Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  It took him forever to peg his way down the hall with the cane. He knew that he could go faster without it, but he also suspected that his leg was going to give out at some point. If and when that happened, he would need the cane to go anywhere. When his hip got really tired, it had a tendency to lock up and become immobile. The only cure would be bedrest.

  Finally at the end of the hall, Brad understood why Mandy had paused. The splashes of glow stick chemical in the office were still glowing slightly. They were an eerie reminder of what had chased him earlier.

  Brad looked away, trying to put it out of his mind. He followed after Mandy. She had already disappeared.

  The stairs up to the roof were a new addition to the school. Brad had helped build them, along with the tower that was up on the roof. In the early days of Gladstone, the school had been at the center of the community. Brad, Romie, Lisa, and Robby had established themselves in new houses after their original houses had been burned down. The community at Northam had dismantled itself when Carrie had moved up to Donnelly. Some of the people who didn’t want to move had moved closer to Romie’s group.

  It was funny that they had been so preoccupied with the idea of fire back then. As far as Brad knew, the only serious threat of fire had come from the misguided followers of the Origin who had burned the houses. But, after a vote, the community had made a priority out of creating an observation tower to spot fires. That tower had been built on the roof of the high school, since it was on one of the tallest hills in town.

  A wave of anger rolled through Brad. Now that he thought about it, it was preposterous that they had allowed irrational fear to dictate the priority of that project. Those first few years had been brutal. Food had become scarce as they learned to stop trusting the supplies that they gathered from the old world. One bad can of green beans and suddenly every canned vegetable was demonized. They should have been focused on getting their power grid stabilized so they could set up their indoor gardens. Instead, everyone had complained about the danger of living in Gladstone because it had too many trees.

  The frustration came back from decades before.

  Brad realized that he was angrier now than he had been way back then.

  In the blink of an eye, over the course of a single pace, the anger waned and disappeared. Brad realized that while he had been so fired up, his body hadn’t hurt at all. His stride had evened out and his limp had disappeared. Now that he was rational again, all the pain returned with his sanity.

  The dread seeped in next.

  Brad swiveled his head, expecting to see the strange shadows again. But that feeling passed as well. He reached the bottom of the stairs worn out from the emotional swing. With his hand on the bannister—a piece of wood that he had installed all those years before—Brad paused to think and looked back down the hall.

  “Is it all connected?” he whispered to himself.

  He thought of the electrical problems down past the Outpost. He thought about the water that wouldn’t boil up in Donnelly. Certainty came like a revelation. It washed through him just like the anger and dread had, moments before. He had no time to investigate his weird idea, but he had to do it. He had to know for sure.

  Brad backed up, slowly, trying to clear his mind.

  As he reached the same place in the hallway where he had searched frantically for the shadows, he felt cold in the pit of his stomach. Paranoia told him that he was being watched, or maybe hunted. Brad kept moving slowly, letting the feelings ebb away as he distanced himself from that part of the hall.

  A map began to form in his mind. The office, the laundry, and this part of the hall could be three points on an arc. Brad kept moving to where anger had hit him. Logic couldn’t keep the feeling away. With one more step, he was furious that Romie hadn’t come along. He was enraged that Mandy had left him to go ahead. Also, strangely, he stood tall. Perhaps it was only the anger, but he felt as powerful as a teenager. His mind and body were filled with destructive energy.

  “Are other people feeling this somewhere else?” he asked himself.

  Brad thought about the observation tower.

  He backed out of the angry place and rushed through the dread.

  Brad climbed the stairs as fast as he could, opening himself to whatever feelings might come.

  As he had feared, his anger began to rise with each step.

  “Shit,” he whispered. Then, unable to stop himself, he said, “Fucking morons are going to get themselves killed.”

  Midway up the stairs, Brad had the unsettling feeling that something was left unfinished. There was a major task—an important duty that only he was responsible for—and he had to remember it so he could finish it before it was too late. The feeling was so strong that it actually stopped Brad in his tracks.

  His mind went to the kids first. Was he in charge of one of them today? Was he supposed to be watching them?

  “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Janelle and Jim are in Donnelly with their father. Ashley is down south with Lisa.”

  Was there a dog he had forgotten to let out? Did he forget to feed one of them?

  “We don’t even have a dog right now,” he told himself.

  The feeling was so strong, it took him forever to recognize it for what it was.

  “This is just like the dread or the anger,” he said aloud. “This is fake.”

  He continued upwards, pushing through the door to the roof and then making his way up to the narrow wooden stairs that climbed to the observation tower.

  “Pam? Kevin?” he called as he climbed. “Mandy?”

  There was no answer from above.

  The wind was whipping through the trusses that held up the tower. A strange light was making the shadows dance. Brad leaned over and saw that the ribbon of jagged light was in the sky again. He hadn’t seen it earlier, when he and Romie had come to the school, but it had been cloudier then.

  “That explains the power,” he said.

  He passed through another wave of anger. This one was so intense that his hand gripped the wooden rail hard enough to cramp his muscles. He wanted to leap up the stairs and strangle whomever was up there, for the simple reason that they had made him climb. It was their fault that he was out here in the middle of the night. It was their stupidity that had put everyone in danger.

  Taking deep breaths, Brad managed to take another step upwards and let the anger subside. He felt his hip click and realized something—he felt powerful, but that didn’t mean that his body was really capable.

  The stairs rose through a hole in the floor of the observation tower. It was surrounded by railings on three side that Brad had put up after he had almost fallen one day. Now, in the dark, he wanted to tear the railings down with his bare hands and throw them out into the wind. With that thought, he realized that his anger had returned to an uncontrollable level. Brad climbed up, letting the moonlight and the flickering light from the crack in the sky come to him and show him the interior of the observation tower. Mandy had to be there. He hadn’t seen her climb the stairs, but there was nowhere else she could be.

  He scanned the dark shadows that lurked behind the waist-high walls of the tower. In one corner, he saw a shape. Brad moved toward it, flexing and clenching his hands to keep them busy as rage coursed through him.

  He wanted to help the person who was balled up in the corner.

  He also wanted to rip them apart, tearing the skin and flesh from the bones with his fingers and teeth. He wanted their blood to pour down his face and into his mouth so he could taste the salty velvet of it. His thumbs itched to press into eyes. The worst part was the dirty, sexual things he wanted to do to the motionless body—regardless of who it was. That was the one thought that he managed to keep at bay. The other desires rampaged through him.

  Brad didn’t know where he had dropped his cane. The only rational part of his brain was thankful. If he had still possessed it, he would have brought it smashing down on the body in front of him.

&nb
sp; “Pam?” he asked the shape. It looked too small to be Kevin or Mandy. He reached down. The body was still warm and flexible.

  “Who is it?”

  The light from the crack in the sky shifted and flickered. Brad saw the bloody face of the person. It wasn’t any of the three people who he expected to find. It was George—the man who had been called into the light, according to his kids.

  Brad put his fingers to the man’s throat to feel for a pulse. Before he registered whether or not the man was alive, he felt the soft flesh under his fingers and he couldn’t control himself. Brad reached down with his other hand as well and closed both around George’s throat, trying to squeeze until the flesh was compressed into nothing.

  His balance gave out and Brad was saved from the horrid impulse. He fell and lost his grip. Brad landed on the floor of the tower next to George’s limp form. This time, he reached for the wrist, and controlled himself long enough to verify that there was no pulse.

  “What happened to you?” Brad asked.

  He realized that his self-control had come back, to some extent. The anger was still there, but it was banished to the back of his head. Like music from another room, he could still hear the beat but he was able to ignore the words.

  “What happened?” Brad asked again, but he knew. George had been wrapped up in the same rage that Brad himself had nearly succumbed to.

  “That’s a lie,” he said. “I did succumb. The only reason I got free was because my balance gave out. If I was still standing…”

  To test his idea yet again, Brad pushed himself up with his arms. His head swam with fresh fury. He lowered himself back down and cowered under the anger. Apologizing with whispers to George’s privacy, Brad searched the corpse until he discovered the ragged hole in the man’s chest. Some weapon had stopped George’s heart before it was able to push out much blood.

  Keeping his head low, Brad searched the rest of the observation tower and crawled back to the stairs. The fear that was creeping into him wasn’t the unnatural dread that he had felt earlier. This was the perfectly rational fear that there was something in the night that had killed George. Wherever that thing, or person, was, it might be fueled by the same rage that Brad could still feel in the back of his head.

  Brad crawled down the first few stairs until he hit the next band of anger. He rushed through it.

  The feeling was manageable when he reached the roof of the school again.

  “Mandy has to be out there,” he said as he scanned the part of the roof that he could see. “She had to have come this way. Mandy?”

  His cane was there, on the flat roof. Bending over, his head swam again. For a moment, until he stood upright again, he had the notion that there was something important that he was forgetting. There was…

  “Not real,” he said to himself.

  Using his cane he worked his way around the little shed that enclosed the stairs leading down to the main hall.

  Brad didn’t trust any of his feelings as he braced himself against the side of the shed. The little building under the observation tower had been built to keep the weather from leaking down into the school.

  “Mice will get in,” Romie had said, the first time she had seen it.

  “What do you mean?” Brad had asked, glancing around on that sunny day. At the time, he had entertained his own reservations for why it was a bad idea to break through the roof of the school. Mice hadn’t entered into his thoughts once.

  “It’s something my mother used to say,” Romie had said. “The reason we didn’t get mice in our garage, according to her, was because it had a tight roof. We used to make fun of her. Then, it’s funny, but during a storm a tree crashed through the roof of the garage. We got it fixed, but we never managed to get rid of the mice that lived in the garage after that.”

  “All garages have mice,” Brad had said.

  “Go back in time and tell that to my mom,” Romie had said.

  Brad held his breath as he rounded the corner of the shed. He didn’t trust his own fear, but he knew what he would see.

  Brad stared down at the lifeless shape there. In the moonlight, he knew who it was immediately. There was no mistaking Mandy’s long hair. To his horror, it was the only way that he would have identified her. Even in the low light, he could see that the skin had been torn from her face. In his time, Brad had seen hundreds and hundreds of corpses. Hell, he had touched hundreds. People with exploded eyes, even people whose flesh had been cannibalized, haunted his dreams. Sometimes, when he was just about to drift off to sleep, he saw them rising from lifeless heaps and stalking after him.

  This was different.

  He had lived alongside Mandy for decades. He had seen her joyful and distraught. He had seen her struggle and thrive. Together, as neighbors in a community of less than a hundred people, they were as close as cousins. It tore his heart to see her limp and lifeless, with her skin ripped away. But Brad couldn’t trust himself—his emotions were not his own. Mourning would have to wait.

  He had found George and Mandy. Kevin and Pam were still missing.

  Brad took a step backwards from her before he took his eyes off of her body. He didn’t trust his own emotions, and he certainly wasn’t about to trust her to stay dead. The image of her walking around with no face was too easy for him to picture. Given the chance, she might creep slowly toward him until she drew close enough to wrap her cold fingers around his ankle and pull him close to her bloody new shape.

  Brad couldn’t breathe. He stumbled back, looking around frantically for help.

  For a moment, he thought he saw someone moving near the edge of the flat roof. It was just a tree against the night sky, tossing in the wind. Brad moved in that direction. He moved toward the fear of the unknown, or maybe he was moving away from his fear of Mandy’s body.

  He didn’t get far. Halfway across the flat roof, with the staircase behind him disastrously far away, his eyes began to pick out another shape in the darkness. There was yet another body. This one was face down and stretched out. Brad leaned over to touch the foot, so he could see if the person was still alive.

  He slipped and put a hand down on the roof. The gravel was wet. Raising his hand in front of his face, he saw dark liquid on his fingers. It smelled of blood.

  Chapter 64: Robby

  “How and why,” Robby repeated. He lifted one of the chairs. The thing was metal and plastic. It was light enough for him to flip over and inspect from all angles. He looked for string attached to it, or an actuator in the floor. He looked for magnets hidden at the base of the legs, trying to figure out how the chairs had fallen over on their own.

  “Magnets?” Jim asked.

  “That’s what I was just thinking,” Robby said. “I don’t see anything obvious, but maybe part of these metal legs is magnetized. With a strong enough electromagnet in the floor, I can imagine sending a pulse up that might knock over a chair.”

  “I think it was wind,” Janelle said. “It looked like that time that the wind knocked over all of Aunt Lisa’s deck chairs.”

  “Did you feel any wind?” Robby asked his daughter.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe?”

  “Well, just because we don’t see anything immediately doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out eventually. Do you two have any thoughts on why?”

  Jim looked down at the chairs. Janelle looked up toward the ceiling. She was either looking for the source of wind, or she was trying to imagine why someone would want to knock over the chairs. There was a chance that she was thinking of something completely different—Robby had all but given up on trying to understand his youngest daughter’s thought process.

  “Someone wants to frighten us,” Jim said.

  “I think something was moving through here and it accidentally knocked over the chairs,” Janelle said.

  “So, when you said wind, you meant accidentally?” Robby asked.

  Janelle nodded.

  “Okay—both interesting ideas. Jim sugg
ests it’s a calculated display trying to frighten us, and Janelle has it as an accidental effect of an unknown thing moving through the room.”

  “A ghost,” Jim said, toying with a smile.

  “Jim,” Robby said with a stern look.

  “I know,” Jim said. It wasn’t the first time he had been chastised for making fun of his sister’s ideas.

  Robby turned a slow circle, taking stock of the room.

  “I think we’re going to let this mystery marinate for a little bit. We’ve found a cafeteria. It will be tight for everyone, but we can congregate here while we make our plans. It can be the base of operations for the community until everyone gets settled. Let’s glance at the kitchen and then head back.”

  “What kitchen?” Jim asked.

  “I’m assuming it’s through there,” Robby said, pointing to one corner. The way the walls came together, they didn’t actually meet, but seemed to form a doorway. It was difficult to tell until Robby approached. The lighting was designed in a way that hid the entrance to the next room.

  The kids came with him even though he wasn’t pulling them along anymore. Robby paused at the doorway so Janelle could make her mark. It wasn’t really necessary, but he didn’t want to discourage her from being thorough at her assigned task.

  The lights in the kitchen were off. When the room sensed Robby coming around the corner, the lights overhead began to warm up. Robby was starting to hate that effect. While they were coming to life, the glow from the things went through a strange spectrum of yellow, green, and then orange. If the whole bunker was a subterranean organism, evolved to look like a manmade object, these were the lights it would have. They were too much like the lures of lanternfish.

  It was a silly idea. The industrial kitchen was all shiny metal and tile. It had big, polished prep surfaces and an eight-burner stove. Pots and pans hung from hooks, close enough to be at hand, but tucked away so a person wouldn’t run into them. It was like every other kitchen Robby had seen in the backs of schools or the basements of churches. Those types of kitchens never held provisions. All the food, even oils and spices, were tucked away in a pantry somewhere.