Blood Soaked and Contagious by James Crawford

now, you fucking piece of shit. Not gonna let you go either. Cut me loose or I’ll tear your arm off.” He didn’t actually say it that quickly or coherently. It came out as bursts of words punctuated by the nasty, almost subvocal, laughter. I knew I couldn’t let him go, even if I wanted to keep my promise.
    Whether or not I liked it, I had to end him there, while I still had a chance. I had to get my arm back in one piece, and it was probably going to hurt like Hell to do that if I had to force his grip. Then I remembered the cleaver by my right knee.
    “All right, I’ll cut you loose!” I told him. “Just don’t tear my arm off!”
    “Heh. Good. Good. Good,” he kept repeating it while denting the chair even further with his head.
    I picked up the cleaver, tried to clear my head, and got a feel for the thing. A Chinese meat cleaver. Heavy blade. Good balance.
    I swung and cut some of the Ethernet cable that bound his right leg to the chair. He cackled with glee and started chanting “More” as I pulled my arm back for another swing.
    As you can imagine, I didn’t swing at the cables, but at his right wrist. I fell into a roll across his arm when the hand parted from his wrist because I was so off balance between the grip on me and the force of my swing. I came back up into a crouch with the hand still attached to my arm, covered in my blood and the spray from his stump.
    The whole beach chair was jumping around on the concrete with the force of his flailing. No human noises were coming from his mouth at this point. Whatever was left of Jerry the Soldier had been replaced by some kind of mindless, raging creature. Thank whichever God you want, I still had the scythe on my back.
    I pulled it out, snapped the blade into place, reversed my grip, and put the spike right between his eyes. The thrashing stopped.
    Then I did something I’d never done before because I didn’t know if the structure of the weapon could take lateral torsion. I leaned my right knee into the body of the scythe and pushed. I half expected the pins and screws that held it together to pop out and go bouncing around the room, but they didn’t. The spike twisted in the hole it had made going in, crushing things as it went. As long as I live, I never want to hear a noise like that again.
    I pulled the weapon free, saw the brain matter on the spike, and decided I needed to sit down.
    I put the Man Scythe on the floor. Then I sat down. The last thing I remember is the concrete floor impacting the back of my head as I passed out.

Chapter 9
     
    There was darkness, and I think it was cold. Definitely not warm, like the kind of darkness you get from huddling under the blankets on a Sunday morning in the wintertime. This was a chilly darkness with a certain moistness. Lo, even a sense of things dripping.
    Did I mention the dripping, cold darkness was soft and smelled exotic in some way? It was really soft. If I were pressed to describe the scent, I would have to use phrases like “warm spices” and “freshly washed girl.”
    Don’t give me shit. There is a “freshly washed girl” aroma. I smelled it, spices, in a soft place that was drippy, moist, and dark. Overall, aside from the dark aspect of everything, it was pretty pleasant.
    Then I opened my eyes.
    “I’m blind!” I yelled and thrashed my head around, heaving myself up into a sitting position.
    There was a cold compress flopped over on a big, bandaged sausage in my lap. Things weren’t dark anymore, or soft, or cold and drippy. In fact, things were well lit, tastefully decorated, and two of my dear friends were composing their faces at the foot of the bed.
    “You’re awake now. That’s splendid!” Bajali was smiling at me from the end of the bed, and Shawn clapped him on the shoulders, looking pretty pleased as well.
    “Oh. How long was I out?” I looked around a little bit, but not very much because the back of my head hurt like a stone-cold son of a yak-buggering