Stefan Petrucha - Dead Mann Walking

I ducked, but not fast enough.

“There.”

The pack came toward me, toward all of us. I’d brought them. They burst through the entrance, rode into the lobby, popping wheelies, gunning engines, their machetes up and ready. And there wasn’t any door I could slam, not even to keep them out of view for a while, just a solid concrete wall against my back.

5

What’s that Tom Waits song where everything’s broken? Wasted and wounded? Can’t remember. What came next was something like that, though, an apocalypse in a broken teacup. It wasn’t important to the universe, or even the next town over, but it was intimate, and messy as hell.

Hakkers swarmed the space like rats entering a bakery, giddy from the smell of food, mad with hunger. A chain saw, teeth whirring, grunted in my direction. I stood there, dumb as a post. The blades made contact with the wall, inches from my head. Cold bits sprayed my face. Plaster or dried flesh—I didn’t know which. I only knew I was glad it wasn’t part of me.

I’d be next. No reason to think otherwise. So this was it, or as close to “it” as a chak gets. What do you do in that moment? Me, I closed my eyes. I pressed my hands into the wall behind me. I tried to focus on the concrete’s feel against my palms and fingers. I tried to think about anything except what was right in front of me. Common sense tells you it’s better not to be paying attention when they cut you up.

And they say if you really, really work at it, you can do that: slip out of your body, away from the here and now, especially if you’re a chak, since you’re half-gone to begin with. But instead of working with me, taking me to my happy place, or at least a cheap motel, my brain came up with something I probably read on a bubblegum wrapper:

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Right. Fuck you, memory. Just fuck you.

No chain saw, though. A hand grabbed my shoulder. When it pulled, I followed, stumbling along. I kept my eyes shut until a low voice said, “Basement. It’s all we’ve got.”

It was Boyle. Somehow he’d managed to keep his head, arms, and legs when all those about him were losing theirs. Did he serve in a war? He acted like he’d been trained, yanking me with one hand, pushing Ashby with the other. All I could think was that he was saving the wrong guy. He should’ve been helping Turgeon. He was the one who could get him the money. Not that I was planning to mention that.

Bit by bit we stumbled through the Mixmaster of a lobby. There was one thing in our favor: The hakkers, bless their tiny brains, were too stupid to get off their bikes. For every lug wrench swing or chain saw swipe, they spent twice the time repositioning their grinders, as if staying in the saddle were a rule of the game. That gave Boyle the time to steer us down the hallway.

Ashby moved like a pull toy with a broken axle. With every shove he’d take a few steps, slow, and then stop. As we neared the end of the hall, a steel fire door came into view. Boyle let go of me and gave Ashby a final push that sent him teetering along like a penguin.

“Run!” Boyle shouted at the kid’s back.

Then he did something that made me think he wasn’t so smart after all. He turned back toward the lobby.

I grabbed him. “You nuts?”

He tried to twist away, but I dug in my fingers and locked the joints. Like I said, once a chak gets hold of something we don’t let go unless we want to. That got his attention. He growled like he was planning to drag me along.

“Let go,” he said. “Stay with Ashby, please. I’ve got to get the others.”

“There’s nothing you can do! It’s over for anyone out there.”

Before he could argue, a new sound rose through the mix of whining engines, screams, chops, and whirs. In a way it was like it’d been there all along, but someone had just plugged in a subwoofer so you could hear it better. It was a keening, deep, low, abject. It sounded so bereft it made you want to weep along with it.

It was the chakz.

Not the ones still struggling, the ones who’d been cut down and left to writhe. Even shredded, they couldn’t die, head for the other side, or melt into an existential nothing. The magic of ChemBet had seen to that. All they could do was abandon what little they had left, their souls, if you like to pray. As they felt it slip away, they cried for it, like it was a baby they couldn’t feed anymore. Once it was gone, they’d be feral.

What was left? A predator honed by millions of years of evolution, or worse, designed by God, hungry, but severed from its higher functions. One after another, the maimed chakz bowed to their inner lizard kings, then lashed out at whatever moved.

You’d think the hakkers would be scared, but they weren’t. They were thrilled. This was what they were waiting for, the moment that justified these little soirees. Ferals proved that chakz were dangerous, that we should be destroyed, that we deserved it. Safe and smug on their bikes, in their thick clothes, heavy weapons in hand, they howled and went back to playing their live-action first-person shooter.

Like I said, ferals aren’t much of a threat unless they come at you in numbers, but you do have to be careful. The dog-soldier who sniffed me out after I shot his friend wasn’t. Maybe it was his first night out with the boys, or maybe he couldn’t handle his liquor as well as he thought. Who knows? Whatever the reason, he spent a little too much time gunning his engine, raising his fist, and whooping, and not enough time looking over his shoulder.

Two moaners barreled into his back.

It may have looked like a coordinated attack, but he was just whooping the loudest and had the shiniest bike. Ferals love two things: shiny lights and liveblood screams. Liveblood screams are different. They sound . . . wetter .

When they hit, the dog-boy teetered. Probably would’ve been a big nothing if the bike hadn’t ridden out from under him. It climbed the coffee table, tore up the magazines, and fell sideways. I think the dog-boy said, “Whoa!” Took him a second to realize his situation wasn’t so funny. Even when he did, his first cry for help wasn’t very loud. The fall must have winded him.

Ferals are fast. Before his friends realized they had a man down, four swarmed him. Two bit into his shoulders, their teeth grinding through his leathers until they reached skin. A woman straddled him, eyes so wide I think the lids were gone. It didn’t look like she could do much. Her arms were cut off above the elbows. But sometimes you just have to improvise. Fistless, she stabbed her pointy stubs at his head in quick staccato bursts.

Now the other hakkers heard him. They dropped whatever they were mutilating to help. With a sudden pause in the slaughter, I figured I might as well let go of Boyle so he could do his thing. The LBs busy, he herded as many chakz as he could into the hallway. Mostly I followed his lead, keeping one eye on the hakkers.

He must have noticed my divided attention, because he shouted, “Don’t look; just move!”

We didn’t have long. Quick as a gamer’s fingers, they pulled the ferals off and chopped them into even smaller pieces. There wasn’t much they could do for the dog-boy, what with his jugular slashed and his face looking like something a cat threw up.

Score one for the zombies.

A hairy ginger with more freckles than skin kept hakking even when there was nothing left but limbs. When the chak pieces didn’t stop moving, he freaked.

“Stay dead!” he screamed. “Stay dead!”

Hey, pal, we would if we could.

The ginger wasn’t the only rattled hakker. That was the second man they’d lost. No one goes on a chak attack without thinking he might cash it in, but might is a long walk from really believing it. They weren’t just grieving their fallen comrades; they were grieving their own mortality.