials
of Eliza’s brew that we can give to people upstairs. Because when
our perimeter is overrun…which it will be…
”