Once inside the fortress it wasn’t hard to find Gary’s tub room. I just followed the smell of overdone bacon. Smoke filled the open space at the center of the tower, an oily, nasty fuming smoke that smudged my clothes where it touched me. Everything in the big room was covered in a thin film of fatty soot. Human beings didn’t belong in a place like that but I did, I had to be there. I stepped closer and peered into the gloom of the empty bathtub. The bricks were spalled by the intense heat of the fire, some of them pulverized by the blast. A pool of molten fat in the center of the tub still bubbled and flickered with tiny flames.
What was left of Gary leaned up against the rim, one sagging shoulder pressed hard against the bricks. Gary’s legs were nothing but scorched sticks of bone that stuck out from the charred mass of his abdomen. They looked like the legs of a stork, perhaps. Something of his torso remained and his arms, club-like appendages that were curled across his chest. His head was still smoldering. It had sustained less damage than the rest of him-the one part of his body that hadn’t been made mostly of combustible fat. His eyes were gone, as well as his ears and nose, but I could sense somehow he was still in there.
“Dekalb,” he coughed. “Come to gloat?” His voice was nothing but a dry rasp.
“Not exactly.”
“Come closer. I’m glad for the company in my last couple of minutes, I guess. Come on. I don’t bite. Not anymore.”
I figured I could handle him now by myself. The voice-the ghost, or whatever it had been-had told me Gary could no longer control the undead. It would just be the two of us. At least, that’s what I was thinking when I stepped closer to the tub. Then I heard a rattling noise like a length of chain being dropped from a height. Exactly like that, in fact. Jack must have climbed up his own chain-then laid in wait, in ambush, for somebody, anybody, to walk directly underneath him.
He was on my back, his legs wrapped around my waist, his teeth in my neck. His fingers grabbed at my face, one of them sinking into my left nostril and tearing, ripping at the flesh there. I shook back and forth, desperately trying to dislodge him as warm blood ran down my already-stained shirt. I heaved backward, unable to catch my breath, my body still stunned by the force of impact. No, I thought. No. I’d come so far, so far without getting badly injured, without being killed “Sucker,” Gary chortled, without lifting his head.
David Wellington - Monster Island
Monster Island
Chapter Nineteen
I threw myself backward, knocking Jack against the wall, trying to crack his spine, trying to break his hold on my face. It only made him more determined. Jack had been a lot stronger than me in life. In death he was strong and desperate. He wrapped a forearm around my throat and pulled, trying maybe to break my neck. He succeeded in pinching closed my windpipe.
I swung around wildly, my hands pulling at the legs he had wrapped around my waist. I might as well have tried to bend iron. The little air in my lungs turned to carbon dioxide but I couldn’t exhale and suddenly dark stars were spinning in my vision, sparkles of light like signal fires, one each for the neurons dying in my head as I asphyxiated. I lost it, lost all reason at that point and just panicked. Without a thought in my head I dashed forward, away from the thing on my back, my subconscious mind unable to realize that it was still attached. Jack’s grip on me merely tightened as my feet dug for purchase in the brick floor. Like a mule pulling a plow I tried to pull away from him.
Anoxia distorted my hearing-the sound of my heart beating was a lot louder than the noise of Jack’s vertebrae cracking inside his neck. He let go of me in a sudden and unexpected way and I slumped forward, catching myself on my hands, spit streaming from my mouth as my body heaved for air. Not so much breathing as swallowing oxygen, gulping it down. I tried very hard not to throw up. If I had I would surely have aspirated something and drowned on my own vomit.