Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2)

by Samantha Durante

  Isaac scrambled in behind her, pausing before he shut the lid to evaluate their options. They were as trapped in this bin as they were in the store, but at least the walls were solid and they were hidden away behind the fence – they were much less likely to be found here. The rank odor permeating the dumpster was a small price to pay for their lives.

  He grabbed the dangling chain to yank it out of the way and realized with a flutter in his chest that there was a lock attached to it, with the key still in the hole. Bingo – if he could get this fastened, even if they were found, the creatures most likely wouldn’t be able to get in.

  Grabbing the ends of the chain, Isaac dropped the lid as much as he could, leaving only enough room for his hands to maneuver with the lock. He pulled the chain tight and opened the clasp, slipping it through the links of the chain and securing it with a click. Pulling the key from the lock, he slipped his hands back inside and pressed against the roof – the lid lifted only a few inches, the tightly wound chain securing them inside.

  Crouched in the dumpster, he searched for Alessa in the near-dark. A slight gap between the rim of the bin and the lid shed enough light to catch her eye. “Are you –” he began.

  But she cut him off with a finger at her lips and a sharp look of warning in her eyes.

  So they sat in the shadows, waiting, their eyes locked on one another, the silence broken only by the thump-thump-thumping of their hearts and the ragged pulls from their lungs.

  Isaac concentrated on slowing his breaths, inhaling and exhaling through his nose in a controlled, deliberate motion. He needed to quiet his body before it betrayed them to whatever lurked outside.

  Alessa suddenly hunched over, clutching at her gut, her face a grimace of pain and bewilderment and fear as she looked up at Isaac for help. He reached for her shoulder, gripping it with concern. She moaned quietly and buried her face in his chest, muffling the sound of her soft cries.

  Isaac cupped her soft hair, pressing her face against him. He didn’t understand what Alessa was going through – this wasn’t a reaction he’d seen before. Did this have something to do with the odd feelings she’d been having of late?

  The crunch of broken glass outside the dumpster broke his train of thought. Alessa looked up at him with alarm and he just held her tighter in his arms, his ears straining to track the movement of the sound.

  The noise moved back and forth, back and forth, as if someone were pacing only steps away from the dumpster. Isaac held his breath, his pulse pounding in his ears, his skin crawling with every snap reverberating through the empty dumpster.

  And then suddenly the noise came faster, like more sets of feet tramping across the pavement in a violent rush. His ears pricked at the intrusion of their snarls and growls, eerily raspy and shrill at the same time. He couldn’t place the sound at all – it was unlike anything he’d ever heard.

  Squinting in the darkness, he tipped his head back and strained the muscles in his neck, hoping for a glimpse through the crack in the lid of the predators beyond.

  There was a quick flash as a hulking mass darted past the front of dumpster; Isaac jumped, quelling the gasp at his lips. Alessa convulsed under his arms, her face still buried in the front of his coat.

  For a moment everything grew quiet. Isaac fought the tingling in his limbs and willed himself a statue, not daring to move or breathe, his senses prickling at the slightest hint. Had the hunters left?

  BOOM, BOOM.

  The force of whatever had just landed on the lid thundered through the dumpster, the walls and floor ringing with an earthshaking rattle. Isaac and Alessa flinched as one, him bearing down instinctively over her curled, trembling body as the center of the ceiling crumpled inwards under the weight of their attackers.

  From above their heads, a magnificent piercing howl penetrated their hiding place, resonating off the walls of the hollow enclosure and chilling Isaac to his core. Any sense of security that Isaac had felt was shattered with that nightmarish wail; whatever it was that wanted them was directly above their heads.

  BOOM.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

  A series of crashes shook the dumpster from the sides, Isaac and Alessa lurching away from one thunderous bang only to be bombarded from the other side with the next.

  BOOM.

  Another jolt from above and a savage grating snarl sent Isaac jerking to the floor, his eyes wide with terror as he gaped at the buckling ceiling. This was no wolf, and no cougar – this was something far more dangerous.

  He seized Alessa in his arms and said a silent prayer for mercy. The only thing they could do now was wait to live or die.

  9. COMPOSURE

  It felt like hours that they sat there in the dark, the deranged frenzy of terror murmuring malevolently in their ears.

  Isaac couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when the noise from outside had subsided, but at some point, the creatures had given up. The only sound he heard now was the hush of Alessa’s breaths and the steady beating of his own heart.

  Eventually Alessa sat up, and Isaac realized that the sun had set – he could barely make out her shape beside him in the gloom. He took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall, letting his head fall against the support. He hadn’t realized how tired he was from holding his muscles tense through that long ordeal. His body felt drained.

  “I think –” Alessa cleared her throat. “I think we made it.”

  Isaac wondered if she realized she was whispering.

  “What were those things, Less?”

  Alessa gulped. “I – I don’t know.”

  The question hung between them for a moment, neither of them able to move past that harrowing thought just yet.

  “How about we stay put for the night?” she asked, a note of timidity in her voice.

  Isaac smiled – he certainly had no desire to face the horrors lurking outside yet either. “I think that will work just fine for me, babe.”

  Alessa reached for her pack and dug out her flashlight, setting it to lantern mode as she placed it on the floor between them. It filled the dumpster with an eerie blue-white light and cast long shadows on both their faces.

  She held her bag open to the light, rummaging around the main pocket for something. “There’s not much food left.”

  Isaac had lost his appetite anyway. “That’s okay – I’m not hungry.”

  “Me either,” Alessa said, dropping the knapsack. She let out a long sigh and pulled out a blanket, then leaned against the wall next to Isaac. She draped the blanket over both of them and pulled her knees to her chest under the covers.

  Staring at the floor, she confessed, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.”

  Isaac reached for her hand under the blanket and gave it a squeeze. “Well, you’re not the only one, if it makes you feel any better.”

  Alessa looked up at him with a small smile. “I’m sorry I shut down like that. Thank you for taking charge.”

  Isaac returned the sentiment. “Good call on finding this dumpster – I was ready to run back into the woods, and that almost certainly would have gotten us killed.”

  Alessa waited a beat before replying. “Isaac – I felt something again. That’s why I couldn’t react.”

  Isaac searched her face; he had suspected as much. “What did you feel this time?”

  “A lot of the same things – confusion, aggression, fear, something a little animalistic but also human at the same time. It’s hard to explain. But there was something else this time, too.” She thought for a moment. “Frustration. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. It was like there was something I needed to do but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t make it happen.”

  Isaac considered what Alessa was saying, but he still couldn’t imagine how this had anything to do with the creatures. He frankly didn’t know what to do with this information.

  “Well, you’re feeling better now, right?”

  Alessa nodded.

  �
�That’s what matters, then. It’s over, for now at least.”

  Alessa didn’t seem totally satisfied by that response, but Isaac just didn’t know what else to say. After a time she sighed and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Tell me what it was like,” she said, “for you and Joe, when you came to Paragon. And during the outbreak. I meant to ask you earlier, before the things came after us.”

  Isaac thought back to life before Paragon. It’d been almost a decade since the virus had torn his world to pieces.

  “I was 16 when we first started hearing reports of the virus. At the beginning, they seemed like isolated incidents, but the symptoms were so… gruesome… that it made the news, just for the shock value. It was clear from the outset that this wasn’t just another strain of the flu or something. People were bleeding from the eyes and nose, coughing up chunks of flesh, their skin mottled with those big black bruises. Just wasting away from the inside out in a matter of days. It was… horrifying.”

  Alessa nodded – Isaac was sure she remembered this from her own experience. He continued.

  “And then when it started popping up all over and they declared a state of emergency and instructed everyone to stay home, that’s when it really set in that this might be more than just a story on the news. They’d identified it as some sort of mutated plague, right?”

  “Yeah. But they still couldn’t find any way to treat it, so they were encouraging people to stay away from the hospitals so it didn’t spread.”

  “Right, I remember my mom saying that. Anyway, we stayed in our apartment like instructed, and it was so weird to all of a sudden be spending all day every day with our parents like that. We fought, a lot. Joe and I had gotten used to being left on our own – Joe was finishing his last year of high school, and I missed meeting up with friends after school every day, and neither of us could stand being cooped up in the apartment 24/7. But they wouldn’t let us leave.”

  “My parents wouldn’t either. I wanted to kill them at the time, but I guess they were just trying to protect us. I didn’t realize then how serious the virus was, how widespread it’d become. How deadly.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac concurred. “There was so much mystery surrounding the whole outbreak – it was really unclear to me how it’d gotten started, what we could even do to stay safe.”

  “They still don’t really know,” Alessa added. “I heard speculation that our enemies in the Eastern Allies had released it as a biological attack, but that didn’t seem likely to me, given how quickly their countries became infected as well.”

  “My dad thought it must have been some kind of mistake at a lab.”

  “That could be.”

  Isaac sighed. “So anyway, my parents had wised up after that food shortage a few years earlier at the start of the war, and they’d been stockpiling whatever they could since then in case we ever hit a shortage again, with the wars still going on. Of course, it wasn’t much – things were always tight for us – but we were in better shape than a lot of our neighbors.”

  Alessa nodded. “My mom had had some kind of intuition and went out and just bought a ton of stuff right when the first reports of the virus came out. ‘Just in case!’ she’d said and we all thought she was nuts at the time, but in a few months, boy were we glad she’d done it.”

  “I couldn’t believe how crazy people got. I saw someone get shot outside our window one day – he was just pushing a grocery cart full of supplies, minding his own business, and then boom – he was dead. They ran off with his stuff and just left his body there to rot.” Isaac shook his head. “We boarded up the windows after that. Luckily our building was run off solar generators, so electricity and water weren’t an issue.”

  “Oh really? We lost power after a few weeks, but it wasn’t so bad. It was summer at least, so we didn’t have to worry about the cold.” At that, Alessa shivered and burrowed deeper into the blanket. “So when did you guys decide to head to the quarantine zone?”

  Isaac’s eyes darkened – this was the most painful part of the story for him. “We ran out of food after a few months. I kept trying to eat less, to leave more for my family, to make it last, but I couldn’t do it. I was so hungry all of the time. My parents did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough to sustain us long-term. So finally one day my dad went out to scavenge, and he came back with a cough.”

  Alessa squeezed his fingers supportively as Isaac wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “We did everything we could, but the virus just took him.” His voice cracked. “It was only a matter of hours before my mom came down with a fever.” He closed his eyes and dropped his head against the wall, pushing the image of his dying mother from his mind. “And then she was gone, and it was just Joe and me. I don’t even know how we managed not to get sick. Lucky, I guess. If you can call any of this lucky.” He looked at Alessa with a shrug.

  She wrapped her other hand around his now too, cradling it in between both of hers. “How did you guys do it? You and Joe, on your own?”

  Isaac shrugged again. “By that point they’d been talking about the quarantine zone on the radio for a few weeks. We still had internet access, so Joe went to some local forums looking for other survivors who planned to make the trip. He found a group, packed up our stuff, and we went – there was nothing left for us at home.”

  “I can’t imagine doing that by yourselves. It must have been so hard for you guys.”

  “I was –” Isaac shook his head. “I was just grief-stricken. I couldn’t function. Our parents were dead, our lives were over, I just couldn’t deal with it. But Joe sucked it up and made sure we would be okay, like he always did.”

  Alessa turned away slightly, but Isaac could still see the tears dripping down her cheeks. He knew Joe had been Alessa’s rock as well – they’d both needed him.

  “So we just piled on a bus with this group of strangers and somehow we made it there. A few people fell sick along the way, and we had a couple close calls with thugs and that sort of thing, but eventually it all worked out and we pulled up to the gates.”

  Isaac fell silent for a moment, remembering his first days at the compound, and Alessa shared her own experience.

  “I think I’ve told you that my family all left together for Paragon, or what would become Paragon anyway,” she said. “But somewhere along the way my brother caught the virus, and then my parents, too. They’d just started showing symptoms maybe a day or two before we reached the gates. Our car even broke down about 10 miles outside the compound, and they found the strength to walk all that way. We really thought they would pull through, that if we could just make it to the compound, that they would have a secret cure or something that they’d been saving, just for those of us who were strong enough to get there.”

  Alessa choked back a sob and took a deep breath. “But they didn’t – they didn’t have anything. And then after we’d come all that way, they wouldn’t even let them in.” Alessa buried her face in her hands for a moment, sniffling.

  “My mom insisted that Janie and I go on, since we hadn’t tested positive for the disease. She still seemed to think there was a chance they’d somehow, miraculously, make it. Or maybe that’s just what she told us, to make sure we went on without them.” Alessa shook her head. “Either way, we never saw any of them again.”

  “When did you first meet Joe?” Isaac asked.

  “When they assigned us an efficiency unit. The first few days, we were in this refugee building, basically a sorting center where they were cataloguing everyone who’d come in and finding a place for them to live.”

  Isaac remembered – long rows of cots in a big open room, sounds of muffled crying from every other bed once the lights went out at night. It hadn’t been an easy adjustment for anyone.

  “We finally got our assignment and went off to find our building, and that same night I met Joe while wandering the halls looking for a less-crowded bathroom.”

  Isaac laughed. “Ah, yes. Joe had s
pent our first few weeks there scoping out the best spots in the building. There wasn’t much else to do at first.”

  “No, not until they started giving out the work assignments a couple weeks later. Then all of a sudden there was a little too much to do.”

  Isaac remembered feeling relieved when he was finally assigned to menial labor, working with the crews completing the walls around the compound – at least it was something to keep his mind off everything that had happened.

  “So then Janie and I just settled in, starting rebuilding our lives like everyone else, and Joe and I got to know each other. He was…” she looked a little wistful, “the best friend I had, besides Janie. It would have been a lot harder without him.”

  “They closed the gates a few months after we got there, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so. That was after we’d stopped receiving radio and internet broadcasts from outside,” Alessa recalled.

  “Were there other quarantine zones?”

  “You know, ours is the only one I ever remember hearing about. I could be wrong, though – it’s not like anything I heard really sunk in that year after the outbreak. Maybe they just had different messages on the radio or whatever depending on your region, so we only ever heard about ours. But I would imagine that other countries at least would have had them.”

  It was funny, but Isaac couldn’t remember hearing about any other quarantine zones, either. That seemed a little odd to him, but maybe he just didn’t remember like Alessa said.

  “You think there’s anyone left out there, Less?”

  Alessa sighed. “I don’t know, Isaac. I can’t imagine that there’s not. But then again, I couldn’t have imagined any of this ever happening, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder once more, and Isaac reached with his opposite hand to run his fingers through her hair. They stayed that way for a while, each lost in their own thoughts.

  Before long Alessa’s breathing had ebbed to the rhythmic cadence of sleep. Isaac switched off the lantern and closed his eyes, saying goodbye at last to this taxing day.