Well Fed - 05 (10 page)

Talbert brandished the machete, looking to hack a head.

Benny wailed hysterically, thrashing against his bonds and swinging, his wavering feet not a meter above the teeming pool.

“C’mon,” Gus said and turned away.

“You will
not
,” Mortimer warned, his voice cold. “You will
watch
, else…”

With that, the rope spun out in a lick of sinewy heat, and Benny plummeted to within a foot of the nearest set of hooked fingers. The man freaked, lifting his knees to his stomach.

“
Don’t
!” Talbert screamed.

“Move anywhere, and I will finger the controls to drop him. Straight down.”

“You’re going to fuckin’ kill him anyway!” Gus shouted over the ravenous chorus and Benny’s screeching.

“Yes. I am. I am. But in the moments
prior
to his death, before that mind-freezing instance where the first finger grazes a bare toe, then the bottom of the foot, the ankle—grabbing it in a graveyard death clench. Pulling the rest of him down into that festering morass where others can touch, can…
grip
. And then, that first exquisite
bite
––every bit as electric and brain blowing as, say, slamming a car door on your finger. The head being thrown back, the sounds as one’s flesh is devoured. In slow, gnawing mouthfuls.
That’s
what I want you to behold. To experience. As fucking
penance
for ever driving up my lane and believing you could trespass on my property.”

With another lurch of the rope, Benny shrieked as he plummeted, his toes dipping into that wiggling surface of fingers. The contact made him jerk his limbs back up to his belly, as if he were performing a midair crunch.

“
TALLLLLLBERRRRRT
!”

Hearing his name, the man slumped to his knees, eyes bulging helplessly. He pulled back his machete arm to throw it, but Gus stopped him.

“No,” he said to Talbert’s broken face. “That’s not going to do a damn thing.”

“
TALLLLLLBERRRRRT
!”

And then a new sound, a chainsaw starting up once again, chewing into the evil hide of the house, caused both men to look over their shoulders.

“Yessss,” Mortimer purred. “Life goes on. And walls must fall. Stephanie has been instructed to continue releasing the hounds. Flood the second floor. Part of why I wish you to see your friend’s demise. The upper floors had never been breached until you little shit stains came along. You see––you see I mean to catch
you
as well. Catch you and sling you up, cock swinging and bare assed like your squealing little piggy friend there, maybe even headfirst this time, or one will be headfirst while the other one hangs by his fingers, feeling every bone snap as your own body weight pulls the joints apart.”

“
Apart
!” Mortimer screamed into the microphone. “
While the other one has his fucking eyes chewed out
!”

Gus gripped Talbert’s shoulder but got pushed away. He stumbled back a step and saw the approaching shadows emerging from the corridor, creeping along like intrepid explorers of an undiscovered country, lipless grins blazing.

Never should have left the farm
. Gus swore, taking up his bat.

Overhead, Mortimer babbled on with his hateful rant, leaving no doubt in Gus’s mind the man’s brain had long since short fused. Crazy bastard could be shitting in his own hand and writing on the walls, for all Gus knew.

“
Talbert! Oh, Jesus! NONONONOOOOOOAHHHHH!
”

Gus swung at an undead workman dressed in a blood-caked T-shirt and jeans. The bat crumpled the workman’s skull and spattered moldy jelly against the far wall. As it dropped to its knees, Gus hammered another brainpan, mashing it into its shoulders and skewing its fleshless jaws into a weird V. Arms reached for him, and he swatted them away with a series of swings, angling himself toward the unobstructed corridor on the other side of the lounge area. Benny howled in the background, pausing only long enough to reload his lungs. Unimaginable agony turned his words into a blaring siren.

Mortimer continued insisting that Talbert and Gus watch,
watch
how trespassers were punished in this part of the world, actually swearing at them to look, vowing even more disturbing punishment once they were caught.

“Talbert!” Gus roared, roundhousing a gimp and removing its jaw in a burst of rubbery flesh. “
Talbert
!”

Talbert retreated from the railing, offering a glimpse of Benny being lowered into that chilling vat of death, head thrashing on his shoulders while his vocal cords frayed. Gus didn’t want to imagine what happened first––Benny’s legs tired, and he had to lower them into that nest of mouths and claws, or he just kept being lowered until the zombies took him whole.

Mortimer screamed, all civility gone from his voice, cursing the two men as they smashed and chopped their way through attacking deadheads. Talbert sided with Gus, and together they retreated from the oncoming front of undead. The foremost of the zombies tripped and fell over their headless brethren, revealing the corridor behind them choked wall-to-wall with shadows.

The lights went out.

And Mortimer
screeched
into the microphone like the singer in a death-metal band stuck in a rage, a madman’s squawking, oddly in sync with the furious song of the chainsaw. The corridor walls shook with the aural warfare, unnerving Gus.

“I’m gonna rip that old fucker’s nutsack off,” Talbert swore in the dark.

“I’ll hold him down,” Gus vowed, flipping up his visor so he might see a little better in the decadent tomb. They fumbled along, passing open doors, and scampered up a short flight of steps before heading through another stone archway into a midnight-black living room. Talbert ran around outlines of plush recliners and crystal coffee tables, toward an archway on the far wall.

Then he halted. Gus drew up beside him.

The chainsaw had stopped.

Mortimer had ceased his caterwauling.

Poor Benny, however, did not stop. His death cries sounded fainter in the distance, delirious, almost completely dunked into that tank of dead limbs, open mouths fastening onto Benny’s naked flesh.

Gus shook himself free of the image.

“They’re coming,” Talbert said, looking back. Gus glanced one way and then the other, trying to hear.

“You sure on that?”

Talbert’s dark features faced him. “Oh shit, yeah. That bastard with the chainsaw opened up another stairway.”

“You can hear them?”

Talbert’s shadowy head nodded. The man was holding it together better than expected, and for that Gus was grateful.

“Oh shit,
run
,” Talbert barked, leaping through the archway and bolting to the right. “Follow me,” he called out.

Gus intended to do just that, but the house interior was nearly black. He crashed into a table, kicked a fallen vase, and hit a low-hanging arch with his shoulder. Talbert turned a corner, and when Gus followed, he saw another railing of squat columns, another set of stairs, and a teeming black gush of bodies pulling themselves through a new hole, staining the dull glow of dreamy white.

“Flooding the upstairs, all right,” Gus observed.

“Yeah, but I know something,” Talbert said and half smiled. “I know where another set of stairs are. This way.”

As they hurried along, barely navigating the hallways, Talbert explained. “While I was here, I did get some exploring done. Fuckhead Morty can’t completely board up the rotunda, and that’s where the staircase rings the walls right up to the third level.”

“So?”

“So? Chainsaw Steffy is on his way there now. And I’m betting he’ll be delayed by whatever dead fucker’s still below hunting for us.”

They passed through halls, dens, and even kitchenettes until they raced through a dim gallery lined with landscape paintings. The far wall opened into the majestic space of the rotunda, a design of metal and glass stolen straight out of a fairy-tale ballroom. Above, night sparkled, seen through vast panes of glass somehow molded into the cavernous dome Gus had seen from outside the mansion. No shutters barred the heavens from above. An eerie marble staircase with elegant pillars coiled upward along the walls, seemingly glowing in the low light, to end at the topmost level. Narrow archways were evenly spaced apart on the first level, branching into halls that led to mystery.

“Wait,” Talbert said, reaching in behind the chest plates of his armor. He pulled out a fancy rope. “I cut this off a window. Used it to haul myself up to the second level here.”

He tied one end off around his waist and offered the other to Gus. “Take this.”

“And what?”

“What are you doing?” Mortimer’s suspicious voice clicked overhead.

The two men ignored him. Talbert glanced back the way they’d come. “Get down there and stop that masked fuck from sawing open those barriers and letting more zombies up here.”

“How many are in this place?”

Talbert shook his head. “I’m figuring we all must’ve put down a hundred so far, and more keep showing up. He must have a goddamn reserve stashed away.”

“Stephanie, they’re at the rotunda,” Mortimer’s voice barked. “It looks as if they’re going to leap back down.”

“Noisy bastard,” Gus growled and looped the cord around his waist. “Don’t you cut that rope,” he warned as he slung himself over the railing.

“Fuck you gonna do about it?
Sayonara
, fat ass.”

With that, Talbert stepped forward and shoved Gus, dislodging him from the rails and sending him swinging into space.

Gus yelped as his body maxed out the short drop and swung inward, the cord tightening around his midsection, tipping his upper body back as if he were Tarzaning it.

And in that arc, he glimpsed the leather-skirted bulk of the man called Stephanie…

Just before his feet crashed into the man’s chest.

“
He’s here
!” Gus blurted and immediately got dropped to the floor.

Talbert had cut the cord.

Stephanie, in all his ferocious leather attire, limped to his feet just as Gus stood and one-armed his bat, lashing the aluminum across the Noh mask with a satisfying
crack
. Mortimer’s stunned henchman stumbled backward against a wall, his mask hanging askew. Stephanie tried to correct his ghostly face while thumbing the electric start button of the chainsaw.

Gus got another hand on his bat and clocked it across his adversary’s head a second time, staggering him visibly. The chainsaw clattered onto the marble.

“Donald! To the Rotunda!
Run
!” Mortimer blared across the dome’s expanse. “They have Steph!
Run!
”

Taking a deep breath, Gus smashed ol’
Steph
clean across the face again, sending the mask scuttling across the floor. The fourth blow landed flush on the big man’s temple, and he collapsed in his leather duds.

Gus reared back for another strike and paused for all of two seconds.

It had been almost two years since he last killed another living person.

And gazing at the freak at his feet, he didn’t feel a lick of guilt.

Gus swung the bat over his shoulder and down, breaking Stephanie’s skull. The brute collapsed, twitching in a widening pool of maroon.

Undisguised grief and rage cut through the loudspeakers, intense enough to threaten blowing the wiring. Gus flinched at the sound.

“
I’ll kill you
,” Mortimer frothed in a rattling voice. “
I’ll kill you
.
I’ll nail your bleeding ass to a table and keep you like a pet! I’ll make your death as slow and painful as––
”

Gus tuned out the rest and glanced around the empty rotunda. A pair of legs appeared from the second floor, and Talbert lowered himself with a grunt.

“The fuck you do?” he asked as he got his feet under himself.

“Killed a bitch.”

Talbert straightened and inspected Stephanie’s bulk. “One fucked-up bitch.”

“And the way Mort’s screaming, you’d think it was his son.”

“Maybe it was.”

“If it was,” Gus said, gathering up the chainsaw with his free hand, “maybe he’ll rupture something while screaming his nuts off.”

Talbert’s features scrunched in disdain.

“I’ll give him a couple of things to scream about,” Gus vowed, brandishing the chainsaw in one hand and pointing at the dead man nearby. “That’s one.”

“That’s one,” Talbert agreed.

“Feel like gettin’ the others?”

“Oh, fuck, yeah.”

“Watch my back, then,” Gus ordered and went to the wide stairs and the first barrier there.

He placed his bat to one side and powered up the chainsaw, thumbing the start button.

“Startin’ to think,” Gus said as he braced his legs on the stairs, “that cutting through these barriers is a good thing. Why should we have all the fun?”

Talbert’s face lightened with comprehension, but before the buzzing saw snarled into wood, he pointed to the second level and a crowd gathering around the railing. A knot of zombies descended the steps, only to be stopped by the wooden barricade.

Gus saw them all and powered down the chainsaw.

“Well, shit.”

Zombies pushed against the upstairs rail. Several toppled over and fell to the marble floor with a sludgy
clap
, like sacks of wet cement bursting at rotten seams. All manner of organic muck squirted from the corpses upon impact, a viscous soup reeking of spoiled meat. A pool slowly formed, spreading outward with every new diver splattering upon the fine marble. Some crashed upon the ones actually rising from the expanding mess.

They continued piling against the rails, leaning over until gravity sucked them down.

Gus prodded Talbert in the shoulder, pushing him to the lower steps.

“Get into the open,” he said, “let ’em see you.”

“What?”

“Just a few seconds, anyway. They’re thinning themselves out.”

Upon the rotunda’s floor, bodies pushed through that foul stew like half-frozen tadpoles. Some of the dead sat up straight in the deepening pond of bodies, ignoring broken bones, only to have new corpses flatten them from above. Talbert descended and split the skull of one uniformed serviceman, halting its creeping progress. He placed his boot heel against its shoulder and wrenched the machete free. A hand reached out from the sloppy pileup of corpses, trying for an ankle. Talbert hacked the hand off, blade ringing off the floor.