colored leaves interspersed with green ones, jutting from dead branches. One tree a stark, unnatural shade of white, gnarled and neglected, with green leaves still sprouting from it. Now, with ninety percent of the tenants on Section 8 housing, and crime, poverty, and hopelessness combining for a cauldron of pain and anger, life in the Phoenix Apartments had been reduced to relentless decay and a cesspool of warrants. Churches nestled densely around the property, a bulwark against entropy. Immanuel Baptist. Church of the Living God. Pentecostal Assembly. Nazarene Church. Temple of Praise. Indiana Missionary. Living Water. Their church signs promised passersby 'Don't worry, God is still in control'.
The engine cooling, the five of them sat in the Outreach Inc. van. Wayne drove with Merle riding shotgun, his window slightly rolled down to cut down on his odor. Lady G sat between King and Lott in the back. King watched the denizens shamble back and forth, the silence conducive to his thoughts. They had bandaged his side and taped it as best they could. King refused to go to the hospital, preferring to end this terrible business that night.
And then there was the matter of the gun.
'Has anyone wondered 'Why us?'' Wayne asked. All eyes fell on King.
'Why not us?' King leaned forward to better see them all. 'I don't know about you, but I'm tired. Tired of people having no expectations of us. Tired of not bothering to dream because I don't think I'll be around to see it. Tired of not being able to walk down a street without part of me fearing a brother walking my way.
'Ain't but a few of us here, but even a few good people banded together in the right cause can make a difference. I have to believe that or what's the point of even going on? Good people have to stand for something.'
'Damn, man,' Wayne said, 'I didn't say go all 'Win one for the Gipper' on us.'
A brooding silence enveloped the apartment parking lot. Dead leaves skittered along the cracked black pavement on a desolate, cold wind. The silence was as pervasive as it was unsettling. Even during colder temperatures, the Phoenix brimmed with activity because fiends and knuckleheads knew no rest. Despite the appearance of a few bodies in the yard, an eerie stillness settled on the apartments. No cars idled, no music poured from speakers, no loud voices claimed the night as their own. Separated like sentries, though locked in their heroin leans, the bodies became more animated as King neared. Some moaned in distress. One man appeared to be attempting to shave the color off his eyeball with a razor blade.
'It's you. They're reacting to you,' Merle said to King.
'How can you tell? They can't even see me.'
'Exactly.'
'Look at them,' Lady G said, 'They look-'
'Dead,' Lott said. 'Remember what Tavon was saying about the fiends falling out?'
The weight of guilt bubbled in Wayne's belly for losing track of Tavon. Some faces looked familiar to Wayne and Lady G especially, having encountered them during their street lives. However, the people they knew were gone. Some shambled about with shorn limbs, some having obviously taken gunfire and ran out of blood, yet still stood. The drugs consumed them a piece at a time, but now it was as if their souls had been snuffed out.
'Got anything we can use as weapons?' King needed the comfort of having some sort of weapon.
'You have the gun,' Lott said.
King waited impatiently for the facts to settle in his head. The familiar weight of the Caliburn nestled along his spine. 'I know, but… it doesn't feel right. Not yet.'
'You'll know when to use it,' Merle reassured.
'I have a crowbar, a baseball bat, and a golf club,' Wayne fished through the trunk of the minivan.
'A golf club?' Lott asked.
'What? I'm a civilized motherfucker.'
'Fine, you the next Tiger, but only one?'
'Shit, I ain't made of money,' Wayne said. 'Figure I just keep hitting shit till the ball gets in a hole.'
'Sounds like a plan for this here game, too.'
'You sure?'
'They're already dead.'
Lott grabbed the crowbar, then grabbed a couple of the screwdrivers which rolled along the floorboard and shoved them into the sides of his jeans. King opted for the baseball bat, leaving Wayne with his precious golf club. Hardly masked by the slight wind, the smell of rotting meat hit them. The trees loomed, strange fruit dangling from their low-lying branches. As the band approached, the forms coalesced. Small bodies, the flesh peeled back or knotted in chunks hung like ornaments. Birds. Rats. Squirrels. The cloud-occluded moonlight gave the illusion of their tiny jaws still moving. The sight of the squirrel bones especially unsettled Merle.
The copse of corpses had been dead for nearly a two days and slowly made their way here to this place of power, this place that beckoned them. To wait. Though the fiends had to have ridden the same blast within a day of each other, some were wasted in such a way as to have been dead for months. Even the freshest among them had meat falling from them in clumps. Their tattered clothes starched with mildew, the rot of their flesh infested their wardrobe. Vacant eyes — a condition not entirely unfamiliar to the fiends — tracked the approaching skulkers. Folks held hostage terrified to leave the building now noiselessly under siege. As long as it was quiet — because indeed, no bullets rang out — the police considered it secured. Loitering was one of those law violations enforced in lighter neighborhoods.
King took point with Wayne and Lott in lock-step behind him forming a wedge through the heart of the milling bodies. Using the bat more like a staff, King jabbed the hand grip into the gut of the nearest fiend, doubling it over as the action forced air from its insides. Its rancid breath choked him. The fat end of the bat smashed into the jaw of one attempting to sneak up from behind. The creatures amped back up, and found their legs again. It seemed easier to think of them as creatures. Stay down, his eyes pled, but the creature stirred. With the sickening accompanying sound of splintering bone, he planted the bat firmly in its skull.
Wayne took no joy in his task. His goal was to keep the creatures at bay from Merle and Lady G, more a distraction until Lott finished them with a severing blow to the back of the neck or a curt ram through an eye. Distracted by the approach of the first body, three fiends collapsed on him from the shadows of entranceways before he realized they were organized enough to create a feint. Stumbling off the broken curb, Wayne kicked the first one, his foot collapsing the chest of it, then getting stuck on the jagged bones of the shattered ribs once the creature juked. Wayne toppled to the ground, and disappeared under a crush of fiends as they pounced on him. Tavon's face suddenly peered down at him, his open mouth a siege of rotting teeth.
Swinging the crowbar like a sword swung with skill and precision, an exuberance to the grim task thrilled Lott. Black ichor, more than blood, poured from the slit throat of one. A decomposed fist slammed into his skull, the warning cry of 'look out' from Lady G arriving seconds too late. Lott staggered to the floor; the creature's desiccated arm lashed out and lifted him from the ground before he could retrieve his crowbar. Its strength flowed from somewhere else, because its brittle arms didn't hold enough muscle to swat at a passing mosquito. Whatever animated them also burned them up. The creature held him up, waiting for others to see his prize and come tear him apart. As if catching his scent from upwind, some undead striders stopped in midmovement and ambled toward them. Lott fished into the side pockets of his jeans and pulled out the screwdrivers. Plunging the twin daggers, he rammed the screwdrivers into each of its eye sockets, exploding what was left of its eye and piercing what passed for its brain. Landing as the creature collapsed, Lott tugged at the screwdriver which was stuck in the bone of the eye socket. As he yanked it free, it flew out of his grasp and tumbled to the ground. As ravenous for a blast as it had been in life, a fiend fell to its knees, grabbed it and jammed it into its arm.
Wayne, his foot still caught in the chest of the fiend who didn't know enough to drop dead, dragged his leg bringing the creature with it. The body crashed into the others, which allowed Wayne to roll through the grasp of one of them. Tavon's rasping fingers found purchase in his side and his side burned as the fingers clawed through his flesh. He grabbed Tavon with both hands and headbutted him. Wayne whirled the body like a shield, shoving the fiends back. He threw Tavon to the ground. Any trace of the man he knew was gone, so Wayne stomped on the back of his skull, smashing its jaws on the sidewalk. A hole opened up among the ranks and he waved Merle and Lady G through it. He chanced one last look at Tavon's still form and told himself that he had to do what he had to do.
Loose Tooth scuttled toward King. In death he seemed to have put on weight. The former old man had renewed vigor as his mouth, his jaw barely attached, dangled open and snap shut as he entangled King in his embrace. Contempt filled his hollowed eyes. King pulled as far away from the chomping teeth as he could, then
