Well Fed - 05 (11 page)

The dead wailed at the living. Their voices carried to the upper dome, making it known through the house that fresh meat had been found.

Gus dropped the chainsaw, took up his bat, and joined Talbert. He bashed limbs and heads as if he were flattening wheat beside a pond of industrial filth. One zombie, a white-dressed maid with the front saturated in gore, actually climbed to her feet and walked toward them both, lipless jaws chattering. Gus smoked her across the face, and her remaining features disintegrated in a chunky burst.

But she didn’t drop. Despite having her entire sinus cavity laid bare and displaying squashed organic tissue Gus had no clue of, she walked on, arms raised, dainty hands ending in peeled fingers.

Gus hesitated at the fright.

Then Talbert’s machete split the deadhead’s noggin to the eyes. “Recognize someone, didja?”

He kicked the corpse off his blade. Gus composed himself as the rain of bodies slowed. At a glance, it appeared most of the dead had fallen in crippled heaps.

He realized then that Mortimer had ceased screaming.

Zombies spilled out of the archways on the ground floor.

“All right,” Gus barked and bounded up the stairs. “Keep them back.”

He left Talbert and switched out his bat for the battery-powered chainsaw. The tool came to life with one jab of its electric start button, and Gus cut wide across the top of the wooden barricade. Chips and dust flew into his face, making him pause to slap his visor into place. Talbert chopped and hacked, slowing the mansion’s residents.

Gus completed the first cut in less than fifteen seconds, pulled the saw free of the thick wood, and finished a pair of downward strokes in an equal amount of time. The chainsaw had surprising power, and Gus wondered how much juice remained in the rig after gnawing through those sturdy planks. At the end of his final stroke, he pulled the blade out and laid a boot to the wood, kicking the slab free of its remaining fibers.

“Talbert!” Gus shouted and buzzed into the head of a straggler gimp just on the other side of the wall.

Talbert stood not three steps behind him, up to his knees in a growing wall of corpses. Pale faces gleamed under the dome, the only flickers of light in a haunting mob of outlines.

“You made the hole big enough!” Talbert yelled, clipping his shoulder on his way through.

“It’s called a fuckin’
bottleneck
, y’moron! Hold them there while I cut through the next one.”

With that, Gus retrieved his bat and sprinted up the curving stairs, the thick layers of his suit steaming him. A few zombies crossed his path on the second-floor landing, forcing him to choose between his two weapons.

He dropped the bat.

There was a feral glee in applying the chainsaw’s whirling teeth to decomposing flesh, but the ferocious back spatter quickly blinded his visor, and he realized it wasn’t the weapon of choice. He tossed the chainsaw, spent precious seconds wiping his visor clean, and slapped it up.

He picked up his bat at the edge of the stairs and cracked two remaining gimps.

Then he hoofed it toward the third landing and the wooden wall barring passage halfway up the stairs.

The lights came back on, illuminating everything.

Farther behind, Talbert cringed at the blinding light, still chopping at anything piling through the opening in the first barrier. More dead things shambled into the killing floor of the rotunda, fully revealed, enough to send a chill of worry through the man. He chopped the head off another handyman-type deadhead. An arm reached for him. He hacked it off with one cut, flash-exposing a black cross-section of the forearm. Another zombie squirmed through, its torso slick with slime. It slipped on the stairs and fell.

Talbert crushed the head under a boot heel.

The chainsaw buzzed above, chewing into a wall and distracting him. A zombie hit his chest, driving him back, and he fell hard against the stairs. His unprotected head bounced against an edge. Another gimp slicked through the breach, its face grimy and skeletal, reaching for him.

Talbert tried to move and discovered, with a doped rush of fear, his limbs were responding with a hypothermic sluggishness. A hand wreathed in tatters of skin and musculature pawed at his thigh, nails clawing into armor plating, discovering sections covered only in denim. Fingers sloughed over straps and buckles, digging into jeans…

Grunting, Talbert held the machete across his chest and pushed the blade forward, scalping the gimp’s soft skull as if shaving a sliver of cheese off a stubborn block. Each cut lifted the zombie’s head. He kept cutting, his senses slowly leveling out, feeling fingers clutching at his upper thighs. More zombies squeezed through the glut at the opening in a horrid bloom. Some fell onto his lower legs, squashing the deadhead’s fingers for valuable seconds Talbert needed to push the head back and stab the machete underneath the chin, up into the brain.

The creature’s death-grinning face flopped into his crotch, and Talbert had never felt more grateful for a protective cup than at that exact moment.

Grimacing, he kicked free of the oozing bodies, flipped onto his hands and knees, and crawled away from the stalled bottleneck.

Then something kicked him in his side, plastering him against the wall.

Pain robbed him of his breath, and for several seconds, he fixated on an arrow sticking out just above his hip, where the plates of his body armor were kept in place by straps.

Blood seeped from the wound, dark and precious.

Grimacing, Talbert looked toward the second floor and saw no one, hearing only the buzzing of Gus’s chainsaw somewhere above. The zombies still crawled through the hole in the barrier, reaching for him on the stairs.

Clenching teeth, Talbert tried getting to his feet, feeling how the arrow moved inside, and blinked against the flashing black motes before his eyes. He glanced toward the rotunda floor.

There, seen through the posts of the staircase, stood Donald.

The archer had taken up position inside an archway, his Korean mask smiling pleasantly.

Aiming another arrow.

Donald released, and Talbert twisted to escape—not fast enough, however, as the arrow spiked his left thigh, grazing bone and jacking nerves as if zapped by a live wire. Talbert gripped his leg. A missile sizzled toward his face, and he ducked while reflexively lifting his left hand to protect his head. The shaft perforated his palm with a shocking
whump
, the impact twisting him off balance. Talbert cried out and dropped onto his belly, seeing the barbless point of the arrow sticking clean through the meat of his palm. Whimpering, he gripped the shaft and pulled five inches free with a grunt and a spurt of gore.

Something grabbed his foot.

“
Fuck off
,” Talbert said and instinctively tried to kick with his wounded leg––a shot of hot agony lanced through his entire side, paralyzing him for seconds.

Enough time for a deadhead’s hands to grasp his knees.

Gasping, Talbert flipped onto his back and booted the zombie’s face with his good leg, squashing the dead thing’s features. He kicked twice more, removing the head from the zombie’s shoulders. The victory was short-lived as a stream of gimps oozed through the opening in the barrier, slipping over each other like buttered worms.

They crawled toward Talbert.

Grimacing, Talbert pushed himself up the stairs, dragging the boneless rubber of his leg and leaving thick blots of blood on the staircase. He glanced toward Donald and grunted a laugh at seeing the archer fighting off a handful of attackers.

A zombie stood up from the scrimmage of undead creeping after Talbert. Another gimp rolled over and hit the standing deadhead’s leg, jostling it against the wall. The zombie righted itself and walked up the stairs. The thing had no eyes, and a long ribbon of skin, from its bottom lip to its Adam’s apple, had been ripped away. It floundered after Talbert. Unseeing eye cavities fixed on him, picking up his location by either smell or hearing or some unknown sense bestowed upon the undead. The monster stepped on another zombie, pinning it to the steps.

The blind gimp reared its head up as if hearing something and reached for Talbert’s retreating ankle.

Talbert peeked over his shoulder at the thing, hearing a pneumonic wheeze escaping its chest.

Then in a flash, the zombie’s head burst apart with a grisly pop.

“C’mon,” Gus shouted, aluminum bat in hand. He hooked Talbert’s armpits and got him to his feet.

“He got me,” Talbert winced.

“In the side, right?”

“And the leg. Hand.”

“Goddamn shooting gallery here,” Gus grumped, looking in Donald’s direction as he lugged the bleeding man up the stairs. Talbert stumbled and almost pulled his rescuer off his feet.

An arrow screamed into the wall behind them, embedding its head deep.

Another one punched Gus square in the shoulder, dropping him to his knees and causing him to spill Talbert.

“Christ,” Gus gasped, feeling as if he’d been jabbed with a prong.

“He’s getting another one ready,” Talbert said and flattened on the stairs. Gus placed his body between the wounded man and the archer, set his jaw, and hauled him along by his armpits, past the landing. Talbert cringed as he threw his arm around Gus’s neck. Together, they stood and staggered up the staircase until they made it through the hole cut into the third barrier.

No arrows came from Donald.

Gus ignored the stairway continuing to the fourth floor and instead dragged Talbert down a polished corridor basking in warm, angelic light. They ducked inside a bedroom where night could be seen through unshuttered windows. Gus carried his bleeding companion to the bed and dumped him on a rosy-red duvet, eyeing the adjoining en suite.

Talbert broke into giggles as Gus returned to the bedroom’s entrance.

“Fuck’s wrong with you?” Gus demanded, closing the door and finding the light switch. Red light illuminated the room, stopping him in his tracks.

Talbert hoisted himself a little farther onto the bed before plopping his head onto a plush, tube-shaped pillow. He lay there, staring at the ceiling for a moment, then smiled and chuckled again.

“You, bro,” he gasped between peals of mirth. “You see what you did?”

Gus didn’t see. He pulled a recliner toward the door to barricade it.

Talbert’s form rattled with another belly laugh, lasting puzzling seconds, before he sighed and stared at the ceiling. “You saved… my ass.”

Shoving the chair into place but questioning whether it would do much good, Gus regarded the man on the bed.

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it,” he said and went to the bathroom. He found some thick white towels and facecloths hanging off metal racks and brought them all back to the wounded man.

“I’m no expert,” Gus muttered as he applied a towel to Talbert’s leg and side, “but I bet you’re wishin’ you wore your fuckin’ fireman’s suit now, eh?”

“Only if… I was on a stage… wigglin’ my ass at the ladies.”

“Yeah, right.”

Gus drew away the towel and saw the dark bruise soaking it. His innards went cold at the sight of so much blood. He clawed buckles open on the armor plates covering the top of Talbert’s leg and flipped them back. He immediately took a long towel and looped it around the thigh, creating a tourniquet.

“Y’know… what’s funny,” Talbert said, his voice becoming slurred. “I… I actually wanted to off you. Out here. Make up any story I wanted then.”

“Yeah?” Gus said, knotting the towel and drawing a deflated hiss.

“Fuck, man, take it… take it easy,” Talbert whispered and turned his head toward the windows. “Nice. Nice place.”

“Yeah.” Gus grabbed another towel and applied it to Talbert’s wound above his hip, balking at whether he should remove it or leave it in. He left it in, pressed the cloth around the arrow tightly, and held it there, watching the material slowly bleed dark.

Silence from Talbert, deep and reflective. Then, “Sorry, bro.”

Despite his dislike for the man, Gus’s throat constricted, which surprised him. He’d gotten used to thinking of Talbert as a piece of shit for so long that… that simple, exhausted apology touched a chord within him while the towel around Talbert’s wound darkened.

“Nah,” Gus rumbled and sniffed, clearing his filling sinuses. “Don’t worry about it. Can’t say there wasn’t a day or two I thought the same thing.”

That surprised Talbert enough to lift his head off the pillow. “You wanted to kill me? You treacherous fuck, you.”

Gus chuckled then, and Talbert joined him. And for a moment, they shared perhaps the only enjoyable moment they’d ever shared since meeting each other.

“Thanks for pulling me up,” Gus muttered. “When you did. You saved me back there.”

“Yeah, I did. I saved you first, didn’t I?”

“You did. Don’t make a thing out of it.”

“Gus,” Talbert said sleepily, his eyes closing. “You… you make them fuckers pay.”

Gus didn’t have to ask which fuckers.

“Hear. Me…?”

Gus removed his hands and regarded the towel, blinking at the steady seepage of blood.

Time braked then.

A thump came from beyond the bedroom door, but Gus ignored it. Talbert lifted his good hand off the bed. It rose slowly, like a toll bridge being drawn up. Gus clasped the hand and held it tightly, sniffling a little more than he should be. Talbert looked back at the window, blinked once as if terribly sleepy, and closed his eyes.

“Goddamnit,” Gus whispered, shaking his head. He couldn’t fucking believe he was getting emotional over
him
. “Talbert. Talbert.
Bro
. Don’t be… don’t be a prick here.”

But Talbert didn’t respond.

When Gus realized the strength had gone from Talbert’s hand, he lowered it over the man’s belly and gave it a solemn pat.

Another thump demanded attention from outside the door.

Gus rose from the bed, his face a shadow of loss, and regarded the dead man on the duvet. Then he considered his bat.

The anger welled up.

Soft mood lighting illuminated the spacious corridor, making the dark baseboard wood and white walls glow with festive warmth. Crystal lamps, worth a fortune to certain collectors, perched on delicate tables and glittered. Paintings of abstract landscapes tastefully covered the walls and begged to be interpreted. A strip of beige carpeting stretched out from the rotunda’s archway and traveled the length of this particular wing of the mansion. An ominous trail of blood dappled its cushiony surface, some blotches larger than others, marring the plush highway all the way to a closed door.