Jack's best plan - the one he'd spent days dreaming up, planning for, imagining ways it could be implemented - was to kill every living person in Gary's fortress. He would build eight bombs, each of them containing enough VX nerve gas to wipe out a city neighborhood. He would strap these bombs to his body. Then he would run through the fortress with a detonator in his hand. Either he would make it outside and into Gary's farm, where the survivors were held - and perhaps in the process get one last look at Marisol - or he would be stopped by attacking ghouls along the route. Either way he would trigger the detonator. The resulting cloud of poison gas would spread throughout this part of the city. It would take hours to dissipate. Anyone who was exposed to it, even for just a few minutes, would die. There was no immunity to VX. You couldn't even hold your breath and hope it would go away. Once it got on your skin you were dead. There would be no time to wash it off.
He believed that by using a nerve gas he would insure that the dead would not rise again. VX worked by short-circuiting the entire nervous system, making it impossible for the body to function. Maybe it would have prevented Marisol and the survivors from Times Square from reanimating. We'll never know.
We tried to kill each other in that last ugly second, with everything we had. I stabbed him with a combat knife, throwing myself on top of him. He used every bit of skill he had with a firearm and tried to shoot me in the heart. Head shots, he would have told me, are difficult to make even at point blank range when you're shooting from the hip with a pistol. Even if you connect you're firing into the most bony part of the human anatomy, the part most likely to deflect a shot. You might just graze your target's scalp, which is just going to make them angry. You might hit them in the jaw, which makes for an ugly wound but in the shock of impact most people won't even feel it. A shot to the chest, however, will at the very least puncture a lung. In terms of stopping power you want to always aim for the torso.
I had no training in knife-fighting. I didn't know any special moves. I certainly didn't know how to effectively kill a living human being with a knife. I just jumped and stuck my knife out and hoped for the best.
He missed. It's possible, I suppose, that he didn't really want to shoot me, that he was just warning me off. This is Jack we're talking about, though, so I think that we can safely discard that possibility. It's much more likely that he couldn't really see me. All this happened, remember, in the glow of four chemical lights. Glowsticks. I was a shadow coming toward him in a room full of shadows. He missed.
I didn't.
There was blood - so much blood - on both of us that I didn't realize what had happened until later when I had a chance to examine myself and didn't find any smoking holes. I had managed to gut him through several arteries and major veins. His blood didn't just leak out, it erupted from his belly. The savagery of my cut was such that I lodged the knife inside of him and just left it there. It was like digging into a perfectly-cooked porterhouse with a steak knife. It was like gutting a fish.
I would think about that for a long time afterwards. In that moment I just lay on top of him, breathing hard, totally unaware of what was happening around me, just knowing that I was still alive, pretty sure that wasn't going to last.
The gunshot was heard throughout the fortress. A dead giveaway.
When the door flew open I didn't hear it though it must have slammed pretty hard. When the dead hands reached down and grabbed at me I was barely aware of them. I was more conscious of how my weight made me slip out of their grasp time and again. I felt like the original unmovable object. I felt like no force in space or time could move me.
Eventually the dead just grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me out of the pumphouse. They dragged Jack out, too, in the same way. He was still alive. Sort of. His eyes were open and bright. He looked at me without any emotion in his face at all as we were pulled down a long hallway, our pants riding down as our asses were dragged over bumps in the floor, my cheek burning with friction where it touched the flagstones.
Then time started up again and I tried to fight back. I lunged forward, my hands grabbing at the rotten fingers that dug into my ankles. The dead men dropped me and I rolled up to a sitting position before they could kick me to death. They tried, believe me. I managed to get my legs underneath me, to stand up. Then five of them just sort of leaned into me, their shoulders connecting with my chest and back. They slammed me up against a wall with just the weight of their decaying bodies. The smell was horrifying, especially mixed with the oily stink of Jack's blood all over my shirt.
They didn't tie my hands - they lacked the coordination to do so. Instead they just pushed me ahead of them with their hands and feet like kids playing kick the can. Every time I turned to attack them they would just thrust me up against a wall again until I settled down.
They had all the time in the world. They weren't about to get tired. Eventually I just let them herd me on. We came to a place where the corridor opened up into a larger room and then they knocked me down onto my hands and knees. I looked up.
Six dead men stood in a ring along the walls of the chamber. Circular and tall, the room was not as big as I might have expected. It was made smaller by the fact that most of its floor had been hollowed out and turned into an enormous basin, a tub. A bathtub. This depression was full of some kind of foul-smelling liquid. I recognized the stench of formalin - it's a precursor chemical, an ingredient in a number of chemical weapons. I would know that smell anywhere. Something the size of a large cabbage floated on the surface but I couldn't see it so well - actual daylight was streaming down through the open ceiling and I was blinded by real illumination after spending so long in the tunnel and the pumphouse.
A mummy - an actual Egyptian mummy, with filthy bandages dangling from its limbs - picked up Jack by one foot and wrapped a pair of police handcuffs around his ankle while he hung in mid-air. I made a mental note - mummies were very, very strong. The other end of the handcuffs was attached to a hook hanging from a chain that stretched away up into the light. The chain was retracted a few feet and Jack was left dangling like a side of beef on a meathook. He wasn't moving at all. Blood fell from him in a thick rivulet that ran down his left arm and splashed on the floor. I couldn't look at him. If he was still alive he must be in agony. If he was dead he wouldn't be for long.
I looked back down at the cabbage-sized thing in the pool. It opened up a pair of very bloodshot eyes. It smiled at me. It was Gary's head. "Hi," he said.
I looked to my left and my right. The dead had stepped back away from me - as if they were presenting a meal to their master. I pitched myself forward, my hands like claws, intending to dig out Gary's eyes or something. Just hurt him, anyway I could. I had come a long way from the cowardly civil servant he'd met in Union Square. He was about to find out just how far.
Gary stood up in his bathtub with a noise like breakers on the beach and reached out one hand to slap me to the floor. My breath exploded out of my lungs and spots swam before my eyes. I looked up and saw the hand that brought me down. It was like one of those over-sized foam hands you get at sporting events. It was enormous, the individual fingers as thick as saplings. Gary was naked, his body a rippling mass of fat and dead veins. Corpse-flavored gelatin stuffed into lumpy sausage casings that threatened to split open at any moment.
He was seven and a half feet tall. He was six feet wide. He must have weighed a thousand pounds. His head hadn't grown at all. It looked tiny on his shoulders, his neck submerged under rolls of fat. He glanced down at himself.
"Between meal snacks," he explained.
