Annie of the Undead (5 page)

They were still hot on my heels. I broke my way
through some rotted boards in a privacy fence into one of the
pocket-sized backyards, crossed the private patch of mud and,
deprived of any more gaps or rot, was forced to climb the other
side of the fence.

The men were bigger than me, and as a result,
the fence slowed them down a bit, which gave me half a second to
figure out what the hell to do when I found that my escape route
was blocked by a wire fence and, more importantly, the gnashing Pit
Bull on the other side. There was a narrow alley between the houses
on my side and the fence. I dashed into it, trying to keep up that
greased pig imitation in its narrow confines. The Pit followed me
with crazed eyes, gnawing the fence beside me as I went.

I got out through the front yard and onto the
next street and just ran –right in front of a car thundering with
base. The tires squealed and the driver leaned out his window and
yelled something not particularly helpful as I ran on. He cursed at
Short John’s boys too, who had been little delayed by fence and Pit
Bull.

I was now officially desperate. I was flagging.
They were going to get me if I didn’t do something creative, or at
least heedless. There was a rotted oak tree that had been downed
between two of the little houses but never chopped up. It fit the
bill. I ran up the trunk and clambered onto the branches, which
creaked and groaned beneath my weight, sheets of bark sheering off
with every step. A couple of the branches reached up and over the
roof of one of the houses. The one that supported me snapped in
half just as I reached the eave, and I caught and clambered onto
the roof.

The roof was in some disrepair, and some of the
shingles crumbled as I scurried over the ridgepole and down the
other side. I heard Short John’s boys bitching as they attempted to
follow. One made it onto the roof just as I jumped from the eave
onto the roof of the next house only a few feet away. Thank the
ghetto gods for cramped housing.

The other guy didn’t make it. I heard him yell
as he fell to the ground, the rotting branches broken by his
greater weight. He didn’t stop yelling either. With any luck, he’d
punctured a kidney.

Candyman cursed as he struggled with the
slipping shingles on the rotting roof, but he made it to the next
as I had. I dropped down onto the roof of a rusted-out pickup in
the next side yard and tried to make the best of my lead, hitting
the sidewalk at a dead run.

I was about dead, and not in the useful vampirey
way. Wild ideas about trying to drop down and hide someplace right
there went through my head, but it would have been stupid suicide.
Every dog in the neighborhood was barking by now, and there was no
way I could hide with the damn cur behind the fence next door
trying to kill the fence to get to me –another thing not to like
about animals.

I staggered over some big plastic children’s
toy, gasping for air and overheated despite the cold. Candyman was
right behind me. I picked up the toy, a tricycle, and threw it at
him. It struck only a glancing blow. I slipped around the corner of
the next house, my pursuer only steps behind. I climbed onto a low
stone wall, startling a cat who tried to leap for safety straight
into the side of the house. It screeched and glanced off, coming
claws to face with Candyman, who, judging by his reaction, didn’t
much like cats either. He grappled with it while I booked.

I crossed the corner lot, knocking over a couple
of garden gnomes and plowing through a righteously prickly holly
hedge before spilling into another street.

I took a step, another step, and then hands went
to knees involuntarily. I gulped air, my lungs screaming from
working so hard in the frigid cold. My fingers were ice. Candyman
would be coming any second, but then I realized I had another
problem.

A car rounded the corner with screaming tires
and then squealing brakes. Out of the blinding light came Short
John, and he had a gun in his hand.

I was almost too tired to think
fuck
as
the first shot whizzed wildly by.

Nothing renews the fleeing spirit like a firearm
in the hands of the enemy. I turned and zigzagged down the street
like a rat on the kitchen floor, trying to avoid a broom. But Short
John didn’t fire again. He started after me, joined by Candyman who
apparently hadn’t lost anything important to the frisky feline.

I ran up the hill and through some brush, now
coated with ice from the slop falling out of the sky. On the other
side of the growth I discovered, to my horror, that I was trapped
in a weird pocket of a chain link fence encircling a junk yard on
the other side. I had only seconds to act before the men got
through the brush and cornered me there.

There wasn’t really a choice. The fence was
eight feet tall with barbed wire strung along the top, but the
steep hill was high on my side, and the barbed wire was loosely
strung and rusting. I put fingers and toes to the fence and
climbed. The barbs punctured my hands and snagged my clothes, but I
clambered over.

But my evil hair had long been planning my
downfall, and now, sensing my vulnerability, it decided to act.
Encouraged by the humidity and excitement to grow to a cloud of
unprecedented proportions capable of eclipsing the sun, several of
the frizzy tentacles wove themselves into the barbed wire, and I
was stuck.

My hair was never fragile enough to be torn. It
was woven of adamantium thread. I pulled Chris’s Ka-Bar from my
pocket and executed swift justice against the traitorous locks,
leaving them entangled in wire and fence. It was a good thing my
brother had kept his knives so sharp.

But my hair had accomplished its diabolical end.
Candyman had caught up with me.

“She’s here!” he shouted to Short John, who was
behind him, as he grabbed my hand to keep me from reaching the
ground.

I put the blade of the knife right into the top
of his hand.

Candyman let me go, or rather, his hand did. He
didn’t have a choice. I dropped to the ground, landing on a pile of
ice-coated hubcaps and sliding down to the bottom, the silver disks
clattering all around me.

That was when Short John decided to open fire on
me again. Instead he hit hubcaps, and I sought cover in a veritable
sea of fifty-five gallon drums.

I crawled a few feet and stayed wedged there for
a couple of seconds, gasping. I was shaking all over from adrenalin
overload. I simply couldn’t, at that moment, go any farther.

Candyman was still screaming about his hand. My
former manager called him a pussy. Then I heard Short John land on
the hubcaps. Having just experienced its joys myself, I knew it
would be a few seconds before he’d get off that pile of crazy
sliding fun. I got up on top of one of the drums, and ran, jumping
from drum to drum like they were stepping stones, fighting to stay
topside on the ice-slicked metal, as some of the improperly-closed
lids slid off.

Three shots were fired behind me. I had
misjudged Short John’s prowess in doing battle with the hubcap
hoards. I was so tired myself that they had almost done me in,
sucked me down into their shiny depths, never to be seen again. But
Short John was fit. He spent his days at the gym, pumping up and
preparing for times like these, when one must do battle with the
hubcap legions. He was already up and shooting at me.

But I didn’t have any choice. I had to run. If I
went down between the drums, I would be trapped, and he would get
to me. It would be like –well, like shooting fish in a barrel.

Short John was a shit shot, at least. He should
have spent more time at the range and less at the weights, but it
had never occurred to him that he might have to shoot a moving
target. He was more the drive-by type.

Short John knew he was a shit shot too. He
started after me over the barrels, and he was gaining. I was
nearing the corner of the yard, coming to another fence. I was
either going to have to climb it or make a right turn and run
through the junk yard.

Once again, my path was decided for me. The junk
yard dogs had showed up.

At least, I thought they might be dogs. It was
possible they were dogs –once, before the radioactivity had mutated
them into things not seen before on Earth. Dogs in Detroit can
sometimes give that impression. These things had four legs like
dogs, and big dumb heads like dogs, and they had a whole lot of
teeth and slobber like dogs. It was possible they were part
Rottweiler or part Mastiff or part Yeti. Whatever they were, they
were huge and gnarly and pissed, and they were headed straight for
me.

There was a line of drums between me and the
fence. I stumbled from one to another with less than finesse, the
dogs snapping at my heels. They were huge animals, their jaws
easily reaching the top of the drums. I could feel their hot breath
on my ankles.

I was beginning to think Badd dog wasn’t all
that bad after all. These things were monsters.

Four, three, two more barrels, then a junk
pickup truck, then the fence. Then the climb, then safety, if I
could just stay out of tooth range until then, and if Short John
didn’t shoot me in the back. The lid slipped on one of the drums,
and my foot plunged into whatever black sludge that had collected
inside. I scrambled out of it and felt teeth clamp onto my pant
leg. The fabric tore as I hit the last barrel and jumped into the
truck bed, just barely making it out of reach of the snapping
jaws.

Short John was shouting in anti-canine
protestation as I climbed the fence. The dogs were after him now. I
climbed the fence and dropped into the brown weeds on the other
side, nearly tumbling into an in-ground pool lying dry and empty in
the backyard of the homeowner unfortunate enough to have his
property backed up against a scrap yard. The weeds stalks, encased
in ice, snapped like glass.

The vegetation wasn’t the only thing that
smashed on contact. My ankle did too. A stabbing pain filled the
joint, and when I tried to get up that pain knocked me back on the
ground.

“Jesus fuck!” I yelled, realizing I was
doomed.

But it didn’t look like Short John was having
such a nice day either. I looked back to see him surrounded by
lunging, slathering dog monsters. He nailed one of the beasts in
the muzzle with his shoe. The thing didn’t yelp, just came back up
again as if it’d never been touched. There were four of them, and
they were all around him –One had even climbed onto the cans.
Another sunk its teeth into his ankle, causing him to discharge his
weapon wildly. The dogs didn’t even flinch at the noise, but he did
finally hit the one that was making hamburger of his leg. The thing
yelped and went down, flailing crazily in the freezing mud.

I crawled away, rose, hopped a few steps, then
went down again, my ankle seriously Jesus-fucked. I just didn’t
have any fight left in me. If the dogs didn’t finish him…

Apparently they didn’t.

“You fuckin’ bitch! You crazy fuckin’ cunt!”
called Short John, who had extricated himself somehow from the jaws
of death and climbed the fence. “You just stay right there, you
hear me?”

He fired his gun, but missed again, and cussed
as the dogs leaped for his feet. He got himself tangled in the
barbed wire at the top of the fence and fell much as I had.
Unfortunately he didn’t break his neck.

“You stay…you stay right there. You just
wait…for Short John,” he panted over the din of the raging
dogbeasts. He had his .45 trained on me.

I had crawled to the opposite end of the pool
patio, but it wasn’t far enough. Short John came limping toward me.
By floodlight I could see that his pant leg was soaked with
blood.

Lights had gone on inside the house. A head
peeked out the window then jerked out of view upon seeing the
craziness going on in the backyard, and the lights went out again.
I couldn’t expect any help from that quarter. Although the
occupants would probably call the police, I would be finished
before they arrived. Short John was about to make short work of
me.

“See, you damn ho? You can’t get away. You can’t
get away from Short John, no way! Short John is the man! You don’t
mess with the man!”

Short John liked to talk about himself in the
third person.

“No dogs go messin’ with the man, and no damn
hos oughtta go messin’ with the man. He ain’t gonna put up with it.
He gonna bust a cap in your ass, you go messin’ with him.”

“It’s a good thing he’s not here,” I answered
between breaths, “‘cause he won’t hear me call him a dickless cat
humper.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up, cunt bitch! You
the man’s property, and you will do what he say. So when Short John
says shut the fuck up, you shut the fuck up,” he advanced on me,
took aim, “and when Short John says fuckin’ die, you fuckin’—”

“Grrrrrraaarrrrrr!”

That said by the most massive of the dog beasts,
which had gotten up on the pickup truck, onto the fence, and
catapulted onto Short John’s back with wild glee.

The weight of the substantial animal bowled him
forward, knocking the gun out of his hand and all two-hundred
pounds of him sprawling into the nearly empty pool.

The gun skidded across the ice-slicked patio
like a hockey puck, and, like a good goalie, I scooped it up.

Talk about a save.

“Get offa me! Fuckin’ animal, get offa me!” came
echoing out from the depths, accompanied by the enthusiastic snarls
of the creature in the black lagoon.

I looked over the edge to watch the party in the
shallow sludge below.

“How do you like that, cocksucker? Short John,
the big badass can’t get his ass outta the pool.”

The thing was using his arm the way some dogs
use a rope toy. I wondered how long the limb would stay attached.
By the way he struggled in vain to get away, it looked like his leg
was broken.