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.