'Til Death Do Us Part

“Empty threat. First off, you were already going to kill me. And I’m the one in here with your rapidly dying brother. Funny you should say ‘gutting’ since I just happen to be holding a fillet knife,” I lied.

I heard hammering blows on the door. “I’ll fucking kill you!” Adam’s brother screamed. His fist blows kept raining down. They eventually began to subside and were replaced by a quiet sobbing. “He’s all I’ve got left.”

I can’t lie, I did have enough humanity in me to have that tug at me a bit. I just had to keep reminding myself of what they had initially come here for: the destruction of my family.

“You willing to trade?” I asked him.

“What do you want?” came his cautious reply.

“I want all of your weapons, then you can take his bleeding ass out of my basement.”

“Fine,” I heard him say quickly.

“Fuck no, Chaz, I’m not giving up my gun. Not here, not now,” one of the attackers shouted. “That bitch will cut our throats if we go back with our tails between our—”

A shot rang out. I waited for the echo of it to die down before I spoke. “Chaz, you still there?”

“Anyone else got a problem with us giving up our weapons?”

I didn’t hear any other dissention.

“Now what?” Chaz asked.

“After you’ve put down all your weapons, with your hands raised I want you to step back from the house so that someone on the deck will be able to see you,” I told him.

“How do we know you’re not going to kill us?” he asked.

“Simple, I’m not you. Better hurry up, Adam is looking mighty pale.”

BT was at the bottom of the stairs with everything I had asked for. I looked over to him.

“Man, I just got down here,” he told me.

“The exercise will do you good, it looks like you’ve been hitting the MRE oatmeal cookies a little hard lately.”

“Fuck you, Mike.” He turned and went back upstairs to check on the status of the gunmen.

“I love you too, man.” I told him. “And stay low, the damn snipers are still out there.”

“Yeah, mom,” he told me.

“We’re waiting!” Chaz yelled impatiently.

“You can wait another minute,” I said under my breath. Or maybe not, I thought as I looked behind me at Adam. He was about as pale as I once figured vampires were; I now knew that wasn’t the case, but just last year that was what I thought. Adam’s breathing was shallow and anything less than a world class hospital wasn’t going to do him much good.

“BT says everything is good to go,” Angel yelled down the stairs. “He also said you were an asshole.”

“Angel!” her brother Ryan shouted.

“Well that’s what he said,” she defended herself. It kept going, but the door upstairs closed and the rest was lost to me.

I grabbed my rifle and took a long look at Adam. I wasn’t completely sure, but his dilated pupils gave me the impression he was no longer focusing on anything on this plane of existence. In fact, they were so wide, they looked like the last thing he had witnessed had scared the shit out of him. I wondered if that would be the last expression I would have when the Dark One came to claim me. Wait…could he claim me? I had no soul to lose? If I made it through the rest of the day I was going to grab some beers and think on that for a little while.

I made sure I was ready to fire and opened the door. Five men peered intently back at me, it was easy to determine who Chaz was by the worried expression on his face.

“All of you turn around,” I told them.

“See! I fucking told you he was going to kill us!”

“I’m going to check for weapons, I’ve been burned by the honor system before,” I told them.

BT was again in the basement. “Can you cover me?” I asked him.

“You want me to do anything else? Maybe get you a glass of water, shine your shoes, do a little tap dance?”

I looked over at him questioningly.

“Sorry, little amped up. Go ahead, I’ll cover you.”

“Gee thanks,” I told him as I put my rifle up against the house. I checked Chaz first; except for a fingernail clipper he was clean as a whistle. The second man had an ankle pistol and a Bowie knife, the third had two grenades shoved in his front pants pockets, I was wondering if he thought I might think these were his balls and just leave them alone. The fourth was also clean, the fifth had a sawed off shotgun shoved down his pants.

“You’re kidding right?” I asked. He shrugged. “Take it out nice and slow, please.”

I jumped when his gun went off. Dumb ass had wrapped his hand around the trigger, when he pulled up he fired, neatly obliterating the front part of his right front from his body. He toppled face first not even attempting to break his own fall. I could hear Gary’s retching from above us.

“Whatever you do, Gary, don’t raise your head over the railing to puke!” I warned him. Brown bile began to leak through the floorboards above and slightly behind us.

“So fruggin gross,” Gary said around a mouthful of semi-digested lunch; and it was. The man’s boot had ripped in two at the top, tendons and muscles had curled up and over the exposed skin, blood drained out so quickly it was easy to see the delicate smashed white bones underneath it all.

“Don’t worry, man, you can hold on to the gun,” I told the fallen man.

He was grunting in misery. It was better than shrieks…but not by much.

“Can I get my brother now?” Chaz asked.

“One more thing,” I said as I put the barrel of the second man’s ankle pistol to his head. I ripped his chain off as I did all the rest excluding the now Shoeless Joe Jackson. “Get him,” I said, stepping to the side. “Just you, though,” I said when two of the others turned.

Chaz ran in to the house, his cry of agony came immediately. “He’s dead!”

“He is?…now get him out of the house. And the other two, hell get them all out of here, including Stubby.”

“What do you want us to do with them?” Steel Balls asked.

“Drag them over to the pit, I don’t care.”

“But...but you took our vials.”

“I left Adam’s and Stubby’s on. You guys can fight for them, grab a body and get off my land.”

“Mike?” BT asked.

“No room here for mercy, buddy.”

“Mike?”

“BT, if we had a jail…maybe. Try to hold on to the reason why they were here.”

“You’re killing us,” Steel Balls, said as he hefted the man Chaz had shot.

“I’m doing no more or no less than you would have done to us,” I told him.

The other man went over and helped Stubby get up. Chaz was still in the basement rocking his brother back and forth in his lap.

The other men including one of their dead were heading across the yard. They were looking at the zombies that were eyeing them back. I wondered how large the sphere of influence for the vial would be. If they got into a tight enough huddle, it should protect the three of them.

I went into the house and dragged the other three dead men out of the house as BT covered me. Their blood had mostly stopped leaking, but I still left a trail a blind man could follow.

The man that had been shot through the head was the worst, dropping bits of brain matter of the floor. I tried to imagine it as something different, but I was staring straight at his head as I pulled him from his arms.

Two of the men were coming back to gather their dead, Stubby was sitting alone, the dead man was now burning in the kerosene at the bottom of the trench, black smoke was wafting up from his burning clothes and hair. The zombie congregation packed a little tighter where Stubby was sitting, either he looked delicious or they really liked smoked meat. A few were jostled into the trench below.

“Let’s go,” I told Chaz when I got the last man out.