by M. D. Massey
“You have to help me.”
Jessica was overwhelmed. She saw his mouth move but was in a daze, like a flash grenade had gone off in the room and disoriented her. The man grabbed onto her shoulders and shook her, snapping her out of it.
“Please, help me.”
“What happened?” Jessica asked.
Running his hands through his hair, the man said, “My wife. She began coughing when we got to the room. I thought she was fine. She said she just had a frog in her throat and to give her a minute. Then, she started dry heaving. I started to bring her into the hallway to get some fresh air, and she just collapsed.”
“Is she breathing?”
The man cupped his hands behind his head and turned around. He was mumbling and wouldn’t calm down to answer Jessica’s questions. She walked over to the woman and knelt down next to her.
She appeared to be in her early forties, an attractive blonde. Jessica saw that the woman’s eyes were rolled in the back of her head. Her chest and stomach were flat, and her arms lay still at her sides. Jessica reached down and grabbed the woman’s left forearm. It was cold, the hand dangling at the wrist. She checked for a pulse.
“Is she okay?” the man asked.
“Stand back,” Jessica demanded.
She leaned over the woman’s face, tilting back the head, and then began to breathe into the woman’s mouth. Jessica blew three deep breaths into the woman’s mouth, and then clasped her hands over the woman’s chest and began compressions.
For two minutes, Jessica repeated the process, all while the woman’s husband stood muttering behind her. A few other people in the hallway who knew CPR were trying the same procedure on others with similar results.
Jessica again picked up the woman’s arm and checked for a pulse. When she didn’t feel anything, she set down the arm and placed her ear against the woman’s chest. When she looked back up at the man, she had tears in her eyes.
“No! Please, God. Jennifer, baby, don’t leave me,” the man cried. He went down to his wife and straddled her, leaning over and running his hands through her hair. Jessica stood and took two steps back, watching the man come to the realization that his wife was gone
He looked up to Jessica.
“Please, do something,” he pleaded with her.
Jessica covered her mouth and continued to cry. She backed away, too overwhelmed by the panicked guests to know what to do next.
A scream bellowed from one of the rooms. Not the same cry of fear and despair that echoed through the hallway, but a scream of pain and utter terror.
Everyone in the hall fell silent. The cry had startled them, and they knew it was different. Something else was wrong.
A man with dark skin came tumbling out of the room that the scream had come from. He hit the ground face first, clawing at the carpet and leaving handprints in blood. He looked over at Jessica with bloodshot eyes and a face that she knew she would never forget. He reached for her just as another man came out of the room and pounced, lowering his head to the fallen man’s neck and beginning to tear into his jugular.
Everyone still standing on the floor let out a harmonized scream and began to scatter.
Jessica heard a snarl followed by a scream just in front of her, and saw the blonde woman pull her husband toward her face and begin tearing his away from his skull with her teeth. Her eyes were red but pale, and she had a look on her face as if she wasn’t really there at all.
The woman pulled away from the face to look at Jessica. She hissed and screamed at her, flailing her arms and trying to get the dead weight of her battered husband off of her.
As Jessica backed away, looking into the woman’s eyes—this creature’s eyes—she knew one thing:
The devil had checked in to her hotel.
4
Gabriel
Inside the small, isolated bathroom, Gabriel Alexander remained stranded with his back against the thin door. The screaming, howling, and banging around continued to ring through his ears.
On the other side of the door, he heard an extended snarl, seemingly directed at the metal he leaned against. He clenched his entire body, stood still, and tried not to make a sound.
A loud bang came at the door next to his ears. It startled Gabriel into a gasp, his body sweating from the absence of new air in the room.
Gabriel was unarmed. If the thing on the other side of the door busted into the room, he would be done.
A plunger sat upright next to the toilet. The room was small enough that Gabriel could simply bend over to reach it, leaving the weight of his ass against the door.
Once he had the plunger, he gripped it horizontally with both hands and brought the center of the wooden shaft down over his knee. He broke it just right, leaving a sharp edge at the broken end, thus creating a small, wooden stake for himself. He knew that he couldn’t hold down in the bathroom for long, so preparing for his exit only made sense.
Gabriel rested the back of his head against the door and closed his eyes, breathing deep as the monster behind him continued to slam its fist against the door and howl at him. He took one last deep breath and then moved away from the door.
It flew open and the thing, a woman, drooling from the mouth with eyes gone pale, came at him.
She pushed him against the wall and he dropped the wooden stake. They grappled, the woman chomping her jaws at Gabriel and spitting at him.
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to push the woman away from him.
She was unresponsive, only growling and spitting at him. Together, they fell to the ground.
He was pinned against the wall, struggling with her. She worked to try and sink her teeth into his face, saliva pouring out of her mouth and landing on his cheek. As one, they fell over to the right, and his head slammed against the toilet. She lunged at his face, but he rolled out of the way, just as her face missed his and hit the wall.
Gabriel pushed her weight off of him and stood. He leaned down and grabbed the stake as she tried to get up, struggling to do so with her body pinned between the toilet and the floor. She managed to flip over, just as Gabriel brought the stake over his head and drove it into her stomach. She yelled out and kicked him back against the wall, still trying to get up.
He looked down at her, the woman apparently unfazed by the shaft of a plunger stabbing into her guts. Moving past her flailing legs, Gabriel put his foot on her stomach and pulled the stake out. She grabbed his foot and he lost his balance. As he fell forward, all he heard was a slurping sound, and when he looked down again, he saw the stake poking out of her skull, neatly driven through her eye socket. She wasn’t moving.
Gabriel looked down to her hands and noticed the paleness in them. He didn’t know the woman, but no one was this pale. Her veins popped from the flesh and she was cold. Too cold for a body that had just passed. This woman, this creature, was human no more.
He put both hands on the stake and pulled, grimacing as the sound hit his ears, the stake slowly leaving her brain and carrying the remains of her eyeball a quarter of the way up its wooden shaft.
He set the shaft down onto the toilet and slid out of his sport coat, tossing it over the body of the dead creature, before picking the stake back up. Over the intercom, he heard the faint pleas of the pilot, urging everyone to stay calm.
Gabriel took a deep breath, held a solemn grip on the stake, and started out of the bathroom door.
The sheer chaos in the plane was a horror he could’ve never imagined. Down the middle aisle, bodies lay both sprawled and stacked on top of each other. On some, arms waved from figures who were covered with the bodies of the assailants. The lights flashed on and off above Gabriel’s head and the captain was still working to calm down his passengers, apparently having no idea of the mutilation happening behind the comfort of the cockpit.
Then Gabriel heard a scream over the intercom, and the calming of the captain ceased to exist.
Frantic alarms suddenly sounded through the plane and Gab
riel lost his balance, grabbing onto a nearby seat to keep himself upright.
In front of him, one of the creatures looked up from its prey and saw Gabriel. It hissed at him from one knee as it dropped the head of its victim and stood.
The eyes, formerly a man’s eyes, had gone as gray as a cloudy spring day. Blood covered its cheeks, and pieces of flesh were stuck around its mouth as it came at Gabriel without hesitation.
As Gabriel backed up, the plane began to rumble, sending him and his stalker both to the ground. The creature rolled over Gabriel, the motion of the plane sending it hissing over him and hurtling toward the back of the cabin.
When he was able to catch his balance, he looked back and saw the remains of his stalker’s brains splattered on the wall.
He turned back toward the front of the plane just as another beast came at him. It was just about to bite his right arm when he blocked the path to his wrist with the stake, and the thing bit into the wood instead of his flesh. It chomped at the wood, leaving teeth marks in the middle of the shaft, as Gabriel pushed the beast away from him. They both fell backwards, away from each other, and Gabriel hit the back of his head on the floor when he landed.
He stumbled to his feet and limped over to the fallen creature. Looking over him, he saw those eyes. Those dead, cold eyes. They looked up at him without a soul. Remembering that the stab to the stomach had done nothing to his previous foe, Gabriel took the stake over his head, and with a thunderous plunge, drove it into the face of the monster below him. The blow covered his white dress shirt in a mural of red, but the thing’s arms went limp and didn’t move.
Gabriel put his foot on the chest of the beast and tried to remove the stake, but couldn’t. The lights flashed and the plane shook again, sending Gabriel off his feet, banging his head again, this time against one of the seats. As Gabriel fell, he clutched his hand and grimaced, feeling the burn of a newborn splinter in his palm from the shaft of the plunger.
All around him, he could hear the echoing of beasts’ howls and victims’ pleas as the plane continued a turbulent and eventual fall to the earth.
The plane fumbled again and sent Gabriel rolling down the aisle toward the front of the plane. One of the things passed over the top of him, chomping its jaws and hissing as they passed each other in mid-air.
Gabriel stopped sliding and rolling as the plane leveled again. His face was against the ground and as he looked over, he saw the young boy curled under the seat in front of his. Dylan lay on his forearms and gripped the metal base of the seat, the lonesome helplessness flashing over him.
Gabriel knew that his only chance to survive was to get back into a seat and hope—pray—that none of those things got to him. He reached up, grabbed onto the nearest armrest, and pulled himself up into his original seat.
Dylan seemed unaware that Gabriel was there; he was in shock.
“Hey, kid,” Gabriel whispered urgently.
The back of the boy’s legs faced Gabriel and he continued to look straight forward, never glancing up.
“Dylan, right? We have to get you up into your seat,” Gabriel told him.
Dylan still didn’t respond.
Gabriel heard more screams from further toward the front of the plane, piercing through the pounding shriek of the alarms.
He knew there was little time, so he leaned over and reached for Dylan’s legs.
The boy screamed and began to squirm, kicking back at Gabriel.
“Calm down,” Gabriel demanded, but Dylan didn’t.
His hands around the boy’s stomach, Gabriel lifted Dylan off the ground as he continued to yell and, with his back facing Gabriel, slapped at whatever part of Gabriel he could find. Gabriel let out a groan, turned Dylan around, and slapped the boy across the cheek.
The squirming stopped and Dylan looked to him in shock.
“Listen to me,” Gabriel said. “If you want any chance of seeing your mom and dad again, you better stop that shit right now and do as I say. Do you understand?”
Dylan, holding his face where the palm had landed, reluctantly nodded.
Gabriel guided the boy into the seat closest to the window and strapped him in. Above their heads, the oxygen masks swung back and forth. He grabbed the mask above Dylan’s head and secured it to the boy’s face, hoping that any beasts still alive were being bludgeoned by the plane’s walls.
“Now, hold on,” Gabriel told him.
Gabriel extended the seatbelt over his own lap and clicked it in, pulling to make sure it was secure. When he went to reach for his mask, the scream beside him stopped him.
A man, sick and decaying, reached at Gabriel. He was about the same height as Gabriel, but heavier by at least twenty pounds from what he could tell. Their hands were locked on each other’s shoulders and Gabriel tried desperately to hold the thing at bay. Its mouth was open, spitting blood and saliva all over Gabriel, who screamed consistently, trying to fight the thing off.
Gabriel’s hand slipped, allowing the thing to get within inches of his face.
Then, Gabriel watched its face fall back and away from him as the lights dimmed and the plane began to dive.
“Shit,” Gabriel mumbled, his eyes wide. The plane was going down.
Frantically, Gabriel reached above his head, trying to grab the mask. His nervous hands shook but he found it and secured it to his face.
He took the hand of the little boy, who was screaming through his mask.
“Hold on,” Gabriel cried out.
He closed his eyes, thinking of Katie and Sarah as the plane made its accelerated final descent.
5
Will
Though clearing the Empties out of the building had taken a mental and physical toll on Will, he knew that he had to keep others from getting inside so everything he’d just done wouldn’t be for nothing. Before going back into the office, he moved two pallets, both stacked with product packed in brown cardboard boxes, in front of the two exterior doors at the back of the warehouse. They only opened from the inside, but it was better to be safe than sorry. With all the bay doors shut and locked, the two rear warehouse doors blocked with pallets, the door in the showroom at the rear of the building secured with a table in front of it, and the front door to the office barricaded with a few of the large desks, Will had secured every possible way inside, hopefully protecting himself from the Empties outside. He began moving all the bodies out of the main office and into the far corner of the warehouse where he wouldn’t be able to smell them once they began to rot. He hoped he wouldn’t be in the building long enough to have to worry about that, but moved them far away just to be safe.
He dragged the bodies from the main office first, watching the small lobby on the other side of the stacks of office furniture fill up with Empties who banged on the thick glass on either side of the door. While he was pretty sure that the glass would hold up, Will planned to spend as little time in that room as he could. If they made it inside, he wanted to be as far away from that room as possible.
Will moved Dean’s body last, dragging it through the showroom and out into the warehouse, where he had an empty pallet waiting so that he could easily move the corpse to the far corner of the warehouse with the others. He used the forklift to move the pallet, and when he got to the far corner of the 30,000-square-foot warehouse, he tilted the forks, dumping Dean’s body off the edge of the pallet and onto the pile of other corpses. Stacking the dead bodies did not seem like the most humane practice to Will, but it made the most sense to him; the only other option being to have bodies spread out over the building. Obviously enough, there would be no going outside to bury them. Will bowed his head and said a silent prayer for his co-workers before jumping back onto the forklift and driving up to where Jordan’s body lay.
Jordan lay just as Will had left him: on his back, his head tilted to the side, mouth and eyes open, hands flat to the concrete at his sides. When he’d moved Andrew’s body minutes earlier, he’d fought the urge to look down at his friend her
e, as he knew this moment would come soon enough.
He knelt down beside his fallen friend, whose face Will had covered with a towel he’d found nearby after he put him down. Will grabbed Jordan’s cold hand and held onto it as tears came out of his eyes.
“I’m so sorry, man.” He dipped his head toward Jordan’s hand. “I’m so sorry.” They were the only words he could find.
Will’s body shook as he turned his head toward an explosion outside.
“What the fuck was that?” he mumbled.
He hadn’t heard anything aside from the banging and scratching at the doors, or whatever noises he’d made himself, so the loud crash outside made his eyes widen.
Will jumped to his feet and ran to the other end of the warehouse, through the door that led into the main front office.
When he looked out the front window, he had a perfect view down the street. He watched in amazement as Empties walked away from the building toward a large cloud of smoke that rose up on the horizon.
After staring for a few moments, he noticed it was too quiet.
He looked down at the ground outside in front of him, and there was nothing there.
Then he looked to his left at the lobby and, for the first time since everything had changed earlier that day, it was vacant.
They were gone.
He smiled and couldn’t help but let out a laugh—the first one all day.
Was it safe to move the desks and go outside? He was hesitant at first, but could see both ways out of the window that it was clear.
So, he walked a few steps over to his left, slid the desk out of the way, and opened the door to the lobby. Moving quickly to the front door, wanting to open it and feel the fresh breeze brush against his skin, he still wisely hesitated, not sure it was safe yet to go outside.
Fuck it.
Will opened the door.
He stood at the top of the six steps that led up to the front entrance of Element and watched as Empties made their way down the hill toward the smoke; there were at least a hundred of them, maybe more.