David Dunwoody - Empire

Her entire body was throbbing with numbness. She lay there and stared at him, his chest heaving with exhaustion. She could barely breathe. And she DID want it to be over.

"But not you," she whispered. "Not you."

She lifted a thick shard to her throat.

He heaved himself at her, and she thrust it at him; the glass chewed deep into her palm and she thought maybe it hadn't penetrated him at all.

Tetch sat up. It had.

He coughed up a gout of blood, spattering both their faces, and fell against the bed with a groan.

"Where…is she?" Jenna asked.

He sneered. "'Where is she? Where is she?' She's DEAD. DEAD!!"

Jenna's eyes fell to Tetch's waist, just below where the glass had embedded itself, and she smiled grimly. "No. You wouldn't kill her, not ever."

Crawling to him, she pulled a ring of keys from his pants pocket. He clutched pleadingly at the air. "Don't take her. Please…"

Jenna made her way to the door. She could barely see it through the blood blisters swallowing her eyes.

"I'M BEGGING YOU!!!" Tetch howled. Meat tore and wept inside him. He couldn't get up. He beat his head against the mattress. "PLE-EA-EA-EA-EASE."

He heard the door open, then quietly close.

In the foyer, Voorhees yanked the widowmaker from one rotter's face and buried it to the hilt in another. The undead's neck cracked with a sharp twist, and a second turn ripped its head clean off.

Still they were coming. He'd been forced to retreat up the stairs, and every rotter he dropped was replaced by three.

Behind him, Jenna was knocking on the walls. "Lily!"

She heard the girl's cry two doors down from the bedroom.

Voorhees met her at the top of the stairs. "It's no good. We can't…"

The man in black cut a mighty swath through the foyer, sending corpses through the air. The scythe skewered rotter after rotter and sent them reeling, lifeless, just ugly dolls scattering across the marble.

"Let her out." Voorhees shouted. Jenna unlocked the study door and collapsed at Lily's feet.

"C'mere!" Voorhees cried. He waved to Lily, who was staring in horror at Jenna. She began to kneel — and Jenna pressed the keys into her hands. "Go, baby."

Voorhees scooped Lily up and rifled through the keys. The truck key was there. He leapt down the stairs as the dark man pushed the undead wave back.

"Where's the truck?" Voorhees yelled as they ran outside. "In the back," Lily said, staring at the doorway, looking to catch another glimpse of her angel. Wasn't he coming? Wasn't he-

A rotter careened into the door and it slammed shut.

Voorhees backhanded a shambling ghoul and threw open the truck door. Lily clambered inside. Voorhees plunged the key into the ignition; for one awful second, he couldn't turn it. Then it gave.

Headlights illuminated the zombies coming around back. Some of them came out the back door of the house. He gunned the engine and swerved around them, not willing to risk a breakdown just to splatter their gaping faces. Lily covered her eyes and pulled her seat belt over her head.

Out the gates and a sharp turn left, going back around the manor, heading for the west wall. With the wall's condition, and this many undead, there wouldn't be much of it left standing. No point in speeding eastward through the city…

His eyes checked the gas gauge, at one-quarter full.

Not much point in speeding anywhere.

The truck bounced over fallen slabs of concrete and out of Jefferson Harbor. Lily raised her head and let the belt pull snug against her chest. She glanced, once, over her shoulder, then out into the endless expanse of the badlands.

"Where are we going?"

Mark was still warm.

Jenna pulled herself to him and kissed his face. There was no feeling in her lips. She nestled her head in the crook of his neck and sighed.

The man in black was still fighting in the foyer. After a few minutes, the fighting ceased.

He threw the bolts in the front door and ascended the stairs. Jenna looked hopefully at him.

"I don't do that anymore." He said. But he knelt beside her, gathering his robes to cover her broken body.

"Will Lily be all right?" Jenna mumbled. "I'll keep watch over her." He answered. She nodded and turned to caress the dead man beside her.

"A beautiful ache?" He asked.

Jenna smiled. "I wrote a song that said that." Then she died.

He went into the bedroom.

Tetch's eyelids fluttered. Heavy with drying blood, they lifted, and his red gaze took the spectre in.

"Are you here to kill me?"

"In time." The dark man said.

An hour or so later, the ferals outside were drawn into the house by a long, tortured scream. When they reached Tetch, he was dead. They sat around him and used broken glass to cut his flesh.

Hundreds of them crowded inside, searching every room on every floor, packing the house. It groaned madly around them. Then it all came down, wood and flesh and stone, all came down into the cellar, into the Hell a man had made. They lay pinned in the wreckage and pawed at one another, a cacophony of groans filling the night sky.

(Where are we going?)

"I'm not entirely sure." Voorhees finally replied. "North, I can tell you that much. That's where all the other people have gone."

"What people?"

"There used to be a lot of people in Jefferson Harbor. They left when the Army did. There are cities, safe cities, in the north. And I don't know how to get all the way to those cities, but I think we can catch up with the Army."

"Why did they leave?"

Voorhees frowned over the steering wheel. "They decided it wouldn't do any good to keep fighting for this place."

Lily stared at her hands, folded in her lap, and said, "I guess they were right."

"We tried." Voorhees snapped. She cast a frightful look in his direction, and he tried to soften his tone. "The people who died back there at the house, they didn't die for nothing. They died saving your life."

"I'm sorry." She pleaded. Pursing his lips, he offered her his best facsimile of a smile. "You'll get it when you're older."

In the middle of the night, they reached a military fuel station. Voorhees whispered a silent prayer that there'd still be gas beneath the cement slab; he slipped the pump into the truck and waited.

The gentle sloshing brought a genuine smile to his face. Looking toward the cab, he saw Lily watching him through the rear windshield. She returned the expression.

The headlights caught the faintest hint of something moving on the horizon. Voorhees leaned into the cab and flipped on the high beams. It was a single rotter, a good thousand yards away, moving on a broken ankle.

He pulled the widowmaker from its sheath. "I'll be right back. Keep the doors locked."

"You could just let it go." Lily said. He fixed his eyes on her naive little face and shook his head. "Be right back."

He strode across the barren soil toward the undead. It lifted its bloody head to study him. He stopped, waiting to see what it would do.

It opened its mouth and moaned for his flesh. It came at him.

When it was finished, he replaced the fuel pump and got into the truck. Lily was silent.

"I didn't do it because of what he was." He told her. "I did it because of what he used to be."

Back in Jefferson Harbor, at the city plaza, Gene was standing. He felt the night wind picking up and let it caress his face. Something inside him tugged gently, pleasantly, and he didn't move a muscle for several minutes. Just stood there, feeling.

He knew one thing: he had tasted the flesh of the man in black, and he was no longer what he had been. His stomach still yearned for meat, and he kneaded his palms as the nagging, maddening need made his mouth water. But there was something else, too. A new purpose.