--"The city is piling up at her feet and she's laughing.
A hefty
matron in shredded summer dress and a black-pearl noose of a necklace folds at
the waist, empties green-grey intestines across the rotting remains of
toes. Disemboweled, the edge of the fireman's axe flipping in a grotesque
thumbs-up. She shoulder-checks the ravager aside and down. Adds to
the collection oozing in twenty-four inches of broken bones and burst tumours.
Empties clatter, wind chimes fit for a firing range.
A slick-haired pizza boy shambles neurotically, slips alongside
the blood-encrusted pedestrian bridge. Bony fingers grasp for
handholds. An index finger is missing. The rest are worked to the
bone, through it. She swings, a textbook decapitation. Steel-toed boots
grip the gratings underfoot as a still-snarling head flies a dozen feet out and
fifty down to an artificial current, still tugging trash and starvation victims
along. The turbines died eleven months ago.
The city is piling up at her feet and she's holding.
She stares down Elysium. A public park atop an urban island,
ringed by an artificial river system in downtown Hades. The names only
ever clicked in February. Or when bleak winter accented the droves of
ravager-dead trampling designer gardens and memorial benches to feed on the
warm proles from uptown.
Oh, the irony.
Gibbering, the wrecked remains of a riot cop drags itself along
thirty yards of dripping bridge. Uniform pants are violently hemmed at
the knees. Hacked carcasses draped around the suspension couplings
provide purchase. It shuddered and slurped at the carnage and her
ankles. She takes her time. Two kicks; one to splinter the nose and
wrench the neck, another to drive her heel through the brainstem and end the ravager's
spree.
The city is piling up at her feet and the grind isn't enough.
"No," she snaps to the overweight sharpshooter Samaritan
with 'Hades Defense Force' stenciled across his jacket. Beady eyes squint
over a badly-gripped Bernelli shotgun, fingers throttling a hair trigger.
Pieter. Idiotic enough to pay her nine clanking blade brutes as muscle.
Didn't understand the points system, the mentality, the guns they'd all
refuse. Or didn't care. Bottling out came up for all the wrong reasons.
Sounds wrong, anyways. Bottling in is more accurate for the Paragons.
The AK-47's dead. Pieter's twelve-year old son tears out a
spent mag and hollers for more.
A
grey-toned construction foreman hefting a wrench and killer halitosis gets a
hit in. Smashes her shield up and aside, pain sinking teeth along
multiple lines of bruising. At least two fractures. She howls,
lashes a backhand into a knot of raised veins along the collar. Bites
deep, centres the hexagonal fused-sign shield as blood and worse splatters in a
seven-foot cone to fade in among chipped red paint and
the occasional white block letter.
It stumbled, caught itself on the dead tide surging forward.
Mangled comrades draped and rolled over the edge. Lineups formed on the
opposite shore as the ravagers locked rotting limbs and leering teeth,
setting. The infectious skeletal pile-driver stubs out her adrenaline
crash, doubles her vision as she hefts her ax and makes--
--contact. A rotting fist
snaps out, disintegrates under a sledgehammer swung from overhead. A growl erupts from the ravager's throat:
frustration, not agony. The stump slumps
in a peculiar pause they all understand.
One, two--
--impact. A final swing
compresses a chipped skull into a crumbling neck. Violently.
The dead fill the breach and the living oblige. A pair of Bowie knives to her left disassembles
a groping hand from fingertips to elbow, biting a path up biceps twitching in
rigor animatus. Combat boots with toes
like mirrors sweep-kick the ravager aside, lends momentum. Shiva; muscle shorts, tank top, an
androgynous welterweight.
Gauntleted hands grab under her arms as the almighty sledgehammer
splinters a Wal-Mart store manager's shoulder like concrete. She nearly tears them off their sockets. He'd stopped to drag her out; slather hot
blood across a dozen superficial cuts they'd both gathered over the last
eighteen hours.
"Taylor?"
"Loco?"
Her standing is third overall, second to Shiva in stand-up
kills. She doesn't use drugs, doesn't
plan to. She'd owe him assists.
"Yeah?
Sloan leaps overhead, machete clipping the ear off a plastic
surgery patient, still bound in hospital gown and facial gauze. Slips, tumbles face-first into a mass of torn
stomachs still steaming in the winter winds.
He doesn't try to stop the heels of the mob's first rank stomping down,
down, splintering vertebrae and another one of the originals.
Ninth, tenth? They've never
kept track.
"Get off."
He kept dragging her, past a swearing Angle propped up against the
rail, clutching a soaked rag to her wrist.
A decapitated punk with liberty spikes the colour of Kool-Aid lay in the
way. Not long enough for her to see the
rag's red beginning to purple. Green
splotches dotted the edges.
"Guiding you, sister.
Didn't notice your knee, did you?"
Achilles stepped overhead and parried a hacksaw, Excalibur
hand-and-a-half sword turning slow glistening circles. Oilcan fires backlit the blade, caught the
point and enormous pupils as it cleaved a schoolteacher in two. A wrist-guard lashes out, close-lines a
sprinting ravager in blue tracksuit.
"It's fractured, I know.
Get back to your score."
Oilcan fires backlight the blade, catch the point and enormous
pupils as it cleaved a marauding schoolteacher in two. A wrist-guard lashes into the throat of a
sprinting armless ravager in tracksuit and a Nike sweater. Sidelined, meat for Shiva's heel. The Captain misses a high block, loses a
wrist to the blade section of a paper guillotine. An office assistant snarls, dreadlocks
flapping. Horsetail banners, stained an
unforgiving red.
"Fractured? Try seriously fucked, dear, unless you've
got any talent for contortionism."
True. Her knee scrapes
along soaked concrete, a kink under a shin-greave she wish she hadn't
seen. Adrenaline highs crash as hard as
morphine, and there's nothing to blame but adrenal glands and the code they'd
all sworn to.
"Creep."
Almost out. The sweeping,
organic curves of the observation deck's railings coiled into the gloom on all
sides. Double-sided park benches cradled
the screaming and the dispatched.
"Couldn't forgive myself if I let a drop of hot blood seep
through that lovely face o' yours."
She opened a dry mouth as--
--her eardrums explode. Over,
and over, and over. The dull cracks of
M14 rifles, the snaps of M9s, the throaty booms of Remington over-under hunting
shotguns. Twangs from high-tension
crossbows. A ragged chorus of munitions
ascending to the heights of tinnitus as the hordes shuddered and slipped and
fell apart. A line chef lost his stomach
to buckshot. A nurse had both knees and
one elbow cracked. A teenager hefting a
scooter like a Scottish hammer took a round that snapped his head back, and
off.
"---fire! Cease
fire!"
Six of the self-declared Hades Defense Force are left; the old, the
sick, the tired. Rusty shells in
fumbling hands, slipping through bones clothed by MRE's and canned
peaches. Pieter lowers his Bernelli,
forgets to flick the safety.
Ten yards past the entrance.
Casings and nine-millimetre lobotomy victims line the concrete lip of
the shore. Dozens draped across the
bridge; maws open, limbs splayed and ajar.
Oilcans smouldered. A barricade
flickered a hundred meters away, piled cars tied off with electrical wire. The last exit. East onto Styx West, out to the highway and
the inherent safety in speed--until the needle tapped 'EMPTY' and the maws
closed in on a dark, lonely turnpike.
The city is piling up at her feet and she's alive.
A solitary rifle cracks, denting concrete two hundred metres
across the water. No hits. Several thousand of the dead milled to
trample the results of their condo fees.
Ethanol engines grumble across the observation platform, figures
throwing blankets and backpacks and the leavings even the vultures refuse to
snatch.
"Is this endgame?"
Death is a disappointment to Loco.
"He wants us for the highway ride. So, yes."
"Wants?"
"Needs. You think
they'll survive the ride out?"
The bridge is silent. The
dead are dragging and heaving their weary hungry thousands into a proper rush,
a semi-organized flying column known to outlast bands of survivors lucky enough
to receive UN Containment airdrops of assault rifles and M3 light machine
guns.
Shiva snorts, sheathes a knife and kneels beside Angle.
"Checked their ammo count a few hours ago. Only Han and Chi-Minh have anything more than
a box mag. Can't shoot straight standing
up with no cross-breeze."
They leaves the rest unsaid.
Flips Angle's body over, letting the other knife slip across a still and
silent throat. Quick and quiet.
"Final score?" Loco asks.
"Nineteen hundred seventy five. That's including a bonus for the
punk." Shiva is generous when they're
impressed. Taylor shrugs and doesn't
challenge. Same goes for Loco. The rest are catching ragged breaths and
finishing off anything still feebly clawing at their boots.
She slips the shield off her arm, lets it fall into a puddle of
half-melted snow swirling across the tarmac.
Gazes at half-inch spiked black hair, muddled nose, torn cheek. Counts the dents along lacrosse-padding
pauldrons , notes the hip-to-hip fingernail scratch across the bulletproof
vest. Tallies of near misses, charts of adrenaline
highs. The point of it all.
The city is piling up at her feet and she's haunted.
Pieter draws close.
Wrinkles his nose, takes shallow breaths. Lets his shotgun droop to his angles,
swinging from the trigger guard and shaking through several levels of adrenaline
and PTSD.
"We leaving?" she asks.
Silence, gasping. A shrug
from Loco.
"We're leaving," Pieter gasps.
Thousands drone across the water.
Flooding dozens of skyscrapers, rampaging across board meetings and
paper and empty glass apartments under empty skies above.
A look from Achilles. A
downward glance from Shiva. Angle's dead
eyes, critiquing from under a pile. The
others, exhausted and sharp. Waiting for
the cracks to prove the code is broken, easily and readily and often. Waiting to give the rough kind of release.
She wouldn't be the first.
"Yes," she says.
Hefting the fire-ax, testing a frayed grip. Swings a loose circle, feels the stitches and
braces and back-alley bone staples grind and hold as dozens pile into another
column. Sections collapse
"That's the point," she murmurs, rolling her shoulders,
limbering up for the next onslaught waddling across shattered limbs and a sea
of broken teeth. Twenty on the
arrowhead, a hundred fifty or more behind.
Half clutch table legs ripped from Home Hardware, socket wrenches, the
bludgeoning necessities of a dozen garage sales.
The city is piling up at her feet and she's bored.
"Wedge?" They
approve, shuffle into the lethal triangle.
Shiva, Mint and Cora in back.
Falcon and Gawain in middle.
Taylor on point, as always.
Weapons clink and slam into palms greased with insecurities masked as
nothing. Armour rattles. Bets hiss between the gasps of breath. Fists clink, necks crack.
A shotgun blasts. Pieter
racks the slide. Drops the shotgun,
sends it skittering across the tarmac fifteen feet to nudge against Taylor's
boot. Spittle swings from a maw wrenched
open by incredulity.
"Don't be insane!
There's food, clean water, shelter, transport!"
A Pontiac van sunk under another thrown garbage bag of cans. Children's hands dangle out the side windows;
five kids and two teenagers. All wailing,
all sick, all hungry.
"I promised good--"
"Sport, survivor.
That's all we ask for."
Taylor's biting her lip as the familiar rush sinks deep hooks, grips her
forebrain with barbs soaked in raw nihilism.
Miles and lifetimes and countless improvised headstones hold steady in a
skull dull with eighteen hours of holding actions, mad sprints, last stands. The thrills of diehard mentalities.
Pieter's hand drifts aside.
"Ask? You
promised--"
Shiva whips out another as the Bowie knife stops vibrating. Pieter coughs. Twice, three times before blood seeps into
his boots and drips off his vest like rapids.
Screams carry across the tarmac.
A bearded figure in an overcoat throws a boy into the back of the last
overloaded F-150, swings out a Remington bolt-action--
--but they're already beginning the creep; the slow march that
builds into a sweating swearing bleeding ram that never runs empty or gets
repetitive. Arms lock in. Her world evaporates to left and right. PCP forces grating howls from several
throats.
No shots. Why shoot the
living dead--life traitors, nihilists-- and waste a decoy?
Eighty meters. Fifty. Thirty.
Irises shudder and blink. Fists
clutch rolling pins, ladles, meat knives draped with precise lines. The customer is always right.
The city is piling up at their feet and they're all addicted.
"First to a hundred," Taylor chokes. Score is low tonight. The drills are at her skull, and the whirring
won't stop. She knows she isn't alone,
but she knows only she'll worry.
This is it."--
Final rewrite for "Paragons". A character sketch piece I found myself sucked into at the beginning of September. I'd finished Telltale's "The Walking Dead", and I had a few thoughts about turning zombie/survival stories on their head: for starters, will adrenaline junkies exist after the apocalypse? Short answer: read above. Long answer: stay tuned.
