They locked eyes for a moment, and Eleanor glanced away, flustered. She had a rule not to date colleagues, but since she was always working, she ended up not dating anyone. Now on the wrong side of thirty, she’d come to the conclusion that she’d married her job.
At first glance, she knew they could have been mistaken for a couple taking an evening stroll through the woods. A small path led between the trees, thick with foliage. Heavy shadow dappled the ground. Only the high bricked wall surrounding the enclosure, topped with razor-sharp barbed wire, and the presence of the high security building at its center gave any clue that this wasn’t simply a protected area of woodland. That and the numerous shallow graves dotted around.
They stopped beside the disturbed graves.
Eleanor smoothed back her hair. “Damn it.”
Oliver was a fifty-six-year-old male in a state of early decomposition. His clothes hung in tatters from his body. The white flesh of his stomach, arms, and feet was exposed, dirt peppering the skin. His hands rested palm up, the fingers curled toward the sky.
The sweet scent of rotting flesh filled the air, but it didn’t affect Eleanor. The smell of decay surrounded them most of the time. The face of the cadaver had decayed, bloated, almost unrecognizable to anyone who might have known him. Bugs skittered across the flesh; a multi-jointed millipede, legs flowing like water, rippled across the face and disappeared inside the mouth.
But the black plastic bag he’d been wrapped in was discarded on the ground at his feet.
Eleanor shook her head in dismay. “Someone is obviously trying to mess with the experiments. There’s no other sign of disturbance except for him being uncovered. What about the other one?”
Robert jerked his head in the direction of the second corpse. “I’ll show you.”
They crossed to the other side of the path.
Tom, another older male, was still slumped in his shallow grave, but the two feet of dirt he’d been buried in lay scattered around the body.
Eleanor huffed out a breath of exasperation. “Who the hell would do this? It must be someone who works here. A trespasser would never be able to move the bodies to this extent and not be noticed. Christ, they look like they just stood up and shook themselves off.”
Robert ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to say. How would someone have come in here and disturbed the bodies without being seen?” He paused, considering something. “Why would someone do such a thing?”
“There are plenty of freaks around. This place isn’t as much of a secret as we think. People are sick enough to want to mess around with the bodies.”
“I don’t know, Eleanor,” he said, turning a circle, his hand locked in his hair. “This just feels…” He trailed off, his eyes focused on something in the near distance.
“What is it?” Eleanor asked, anxiety buzzing through her body. “What’s wrong?”
Robert didn’t answer. Instead, he strode off down the path, stopping twenty feet away. “Look at this!”
Eleanor ran at a gentle jog toward him. Where a body should have been buried, there was now only a six-foot deep gaping hole. Fresh dirt spilled from the empty grave, but there was no sign of a body.
“Where’s Bernie?” she said, all of the hairs on the back of her neck standing to attention. While she wasn’t a superstitious person, bodies disappearing and moving apparently without any help was always going to give her the heebie-jeebies.
Robert shook his head. “This is impossible. Nothing had touched this site when I was here twenty minutes ago. There’s no way someone could have got in, unburied him, and taken the body away in that time. Especially since I went straight from here to security. They’re watching the cameras, and they’d have spotted someone digging.”
“So someone is working on him then,” she said, her scientific brain always going for the most obvious answer. “Maybe you just didn’t notice?”
“No. I’d have noticed. I checked everything was how it should be because of the other two. There’s no way I missed it.”
Eleanor bit her lower lip and shook her head, baffled. “I don’t know what to say, Robert. I mean, Bernie didn’t just push his way out of the ground, so someone’s taken him.”
His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “This is nuts.”
“So what do we do?” she asked. “Cover the other bodies back up and try and preserve as much of the experiment as possible?”
“The experiments are null and void now. We’ll have to start again. And I don’t think we should touch anything. Whoever has been messing with them might have left some evidence. We wouldn’t want to disturb it.”
The pair turned away and walked back to where the two uncovered cadavers lay.
Eleanor crouched, her keen eyes searching the area and body for anything that might help forensics—a thread of material not matching the body’s clothing, a shoeprint in the mud. She examined the pale, rotting skin, the fingernails filled with dirt, trying to spot clues as to who was responsible.
As she stared, focusing intently on every detail, the hand twitched, fingers curling inward, little shocks of spasms jolting through the digits.
“Shit!” Eleanor jumped back, her heart pounding. “What the hell was that?”
Robert’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. An electrical charge?”
“He’s been dead over a year. You really think there are any synapses firing?”
“No, I guess not. That’s what it looked like, though.”
“Must be insect activity,” she said, her heart slowing to its normal rate. She leaned in closer.
The hand jerked, lifting right off the ground for a second before falling back down.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Robert.
The hand twisted and jerked. The rest of the body lay still and impassive, the eyes missing, filled in only by dirt and the cases of long-dead bugs.
Her stomach had lurched into her throat. “There is no way that’s caused by insects.”
A crashing through the undergrowth, twigs cracking and tree branches snapping, leaves being torn away, snatched away their attention. Both doctors looked up. Whatever was headed in their direction, it was big, and they both knew no big animals were in the enclosure—they couldn’t have the wildlife making meals of the corpses.
Eleanor slowly got to her feet, her eyes trained on the bushes. Unconsciously, she reached out to Robert, her fingers grasping his broad forearm.
A piercing shriek of rage reached their ears, and Bernie rushed out of the bushes. A fat man when he’d died, his flesh hung off his bones in flaps. His lips had long been eaten by bugs, but his mouth stretched wide open as he screamed, revealing tombstone teeth and a fat, bloated tongue. He rushed at them, his arms outstretched, his eye sockets empty and blind.
The dead were alive.
Eleanor stood for the briefest of moments, her brain trying to comprehend what her eyes were seeing. Then Robert grabbed her hand, yanking her out of her reverie.
“Run!” he yelled, pulling her along. “Fucking run!”
Eleanor burst into motion.
With the thing screaming behind them, its speed incredible for a person who had been dead several years, her feet slammed against the concrete path. Her breath ripping in and out of her lungs, Eleanor glanced back over her shoulder. The creature was gaining.
On either side of the path, other graves rippled and shifted. Bodies moved, exposed limbs twitching. The lid on a trashcan where another body had been placed slammed up and down as whatever was inside struggled to get out.
Eleanor and Robert collided with the entrance to the secure facility.
Frantically, she swiped her card to get access to the building. The led light showed red, red, red.
“Come on, you fucker!” she swore, and the green light flicked on and the door buzzed open.
They burst into the building, slamming the doors behind them, the automatic locks clicking into place.
Part Two
Bernie slam
med into the glass pane of the door, clawing and grasping at the window.
The two doctors backed away, trembling, their eyes wide with shock.
“What the hell…?” Eleanor breathed.
Another body came running toward them, one Eleanor didn’t recognize. It seemed to be filled with such fury and hate, focused on getting to them.
“What the fuck is going on?” demanded Robert.
Eleanor’s heart raced. This wasn’t possible. This simply couldn’t be possible. She’d seen people she knew were dead run and move like the living.
They were surrounded. On every side of them, the acre of enclosure was filled with almost a hundred bodies. Were they all like this? Had they all come back? Mentally, she scanned what she had seen. On their crazed run back to the building, she’d barely had a chance to think, but now that she looked back, she could see it in her head. Almost all of the graves had been disturbed.
“Do you think it’s all of them?” Robert asked, picking her thoughts out of her head.
“I don’t know. Jesus, I hope not.”
More bodies slammed against the glass, an elderly woman, her face little more than holes with scraps of skin, her long white hair clinging to her scalp, and a middle-aged man, not long dead, his face and hands bloated with gases. They tore at the locked door, bashing their rotten fists and mouths against the glass panels, leaving smears of dirt and putrid flesh. The doors were strong, purposefully designed to keep out intruders, and they didn’t budge under the onslaught.
Robert’s fingers wrapped around her forearm, his blunt nails digging into her skin. He tugged her down the corridor, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from what was happening. Her neck craned backward, watching the things claw at the door, their rotten faces pressed up against the glass.
“Come on!” Robert yelled, yanking on her arm, snatching back her attention.
On autopilot, their feet smacked against the linoleum floor as they raced down the corridor to Eleanor’s office and lab. They burst through the door, and Eleanor slammed it shut behind them, using her key card to lock it.
Panting, she pressed her back against the door. “What the fuck?” she said, staring at Robert, her eyes wide. All the blood had drained from Robert’s face, his skin as ashen as one of the corpses. “I must be dreaming. Please God, let me wake up. I must have fallen asleep at the slab, and this is all just…”
Her thought of work sent her eyes skittering across her lab to the mortuary table, where only thirty minutes earlier, she’d been working on a corpse.
The silver surface lay empty.
“Where the hell is Janet?”
Robert spun around. “Who?”
“The woman I was working on when you came in to tell me about the disturbances. She’s gone.”
His eyes locked on the empty table and widened as the implication of her words sank in. “Holy shit! Where is she?”
Both the office and the lab only held the two doctors. Wherever the corpse was, it wasn’t in the room with them.
Robert’s hand went to his mouth. “You know what this means. Assuming someone hasn’t moved her, and from the scene outside that seems fairly likely, then she…”
“Moved herself,” Eleanor finished.
He shook his head, pacing up and down the office floor. “What do we do? The same thing might have happened to all of the cadavers. This place might be riddled with them.”
“We need to lock ourselves in here and hope whatever is going on out there will end.”
“No. We’re blind in here. We need to get to the security office. They’ve got cameras all over this place. At least then we’ll know what we’re up against.”
Her stomach dropped. “So we need to go back out there?”
“Only to the security office. It’s three corridors down. We can make it.”
“Oh God.” Nausea washed over her, bringing with it a rush of heat. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. Can’t we just hide in here and wait for someone to come and rescue us?”
“What if no one is coming?”
They stared at each other.
“Okay,” she relented. “Let’s do it.”
Using her key card once again, Eleanor opened the door. Cautiously, she poked her head out into the hall. All was quiet. There was no sign of any bodies.
Light-footed, the doctors ran down the corridor. Every muscle in Eleanor’s body was tensed for attack, but none came. The silence around them was almost too quiet, as though something was waiting.
Where are all the dead bodies?
There were at least two in the building, and no doubt more had been stored overnight in the mortuary. What were they doing? Grouping? Trying to figure out a way to let the others in?
“I don’t like this,” she hissed. “It’s too quiet.”
They reached the security office booth. Glass windows were embedded on either side of a black door. A silver panel with touch buttons allowed access to those who had both the key and the code.
Inside, the two security men huddled together. An older man, Jimmy, had his arms around a younger guy in his early twenties. Kyle’s dyed black hair stuck up from his head as he peered at them through the glass.
Robert yanked on the handle, but the door didn’t budge. The two men stared at him, bug-eyed, clinging to each other.
“Hey!” Robert smacked his palms on the window. “Let us in!”
“How do we know you’re not contaminated?” Jimmy shouted, his voice muffled through the barrier. “You’ve been out there with them. We saw you.”
“Jesus, don’t be ridiculous. We’re fine. We need to find out what’s going on. We’re the scientists. If anyone is going to figure this thing out, it’s us.”
“No way!” yelled Kyle. “You could have those things out there with you.”
“Let us in, you assholes!” Eleanor beat her fists against the solid door. The possibility of attack lurked at her back. Bodies were missing in the building and could come racing down the corridor at any minute. “You want to die in there like trapped rats, or do you want to do something and survive?”
The two men glanced at each other.
“Okay, do it,” said Jimmy.
Kyle stepped forward and disappeared from view as he swiped his security card. On the outside of the door, the red light flashed green, and the two scientists imploded through the door, slamming it shut behind them.
Eleanor snatched up one of the phones. “We need to get hold of someone—the police, the military.”
“We’ve already tried,” said Jimmy. “It’s just an automated answering service.”
Robert turned on him, his eyes narrowing behind his glasses. “What do you mean? Who did you try?”
“Everyone,” Kyle answered in a rush. “We tried every number we have. No one is answering.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is,” said Jimmy. “Try for yourself.”
Eleanor’s gaze flicked to Robert, who nodded in encouragement. With her heart in her throat, she dialed 911. Robert leaned in close to hear.
“I’m sorry, but your call cannot be taken. We advise you to stay in your homes at this time and keep all of your doors and windows locked. Help will be with you shortly.”
She hung up. “What the hell sort of emergency response is that!”
Robert was pale-faced. “It’s not just here. Whatever has happened to our dead has happen on the outside as well.”
“So what are you saying?” Jimmy asked. “That we’re stuck here? That no one is going to help us?”
“It sure sounds like it.” Eleanor’s thoughts turned to the people she had on the outside. Both her parents lived out in a retirement home in Maine, and while she tried to visit them as often as she could, the distance made things difficult. She prayed these troubles stayed a long way from her family. She couldn’t bear to think that the last thing her parents experienced were these nightmare creatures coming for them. They wouldn’t be able to defend themselves
or run away.
At the thought, she choked back at sob, her hand held against her mouth.
Robert rubbed her back. “Thinking of people on the outside?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for the moment.
“I wish I was with my pa,” said Kyle. “He’s got an armory in his basement. He’d take these fuckers out.”
“What about you, Jimmy?” asked Robert. “You got anyone on the outside?”
“I’ve got a son, but he lives in England now with his wife and kid. Hopefully this madness hasn’t spread across the pond.”
The older man eyed him. “You?”
Robert shook his head. “No, thank God. I’ve always wanted a family, but I guess this is one time I can be thankful it never happened. I’ve got friends out there, but I’m hoping they’ll be able to take care of themselves.”
Eleanor nodded, empathizing with his words. She’d always imagined herself with a family one day as well, but her work had taken over, and before she’d realized it, she was thirty-seven without even a date with a live person lined up. But Robert was right. She wouldn’t need to be terrified for the lives of her loved ones, of children and a husband.
Her gaze flicked to Robert’s strong profile beside her, and her heart weighed with sadness. She’d believed she still had time. How could she ever have imagined life would end up like this?
Movement on the numerous small security monitors that made up most of the back wall caught her attention. In synchronization, the inhabitants of the security booth turned, their eyes trained on the screens.
On each one, the dead were running at speed, no shuffling gait of rigor mortis-ridden corpses. No, they had purpose. There were numerous corpses in various states of decomposition, with clothing hanging in tatters from their limbs, flesh peeling like old paint from their bones. Yet none stumbled or limped. Whatever state the bodies were in, they moved with the unnerving grace and speed of an athlete.
In every small square of the monitors, the dead ran toward them, toward the cameras.
Eleanor clutched her hand to her mouth. “They’re all coming to the building. They know we’re in here.”
13 Night Terrors Page 23