by Chad Morgan
“Looks pretty clear to me,” he said.
Lisa walked up to him and took in the view, then just as quickly went back to pacing. “I don’t know, Daniel. It’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
Daniel hung his head for a moment. Going to the guns was her plan. Well, it was his plan, but where to go get them was her idea. She had been all gung-ho earlier, but now that it was evolving from an abstract idea to action, she was losing her nerve. Daniel sighed. “You said yourself, if monsters attack people, which turn in monsters, then go where there were no people. You say this side of town is the commercial area?”
He felt Lisa’s slender hand take his, and she tugged him towards the door. Her action lacked any strength or conviction, a plea instead of an order. “Daniel, let’s get back indoors. We can find a place to hide . . .”
He knew this was coming ever since they found the vacant apartment. Even with two corpses in it, Lisa’s instincts were to crawl into a hole and hide. She was like an alcoholic fresh on the wagon and discovering a bar. Daniel looked at her straight in the eyes with an expression that, he hoped, was commanding yet compassionate. “Inside is a trap, Lisa. Eventually, they’ll find a way in like they did at your apartment. We need a way to defend ourselves.” He pointed to the camping store. “That building over there? That’s the store with the hunting gear?”
Lisa looked where he was pointing, then back at Daniel. “Yes, that’s Buck’s.”
“What’s that over there?” he asked, pointing to the building with the large windows.
Lisa looked. “Dora’s Diner. Why?”
Daniels brows went up. “That’s a diner? It’s so big.”
“It used to be a lumberjack dining hall,” she said.
“A what?”
Lisa had the look of a child having to give a school report. “In the old days, the lumber company used it to feed their lumberjacks. Now it’s a tourist trap. Why?” Her mood swung to full panic. “What’s wrong? Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Daniel rubbed his forehead. This was going to be painful. “Well, if it makes sense that there are no monsters at the bank because there would have been no people to turn into monsters . . .”
Her eyes went wide, and Daniel knew the panic attack was washing over her. “Shit,” she gasped. For a second, Daniel thought he might have gotten lucky and that was the extent of it, but then Lisa ran for a corner of the roof and curled up in a fetal position, chanting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Daniel shook his head, looking out at the town. Every problem had at least one solution, though not always a solution you liked. He could hear Lisa continuing to curse and he said, “That’s okay, we just need to plan ahead,”
“Because your last plan worked out so well,” she spat, every word dripping with sarcasm.
He turned to look at Lisa. “It worked, didn’t it? And I had like five seconds to come up with it.”
There were still faint trails of smoke from behind Lisa to remind Daniel of how well that plan had worked. It only took burning down all of Lisa’s possessions, her getting stabbed. and almost breaking his ankle. Still, for an impromptu plan, it did work. They got away. So now he needed a new plan for a new problem.
“So, what’s your plan for the diner?” Lisa asked, and mixed with the sarcasm was a dollop of hope.
Daniel turned back to the street. He stared at the buildings. “I have no idea.”
“Great,” Lisa spat. “Wonderful.”
“Will you relax?” he said, staring at the diner. “I’ll think of something. There’s got to be a way by there.”
“I told you, it’s a lumberjack dining hall,” she said. “It was built to feed half the town, and now it’s going to be filled with those things. We go near it, they’ll leap through the windows and we’re done. Face it, we’re fucked.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. “What else is new.”
He stared at the street, willing an answer to come. He walked to the edge of the roof, and then he saw a possible answer. He pointed to the edge of the diner.
“Is that an alley back there?”he asked.
Lisa didn’t bother to get up or look. “Yeah. So?”
Daniel smiled. “So, they aren’t going to have any windows on the alley side. We can sneak by and they’ll never know we’re there.”
“And if something comes at us in that alley, we’ll be trapped,” she said.
Lisa had a point. If something came at them from one end, they could retreat, but if they came from both ends they would be trapped, much like he was trapped in the apartment hall before Lisa saved him. He doubted he would get lucky like that twice. It was a risk, but was it likely to happen? At night, maybe, but the monsters were less prevalent during the day. He turned to Lisa. “Yeah, I know, but do you have a better idea?” When Lisa said nothing, he added, “Yeah, okay. Let’s get moving.”
Lisa didn’t move. Daniel knew leaving her apartment was a huge step for her, but she would need to do much more if they were going to get out of here. He walked over to her and knelt in front of her. “We have to move. We can’t just curl up in a corner and hope this goes away. They found you in your apartment, they’ll find us here. It’s only a matter of time. We get to the camping store, we can at least get weapons and defend ourselves.”
He left unsaid his fears that the store had already been looted of anything useful. It was their only viable plan, and he didn’t want to fuel her counter argument. If they got to the camping store and it was empty, he’d deal with it then.
“I know you’re scared,” he continued. “I’d be more worried about you if you weren’t. But I need you to be brave for just a little while longer, okay?” He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m going to get you out of here. I promise.”
Lisa looked up at him and met his eyes, then she nodded. Daniel stood up and held his hand out to hers. Her slender hand took his, and Daniel pulled her to her feet. Letting go of her hand, he walked to the narrow stairwell and headed down. Halfway down he stopped, realizing he was alone in the stairwell. He paused there for a heartbeat, then two. Right before he went back up to get Lisa, she entered the stairwell. Together, they headed for the alleyway, and hopefully a safe passage to the camping supply store.
Charlie stood on the roof of a building kitty-corner from Buck’s Sporting Goods and across the street from Dale’s Gas. Parked in front of the small store at the gas station was a large semi-truck, a trailer full of cut logs that would never make it to the mill. Damn, after all these years, Dale’s Gas was, well, still Dale’s Gas. He and Carolyn used to go there every time they were in town. It was the only place to get baseball cards with the world’s worse gum inside. Dale also didn’t mind they were Native American’s, unlike that bigot that ran the small store on the other side of the street.
Not for the first time, Charlie felt the pain of knowing his cousin was gone, and he wondered when he and his grandfather would ever have time to mourn her death. His grandfather was right, of course. They had a world to save, and Carolyn would want them to complete their mission, but when this was over he would get good and drunk. Then, he would probably cry like a two-year-old with a skinned knee. For now, he needed to find the people responsible for this mess and get the scroll.
He still didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together, but when the trees started walking he started going along with things. He knew the bad guys needed the rite written on the scroll to make what happened in Shellington Heights happen everywhere, and his grandfather needed it to put everything back. And the kid was involved somehow. That part his grandfather was vague on. Maybe the ritual had to be read by a virgin or something? And now he had to find and bring back the dad? When he got back to the graveyard, he’d have to talk to his grandfather. Maybe it was time he stopped going along with things and get some more details.
Charlie watched the bank through a pair of binoculars. He was sure those suit-wearing fucktards were in there. If not there, then where?
“C’mon, yo
u bastards,” he said to himself. “You have to be out here somewhere. Where the hell are you hiding . . .”
He stepped out of the bank. Him. That blond-haired Aryan dickwad. He stepped out, looked around, then walked back into the bank. Charlie lowered the binoculars and smiled. “Gotcha!”
Charlie climbed down the stairs of the building and, making sure the coast was clear, sprinted across the street. His bow and quiver banged against his back as he ran, and his dress shoes didn’t grip the road very well. Not for the first time, he wished he was better dressed for all of this. In his mind, Charlie was creating an apocalypse gear list for the next time, and then he shuddered at the thought of all this happening again. He unslung the bow.
He walked up to the truck cab and opened the driver’s side door. A body fell out of the cab, and Charlie jumped out of the way in time to avoid getting hit as it fell to the ground in a wet splat. The body’s chest was ripped open and all the messy internal organs were missing, but the face, frozen in unbelievable pain and horror, was recognizable. Around his neck was a necklace like the one Charlie wore, which explained why this was a human corpse and not an attacking monster. Well, didn’t exactly explain, but that’s what his grandfather said they would do. Again, he would need some details when he got back to the graveyard.
Charlie knelt to the body and looked at the face. “Jacob? Oh, man, I’m so sorry. I was kind of hoping you were out of town when this went down.”
The town had a love-hate relationship with the reservation. Most reservations were a downward spiral of unemployment, substance abuse, and inefficient policing from insufficient federal funding. His grandfather and the tribal chief went to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen in their reservation. One of his grandfather’s biggest contributions was a cultural center that attracted tourists to come and learn about tribal life. Then the mill started laying off people, and the tribal lands being a major source of income for the town earned them both gratitude and jealousy.
Jacob had been one of those friendly towards the Native Americans. Charlie even considered him a friend, though once he left the reservation he never looked back. In the world of social media, he kept track of Jacob’s life as well as any others in the town. Jacob was a freelance trucker. Charlie had hoped he was out of town doing a run. No such luck.
A rustling came behind him. Charlie swung around, arrow cocked in his bow, to see two avatars walking towards him. The branches and vines shaped themselves to look like gorillas, their forearms hitting the ground like giant clubs. Charlie lowered the bow.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he said to the avatars. Once his heart beat slowed down to normal, he climbed into the cab. He turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. He looked at the gauge, then turned to the avatars and said, “Out of gas. Good thing we’re at a gas station, huh?”
Charlie slid out of the cab and, careful not to step on Jacob’s body, walked over to the pumps. He pulled out the nozzle, flipped the pump to on, and squeezed the handle. Nothing happened.
“No power,” he said to the avatars. “There might be some kind of emergency hand pump in the station.”
The two avatars looked at him blankly, which was how they looked at everything because they had no eyes. Charlie was wondering if they had grown roots, or if whatever hocus pocus made them move had left, like exiting a suit of armor, but then the two avatars turned and started to walk away.
“Hey, wait!” he called to them. The two avatars stopped and turned back to him in unison, which Charlie thought was creepy as hell. He stepped up to the avatars and said, “Look, I know where the scroll is.” The avatars didn’t move, and Charlie wasn’t sure if they were not understanding him, or simply unable to express their thoughts. “You know, the scroll? The thing we need to make all the bad things go bye-bye? I have a plan to get it, but I need the truck.”
He gestured to the cab behind him. The avatars didn’t move. “To get the truck to work, I need diesel. To get the diesel, I need to get the key to unlock the underground tanks and see if they have an emergency pump.” He pointed to the metal caps in the pavement, and again the avatars gave no indication they even heard him.
Charlie continued, “Dale used to have one of those that ran off of a car battery for when the power went out. If I can find that and the key . . .”
The avatars didn’t blink, didn’t shrug, didn’t even rustle. Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose and said to himself, “I’m talking to topiary.” He looked up to the avatars and said, “Just watch my back, will you?”
The two avatars watched him as Charlie turned and walked to the store of the gas station, shaking his head and saying under his breath, “Lassie would have understood me.”
23
Charlie stepped into the small store of the gas station. It was about half the size of the convenient store on the other end of the street, at least if his memory served him well. There was a weird smell, like burning oil and bar-b-cue. At the far end was a door that led to the garage, where Dale would do car repairs, oil changes, that sort of thing. Near the front door was the cash register, and on the wall behind that were the cigarettes and nudie magazines. Charlie remembered staring up at the covers when buying baseball cards or sodas as a kid, a tantalizing treat forever out of his prepubescent reach. The shelves were empty now, the metal pieces ripped down and hanging at odd angles. Littering the ground were packages of cards of all different sorts, from different games and different sports, but there were still baseball cards. Some things never changed.
“Charlie?” a week gasp came from behind him.
Charlie spun around, bringing his bow to bear, but he immediately lowered it. Along the back wall, where the fountain drink dispensers sat empty, a woman hung from the wall, her arms stretched out as if crucified.
“Sue Ann? Oh, God.” Charlie ran between the display racks, leaping over debris to get to her. Sue Ann was, like Jacob, another old friend from when he lived in the town. As kids, Sue Ann had been way out of his league, as Carolyn loved to remind him, but she had been the subject of his first adolescent crush. Her freckles had faded, her braces were gone, and her hair was dirty, but that was the same face a young Charlie Lightfoot fell in love with.
Then Charlie skidded to a halt. Her lower body was shredded, the flesh and muscle torn into strips by gigantic claws. Those once shapely legs he and Jacob would stare at from across the cafeteria were now bloody chunks of loose-hanging burnt meat. Charlie choked down the urge to vomit, now knowing where the burnt meat smell came from. The burning of her lower body probably cauterized the wounds and kept her from bleeding out. Looking up at her face, partly to calm her and partly to look away from her mangled lower half, he saw the familiar necklace around her neck. Well, thank god for that, at least.
“Jesus,” he gasped. “Hold on, I’ll get you down.”
“Ben . . .” she said, her voice weak.
Charlie laid his bow on the ground and grabbed an overturned box, sliding it in front of Sue Ann. He stepped on it, testing to see if it would hold his weight. When he was confident it would, he stepped up and grabbed Sue Ann. He couldn’t pull her free, and Charlie began looking at how she was suspended from the wall. It looked like her palms were nailed to the wall with . . . was that bone? Oh, lord, please don’t let it be her own femur.
“Don’t talk,” he said, hoping he sounded reassuring and not panicked. “I got you.”
“Ben . . .” she said again.
“Been what?” Charlie asked, trying to pull the bones out of the wall.
“Ben,” she said. “Behind you.”
Charlie froze, his ears perking up. As slow as possible, he turned to see the thing that used to be Ben leap up onto the counter. His shirt, with “Ben” stitched onto the right breast, was molded into his skin, which was now wet and bubbling in what looked like crude oil. Charlie’s eyes grew wide as its hand, if you could call it that, swelled up into a ball of black muck, then the damn thing caught fire! The Ben m
onster flung his arm at him like a baseball pitcher and the flaming blob of oil snapped from its arm and went flying at Charlie. He dove for the ground, but the fiery blob splattered on the wall next to Sue Ann. She screamed as her skin sizzled, the air filling with a fresh wave of burnt flesh. A pang of guilt gripped Charlie’s heart, but he was no help to Sue Ann if he was dead.
Ducking behind the shelves, Charlie’s bow was on the other side of the aisle. He reached out for the bow, but he heard the fluttering of flames and jerked back just as another flaming blob splattered on the wall between the shelves. Splatters of fire hit his legs, and Charlie’s pants began to smolder. He grabbed whatever was lying nearby and swatted out the flames, adding melting plastic to the odors in the air.
Charlie heard the thing that was Ben land on the ground with a deep squelch. He could hear the wet footsteps as it came down the aisle, and Charlie skittered away, keeping low. The monster that used to be Ben peered around the aisle, but Charlie was already gone, making his way down the next aisle. He had to sneak around the abomination and get to his bow. Only then would he have a chance. Hadn’t he asked those two avatars to watch his back? Where were they anyway? There was definitely a communication breakdown between human and fir tree.
Charlie and the creature crossed each other at opposite ends of the aisle, Charlie cutting over as the creature stalked past. He was almost to the isle where his bow was when his damn patent leather shoes squeaked on the tile. He bit down hard, keeping the curse from flying out of his mouth, but the damage was done. The Ben-thing leaped onto the top of the shelf and reached down for Charlie. He dove out of the way, reaching for his bow as the shelves fell over like dominos. The shelves came down on his lower half as he twisted and fired the notched arrow at the thing, but it was already gone. Damn, for a goo monster the thing was fast! The thing jumped in front of him, straddling the fallen shelves, which put even more weight down on his lower half. The thing reared back, forming another glob of flaming oil above Charlie’s head.