“Hey, boys, here come the toys!”
Oates shoved Neiderhauser forward, spun around and dropped to one knee. He opened up on that putrescent old whore on full auto. His first volley of shots blew two or three fingers off her left hand as it again squeezed that bulging sack of tit and the breast itself imploded and deflated, a gush of black fluid and meat running from it. The second volley stitched her from crotch to throat, each individual hole freeing a storm of trapped flies and a pissing green bile.
The zombie whore screeched at that. “Look what you did to my beauty, you rotten fuck! Look what you did to Long Tall Sally’s lovely, lovely tit! Now I won’t be able to squirt my milk into your mouth when I catch you!” She cackled at the idea of that, rotting teeth clattering together, and threw her head back. “Go run off, I’ll catch you in the end! Then I’ll take your meat down my throat and give you a sweet taste of what I’ve got brewing down below! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A sweet taste of my naughty parts? I’ll ram ‘em in your mouth and make you suck the blood out of ‘em! Go run and hide, Henry T. Oates, because when I catch you, you’ll get the fucking of your life?”
Oates grabbed Neiderhauser by the scruff of the neck and pushed him along, hoping beyond hope that there was a stairway leading up or down because they had to get out of there. There was a hot sharpness at his bowels like he badly needed to fill his pants, but he wasn’t giving in. He wasn’t going to drop and sob and suck his thumb, no sir! Not Henry T. goddamn Oates. For he was the baddest motherfucker God had ever seen fit to set loose in any war zone, walking dead or no walking dead. He was one bad-ass, life-taking, ball-busting, throat-slitting death machine and he did not give up or give in!
“Stairs,” he said, sighting them just ahead. “Neiderhumper, move your poo-nanny ass up while I cover your behind! Get going, you leg-humping sonofabitch! You don’t move and that cream-queen is going piss her ovaries right down your throat!”
Neiderhauser mumbled something and started up the stairs. He climbed them on all fours like some sort of half-ass monkey until Oates told him to stand up and act like a goddamn man…if such a thing were possible. Had he the time, he would have kicked him in the ass and kept kicking him until his rectum was under his tongue, but there was no time for that.
Long Tall Sally was coming and she was in the need of male companionship.
Oates followed Neiderhauser up the stairs, listening to Neiderhauser whining out some prayer he’d learned in Sunday school. Behind them, the dead whore was saying something about little boys tasting like snails and puppy dog tails. They made it up to the top and Neiderhauser was the first one into that dim hallway.
And that was a lucky thing for Oates.
For Neiderhauser waltzed right into a carefully prepared booby trap.
When Oates was with the 101^st, he’d attended a little seminar on booby traps, learned all about the amazing variety of anti-personnel devices the enemy can fashion from just about anything?unexploded ammunitions to household items. Everything from grenades and bullets to wooden stakes and tin cans. Ingenuity being the mother of invention and all. And people got real inventive when it came to killing other people. But the people that engineered the apparatus that took out Neiderhauser had not been schooled by any army this side of the grave and their idea of raw materials was a little more than shocking.
Oates saw Neiderhauser get it.
About ten feet into the corridor, he tripped some kind of wire and something huge and dark that had been tied off to the ceiling came swinging down on a cord and hit him, impaling him instantly.
Oates went down to his knees at the sight of it.
Somebody?and he could pretty much guess who or what?had taken the time to build a graveyard version of a man trap. What it was, was a carefully erected cage of human bones tied together with sinew and what might have been ligament. For weight, two corpses were tied to the back of the thing so it would swing down with devastating impact. So there you had it: a sort of Malayan Gate but not made of jungle vines and bent-back saplings, but the raw materials of the grave. The two stiffs tied to the back of the bone cage gave it weight, the bones?leg bones and arm bones and the slats of ribcages?gave it a framework and then in the very front, a dozen human femurs were wedged in there, the ends snapped off so that they were sharp, jagged, and lethal.
Amazing.
Lurid and unthinkable, but effective.
It hit Neiderhauser with a wet thudding sound, impaling him easily, and then, with him in tow, it continued to swing back and forth on the cord that tied it off overhead. Oates just sat there on his knees, prostrate and gibbering madly, watching it swing to and fro like a pendulum, Neiderhauser’s blood spraying evenly over the floor and walls.
He died very quickly.
Oates finally found his feet, realized he had pissed himself, but did not care. He just stared at Neiderhauser. “What the fuck you go and do, boy? What kind of horseshitty business you get yourself into?”
But Neiderhauser just swung back and forth like Tarzan.
Long Tall Sally was coming up the stairs with a slopping, juicy sound, humming some profane melody under her breath…if she indeed had any. Oates made a funny sound in his throat and moved up the hallway at a crouch. The fear and shock had drained away now and Henry T. Oates was back, talking to himself and singing songs by the Turtles and The Righteous Brothers…or what he could remember of them.
Again, he saw the humor in it all.
“Hey, you zombies!” he shouted into the stillness. “It’s yer lucky day ‘cause here comes Henry T. Oates! And I’m coming for you, sure as shit! So drop ‘em and grin, pucker up yer A-holes and make ready, ‘cause here comes the loving!”
The hallway veered to the left and Oates was glad to leave Neiderhauser back there, dripping and swinging. Long Tall Sally had gotten up the stairs and she was cooing over Neiderhauser’s corpse, saying how glad she was his penis was intact. Last thing Oates heard back there was the sound of chewing and slurping.
At the end of the hallway, something came padding out of the darkness.
A dog.
Oates caught it in the beam of his flashlight and that stopped it.
Except this dog was in a bad way, its back leg broken, its side smashed in, and its head crushed, a slop of brains hanging out and solidifying there. It had been a collie once before a car knocked it into the gutter and before resurrection, but now it was just a mess. Its coat was black and muddy, things crawling in it. One eye was gone, the other just red and oily. Its viscera dragged along the floor after it from its exploded belly.
“And Bing-O was his name-O,” Oates heard himself say.
It growled at him, showing its teeth which were remarkably white and long and untouched by the trauma that had killed it.
“What’s the matter with you, old boy?” Oates asked it. “What’s yer name? Old Red? Sure, that’s your name. What’s that, Old Red? You trying to tell me something? You want me to follow you? Right down into hell?”
Oates giggled and sprayed it down with his M-16. About all he did was make a bigger mess of the poor animal, dropping it to the floor where it growled and panted, snapping at lengths of its own intestine.
Oates moved on.
He came to a door marked PRIVATE and that was the one he wanted. He blew the lock off and found himself in a wide maintenance shaft. A ladder climbed right up to the roof overhead.
A few minutes later, Oates was up there, free at last.
He howled his triumph into the black, wet night, dancing around and jumping up and down, shaking his weapon. But after a time, he just sat down and told himself how goddamn funny it all was. He told Neiderhauser, too, forgetting sometimes that he was dead.
But what did that mean anyway?
Death in Witcham wasn’t like death other places.
So with that in mind, Henry T. Oates put the barrel of his pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
18
