The Damned Read Free

sidewalk. He rounded a burned-out shell of an apartment building and stopped dead in his tracks. Ten yards ahead, three huge men stood with their backs to him, behind a fourth who was turning a naked woman round and round on a spit over a roaring fire. She was tied, arms and legs to a wooden pole held off the ground by two sets of iron bars crossed in an X a couple of yards apart, fastened together with strands of twisted wire. Her skin was cracked and charred, her scorched breasts dangling just out of the fire’s reach, belly split open like an over-cooked sausage, hair singed down to her smoldering scalp. The juices running along her sides sizzled when they dropped into the flames. All four behemoths stood grunting like cavemen who had just discovered the miracle of fire… and cooked meat. Scott pumped a shell into the chamber and one of them turned, squeezed the trigger and the top of his head dissipated into a fine red mist; blood sloshing from the cratered shell that remained as his body flopped to the ground. Scott ratcheted another round and the spent plastic cartridge fell smoking to the dirt. All three turned and he fired again. Blood and bone splattered the ground; chunks of raw-red meat sailed through the flames as another body convulsed onto the dirt and the remaining two ran for cover. Scott pumped and fired, pumped and fired again. The first blast ripped a gory crater through the man’s back. The second blew a mammoth knee apart and the last creature fell shrieking to the ground. Scott stepped forward jacking a shell into place, and a smoking cartridge flipped end-over-end through the air. He walked up to the huge man, who was crawling across the dirt with nothing but a grimy pair of cut-off jeans covering his filthy body. A pistol was wedged into the waistline of his pants, but he didn’t go for it. He crawled forward, grunting and dragging the bloody stump of his leg behind him, leaving a slimy red trail as he went.
    Scott touched the barrel to the back of his neck.
    The guy turned and smiled.
    And a roaring blast blew his head clean off.
    A voice called out, “Hey, mister!”
    Scott whirled, and found the shotgun barrel dead-center in the small face of a dwarf. He wore a soiled white tank top with Come Join Us! stenciled across the front, dirty black pants and faded grey sneakers. An inch-high growth of dirty blonde hair surrounded the back and sides of his head. The silver-handled walking stick gripped in his hand like a shepherd’s staff was bigger than he was. He threw a hand in the air and said, “Easy, pal.”
    “The fuck are you?” Scott said, his wide eyes scanning the dreary landscape to either side of him.
    “You gotta get outa here. We gotta get outa here.”
    “Jesus Christ, what’s happening to me?”
    “C’mon, buddy. They’ll be back, and a hell of a lot more of ‘em.”
    “Who? Who’ll be back?”
    “Whoever heard that goddamn thunder-stick of yours.”
    Flames crackled and popped, sizzling in the background as they licked their way up the naked woman’s torso and face. Scott nodded at the fire. “What about her? We can’t just leave her like that.”
    “What’re you, kidding me?”
    The distant clattering of trashcans crashing to the sidewalk swiveled Scott’s head toward the noise.
    “Run!” the midget called out, and Scott chased him across the street, into an alley that lay between two houses. In the darkness at the corner of a house, the midget on one knee, Scott crouching behind him, they watched five men emerge from the side of a building a ways up the street. Two carried baseball bats with long nails hammered through their thick ends; another carried a machete. Like their fallen counterparts, the two carrying bats were huge, well over six feet tall. Scott stroked his shotgun for a little high-powered reassurance as three of them broke off from the others and made their way down to the fire, whose light revealed pistols jammed into the back of two of their