Page 129 of Sinful Crimes for the Artistically Inclined
She laughed, with a sinister edge that Percy had never once heard there before. “I’ll do you a trade. The sheath for… Now what’s that name? Oh, yes. Joe Bruno.”
The words were like two litres of adrenaline injected straight into Percy’s heart. He dropped the phone as six men stood, right behind Joe. One slid an arm around his neck and pulled him backwards, but Joe was ready. He thrust Percy’s knife into the arm and slit it deep, spilling blood across the table in a vermillion streak.
People were standing, trying to flee the restaurant. Percy jumped the bench, knocking anyone who got between him and Joe to the floor.
Another arm wrapped around Joe’s head, covering his eyes, wrenching him backwards. He was thrown to the floor, then both his arms were taken a hold of.
Percy picked up a chair and smashed it across the head of the assailant who had Joe’s left arm. He fell straight to the floor, freeing Joe’s one hand. Joe rolled over, took the knife he had in his right hand into his left, and drove it down hard into the foot of the man who still held him.
There was a moment of pause, as something subconscious in Joe had expected that to halt the abduction, but the man kept walking, a stream of blood pouring out of the shoe Joe had pierced, leaving the floor slick with red. And the smell. The smell that escaped was indescribably terrible, but… familiar.
By instinct, Joe pulled the dagger free, and plunged it back in, to the same effect. His feet slid on the blood as he tried to swing his legs around to get some leverage, but all it seemed to do was ease the procession across the tiles.
Arms reached down around his waist, lifted, then let go, and a stinking breath hit Joe’s face as that man doubled over from the punch in the guts Percy gave him. Then he was pulled up, head grasped and smashed down into a table. Percy wrenched him back, the crack of a neck breaking accompanying his final fall.
Joe wrapped his legs around those that pulled him along, and taking Percy’s lead, decided that crippling the man was the only option. He held strong and sliced across the back of a leg, straight through the calf muscle, right down to the bone. Finally, the man who held him slumped down to the floor, but he didn’t make a sound. He righted himself, crawling, even as Joe hurled himself away from what he now saw to be a dead thing. Something with decrepit and rotting skin and milky eyes that lunged for him.
Percy’s boot kicked the thing backwards. He pulled Joe to his feet, and dragged him through the restaurant to the deserted kitchen, the staff and customers having had the good sense to evacuate.
Percy paused in the middle of the room, taking up the biggest knife he could find—a cleaver—stuck in a gigantic hunk of pork that was being prepared for the evening’s meals. Joe passed his dagger over, finding a much larger carving knife. He turned, his back meeting Percy’s as they prepared to fight. “Kill them all?”
“Every last one,” said Percy.
The first to arrive in the kitchen got the cleaver straight into their skull, stuck halfway in. Dead eyes rolled back, and the being lost control of its movements, flailing to the floor, twitching.
“Standard zombie protocol,” Percy called out.
Joe had already slid his knife into the guts of the next thing, pulling the chef-sharp blade upwards, soaking himself in thecold blood of the undead. “Got it.” He shoved it in as deep as he could, severed the spinal column and watched the creature fall. Crushing a boot down on the side of its face, the knife went into the neck to sever the head.
The next one jumped at Percy, who uppercut into his stomach, eliciting an emphatic, “Oof!” Percy shoved him against the wall where his skull audibly cracked.
“Is that one human?” Joe stood so sharply, head snapping across so fast, that he didn’t see the fist that came from the right and cracked into his cheek, felling him to the linoleum floor.
“Bastard!” Percy shouted. Joe’s attacker, human or not, was shoved up against the wall, knifed in the chest three times, then thrown to the ground with a pot of boiling stock on top for good measure. To Joe’s horrified relief, it didn’t make a sound as the skin of the face pulled up and broke apart into angry red burns, singed off down to the muscle. Percy ripped it to its feet, smacked its chin down on the bench, and even Joe had to turn away at the brutality of the movement when Percy smacked two fists down so hard on its back that the head flung upwards, breaking the neck in one go.
Joe scrambled to his feet double fast, putting himself between Percy and the one they knew was human, who was grasping the kitchen island to pull himself up. “Stop,” Joe begged. But he recognised the one-track march to destruction that Percy had started on. “Percy, you don’t need to.”
The flash of a meat tenderiser caught Joe’s eye as it twirled off the bench, between Percy’s fingers, then came down hard on the man’s grasping hand, breaking all four fingers. A shattering scream smashed into the kitchen walls.
“Percy!”
“He’s not your friend.” Percy’s hand moved to Joe’s waist, surprisingly gentle in the firm attempt to move him to the side.
Joe slid out of his grasp, twisting to get a hand on the arm that held the weapon. “Let’s go out the back. Come with me.”
He pulled at Percy’s hand, but Percy kept on towards the man who had crawled against the wall, clutching his mangled fingers, begging for his life. “Just as soon as I take care of this.”
“Percy, please.” Joe put a hand on his cheek, bringing his eyes across to meet his own. “Let’s go.”
“If you leave them alive, they will come for you. You must realise that by now.”
“You killed them last time, and they came, anyway.” Percy rolled his eyes at the logic, the first hint he might be softening to Joe’s entreaties. Joe spoke again, twice as determined. “They’re zombies. That means they’ve got to be Cleo’s, right? If you kill him, she’ll just turn him into one of them. She’s not going to run out of dead people. Killing him makes no difference. We have to go.”
A coughing, choking splutter came from behind Percy’s foot, and the thing whose neck he had just broken twitched. The burned creature flopped and rolled. The one with the severed spine gave a powerful shudder.
“They’re reanimating,” Percy said. He eyed the doorway, the empty back alley through which they could wind their way out of the city under the cover of darkness if they were fast enough. “Fuck!” His murderous eyes fell back on the human.
“Please!” said Joe. “We need to run.”
