An Axe to Grind

An Axe to Grind

By Hope Sullivan McMickle

Copyright 2008 Hope Sullivan McMickle

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John Warren squinted in the glare of the late morning sun and watched the girl stagger across the grocery store parking lot. He leaned forward on his perch in the deer blind he’d installed in the tall tree beside the university library, slowly adjusted the focus on his binoculars, and studied her for a long moment. She appeared to be an ideal candidate. Despite her unwashed and tangled blonde hair and flaking purple sparkle nail polish, her lithe body was still somehow graceful. A thin gold bracelet glinted above her right ankle - a glittering bauble above dirty bare feet. He lowered the binoculars and raised the barrel of the AR 15 - not yet modified to fully automatic although he supposed he’d get to it one of these days - until the girl was framed in the crosshairs of the sight. She wore a black silk halter top above a pair of high-cut blue jean shorts faded nearly white. A spattering of blood partially obscured the rose tattoo on her left shoulder, trailing back to the gaping maw where her throat had once been.

He paused and swore softly under his breath, just to break the silence that filled so much of his days. He lifted his eye from the sight and watched her weave her way past the deserted parking area, getting hung up briefly in the cart corral, before resuming her lurching shamble in his general direction. Her age was right - she looked to be about 20 - her look was right, and her body was as yet largely unmarred by the decay that plagued so many of the others. As he watched, the dead girl made her way past the grocery store and approached the nearly invisible wire snare that he had rigged across the narrow alleyway between the store and the neighboring Domino’s Pizza, an area that created a natural bottleneck. At one time, the area had been notorious for exceedingly poor traffic flow but now it made for an exceptional capture point since traffic had ceased being an issue nearly two years ago. He knew the girl would keep coming, never straying from her trajectory as long as no obstacles got in her way and necessitated a change in path. It was the singularity of purpose and unity of the damned that he had observed a thousand times. Motivated only by hunger, the girl continued down the alley drawn to the scent of fresh blood that John used to bait the trap. There was an audible snap when the girl’s left foot triggered the snare. They fell for it every time. John laughed, clicked on the rifle’s safety, and climbed ponderously down the aluminum ladder to meet the new girl, who was dangling by her ankle in the snare.

He paused at the base of the tree to scan north and south along Commercial Street, then east and west down 12
^th
. Although night was more dangerous due to limited visibility and the element of surprise, John found that daylight made them restless and he was more likely to come upon small contingents of them stumbling about. The dead demonstrated no capacity for planning or coordination, but their ferocity and tenacity could overpower and overwhelm those caught unaware, and he intended to put a bullet in his head before he became one of them.

John shouldered his rifle and walked over to the police car he had appropriated and retrofitted compliments of the Lyon County Sheriff’s Department. Equipped with a 4.5 liter V8 engine, the Crown Vic Interceptor had a speedometer calibrated for 140 miles an hour. He’d got it up to 115 on the ten mile stretch outside of town, heading east to Olpe, before he chickened out and slowed down. Every so often cattle made their way onto the roads, and the idea of hitting one at that speed made his skin crawl. He retrieved a Kevlar vest, thick leather gloves, a utility belt, riot helmet, a pair of handcuffs and foot shackles, and a catch pole from the trunk. The catch pole he had discovered in the back of an overturned animal control van, and had found it to be imminently helpful. He donned the Kevlar vest, not that it would do him much good - it was designed to stop a bullet, not prevent a set of gnashing teeth from ripping his throat out or taking a massive chunk out of his forearm or thigh - but it did make him feel safer. He tugged on the riot helmet and hurried across 12
^th
Avenue to properly introduce himself to the girl.

Her halter top had fallen forward over her head as she swung and thrashed in the snare, exposing perfectly rounded breasts that would have once been attractive but were now little more than sallow grey lumps. John gazed at her with clinical detachment; up close, he noticed more extensive damage. Tatters of bloodless flesh dangled from her palms, and bone gleamed from within a deep gash just above her elbow - clearly post-mortem damage. As John approached, the girl ceased struggling and stared in his direction, tracking his steps. Her eyes burned, not with any kind of cognition or intellect, but with hunger. She bared yellowed teeth and hissed. John hissed back with a wink and a grin. They were so easy to toy with.

He held his breath as the smell of decay enveloped him. He had never quite become used to the smell of them; the tolerable ones smelled like a gassy dead skunk baking on the highway in the Kansas summer heat. The bad ones emanated a sweet, cloying stench of rot and putrefaction that was nearly unbearable in close proximity. This girl smelled more like dead skunk. John drew in one last breath of clean air and stepped forward, focusing on the task at hand.

The girl resumed thrashing in her snare, fingers hooked into purple sparkle claws, reaching for him. The movement of her body swung her toward him, and John chose that moment to act. He swung the animal catch pole and deftly slipped the vinyl coated cable loop over her head and around her neck, then released the brake to tighten and lock the noose into place. The vinyl coating in the cable kept it from cutting too deeply into her flesh. The catch pole was six feet in length, but could be telescoped to eight feet, and was perfect for controlling feral animals and keeping them at a distance. John held onto the catch pole and as it shuddered in his hands, eased behind her and released the snare in which she’d been suspended. As he did, her body plummeted awkwardly to the ground and hit pavement with a sickening thud. She immediately began growling and crawling toward him. The whole operation had taken less than a minute but John glanced up and down the alley to ensure that the commotion, or more likely his scent, had not attracted more of her kind. He had been distracted and caught unaware several times before - most recently while helping himself to the Liquor Locker’s stock of Patron, when four adults, a half-grown boy, something that had once been a toddler, and a wolf, a fucking zombie wolf for crissakes, cornered him - and since that last near miss John had been vigilant almost to the point of compulsivity. The alley was clear, the parking lot vacant, and there was no sign of movement or sound other than the growling and hissing of the bag of flesh at his feet. Reassured, he stepped toward her and used both hands to leverage his considerable weight to flip her onto her stomach and drive her head - and most importantly her teeth - into the hot blacktop. He took another step forward and pinned her to the ground with a heavy leather boot caked with dirt and old blood.

In a single fluid movement, he let go of the catch pole and leaned forward, roughly cuffing her wrists behind her back. He then dropped to his knees and slipped a black leather bondage mask over her face and belted it behind her head. He’d found the mask on a mannequin at the adult bookstore next to the railroad tracks, and although he’d never been into the kinky shit, the mask certainly did an excellent job of preventing bites. He’s already zipped up the nose and mouth slits; the lack of oxygen was not going to be an issue for this woman.

“Let’s go, princess,” he said, laughing as she bucked and squirmed beneath him.

It only took a moment more to secure her feet in the shackles and he stood back up, grimacing and rubbing his back. He watched the girl struggle for several long moments before he released the noose on the catch pole and removed it from her head, doing the same with the snare that had been attached to her ankle. He absently tossed the snare aside; he’d re-rig it tomorrow. The wind blew through his long, graying hair as John reached down and pulled her up by her manacled wrists and carried her like an awkward piece of luggage to the back of the police cruiser. He’d decided not to drag her since she was pretty. There was no sense doing more damage. He opened the back door of the squad car and shoved her in head first.

ACDC’s album Back in Black was in the rotation today. The ride to White Auditorium was less than two minutes, even though John took the long way so he could hear the end of Hell’s Bells. He’d ripped the two-way radio out of the cruiser and replaced it with an Alpine stereo and a 50 disc CD changer, which was housed in the trunk. Triggering the lift to the garage door, John parked in the empty bay of the fire station and leapt out of the vehicle to lower the door behind him. The fire station had been housed in the massive city auditorium since it had been built in 1940 as a multi-purpose facility. With seating for 2,000, a fire department, and numerous city offices, it had been a simple task to clean, fortify, and defend. The facility offered him more room than he would ever need. The fire station served as his primary base of operations, although he maintained his living quarters on the second floor of the building. A little more than a year ago he’d spent a week removing the surveillance equipment from the jail across the street and re-installed it throughout his building. A large bank of generators he’d scavenged from the Home Depot were housed in a shed behind a small area of chain link fencing, and they provided plenty of electricity. He’d worried a little about electrocuting himself when he’d installed those damn things. A quick glance at the monitors revealed nothing out of the ordinary, outside or inside the building. Satisfied, John hauled the girl out of the police car by her feet, sliding her onto the concrete floor. She gazed dully at him, oddly submissive. As she lay on the floor John retrieved the hand truck from where he’d stashed it and laid it flat on the ground beside her. The girl weighed no more than a hundred pounds, and it was an easy matter to roll her over so she laid flat on the hand truck, enabling him to secure her to it with thick leather straps that went around her shoulders, hips, and knees. Once she was secure, John removed the mask. She exceeded his expectations, and would make an excellent addition once he’d prepped and cleaned her up. John bent down and grunted with effort as he raised her to an upright position. Behind him, fingernails scrabbled against the metal garage door. One of the external monitors confirmed that two walkers were outside, probably drawn by the sound of his engine. John figured if they continued to loiter around he’d burn their sorry asses, but at the moment, that sounded like more work than he’d planned on that morning over coffee. Getting the girl was plenty of work in and of itself.

Since the garage door was constructed with heavy sheet metal and secured with multiple locks from the inside, John figured they posed no immediate threat. Hell, there were dead people everywhere. He wheeled the girl up the access ramp he’d constructed over the concrete stairs to the first level office area. The building was stuffy but not unbearably hot. Air circulated through the open windows on all sides of the second story of the building, and the lower level tended to have an aura of damp coolness even in summer. The yellow brick façade of the building did a nice job of reflecting a lot of heat, although it was probably 92 degrees inside. John had sweated through his t-shirt before he made his way halfway down the hallway. The lack of air conditioning was something that he had grown accustomed to, but the lack of central heat in the winter was frustrating. Even with the generators, there was not enough power to run the heating and cooling system. Despite space heaters in the rooms he used with the greatest frequency, there was a deep chill in the building throughout the cold season, and John made do with many layers of clothing to combat the cold. In the winter, his fingers and toes seemed to be perpetually numb. Now, he dripped sweat as he wheeled the girl into the clean up area, previously the city water and sewer department. Thousands of people had walked through the outer door to pay their water bills here over the years, but not anymore. John had installed metal hurricane shutters over the windows, machining most of the parts himself at the city maintenance shop across the street. Then he’d bricked up the doorway. It hadn’t been difficult to learn how to mix the mortar and lay the bricks; the public library was across the street and John had discovered that even without the internet it wasn’t too hard to find out just about anything if he spent some time reading books. He had plenty of time on his hands now.