Death Row Apocalypse (10 page)

Despite having enjoyed killing Eddie and savoring every moment of each and every injection, she now faced Eddie the avenging zombie, and she was sure that she would die at his hands, or more probably his teeth. Her mind wanted to shut down, preferring ignorance to the impossible gore that her unblinking eyes had been witness to and to the situation she now faced. She backed away from window and door, seeking the illusion of safety in the most distant corner of the small room. She stood there trying to shrink even further into the corner, her hands flat against the walls to either side, and her gaze firmly fixed on the door handle.

Over the wail of the siren, she heard the door being assaulted. It rattled and shook as the two zombies sought balance while banging against its surface and continued to slip on the oily blood that separated their soles from the floor. It was now that they began their low groan, which soon became a roar, and even with the ear-splitting wail of the siren, the zombies could be heard clearly from inside the executioner’s room.

Eddie slipped probably for the hundredth time, but this time luck was in his favor, and on his way down to the floor he snagged the door handle with his forehead. The door flew open, banging against the inner wall. The zombie guard slipped and stumbled over Eddie and into the room. The scent was stronger here, and his head turned this way and that, hunting for its delicious source. Like a bloodhound, he soon found the source cowering in the farthest, darkest corner of the small room.

Her tears ran freely now. Through her blurred vision, she saw the zombie guard stumble into the room. Her bladder relaxed, causing its warm contents to run freely down her legs, creating a sizable puddle at her feet, which extended outward for about a yard.

Eddie had now regained his footing and fully entered the room. The unfortunate guard with the constant sneer, now missing his nose, lunged for the woman first, followed by Eddie closely behind, saliva, blood, and the green ooze now gushing from their mouths in unison in anticipation, resembling some kind of demonic vomit as they both came in for the kill. The guard was first to reach her. Splashing through her pee, he shot his hands out to grab his prey but missed.

At the last moment, with perhaps more luck than judgment and maybe even a splash of some ancient lucky DNA, that something, whatever it was, now kicked in to preserve her life, and she ducked. The zombie’s hands and arms outstretched had missed her by a hair’s breadth. Instead, they now came into contact with the wall behind her, subtly bringing into action the laws of physics, causing the zombie’s feet to slip out from under it. It went down fast and hard, and as it went down its legs now came into contact with Eddie’s feet. Eddie went down right on top of the zombie guard, his face slamming into the back of the guard’s head.
Crack!
The woman, not believing her luck and certainly not waiting around to figure out how exactly she had escaped certain death, carefully made her way around the two zombies currently floundering in her pee and headed for the door. Seconds after closing the door behind her, the two zombies began slamming into it. This time there was no easy way for the door to open, and thankfully they did not have the intellect to work it out.

The woman’s name was Lucy Bugner. She was a mother of two darling little girls, who were at this time in preschool. Lucy was for all intents and purposes the typical suburban housewife, able to multitask at an Olympic-competing level. At any one moment she could be found simultaneously making dinner while cleaning house, changing the bed linen, and organizing the regular Sunday afternoon charity picnics, or maybe something else equally challenging. At five feet two, she was the spitting image of the once-famous female actress lovingly remembered as the Poison Dwarf from the hit series
Dallas
, and for every inch of her height she packed a pound and a half of TNT, making her surprisingly fearsome when ignited. Nothing short of a zombie apocalypse could freak her out, which is exactly where she now found herself.

Dressed in her power suit, as she liked to call it—a dark-blue two-piece skirt and jacket combination with a white blouse, which was currently open at the neck—she stood and gaped at the view that was burning into both her short- and long-term memory. The chamber vaguely reminded her of one of the scenes from
Kill Bill
, where the bride had dismembered hundreds of yakuza warriors. That was a great movie but perhaps a little hard to believe in places! She had found it difficult to accept there was really that much blood in a human being. However, the view before her now convinced her otherwise.

Being on the short side of tall, Lucy would, for a little extra height, normally wear three-inch-high heels when in town, but today she had wisely chosen a pair of flats instead. Her plan was to remain unseen, and if seen, then to appear inconspicuous, powerful, and yet demure, a combination that she had spent a full afternoon last week working on by going through her collection of powerful-women-genre DVDs. It took a further four hours to finely tune the smaller details of her outfit, from selecting her earrings all the way down to choosing the right shoes, not to mention the time spent deciding on her hairstyle, perfume, and underwear. As far as her husband was concerned, on the day of the execution she would be spending the afternoon and early evening visiting her brother. Her soon-to-be ex-husband was tasked with picking up the children from school, taking them for ice cream, and then heading home and feeding them. Lucy had prepared, cooked, then placed in the fridge a family-size lasagna with instructions on how to reheat it without ruining the delicious meal. As for their failed marriage, the separation was a mutual decision and a totally amicable arrangement. Sometimes life just dealt you lemons! Her parents’ murder hadn’t helped her failing marriage in any way; in any case, it was simply another reason for Eddie to die.

As one of the popular mums in the street, she had no intention of being recognized at Eddie’s execution. Lucy could quite imagine all the whispered conversations that would go on behind her back, and she certainly did not want her precious little girls finding out that Mummy was really an avenging angel of death that had swooped down to destroy the killer of their grandparents. Even though it was true to a degree. The execution coverage was going to be the program of choice that evening for the entire street. Many of the families knew and liked the Bugner family very much, and besides, they were a nosy bunch and looked forward to sympathizing with and consoling Lucy after the show. She also knew that this execution would be the topic of choice in the upcoming Sunday afternoon picnic, and she didn’t want to be the main course in terms of gossip.

It was through an unbelievable set of circumstances that Lucy was allowed to be able to attend the execution. Not even two weeks previous she had almost been the last victim of the IKSM, a group of terrorists that had left a trail of bodies all over Florida. If that was not enough, her life had been spared through the actions of the serial killer known as the Blender Butcher, who was currently being executed also by lethal injection not thirty feet from where she stood. It had been with no little effort that she had managed to convince the authorities to keep her identity confidential. Even her immediate family were completely unaware of the attack. The experience had shaken Lucy to her core. She took that horror, fear, and feeling of helplessness and pushed it down and buried it away, refusing to allow anything to come between her and Eddie’s demise. She damn well refused to be another victim. She wanted her revenge, and yes, in many ways she did think of herself as that avenging angel.

Chapter - 9

- Sanctioned Murder - IKSM Terrorist Cell -

She was dark skinned, in her fifties, and had what I would say is a typical Eastern look to her and could have had roots in any of the surrounding Mediterranean countries. Although she had no family in the USA to speak of, she nonetheless had many followers, who were closer to her than flies on shit. As leader of the cell, she was also a priestess of sorts, leading and driving the cell from atrocity to atrocity using their fanatical religious teachings as reasoning for the extreme acts. The terrorist cell had planned and carried out a number of vicious strikes on private US citizens. Perhaps I could have understood their motives and reasoning had their targets been military or government ones, but they had not been, and I did not.

To date the organization led by this woman had targeted children, pregnant women, and young families. The communities that the victims belonged to broke apart like rotten fruit due to the fear and distrust that had been seeded through the attacks. It was only recently that the latest attack took place. The terror cell’s inhuman acts had shocked the nation to its core. Their acts had ignited a series of protests and street demonstrations throughout the US, demanding that law enforcement agencies do something about these obvious terror attacks.

The latest involved the kidnapping of a five-year-old infant as he played in the backyard of his kindergarten. His single mother had dropped him off that same morning at eight, as she did every morning on her way to work. During the summer months the kindergarten caregiver would let the children play in the backyard, where the property owners had installed a kid-size tree house, a climbing frame, swings, and a sandpit, where the youngest of the children could be left to play.

The kidnapping surprised and shocked the small community of Macclenny that day, but that shock was nothing in comparison to the shock they would receive the following morning. In fact, the events of that week would burn into the inhabitants’ memories, ensuring that no one would ever forget the gruesome details of the crime.

The boy was discovered missing midmorning, and the police were informed immediately. As the day progressed, the parents, police, and neighbors searched the properties surrounding the kindergarten. It was midafternoon when a Channel 42 News crew turned up and began interviewing the family and friends of the missing boy. The station even began broadcasting regular segments, calling for help from the townspeople, asking them to come forward if they had seen or heard anything suspicious that morning.

No one came forward and no clues were found by investigators that day or evening. The boy’s mother and several of her friends walked their neighborhood streets throughout the night, searching for the little boy and calling out his name every few seconds.

It was the following morning that his dismembered body was discovered. It had been neatly cut up and placed into the kindergarten’s sandpit. Each body part had been buried in the sand and lay just a hair’s breadth beneath the surface, so that when the toddlers were placed in the pit to play, they soon discovered the grisly remains of the missing boy. The infants innocently played with the deceased child’s remains as they would any other toy. What separated these from normal toys was the congealed blood leaking from the severed ends. One baby barely out of diapers ended up smeared from head to toe with a mixture of sand and dark-red glutinous blood, while another infant had discovered a hand and used it to shovel sand from the pit into a sand castle molding bucket. Yet another child sat giggling while with tiny thumbs he poked at the dry, rubbery eyes in the boy’s decapitated head. The child’s curiosity explored further as he checked out the neck to see what was inside. Then, with his curiosity sated, he placed the head back on the sand and parked a matchbox-size red Ferrari in the deceased boy’s open mouth.

The three infants were discovered with their once-angelic hair now matted with blood, and their once-sweet faces the epitome of evil infants incarnate. It was a sandpit from hell, and its image burnt into the hearts and minds of the community, forever changing their lives.

For the kindergarten teacher, the images would haunt her for the rest of her days, which turned out to be far less time than anyone could have guessed. With her sanity broken, this last Christmas Eve she took a drunken flying leap from her roof and was cut in half by the white picket fence that bordered her small garden. The surrounding snow was drenched in blood, creating a strawberry slushie of gigantic proportions, while the steam from her innards drifted above her corpse like an escaping spirit.

The war on terror in the USA is like an iron fist crushing all that it slams into. When it hits the aggressor, nothing is left to chance, and everything within its field of destruction is removed from existence. In many ways the war on terror on home soil is employed in a similar fashion as the shock and awe tactics employed by the US armed forces overseas. With the CIA’s hands effectively tied from being able to remove homeland threats, other means of achieving the necessary ends were adopted. The cell led by this maniac had to be eliminated, but in a way that would not be destructive to our way of life, and in a way that would act to reinforce society while also sending a message to the religious fanatics that this woman associated with. The iron fist against terror was not the shock and awe tool that my new employer wanted to use. Instead, they had approached me and requested that I use methods that would be hard for these religious extremists to forget. I guess they wanted to use me as a precision instrument—a scalpel, if you will . . . I got the point, and so would she.

The IKSM was responsible for the boy’s death and would be brought to justice, but not in a way anyone could predict or even have imagined. The CIA hired me to “take care of them,” with one proviso. My work should result in the most visually impacting results I could imagine. Now, I can imagine an awful lot, so there is a chance that perhaps I went a little too far, and perhaps I took the instructions a little too literally. Nevertheless, I completed the assignment and started by decapitating the organization.