I raised my arm in a sweeping arc as if to execute a high outer forearm block, catching the blade of his knife on its way down with the inside surface of my hook, trapping the knife within its steel C.
His strike was slow and weak but still had enough force to carry his knife all the way down the hook until his fingers were nearly in contact with my stump. I twisted my arm, forcing the razor-sharp outer edge of my hook against the back of his fingers. The knife and four of the flenser’s fingers flew out over the bone pile, trailing dark droplets of blood. The knife clattered to the floor somewhere out of sight.
The flenser let out a polysyllabic moan as if he were trying to say something, but it was so slowed and slurred as to make it unintelligible. He struck at me with his left hand, fingers shaped into a claw as if he meant to rake them down my face. His nails were long, gnarled, and crusted with bits of dark filth—the better to pick out marrow from bones, I assumed.
Darla was standing to one side. I stepped back, dragging my feet along the floor to push bones out of the way. Darla raised her rifle to shoot, and I held out my palm for her to stop. The flenser was moving toward me in his awkward, shuffling gait, both hands waving—one formed into a claw, the other spewing blood.
I raised my foot in a simple front kick, catching the flenser right in the middle of his chest. He toppled backward with a crash, and an almost musical tinkling sound of disturbed bones ensued. I stepped forward, planting my boot on his wrist and pinning it to the floor.
“Move back, and I’ll shoot him,” Darla said.
“We can’t just shoot him,” I said.
“Sure I can,” she replied.
“I don’t want the rest to know where we are.”
Darla put one of her boots on the flenser’s chest, and he clawed at her leg futilely with his mangled hand, bloodying her boots and coverall legs.
I pushed down on his wrist with my boot—just enough to let him know I could break his arm if I wanted to. “Are there more of you here?”
“Ahhhh-ohhhh,” was the only reply he made.
“Something’s wrong with this guy,” I said.
“Let’s just kill him,” Darla said. “I’m worried about getting his blood on me.”
“You know what he’s got?”
“Shaking sickness, I think. Some kind of disease cannibals get. I saw it in a movie once.”
“Is it just the three of you here?” I asked him.
“Ahhhh-ehhhhh.”
“We’ve got to move,” Darla said.
“What do we do with this guy?”
“We need to kill him quietly Preferably without touching him.” Darla pressed down with her boot until I heard the guy’s ribs cracking. It didn’t seem right, killing a man in cold blood like that. The first time I had killed someone—a prison escapee who went by Ferret—I had vomited afterward. I dreamed about him for months: the crunch as the blade of my hand hit his neck; the limp, boneless way he fell; the unnatural angle of his body on Darla’s mother’s kitchen floor. He had utterly deserved death for what he’d done to Darla’s mom, but it was still hard to come to terms with the fact that I’d killed him.
I thought about Ed. He had been a flenser once, but now he was a friend, comrade, almost an older brother. Could the guy under Darla’s boot be redeemed?
Darla kept pressing, forcing the air from his chest. He batted at her leg with his damaged hand, but still she pressed down as his face turned red, then purple, and finally blue. He went limp, and Darla stood on him until I was sure he was dead. I wondered if I should have done something, stopped her.
A three-round burst of rifle fire snapped me from my ruminations.
We ran around the bone pile toward the front of the store. “Go slow,” Darla whispered. “They could have split up, set an ambush for us.”
I nodded my agreement, and we split up, pressing ourselves to the wall on either side of the big, plate glass windows and peering out. The gunfire seemed to have come from the spot where Ed had set up his ambush. I couldn’t see him or Nylce, though. I gestured toward the nearest snow mound, which was easily large enough to have hidden an SUV. Darla raised her rifle to cover me, and I ran for the door, bent over as low as I could manage.
Once I was crouched behind the mound, I looked around— everything was silent and still.
I waved Darla forward, and she came at a run. We worked our way around the mound in opposite directions, rejoining each other at the far side. She gestured with her rifle, and I prepared to run to the next car/snow mound.
Some slight sound—a crunch of snow or breath of wind—made me turn and look up. A huge man was above me, stretched out in a flying leap from where he had been hiding on top of the SUV. He held a butcher knife in his outstretched hand. And it was aimed squarely at my head.
Chapter 48
I flung up my hands, barely managing to deflect the blade of the butcher knife on the outside edge of my hook. He fell on me, his rotten-meat breath full in my face, so close that the bits of unidentifiable filth clotting his wild beard rubbed my cheeks.
I rolled backward under the impact, reaching up to grab his wrist and try to control the knife. I kicked out, hoping to continue the backward roll and come out on top.
But this flenser wasn’t trembling, weak, or slow. Somehow he had avoided the shaking disease that had afflicted the first guy. He threw his free arm out above my head, planting it in the snow and instantly arresting our roll. At the same time, he bore down on the butcher knife. I clutched his wrist with my right hand and put my left arm behind it for support. It felt like I was trying to hold back a hydraulic ram. The knife inched inexorably closer. He grinned, and saliva ran from his crooked, yellow teeth, a drop splattering against my cheek. Darla couldn’t shoot him—her rifle was so powerful that at this range, the bullets would tear right through him and kill me too. I had to change the rules somehow, use his weight and strength against him.
I shoved his hands one direction and frantically wrenched my head in the other. The butcher knife buried itself in the snow beside my head with a soft, nearly inaudible thunk. The flenser fell forward—right into the blade of my hook.
I hadn’t had room to do anything but line up a short, weak jab to his throat, but his weight took care of the rest. My hook sunk deep. Blood sprayed from the wound, coating the side of my face in a hot, wet glaze. For a moment he seemed to hover there, poised over me, caught on the edge of my hook. Then he opened his mouth and vomited blood, splashing the top of my head.
I shoved him sideways, but it was like trying to move a dump truck. Finally I managed to scramble out from under him. Two shots rang out—one from Darla, right next to me; the other from Nylce, up on the nearby hill. Both hit the flenser perfectly, center mass. He gurgled once more and died.
Ed peered out from behind a nearby snow mound. “That’s two,” he said in a stage whisper.
“You count the one we killed inside?” Darla asked.
“No,” Ed replied, “I shot one who was trying to sneak around to the side door and come in behind you. So that makes three.”
Nylce started to get up and come down the hill toward us, but I waved her off using a series of gestures to tell her and Francine to stay put and keep watch.
Darla handed her rifle to Trig and knelt beside me. “You get any of that blood in your mouth?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“We’ve got to get it off you.” She grabbed a handful of snow and started scrubbing at my face.
“This guy wasn’t sick.” I gestured at the big flenser laid out in the snow nearby.
“He could still be a carrier. The disease might have taken longer to manifest in him.”