"Adam," he rasped.

"Adam," I repeated.

"If you kill my brother, I'll gut you like a fish!" the man yelled through the door.

"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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.s out of my bas.e.m.e.nt."

"Fine," I heard him say quickly.

"f.u.c.k no, Chaz, I'm not giving up my gun. Not here, not now," one of the attackers shouted. "That b.i.t.c.h 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."

"f.u.c.k 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 d.a.m.n 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.shole."

"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 s.h.i.t 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 f.u.c.king 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. "Can you cover me?" I asked him.

"You want me to do anything else? Maybe get you a gla.s.s 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 a.s.s 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, h.e.l.l get them all out of here, including Stubby."

"What do you want us to do with them?" Steel b.a.l.l.s 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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.

His eyes were red-rimmed. "He's all I've got left."

"Yeah, and all those people you were going to kill upstairs, they're all I've got left. Get out."

He did without any further words, hefting his brother up over his shoulder. He brushed by as he left. Within a few more minutes all of the dead raiders were now permanent fixtures with the ground. The men were looking at the gap and the zombies, trying to figure out how they were going to get back across. BT and I watched as one of them actually turned and began to come back. I raised my rifle up and he turned back to the zombies.

Steel b.a.l.l.s and the man who had turned around began to talk rapidly, their voices rising to a peak. It looked like Steel b.a.l.l.s won. I could see Stubby begging, his hands were up in the air, he was shaking his head back and forth and trying to scoot back as fast as he could. Steel kicked Stubby in his bad foot. Stubby stopped moving immediately as his scream of pain pierced the silence. He paid no attention as Steel b.a.l.l.s moved and grabbed the chain off his neck.

"Help me, please!" Stubby begged.

I went back inside; BT stayed out a moment longer before joining me. I grabbed a bucket and some water out of the utility closet and had already started cleaning up stains that would never vanish.

"What happened out there, man?" BT asked me.

I looked up from my scrubbing. "What would you have done differently?"

"At least I would have left them the vials," BT said, rubbing his face with his hands like he was trying to scour away the grime of the event.

"I'm going to walk you through my thoughts."

"Go on," he said, pulling up a folding chair that I did not think was up to the task of holding him suspended in s.p.a.ce.

"They weren't here to borrow sugar, BT."

"I get that, Mike, I do, but that's cold-blooded."

"I'm not done." BT motioned for me to continue. "I let them leave intact, they go right back to Eliza, regroup and try again. She's not just going to pat them on the shoulders and say, 'Nice try fellas'. Maybe we stop them again, maybe we don't. I'm not willing to gamble the lives of those people upstairs at all, no matter how good the odds may seem in our favor. Money is gambled, not lives. Now, as an added bonus, we have seven more vials of Eliza's brew that we can give to people upstairs. Because when our perimeter is overrun...which it will be..."

BT's eyes got wide.

"When the zombies get to the house, seven more people upstairs will now have a chance to blend in and maybe get the f.u.c.k away from this death house. Seven more of the people we love were just given an extra chance to hold on. And if the dip wads outside had played their cards right, I'm pretty sure the two vials would have been enough to protect all of them. Sure, they would have to know each other a little better than they may have wanted to, but they would have survived. And already they're turning on each other. I doubt two of them make it back. They're killing each other. They would have had no problem killing us. I say f.u.c.k 'em, you should, too," I told him as I got back to scooping brain and scrubbing blood.

The folding chair sighed in relief as BT heaved himself to his feet. He squeezed my shoulder as he went by. "Is there another sponge?" he asked, pointing to the utility room.

"Enough to make it through the apocalypse."

"I hope so."

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

The Backyard "What now?" Xander, the silent one of the remaining three live men said as they stared across the abyss.

"Well, near as I can tell," Steve, aka Steel b.a.l.l.s, began, "we have two vials and three people, and since I'm holding one and so is Chaz, it looks like you're odd man out."

"That's not right, man, if we stay together we can make it," Xander complained.

"Not a chance," Steve said as he jumped the gap. The zombies in the front row could not yield fast enough as Steve struck chest to chest. He bounced back, grabbing onto the zombie's tattered shirt pulling them both back into the pit.

He pulled the zombie to the side in a desperate attempt to avoid the deadly steel spikes. It worked to a point as a barb cleaved him on the left side of his abdomen. His hand clenching the vial opened to brace his body to stop any further damage. The zombie came straight down flush on the spike; it broke through his sternum and impaled him completely. The duo were locked head to foot, and without the vial to protect him, the zombie unaffected from the damage to his mid-section began to feed.

Steve started to pull frantically, his muscle and skin stretching violently as he tried to rip himself away sideways from the spike before the zombie could break through the denim pants he wore. "Xander, help me, man," Steve asked frantically.

He was crying out loud as he tried to sever through three inches of his being. The zombie was making short work of the heavy material. Steve was kicking his leg so that the zombie could not seek purchase; he was losing the battle. Steve's skin split with a wet rip from the pole just as the zombie took a small ribbon of meat from his calf.

"Oh f.u.c.k, man!" he yelled as he scrambled to get away from the zombie. One hand was clenched over the wound in his side. The kerosene fire below was threatening to ignite his shoes and the zombies at the top, beginning to realize he was fair game, started to walk into the fire to get at him.

"Xander, Chaz, please help me," he begged.

Chaz was lost in the depths of his mourning and barely cognizant of the happenings in front of him. Xander had come to the conclusion that if Steve started to burn he wouldn't even p.i.s.s on him.

"Come on," Xander said to Chaz as he led the brother away and to the other side of the yard where the steel framing to the foot bridge still remained. Steve screamed out four more times before either the fire or the zombies devoured him.

Xander made sure he had a handful of Chaz' shirt at all times as he led the man out of the zombies. The zombies pressed tightly as they pa.s.sed, sometimes not yielding their spot even after Xander walked into them. He kept his head down thinking that somehow, by not making eye contact, he would not illicit a challenge. The zombies were within tongue range almost constantly and Xander had enough wet marks to prove that they were tasting the validity of the food. He was happy they weren't like sharks that bit first to determine taste.