All Or Nothing

No matter what game you’re playing in Vegas, someone always has to lose. Find Evie and Owen’s story up until now here.

Photo © me

         Evie didn’t look down as she was hauled painfully upward; the rope bit into her skin. It was a relief when a hand reached down and yanked her up into the helicopter. She struggled with the knots, finally freeing herself from the flimsy, makeshift harness. The rope twisted back down again and she peeked out the open door long enough to see Jessamy gesturing at Owen before shaking his head and looping the rope around himself.
         Someone else was flying the chopper; Gregg had on a massive set of headphones and leaned over her. “Who’s the runt?” he yelled over the buffeting propellers.
         “A new friend,” Evie shouted back.
         “Good thing we brought this baby,” Gregg gave her a satisfied grin.
         Evie leaned back against the cold metal, too exhausted to pull herself up into one of the few precarious seats. Jessamy appeared a few minutes later, wincing as he shed the harness.
         “Chris’almighty,” Gregg swore, flinging the rope back down again.
         “What?” Evie asked, heaving her pack off and crawling towards Gregg and Jessamy.
         She saw Jessamy’s face turn white. Evie grabbed his arm and stared down at the building. Tweakers swarmed the rooftop; somehow, they managed to pull themselves up the icy metal rungs. Owen fired into the stumblers that were already over the edge, but Evie could see more crawling up behind.
         “Throw the rope! Throw it!” she yelled, her fingers biting into Jessamy’s shoulder.
         The rope swung wildly, buffeted by the wind and the propellers. The snow whipped around Owen and she saw him squint as he tried to grab the rope once, twice. Jessamy swung his rifle out the door and began shooting the tweakers as Owen tried to tie the rope around his torso. Evie saw one break free from the milling mass; it stumbled over another tweaker’s writhing body and stayed upright. Her scream froze in her throat as Owen gave a frantic tug at the rope. Gregg and Jessamy hauled at it so hard it knocked Owen off his feet. He struggled to right himself, to keep one hand on the rope and one on his gun.
         Evie reached out one hand—to warn him, to stop the tweaker, she wasn’t sure. But as he spun at the end of the rope like a rogue kite, the tweaker latched its grimy hands on Owen’s arm. She heard his scream as the stumbler buried its teeth in Owen’s outstretched hand. The gun dropped onto the snow and the men gave a tug that pulled Owen clear off the rooftop. Evie thought for a moment that the tweaker would come too—that he would rip Owen’s entire arm off. But Owen released the rope and drove the heel of his other hand into the tweaker’s face. Evie thought she could hear the bones shatter, but surely the roaring in her ears was too loud.
         Owen’s face looked gray as they pulled him over the edge. The whites around his eyes were showing and there was blood running freely down his hand. His thumb and most of his next two fingers were gone—mangled stubs of raw meat. They pulled him all the way in and Gregg, swearing enough to impress even Evie, launched himself into the copilot’s seat. They spiraled away from the rooftop—now completely overrun. Evie had Owen’s head in her lap and his uninjured hand clamped tightly on one of hers, she could feel the feeling leave her fingers.
         “Jessamy, in my pack there’s a black canteen,” she waited for his eyes to focus on her. “It should be in one of the side pockets.”
         She could see his hands shaking as he fumbled with the zipper.
         “Evie,” Owen said weakly; she could hear the panic in his voice.
         “Shut up,” she said, squeezing his fingers—hard.
         “Here,” Jessamy handed her the canteen, top unscrewed.
         “This is going to hurt like hell,” Evie said.
         She glanced at Jessamy and he moved to hold Owen still. The floor of the ‘copter was sticky with blood. Evie poured the moonshine over Owen’s ruined hand and felt him stiffen. A sound almost like a whimper escaped his lips and his fingers crushed hers. Evie poured a continuous stream over the seeping wound. The bright red blood didn’t worry her, but she saw the clear outline of the bite on the back of his hand and fragments of teeth. She bit the inside of her cheek. If he ripped out the tweaker’s teeth, there would have been blood. If that blood got into the bite…
         A scratch from a tweaker was fine—unless infected blood got in it. A bite might even be okay if their mouths weren’t bleeding. The problem was that the first things the drug killed were the brain’s pain receptors. The only way to make sure they stayed down was to cut off their heads, stick a knife through the eye, a gunshot to the head—anything that destroyed was left of their intelligence.
         Since they couldn’t feel pain, the stumblers tended to be riddled with diseases and infections. They staggered around bashing themselves into things, cutting themselves up. Most of them had some kind of internal bleeding. If you hit one with a car and didn’t crush the skull, the bastards could get right back up. Evie hunted one with a leg so mangled it was just dead weight. The thing kept going for miles and still had some fight left in it. Chett cut himself on something—a deep cut but not dangerous. Then, in a fight with some tweakers, he made a real mess of one and blood got into the wound. Just like that. Three days later, she put a bullet in his skull and never regretted it.
         She looked down into Owen’s gray eyes, half shut in agony as remaining fingers on his hand twitched convulsively. The eyes were the first thing she noticed when Chett started to turn.