Well Fed - 05 (38 page)

Her breath caught in her throat.

This. Was different.

And utterly fucked up.

Whoever these people were, they were twisted. They had sealed off the room directly underneath the play pen––a sick name for its torturous nature––and filled it with the undead, decomposing heads of God-only-knew-how-many zombies.

A writhing, twisting carpet of heads.

Pasty fleshed, even bluish in the pale light, a few had exposed profiles missing ears or entire cheeks. Some heads were attached to shoulders and flagella-like arms but very little else. As she watched, a few of the shaggier heads, the hair strands partially blinding them, opened mouths like dying fish. Eyes with the texture of rotten yogurt reacted to her movement above and widened ever so slightly, some even fixing on her. Some of the heads, the ones on top, opened their mouths, causing them to tumble from their little hills as if freshly chopped from the neck. The smell alone was enough to torture a person, and Collie tore her gaze from the gruesome scene below to the now-desperately awake person clinging to that little perch across from her, his hands splayed out on either side in one last attempt to keep him out of that mulch of insanity.

“Please,” he begged. In his exhausted and weakened state, that subtle gesture shifted his weight a fraction off balance and he jerked backward, fighting gravity’s pull. Collie reached out in reflex, and both of them froze, afraid that the barest movement would slide him into the pit.

“Help,” he whispered.

Collie withdrew to the door and gently opened it. The ladder was there. She hefted it with a soft rattle. Not waiting to see whether anyone heard or not, she maneuvered it back into the room and tried to extend it toward him.

Then it hit her—he had no room to
stand
on that miserable perch, nowhere to butt the end of the ladder while he crawled to safety. And he couldn’t hold the ladder in his lap or somehow worm it underneath himself. He simply had no room.

“How’d you get over there?” Collie whispered, pulling the ladder back and laying it on the floor, a portion of its length sticking into the hall. There wasn’t any room inside without letting it tip into the pit.

“All right,” she told him, hating how the guy’s eyes were brimming with fright, terrified she might abandon him. “Listen, here’s what we’re gonna––”

A door closed down the hall, causing her to freeze.

“Hey, they get him yet?” an ordinary voice yelled out, breaking that fragile silence. Footsteps padded toward the play pen.

Collie glanced at the guy in the corner, his legs dangling seven feet above an animated charnel pit.

“God
damn
, I was hoping he’d hold out the night. Must’ve stuck himself to the wall with some bum butter or some shit. Had a fuckin’ quart o’ rye bet on his skinny ass clingin’ to his shit.”

Then the person horked fiercely, drawing up curds of lung butter that turned Collie’s guts just hearing it. And the grosser thing was the guy
didn’t spit
.

Is he chewing it?
She placed the ladder on the floor, the upper end of it well out into the hall. She had no choice.

Another voice shouted from inside another room, too muffled to understand. Collie went to the doorway and readied herself just inside the doorway, bringing her Sig Sauer up to her shoulder. She took a settling breath, relaxing, getting loose, and waited for her target.

“Fuckin’ get your lazy, square-holed, bitch asses outta bed, then,” the partially filled voice answered with glee. “Y’probably spent the night balls deep in her crack anyway, so why y’ wearin’ it out?”

A fist crashed against the door of the captives’ room, right across from the play pen, loud enough that Collie knew the jig was up. Voices cried out as a man––a
young
man––barely twenty, with an eyebrow of a moustache and dark fuzz coating his chin, turned his cruel
hyuk-hyuk
grin toward Collie.

She grabbed him by the throat.

His grin sagged into astonishment as the sound suppressor shoved into the corner of his mouth. Collie pulled him into the room and slammed him against a wall. If he hadn’t been clear on her intent yet, she jammed the barrel of the Sig Sauer deeper into his face, uncovering yellow teeth.

“Now,” Collie hissed. “Shit-kicker, you be––”

“Jezuz Chreest! Dere’s a wo––”

That unexpected blast blow-dried her face, catching her off guard and causing her to tense up on the trigger just enough to fire, killing the man-boy in a muddy splash of teeth. The back of his head flapped as if an inner clockwork spring had popped free. His legs did a spasmodic two-step, do-si-doing in a terminal square dance before dropping him on his ass. Collie let him fall.

Sonavabitch
, she swore.

She flicked a glance at the prisoner stuck in his corner, and his eyes damn near exploding from their sockets was all the message she needed. The corner of the doorframe trembled when Collie butted her shoulder against it, holding her gun two handed and just listening. Across the way, two sets of eyes stared at her from the slot, filled with disbelief. She couldn’t do anything for them then.

In the hall, just after the yeller thumped to the floor, there was a moment of silence, an ominous portent of bad things to come.

The muffled shouting and banging came all at once, all from the south end. Then one door slammed open, followed by another and then a clatter of rooms opening. Collie imagined prairie dogs standing at attention at the lips of deep burrows, seeing what was up. But those dogs weren’t going to run.

Collie eyed the planks barring the window at the north end of the hall, figuring if she had to, she might be able to summon enough momentum to heave herself wrecking-ball style through the barrier.

But she wasn’t ready to go anywhere yet. Collie had never gotten any of her scars or disfigurements from sneaking around—she
earned
them.

“You okay down there?” a man called cautiously.

“That was Ryan,” a woman supplied.

“Ryan?”

“Yes, Jesus Christ, yes, Ryan!”

“Everything cool, Ryan?”

A wary silence was fringed with growing whispers.

Collie sighed and waited, adjusting her grip on the Sig Sauer, her fingers flexing.

“Ryan, you still here, bro? Still with us?” The voice was closer, followed by a spidery wall of stillness creeping forward.

Collie could imagine them, maybe a dozen men and women hunched over, hugging the walls, armed and believing themselves ready for one guy seemingly doing the impossible—escaping the play pen.

“Hey, Jimbo,” a rough voice called, perhaps no more than twenty feet from Collie’s position, “if you’ve got Ryan with you…”

Collie slipped down to the baseboard, edging closer to the corner, back to the wall.

“Let him go.”

From his perch in the corner, Jimbo whimpered.

“Let him go, or I swear as Christ is my witness, I’ll fuckin’
fork
feed you to the––”

She leaned out from the corner and fired, snapping off a barrage of silenced shots into the people clogging the corridor. A man reeled back after being tagged twice in the chest. A woman gripped her face just below a black headband. Another woman, red haired, shrieked as a round caught her shoulder and spun her around. Another guy grunted and landed flat on his face. Blood spritzed the air. Brass casings jumped across the carpet. Collie continued firing into the mass of torsos, causing the ones in the middle and rear to stampede into each other like squealing piglets as they ducked into now-open doorways.

Six or seven bodies littered the carpet when her Sig Sauer clicked empty and the magazine slipped out the bottom. Collie retreated around her corner, reaching for one of three spare magazines on her belt. Screams of wounded rage reverberated along the walls, but Collie only readied her sidearm, wincing at the stomach-turning stench emanating from the pit. She glanced up at the slot across from her. A set of eyes stared out, utterly shell-shocked at what she’d just done.

Only getting started, honey
, she conveyed with a murderous look before directing her attention back to the fight.

A barrage of rifle and shotgun fire ripped past her cover, peppering the boards on the end-of-the-hall window. Shots zinged by, taking impressive bites out of the wood, snapping splinters off the door frame. Glass shattered and blew outward. Bullets punched a path of shredded holes up a strip of wood. Carpeting jumped. A slab of overhead paneling fell to the floor, and Collie lifted a hand to shield her eyes from any debris. The person at the slot across the way had disappeared.

Smart.

“All right, pigfucker, all right,” a different voice shouted while the shooters no doubt reloaded. “Don’t know who the hell you think you
are
, but I’m here to tell you what you’re gonna
be
. You see them heads in the pit? You see ’em? You’re gonna be seeing them a lot closer soon enough. There’s no way out of that room. No cover except where you are. You come out into the hall, maybe jump through that boarded-up window, and we’ll light you up so hard you’ll think someone set off two tons of White English in your ass.”

Jimbo whimpered again behind her.

A note of finality was in that last sound, and Collie looked around to see Jimbo slowly slouching, succumbing to the pull of the pit.

She wouldn’t allow that.

Collie moved away from the door, shoved Ryan’s corpse off the ladder before grabbing the end. With a grunt, she heaved the ladder into the fragrant pit, toward Jimbo. It extended with a loud rattle, and the ladder stabbed deep into that morass that yawned and chewed and came to a stop right below his hellish seat. Not happy with seeing the end of the ladder sinking into that fleshy compost, Collie took the chance of pulling Ryan’s body to the pit’s edge. She propped him over a shoulder with a grunt and dumped him onto the metal rungs. The corpse tumbled and fell heavily onto the heads, but his upper torso covered enough of the undead that when Jimbo finally fell forward, he landed with both bare feet on Ryan’s dead ass. Jimbo yelled and slipped, his left foot mashing into the decaying cheek of a zombie before jerking away and stepping onto the ladder.

Unable to spare any more time on him, Collie withdrew to the doorway, gun held at her shoulder. The pit’s smell brought water to her eyes, and she took a second to wipe them.
Stink!
She couldn’t remember anything smelling so damn foul. Even with her mask on, she felt violated, polluted, just by breathing it in.

A violent hail of gunfire caused her to shy away from the doorframe. Bullets ravaged the wood. Splinters cut through the air.

“We’re comin’ for ya, shitkicker,” an eager voice promised. “And when we get ya, you’ll wish you’da saved a bullet for yourself. Best put one in your eye right now.”

Collie set her jaw and waited.

The uneven earth was causing Wallace problems.

More to the point, he couldn’t lift his legs high enough at times to clear rocks, dips, or clumps of decaying vegetation. Shouts flared up from the direction of the motel, reinforcements being summoned. Wallace didn’t like that. Contrary to his earlier comment, there just
might
be more than Collie could handle, and there he was, barely able to walk. He couldn’t feel the painful growl of his joints anymore.

A tangle of exposed roots stopped the steel toes of his boot, and he went down hard.

Gus was ten strides ahead and immediately stopped when Wallace fell.

“You okay?” he called out, loud enough to make Wallace cringe.

“Yeah.”

Gus ran back through the trees. Wallace did a slow push-up and rolled onto his side, black visor staring up at the bearded man.

“Wait.” Wallace put up a hand. “Listen, you’re faster, and you’re armed. You get your ass downtown and across that bridge. Find Collie. If any wannabe thudfuck points a weapon at you, you blow their goddamn head off their shoulders. You got that?”

Gus nodded. “What about you?”

“The fuck you care? Get outta here and get to Collie.
Now
.”

He hesitated, clearly divided, but only for a fleeting second. Then he was rushing away.

Wallace sat up like a creaky drawbridge, feeling his abs tighten, wondering if anything was about to squirt out of the hole he’d made. He could lift his arms only to his shoulders, and that robbery of movement made him shake in chagrin. He couldn’t help Collie in his present state, but maybe sending in a civvie might give her a needed distraction.

Maybe.

His grimace deepening, oozing rage, it was only by sheer force of will he got to his knees.

Bullets zinged down the hallway, perforating the boards at the end of the hall and sending shards of wood and glass spinning into daylight. The daylight returned fire of its own, sending lasers back through the holes being made. Whoever the shooters were, they had no conception of conserving ammunition, pausing only to reload in a ferocious clatter of metal on metal and hillbilly yowling. They cursed at her, screaming vengeance for killing Ryan and the ones gunned down in the corridor, still wrongly thinking she was a dude.

Collie returned fire, squeezing off only a couple of rounds in their direction, letting them know she was still there. They’d taken up defensive positions in the doorways, leaning out only to unload. Only a matter of time before they started to leapfrog up the corridor, one doorway to the next. Jimbo had crawled up from the pit and ducked into the bathroom without even so much as a thank-you.

Ungrateful bastard
.

Collie suddenly got tired of waiting and decided to weave some black magic.

When the next salvo stopped, she collapsed on her belly and angled her arm around the corner. Bullets screamed past her head from two different points of fire, the shooters only partially concealed in their doorways. Collie’s sights fell on a woman, and she drilled the target through the chest. The woman dropped her rifle and slammed against the frame, falling to a sitting position before toppling over.

“Annie!” a man wailed.

The second shooter rushed his shot and missed, but one shell ripped up a slab of carpet and flung it into Collie’s eyes. She scrambled back behind protection, clearing her vision.