Life Among The Dead (Book 2): A Castle Made of Sand (20 page)

“I never took him for the Dahmer type,”
Sartori had said when he looked into the cell containing the
useless cogs of his scheme. He couldn’t help but feel cheated when
he saw the man that was supposed to die was the victor. The pudgy,
shorter intended victim, whose name Benito had forgotten, was on
top of the other eating him. The cell mates were both covered in
blood.

Manny, Benito’s lifelong friend and trusted
associate, leaned in close to the bars to see the fallen guy being
mauled. The black-haired zombie groaned, making the large enforcer
jump away. “Christ! Is he ok?”

“Does he look ok?” Sartori asked
sarcastically.

He was angry. The escape plan had been
thwarted by an out of date blue print, and they had been forced to
exit the duct work they were crawling through. The absence of the
guards was their saving grace.

Inmates yelled for the crime boss to help
them, they groaned and reached for him and Manny. The larger of the
two kept his distance from the vacant eyed prisoners, while Benito
just ignored them. He had restored his family to its former glory,
made the Sartori name mean something once more, and he was
respected and feared. The thirty-year-old capo had no time for
those he felt superior to, which included everybody.

“Fuck ‘em.”

“We can’t just walk out, Benny!” Manny
sounded nervous as he cringed from the reaching hands and the sight
of the prisoners that stared at him. “What about the guards?”

“We haven’t seen a bull in days.” Benito
tried to calm his friend’s nerves. Most of the guards became
employees of the capo once he entered the facility, but they
certainly would never let him escape, since doing so wouldn’t just
cost them their jobs. It would also get them locked up in the very
prison they were sworn to watch, with the very prisoners they had
bullied and abused. Killing Benito in his attempt to escape would
make them a hero, and probably earn them the respect of the FBI and
protection from reprisal.

At the end of the block, they saw the door
was actually propped open with a boot. Beyond the steel sheet was
the control room, a small antechamber where the guards maintained
their vigil over the jailed. Through the shatterproof window they
saw one guard, the first screw sighted in days, pacing the tiny
room with his head slung low as if lost in thought.

Manny followed Benito’s lead, creeping under
the safety glass. The capo cautiously peeked over the thick, bolted
sill before instructing his companion to head back to the tunnel.
Manny obviously felt uneasy about it but complied.

Benito waited for Manny to get a head start
before he slapped the glass as hard as he could. Manny looked like
a deer caught in a set of oncoming headlights when he turned to see
the guard heading for the door.

In the door’s swing zone, Sartori waited for
his chance. He expected the bull to pass him by so he could grab
him, but the man tripped and fell right in front of the prisoner.
The guard locked his eyes on Sartori and immediately tried to grab
him, snagging his shoulder.

Benito struggled to get away, but the guard
had a viselike grip on him. His eerily vacuous eyes never wavered
or blinked in the dim light of the cell block. Benito kicked
against the steel door between him and the guard, hoping to force
him to release his hold. It took a massive effort to free himself,
but once the moaning guard lost purchase on Benito’s prison issued
shirt, the capo scrambled around and over him. He entered the
control room, heading straight for the gun rack.

Before Sartori could reach the shotguns, his
ankle was seized, taking him down hard. Benito was up again
quickly, fighting the bull’s efforts to pull him down, clinging to
the rack of shotguns in his attempts to break free. With many of
the weapons gone, he had to get to the far corner to claim one of
the few that remained.

Manny had rushed to his friend’s aid,
arriving late, and the door had been allowed to close. The big man
was locked out, slamming against the pane to no avail, unable to
aid Sartori.

Hopping on one foot, Benito fought to drag
the jailer to the rack, needing just a few inches more. He couldn’t
help finding it odd that the guard hadn’t uttered a single word to
him, hadn’t told him to stop. He found it even odder that the man
seemed bent on biting him.

All of his efforts to reach the rifles paid
off. The second he had one in his hands, he turned and fired it
point blank into the bull’s head. The projectile ricocheted off the
man’s face, yet he seemed unaffected, though his left eye suffered
an orbital blowout. The cheekbone was shattered, the eye ruptured
from the incapacitating round and looked misshapen, and yet the
guard still persisted. The bull had not released Benito either, but
his eager moans were silenced when the capo stuck the barrel in his
mouth and pulled the trigger. But the guard still fought in
silence.

The capo started to use the ineffective
weapon as a bat. Balancing on one foot, he swung as hard as he
could at the crazed man’s head, until he finally fell limply to the
floor. He let himself fall as well, trying to catch his breath.
Fucking
beanbags
! he mentally insulted the weapon he
rested his head against.

Manny was still clamoring against the glass,
and Benito used the shotgun to rise to his feet so he could let his
friend in. On his way he savagely kicked the fallen bull for being
such a ‘tough bastard,’ and his curses in his native language were
amplified by the confining space. Kicking the boot that had held
the door open, Sartori found it heavier than it should have been,
as if something was in it. As he let Manny in, he picked the item
up out of curiosity. The piece of apparel was immediately dropped
when he discovered that it contained a foot.

“What the fuck is going on here?”

“What do you mean?” Manny asked as Benito
handed the errant footwear over. The body part made him shudder,
and he dropped the shoe with a shiver.

Benito looked for real ammo, but turned up
none. They would have to settle for the incapacitating beanbag
rounds. He tossed one to his massively built companion, whose body
actually dwarfed the long rifle, making it look like a toy in his
meaty hands. They proceeded through the dark halls, all the way to
the front door. The two had lost track of time, but opening the
door told them it was night. Large flakes of snow fell, blinding
them to anything that wasn’t in the immediate area; it was
accumulating quickly in the almost empty parking lot.

A pair of headlights from an approaching
vehicle struggled to cut through the whiteout. The arrival was
almost completely obscured until it turned into the lot through the
open gate. Sartori pulled his friend back into the prison before
they could be seen. The two men peered out into the blizzard to see
who had the audacity to foil their escape, yet again. Soldiers were
huddling in the back of an open jeep under a large poncho, but the
armed men hurriedly jumped out of their ride to come calling.

“Shit!” Sartori cursed. He led Manny back
through the halls, the way they had come, and into a locker room.
The crime boss scrambled to locate uniforms, tossing the largest
items he could find to his associate. “Put these on.”

The soldiers knocked and awaited an answer.
Another knock went ignored by the prisoners, who hid in the dark
halls. There wasn’t a third, because the soliders kicked in the
locked portal.

“Lots nearly empty. Looks like the guards
have taken off, over,” Benito heard one doughboy report.

A crackly voice responded between
intermittent bursts of white noise, “Proceed with caution… The
scouts did not clear the facility… Check on the inmates and feed
them. Do not let them out, over.”

“Roger that.”

Cleared
? The capo thought,
cleared
of
what
? Beams of light sliced through
the shadows on their way to where the jailbirds were hiding.
Sartori had to act, so he challenged the intruders. “Who’s out
there?”

The flashlights suddenly stopped and
converged on the voice from the dark. One of the men responded,
“The United States Army.”

“Oh, thank god!” Benito Sartori proceeded to
join the soldiers, his puzzled enforcer in tow.

The soldiers didn’t share his relief. Instead
they trained their rifles on him. One issued him an order. “Put it
down!”

“It’s just a bean bag shotgun.”

“Yeah, but they hurt like hell,” the soldier
countered. “Put ‘em on the ground, both of you.”

Benito and Manny complied, cautiously keeping
their free hands in the air.

Sartori kept the act up. “The others just up
and left us… What’s going on?”

“They don’t know?” one of the young soldiers
asked.

“They probably haven’t had much contact with
the outside.”

Not
in
a
long
time
, Benito thought to himself.

##

The unfathomable explanation wasn’t too hard
for Sartori to accept considering the exodus of the guards, and the
tenacity of the one in the control room. He had seen screws fold
under far less punishment. The soldiers informed the cons in bull’s
clothing that they had been ordered to babysit the prison since the
brass at Eagle Rock were unable to bring the caged men on base.

The prospect of having the army hovering
while they tried to escape was unacceptable. Benito insisted that
he and his comrade could handle it alone. Surely the soldiers were
needed elsewhere.

“We are,” the leader of the squad had agreed.
“They almost didn’t send us here. But I guess it’s the humane thing
to do.”

“We appreciate the army’s compassion,” Benito
said. “But, there’s no sense in pulling you off duty. Once that
gate is closed there’s no way in, and those in lockup have no way
out.”

A quick conference over the radio with
command was all it took to ensure the departure of the soldiers.
Sartori offered them a place to stay for the night since the
weather was far too severe to risk travel, and not making the
gesture would have been suspicious.

Sartori and Manny prepared their guests a
meal in the chow hall after asking them to secure the halls. Benito
told them they hadn’t been able to do so since all the real weapons
had been taken.

In the morning the military deployed a plow
and the soldiers departed. Periodic check-ins were promised to the
seemingly grateful pair.

“What now, Benny?” Manny had asked as the
tall steel gates closed them in.

“This is the safest place on earth,” the capo
answered, “We’ll wait this out ‘till spring, then we’ll go
home.”

“What about the other cons?”

“Fuck ‘em”

During the winter, the periodic checks on the
prison became fewer and farther between. The military ended them
all together and just issued the two diligent guards a radio to
call in to tell them everything was ‘hunky-dory,’ but the army
hasn’t responded to Sartori’s last few calls. The outside world has
long been thawed and the prison’s supplies are exhausted. It’s time
to go home.

Benito and Manny have made one of the
remaining vehicles road ready; it took several tries to start since
it had sat all winter, but they are on their way to one of the
capo’s safe houses. A remote estate near Poland Creek that the
crime boss purchased thinking no one would ever look for him
there.

The streets of Poland Creek are quiet when
Manny pulls into the lot of Gary’s Gas and Go, but the small town
looks like a photograph of a massacre. Bodies are littered
everywhere, left to waste away and rot. A line of cars stands
motionless along the main street of the one stop light town.

“Grab booze and smokes,” Benny tells his
loyal man, while he leans back in the passenger seat with his eyes
serenely closed. “All you can carry.”

They had trouble scoring alcohol and nicotine
in the joint once the world fell to the dead, because many of their
hook-ups were locked in their cells with their wares. In
retrospect, Sartori figures he should have kept some of the cons
alive, instead of letting them starve and eat each other. But once
they had all died out, the near silence was glorious. Their screams
for freedom became a choir of moans that reverberated through the
cell blocks like the benediction of monks.

His memory is dashed when Manny comes
crashing out of the little store. The large man is screaming,
running to the car with an armload of booty. He trips over one of
the strewn bodies and loses his haul, and several of the cardboard
crates of beer crack open, sending the cans rolling away in every
direction. Sartori just watches.

Manny leaves everything behind to crawl to
the safety of his lifelong friend. Benito had rolled his window
down, and the enforcer heaves himself up to report. “They were all
dead… I got the shit… One started to twitch, she… she bit me…”

The breathless account makes Benny’s heart
sink, but he keeps a brave face. “Grab what you can. I can always
come back.”

Manny gives the capo a nod and slowly returns
to where he had stumbled. As he tries to return the dented and
bulging cans to their home, the zombie emerges from the door his
hasty exit had left open. Manny points to the old woman limping his
way to draw Benny’s attention to her. Then he retreats with a few
cartons of cigarettes and a couple of cases of beer.

Sartori gets out of the car with his
incapacitating weapon. This zombie has robbed him of the most
steadfast friend a man could have. People used to say that they’d
‘kill or die’ for another, odds are they were exaggerating, but
Manny has more than proven his dedication over the years. The capo
gets between the corpse and Manny; he angrily stares into the
vacant eyes that are lustfully locked on him. Every step makes the
dead woman’s head wobble, due to the heavy mass of hair weighting
it down. A disaster of a blue beehive. Sartori fires point blank
into her face, though he knows it won’t put her down, but it will
knock her head back. The volume of hair proves to be too much, and
she is unable to bring her head forward. The zombie walks
backwards, her arms still reaching for the food. Benito strolls
easily up to her so he can beat her savagely with the butt of his
rifle.