Everyone Dies in the End #73

Zak

The someone that Zak had in mind at the closing of his last visit with you, fair reader, wasn’t, of course, Katarina, but it was Katarina who he now saw. Striding down the broad corridor, the guard she killed laying on the floor behind. Her scream, “The keys, give me the keys, or I’ll rip your arm out,” had sounded above his conversation with William. Both of them had dashed to the bars. By pressing his face hard against them, Zak had witnessed the confrontation’s bloody conclusion.

By his estimation William and he were the only observers. The cell across the corridor held no prisoners, nor did he hear anything from the other cells that lined the hall.

“Hey!”

He spoke before she drew abreast of the cell, and her head turned. A pretty girl. Khaki slacks, T-shirt, athletic body, thick blue-black hair, but the blood sort of ruined the idyllic picture. He guessed it was the dead guard’s that sat, if corpses really sat, against the bars of the pretty girl’s former cell. The blood was soaking and dark red on the chest of her t-shirt. That was fine, at least as fine as blood-soaked t-shirts get. He had seen his share in the past week. The lips and chin freaked him. They too were covered, but not really. She licked the lips clean with a delicate tongue as she came toward him, and smeared the blood on the chin with the back of her hand.

William screamed. “She’s one of them!”

‘Them’ didn’t need a clarification, not given the setting. Zak and William paced in a cell, to be fed to vampires, a lady with blood-soaked t-shirt and crimson chin on her way to pay them a visit. But it didn’t work. If the crimson lady was a vampire, why was she also caged? 

She stopped in front of the cage, breathing heavily. In one hand she held a sawed-off shotgun. Way sawed off, probably ineffective at more then twenty-five feet, Zak thought, but real damn effective within that range, a range in which he and William currently resided. Zak didn’t care about that hand, but liked what he saw in the other—the cell keys.

He spoke. “Let us out.” She cocked her head. Unpleasantly like a rooster looking at a worm, he thought.

“Why would I do that?”

Williams retreated to the toilet in the corner of the cage, whimpering, “Don’t kill us.” The woman smiled, revealing teeth still red with the guard’s blood, but didn’t answer. Zak pointed to the dead guard.

“I don’t know what’s going on around here, but it doesn’t look like he was your friend. He wasn’t my friend either. Let us out of here. I know a bit about fighting, I can help.”

She looked him over from head to toe. Zak hoped his army fatigues meant something to her. In the corner Williams cried, “God no, no, let her go.”

“Okay soldier boy, you’re on.” She slid the key in the lock, the door rolled silently open and Zak stepped through. William stood. Blurringly fast the woman snapped the scattergun to her shoulder and fired, the blast deafening in the corridor, the flash bright.

William, a headless William, flew back against the wall. Blood spurted from stump that had held his noggin a second previously. His heels tapped on the floor two or three times, and then went still. 

“Why the hell did you do that?” Zak screamed. His hands shook at his side.

            She shrugged, “I hate whiners.”