Waking from slumber… It was like putting fingers in an electric socket or fall into an icy river.
When his motor functions returned, he raised his ugly tumor-like head. His eyes saw the night as if they casted a powerful light that only he could distinguish and from whose pale arms, disembodied, drew benefit.
Ahead he saw a large box resting on four round objects. In his infected brain flashed one word: car. It was more a feeling, since he would not distinguish neither words nor images projected by the mind.
Moving the ugly, huge head around, he saw many of those cars. He was surrounded. He saw some of his folks – a group of three – walking aimlessly like idiotic larvae, screaming and waving arms. They still had the smell of prey on them: they were mindless and purposeless.
Far beyond the immovable shadows, he saw high rocky cliffs on which, even higher, metal towers stood. Some shone with tiny lights, others were just empty and cold shells. But there were no nests: the towers were dangerous, they were prey's home. The nests, however, were in the dark caves, smooth stone and metal, surrounded by abandoned cars, left here.
One of them was crumpling under the pangs of the Scarlet Tongue. The Tongue was dangerous because she bit everything. She could not be caught, nor killed – but only put to sleep – and often the puppies ran straight into her. He recalled that waking her was something of a great power, a power that neither he nor his folks has but the prey.
The prey!
And he was hungry. He crouched and screamed. He heard the mighty roar bouncing off the cars, against caves, against liquid and mobile earth; He heard it on high towers, on his spawn, before it returned bringing back information about the prey.
Four of them were at the bottom, along the dirt hard track, full of cars. He needed only a slight pressure of the muscles to break away from the ground and to blast in the air. One snap of wrists sent out two tentacles. They wrapped to a ledge like tongues. Back in the wrists, they caused a slingshot effect, hurling him like a bullet above the cars, above the heads of the stupefied hellish spawn puppies.
The prey were on a hard, smooth ground platform, a little less than a leap from the ground. Under it, four of his sons were moaning, trapped.
He landed on top of a car and watched his prey. There was something unclear in their behavior. Usually they killed cubs on the spot, but not now.
So why they were there?
It was not a real question, as in the infected cluster that served him as a brain there was no room for question or answers, only impulses and feelings.
He roared, letting the sound bounce against obstacles. He located the prey. They were six of them!
Two held back, hidden in an autobus.
He heard a scream and saw one of the puppies run towards the prey. It was faster than his older brothers, but still smelt of prey.
He saw him climb over one car and head towards the platform. But he did not move and remained crouched, waiting.
The cub climbed up one of the cars and tried to reach the prey. Suddenly he was hit by beams of purple light arisen by the group. He cried out in pain, folded his arms and dropped to the ground. His head struck the car, the neck tilted and broke.
From his hiding place, the creature saw his puppy's death. He tilted his head back and let out a roar.
"Listen!" Angelo leant over the roof of the gas station and peered into the darkness. A red bandana covering his mouth and nose to make him oblivious to the stench of the dead. He was the only one still not used to it. Beside him, Ian pointed his UV-flashlight down, framing a squashed body on the roof of a car.
"I knew him" he murmured, more to himself than to Angelo.
"But haven't you heard?" asked the other, on his toes. The wait was unnerving and Joe's plan completely crazy.
Indeed, since they had arrived in that city on the border with Turkey everything was crazy.
Ian nodded, lost in thought for a moment, then pointed to the darkness.
"Here's a couple of fast ones" he said. Angelo nodded. A moment later, two throwing knives appeared in his left hand. He scanned the infected: they came running, clawed fingers and eyes bloodshot. They were still partly human, but the infection had ravaged their brains, leaving them unable to do complex thoughts and pushing them to attack and kill. You could not reason with them, no one could soothe them. Sometimes, in the midst of growls, they said a human word.
Joe called them "first stage" because the infection had hit them only few hours or few days before. The appearance was still human, the behavior already bestial. Then there were the "slow-ones" or "second stage". These were clinically dead, walking corpses advancing like sleepwalkers moaning and growling.
The headhunter had classified many others, including the abomination they were trying to catch. His plan was to lure the monster with a bait: four bare living dead, repulsive with bony growths sprouting from their back, were nailed to the floor, under the roof of the petrol pump, with iron rods. They were the monster's "sons" as Joe called them.
The radio came to life.
"He's coming. Keep UV lights ready." Joe's voce was calm as usual. Someone told Angelo that the headhunter had killed ten of those big monsters they were hunting now. He did not know whether to believe it or not, but it was certain that the man had a temper and an uncommon calm.
"Hear that?" said Manuel, the hooded Spanish. Angelo cracked his neck bones and nodded, before moving the powerful shoulders.
"It will not be a walk" he said, thinking of the effort made to capture the bait. Now the two infected were within the reach of his knives. He hurled them, hitting the double target in the head. They fell growling and gurgling, but Angelo heard one of them shout, "Please no!"
He tried not to think about it and gripped another knife. It was well balanced. He built those knives with steel pieces recovered in the garbage, using Joe Heseken's lathe.
He moved his normal torch, fixed on the fight shoulder. He illuminated a first stage and a large group of slower second stage. He raised the knife and took aim. He jerked the wrist and let the knife go and stick in the infected forehead. Growling, the infected did a somersault and ended his run against a police car.
Angelo nodded to himself. He saw Ian wielding a gun. Even Joe must have noticed, because the radio came to life with a snap of static discharge.
"Put it away." The words, spoken calmly, were enough to convince the afraid Dutch. Slowly, with a trembling hand, Ian put the gun back in his holster.
Behind them, Axia started to light a Molotov cocktail, but Joe scolded.
"Never mind the slow-ones" he said, "it is him that I want."
There was another roar and Angelo saw an abnormal creature at the edge of light and fire, tormented by something, by some desire which was traveling in his alien mind full of worms. It was a flash, because it disappeared and Angelo saw only the concrete wall on which it had rested.
A moment later Ian was grabbed by a pair of tentacles and crushed. Pieces of meat and pieces of clothing were thrown to Angelo, Manuel and Axia.
Angelo looked around and saw him: a monster with an abnormal turban-shaped head. He was crouching on his hind legs, as if getting ready for a jump.
"Now!" crackled the radio. Angelo cast the UV against the monster. The effect was striking: the creature instantly began to whine and beg in a bestial language; it crossed its arms and was thrown to the ground, beating its fists and rolled in a desperate attempt to escape the pain.
Some parts of leathery skin became hot and the smoke began to sizzle from meat for some king of incomprehensible actinic reaction.
Axia and Manuel imitated Angelo, pointing the lights to the monster.
Meanwhile, Joe had left the bus and, together with the last members of the group, Lobo, had lit flares and had dropped them on the edge of the gas station.
The light given off by high sizzled flare, stopped the flood of undead that would otherwise close around them.
It was ultraviolet light.
Holding the lamp with one hand, with the other, Axia drew her machete. Angelo looked at the monster. He was surprised to see his yellow eyes hateful, a sign that inside that putrid head was a hunter and intelligent mind. On the other hand, a brainless monster could never fall to their trap. The beast's intelligence would be his downfall.
Axia dropped the machete, slashing the skin of the monster and splashing dark colored liquid.
Finally Joe and Lobo climbed on the roof of the gas station. Both unsheathed machetes.
Below them, undead approached, challenged UV flares and then retired howling with arms crossed in front of dead eyes.
"Leave him to me!" Joe pulled Axia away and raised his machete. He was tall, broad-shouldered man with a gray hooded sweatshirt. No one knew who he was before nor where he came from. The last name sounded German or Jew, but that was all they knew.
When he raised the blade, the monster did a strange thing: he opened his mouth to spit. Joe was hit by that kind of slime, reeking of rancid milk. He removed it from the face, backing away.
It was then that the monster pounded his fists on the platform. Joe and the others ended upside down. Axia struck her neck and dropped the machete. The flashlight fell from her hand. Angelo and Manuel were able to hold theirs.
With skin on fire, the monster tried to get away, to go to the brink, but Joe arose to his feet and snatched the lamp from Angelo's hands. He let him.
Joe approached the monster that seemed to shrink under the UV light and said:
"Burn! Son of a bitch!"
Then there was the first explosion. The platform shook.
Lobo ran to see and distinguished screaming shapes, with swollen bellies like pregnant women, lashing in the light of flares and against the columns of the gas station, in a suicide attack.
"Zombie-bomb" he said, pointing at the swollen silhouettes. One of them had detonated at the base of a pillar and now the entire platform wobbled.
Angelo threw and missed: another zombie-bomb had detonated, sending him back to the ground.
The platform tilted. Joe and the monster ended down. Axia met the same fate. Lobo was crushed beneath the rubble. Dead.
Angelo found himself clinging to an iron rod striking out of the platform. The other hand was free. He looked down and saw the struggle between Joe and the monster. The man was burning the creature with UV light.
He saw a "bomber" approaching dangerously, trespassing the flares. It was just a few meters from Joe. Angelo had no weapons to use.
He tried to pull himself up; he clenched his jaw and tried hard. He put his hand on the concrete and met something.
It was Ian's gun, a prohibited weapon. The sound of gunfire would attract them like flies. But the bombers had done their part and now the square teemed with undead.
He took aim and fired.
The bomber exploded in a myriad of fragments of rotting flesh, raining on Joe and the monster. Angelo fired to another creature, which exploded too. Sighing, he began to target the others.
They were males and females, but it was not clear what age they had before the transformation. The virus made them all the same: thin, bald, emaciated, dark-skinned, full of wounds and infections.
Some wore Arabic caftans, others wore western clothes, some had police uniforms or fire brigade helmets.
Under him, Joe took one last look in the yellow eyes of the monster before splitting his skull with the machete. Burned, wounded to death, the monster fell.
Climbing down, Angelo and Manuel went to Axia and Lobo. Angelo rummaged in Lobo's backpack and took a flare, lit it on his knees and dropped it. UV light forced the dead to back away, but those who had already passed, attacked the humans.
With Lobos machete, Angelo cut the skull of a dead, lengthwise, and he speared another, and Arab woman dressed in lilac.
Behind him, Manuel lit a flare to protect Axia, whose right arm hung inert from the shoulder.
Angelo looked around: only the UV light was keeping the undead at bay, now.
"Joe! What's the plan?"
Joe, another flare in hand, turned and held it high as the torch of the Statue of Liberty.
"On the bus! We wait for the dawn" he said.
"Fuck!" said Angelo.
"You have a better idea?"
"I'm no boss."
"Right! You're just a punk."
Angelo shook his head in disbelief and looked at the bus. The dawn was far away.
"Okay" he said, straightening his grip on the machete.