The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  Bracing herself against the door, she looked down at the man on her floor. He looked back up at her in a daze, the stupid bastard. She yelled, “Help me, damn it!”

  The man woke up and snapped into action, grabbing the bent iron thing and jumping to his feet. He rammed the door with his own shoulder, shoving back against the spider monsters. One of the monster’s knife-like limbs shot through the gap between the door and the frame, but the man shoved her back as it fished blindly for them. Together they forced the door closed and pinched the limb in the frame. The man swung down with what Lisa now recognized as a tire iron. She heard the sharp crack as the thin, elongated boned snapped under the downward swing of the man’s tire iron. The monster on the other end of the door screamed in pain as it pulled its limb back, the skin scrapping off and leaving black streaks against the edge of the door and the frame. Once unobstructed, the door fell shut with a bang and the latched clicked. The man threw the deadbolt closed as Lisa ran for the pieces of her improvised barricade. As she started hefting the large board up, she saw the man resting against the door as if they were safe. They were never safe. The first time one of the spider monsters rammed the door and threw the man off it like a croquette ball, he realized it too.

  “We need to get the boards back in place!” Lisa shouted. “Help me!

  The man grabbed the end of the board and held it high. Taking the hammer from her, the man pounded the nails into the door frame, then handed it back to her to hammer in the other end. He braced the door as Lisa grabbed more pieces, working together to put them back into place. When the last piece was nailed back in, they stepped back and watched the door for any sign of giving, but the door held. They were safe.

  Or was she? She eyed the man she had just let into her apartment. It was a small town and she knew pretty much everyone in it, or had before everything literally went to Hell, and she didn’t know this guy. He could have been anyone. He could have been the person who started this whole mess. He could be here to kill her, to finish the job.

  “Thank you,” the man said, panting. “I would have been dead if you hadn’t . . .”

  Lisa swung the hammer at his head. The man ducked, the hammer missing him by a hair’s width, but he had leaned too far and fell over backward. He held up his hands. Lisa raised the hammer over her head, ready to bring it down at the slightest provocation. She stood over him, straddling his waist, getting a clear shot of his head.

  “Who are you?” she yelled. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Woah, easy!” the man shouted, but he was bringing his tone down. It was almost calming. “Easy! I don’t want to hurt you. I’m Daniel Burns . . .”

  He tried to slide out from between her legs but Lisa raised the hammer higher. “Don’t move! Don’t fucking move!” She then realized how vulnerable a spot she was in. This man, Daniel, was right under her. A well-placed kick, a quick grab, a hidden gun . . . she was suddenly no longer confident she held the upper hand. She backed away, almost running, never turning her back on him or lowering her hammer. “Just . . . just stay back!”

  Daniel got to his feet, keeping his hands up. “I’m harmless, I’m just happy you saved me . . .”

  “Shut up!” she snapped. “You’re not from here.”

  “No,” he said, “I live down in LA. I was passing through . . .”

  “Passing through?” she asked. Who did this guy think he was kidding? “Passing through? Here? In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not on any map. Not anymore. So why are you here?”

  This guy Daniel stuck to his story. “Honestly, I was coming down the coast. There was an accident. I came into town to look for help, and now my daughter is missing.”

  She could feel the weight of the hammer. Certainty had given her strength, but it was draining from her now. “Your . . . your daughter?”

  Daniel nodded. “Yes. She’s nine.”

  Lisa realized the hammer was dropping. She pulled it back up and stiffened her stance. That’s what he wanted her to do, to lower her guard. “Bullshit. You’re a liar. You’re a fucking liar!”

  “Here, look,” Daniel said.

  He reached for his backpack. Probably a gun! Lisa swung the hammer and Daniel jumped back. She screamed at him, “Get back! Get back!”

  “Easy!” Daniel said. “Easy! In my backpack. There’s a doll, my daughter’s doll. Look for yourself.”

  Lisa got to one knee by the backpack, keeping her eyes on the man. With her free hand, she jerked the zipper of the backpack open. She could see the golden strands of fake hair catching the faint light. She pulled the doll free and stood up. It was worn but well cared for, its clothes a mismatch of new and constantly laundered. She looked into the dolls eyes, then to Daniel who stood in front of her with his hand outstretched waiting for the doll. She almost didn’t hand it to him, wanting instead to cradle it to herself, as if by squeezing it tight enough she could go back in time to when she was a little girl and things made sense. But she outstretched her arm and handed the doll to Daniel. He held it in front of her.

  “She named it Chrissy. It’s the only thing she has left from her mother, and she’s going to want this back. Somewhere out there is a very sad, very scared little girl, and I have to find her.”

  Lisa let her arm with the hammer drop. Real life was going to hurt more than that hammer ever would. “She’s . . . she’s probably dead by now . . .”

  Daniel stepped up, and Lisa saw something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a long while – hope. “No, some people took her. I think they’re the same people responsible for all this.” He waved his hand as if he meant her apartment, but Lisa knew what he meant. “This whatever it is that’s happened to your town. I need to get her back.”

  Lisa shook her head. “Why? Why would they take her?”

  Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want my daughter back.”

  Lisa looked Daniel up and down. He was wearing a long sleeve shirt and his pants looked intact. She saw no rips or tears. She jerked her head back towards the door. “Did those things in the hall get you?”

  Daniel blinked, apparently not keeping up with the change in the conversation. “What?”

  “Did they get you?” she asked. “Did they bite or cut you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Did they bite you?” she screamed, raising the hammer back up.

  “No, they didn’t,” he said.

  She lowered the hammer. “Sometimes, people get bit by those things, then they become one of those things. One of those things that attacked you? Used to be the Parkins. I think the other were the Fitzgeralds.” The Parkins were always nice to her, an elderly couple that moved to Shellington Heights after retiring. Meredith, the wife, was Filipina, had met her husband Richard when he visited the Philippines when in the Navy, and she always cooked food Lisa had never tried before. The Fitzgeralds kept to themselves mostly, but they would leave small tins of cookies for everyone in the apartment every Christmas. They had a small girl. Lisa wondered what happened to her. Had she escaped? Did she turn into one of those things? Was she caught by her own parents, wrapped in a cocoon to be slowly exsanguinated over days?

  At that gruesome thought, Lisa’s mind snapped back to the present. “But they didn’t get you? They didn’t cut you?”

  “Uh, no, they didn’t get me,” he said.

  Lisa studied him for a long moment, then ran at Daniel. He put his hands up to block her, but Lisa wrapped her arms around him and hugged him with all her might, the hammer still in her hand. She grabbed him by the head and kissed him, a long and passionate kiss, as if it was the last kiss she would ever have. Then she held him, resting her head against his chest.

  “I thought I was the only one left,” she said. “I thought I was all alone.”

  She held him. After a moment, she could feel Daniel’s arms hugging her back, light and uncertain, but they were there. It would do for now.

  Charlie Lightfoot was getting dirt on his suit.
He lay on a large boulder and stared down to the mill below through a pair of binoculars. From his vantage point on the side of the mountain, Charlie could see his targets walk up the gravel road and through the gates of the old saw mill. It reminded him of that kid's show on TV when he was little, looking through the magic mirror and seeing who they could see. There was a man he didn’t recognize and a woman he did, both as blonde as Fox news anchors and in business suits. He lingered on the woman’s shapely legs for a bit before moving on. There were a couple of those four-legged abominations flanking them like guard dogs. That was interesting. He knew the abominations didn’t attack them, but until now he hadn’t realized they were at the business suit people’s beck and call. Made sense, they were the ones that summoned them.

  And between them was the girl, Bethany. Poor kid, she looked scared. The dog monsters were sniffing at her, eyeing her, and the girl knew that it was the business suit people keeping the monsters from ripping her apart. Charlie couldn’t blame her for being scared, but he wondered how much of a threat they really posed to her. She was the key, whatever the hell that meant. Didn’t that mean the monsters and whatever else needed her? They weren’t completely mindless if they could take orders, but then a dog could obey orders. It didn’t mean a dog could reason.

  Hanging on the rusting gate was a new metal sign that said, “Shellington Heights Mill – a BEC enterprise.” Charlie gritted his teeth. The mill was the town’s main source of income for generations, but like many lumber mills, it had struggled in recent years. Then BEC swooped in and bought the place up. At the time the town folk thought it was their salvation.

  “So that’s where they’ve been hiding,” he said. “Why out here, I wonder. Guess that doesn’t matter.” He started looking around, getting a head count of creatures guarding the mill. “Looks like at least a half-dozen of those dog things, I see two of those snake-arm things, and three things I don’t know what to call them. Ugly looking bastards, though. Anyway, to do this right, we’ll need at least a dozen on our side.”

  Dropping his binoculars, he slid down from the rock and out of sight of the saw mill. Charlie got to his feet and started brushing off the dirt and pine needles from his own suit. He looked up into the sky watching the dim fog-occluded sun. Was it his imagination or were the days shorter now? Were they even orbiting the same sun? He had no idea, and his grandfather was no help. He was a sharp guy, his grandfather, but he wasn’t exactly Neil DeGrass Tyson. His grandfather could recite from memory the mythologies of dozens of different cultures and speak lord-knows how many different languages, but he knew nothing of astrophysics or quantum physics. He supposed it didn’t matter. It could be some guy in the sky with a giant flashlight, it wouldn’t change anything. He needed to rescue the girl and get the last rite back.

  Charlie started walking back down the trail. “We need to plan ourselves a rescue.”

  After a few feet, however, Charlie noticed he was still alone. He stopped and looked back to the boulders and tall trees.

  He asked, “You coming?”

  For a moment, Charlie questioned his sanity. It would have been easy to believe he imagined all of this – the monsters, the never-ending fog, his cousin killed – but then two of the trees pulled its roots from the ground. The live wood creaked as the large redwoods morphed and twisted on itself, forming legs and necks and tails from its branches and trunk.

  Charlie sighed. He almost wished he was crazy. He turned and led the living trees back down the path.

  15

  Daniel sat on the couch in the crazy woman’s apartment. He kept catching himself rubbing his injured arm and stopping himself. He hadn’t lied to the woman, not really. The spider things hadn’t gotten him. The wound on his arm was from a different monster from the other day. The woman had said some that were bit changed. Was that just the spider monsters, or all of them? If he was going to change into one of those things, how long did he have?

  The young woman was a buzz of activity. Daniel wondered how long she had been alone in the apartment. Judging by the piles of used food containers burying her small kitchen trashcan, he guessed a couple of weeks at least. The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes, but while the smell of the rotting food was faint but noticeable, there were no flies to gather. Along the kitchen counters she was relighting candles, their bases of large pools of once-melted wax telling Daniel they were well used.

  Looking around the apartment, he had to admit the woman was resourceful. In one corner were piles of DVD movies and books that no longer had bookcases to hold them, the pieces of which covered the windows in haphazard arrangements. Daniel cocked his head at the windows. They were on the second floor. Did the spider monster things crawl on the outside of the building? Or was there something else out there?

  The woman ran out into the hall that connected the bathroom with what he assumed was the only bedroom. In the dim light, she was a blur of bushy light-brown and unkempt hair. Daniel thought under the dirt and grime might be an attractive young woman. She grabbed some thick quilts from the hall cabinet, it’s door missing and presumably covering a window somewhere, and carried them to Daniel.

  “Here, I have a few extra blankets,” she said, the words rushing out. “The power is out, and so’s the water, but no power means no heater and it gets really cold in here.”

  Daniel took the blankets. “You could light a fire. What about the stove?”

  The woman shook her head violently, her shoulder-length hair flying. “No, tried that, wasn’t a good idea. Propane tanks might still have something in them, but the heat attracted those . . . things.”

  “Right, forgot,” he said, more to himself than to the woman. “It’s cold where they’re from.”

  The woman’s face turned from joyful to sober and suspicious in a heartbeat. She froze, her icy glare piercing his eyes. “What did you say?”

  “Huh? That I forgot that. Too bad, because it’s cold in here,” he said.

  The woman studied him with narrowed eyes. Then, in an eye blink, they were wide as her smile, and in spite going back to her pleasant mood, the severe mood swing was alarming. “Besides, fire’s no good. No place for the smoke to go. Smoke fills the place up, can’t breathe . . .”

  “Why can’t you open a window then?” Daniel asked, suspecting he knew the answer. “We’re on the second floor, can those things . . .?”

  The woman went to the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. She grabbed an empty pack of cigarettes and shook it hard, but no cigarettes shuffled out. She threw the pack back on the counter and said, “Yes, yes, they climb. They climb up from the ground, climb down from the third floor. Any other silly questions?”

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She stopped in her frantic running around. She found it hard to look at Daniel, brushing her hair aside but turning her head away to hide her smile. To Daniel, she now looked much younger, like a teenage girl with her first crush. “Lisa. Lisa Lamb.”

  Daniel blinked. “Elementary school must have been hell.”

  The woman, Lisa, laughed hard. Too hard, as if she had been starving for humor and needed to devour any joke no matter how small. Lisa clapped a hand over her mouth when she heard how loud she was, but the smile stretched past her fingers.

  “How long have you been here?” Daniel asked.

  “I’ve lived here for a few years . . .” she started.

  “No, I mean how long have you been holed up here,” he interrupted. “How long have those things been roaming the halls.”

  Her smile was gone. It was a little scary how quickly her moods would jump. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  Lisa shook her head. “The days, they blur into each other. I lost track.”

  “We talking days? Weeks?” Daniel asked, then added with a sense of dread, “Years?”

  “No, not years,” Lisa said, and Daniel felt a touch of relief over that. “Maybe a week. Mayb
e a couple of weeks, I’m not sure.”

  Daniel put the blanket in his lap aside. “You couldn’t have survived weeks without water.”

  “I had bottled water for a while,” she said. “Most of it's gone. So is most of the wine. I got used to drinking a lot of wine. Especially at night. Say, do you have any cigarettes? I haven’t had a cigarette in I don’t know how long...”

  “No, sorry, I don’t . . .” Daniel started to say.

  “Are you hungry?” she said, cutting Daniel off, her mood back to manic joy. Daniel felt his shoulders grow tense, afraid for when Lisa’s mood jumped back to the hammer-wielding psycho that saved him. For now, Happy Lisa darted into the kitchen like a happy homemaker from a 50’s sitcom. “I have some rice still.”

  “How do you cook it without a fire?” Daniel asked.

  Lisa opened a large bag of rice, the kind of bags from those warehouse markets that sell in bulk and scooped out a handful. She waited until all the loose grains sifted back into the bag, then carried the rest carefully as if each grain was more valuable than a diamond, which Daniel figured in this case it was. Lisa knelt in front of him and held the rice up, picking individual grains with her free hand and popping them into her mouth. The raw grain of rice crunched in her mouth. She held it up to Daniel who took a grain for himself.

  “Don’t cook it,” she explained as if the demonstration wasn’t sufficient. “Chew it raw. Kind of crunchy. A little goes a long way, actually. Keeps you feeling full for a while anyway. Do you want some?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, not sure what would happen if he declined.

  Lisa took Daniel’s hands with her free one and arranged them into a bowl. She poured the rice carefully into Daniel’s hands, beaming a smile back up at him, then goes back to the kitchen for some uncooked rice of her own.