Gravewalkers: Dying Time (32 page)

“
Three people are coming,”
he told Carmen.

The three men reached the
foot of the ramp.

The first to arrive carried
a scoped rifle with a long silencer. He glanced at Critias with
satisfaction, “I told you it was a man that I shot in the head.
Hiram is not the only one who figured out how to dress up like one
of the freaks to sneak past them.”

The second man carried a
standard military-issue assault rifle. As he glanced about for
ghouls, the man asked, “Was he alone or was someone else driving
the car?”

“
I’m right here,” Carmen
called to the men from in front of the car so that she could use it
to conceal her maschinenpistole. The vehicle also made for
excellent cover since she had faith they wouldn’t risk disabling
the car by shooting it up. It also had the steel ram that would
protect her if they did open fire. Besides, in her estimation, they
seemed pathetically weak and incapable of effectively threatening
her survival regardless of their intentions.

“
Jesus H. Christ,” said
the third man who carried only an automatic pistol. “We struck the
power-ball jackpot this time, boys.” He walked slowly up the ramp
to the rear bumper of the Betty. “Be a good girl now,” he told
Carmen as he did his best to seem nonthreatening. “Step over here
where I can get a better look at you.”

Carmen discretely put her
MP5 down on the car’s ram-bumper and then slowly stepped out to
take a new position beside the driver’s door.

“
Well now,” the man with
the pistol spoke to Carmen as he ogled her. “What’s a sweet young
whore like you doing out here?”

The other two men stepped
up the ramp to be out of general view and to get a better look at
Carmen.

She asked, “Are you three
from Denver?”

“
So some of the others did
reach that King Louie,” the rifleman deduced from her question. “He
must not be a very smart king if he sends out one idiot dressed as
a shrieker and a pretty girl to search here for more
survivors.”

The man with the assault
rifle put his weapon on the trunk lid then pulled off his poncho.
“You two keep watch while I teach this little bitch how things are
going to be from now on.” He chuckled evilly at Carmen, “You can
fight if you want, but it would be best if you just cooperated. You
might even like it.”

Carmen offered them a soft
warning, “My master told me never to kill humans, only ghouls.” It
was her honest explanation as to why they were still even alive,
though they didn’t comprehend her meaning.

The man advanced on Carmen
to rape her, “We killed your master, slut!” The man reached crudely
for Carmen’s breast, “Now we’re going to fuck you
bloody.”

She calmly grabbed his hand
then twisted his wrist until he spun about under the relentless
pressure. Carmen grasped him by the throat with her other hand
while she forced his arm to pin it up behind his back. With the man
thusly immobilized, she used him as a human shield.

The man with the pistol
aimed his weapon at her, “Let him go or I’ll shoot you right
through him.”

Carmen shook her head with
pity over their sad stupidity, “If you drop your weapons at your
feet then get on your knees with your hands on your heads, you may
live through this, but I can’t promise you anything. Aiming a gun
at me is most unwise, but then again, threatening to rape me in the
bad way was not very smart either. My master doesn’t like it when
people are impolite to me. It makes him irritable and he kills
little fat kids on a good day.”

The man with the rifle
pulled a long knife, “Spare us your lies, honey. We know you’re all
alone now. Your costumed partner took a bullet to the face. You had
your fair warning, but now you’re going to see what impolite really
is. We were going to play nice before, so we could enjoy you for
days, or at least until we got hungry enough for stew.”

Critias quietly got to his
feet behind the men, took aim with his pistol, and then shot a
silent bullet into the head of the man who held the automatic
handgun. The ballistic slug lodged into the looter’s brain, which
made the man collapse dead without even so much as an uttered peep.
“The lady told you to put down your weapons,” Critias informed the
man who held the knife. “You didn’t listen when you really should
have.” He walked up the ramp with his pistol aimed to kill that man
too if he offered any reason.

“
Hello, my dearest
beloved,” Carmen greeted Critias with a sweet smile. “These
barbaric men were planning on raping me in the bad way.” In her
garbled thinking, the bad way would be without them enjoying it, a
mere act of militant violence for the purposes of coercion and
intimidation.

He knew, “I heard
everything. I don’t think knife-boy will be doing much raping after
I put this next bullet into his crotch.”

Carmen easily restrained
the man she had caught with her superhuman strength. The other man
dropped his knife to the deck rather than have Critias shoot him.
“Look friend,” the man stuttered in fear for his life. “We didn’t
know that this lady was spoken for. We can come to some kind of
arrangement.”

Critias plucked the rifle
slug from his armor so it could regenerate the hole. He tossed the
piece of lead at the man’s back, “You signed off on our accord when
you shot me in the face. Are you assholes from Denver?”

Knife-boy nodded rapidly in
confirmation, “This is our plane.”

Critias pushed the barrel
of his pistol into the man’s spine, “Want to bet on it?” He looked
to Carmen, “How long would it take for you to get this contraption
off the ground?”

“
Just a few minutes,” she
said confidently. “Once the ramp is up, we will be safe enough for
that long.”

Critias waved his pistol at
the man Carmen held, “You two are coming with me. You can fight if
you want, but then I’ll just shoot you in the belly and then roll
you out to be eaten alive.”

Carmen released her man
with a shove toward Critias who waved his pistol for them to
follow.

“
Drag that body off,” he
ordered the two.

They grabbed the body of
the raider that Critias had killed. They lifted him by the arms
then pulled the corpse off down the ramp.

“
Now walk, over there,” he
pointed to the nearby cars in the direction the men had come from.
Critias marched them before him through the rain, “So none of you
dumbasses knows how to start a car?” Critias didn’t know how to
either, but he had Carmen for that technical stuff.

“
Take us with you and
we’ll be your loyal henchmen,” the rifleman offered Critias. “I
know you need more help, if you’re traveling out here with only a
girl.”

He informed them, “The only
reason you’re alive is because that girl thought you three idiots
were too incompetent to qualify as a legitimate threat. If I would
have allowed it, she could’ve killed you morons with her bare
hands.” Critias selected a small two-door car that had one door
open and a vandalized dashboard of wreckage that showed how someone
had tried then failed to get it started. Critias told them, “If you
speak, I shoot you both in your knees then leave you here to die.
Now, strip off everything and do it quickly. We don’t have a lot of
time before some of the freaks see us, and then you’re really going
to be unhappy. After all, I won’t need to outrun the ghouls. I’ll
only need to outrun you two shit-for-brains and your bullet-ridden
kneecaps.”

The men started to remove
all their clothes.

Critias cautioned, “If
you’re thinking about pulling some hidden weapon on me, try to
remember you couldn’t kill me from ambush with your rifle. My body
armor can take more than you can dish out, so get it all off before
I give you some incentive.”

Both men stripped naked and
true to Critias’ suspicions, the rifleman had a concealed pistol,
but he only added it to his pile of clothes.

“
Get in the car,” Critias
ordered then waited while they complied. “My woman has a kind heart
and so is not the sort to go around slaughtering people; too bad
for you that I’m nothing like her. We came out here looking to
rescue you, but instead you shot me in the face then threatened to
rape and murder her. For that, you’re going to reap the whirlwind,
because you messed with the wrong son-of-a-bitch.”

The rifleman trembled and
it wasn’t from the cold rain, “What’re you going to do to
us?”

Critias quietly closed the
car door, “You were looking for a good fuck and now instead you’re
about to get professionally ass raped by me.” He bent down, grabbed
the car below the rocker panel, and then used his mechsuit strength
to lift the side of the car to roll the whole thing over onto its
top. The vehicle’s glass shattered out as the roof caved in to pin
the doors shut inside their frames. Critias banged loudly on the
side with his fist while he shouted, “Come get your ass rape stew!”
So satisfied with their inevitable fates, he scooped up their pile
of belongings then zombie-shuffled back to the plane’s
ramp.

The two men screamed for
Critias to come back. Their shouts only summoned hungry infected
who would investigate the disturbance. It would take the ghouls
some time to drag them out as the men hopelessly struggled inside
their wreck. That was all the greater misfortune for those men
because the ghouls had all the time in the world to go about their
business of eating them.

Critias walked up into the
plane where he dropped their belongings, “Get this ramp up, and get
us in the air. We’re done here.”

Carmen started the
generator, “What did you do with those men?”

“
I helped them find a
car.”

Outside were the feeding
howls of ghouls that mingled with the men’s screams of abject
horror.

When Carmen triggered the
switch to close the hydraulic ramp, she told him, “Come here and
take the copilot’s seat so you can help me.”

Critias went forward to sit
beside her.

She flipped more switches,
“Did you feed those bad men to the ghouls? That is what it sounds
like and I don’t want to jump to any conclusions.”

“
I may not be as romantic
as Hatchet,” he said sourly since he still dwelled on that
flirtation. “I do for you in my own way. You warned those assholes
yourself that I don’t appreciate anyone disrespecting you or women
in general. They shot me in the face from ambush and then
threatened to make a rape stew out of you. I gave them a fair
trial. It was over quickly since I was both judge and star witness.
I found them guilty then sentenced them accordingly as
deserved.”

“
I’m not complaining,” she
chuckled as if she intended to hide it, but some came from her nose
in a huff of breath. “I became certain of your chivalrous defense
of my virtue when you started taking people who insult me and
throwing them to ghouls. I think it’s romantic in a disaster
scenario kind of way. I’m the only thing that seems to make you
dramatic.”

“
You do make me stupid,”
he agreed to that much of what she said. She made it sound like he
was feeding people to ghouls as some kind of tantrum. Jim had
dropped the hammer on fat Danny; all Critias did was show him the
door. If he had dragged the matter out any longer than necessary,
it would have been tantamount to psychological torture. The three
Denver dickheads punched their own tickets with their foul-running
mouths. All of them were gallows bait who only waited for some
buzzards to land. Their rape stew reference alone was a death
sentence confession made in his presence. He told Carmen, “Kevin
said they specially programmed you to know what to say and how to
act to make me attached to you and that was why I would not let him
perform brain surgery on you.”

In her naïve confusion,
Carmen took his comment good-naturedly. She confessed openly since
she saw no shame in it, “My combat game computer tells me what
would make you happy and it makes me happy to do those things for
you. I took good care of you when you were hurt, didn’t
I?”

He didn’t say anything.
Critias thought that he was losing touch with reality. The hard
truth was that Carmen was an exquisitely programmed manmade
creation. It didn’t really matter whether she was humanoid,
android, or neorganic clone cyborg. She hadn’t been alive along
enough to have a mind of her own. Her personality was software
driven simulation to some substantial degree. It was insane of him
to think of her as a real human. He was too emotionally involved
with something that wasn’t really a person. His whole civilization
existed around the servitude of the androids. Critias couldn’t
start to defy his society over something as insipid as infatuation
with his technological super toy.

Carmen realized his real
meaning from the silence. “We both live behind the masks of our
rigid rules,” she told him. “You did not ask to join the ludus
since you were too young to have any say in the matter. Now you are
their martinet. You have all your codes and rules and ways that are
always making choices for you just because those are the way things
have to be with you. Even if everything you were thinking about me
were true, it shouldn’t even matter to you. What difference does it
make if my combat game computer advises me on how best to make you
happy? When you want to make someone happy, are you not also
conspiring to make it happen?”