Maurice Broaddus - King Maker

"D?" one of his men said, street-sharpened instinct on high alert. He gestured for silence.

Everyone made their way to his end of the porch. They heard it, too. Something stirred, like the rustling of dead leaves across a floorboard. Both the guards drew their guns. The boards of the house next door shattered, baseheads poured out of the window frames or ran out the front door. Dollar and Tavon ducked behind the guards, landing hard on the concrete. That white burnout leapt onto the porch, a feral gleam in his eyes, slashing at the throat of one of the guards. He took three bullets to his chest before another shot sprayed the back of his head along the porch stones. The fiends fell on the guard, tearing at his clothes, shredding his pockets. Not satisfied, one held him by the back of his head, his fingers digging into the sockets of his eyes, then bit into his skull. His body danced, as if caught on a live wire, then slumped. The other guard never even got off a shot. Overwhelmed by the scene, he just stood rooted with both guns drawn. The fiends dragged him down, without a cry, knocked a gun from his hands, tore out his pockets, then took turns scooping out bits of gray matter with their fingers.

Dollar scrambled for the loose gun.

"Come on," he said, waving him inside. Tavon spied a couple more fiends coming from the other end of the porch. Whatever fiends that remained converged on the house.

Dollar and Tavon rushed into the house and lifted the plank into place. The plank normally served to stop any impromptu police raids. The scale of the problem dawned on Tavon. The house had over twenty windows, plus four doors, not including the basement entrance. He heard a crash from the back of the house — the kitchen — then a thudding from behind him. Fists pounded against the basement door as if the house itself had found its heartbeat. They pushed against the door. A creaking shudder came from the great room. Tavon chanced a peek around the corner. The already-weakened floor gave way. Miss Jane pulled herself from the hole, paying no mind to the jagged floorboards tearing a bloodless track through her thigh. A bone protruded through her flesh, yet she tried to walk like she still had wares to sell. There was no residual spark, no light of recognition in her eyes.

"Shit, they ain't even bleedin'. Don't look like they even feel pain," Tavon squealed.

"We gonna have to go upstairs. Get them when they come up one at a time."

As soon as their weight left the door, hands — craggy masses of picked flesh — wrangled through, desperately grasping after them. Tavon scrambled up the stairs first, followed by Dollar who took each step one at a time, aiming his gun at any movement. When the crush of bodies started shambling up the stairs, he let them step near enough to pop them in the center of their foreheads. Couldn't have been more than a few dozen fiends taken out by the package, Tavon hoped. Judging from the daylong gunfire, there were maybe a dozen of them laying siege to the house.

Tavon heard a scrabbling along the roof.

He stared along the vaulted ceilings, then opted to check the three bedrooms. The first bedroom had once been its own apartment. Someone had torn the kitchenette from the wall and pulled a door from its hinges. Inside what Tavon originally thought was a closet was a bathroom that had been nailed closed, its cracked ceramic bowl bled thick urine. A pile of crap sat in the corner. All the boards remained intact on the windows, so Tavon shut the door.

Dollar let the bodies pile on the stairwell, the obstacles proving difficult for the walking decay to navigate. Even as one climbed over the half-dozen bodies' sprawled limbs, he'd shoot them, adding to the stack. Tavon closed off the second room before slipping into the third. Piles of split boards and plaster were scattered in the room. Three windows on one wall, still boarded, but cracks of light revealed an odd shape to the middle window. Tavon stepped nearer. It wasn't a window.

It was a balcony door.

The door splintered open. Loose Tooth hung from the gutters, having swung down from the roof through the door. Tavon hit the floor, shielding his face from the flying glass shards and bits of boarding. Loose Tooth was slow to get to his feet after a landing that left his legs bent at odd angles and him laying on his back. Still, he pulled himself together, heedless of the glass teeth of the broken window that ripped into him. With the shamble of a hit-and-run victim, he shuffled toward Tavon. Stinking of fetid mud, his vacuous face eyed Tavon hungrily. His mouth moved in an approximation of speaking. If Tavon didn't know better, he would've sworn Loose Tooth tonelessly voiced the word "Blast".

Tavon grabbed a board and swung it, breaking it over Loose Tooth's shoulder. He barely flinched. His mouth opened and closed, long ropes of saliva streaming in thick gooey bands. If you couldn't bring the mouth to the curb, bring the curb to the mouth, Tavon thought. A jousting knight, he charged with the board. The board plunged into his friend's mouth, then he used Loose Tooth's neck as a fulcrum and snapped the top of his jaw. He still twitched, his arms pining toward him in loose spasms.

"This way," Dollar yelled, only glancing at the pursuing fiend. "There's too many of them and I'm almost out of bullets."

They ran into the back bathroom. A cast-iron tub took up most of the space. The white-tiled walls looked relatively pristine, though the stench of the long-unflushed toilet gagged them. Stool steeped into a muddy tea. They shut the door and sat against it.

"I think they after you," Tavon said.

"Why me?" Dollar asked.

"They need a fix. A fiend is a fiend." Tavon glanced at the gun. "How many shots you got left?"

Dollar pulled out his clip. "One, with one in the chamber, left."

Tavon thought about his last blast. A taste would sure go down good about now. If he didn't have much world to begin with, handling the end of it wasn't a stretch. The door lurched, the fiends pushing forward. Hands pressed in from all sides, searching for purchase. Dollar held the edge of the door. Another burnout squeezed his head between the opening, the skin of his face pulled taut. He craned his neck and bit into Dollar. Dollar pulled back and fired into his skull. His body fell into the other fiends, giving Tavon the moment he needed to get the door closed again.

"I'm done, Tae." Dollar clutched his arm. Tavon moved his hand to see the wound.

"It's only a scratch. Ain't nothin' but a thing."

"He took a bite of me. They're like rabid dogs, Tae. I can feel their poison working its way through me. It's warm, almost tingly." Tavon knew the feeling, but said nothing. Dollar continued. "It's only a matter of time. And I don't want to go out like them."

Before Tavon could stop him, Dollar put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger. A crimson trail filigreed the tiles. Tavon opened the door to an explosion of skeletal hands. They pulled Dollar's body through. Tavon listened to the terrible wet chomping sounds. He couldn't believe that it would end this way. He did the deeds, a soldier in the game. They all were. He expected to die on the front lines, but with some sense of dignity. Not to face sickness in that place where beetles crawled and centipedes squirmed. He prayed that Dollar, or whatever they found on him, might sate them, at least for a little while. But he knew better. The friends he knew were gone.

Only the desire remained.

Watching the natural ebb and flow of the neighborhood, King sat on his porch step. An unusually cool night, the wind caught the storm door of the vacant condo next door and produced a series of crashes and grinding metal squeaks with each gust-driven clang. A smoke-hound on a bicycle peddled up and chain-smoked cigarettes until Prez came out to greet him. A handshake-cum-transaction later, and they parted company. Prez with the bike. Either Prez had impeccable timing, or he was a call-ahead/curbsideservice drug dealer. He eased his new bicycle away from the front door of his condo and rode it across the grass before ducking into the condo for a few furtive minutes. Nodding to King, he rode off to run his errands. King still liked Prez, a young brotha not so far gone as to give up on him, but that was quite a bit aways from saying that he respected him. Having dropped out of school, Prez was one of those no-account niggas: no job, no car, no responsibilities beyond servicing his dick. Prez now crashed at one of the neighboring condos rather than at Big Momma's. With several of Green's boys crashing there, the condo proved to be an oasis of temptation for Prez. King wondered, how you could you tell your momma you were working, leave for "work" every day, within two weeks make up some elaborate scenario detailing how your boss was a racist or simply out to get you and thus you lost your job… but never bring home at least one check? Prez was probably setting up a break-in or some side-ass quick-money gig or buying weed to pass his days.