Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (21 page)

“Shhhhhhhh…” Evan placed his palm against her mouth, which almost made her scream. “Close your eyes and count to ten,” he whispered in her ear.

Troi closed her eyes and counted to ten, letting them adjust to the dark.

“When you open your eyes,
do not
scream.”

When Troi opened her eyes and looked around in disbelief at the chamber of horrors they had stepped into, she went to scream, but Evan clasped his hand over mouth again, stifling the cry.

“Take it easy…”

Light filtered into the room from gaps amid the rafters high above.

Zombies and zombie parts were hanging from the rafters by chains and ropes. There were half a dozen cages with undead in them. The barn stunk like rotten meat left in the sun.

Troi hyperventilated behind Evan’s hand.

One zombie had its face and head duct-taped and its hands cut off.

Another caged zombie wore a straight jacket.

“Breathe…breathe…”

A dunking stool took up much of one side of the barn. The chair was immersed in a vat of boiling water. Coals glowed under the vat. Fat bubbled on the surface of the water, producing the noisome stench that permeated the place.

“Breathe, Troi…”

There were two flat, wooden tables with bodies on them. One of the bodies was a zombie, and it had had both arms and legs removed and sewn back onto the opposite sides of its body. It had lifted its head and watched them, mouthing at them without any noise.

The other was a torso, and it was peeled open, flaps of its skin pinned down to the table. Its wrists and ankles were shackled and stretched taut. It was hooded.

“You okay now?”

Troi nodded and Evan removed his hand.

“Is that one human?” As she whispered it, the hooded head lifted from the wooden table and turned in their direction.

“Ev, let’s get out of here…”

A moan sounded beyond a well-lighted doorway opposite them.

Evan looked unhappy. “Go get the others.” Before Troi could say anything he walked off, crossing the tableau of barbarism.

“Ev!” Troi hissed at him, but Evan stepped through the doorway.

She waited, scared out of her mind. The zombies in the cage and on the table were aware of her presence. The one that was duct taped, and the one that was hooded and eviscerated, couldn’t see her, and because they couldn’t see her they were uninterested and had lowered their heads. However, the amputated Zed and the one bound in the straight jacket watched her intently.

A zombie hanging from the rafters reached out for her. The chains that suspended it clanked. The creature was gagged.

“Ev!” Troi hissed out at the darkness again, but there was no response.

She looked behind her, back towards the door and the trees and Anthony and Riley. “Damn you, Ev.” Troi navigated the room as quickly and as cautiously as she could, keeping well away from the tables and the cages and the zombies strung from the ceiling.

She stood outside the door to the next room and paused. There were footsteps from up above. The footsteps descended some stairs. Muffled guttural sounds floated from the next room, a grunted conversation. The doorway next to Troi brightened further with the creak of wood. A door had opened. More light had been let into the room.

The unseen stairs creaked anew as something trudged back up them.

And then it was silent once more.

Troi told herself she had to be crazy. She stepped through the doorway and into the next room.

Daylight flooded in through wide open barn doors, illuminating a corridor down the middle of the room. Horse stalls were on either side of the light, hidden in shadow. Troi moved forward, ready to fire her Model 7. She looked into each stall she passed to make sure nothing was hiding in them. The stalls were bare save for shackled human skeletons. One berthed an enormous cannon on wheels.

The room she was in was shaped like an L. When Troi reached the end of the stalls, she furtively glanced around the last one, then stepped into the light.

There were two figures on the ground, both female. One was headless. Gaping wounds perforated her torso. An electric drill lay in the dirt beside the body.

The other woman was alive. She was brutalized and bloody, naked. She looked up at Troi through blackened eyes and drew her bloodied thighs together as best she could with legs disjointed and broken.

Troi crossed the room to her without thinking, kneeling down beside the woman.

“It’ll be okay…” There was a small round cask of black powder—for the cannon?—against which Troi propped her M7. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

She didn’t know where to begin. The woman was a mess. Why did she have to go and leave her pack outside? All of Troi’s medical supplies were in it.

The woman could not say anything. Her jaw was broken. She started to cry.

“It’s okay, now. It’ll be okay…”

Troi scanned the room for something she could use to help the woman,
anything
. The wide open barn doors let onto a dirt path that ran up to the house. A stairwell disappeared into the ceiling. There was a stack of cannon balls in one corner. A triangular harrow lay flat on the ground like a large rake with rows of rusty, jagged teeth.

“
Ugh
!” Troi recoiled from the grunt. There was a naked zombie with a chain around its waist across from them. The zombie was chained to a metal ring in the floor.

“Okay, let’s get you—”

The woman scrunched her eyes closed and shook her head.

“What? What is it? You’re going to be—”

There was a creak as something mounted the stairs, and Troi scurried back into the shadows without thinking. She pressed her back to the wall of the barn and held her breath.

The thing that came down the stairs was monstrous. She could see it clearly from where she stood. At over two meters in height, it wore coveralls that were unhooked and hanging off one shoulder. Bulbous growths covered its head and shoulders. Wisps of hair sprouted from the huge tumors covering its head. One of the tumors had grown over an eye. The thing’s hands and feet—it wore no shoes—were enlarged, as was one of its arms.

It held something in the over-sized hand attached to its elephantine limb. As it came off the stairs and into the light, that side of its body was hidden from Troi, and she couldn’t see what the thing grasped. She could see what it held in its other hand, and it did not reassure her. The wooden handle of the sledgehammer was swallowed up in the thing’s paw.

Munts
, Troi thought. That’s what Krieger had called them. Mutants.

The thing crossed over from the stairs and stood looking down at the ravaged woman on the ground. It grunted down at her, but she did not respond. It prodded her with its foot and she cried out. Before Troi fully comprehended what was happening, the beast reached down, placed a railroad spike against the disabled woman’s forehead, and, with one blow from the sledgehammer, hammered the spike through her skull.

Troi gasped. The mutant apparently did not hear her, but the zombie chained to the floor waved its hands towards her in the dark.

At that moment, Troi realized she did not have her rifle. She looked past the mutant to the barrel of powder. Her M7 rested against it, barrel up.

The thing above the woman placed the sledgehammer down and picked up the drill that was lying next to the limbless, headless torso. As Troi watched, the beast drilled a hole into the dead woman’s side. It worked the drill in and out, widening the wound.

The noise from the drill died out. The mutant stuck two sausage-like fingers in the woman’s side, as if it were measuring something. Seemingly satisfied, it reached out and gripped the woman by her ankle and the railroad spike in her head and flipped her corpse over onto its side.

Where the hell was Ev?

The creature had unbuckled its overalls, which fell and pooled around its ankles. Troi stared in disbelief at the size of the monster’s erection. It was at least as long as her forearm and twice as thick. Disbelief turned to horror as the mutant flopped down on top of the dead woman, ramming its erect member through the freshly drilled orifice.

Troi closed her eyes. She didn’t want to watch this. She had to get outside to Anthony and Riley and hope Evan was already there. They had to get the hell out of here
now
.

The mutant grunted as it humped the corpse, intent on the carcass beneath it.

Now or never…
Troi stepped from the shadow and walked sideways…

—the beast snorted—

…watching the monster as it heaved in place, looking towards the gloom amid the stalls and the way she had come…

—the mutant groaned and shuddered—

…glancing longingly towards her assault rifle against the powder cask…

—the mutant went silent.

Troi froze.

It looked at her.

The thing, on its knees, opened its mouth and emitted a raspy, grating noise. It was laughing. It rubbed the bloated purple head of its cock as it stared at Troi.

Evan stepped out of the dark from behind the beast and brought the axe he gripped down onto its head.

One of the tumors on the thing’s skull burst, and fluid splashed out. It reached up to the axe buried in its head and felt it, found the cheek of the blade and the wedge, and clawed at the wood of the grip, which it tried to get a grip on.

Evan drove a pitchfork through its lower back.

The creature made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a growl and stood. It turned to confront Evan, who stood empty handed.

“Yeah? What!” Evan faced the thing in his poncho, his fists raised.

Troi rushed forward, snatching up the sledgehammer from the ground. The mutant, aware of her motion behind it, turned as she brought the hammer around and into its knee. Its leg crumpled inwards and the monster went down onto its hands.

“Freak!” Evan yanked the pitchfork from its back and drove the farm implement back in repeatedly with a series of short, furious strokes.

The thing reached out for Troi. She hammered it in the head and face until it slumped over, toppling onto the rusty teeth of the harrow, and then she hammered down on it, driving its body onto the teeth.

“Troi. Troi!” Evan wasn’t whispering.

She panted as she rested the sledgehammer on the floor of the barn. She considered going to the woman but knew it was too late.

“Oh…” Anthony gasped as he and Riley stepped into the room. They’d brought Evan and Troi’s packs with them.

“These people are animals,” said Riley.

The mutant pressed to the harrow was not moving.

The zombie chained to the wall was doing its best to reach them but couldn’t.

“Is that a tail?” Anthony asked. There was something protruding from between the undead’s buttocks.

Evan didn’t think anything could surprise him anymore. “Is that a head coming out of its ass?”

“It’s a prolapse.” Troi retrieved her M7.

“That’s gross,” said Anthony.

“Disgusting,” agreed Riley.

They looked out the barn doors towards the house.

“There’s another one,” said Evan, “up in the house.”

“These animals…” Riley was angry.

Anthony looked at his Geiger meter’s LCD display. “There’s a lot of radiation in here.”

Troi up-ended the cask of powder and rolled it around the barn, dumping the powder. “Let’s burn their damned barn.”

Evan found the two bottles of whiskey in his pack. He tore some strips off the soiled clothing he found near the women’s bodies. As Evan made his Molotov cocktails and Troi spread the powder, Anthony and Riley watched the house up the path.

A few minutes later they stood together. They were mad, disgusted, and afraid.

“Whatever’s up in that house,” said Riley, “it dies. We agree?”

“Damn straight,” said Evan. He’d swung Bertha around his back and gripped the two bombs.

“Yeah,” said Anthony.

“Let’s get them.” Troi led them out of the barn.

“Turn that thing up,” Evan referred to the volume on Anthony’s Geiger meter.Outside, in the sun of the afternoon, the Geiger indicated an acceptable level of radiation.

…click…click…click…

The house might have been a stately place a hundred years before, but it had long since given to ruin. Part of the second story had collapsed down onto the first, and what remained of the roof sagged. Planks of wood were pulled back, peeled off the sides.

The path to the house was strewn with junk—a rusted tricycle, the hub cap of a tire. An engine block hung suspended from a tree.

“What do they have in there?” Anthony looked from an enormous pile of feces in the middle of the path to the house. “A horse?”

“You saw the size of that thing in the barn,” said Evan.

…
click
-
click
-
click
-
click
…

The clicks-per-minute were through the roof as Anthony passed the defecation.

A porch ringed the front of the house. Its railing had collapsed in places, stray boards of rotting wood hanging from rusted nails. A doorway and several windows gave unto the bowels of the house. The frame of a screen door was bent and the screen was ripped in several places, coiled around itself in one corner.

…
click
…
click
…
click
…

The four men and women moved slowly, guardedly towards the porch.

“I’m not going in there,” said Evan. “Screw that.”

“Look at this place…” Riley said.

“Nobody can be living here,” said Anthony. “Can they?”

“Shhhh…” hushed Troi. She couldn’t get that woman in the barn out of her head. What had happened to her?

“Look at that…” Anthony pointed to a rocking chair on the porch.

The chair wasn’t moving, but something sat in it.

…click…click…click…

“What the hell is that?” Evan asked a little too loud. “What the…”

The thing in the chair sat up and watched them as they moved closer to its home. It looked to be a third of a meter in height, and had arms and legs and eyes and a mouth, but its semblance to anything human ended there. Its large, clear eyes bugged out of its head—a head which ended immediately above those eyes. Its wet-looking mouth was too large for its face.