Delivering Vengeance

Collecting a hundred Nasties' heads ended up being a task… mostly because half the heads the three remaining Saviors and their leader could haul in in a day went straight into Vengeance's belly. Like a bear at a favored picnic site, the creature had learned when the humans came home, she would be fed without having to scout around for her own food. She also figured out that bullying her keepers as they ran for the door sometimes meant Nasty heads dropped or were thrown her way as a deterrent. One day, the woman she was haranguing tripped in trying to escape the beast as it ran at her, and heads rolled. The woman, however, did not, and a live brain was a rare delicacy… so, with a scream and a crunch, their team was down to three.

Their supply also took a hit when Vengeance discovered they were storing the crates of heads just inside the school's entry and knocked the door off its hinges to invite herself in and feast on a whole two boxes, getting her head stuck inside the wooden crate and bashing the surrounding walls to pieces as she tried unsuccessfully to knock it loose. Lenny eventually managed to hook a corner of the crate from a second-story landing and pull it loose, somewhat to the chagrin of Travis and Gina, the other remaining Saviors.

Nevertheless, Nasties were in no short supply. The trick was catching a few at a time—and well away from Vengeance and her insatiable appetite for sweetmeats—while avoiding the larger groups. If they were lucky, as a group, they could get two apiece, maybe even three before either the area was clear or they had to cut and run from the Dead getting too thick around them.

Then there was Lenny, who insisted on feeding the damn monster. If they brought in twelve heads in a day—three each, before Vengeance ate Silvie—six of them went down its gaping maw. Didn't want her wandering off, now, did they? They did… Oh, they would have liked nothing more but for Lenny to let that damned thing wander off anywhere that wasn't where they were… but no. Vengeance was their fast track to revenge. Or death trying… which was seeming more and more the likely.

They could leave, of course… defect like many of the others who had got out. Their sympathy for the fallen leader only stretched so far. His lust for revenge was borderline insane, the whole plan of bringing the beast to attack Alexandria was fucking clown-shoes crazy. But, on the other hand, there was a brain-craving monster hanging around just outside the door. Leaving became a non-option.

But, over time, the head-count hit the hundred mark, and with a head-sized hole cut into the back of the trailer, it was go-time.

Vengeance happily ate her way through the trail of jabbering heads, noshing on the heap of them left as the ultimate prize within the trailer, and was still busy crunching her way through them when Gina and Travis shut the doors and barred her in. Lenny took the shotgun seat and Gina drove, leaving Travis the unsavory task of shoving a chomping Nasty head through the sawed-out window in the front of the trailer with a pair of fire tongs every time Vengeance started getting unruly… which was pretty much any time she finished chewing up the previous one. Travis was beginning to doubt if eighty heads was actually going to be enough for the trip to Alexandria. He tried holding out as long as he could between treats, knowing they might need some in store to direct the mutant into or around the fortified compound, but he also doubted the horse trailer would keep the weird thing contained if she decided she wanted out. So far, she seemed insatiable, but if they ever reached a point where her belly was full and Dead heads were no longer a leverage point…? Travis's muscles pulled taut in anticipation of having to jump up and run.

"Boss, we've got a herd ahead," Gina stated, waking Lenny from his comfortable doze.

Lenny blinked a few times and took in the sight of the throng of the dead shuffling down the road directly at them. He gave a nod. "Speed up a little, and we can make our turn before they reach it. With a little luck, we'll even drag some of them along after us. After all, it's rude when visiting to arrive without a gift!" The driver side-eyed him, but said nothing, having to trust in the seemingly unbalanced man's quest for revenge.

Glancing in the rearview, what she could see past the trailer, Lenny was correct; stragglers from the herd were breaking off and following them toward Alexandria. Lenny may have thought of it as a fortunate break, but was it, really? Get to Alexandria, crash the gates, let the monster loose to fuck up the inhabitants… and then what? No one had mentioned an exit strategy to her. Surely there had to be one, they just hadn't told her… right? She questioned Lenny about it as they made their approach. He only told her not to worry about it, which delivered the opposite effect.

x-x-x-x-x

Twelve hours had passed, and one of the patrol groups Rick had sent out had still not returned, so early on, he and a contingent of Alexandrians had gone out to sweep the area. Nothing overly amiss, given what the world had become, but in the spirit of their close-knit community, it was both in looking out for their own and demonstrating to the newcomers what their group was all about. It ended up putting them out of harm's way.

Two had regained some strength in her legs, but was having more trouble than a simple cane would compensate enough for, so Aaron and Siddiq had hunted up some leg-braces and a walker for her—the medical kind, not the zombie kind—and she was managing to get around reasonably with it, though she complained about having to use it.

"I feel so old with this thing!" she kvetched at Eugene as he walked slowly at her side to the workshop. "I know I'm in my twilight and all, but damn, I'd rather planned on a swift and violent end instead of tottering along like this…"

"Might I offer piggy-backin' it the rest of the way?

She chuckled. "You might! At least my arms still work…" She looped them around his neck as he hoisted her up, carrying both her and her new walking aid to the shop. Once there, he sat her on her worktable, then offered his arm as a grab-bar as she stood shakily to transfer herself to her rolling chair. "This is so lame," she griped as she scooted herself under the desk. "Literally."

"I know you must surely hate it, losing some of your bodily autonomy."

"Yeah," she grumbled back. "But whatcha gonna do?

"My full intent, right at this moment, is to give you a peck on the cheek, then I am going to fetch you a bottle of water, then I am going to work on the solar arrays while you finish wiring things up."

She giggled at his literalness, tilting her head to offer her cheek for him to plant his kiss, but then took his face in her hands for a longer, deeper one. Though he didn't object, rather moving his mouth to accommodate hers, when the kiss ended, he gave her a confused look. "That was not on the proposed to-do list."

"Hidden side-quest," she grinned back. "Achievement: Sha-la-la-la-la-la."

"Oh," he said, nodding with acceptance, then turned and resumed his planned route. He had cleared the door by a couple of paces when he flinched slightly at the small sting of something hitting him in the back. He turned, just in time to see another white pebble flying his direction. Surprising himself with his own reaction time, he snatched it out of the air, examining it a moment before throwing it back at her. It pinged off her worktable, and she squealed and threw her hands up to shield herself, laughing heartily. The corners of his own mouth turned upward at her joy as he proceeded on his way.

x-x-x-x-x

Claudia peered through her binoculars at the vehicle. It looked to be towing a horse trailer, for all that meant; whoever it was could be hauling horses, or they could just be using it for storage or extra sleeping quarters. No way to know until they arrived. Which they seemed to be doing rather quickly…

"Hey," she called to one of the new arrivals as she was walking past. "Go get—" She paused, recounting who had gone out on the retrieval mission and who with authority was still within the compound. Rick was out. So was Michonne. And Daryll, Rosita, and a dozen others. "Do you know who Gabriel or Aaron are?"

Cherise looked up to her, nodding. "Yeah."

"Go find one of them," the lookout told her. "We've got an unknown inbound coming at us. Could be hostile."

Cherise nodded and ran for the church, and finding it empty, switched direction toward Aaron's house.

Claudia took another furtive glance through her binocs at the vehicle, then lowered them to judge the speed of the oncoming truck and trailer. They didn't seem to be slowing. In fact, they seemed to be picking up speed, which was worrying. She brought her rifle around to bear on the vehicle.

x-x-x-x-x

"Break straight through those gates. Stop once we're well inside," Lenny instructed.

Gina glanced at him suspiciously. "And then what?"

"Then, we let Vengeance out and let her do her thing while we make our exit."

"You're sure this is gonna work?"

"Don't worry so much. Just bust the gates." He turned to holler out the cab's rear window, "Hang on to something, Travis!"

It wasn't as though they had time to debate alternate outcomes at this point, so Gina braced her hands on the wheel and stomped the gas pedal. The woman in the guard tower fired off a number of shots at them, busting an outer tire and perforating the cab and bed in various places

They were doing fifty when the 4x4 hit the gate, warping the chain-link around the bumper and getting no further as the steel reinforcements bent slightly, but held. Airbags exploded in the occupants' faces as the rear of the truck broke free of the trailer, bucking high in the air and sending Travis to slam against the bare metal of the bed. The trailer jackknifed around, crashing against one of the settlement's walls. Vengeance let out a bellow, whether out of pain, fear, or anger, no one could tell, but judging from the intense scratching coming from inside, she clearly wanted out, and a little sheet metal wasn't going to hold her for long!

Lenny battled the airbag material away from his face, unbuckling himself and half-falling out of the cab. "Well! That's new! They've added some reinforcements!" he aimed at Gina, but either the crash or the impact of her own airbag had knocked her cold. She slumped through the deflating bag against the steering column, blood streaming from her crushed nose. Lenny waved a reassuring hand back at her. "It's all right… you 've done your part, you've earned a nap. Travis, the ramp!" he shouted, dodging behind the truck to help unload the sheet-metal platforms, using them as shields as the gunner continued to unload her clip at them. Safely behind the truck, they joined the three sections together, creating a long bridge, with spikes sticking out roughly every four feet.

When the watchwoman had emptied her magazine at them, they hefted the ramp up to the top of Alexandria's wall and Travis ran for a crate of Nasty heads, jamming one on each spike as he made his way up. As he reached the summit, exchanging pistol fire with the guard, he hazarded a glance back to see if Lenny would come to his aid, he saw the older man open the horse trailer doors and dash back behind the cover of the truck as Vengeance charged out. He shook his head in disbelief. "Oh, you son of a bitch!"

Lenny peeked out from his cover with an apologetic shrug. "We all knew there was no way back."

He gaped back at his boss incredulously, a sinking feeling coming with the dawning realization. "Shit!" With the giant carnivore headed his way, toward her beloved heads, he had no other option; he swung over the top of the wall and dropped to the ground. He made to run, but Claudia clipped him in the thigh with a bullet, uncaring of his plight. He screamed from the pain, but more than that, the horror of what he knew came next. "No, no!" he hollered, taking a shot in the torso, but he continued trying to drag himself forward, away from where Vengeance would crest the wall.

Eugene, working on their solar array, in the middle of Alexandria's open field, had looked up when Claudia started firing on the intruders and was on the move toward the armory when the familiar man—one of Lenny's inner circle—came over the wall and took a pair of bullets from Claudia's expert marksmanship. Even critically injured, Travis was clawing and crawling his way toward cover, whimpering more out of terror than the pain. Someone had reached the alarm bell, and it was sounding urgently through the township.

Two appeared at the door as he hustled past. "What is it?" she called out.

"Close the door and stay inside!" he hollered back, knowing that did not answer her question, but hoped it would at least keep her put and out of harm's way, but dreading that she was just too stubborn to.

He paused to drag Travis along under his arms. "Is it the monster?" he queried as Alexandrians ran to fetch all the guns and ammo they could carry out of the armory, for all the good the bullets would do them.

Travis just groaned, but his answer came in the form of Claudia, yelling, "Oh my god… What the hell is that?!" and emptying her new magazine into it.

Vengeance yowled, its thick muscles stopping the bullets like a layer of near-impenetrable ballistic gel, the beast merely scratching the burning lead and copper from its non-hide.

Eugene stashed Travis under a porch. "You can't just leave m—!" Travis yelped in protest as the autistic man resumed direction for the armory.

Aaron and one of the newcomers had joined Claudia on the lookout tower. Others had managed to prise the bent gate open enough to start raining fire at the monster, for all that it only irritated the creature into bellowing at them and rushing the gate so that it had to be hastily forced closed again.

With everyone already out of the way, Eugene had a clear path to roll out the cart of Molotovs. "Now not being the best time for an I told you so, I believe these might be the better tool for the job… Optimal range for the catapults ought to be thirty feet back from the wall. Draw, light, then loose," he instructed. Some of the supply was passed up to the folks on the watchtower and at the gate to be thrown by hand, and the biodiesel bombs started flying en masse.

One of the first volley shattered and splashed apart, spreading a broad wall of flame at the beast's front feet, and it shied back from the fire, only to have another bomb ignite behind it, spooking it into a frenzied search for exit as more Molotovs kept coming, the whole store, meant to repel an army, used against a single mutant. Someone finally scored a direct hit, the biodiesel coating the creature as the bottle broke against it and ignited. Vengeance wailed as that thick layer of impenetrable muscle charred black, and with nowhere to run, the creature simply crumpled down on top of its legs, tucking them beneath itself and attempting to hide its face against the ground.

As the spattered fuel burnt itself out across the ground and the intruding vehicles, Lenny cautiously emerged, skin reddened from the intense heat all around his cover, up against the wall and behind the ramp, where no one was able to get a clear shot at him. He cocked a questioning eye at the strange, long pit that the Nasties that had followed them seemed to be congregating in, some of them now also on fire as they shambled about, spreading the fuel to others and lighting parts of them ablaze as well. Lenny decided he didn't care. If this was a Nasty trap or a mass grave, he really could not give a shit. He cast his eyes on the blackened lump of his pet, weeping for her fate. He approached the smoldering monster, reaching as close as he dared to the still searing-hot body, and his face screwed together in grief, anger and anguish.

He whipped around toward the guards at the tower. "How could you?!" he screamed at them. "This beautiful creature, my Vengeance… She was the last thing I had, one of a kind, and you destroyed her! Just like you destroy everything else!"

Those on the tower, and the ones wrenching the gate halfway open again, Tara, Gabriel, and Victor and his group among them, simply watched. This pathetic man, the one-time leader, howled his hatred at them. No one felt like he was worth wasting a bullet on, and just let him scream his piece.

Behind him, a chunk of the char fell from the monster's back. Lenny, in his aggrieved speech, neither saw nor heard it. "You all think that you have the high moral ground, while you go around killing off any group that opposes you, leaving none alive!"

None of the onlookers said a thing, though perhaps if the man had been watching their expressions, he would have seen the reflections of dread as another slab of charcoal cracked and fell from Vengeance's side, revealing untouched red muscle beneath; shiny, like new tissue tended to be. As Lenny chastised them for destroying the very rebuilding of society he was attempting, the big lump of flesh behind him started to move, red showing through the cracks of the burnt bits as more pieces fell away. Vengeance got to its feet, shaking like a dog to shed the charred flesh, and gave a great, irritated roar.

Lenny turned at the bellow, his mouth spread wide in a great smile that all his grief had been for nothing. "Vengeance!" he cried joyously, hugging the creature's side as it came around to face him and swatted him to the ground with one massive seven-toed claw. "Vengeance, no! No, Vengeance, no! NO! AARGH!—"

Desensitized to gore as many of the group were, few looked away, but many winced as Lenny's Vengeance came back to bite him, and the resulting arterial splash coated his pet monster's face.

Then it turned its beady, black eyes on the living on the watchtower, and with a leap onto the ramp provided for it, the mutant cleared the wall into Alexandria.