Dead Mann Walking

5

What’s that Tom Waits song where everything’s broken? Wasted and wounded? Can’t remember. What came next was something like that, though, an apocalypse in a broken teacup. It wasn’t important to the universe, or even the next town over, but it was intimate, and messy as hell.

Hakkers swarmed the space like rats entering a bakery, giddy from the smell of food, mad with hunger. A chain saw, teeth whirring, grunted in my direction. I stood there, dumb as a post. The blades made contact with the wall, inches from my head. Cold bits sprayed my face. Plaster or dried flesh—I didn’t know which. I only knew I was glad it wasn’t part of me.

I’d be next. No reason to think otherwise. So this was it, or as close to “it” as a chak gets. What do you do in that moment? Me, I closed my eyes. I pressed my hands into the wall behind me. I tried to focus on the concrete’s feel against my palms and fingers. I tried to think about anything except what was right in front of me. Common sense tells you it’s better not to be paying attention when they cut you up.

And they say if you really, really work at it, you can do that: slip out of your body, away from the here and now, especially if you’re a chak, since you’re half-gone to begin with. But instead of working with me, taking me to my happy place, or at least a cheap motel, my brain came up with something I probably read on a bubblegum wrapper:

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Right. Fuck you, memory. Just fuck you.

No chain saw, though. A hand grabbed my shoulder. When it pulled, I followed, stumbling along. I kept my eyes shut until a low voice said, “Basement. It’s all we’ve got.”

It was Boyle. Somehow he’d managed to keep his head, arms, and legs when all those about him were losing theirs. Did he serve in a war? He acted like he’d been trained, yanking me with one hand, pushing Ashby with the other. All I could think was that he was saving the wrong guy. He should’ve been helping Turgeon. He was the one who could get him the money. Not that I was planning to mention that.

Bit by bit we stumbled through the Mixmaster of a lobby. There was one thing in our favor: The hakkers, bless their tiny brains, were too stupid to get off their bikes. For every lug wrench swing or chain saw swipe, they spent twice the time repositioning their grinders, as if staying in the saddle were a rule of the game. That gave Boyle the time to steer us down the hallway.

Ashby moved like a pull toy with a broken axle. With every shove he’d take a few steps, slow, and then stop. As we neared the end of the hall, a steel fire door came into view. Boyle let go of me and gave Ashby a final push that sent him teetering along like a penguin.

“Run!” Boyle shouted at the kid’s back.

Then he did something that made me think he wasn’t so smart after all. He turned back toward the lobby.

I grabbed him. “You nuts?”

He tried to twist away, but I dug in my fingers and locked the joints. Like I said, once a chak gets hold of something we don’t let go unless we want to. That got his attention. He growled like he was planning to drag me along.

“Let go,” he said. “Stay with Ashby, please. I’ve got to get the others.”

“There’s nothing you can do! It’s over for anyone out there.”

Before he could argue, a new sound rose through the mix of whining engines, screams, chops, and whirs. In a way it was like it’d been there all along, but someone had just plugged in a subwoofer so you could hear it better. It was a keening, deep, low, abject. It sounded so bereft it made you want to weep along with it.

It was the chakz.

Not the ones still struggling, the ones who’d been cut down and left to writhe. Even shredded, they couldn’t die, head for the other side, or melt into an existential nothing. The magic of ChemBet had seen to that. All they could do was abandon what little they had left, their souls, if you like to pray. As they felt it slip away, they cried for it, like it was a baby they couldn’t feed anymore. Once it was gone, they’d be feral.

What was left? A predator honed by millions of years of evolution, or worse, designed by God, hungry, but severed from its higher functions. One after another, the maimed chakz bowed to their inner lizard kings, then lashed out at whatever moved.

You’d think the hakkers would be scared, but they weren’t. They were thrilled. This was what they were waiting for, the moment that justified these little soirees. Ferals proved that chakz were dangerous, that we should be destroyed, that we deserved it. Safe and smug on their bikes, in their thick clothes, heavy weapons in hand, they howled and went back to playing their live-action first-person shooter.

Like I said, ferals aren’t much of a threat unless they come at you in numbers, but you do have to be careful. The dog-soldier who sniffed me out after I shot his friend wasn’t. Maybe it was his first night out with the boys, or maybe he couldn’t handle his liquor as well as he thought. Who knows? Whatever the reason, he spent a little too much time gunning his engine, raising his fist, and whooping, and not enough time looking over his shoulder.

Two moaners barreled into his back.

It may have looked like a coordinated attack, but he was just whooping the loudest and had the shiniest bike. Ferals love two things: shiny lights and liveblood screams. Liveblood screams are different. They sound . . . wetter .

When they hit, the dog-boy teetered. Probably would’ve been a big nothing if the bike hadn’t ridden out from under him. It climbed the coffee table, tore up the magazines, and fell sideways. I think the dog-boy said, “Whoa!” Took him a second to realize his situation wasn’t so funny. Even when he did, his first cry for help wasn’t very loud. The fall must have winded him.

Ferals are fast. Before his friends realized they had a man down, four swarmed him. Two bit into his shoulders, their teeth grinding through his leathers until they reached skin. A woman straddled him, eyes so wide I think the lids were gone. It didn’t look like she could do much. Her arms were cut off above the elbows. But sometimes you just have to improvise. Fistless, she stabbed her pointy stubs at his head in quick staccato bursts.

Now the other hakkers heard him. They dropped whatever they were mutilating to help. With a sudden pause in the slaughter, I figured I might as well let go of Boyle so he could do his thing. The LBs busy, he herded as many chakz as he could into the hallway. Mostly I followed his lead, keeping one eye on the hakkers.

He must have noticed my divided attention, because he shouted, “Don’t look; just move!”

We didn’t have long. Quick as a gamer’s fingers, they pulled the ferals off and chopped them into even smaller pieces. There wasn’t much they could do for the dog-boy, what with his jugular slashed and his face looking like something a cat threw up.

Score one for the zombies.

A hairy ginger with more freckles than skin kept hakking even when there was nothing left but limbs. When the chak pieces didn’t stop moving, he freaked.

“Stay dead!” he screamed. “Stay dead!”

Hey, pal, we would if we could.

The ginger wasn’t the only rattled hakker. That was the second man they’d lost. No one goes on a chak attack without thinking he might cash it in, but might is a long walk from really believing it. They weren’t just grieving their fallen comrades; they were grieving their own mortality.

Knowing how quickly that grieving could turn to rage, I pulled at Boyle again.

“Come on! Now!”

Ignoring me, he steered a few more chakz down the hall. I don’t usually try reasoning with a chak, but I figured it was worth a shot.

“Boyle, do the math. Get cut up here, you’ll never build that sanctuary.”

That did it. He turned and we ran. Between us and the basement door were about seven uncoordinated bodies, stumbling around as if they’d only recently discovered they had legs. Ashby was beyond them. He had the basement door open, but instead of going down, he stood on the top step, waiting for Boyle with a wimpy grin plastered on his face.

Despite the obstacle course, we moved fast. I thought we’d all make it until a roar rattled the walls. It was an engine, but not a wussy rice-grinder whine. This was guttural, an all-American putt-putt.

Some buried masochistic streak made me turn for a quick look, not that you could miss a hairy monster astride a gleaming Harley Softail Fat Boy. No grungy thug, the rider was nice and clean, a wash-and-werewolf decked out in impeccable studded leather. He and his machine were pointed down the hall, right at us. He flashed a grin, gunned the engine, and my chest rattled like a space shuttle was taking off. Boyle summed things up nicely.

“Shit!”

We picked up speed, pushed the others hard. Still at the door, poor Ashby found himself faced with a pack of oncoming bodies. Looking as if he was about to say heh, he fell backward and disappeared. Seeing his buddy vanish, for the first time Boyle shoved ahead of the others.

By the time I neared the doorway, I couldn’t see Boyle or Ashby, only an Escher-like maze of heads, torsos, and limbs rolling down concrete steps into a musty, dark basement. Unlike the mess left behind, I assumed these body parts were all still attached.

I was about to dive into the pile when the wash-and-werewolf put the Harley in gear. The rear tire screeched against the linoleum. The bike flew forward.

If he kept his mean machine straight for about fifty yards, Lon Chaney Jr. would fly down the stairs, crushing everyone and everything, including me. Judging by all the flailing on the steps, nobody was thinking about getting out of the way.

I went into a lightning round of Trivial Pursuit: How many seconds does it take a Softail Fat Boy to go from zero to sixty? Five? How long was the hallway? Fifty yards? How fast could I go from zero to sixty? Fast enough to reach the knob and pull the door shut? And if I didn’t get it exactly right, what would it feel like when that thing rammed into me?

After wasting a precious two seconds on that crap, I grabbed the silver knob and jumped, yanking the door with me. As I flew, still in midair, I swear Chaney got close enough for me to see his eye color. Dirt brown.

That, I remember.

The door was half-closed when his front wheel caught it. The fire-resistant slab of gray slammed into me so hard I not only stayed airborne, I played Superman, up, up, and away as the door crashed into the frame. When gravity caught up, I fell onto the pile of scrambling bodies at the base of the stairs. A Twister game of the dead. Patent pending.

Shaking off the vertigo, I extricated myself and looked up. There was a big wheel-shaped dent in the middle of the door. The hinges were bent. The cement around the frame had cracked, but held. I doubted Mr. Chaney looked nearly as good.

We were safe, but not for long. It wouldn’t take much for the Livebloods to pull the bike out of the way. Then they’d come for us.

I looked around for blunt, heavy objects, but it was too dark to see anything. I was trying to remember how many bullets I had left in my Walther when a flash of light got everyone’s attention. Boyle was standing in the center of the wide, shapeless space, holding a cheap plastic lighter with a tiny flame. Ashby stood behind him, looking like an accessory, but none the worse for wear. Other than the half shapes of nervously shifting bodies that reminded me of cattle stuffed in a railcar, I couldn’t make out much else.

A community organizer to the end, he spoke softly. “Everybody stay calm. We don’t need anyone going feral.”

But something else, even harder to ignore, competed for our attention, a loud . . .

Crunch.

All eyes shot to the door at the top of the stairs. They were already trying to move the bike.

Turned out Boyle wasn’t the only one who could talk. Some genius announced, “They have to come down on foot, one at a time. We can take them.”

Ashby repeated the last two words. “Take them. Heh-heh.”

Creak.

A more resigned voice spoke up next. “Then what? If we make a pile of bodies, they’ll burn this place to a cinder in the morning.”

“I’m ready for it,” another said. “It’s better than going on like this.”

That was it for intelligible speech. Hisses and grunts followed, most sounding like they agreed.

Boyle, for whatever ridiculous reason, turned to me. “Got any better ideas?” The equivalent of asking, “Excuse me, buddy, can you stop the rain?”

Crunk!

Back up at the door, cement drizzled from the cracks. It came down so freely, I looked around for an umbrella. We couldn’t go out. We couldn’t fight them if they got in. What was left?

“Barricade,” I said. “We pile shit against the door. Hakkers don’t have a big attention span. Keep them out long enough, maybe they’ll get tired and go home.”

I thought it wasn’t a half-bad idea, but Mr. Last Stand chimed in. “Barricade it with what? Cardboard boxes? How do we brace them? They’d just push them down the stairs.”

One of the smart ones. Asshole.

Clank!

That last one sounded like the whole doorframe was coming loose. Everyone shifted like a bunch of cows. I thought I heard a few low moans.

Boyle heard it, too. “Stay calm! We’ll be fine!”

He didn’t sound like he meant it.

Unlike having my back against the wall and a chain saw in my face, it was quiet enough here to pray. It was one of those desperate moments when you hope an angel appears and you don’t particularly care if it’s from heaven or hell.

That’s exactly what happened, sort of.

From somewhere out in the dark, a wispy, boyish voice nervously said, “Don’t worry. I called the police ten minutes ago.”

At least it broke the tension. Everyone with a mouth laughed.

I knew the voice. “Turgeon? You down here? Where are you?”

“I’m sitting on some sort of crate. I think I have a splinter.”

That earned him another laugh. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxed or in shock. If he was relaxed, I’d have the pleasure of telling him, I told you so. If he was in shock, what would be the point?

“If you’re on a crate, better crawl inside it and kiss yourself good-bye, Mr. Turgeon. There’s no way the cops would bother showing up to save a bunch of chakz.”

Turned out he was the one who had to spell things out for me.

“You forget, Mann,” he answered. “I’m not a chak.”

And that was when I heard the sirens.