Nightmare of the Dead: Rise of the Zombies (8 page)

A sudden crash through the thicket ended their conversation. They waited and listened to something with a heavy gait stalk through the swamp. Water splashed and the little creatures tittered. Bannan could feel McPhee's entire body throb with racing blood. She ground her teeth together and waited.

Years seemed to pass. Her forearms were stuck to McPhee's sweat-slick shoulders. If she knew they passed, she could work up the courage to chase them down and kill them, one by one. Even in the complete darkness, she had to believe their senses weren't enhanced, and she could stand a fighting chance against them. It was better than waiting to die.

"We're going to die here," McPhee whispered in her ear. A rush of warmth flooded the water around her legs.

She shouldn't be so concerned with this loser. He'd raped and murdered innocent people, and he'd demonstrated nothing short of cowardice. She'd learned as much as she could from him, which was next to nothing. How long could she put up with him? He presented more of a risk to her own safety. How good would he be if they were forced to fight those creatures?

Her alert eyes continued to scan the dark, shadowy brush around her. An extended silence reigned over the night. Even the swamp minions seemed to cower in the wake of some terrible power.

Bannan's mind raced. It was very possible they could contract a disease while they waded in the swamp water. The creatures might possess an arcane power that allowed them advantages living men didn't have. The unnatural monsters lusted after their blood; she was certain they were hunting her and McPhee, and who knew what might happen when they found a town of their own to ravage. Did the creatures travel together?

Death was supposed to belong to her—everyone thought Neasa Bannan, the notorious,
gun slinging
outlaw, was deceased. Shouldn't it be difficult to recognize a woman whose name appeared in illustrations in towns that were miles apart? There were things that didn't add up about her own identity. Surely, she was a pawn in some game played by the Nightmare Collective.

With her damaged mind wandering, her splintered memory once again attempted to reform itself through the sudden onslaught of familiar images: she saw herself in a town.

***

(The town was like any other town: it could be burned to the ground. There was a bank that could be robbed
and t
here was a group of local toughs who thought they were good enough with their guns and courage to defend the town against outlaws
.  Outlaws
who sought to consume every shred of decency and morality they could rip from the flesh of the common folk. The toughs were sometimes envious of their outlaw foes; some of them had once served in criminal regiments, and they'd given up their desire to chase debauchery in all of its forms by hiding behind a badge someone gave them. It was a form of retirement, a version of cowardice.

The concept of justice was defined by those men who believed they upheld the intangible concept of law. Justice rode upon a powerful black stallion; justice was survival, and it roughly pursued all means by which justice might be acquired. To the outlaw, justice was tangible.

Santiago sat astride his own black horse. The sun was a yellow orb that hung behind a curtain of smoky clouds. Bannan looked up at him and saw only the figure of a man, features rendered invisible by the anonymity of that which he brought, the very power that cursed the mortal realm and transcended it: death. For too many men, he was the last thing they saw before their fool's road terminated.

The town burned. It could have burned for any number of reasons; the rationale for violence was lost to the discarded fragments of her shattered memory.

There was a rule. It might have been her own, unspoken rule, or it may have belonged to the group she attached herself to. It was a rule that played itself over and over again in her mind, a nagging, incessant whisper which suggested failure.

No women, no children.

She understood rape was its own sort of reward for the ravagers, but Bannan's savage group was purposeful. Women weren't supposed to be killed unless they were armed, and the same applied to children. Bannan didn't cringe nor did she hesitate to end another's life if they threatened hers.

Santiago's horse reared up, and its dragon-like nostrils flared. The funeral-pyre town smoked as the inferno engulfed the dreams of men and women who never asked to be murdered or caught in a conflict that hardly involved them.

In the middle of the main
street,
a little boy stared blankly at Santiago and Bannan. His tiny fingers were balled together into one fist, and his wide eyes were wet with tears. He briefly looked over his shoulder as if he expected someone to be there beside him, or he was perhaps wondering if anything from the world he'd once known was going to survive.

Bannan wanted to say a word. The sound caught in her throat, and with her hands on her guns, she stood stiffly,
neither limb nor
muscle responding to her desire to move. Santiago was her ally and he knew the rules. No harm would come to the boy. Let him suffer the world and taste the concept of revenge, or at least let him attempt to survive in the cruel world.

But Bannan knew the creed was already gone. The women in the town were dead. Something had moved Santiago to such villainy, and she'd watched it all. A bout of madness had driven them to the depths of depravity—what happened?

The boy once again glanced over his shoulder as the hooves thundered upon the ground. Bannan moved then, and her mouth moved, too, but if the sound escaped from her mouth, it didn't matter. The flames that coursed over the town sounded like a thousand whips cracking at once, such was the intensity of their burn. Nothing from that place would be saved. Nothing would be salvaged.

That was Santiago's purpose.

From the edges of reality and time, she wanted to shout at herself, shake the woman who merely stood with her hands on the guns.
Shoot Santiago. Stop him while you still can. What will you win by allowing him to have his way? Take him in the back and let his body molder within the flames. Take the boy and help him build a life. Perhaps leave him on a church doorstep. Save him, because nobody else will.

She was somehow different. She wasn't the woman who watched Santiago. The revulsion she felt now while the horse galloped into the bowels of damnation wasn't familiar to the version of herself that stood near the heat o
f the flames and watched with mouth agape.

Hot ash carried by a sudden wind caused her eyelids to blink frantically.

Shoot him. Save the boy.

Who was this woman? How could she allow such terror? She was no different
from
the bloodthirsty creatures
that hunted her in the marshland.

The horse galloped onward, and a glowing shaft of sunlight fell upon the burning town as the boy cried out for his mother
.)

***

It was easy to occupy her mind with these ruminations while she waited in the darkness for terror to find her.

McPhee fell asleep against her shoulder, and she continued to watch the shadows. Her stomach growled, and her throat ached for a sip of water from the canteen amongst her belongings. It wasn't far away, yet, she didn't want to give away their position. What if the creatures waited for them to emerge?

Perception became warped by the long minutes and the desolate, featureless shadows. She was alone against the light of the moon and its propensity to wrestle with her concept of reality. She tried to re-focus her mind and think about the long, strange day she'd experienced. She remembered Bill Carter, young and dead, like his brother. She thought about Santiago's cold eyes, and Doctor Lynch's odd laughter.

There. A pair of glowing, feral eyes were trained on her from between the black brambles and swaying boughs. She stared back and waited. No part of her wanted to move. She forgot about the guns in her fists. Her lips wanted to form words, but they could not. Her will abandoned her in the wake of soul-devouring fear.

Her entire body seemed to sink beneath the weight of strength-sapping exhaustion. McPhee dozed soundly, and she slowly turned their bodies so she could eye their surroundings without losing sight of the glowing eyes that waited in the brush. If they were surrounded, the fight would prove challenging, although Bannan could never admit that a situation was hopeless.

How could those eyes glow? She had to talk herself down, slow her heartbeat. Even if those beasts had once been mortal men, they couldn't be gifted with any extraordinary powers. She almost believed that a touch of moonlight had highlighted a set of malicious eyes. It might have been foolish to move, no matter how slowly, but if those were eyes, they were clearly leveled upon her. As she turned, the eyes seemed to disappear into the dark. The temptation to breathe a sigh of relief was crushed when a swath of tall grass crunched beneath the weight of something heavy.

In McPhee's ear, she whispered, "Wake up."

When he didn't stir, she gritted her teeth and said it again. A low growl emanated from the shadows. She took a deep breath and decided she was going to do what needed to be done.

With her arms raised about McPhee's broad shoulders, she bit her bottom lip and counted to ten. One more sudden
movement
and she would open fire. Her fingers were ready. Her heartbeat slowed while her vision narrowed. Her aim would have to
be
perfect. She couldn't think about what might happen if all six creatures converged at once.

A putrid stench tickled her nostrils.

Movement behind her. A splash of water. Another splash. She began to turn McPhee's body as h
is
eyes fluttered open. His bottom lip quivered and he became a block of frigid ice.

An overwhelming shadow engulfed her field of vision, and a rancid, diseased smell caused her to gag on sour, throat-scorching bile. She fired one pistol into the looming shape as she let go of the awakened spy. Cold, rough hands seized both of her arms. Her eyes watered as the foul, noxious vapor of a decomposing corpse filled her nostrils. She choked back her urge to retch while doing everything she could to resist the creature's power. 

The beast was incredibly strong. The shadow loomed over her, and while she attempted to wrest her arms free, the creature leaned forward in an attempt to rip at her exposed skin with its teeth. She could feel the terrible gas that emanated from its gullet. Its wide mouth produced a hole darker than the night, a gaping abyss in which she saw her own mortal folly displayed for all time.

If she blinked, she would die.

Its strength was un-human. A dark, thick liquid poured over the rim of its jaw, and Neasa was glad she couldn't see its features in the darkness.

A little girl in a cotton dress giggled while she ran over a grassy hill, storm clouds rolling above her head while waves lapped against the shore beneath the hill.

Images from someone else's history.

Dr. Lynch held a black rubber syringe in his hands while firelight danced within his shining eyeglasses. "This won't hurt as much as we thought," the doctor said while a sly smile snaked across his face.

There might be a reason to live. There might
be
something to feel other than fear of death or the adrenaline borne of viole
nt action.

Against the pangs of exhaustion which threatened to crush her resolve, she willed her limbs into resistance. She twisted her wrists and opened her mouth to roar in the face of death. She would live, or die trying.

She slammed a gun beneath the creature's
jaw
and with one motion, cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger. The explosion was complemented by a spray of blood in her face. The creature instantly sagged backward into the water, its grip loosening.

Both guns were still dry. She cocked the hammers back and looked around her. What happened to McPhee?

Where there was one, there might be others. Waiting to die was no longer an option.

Pushing across the swamp, she returned to the supply cache; McPhee had taken his and run. Some outlaw he turned out to be. Why did she bother helping him escape from Cedar Rock? The old Neasa Bannan, whoever she was, wouldn't have done it.

Crouched in the darkness, she clothed herself and buckled her belts over her waist. Any minute now, the rest of those creatures would crash through the brush. They would have heard the gunfire.

Dawn's imminence was forthcoming; the bleak darkness of night was already surrendering to a cobalt-colored sky. It was just enough light to see the three figures which stood with their hands at their sides. They weren't breathing.

She cocked the hammers and spat.

The first one's head exploded as soon as she squeezed the trigger, and before it hit the dirt, the two others were already upon her. A gun was slapped from her fist, and she fell to her back while firing the other pistol wildly. The shadowed creature reared back from the sudden wound to its throat; the moment of hesitation was all Bannan needed to land a precise shot in its skull with the second trigger pull.

The foul-smelling corpse fell on top of her and the breath was knocked from her lungs. Her pistol-hand was crushed beneath the dead weight. She could taste the creature's coppery blood on her tongue. She adjusted her body and attempted to roll from beneath the corpse—with only one free hand, she was trapped.