Lot of vets had seen bad things, had experienced mind-numbing horrors that their Main Street, USA upbringings had definitely not prepared them for, but he had seen things far worse.
The war had been history for roughly thirty years now.
He had seen his fiftieth birthday come and go.
And what had he learned in all that time?
Not a thing, not really. Nothing he didn’t know at twenty in the Delta. Sure, he’d mellowed after they let him out of the hospital, he’d gotten a grip on reality again via intensive therapy with other vets. He’d even managed to hold jobs. But what never changed in all that time was that the war still left a bad taste in his mouth.
And, more so, the government that waged it, its citizens who allowed it.
He sat there, cheek packed with chew, thinking, wondering why he hadn’t just gotten the hell out when he’d seen this coming, because he had. Maybe it was that all these years he’d been looking for some action, looking for a good fight, a reason to do some serious damage and now he had found it.
The belfry had been screened-in to keep out birds and bats, but Johnny had cut the screens out with his K-bar. So, up there in the tower he had himself a four-sided gun port. With his Winchester and its telescopic nightsight, he could pick the rabids off a block away. Not that they’d stay down unless you got them just right, but he could still drop them.
He studied the town.
He had a .357 Smith in a holster at his belt, along with a Browning 9mm semi-auto and .38 in his shoulder sack. Plenty of ammo for all three. Then there was the K-bar, a machete, and a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump with a pistol grip.
Loaded for bear?
Damn right he was.
Bears were nothing compared to what he was facing.
What would have been nice would have been some grenades, some Claymores for perimeter defense. Maybe a sixty or an over-and-under CAR-15. Yeah, sure, and while he was at it maybe an RPG and a Stoner machine gun like he’d carried in the war.
He watched the streets and hated what was happening, while knowing something like this was inevitable. He hated the innocents getting caught up in it, especially the children. They always suffered. He didn’t like the government (never voted, thought they were all corrupt, self-serving facists owned by rich special-interest groups) and hated authority in any form. He knew he was a dinosaur with his revolutionary, anti-establishment attitudes that stunk of sixties’ radicalism.
But he didn’t care.
He was getting old and he was going to die this time, probably. And the thought of that didn’t scare him, it energized him. He decided he was just going to watch this get out of hand, wait for those in power to send in the troops to clean this up, to stop it (if they could), and when they came, he was going to start killing them. Until then he would—
Jesus H. Christ, what was that?
He saw it, but didn’t believe it.
Down there, walking up the sidewalk was a woman. She looked confused, dazed, lost. At least, that’s what her stumbling gait told him. Crazy thing was that she carried what looked like a guitar case.
Was that possible?
“Going to a jam session with those animals, dear?”
He took up his Winchester, sighted her with the night scope. He watched her in the field of green, brought the crosshairs to bear right between her shoulder blades. It was the best way to grease someone. A slug in the spine would explode the vertebrae like shrapnel.
Killshot.
He kept watching her, wondering what her deal was.
She didn’t move like one of them.
He didn’t like the idea of shooting, of announcing his presence to the rabids. But this woman, she had to be fucked-up to be wandering around like that. Had to be. Besides, it was only a matter of time before they got her and he needed a target to sight his rifle in with.
He’d save her from them.
Winchester balanced on the lip of the belfry, eye pressed to the sight’s eyehole, he breathed in and out slowly, bringing himself down, willing a total calm to descend over him. Killing in war was a business and had to be handled in a business-like matter.
Nothing personal, bitch.
He applied pressure to the trigger.
7
The voice was clotted, full of dirt: “You got a smoke for me, mister?”
Lou Frawley almost fell right over, knowing he was not only in imminent danger but that he had been since he’d hid out in the alley. The voice belonged to a woman… no, not a woman, a young girl. A teenager, he guessed.
He made his way out of the alley into the streetlights.
He saw no one around. Heard nothing.
He stood there, his throat tight, his heart pounding, wondering if maybe he’d imagined it all. He waited a moment, two, three. Nothing.
What if that girl was still human?
What if she needed help?
Then he smelled something.
An odd odor. Sharp, pungent. A chemical smell. That and a vague stink of decay, like what you might smell at the bottom of a pile of wet leaves. Not revolting, really, simply earthy, unsettling.
He cleared his throat. “Come out where I can see you.”
First, he heard a slithering sound.
It turned his guts to jelly, made him take a few steps back. Nothing sane made a sound like that. It was low and wet-sounding. He expected to see a nest of snakes come slinking out of the darkness, all knotted-up together like when they hibernated, a great tangle of reptilian motion.
He heard a wet dragging sound, heard it getting closer.
It was time to run, but he couldn’t.
Like the aftermath of a head-on collision, he just had to look.
She came out of the alley on her belly, eyes lit yellow like Christmas bulbs. She was grinning, a wild and deranged smile, all teeth and gums, a froth of foam coming from her nose, her mouth. She slithered along on her belly in a hideous, side-to-side serpentine motion. Her hands were out before her, clawing at the pavement as she came on, the fingertips scraped to bloody nubs.
And Lou, who’d grown up in the mean streets of Milwaukee and had witnessed the aftermath of a gangland execution before his twelfth birthday, fell back, but did not go down.
His head grew dizzy, his lungs seized up and ached from the lack of air.
Then it came, from down deep, somewhere distant and primal, a ragged manic scream that made his bones rattle.
It snapped him out of it.
Like a snake, an emotionless voice told him, she moves like a python, a crawling, legless thing.
And the crazy part was, she moved very quickly.
When she was within a few feet—about the time he screamed—her head and torso rose up like a cobra preparing to strike. He could see that her abdomen had been rubbed raw, her breasts worn to bleeding sacs that hung like skinless polyps.
He also saw why she moved like a snake-woman.
She had no feet.
There was nothing beneath her ankles, just crusted, ragged stumps.
Her bleeding hands reached out for him. “Can you help me, mister? Can you? I’m sick, mister… help me…” she asked, her voice black and soulless. Her tongue came out, seemingly five or six inches of it, white and swollen, tasting the air and looking for life to steal. “Please, mister, I’m so cold… help me…”
But he couldn’t help her.
He couldn’t even help himself.
For one crazy moment while his mind teetered on the edge of some yawning black pit, he almost went to her, pulled her into his arms. He could almost feel the chill of her damp flesh against his own, smell her acrid chemical stink, feel her teeth sinking into his throat.