Annie of the Undead Read online

  I got out through the front yard and onto the next street and just ran –right in front of a car thundering with base. The tires squealed and the driver leaned out his window and yelled something not particularly helpful as I ran on. He cursed at Short John’s boys too, who had been little delayed by fence and Pit Bull.

  I was now officially desperate. I was flagging. They were going to get me if I didn’t do something creative, or at least heedless. There was a rotted oak tree that had been downed between two of the little houses but never chopped up. It fit the bill. I ran up the trunk and clambered onto the branches, which creaked and groaned beneath my weight, sheets of bark sheering off with every step. A couple of the branches reached up and over the roof of one of the houses. The one that supported me snapped in half just as I reached the eave, and I caught and clambered onto the roof.

  The roof was in some disrepair, and some of the shingles crumbled as I scurried over the ridgepole and down the other side. I heard Short John’s boys bitching as they attempted to follow. One made it onto the roof just as I jumped from the eave onto the roof of the next house only a few feet away. Thank the ghetto gods for cramped housing.

  The other guy didn’t make it. I heard him yell as he fell to the ground, the rotting branches broken by his greater weight. He didn’t stop yelling either. With any luck, he’d punctured a kidney.

  Candyman cursed as he struggled with the slipping shingles on the rotting roof, but he made it to the next as I had. I dropped down onto the roof of a rusted-out pickup in the next side yard and tried to make the best of my lead, hitting the sidewalk at a dead run.

  I was about dead, and not in the useful vampirey way. Wild ideas about trying to drop down and hide someplace right there went through my head, but it would have been stupid suicide. Every dog in the neighborhood was barking by now, and there was no way I could hide with the damn cur behind the fence next door trying to kill the fence to get to me –another thing not to like about animals.

  I staggered over some big plastic children’s toy, gasping for air and overheated despite the cold. Candyman was right behind me. I picked up the toy, a tricycle, and threw it at him. It struck only a glancing blow. I slipped around the corner of the next house, my pursuer only steps behind. I climbed onto a low stone wall, startling a cat who tried to leap for safety straight into the side of the house. It screeched and glanced off, coming claws to face with Candyman, who, judging by his reaction, didn’t much like cats either. He grappled with it while I booked.

  I crossed the corner lot, knocking over a couple of garden gnomes and plowing through a righteously prickly holly hedge before spilling into another street.

  I took a step, another step, and then hands went to knees involuntarily. I gulped air, my lungs screaming from working so hard in the frigid cold. My fingers were ice. Candyman would be coming any second, but then I realized I had another problem.

  A car rounded the corner with screaming tires and then squealing brakes. Out of the blinding light came Short John, and he had a gun in his hand.

  I was almost too tired to think fuck as the first shot whizzed wildly by.

  Nothing renews the fleeing spirit like a firearm in the hands of the enemy. I turned and zigzagged down the street like a rat on the kitchen floor, trying to avoid a broom. But Short John didn’t fire again. He started after me, joined by Candyman who apparently hadn’t lost anything important to the frisky feline.

  I ran up the hill and through some brush, now coated with ice from the slop falling out of the sky. On the other side of the growth I discovered, to my horror, that I was trapped in a weird pocket of a chain link fence encircling a junk yard on the other side. I had only seconds to act before the men got through the brush and cornered me there.

  There wasn’t really a choice. The fence was eight feet tall with barbed wire strung along the top, but the steep hill was high on my side, and the barbed wire was loosely strung and rusting. I put fingers and toes to the fence and climbed. The barbs punctured my hands and snagged my clothes, but I clambered over.

  But my evil hair had long been planning my downfall, and now, sensing my vulnerability, it decided to act. Encouraged by the humidity and excitement to grow to a cloud of unprecedented proportions capable of eclipsing the sun, several of the frizzy tentacles wove themselves into the barbed wire, and I was stuck.

  My hair was never fragile enough to be torn. It was woven of adamantium thread. I pulled Chris’s Ka-Bar from my pocket and executed swift justice against the traitorous locks, leaving them entangled in wire and fence. It was a good thing my brother had kept his knives so sharp.

  But my hair had accomplished its diabolical end. Candyman had caught up with me.

  “She’s here!” he shouted to Short John, who was behind him, as he grabbed my hand to keep me from reaching the ground.

  I put the blade of the knife right into the top of his hand.

  Candyman let me go, or rather, his hand did. He didn’t have a choice. I dropped to the ground, landing on a pile of ice-coated hubcaps and sliding down to the bottom, the silver disks clattering all around me.

  That was when Short John decided to open fire on me again. Instead he hit hubcaps, and I sought cover in a veritable sea of fifty-five gallon drums.

  I crawled a few feet and stayed wedged there for a couple of seconds, gasping. I was shaking all over from adrenalin overload. I simply couldn’t, at that moment, go any farther.

  Candyman was still screaming about his hand. My former manager called him a pussy. Then I heard Short John land on the hubcaps. Having just experienced its joys myself, I knew it would be a few seconds before he’d get off that pile of crazy sliding fun. I got up on top of one of the drums, and ran, jumping from drum to drum like they were stepping stones, fighting to stay topside on the ice-slicked metal, as some of the improperly-closed lids slid off.

  Three shots were fired behind me. I had misjudged Short John’s prowess in doing battle with the hubcap hoards. I was so tired myself that they had almost done me in, sucked me down into their shiny depths, never to be seen again. But Short John was fit. He spent his days at the gym, pumping up and preparing for times like these, when one must do battle with the hubcap legions. He was already up and shooting at me.

  But I didn’t have any choice. I had to run. If I went down between the drums, I would be trapped, and he would get to me. It would be like –well, like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Short John was a shit shot, at least. He should have spent more time at the range and less at the weights, but it had never occurred to him that he might have to shoot a moving target. He was more the drive-by type.

  Short John knew he was a shit shot too. He started after me over the barrels, and he was gaining. I was nearing the corner of the yard, coming to another fence. I was either going to have to climb it or make a right turn and run through the junk yard.

  Once again, my path was decided for me. The junk yard dogs had showed up.

  At least, I thought they might be dogs. It was possible they were dogs –once, before the radioactivity had mutated them into things not seen before on Earth. Dogs in Detroit can sometimes give that impression. These things had four legs like dogs, and big dumb heads like dogs, and they had a whole lot of teeth and slobber like dogs. It was possible they were part Rottweiler or part Mastiff or part Yeti. Whatever they were, they were huge and gnarly and pissed, and they were headed straight for me.

  There was a line of drums between me and the fence. I stumbled from one to another with less than finesse, the dogs snapping at my heels. They were huge animals, their jaws easily reaching the top of the drums. I could feel their hot breath on my ankles.

  I was beginning to think Badd dog wasn’t all that bad after all. These things were monsters.

  Four, three, two more barrels, then a junk pickup truck, then the fence. Then the climb, then safety, if I could just stay out of tooth range until then, and if Short John didn’t shoot me in the back. The lid slipped on one of the dru
ms, and my foot plunged into whatever black sludge that had collected inside. I scrambled out of it and felt teeth clamp onto my pant leg. The fabric tore as I hit the last barrel and jumped into the truck bed, just barely making it out of reach of the snapping jaws.

  Short John was shouting in anti-canine protestation as I climbed the fence. The dogs were after him now. I climbed the fence and dropped into the brown weeds on the other side, nearly tumbling into an in-ground pool lying dry and empty in the backyard of the homeowner unfortunate enough to have his property backed up against a scrap yard. The weeds stalks, encased in ice, snapped like glass.

  The vegetation wasn’t the only thing that smashed on contact. My ankle did too. A stabbing pain filled the joint, and when I tried to get up that pain knocked me back on the ground.

  “Jesus fuck!” I yelled, realizing I was doomed.

  But it didn’t look like Short John was having such a nice day either. I looked back to see him surrounded by lunging, slathering dog monsters. He nailed one of the beasts in the muzzle with his shoe. The thing didn’t yelp, just came back up again as if it’d never been touched. There were four of them, and they were all around him –One had even climbed onto the cans. Another sunk its teeth into his ankle, causing him to discharge his weapon wildly. The dogs didn’t even flinch at the noise, but he did finally hit the one that was making hamburger of his leg. The thing yelped and went down, flailing crazily in the freezing mud.

  I crawled away, rose, hopped a few steps, then went down again, my ankle seriously Jesus-fucked. I just didn’t have any fight left in me. If the dogs didn’t finish him…

  Apparently they didn’t.

  “You fuckin’ bitch! You crazy fuckin’ cunt!” called Short John, who had extricated himself somehow from the jaws of death and climbed the fence. “You just stay right there, you hear me?”

  He fired his gun, but missed again, and cussed as the dogs leaped for his feet. He got himself tangled in the barbed wire at the top of the fence and fell much as I had. Unfortunately he didn’t break his neck.

  “You stay…you stay right there. You just wait…for Short John,” he panted over the din of the raging dogbeasts. He had his .45 trained on me.

  I had crawled to the opposite end of the pool patio, but it wasn’t far enough. Short John came limping toward me. By floodlight I could see that his pant leg was soaked with blood.

  Lights had gone on inside the house. A head peeked out the window then jerked out of view upon seeing the craziness going on in the backyard, and the lights went out again. I couldn’t expect any help from that quarter. Although the occupants would probably call the police, I would be finished before they arrived. Short John was about to make short work of me.

  “See, you damn ho? You can’t get away. You can’t get away from Short John, no way! Short John is the man! You don’t mess with the man!”

  Short John liked to talk about himself in the third person.

  “No dogs go messin’ with the man, and no damn hos oughtta go messin’ with the man. He ain’t gonna put up with it. He gonna bust a cap in your ass, you go messin’ with him.”

  “It’s a good thing he’s not here,” I answered between breaths, “‘cause he won’t hear me call him a dickless cat humper.”

  “I told you to shut the fuck up, cunt bitch! You the man’s property, and you will do what he say. So when Short John says shut the fuck up, you shut the fuck up,” he advanced on me, took aim, “and when Short John says fuckin’ die, you fuckin’—”

  “Grrrrrraaarrrrrr!”

  That said by the most massive of the dog beasts, which had gotten up on the pickup truck, onto the fence, and catapulted onto Short John’s back with wild glee.

  The weight of the substantial animal bowled him forward, knocking the gun out of his hand and all two-hundred pounds of him sprawling into the nearly empty pool.

  The gun skidded across the ice-slicked patio like a hockey puck, and, like a good goalie, I scooped it up.

  Talk about a save.

  “Get offa me! Fuckin’ animal, get offa me!” came echoing out from the depths, accompanied by the enthusiastic snarls of the creature in the black lagoon.

  I looked over the edge to watch the party in the shallow sludge below.

  “How do you like that, cocksucker? Short John, the big badass can’t get his ass outta the pool.”

  The thing was using his arm the way some dogs use a rope toy. I wondered how long the limb would stay attached. By the way he struggled in vain to get away, it looked like his leg was broken.

  “Annie! Fuckin’ shoot it! Shoot the fuckin’ animal!”

  “Shoot the fuckin’ animal, huh?”

  The other dog-monsters were gnawing at the fence.

  “Shoot it! Shoot it! Fuck! Oh!”

  Shoot the fuckin’ animal. You know, there are times when we’re placed in a position of power by –call it God or fate. Call it chance. Whatever it is, sometimes we’re given the opportunity to help someone in need, someone in desperate, mortal need. Maybe that person had ill intent. Maybe that person wouldn’t have held out that hand for us if they were in the same position of power and we were in need, and maybe we know it. But if we can find it in our hearts to do the right thing, to hold out that hand, to use that power as Ghandi might, or Jesus, or Mother Teresa, maybe our decision can help in some small way to make a better world. Maybe we can learn to forgive.

  But this just wasn’t one of those days.

  The snarling continued after I’d squeezed the trigger, but Short John wasn’t talking about himself anymore. In fact, my once-manager, sorta-sugar-daddy, tried-to-be rapist, and would-have-been killer made no more sound at all. I’d hit where I’d aimed. I’d shot the animal.

  It didn’t seem prudent to stick around and wait for the police. I broke down a pool skimmer and used one of the segments as a crutch to get the hell out of Dodge. Snow was falling fast now. It would cover my tracks wherever I went.

  The only problem was that I had nowhere to go.

  So I was sitting on a bridge in the park in the dark (yes, yes, like a damn aardvark), not thinking about the guys who had just tried to kill me, or the bitch who had given birth to me, or the jerk who had told me I wasn’t worth rehabilitating, or the fact that I knew he was right. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that my ankle throbbed or that my clothes had been torn to shreds by ravening beasts spawned in the fetid underbelly of Detroit where I too had been spawned. I wasn’t thinking about my dead brother, or the rat bastard known as Tim who had treated me like a blow-up doll five or six days a week for two years, or the fact that everyone else in my life, including me, had turned out to be an asshole. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I was sitting out on a bridge in a blizzard in Michigan in October in nothing but rags with a frozen-wet foot, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about life, the universe, and everything. All I was thinking about was the cold metal of the .45 in my hands.

  I had checked the clip. There were nine rounds left. Short John, Satan rest his soul, had used high-capacity magazines. I found myself strangely amused that those nine rounds could have been put into me.

  A single light illuminated one end of the bridge from which I had come, the fat flakes of snow swirling down like manic ghosts in its light. The other was out. I sat between the light and dark, in the gray borderland halfway across the bridge, holding that gun in my hand and not thinking. No good at all could come of thinking.

  Something moved out in the dark amongst the falling flakes. I raised the gun. It was a little dog, frail and short haired –a mere thing. It started to pad onto the bridge, head down and licking in submission. It couldn’t have been more than twenty pounds, a far cry from the other canines I had dealt with that day, but the last thing I wanted to look at right now was a dog, or a living thing, of any kind.

  I made a snowball and lobbed it at the cowering creature. It yelped and ran back into the snow, but after a moment it came back, crawling on its belly. Just a thing with bad instincts.<
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  I made more snowballs. Each time I threw one, the dog shrank back, but each time it returned, wretched, desperate. It had nowhere else to go. It must not have to have come to me.

  Finally, I stopped throwing snowballs, if only because the snow was turning to powder. I pointed the gun at the mongrel instead, but the little thing had stones or was stupid and walked against the wind. It crept up to me, so slowly, so low. It whimpered as it came. As it neared, I saw that its coat was matted with grunge. Little balls of ice sparkled at the ends of its whiskers. It was emaciated, its ribs sticking out like tent posts through its filthy hide. It was shivering.

  God damn it.

  I lowered the gun. I fished into my pocket and found the stick of buffalo jerky I hadn’t bothered to eat. The dog whimpered with desperate glee as I unwrapped it, its little rat tail wagging furiously.

  “I hate dogs,” I warned it as I handed the jerky over.

  The dog took the shriveled meat tentatively in its mouth, then spun about as though trying to decide where to take its loot. Finally, it lay down in the snow and started to gnaw, not thinking about anything other than its prize, its mind perfectly at peace in that moment.

  I dug in my pocket for that last cigarette, took it out of the now completely flattened box, and straightened it out. Then I searched for the lighter.

  But Chris’s lighter was nowhere to be found. I must have lost it sometime during that Short John fun. I’d sure had plenty of opportunities. I’d lost everything else.

  That was it then. It was just me and the dog and the .45 in the snow, freezing our asses off. I put the crooked, unlit cigarette in my mouth, and then I laughed.

  And laughed.

  I must have scared the dog. Without warning, the little cur glanced over its shoulder, jerky hanging half-eaten from its jaws, then it started up like a flushed stag and ran into the snow, tail tucked between its skinny legs. So it would gnaw its prize somewhere else, the little traitor. Like everyone else.