Stefan Petrucha - Dead Mann Walking

As he pushed us through the plastic maze, Turgeon stopped a few times and looked around. I don’t think he was admiring the view; he just didn’t know exactly where Odell Jenkins was. Grateful for the extra seconds, I kept at the ropes. If Egghead saw me squirming, he didn’t say anything. I got nowhere, but Turgeon had some success.

He’d found an area where even the emergency lights didn’t work, and a long yellow extension cord ran to a distant hanging lamp. There were new sounds—hammering, crunching, shredding—and the shadows shifted with them.

Turgeon’s pace picked up. He’d found Odell. Rather than head straight for the light, he wheeled the dolly toward the gloom behind the sheets. As we rolled through, the plastic crawled across my body, leaving a sheen of white dust. Funny, it reminded me of Ashby.

Ahead was a dark nothing. To the left, the hammering got louder. I twisted my neck and caught my first, plastic-blurred glimpse of Odell Jenkins. He worked alone. Maybe it didn’t make sense to give zombies a day off. He was standing near the hanging light, where the ends of the vacuum tubes had been set up. At first I thought his hair was white, but when he swung a sledgehammer into the wall, a cloud of plaster dust puffed from the top of his head.

He didn’t wear a protective mask or a hood. From the looks of the rest of him, he wouldn’t go down easily. The former brain surgeon was a bruiser with anaconda arms and door-wide shoulders. He swung that sledgehammer like it was a feather, tore off the drywall by hand, and then yanked the exposed two-by-fours free, nails and all. Maybe his boss figured he didn’t need any help. Given enough time, he’d take the whole hospital down himself.

Turgeon stopped us alongside one of the wide concrete supports. I still couldn’t see him, but I imagined he was eyeing Jenkins the way a starving hyena might look at a distracted lion. He had all the cards; the only question was how he’d play them. He’d want to D-cap Jenkins, then me and Nell, set his explosives, and leave with his bag full. When the building came down, this place would make a nice mausoleum. If they ever dug us up, it’d be no surprise to find a few chak pieces. Better than the desert or the acid. The daddy head might not like it, but there wasn’t much it could do.

Chk. Chk.

Somewhere above my left ear, Turgeon was testing the clippers, slowly, quietly, so Jenkins wouldn’t hear. He stepped to the side of the dolly and held open the nearest plastic flap. It gave me a clear look at him, and a clearer view of Jenkins.

The odds weren’t as good as I thought. Jenkins’s bright orange jumpsuit made him a great target, but worse than that, he was wearing earbuds. The poor sap was listening to music, or an audiobook, trying to improve himself. Turgeon could play a trumpet and still sneak up on him. And the clippers were very sharp.

I grunted and kicked, hoping Jenkins might hear me even through whatever iThing he had on and turn around. The heads rustled a bit, but the one who really responded was Turgeon. He held the blades in front of my eyes and said, “Shhh.”

I could have kept kicking. If I forced it, made him D-cap me first, Jenkins might hear something and get away. Y’know, if it’d just been about my death, I might’ve gone for it, but I really did not want to wind up in that bag. So one look at those razors and I clammed up tighter than a crab’s ass at high tide.

With such concerns behind them, there was nothing to keep the heads quiet. They kept jostling, their twitching joined by those scraping paper-bag voices. But the vacuums were loud and their voices so soft that Turgeon only gave the duffel bag a halfhearted kick before stepping to the other side of the plastic.

Would Turgeon really take him? Likely. There was so much noise, so much concrete and hanging plastic to conceal his approach, he could get close easily and get the blades in place. One spring-assisted crunch and it’d be all over.

As Egghead crept from one hiding spot to another, Jenkins never turned from his work. The chak still had his focus, I’ll give him that, but it was the kind of concentration that’d keep his back turned long enough for his head to get sliced off. Makes you wonder what the hell’s worth wishing for.

I grunted and pulled. The heads started gnashing. I could see their mouths open and close through the fabric, as if they wanted to chew their way out. I might have frozen in fear, but beyond the duffel bag I caught a glimpse of green eyes. Nell Parker wasn’t moving much, but she was staring at me and making noises like she was trying to talk. The gag must’ve been buried pretty deep in her throat. She sounded worse than the heads.

Thinking she could squirm away and hide if she was fast enough, I twisted around and tried kicking her off the dolly. All I managed was to push the bag of heads into her, and her into the handles. It wasn’t happening. The only way to free her was to free myself first. So I had to do it somehow. I had to.

But “had to” is a funny thing if physics disagrees. Despite my best writhing, all I did was flop around like a fish. I stopped when my head neared the top of the duffel bag. The cord that held it closed slapped against the gag in my mouth.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all, but it gave me another idea. The heads had no love for Turgeon. If I could get my ropes near those gnashing teeth, maybe they’d, I don’t know, gnaw them off?

I’d rather be picking my nose in a septic tank, but that wasn’t an option. I closed my eyes and white-knuckled it. I gulped, trying to swallow the electric syrup already filling my throat, and wedged my nose into the opening of the duffel bag. After some effort, I managed to wriggle my nose and then my jaw inside.

It sucked. It was so close I was already claustrophobic. Little puffs of dry air from nostrils and open mouths hit my cheeks and eyelids. I heard jaws open and clamp, teeth click. They were excited, either happy to see me or annoyed at having to share their space.

Hoping I wouldn’t pass out or go feral, I pivoted my own head along the opening, trying to make it bigger. I told myself if it worked, it’d all be over in a few seconds. Just a few tiny seconds. I forced my head in deeper, widening the opening even more.

I was finished, but it turned out I’d lied to myself about the few seconds. Before I could yank my head back out, a set of teeth clamped down on a clump of my hair. The only thing that stopped me from screaming was the thought that Turgeon might still be close enough to hear me even through the gag.

Acting like a weird cyborg somewhere between animal and machine, I clamped my jaw shut and snapped my head left and right, trying to shake the son of a bitch loose. The other heads nuzzled closer. I kept my eyes shut, but I could hear their teeth grinding, clicking, chomping. I’d stuck my head into a fucking piranha tank. They’d tear me up, rip the flesh from my skull, chew my eyes, crunch the bones.

I was hungry to leave my body, like I did when the acid pool was bubbling beneath me, but before I could, no longer caring who heard, I howled the way only a dead man can. The sound startled the heads long enough for me to yank my head, and the head clamped onto my hair, out of the bag and into the dusty air.

As I came free, I felt something heavy clonk into my forehead. The sensation was followed by a sharp tug and tear on my scalp. The head went flying over my shoulder, a clump of my hair still clenched in its teeth. I heard the thud of its landing, a thrumming as it rolled, and a plop as it hit a plastic sheet.

Oddly enough, everything had gone according to plan. The duffel bag was open.

Now I just had to get the heads out and hope they’d chew on the rope instead of me. I wasn’t particularly convinced they would, but I had no plan B. I kicked the bag, evening out the heads along its length. I laid my feet down on the middle of the bag, thinking I could push a few out. Flexing my tied ankles, I worked two of the heads toward the opening. As I went at it, I caught glimpses of Nell’s eyes, her expression telling me what I already knew—that I was out of my fucking mind.