Bone And Cinder: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Zapheads Book 1) (19 page)

Mackie had been too focused on maintaining his chokehold to consider the letter opener as a viable weapon.

Mackie clutched the implement’s handle, and the blade slid from Herrera’s back as he stood.

Herrera smiled down at Mackie’s weak hold on the now-useless weapon.

“What’s that they say about bringing a knife to a gun fight?” Herrera shucked his rifle and pointed the muzzle down at the wheezing Mackie.

Just wait.  Wait for it to be over.

Nothing else to do.

Nothing here for me, anyway.

It won’t even matter if there’s pain.

At least I’ll be feeling something for a change.  Not a bad way to go out.

And then there was Meredith again, hurling her body into Herrera’s.

It was weak.

But Mackie loved the hell out of her for trying.

Herrera grunted and spun around as a cluster of shots went wild. Meredith gripped the smoking barrel of the rifle, attempted to pull it away from Herrera while keeping herself out of firing range.

Mackie only had a moment before she would be hamburger, and then his turn would come.  He crab-crawled toward them and swung wild, driving the letter opener into the back of Herrera’s knee

There were other places Mackie could’ve aimed, but there was no time for calculation.  Steel piercing flesh...that had been Mackie’s only objective.

Herrera howled and plummeted downward as his leg buckled.  Instinctively, he tried to use the rifle’s barrel to break his fall, and for a lighter man, that might’ve worked.  But with Herrera’s massive frame bearing down on it, the barrel bent beneath the momentum of his fall.

On one knee, he looked down at the useless gun beneath him and he laughed.

At first it was a few soft chuckles, and then the laughter turned loud and raucous.  Soon, Herrera was wiping tears from his eyes.  “Oh, ain’t this some shit.”

Meredith stumbled toward him and Herrera threw another kick—from the same leg with the letter opener protruding—into her stomach, this one actually lifting her off the ground before sending her to her back.

It was the hit that finally took her out of the game, vomiting and coughing.  She wasn’t getting up from that one any time soon.

Herrera pulled the letter opener from his leg.  He looked at it, chuckled again, and gave it a toss.

Then he lifted his pant leg and removed a Blackhawk tactical knife from a sheath strapped to his ankle.

Son of a bitch.

“Now
this
is a knife.”  Herrera had seen no reason to go for his hidden Blackhawk when he had an assault rifle in hand.  But now the gunfight was over and the Mexican gladly adapted to the new rules.

Something Mackie should have expected.

Herrera managed to stay on his feet, even with considerable pain from his wounded leg, and he surveyed the fallen and wounded around him.  He could have been Genghis Khan after a Mongol massacre, General Santa Ana at the Alamo, Pol Pot enjoying a Khmer Rouge purge. The reptilian smile was back, adding cold illumination to a face grotesquely scorched, one eye bloodshot and swollen.

He stood over Mackie and pressed the tip of a finger against the Blackhawk’s blade.  “I don’t want to waste my energy killing you yet.”

“Haven’t...done a great...job of it so far.”

“Think I’ll leave that to the Zaps while I pay your girl a visit.  And I’m going to do awful things to her.  She won’t even understand what’s happening...but you’ll get to see it all.  Unless you get there first and stop me.”

And then Herrera turned and jogged in the direction of Linvale, limping slightly as he took care to keep as much weight as possible off his injured leg.

The Zapheads were now thirty feet away.  Mackie shouted at Dr. Lehman to rouse Desiree and Meredith and get them to safety.  Meredith was already on her hands and knees, recovering, but Todd and Emma were hopeless.

Mackie considered trying for McRae’s rifle, but more Zapheads had appeared—six or seven of them.  He’d never reach it without a fight, and by then Herrera would have plenty of time to—

No choice.

Mackie tried to stand, gravity and crushing pain making the task all but impossible.

27.

His battered body moved far faster than he had any right to expect.

Still, the distance to Linvale seemed impossibly far, the stone and glass of the dorm taunting him.

He hadn’t even made it to the front door yet, but surely he’d been limping along for hours now, his shattered ribs scooping into the meat of his chest.  His body felt like one big bruise.  He even
felt
purple.

And time had stretched as he fought for each breath, and he wondered if he’d blacked out for a minute.  Dr. Lehman called him but he didn’t respond.  All that mattered was the next step.

He turned at the door, saw Dr. Lehman and Desiree half-dragging Meredith to the student union.

They’re going to make it.

The Zapheads reached Todd and Emma, who gave out weak screams as they vanished beneath a mass of writhing, scrabbling limbs.

Mackie turned away.  All that mattered now was staying awake and on his feet and covering the distance between his next step and Allie’s room.

The stairs.

Just enough daylight spilling through the stairwell windows to illuminate the stairs and push back a layer of the suffocating dark. But now Mackie’s vision was starting to blur.

He’d never be able to climb the stairs, and it was an act of foolishness to think he could even try.

He couldn’t spare a second, and yet he still had to step carefully as he climbed, clinging to the rail like a drunken freshman after a Friday Happy Hour.

Mackie tried to regulate his breathing.  If he hyperventilated, he’d pass out for sure.

If he fell, it was over.

He passed the site where he’d been attacked by Zapheads on his first ascension, when Artiss had refused to help him.  The Zap blood still painted the stairs, sticky with flies.  He climbed past and reached the landing.

Of course, Herrera could just lock Allie’s room from the inside and there wasn’t shit Mackie could do about it.

But no, the door stood open.

He wanted Mackie to see this.

Buckets of sweat seemed to be spilling from every pore in Mackie’s skin, and it smelled of rust and poison and smoke.

He stumbled into the room and found Herrera with Sabbath in his arms.

Allie was on the bed, not still, but not thrashing as spastically as Mackie had seen recently.

Her eyes were wide, always so wide since the Big Zap, so alien that he couldn’t remember what they’d been like when he’d once gazed romantically into them.

“McRae wasn’t lying about you havin’ this cat,” Herrera said.  He stroked Sabbath’s head with a beefy thumb.  His touch was gentle, but applying enough force to crush the life from Sabbath would require no thought and little effort.

And even if his body wasn’t battered and exhausted to the point of collapse, Mackie probably wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

“Put her down,” he wheezed, the lack of air behind the words making them even more pathetic.

“Y’know, everything’s different now, bro.  Be hard enough to find the resources to take care of ourselves, much less all of God’s other creatures.”  He gripped Sabbath beneath her shoulders and touched his nose to her nose.  “You bringin’ an animal here...that’s just not responsible.”

He dropped the cat, and she scurried under Allie’s bed.  Herrera jabbed Mackie’s backpack with the tip of his Blackhawk.  “She’s pissed all over your bag, too.”

Herrera bent over to Allie and ran a scarred palm across her hair and face.  “I’ll stroke your other pussy now, just because I can.”

“Don’t...don’t touch...her,” Mackie said.

“You came up here to have a hero moment.  To stop the bad Mexican from doing all the bad shit he wants to do.  Like you think that’s gonna make up for everything
you’ve
done.”

“God damn you.”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve to call upon God,
pendejo
.  The shit you’ve done?  Besides, He lit the sky on fire and walked away.  Left us on our own.”

Herrera stood in a light crouch, his knife held with the top of the handle pinched between thumb and forefinger, his other three fingers wrapped loosely around the remainder of the handle.  The tip was forward, the edge cocked at a slight angle.

A saber grip—a common choice for trained fighters.

Mackie had come here to die in the first place, but in his fantasies, Allie would be whole and Krider would be dead.  He would get no satisfaction here.

At best, he’d get the fleeting illusion of martyrdom and the cold finality of the grave.

“I think I’ll cut the tendons in your arms and legs, leave you sitting there like an ass-end-up tortoise,” Herrera said.  “Then I’m gonna make you watch everything I do to her.  After I kill you, I’m not gonna send her on to be with you.  I’m gonna keep her alive for a long, long time.  And I’m gonna enjoy her in every way I can think of.  Having a Zap might be wild, man.”  He thrust his hips lewdly.  “I like it when they got a little fire in them.”

Taking the bait and rushing at Herrera would end this too quickly.  Mackie didn’t plan to survive this, but he wouldn’t let it be
that
easy for Herrera.

Nothing to do now but wait for the first strike.  Wait for the bleeding to start.

Herrera grinned and leaned in with a quick jab of the blade.  Mackie sidestepped, stumbled over his feet, and nearly fell.  The room was cramped and there was so little space to avoid an assailant, especially one as large as Herrera.  Herrera’s rush of movement shot a quick blast of cool air into the stale humidity.

He wasn’t even trying and Mackie knew it.  Just toying, teasing.  His advantage was unshakable, immutable, and he was just taking a victory lap before the checkered flag.

Like Sabbath with a crippled mouse.

And then the playfulness was gone, and Herrera jabbed the knife with purpose and intent, eyes bright with a mad bloodthirst.  Mackie held his forearms up, the outsides facing Herrera, as the blade punctured flesh like the stings of monstrous hornets.

He knew
that
much about facing a knife attack, at least: 
Protect your body with the outsides of your forearms.  Tougher skin, no major arteries to nick or
sever
.

If you have to get cut—-and you will—-that’s the best place for it.

Mackie glanced down at his arms, noted the angry splotches of red that were beginning to ooze.

He threw a kick at Herrera’s right knee (
is that the injured one?
) hoping to blow it out, but he couldn’t
load the strike with enough force to make that happen.

Herrera charged ahead with the tip of his Blackhawk.  Again, Mackie’s arms took most of the damage, but a few thrusts of the blade slipped through and jabbed into Mackie’s pectoral, missing his neck by less than an inch.

The punctures were just shallow enough not to be disabling, but they were no less painful for their lack of depth.

Herrera could’ve charged on through and ended this quickly.  But this was fun for him.  Seeing Mackie try to defend himself when he could barely stay on his feet added to the enjoyment.

Entertainment for the end of the world.

“You knew there was never a place for you here,” Herrera said.  “Don’t care if you went to school here and had keggers and played grab-ass with a bunch of co-eds.  This is a whole different world, and it’s gonna take strong people to rebuild it.  Me and Lucas, we can do that.”

“Lucas ran away,” Mackie said.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure he didn’t go far.”

“He abandoned you.  In the end, he was a coward too.”

Herrera’s face shifted.  “Y’know, when that little punk-ass down at the cottages was telling me about how
I
should be running things, you think I needed
him
to make that sound like a good idea?  You think that hadn’t crossed my mind?  But, see, I’ve got reasons to be loyal to Lucas.  And he and I, we need
each other
to build things here.  Neither of us can do it alone.  He’ll be back.  That I guarantee you.”

Mackie said nothing.  His gaze fell to something propped near the window.  And then he smiled.  “Krider ran away because he was scared.  You were second fiddle to a chickenshit coward.  And that makes you even more pathetic than him.”

It was the right button to push.

Herrera’s scarred face clenched.  He roared with blind rage and charged at Mackie.  Mackie sidestepped, and Herrera tripped and crashed into the doorframe.

Mackie veered to the open window and grabbed Allie’s guitar, which was propped against the sill.

As Herrera turned to charge again, Mackie swung the guitar into his head.

The body of the instrument cracked and splintered, but didn’t quite shatter.  Mackie swung again and the remaining pieces of wood broke away from the guitar’s neck, scattering across Herrera’s head and chest.

Mackie was left holding only the neck with six loose strings attached only by the tuning pegs.

It’s only rock’n’roll but I like it.

Herrera was momentarily dazed but far from seriously injured.  He looked incredulous.  “You thought
that
was going to save you?”

But it wasn’t the guitar itself Mackie needed.

It was the strings.

Mackie threw another kick into Herrera’s injured knee, more forcefully this time, and when Herrera’s weight dropped onto the injured leg, Mackie dodged behind him.

Mackie wound the cluster of strings around his fingers and then wrapped them around Herrera’s throat and neck.  Mackie crisscrossed his forearms and pulled the strings so tightly he thought the veins in his arms would explode.

Herrera stabbed behind him with the Blackhawk in flailing, frenzied motions.  The blade pierced Mackie’s forearms and his right bicep, and came dangerously close to his neck a few times.

Though sweat stung his eyes, Mackie kept his gaze on Allie as he pulled the strings tighter.

It’s not her.  But it is her.

Stay with the eyes.

Not her eyes, not with that weird glittering.  But focus on them anyway.

Don’t look away.

Don’t look away.

Mackie wasn’t sure when Herrera stopped moving, but eventually he crawled away from the limp body.

Herrera’s eyes bulged comically, as if refusing to believe he could die from an ounce of steel.  The guitar strings had sliced through the skin of his throat and shredded the tissue inside.

Mackie lay on his back, eyes focused on the ceiling, fingers bleeding as the circulation screamed its way back into his veins.

He could be in the past if he wanted.  Allie’s room was the vessel that could take him there.

Let your mind go back.

There is no After.

There is no Now.

Only before.

Eventually he became aware of Sabbath licking his fingers.

He lifted the cat, moved toward Allie, and as he wrapped his damaged fingers around her sweat-slicked hand, darkness overcame him.

He welcomed it.