Well Fed - 05 (8 page)

“Yeah? So why do parts of me feel like I’ve been run over by a truck?”

“Said it was puncture proof. The arrows probably still leave a bruise or two.”

Great.
Gus’s head fell between his shoulders.

“All right,” Talbert went on. “You just lie there for a bit and listen. Okay? I’ll fill you in on what happened these last couple of days.”

“We safe here?”

“Yeah, we’re safe. They don’t let the zombies onto the second floor.”

“Huh?”

Talbert smiled, a crooked ribbon of snow. “You heard me right. Congrats. You made it out of the arena in one piece. Minus your balls, of course. Not like you had a set anyway.”

At that crack, Gus pulled his annoyed self to a sitting position.

“All right, listen to this,” Talbert cautioned. “You’ll need to know.”

And he started talking.

Talbert and his lads had pulled up in front of the mansion, wide-eyed, weaponized, and eager to explore. The front door was wide open and not a gimp in sight, so they immediately went to work going through rooms. The place was just as they imagined, luxurious to the point of near disbelief. Almost right away, they picked up a few killer-slick military-grade weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie, sick instruments of wrath none of them had ever seen before. Plenty of guns… but no ammunition. In the end, they left the arms where they’d found them.

“That is a problem,” Gus stated.

“You gonna listen?”

“Go on.”

Talbert scratched at his head and continued.

After he and his boys had gone back out into the main hall, the door was closed. Worse, a steel plate had slid across and finalized their trapped asses. They were actually working on digging through the wood and seeing if some rewiring might open that bunker-sized slab of steel when the gimps attacked in force—a whole township, it seemed.

“And the lights were on?” Gus interrupted.

“The lights were on, but it gets better.”

They fought a running battle though cathedral-like halls and were holding their own when voices started coming out of speakers built into the walls. Giggling voices. Also, the halls had tiny cameras fixed in nooks and crannies, little black snowdomes turned bottom up and stuck to the ceiling, watching every move. Talbert and his men stuck to the side rooms, running through doorways, securing the ones with locks. They managed to evade the zombies in the beginning until they turned a few corners and wound up on an indoor bowling alley. Busloads of dead men, women, and children trailed after them, pinning them in the alley, which had no windows and no other door besides the one they came through…

A door that had mysteriously
unlocked
itself after Talbert himself had locked it.

“That’s what’s up with this place,” he said. “About half the rooms on the bottom floor are safe. They can be locked. The others got dick-all, and some… can be locked and unlocked
remotely
. You have to pay attention to where you are.”

Talbert cleared his throat before continuing.

They fought through the mass of zombies. Matt “The Machete” Miller was in his element, hacking and cutting like an electrified dervish. Benny swung his hammer while Talbert and Sheldon used their bats, and after a while, they actually thinned out the dead, enough to leave the alley. Back in the hall, however, Donald introduced himself from the third floor by sinking one of his arrows into the back of Sheldon’s neck.

The memory of the attack left Talbert speechless for a moment, and Gus didn’t press him.

Talbert started again, recounting how they tried to get upstairs to Donald. The voice on the speaker system started speaking. They were trespassers, the voice said, and as such had no rights to anything except a slow death. Sheldon had died slowly, painfully, kicking and twitching in his own blood. The point of the arrow had cut through his Adam’s apple, and no doctor was needed to tell he was a goner. Sheldon slipped and staggered about like a wounded buck, the others too damn stunned to do anything, listening to that horrible rasping of air being forced through bleeding airways. Sheldon actually started clawing at his throat in the end, and that was the last image before the lights flickered off. Benny and Matt started freaking out while Talbert gave up trying to compose them and flailed his way through the dark as a fresh wave of undead piled into the corridors. Though he couldn’t see it, behind him, in that suddenly suffocating darkness, he heard Matt Miller swinging his machete and calling out for his companions. Talbert heard the harsh connections of the machete, heard Miller straining against that black pitch tide of limbs and mouths. Heard the curses become shrieks then muffled gargling before that horrible, nerve-slicing sound of…
feeding
… filled the hallway. Talbert wanted to help him, but that writhing midnight soup of limbs and mouths stopped him cold. His own panicked screams drowned out the dying Miller.

“Matt went down swinging. Give him that. Right in the center of a mob. Didn’t know what happened to Benny until a day later. Sheldon bled out. At least I
hope
he bled out. Matt cut up more ’n a dozen of the things. I found the heads the next morning, and this”—Talbert held up the machete—“right in the middle. No Matt, though. No Benny either. Lights were still off, but there was some lit farther in the house, not that I was in any mood to explore then, so I barricaded myself in a neat little bathroom I’d managed to crawl into the day before. Plenty of running water. Raised sinks. Tub with a TV screen and even a silver minibar––empty, though, but I mean,
Christ
. Best thing? The toilet flushed. I mean, the place was nicer than my fuckin’
bedroom
. I stayed in that shitter for a day and a half until I saw the light shining in from under the door. It stayed on, and a couple hours later, after I couldn’t hear anyone out there, I stepped out.”

Stepping out into that dreadful quiet, catching a whiff of air ripe with offal and viscera, and seeing what was left of a buddy left Talbert shaken. A zombie had wrenched his bat away, so he used the machete and went from room to room, deeper into the house, retreating into bathrooms upon seeing any walking corpses and hiding out like a mouse in the walls. Sometimes, he had to fight, and he killed them straight out. The lights always went off just as a pack of zombies came into sight, and Talbert quickly learned that whoever was being cheap with the power was playing a game. Light to lure him out of hiding. Dark just before the gimps tried to eat him. Sometimes, Donald stalked about with his bow. In a short time, Talbert learned where the rotundas were and sections where a person could stand on the second and third floors and gaze down into the first. His armor had saved his ass from Donald’s arrows three times already.

“Donald usually stayed up here, and I couldn’t find a way up. The staircases were all shut off. Only reason I got up to the second floor was by getting a fancy cord cut from a length of curtain, tying it off around the hilt of the machete, and spearing that through the posts of the railing and hauling my ass up and over. Only way. Up here, there’s pretty much nothing, and the stairways to the third level are boarded up as well. Tried going through one of them barricades, but the racket brought the dead on my ass, and in the end, I couldn’t break through—not with what I have here. Tried to find another way out, but…”

Talbert shrugged.

“We can’t get out?” Gus clarified.

“I haven’t found it. This place is ratproof, bro. We’re safe up here, but for how long I don’t know. And…”

He trailed off, smiling weakly. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more hungry in all my life. You didn’t happen to bring anything to eat, did you?”

For all his dislike of the man, Gus felt a moment’s pity when he shook his head and saw the hope drain from Talbert’s features.

“Sorry,” Gus said. “Wasn’t prepared for this. Didn’t even think there’d be any gimps still walking by this point.”

“Must be the floors or something. Not as rough as scuffing along pavement.”

“Maybe.”

“Searched the kitchen and pantry down below. Nothing. The cupboards were bare.”

“And we can’t get up to the third?”

“Not yet. Maybe with you here, we can figure something out.”

Gus nodded. “Maybe.”

“Don’t know how much good I’ll be to you. I’m pretty much spent. Must be the tension or something, burning up calories. Surprised myself when I pulled your ass up from below.”

“Who’s doing the screaming?”

Talbert cocked an eye at him. “Below? Hate to say it—I think it’s Benny.”

“Benny?”

“Donald caught him or something. Didn’t let the gimps have him. Anyway, I think it’s Benny. Been listening to that for the last day or so. Deeper in the house, in a part I’m staying away from because they seem to migrate there when the screaming starts. It’s like… you know how hunters will use duck and deer calls? To lure critters in?”

“Yeah?”

“I think that’s Benny. Think Donald’s keeping him alive long enough to use him as a fuckin’ morbid duck call.”

“To draw the gimps away from the door?”

Talbert nodded. “And to sucker us into going after Benny.”

That straightened Gus up on the bed. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. It’s like that.”

Benny wasn’t one of Gus’s favorite people simply from association with Talbert, but knowing the man might be being used as bait soured his sensibilities.

“So then,” Talbert said. “You’re all caught up. We’re stuck here until we can figure a way out or we both starve. Wouldn’t hold out on the starving, though. Donald knows we’re up here, so I expect he’ll be along shortly.”

“Then it’s two against one.”

“Maybe,” Talbert acknowledged, but his expression wasn’t so confident.

“You don’t seem so sure.”

“Well,” he said after a bit, “thing is––”

“
I trust you gentlemen are resting up
?” a gravelly voice inquired eerily through the walls, causing both Gus and Talbert to jump as if icy hands had cupped their testicles.

The disembodied voice paused for a moment, allowing Gus and Talbert to creep to the main door of the bedroom.

“Step out into the hallway where I can see you,” the voice continued with crisp, cultured enunciation. The speaker volume lessened.

“Fuck that,” Gus muttered. Talbert nodded agreement.

“I applaud your resilience, gentlemen. Most succumb to the zombies of the house. Otherwise, Donald cleans up. One of you, the one wearing the military-grade armor, has actually broken the record for longest period of survival on the first floor. That’s quite an achievement, considering the history. You’ve been duly noted in my journal—an honorable mention, if you will.”

Gus cracked open the door to the dimmed hallway and scanned the ceiling, feeling the moody oppression of the place.

“Who are you?” he yelled.

“Ah,” the voice sighed. “I’m the owner.”

“Mortimer?”

“Ahhh, you know of me.”

“Heard a few stories.” Though the voice sounded clearer, Gus couldn’t locate a camera.

“Are you from Digby?”

“Annapolis.”

“I see. I actually visited that small city once, unannounced. Incognito. One benefit of electing a recluse’s existence––the common folk fail to recognize you upon making appearances. Annapolis. What a miserable, self-indulgent mash of second-tier industry and misplaced elitism, sprouting from soil drenched in weekend alcoholic binging, academic malaise, and an eroding military presence—an unlikely economic synergy that refused to perish. Astonishing, really. Even more so when all those quaint little towns amalgamated. Town pride and all that.”

Talbert’s
what the fuck?
expression said it all.

“Well, in any case… gentlemen, you’ve forced me to play my hand.”

“Why?” Gus demanded, scanning the hallway.

“What do you mean ‘why?’”

“Why are you doing this?”

“
Why
?” the voice repeated, incredulous. “Why
not
? In the absence of a police body, one must defend one’s property. To be perfectly blunt, you’re trespassing. And neither you nor your surviving companion have been the first to violate my home. If being besieged by the undead wasn’t deplorable enough, you can’t possibly imagine how… displeased I felt to discover that the remnants of humanity had, in effect, taken some self-deluded high moral ground and believed anything was up for the taking—especially a self-contained, self-sufficient dwelling such as my manor and the lands surrounding it. This piece of honeyed real estate drew clouds of human flies, who weren’t at all responsive to my attempts of dissuasion. In fact, like petulant children, they couldn’t fathom
why
I refused them entry into my domicile. Can you believe it? I never associated with any of them during the preceding, lethargic juncture reached by civilization, so what would propel me to do so in the apocalypse, at the very height of barbarism? Humanity? Oh, they pleaded that point until it bled. And when I still refused, well, the subsequent acts of vandalism and violence only confirmed my suspicions of their uncivil and barbarous nature. Their myopic crabbiness served only to strengthen my resolve to forever distance myself from the surviving, warring populace.

“There was one problem, however. More and more of these desperate refugees, armed to the teeth in some cases, became the law unto themselves. Self-proclaimed pillars of the community, braying righteousness, willing to do whatever was necessary to protect their children, courteous one moment, infuriated and frothing at the jowls the very next. Every group that stopped on my doorstep seemed more willing than the last to resort to violence in order to gain entry into the kingdom. It actually started to amuse me to see how a simple refusal could not be processed—how a blunt ‘Go away’ let slip the dogs of war. Scenes I never thought probable manifested themselves right on my very doorstep, all because I
had
and they didn’t, thus, they would
take.
And take by force. Humanity.”

The word bubbled with loathing.

“In the first year of the apocalypse, sheer
spectacles
of depravity and violence played themselves out on my doorstep. People had reverted to their baser instincts, their covetous nature. Entirely id, you see, labeled by the rather ambiguous term of
survival
. I eventually recognized that the solution to dissuading these packs of roving Huns was right before my eyes.”