The flammable liquid in Gary's bathtub ignited all at once with a great FFFHWOOMPing noise as all the air in the room was sucked into the conflagration. A fireball of incredible light and heat shot upward through the open ceiling while everything in the room tried to catch fire at once. I raised my arms to protect my face as light and heat roared out at me as I tried to catch my breath. My feet left the floor and everything turned over on me and I could feel the hair on my forearms curl and singe. I lowered my arms and found myself on my back.
Painfully I sat up until I could see Gary again. He had become a pillar of molten flame. His enormous overstuffed body shook convulsively as burning fat seeped from his broken skin and dribbled down his limbs like candle wax.
As I stared - and believe me, I was staring, there was a brutal hypnotic quality about the horror before me that would not let me go - he struggled to recover himself, to regain control of his body. The pain... I can't describe the pain he felt. No one could, no one living. Human beings don't ever experience being burned to death, not the same way Gary did. Our brains can't take the overwhelming stimulus. We black out and are spared the worst of the misery.
The dead don't sleep. They don't faint, either. Gary was dying in the most excruciating way possible but he was not allowed the mercy of unconsciousness. I could see him trying to regain control of his rebel body, to fight through the pain. His hands flexed, his arms came down. He was trying to grab something. Anything. Me.
I barely rolled out of the way as a massive burning arm slammed down on the flagstones beside me. I could feel the heat coming off of Gary, I could feel the super-heated air displaced by his strike. My feet pushed hard to get underneath me, my arms flexed to lift me off the ground. If I didn't get up to a standing posture in the next second I was doomed.
Gary swung around, his arms extended like clubs, the light they gave off dazzling me as I slipped just under his grasp and came up with my back against the wall. He pulled back an arm and tried to punch me with an enormous burning fist but I managed to dodge. The punch collided with the wall and shattered the bricks there.
I had a moment of safety. Gary was blind - the fire had turned his eyeballs to cooked blobs of jelly. He cast about, this way and that trying to find me in his personal darkness. I decided not to give him the chance.
I turned and ran and slipped into a corridor leading out of the tub room - and found myself face to face with a dead man in scorched denim overalls. I had forgotten about Gary's personal guards. This one didn't seem pleased at all by what I'd done to his master. His broken hands grabbed at my shirt and his mouth came open, his teeth angling for my shoulder. I reared back, trying to break his grip but it was no use - he'd gotten his index finger tangled in one of my belt loops. The best strategy I could think of was to knock him into Gary's bathtub, hopefully setting him alight, but if I had tried that I would have been pulled in right after him.
The dead man's jaw stretched open wide, preparing for the bite, when something truly surprising happened. Whatever animating spark, whatever life force I could find in Overalls' eyes (and there wasn't much) drained out of him. His eyes rolled back in his head and his knees buckled. Lifeless, twice dead, he slid down beside me and nearly yanked me off my feet.
A dead woman with cornrows in her hair appeared to replace him but she dropped dead before she could even touch me. Good thing. I was still busy trying to untangle Overalls from my belt loop.
I got free and ran - just ran as fast as I could, with no idea where I was going. I came to the bottom of a flight of stairs and tried to remember whether the dead had dragged me down or up when they took me out of the pumphouse. I was still standing there in indecision, desperate to get out of the dark fortress, when I heard footsteps from above coming toward me. Two sets of footsteps. One slow, measured and rhythmic, the other jumbled and chaotic as if someone with no coordination at all was trying to keep pace. I'd heard footsteps like that before, in the hospital in the meatpacking district. That had not ended well.
There was no place to hide and I had no weapons. I would have died, no question, if the creatures coming down the stairs had wanted to take my life. Lucky for me they didn't.
A mummy with a blue ceramic pendant dangling from his neck appeared out of the gloom. She - I could see rough angular shapes like breasts and hips under her tangled linen wrappings - lead one of the dead behind her, a man with no nose. Just a gaping red hole in the middle of his face.
Three steps above me they stopped in unison, in a way that suggested she was in control of the dead man. She placed her hands on opposite sides of his head and pressed hard as she leaned her forehead against his. The dead man made a strange dry sucking noise, raspy and painful-sounding, that had to be him drawing breath in through his wound. When he spoke it was clear to me somehow that it was not his own voice I heard but that of someone else, speaking through him.
You should go now, she told me. He's not so much in his right mind anymore, our Gary. He can't hold his end up, if you catch me right. This place'll be crawling with the dead anytime now. I'm guessing you don't want to be here then.
I licked my lips. "Well, yeah," I said.
Come with me then, lad. I'll show you the way out, she said, and stepped past me, dragging her pet dead man with his head under her arm. She moved quickly, far more quickly than any of the dead I'd seen so far, and it was difficult to keep up in some of the narrower passages we had to crawl through. I must have run in exactly the wrong direction when I left Gary's tub room. If it wasn't for my Egyptian guide I would never have found my way out.
We emerged eventually into bright daylight and fresh air. I didn't realize until I got some clean air into my lungs just how much soot I had inhaled. Gary's fortress was burning - the plume of smoke trailing from the top of his tower was shot through with sparks. I didn't care too much about that. There was no point in going back inside.
I did care about the fact that the mummy had brought me out onto a lawn of scruffy-looking plants surrounded by quaint brick houses. Gary's stockyards, where the prisoners lived. I called out Marisol's name until I started coughing, my scorched esophagus protesting vigorously against any further speech.
Doors and windows opened in the houses and terrified faces looked out at me. As I stood there wondering what to say to these people Marisol came running up to me with a chipped tea cup. It was full of water that I gulped down with gratitude.
Marisol gave the mummy one quick glance and got over any surprise she might have felt at the Egyptian woman's presence. I suppose she must have seen lots of dead people during her time of imprisonment.
"Where's Jack?" Marisol asked.
Jack. Sure. Jack, who as far as I knew was at that moment hanging upside down by one foot in Gary's tub room. Dead. Hungry. Unable to get down. "He didn't make it," I told her. No point in going into the details.
She slapped me hard across my cheek.
"Okay," I said, sitting down hard on the patchy grass.
"That's for getting him killed. Now. What the hell is going on? Is Gary dead? Please tell me that Gary is dead."
I nodded.
"Good. What's the plan?"
I thought about that for a while before answering. There had been a plan - then the plan fell apart. Except now maybe it might still work. "We have a helicopter coming. That fire should be all the signal our pilot needs - he'll be here in ten minutes. Then we'll get you out of here. There's one problem, though."
"There's only one problem?" Marisol asked. "That makes this the best day ever!"
"Calm down, alright?" I stood up and handed the tea cup back to her, having caught my breath for the moment. "There's not enough room in the helicopter for all of us to go at once. But look - we're protected by this wall." I pointed at the fifteen foot tall brick wall that ran all the way around the stockyards. It butted up securely against the side of the fortress and was clearly designed to protect against undead attack. "We'll take the women and children first, then come back and make a second trip for the men."
Marisol bit her lip so hard it bled. I could see the blood. Then she nodded and grabbed me by one ear. She pulled hard and I could do nothing but follow her, protesting madly.
She took me all the way past one of the houses before releasing me. I stared at her, truly pissed off - I'd just risked everything to save her from Gary, after all. Then I looked up and saw what she was trying to communicate to me.
There was a fifteen foot wide gap in the wall - a place where Gary hadn't quite finished his construction job. There were tidy piles of bricks lying around, ready to be put in place, but no work crew around to finish the task.
Meanwhile on the other side of that wall were perhaps a million dead people. A million dead people who hadn't eaten in days.