Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (109 page)

“Leave,” she says, “and you won’t be hurt.”

The woman says nothing more, gets up, quickly dresses, and leaves the room. Sarah turns the SKORPION back on the New Harmony V.P.

The man glares at her. “You’re Keith’s bitch.”

Sarah laughs. “I was.”

“He’ll have your head for this.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know Keith.”

She doesn’t say anything.

The man growls, “He’s probably looking for you right now, calling his guards.”

“I don’t think so. He’s lying dead in his room. So are his bodyguards.”

The man’s face goes pale, and then it flares with red-hot anger. “Cunt.”

“Where’d they take them?”

“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.”

“The men who were with me.”

The man grins. “Are you sure you want to know?”

She pulls the trigger.

The man shrieks, falling to the floor.

Blood streams from his upper leg.

“You bitch!” he screams, grappling at the wound.

“Next time I’ll shoot something a little more valuable,” she says. He grits his teeth, sweating. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”

“Where are they.” More of a statement than a question.

“They’re in the basement. ‘The Dungeon.’”

“There’s a dungeon?”

“No. It’s like a… club. I never go. It’s not my style.”

“Why are they down there?”

“They’re the entertainment.”

That didn’t sound good. “What kind of entertainment?”

He glares at her. “Why don’t I show you? I’ll show the way.”

“No, thanks,” she says. “You already told me where.”

She shoots him in the head and leaves.

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They are pushed through the crowd, and the throng cheers. The lights are dizzying, flashing from mounted bulbs fastened to wires that rock back and forth. In a recess above the floor, against the far wall, is the D.J., and the crowd lets out a whooping cry of approval as he puts on the track “Down With The Sickness” by Disturbed. The lyrics fill the smoke-choked room. They move along the wall to the left, and the man is mortified at what he sees. There are several dark-walkers chained to the wall, and people clamber up next to them, right outside bite range, and get their photographs taken. The dark-walkers howl and shriek in the room void of ultraviolet light, and their eyes are filled with envy and sadness. The man stumbles to watch, but the guard drives the butt of the UZZI into his back, and the man continues, following after Mark. There is a corridor branching off from the room, and down the hallway are several rooms. They walk past the corridor, and the man looks over his shoulder, peers through the window on one of the first doors, and through the glass he sees a dark-walker chained to a bed, its head held down by leather straps, and there is a man on top of her, raping her emaciated body. Bile creeps up the man’s throat, and he turns to the side and dry heaves. People laugh—“Having second thoughts, are we?!”

an overweight woman chimes—and the guard forces him forward.

They walk past a large cage with several armed guards. Within the cage are fifteen or twenty dark-walkers, crawling all over one another, reaching through the bars, groping at the crowd with hungry and delicate fingers. Mark stares at them, looks back at the man, mouths,
Why?
The man shakes his head. He doesn’t know. The guard behind him nudges him in the back, points towards the center of the room, the crowd peeling apart to let them pass. The man looks back at the caged darkwalkers, and he understands. “Oh,
fuck
.”

They are led forward. In the middle of the room is a depressed pit with wrought-iron bars surrounding it. There is a door with a padlock leading into the arena. Mark and the man are pressed up against the barred gate. The depression in the floor is filled with dirt and broken bones. There are swathes and stains of blood along the walls surrounding the pit and painting the bars against which they stand. Their hearts begin to beat in synch, a pensive and rapid rhythm. The guards undo the handcuffs around their wrists, and after unlocking the padlock on the door, they are thrown inside. They land on their hands and knees, a cloud of dust washing over them. They pick themselves up. The people are pressed against the cages, the party over.
Maybe the party isn’t over
, the man thinks:
Maybe it’s just beginning
. He looks over at Mark.

The boy says, “We’re supposed to be gladiators.”

“I know.”

“Gladiators kill one another.”

“I know.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“I know.”

Mark takes a deep breath. “But you’re going to kill me?”

“I don’t think that’s how this game works.”

The music stops, and a great silence fills the room.

Mark looks at the man. “Then what kind of game is it?”

“A different kind of game.”

The guards open the cage containing the dark-walkers, and using cattle prods latched onto chains around their necks, they guide one out, directing it towards the pit. The dark-walker fights against its entrapment, swinging its arms out at the crowd, foaming at the mouth. It is an older woman, maybe forty or fifty, the wrinkles of her face replaced with dark lines forged in the heat of deprivation and Anthony Barnhart

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desperation. She is maneuvered towards the entrance to the pit, and then the guard stops. Mark and the man stand side-by-side, facing the entrance, their muscles twitching in anticipation. A guard shouts behind them, and they turn, and there lands in the dirt before them two Medieval replica weapons. Broadswords. They kneel down and pick them up. The swords are heavy. The man turns and faces the dark-walker, gripping the sword in white-knuckled fingers. The D.J. turns on a heavy metal song, and the dark-walker is released. It leaps down into the pit, and it runs after the man in great strides. The man ducks out of the way, extending his sword; the dark-walker buckles over the blade and falls to the ground. The man spins around and drives the tip of the sword into its chest. The dark-walker spits blood and lies still. The man withdraws the blood-stained blade. Mark, now standing next to him with his own sword, says, “That wasn’t too hard.”

The man looks over at him, doesn’t say anything.

The crowd cheers.

They look towards the entrance.

Three dark-walkers are being led forward.

“Shit,” Mark says under his breath.

“That was just a warm-up,” the man mumbles.

“How many did you see in the cage?”

“Maybe twenty.”

“That means there’s… sixteen after these three.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re fucked.”

“I know.”

The dark-walkers are at the entrance to the pit. Mark and the man stand shoulder-to-shoulder, swords held before them. The dark-walkers are unleashed, and they storm into the pit. The man grits his teeth, prepares to swing the sword. A shot rings out, followed by two more. The dark-walker closest to them is tossed to the side, its nose blasted away, revealing a bloody chasm under smokefilled eyes. The other two drop in their tracks, bleeding into the dirt, turning the dirt into foaming mud. The room goes silent. Mark stares at the fallen creatures, and the man scans the crowd around the pit. “Thank God,” he says.

Sarah stands at the entrance to the pit, dressed in a torn and blood-spattered white wedding dress, clinging to one of the guards with one hand and pressing the barrel of the SKORPION into his head. Everyone stares at her. More guards move forward, slowly, fingering the weapons in their holsters. She demands that the man be released. No one says anything. She presses the gun harder into the guard’s temple, demands it once more. There comes some laughter, some foul words regarding “fear of a woman”, and one of the guards moves forward, calling her “Sweetie” and “Honey.” She doesn’t flinch as she swings the gun outwards and pulls the trigger. Before his body falls to the ground, the gun is placed back against the other guard’s head. It is over in milliseconds, and the guard’s body goes into convulsions on the floor as he grasps at his wounded throat, a hole drilled through his jugular and trachea. His eyes swim with blood, and he is silent. “You’ll rush me and you’ll get me,”

she snarls, “but not before I kill this man, too.” No one moves. She demands, again, that Mark and the man be released. The guard she is holding hostage tries to pull a quick one on her, and she yanks down on the trigger; a hot geyser of blood sprays her in the face, and the guard collapses. The blood is warm on her face as it traces lines in great goblets down her cheek. One of the guards grins, moving towards her: “You just lost all your cards.” She grins at him; “Not quite.” She steps back, towards the door, and she swings the gun around. It sings, the bullets finding their marks on the Anthony Barnhart

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electric breaker. The lights sputter out, and the crowd screams. Sarah ducks down and pushes her way through the darkness, abandoning her gun. The guards shout at one another, and she weaves her way through the crowd. She can see Mark and the man climbing out of the pit, and she grabs them by their hands, whispers to them: “It’s me.”. Together they move towards one of the corridors. A guard sees them, shouts. “Run!” Sarah hollers, and they duck into the hallway. The guard in the room fires at them with his Uzzi, mowing down several partiers. One of his bullets clips the padlock to the cage containing the dark-walkers, and they pour into the room, masked in the darkness. No one knows they’re there until it’s too late.

An illuminated sign along the top of the ceiling reads PLAYBOY HALL. The rooms on either side are filled with the chained dark-walkers, and they are ridden by sex-mongers who enjoy the thrill of erotica with the seemingly dead. The man keeps his eyes from the windows looking into the rooms. It had been, at one time, some sort of office complex. He figures that this might have been the security hub of the building, and the larger room being where they kept the vault and such of that nature. He glances over his shoulder and can still hear screaming from The Dungeon. He doesn’t know why. They round a corner, and Sarah stops. Mark runs into her, and they topple to the ground. The man stumbles forward as he slows. A figure stands before them, wielding a hand-bow. Nathan shouts, waving his arm to the side, and the man ducks. Nathan raises the hand-bow and fires a bolt. It slices through the air, striking its mark: an armed guard. The bolt cuts right through his forehead, and the slender point explodes out the back of his skull in a great wash of blood, brain matter, and bone fragments.

“I heard you guys were in trouble,” Nathan says, fitting another bolt.

“Yeah,” the man says, helping the others to their feet.

“Don’t cross The Boss. He’ll play his little games with you.”

“Thanks for the warning,” the man grimaces.

Nathan eyes Sarah. “Why the wedding dress?”

“I crossed The Boss.”

“I’m guessing that’s not your blood on it.”

“No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

“Okay.”

The man says, “We need to get the hell out of here.”

“I know.”

“Take us to one of the helicopters. We’ll hijack it.”

“You know how to fly?”

“I flew a helicopter once. I should be able to get us far enough away.”

“Too bad. No more shipments are flying in for another forty minutes.”

“We can wait,” the man says. “Hole up somewhere.”

“No,” Nathan says, pointing. “You can’t.”

The man turns, looks.

Down the corridor, dark-walkers are stumbling into the rooms, feasting on the sex-mongers. Their screams travel down the corridor.

“What’d you do?” Nathan asks, mortified.

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“It was dark,” Sarah says. “Shit happened.”

“Come on,” Nathan says. He turns and heads down the hallway.

The others follow.

They take the stairwell, leaping up two steps at a time. The electric bulbs above sputter and flare. They are soon out of breath, and they stop to take a break. Mark leans over the railing, his heart pounding, lungs heaving. He opens his mouth, feels ready to vomit, closes it and stands erect. He feels weak, his legs are like rubber. Sarah leans over the railing. “They’re coming up,” she says, pointing down into the flickering shadows. The man follows her gaze, and in the intermittent sparking of the lights, he can see figures running up the stairs, stumbling over another. They are halfnaked or totally nude. “Dark-walkers,” he says. “Shit.” Nathan says they need to keep moving, stomach the pain. No one argues. The man wonders why there are so many of them;
weren’t there only
about twenty?
And then he remembers that there were some for the photographs, others in PLAYBOY

HALL. He wonders if the dark-walkers freed their captive comrades, but that thought doesn’t sit well in his stomach. It’s too civilized, too caring, too…
human
. And then he remembers the eyes of the figure back at the Amtrak train, those sub-human eyes. He pushes the thought away and continues to ascend the stairs.

They reach Level 184. Nathan pushes open the door and steps out into the hallway. The lights are still sputtering, and in their scattered bursts, he sees a body lying in the corridor, a pool of stagnated blood underneath. He looks over at Sarah, sweat crawling down her face, the wedding dress sticking to her damp skin. He beckons the others forward, and they move down the hallway. The door to Keith’s room is open. He goes inside. There are two guards lying in the doorway leading to the master bedroom. He enters, sees Keith’s body lying amidst the bloodied sheets, his face a contorted mask of pain. The others are behind him, and Sarah looks at the grisly scene with pleasure. She looks down and realizes she doesn’t have the SKORPION anymore. She grabs the other guard’s weapon, and the man takes the GLOCK 9mm off the floor. Mark goes back into the hallway and takes the fallen guard’s UZZI. Nathan says, “He was the only tenant on this floor, so we should be all right. We won’t attract too much attention. But we need to barricade this place. Start shoving any furniture you find against the door. There’s only one way in, so if we get that fortified well, we should be all right till morning.” He looks out the window. “Of
course
this had to happen at night.”