Specs and I pulled back along the far wall, right near to the door so we could run the hell out of there if we had to. I could hear the slapping sound of bare feet coming up the steps and my mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I could hear the Trog breathing with a hollow hissing sort of sound. That urine stench grew stronger, a low and mean smell that made my eyes water.
“Get ready,” Sean whispered.
I saw a shadow emerge from the gloom…it was distorted, semi-human. It was making a low growling sound in its throat. It came up into the light, a grotesque caricature of a human being. It was woman, I thought. Broken, bent at the waist, one shoulder pulled up higher than that other. The left arm reached down near the knee and the other only to the waist. She was naked, her flesh a greasy yellow like leprosy, horribly corrugated, the fissures and clefts in her skin so deep you could have lost a penny in them. Her breasts looked like deflated, fleshy balloons.
“Jesus,” Specs said.
Her head was misshapen, long cobweb gray hair hanging from the raw scalp. She looked around with glossy pink eyes that were set with a fine tracery of purple veins like unfertilized eggs. Each set with a tiny black dot that must have been a pupil. Her puckered mouth pulled back from teeth that were black and overlapping, triangular in shape. They looked serrated. A watery brown juice ran from the corners of her lips.
She held a hand up before her face to block the light and I saw that the palm was set with ring-shaped protrusions that looked like the sucker scars of squids you see on whales.
“I’m over here, you bitch,” Sean said.
The Trog looked at him and I wondered at that moment if she did not recognize him. She let out a shrill, piercing scream that grew in volume, an unearthly wailing that went right through me, scraping along the inside of my skull like a fork. I thought my bladder would let go. I almost fell over Specs. The scream echoed through that deserted building and came right back at us: it was an agonized sound like an animal being put to death.
Then she spoke…or made sounds like speech. I’m not sure. But this is what I heard: “Yyyyyyoooooouuuuu,” she hissed with a timber that made everything inside me pull up tight. “Yyyyyyooooouuuuuu…”
If Sean hadn’t had that shotgun, she would have torn out his throat and washed herself in his blood. She stumbled towards him, blinded, hissing, and very pissed off.
Sean let her get within four feet and then he gave her a round right in the belly. 12-gauge shot at close quarters, it nearly torn her in half. She went down screaming and thrashing. He gave her another right in the chest and she flopped, screeched, and then went still. The stink of her blood was just as bad as her urine.
“That’s how it’s done,” Sean said.
My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard next to Specs who’d already folded up. We sat there, speechless. We thought killing that thing would be enough. But it wasn’t. Not for Sean. He set aside his shotgun, kneeled down by the Trog. He wrapped her hair in his fist and pulled it tight. Then out came his hatchet. With a couple quick strokes, he decapitated her.
He stood up, holding that vile grimacing head by the hair. Blood dripped from the severed neck. “Either you boys want this for your trophy cases?” We just looked dumbly at him. “Didn’t think so.” He opened his potato sack and dropped the head in, tied the sack off at his belt.
I finally found my voice. “What the hell do you want that for?”
“I got my reasons, brother,” he said. “See, Trogs are superstitious, I think. Maybe they believe in ghosts or something. I don’t know. But they don’t care for their own dead or parts of ‘em, for that matter. I was in a pinch one time with three of the fuckers bearing down on me. I only had one round in my gun. What to do? I threw a trophy Trog head at the others and they ran off like the Devil was coming down to fucking Georgia. You should have seen it!”
I was very happy that I hadn’t.
9
There was no way in hell I wanted any part of Trog-hunting. You couldn’t have paid me to go after those monsters. They lived down in the sewers mostly, Sean told me, and I was content to let them stay there. But something happened that changed my mind.
We left the building, got out into the sunshine-Sean had promised us he had an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels back at his apartment and I was all for that-and right away we saw carnage. Scabs. About a dozen of them were lying dead in the streets. Their blood was very bright, very red spilled over the rubble. They had been dismembered, hacked and slit, disemboweled. Their entrails were strewn everywhere. One particular set was hung from a STOP sign. They had all been decapitated, the heads set neatly next to one another on the curb.
“Hell’s going on?” I said.
Sean went down to a low crouch right away like he was back in the Army, a recon scout sneaking through enemy territory. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Who killed ‘em?” Specs wanted to know.
“Shut the hell up, both of you,” Sean told us and meant it.
He moved towards the bodies, eyes scanning the terrain in all directions. He went over to one and pulled something free of an abdomen. It looked like a broken stick. But when he brought it over, I saw it was a spearhead of all things.
“Hatchet Clans,” he said. “Must’ve swept through while we were inside. Get back in the building.”
“I’m not going back in there,” Specs said.
“Then you can die out here, little man,” Sean said. “Because you will die. The Clans leave nothing alive when they sweep an area.”
I went back into the building. I decided to err on the side of caution. It was the second time Sean had mentioned these Hatchet Clans. I didn’t know what they were, but if they scared Sean they must have been some real bad boys.
We got inside and Sean told us to stay away from the windows. He stayed by them, watching the streets.
“What are these clans?” Specs asked.
Sean let out a long, low sigh. “They’re fucking dangerous, that’s what,” he said. “Scabs are psychotic, but they’re disorganized. Half the time when there’s no game-people, I mean-they’re killing each other. But the Hatchet Clans are organized into large units. They kill anything they see. Those they don’t kill, they rape, torture, or enslave. You don’t want to fuck with ‘em. They’re…savage, primeval. That’s the best I can do. They don’t use guns. They use axes, spears, hammers…whatever. Let’s put it this way: you ever seen those shows on TV…when there was TV…about army ants marching through the jungle and fucking devastating everything in their path? That’s what the Hatchet Clans do. They’re raiders for the most part. They like to scalp people, cut trophies off ‘em.”
I had a lot of questions, but I didn’t ask them. I was scared. Specs was, too. Sean was a badass. I didn’t think there was anything he couldn’t handle, but the Clans had him spooked and that was enough for me.
After about ten minutes of silence, he motioned us over. “Look,” he said.
I saw two or three men come over a heap of rubble. They wore filthy old Army overcoats. One of them had a machete. One was carrying a length of chain in his hand. The other had a fireman’s axe balanced atop one shoulder. They were looking around. The most amazing thing was that they had gas masks on like soldiers from the trenches of World War I.
“What are those masks for?” Specs whispered.
Sean shook his head. “Fuck if I know. But they all wear ‘em. Must’ve looted ‘em from an Army depot or a National Guard Armory, Army-Navy surplus or something. I’ve never seen what’s under the masks, but I heard their faces are eaten by some kind of fungi.”
I’d seen and heard enough.
Sean kept watching them. “You see two or three like this, you can bet there’s thirty more. These are scouts. Hate to tell you, brothers, but we’re in some real shit here. They swept through before. Now they’ll start hunting building to building.”
Specs looked at me. His eyes were bulging. “Oh, that’s fucking great. Now what?”
