by Yul Calsto
Jake approached quickly but cautiously, he held his shotgun out and had his finger on the trigger. “Buggy, what the hell are you doing?”
Buggy turned from the edge and faced Jake. His boyish face had changed. His pale skin was still smooth, but his cheekbones had pierced through. The corners of his mouth were split and blood was trickling down. His features were set ablaze by the red sky.
“Buggy?”
The boy opened his mouth and hissed through a set of sharp teeth that dominated his face. The boy’s eyes were black and dead.
He screamed. It was a scream that sent Jake’s heart racing with fear. He expected the boy to leap at him, and he set his feet apart to steady himself. Bill set up behind him, his sword ready.
In an instant, the boy vanished over the edge of the building, landing on his hands and feet lithely on the pavement at the front of the store. Jake and Bill both ran to the edge, fearing the worst for the group below. And the children. They called out to warn them, but when they reached the edge and looked down, there was already blood on the pavement.
When he landed, Buggy stood quickly from his position on the floor. As he reached his full height, the blade of a battle axe beheaded him. Brooks followed through with his swing, and Buggy’s head went rolling into the parking lot.
Emily covered the three children’s faces, and her own from the sight of the decapitation.
The priest and Thomas were already in motion, up and down the aisles, filling their backpacks with cans of food. Tuna fish, ravioli, tomato sauce, corn, peas, spam…anything that would last a long time without refrigeration.
Thomas grabbed another two empty water jugs from the shelves, a five-pack of cigarette lighters, a sturdy camping knife, a frying pan, and a rope.
At the back of the store, Jake and Bill came back in through the exit, the red light from the sky filled the store. “We need to move quickly, there’s no way the Marked didn’t hear that.”
They saw Brooks come down the aisle with the other backpack. He pulled multiple cans from different areas of the shelf into the pack, filling it in a matter of seconds. He clipped it closed and ran with the others to the front to rejoin Emily and the children.
They heard a scream at the front and the red light that poured in from the front doorway became a bouncing puppet show of incoming shadows.
Jake ran to the front. Emily had the children, Jimmy, Josh, and Jenny, running from the entrance. The parking lot was moving with the Marked. He guessed there were almost fifteen of them, answering the call from Buggy, all just yards away from pouring into the grocery store.
“Get to the back. There’s an exit. Go upstairs to the roof,” he yelled to them.
The painful moans of the Marked were ringing through the hollow of the store opening. He could see the twisted faces of them coming at him in a run.
Jake shot the first one. The buckshot making quick work of its chest, and it dropped. Jake was backpedaling, but holding his shotgun steady. Another shot sounded, and another of the Marked stopped in its tracks. He turned and ran to catch up with the others at the back exit.
Brooks was already leading Emily and the children up the stairs outside. The priest held open the door at the back and Jake ran through, making his way up the winding staircase with the priest at his heels.
Bill, Thomas, and Emily waited with the children at the top. Brooks was at the roof’s edge, hanging over the twisting staircase with one of the gallon jugs of holy water ready to tilt. Jake and the priest moved past him.
The door below had no lock to keep it shut. It was quiet for a moment, and in that instant Jake thought that maybe he would wake up from this nightmare. He hoped that he might find himself in the calmness of his childhood home with his father reading to him near the fireplace.
A second later, the door slammed open and out poured a fury of the Marked, howling under the red light of the sky.
“Up here,” Brooks shouted down to the demons.
“What are you doing?” Jake asked.
Bill was ready to join Brooks in a glorious battle. “C’mon up, you devils.”
Jake was shoving shells into the shotgun. The priest held his revolver out in unshakable hands.
The Marked moved quickly up the staircase. The metal of the stairs shook at the pounding of evil footsteps, as one after another stampeded up with teeth showing and dark, dead eyes fixed.
“Now, do it now, Brooks,” Jake could see the staircase was full of demon hate.
“Steady,” he said calmly.
“They’re here, do it now.”
The Marked rounded the turn in the stairs, and Brooks unleashed a holy waterfall. He moved the jug back and forth, running along the roof’s edge over the staircase. The screams that followed were a hateful pain that would stay for a lifetime in the ears of all who heard it.
The stairs became a jumbled line of sizzling bodies, falling over each other in agony. The Marked below seemed to shrivel before them, their pale, bloody skin shrink-wrapped against their skulls. Some of them went reeling over the edge of the staircase, some simply twitching under the water, and few of them evaporating completely into ash.
Bill sprang into a frenzy down the stairs, his sword already red from the first of the Marked that he plunged his blade into. He stepped over the bodies of the weakened demons that were transforming before their eyes.
“Bill don’t. Stop him!” the priest yelled out.
Their calls for him to cease fell on deaf ears. Bill was already halfway down the stairs, mixing the blood of the collapsed Marked. His sword was sharp, and it cut through the chests and necks of the Marked, one after another as he trampled through the mess, plunging, and slashing down the staircase. The screams continued, but the yells from Bill were louder.
Jake followed the hippie. When he reached the pavement, Bill stood before him drenched in blood. The Marked were gone, and what lay on the staircase now was a line of people, horrifically cut open and dead.
The priest was down in an instant, “These are people, Goddamnit!” He held his revolver out in front him, the barrel pressed against Bill’s forehead. “People!”
“They were demons.”
“They were people. Like us!” he pressed his gun further into the old man’s head, enough to make him trip over his own feet and fall on the pavement. The priest stood over him. Jake wrapped his arms around the priest to hold him back.
They moved on. With supplies replenished, and water jugs refilled from the melting ice in the grocery store ice machines, they kept moving. The priest was at the front of the group with Jake, and Bill was at the back with Brooks.
They wanted to be as far away from the scene at the staircase as possible. They were tired. They had managed to sleep at Thomas’ house, but it wasn’t much, and their exhaustion was now multiplied by the skirmish at the store. They were hoping to be able to find some cover in the darkness and camp, but the red sky never ceased to radiate and darkness never came.
The group stuck to urban bike paths where they were more likely to avoid the Marked. This worked, but they also avoided picking up any survivors that could still be hiding in the suburban developments. They couldn’t risk it. They could hear screams of survivors off and on throughout the day. Some were nearby, just over the fence that separated the dirt path that they were on, and some of the screams were far in the distance and carried through the deserted landscape of the city.
At a creek bed underpass, they camped. Brooks made a small fire that he hid well in the rocks, and he boiled the creek water to refill the empty jugs.
“We have water for drinking, but we have only one jug of holy water left.”
The priest moved to the jugs and spread his hands out over them, blessing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. “I am a priest after all.”
Brooks smiled.
Bill separated himself from the group and washed in the creek bed. He was ashamed of his actions. The Marked had been transformed from e
vil, but he had moved in with his sword too quickly to realize what he was doing. In his mind, he was saving the group from death. Only after he had slain the last of the withering bodies on the stairs did he have a moment to think.
He reflected on it now, and he wept alone.
Jake was crouched by the small fire, and wished that Oscar was still with them. “We’re about seven miles from St. Patrick’s. I’ve ridden my bike on this pathway quite a bit. If we can stay out of sight, I think we can make it there safely in another three hours.”
They heard a scream in the distance. The red sky began to swirl with clouds overhead.
“I hope that there are people in the church when we get there,” the priest said with his eyes on the sky. “We could use all the help we can get. We’ll need to be able to survive for…who knows how long.”
“How are you doing, Emily?” Jake asked. She had been quiet for the most part, and Jake realized that they had hardly exchanged any conversation up to now. She had hardly spoken to anybody, really.
“I’m fine.” Her eyes were looking into the fire that Brooks was poking with a stick.
“Do you have…family? Here in town?” Jake knew this could be a bad road to walk down, but the words came tumbling out in a panic to make conversation.
Emily looked at Jake. He winced a little, expecting the worse. “No. Not here in town. They all live in the South. Georgia,” she said.
Jake was relieved. “I’ve never been there. Is it nice?”
“It is. I like it here better.”
“What brought you out here?”
“Teaching. I graduated with a history degree and the only employer that I had a lead on was up here.”
“Oh, you’re a teacher. What do you teach?”
“Third grade.”
The clouds overhead were black and spun around in a miniature tornado. They were small at first, but grew quickly and began to multiply into several currents. Three black swirls of cloud.
“I bet that’s fun.”
“Jake, what is going to happen here?” she asked.
He felt inadequate to answer this question. “I have no idea. But we’ll be safe. Don’t worry.”
The three children were standing around the fire. Jimmy, the oldest, sat in between Jake and the priest. “Where is my mom and dad, Mr.?”
Jake was thankful that the priest fielded this question. “They are someplace safe. Don’t worry about them. They’re watching you now.”
The other children gathered around their older sibling. “They can see us?”
“Of course they can. I think they are very proud of how brave their children are being.”
Jenny, the youngest, put her head on the priest’s shoulder. “Can we see them?”
“Of course you can. Close your eyes with me.” The priest was handling these questions with expert skill. “Now think of your mom and dad. What are they doing?”
The three children all closed their eyes. Jenny answered the priest first, “Mommy’s cooking us dinner.”
“Dad is fishing,” Josh said with a smile.
They felt a tremor underneath them, and the black swirls of cloud multiplied again into six tornadoes that hovered above. They suddenly pulled together, and each finger of black became a tentacle of a powerful hand that stretched out across the sky.
Jake was watching it with growing concern. “Get to the underpass. Everyone.”
He pulled Emily up and led her to the crevice of the underpass where the concrete of the road and the support came together. Brooks cradled the three children in his arms and followed Jake with the priest and Thomas behind him. Bill was still down in the creek.
“Bill, get in here,” Jake yelled across the slow flowing creek. Bill looked up, and the sky became dark, still red, but a dark red similar to the rolling clouds that previously overcame the golden light.
The swirling hand of clouds swooped down quickly and crashed into the earth like a meteor. It ripped apart the buildings that were in its path and squealed a high pitch that stung their eardrums. It moved quickly to the creek bed, and engulfed Bill before he had a chance to stand up. Water and rock burst outward from the impact and the creek bed was sucked dry in an instant. The hand became one swirl of cloud and lifted off the ground rapidly and disintegrated into the sky, spraying rock and water across the earth below. It gave a quick rumble of disgust and was gone.
The sky had changed from its cherry red to blackness and it became like night again. There were no fires to light the night this time. The earth rumbled once more at their feet and they heard the excruciating groan of the Marked nearby.
“Dad, put out the fire,” Jake whispered to his father.
The fire had already extinguished from the wind of the tornado, and Thomas hushed his son. They were in a blanket of black, and they couldn’t see each other. They huddled closer under the concrete crevice of the underpass.
The groan of the Marked became two. And then three. They could hear the shuffling of their feet and the sniffing of their noses as they came closer. Jake clutched his shotgun close, and the priest slowly cocked the hammer of his revolver. Thomas held his Glock ready in both hands. The children were held close by the arms of Brooks, each one holding a hand over their own mouths to not let a whimper out.
A shriek echoed in the underpass, and the eyes of a Marked were suddenly glowing red next to them. Emily screamed as the Glock leapt in Thomas’ hands. The red glow disappeared, but more shrieks were heard overhead and the scurried sound of footsteps came down the hill into the creek bed. There were two sets of glowing red eyes that moved quickly toward them. Thomas’ Glock and the priest’s revolver sounded as one. And again. The blasts lit up the underpass.
“We need to get out of here. Now.”
They moved down the dry creek bed in the blackness. Each footstep was a blind trust in God as the priest led the way. “Stay together,” he whispered.
The children were crying. Brooks held two of them in his arms and the other was piggybacking. Emily held his belt for guidance in the darkness. They stumbled in the rock-strewn creek bed.
A flash of lightning burst overhead, but there was no thunder. They kept moving. They could hear the shrieks behind them as the Marked came running to the underpass.
The lightning came again, and more frequent, until the entire sky was a spider web of Godly magnificence. Yet, there was no thunder. They ran.
The Marked were moving quickly after them. The darkness seemed to be no obstacle for them as they maintained a speedy pace, never stumbling once on the rocks.
“Keep going, I’ll catch up,” Jake stopped and flattened himself against the side walls of the creek bed. He pulled his shotgun up and readied himself.
There were three of them running after them, eyes glowing red. He stood up when they were upon him and the shotgun took the first two. Jake dropped the shotgun and held the curled dagger in his hands. The third Marked was already upon him.
They tumbled into the rocks and Jake could see the snarled teeth dripping fresh blood with each flash of lightning.
It bit into him and he cursed. Sinking the blade of the dagger into the stomach of the demon, he ripped it sideways in the direction that the blade curled, letting the serrated edge do the work. He felt a warm gush of blood against his skin, and the red eyes of the Marked stayed open, but he felt no resistance from its body.
The bite had gone into his pectoral underneath his armpit. He couldn’t see the damage in the dark, and he felt the warm blood on his body, but he wasn’t sure if it belonged to him or the Marked.
He ran.
The lightning lit his path, but he stumbled continuously along the way. His footsteps began to splash as the creek held puddles of water and stagnant pools were beginning to fill in the bed.
He kept running. He heard more shrieks behind him, but he did not look back. He could hear the suction of mud as his feet were finding more water, and he heard the trickle of the creek. He didn’t stop.
&nbs
p; In the silent flashes of light against the black sky he could see another underpass ahead. He hoped that the group was there waiting for him. The shrieks were getting louder behind him. Jake looked back. The creek bed was glowing with more pairs of eyes than he had hoped for. They moved quickly along the rocks, as agile as goats.
He stumbled forward, praying under his breath. The army of the Marked was screeching behind him.
“Jake, up here.”
Jake looked up the side of the creek bed, and in a flash of lightning, he saw his father’s hand reaching out for him. Thomas grabbed his son and they hurried up the dirt wall and soon found themselves on the road.
“In here. Go through, out the back.”
They moved into a gas station. It was empty, and the glass windows had been shattered out. Brooks was out front, the crossbow on his back, and he was feeding the long length of rope down a hole in the pavement to the chamber of gasoline below.
Thomas, with his son’s arm around him, moved them through the gas station building and out the back door. The others were already running down the alley behind the station with the priest leading the way. They were running hard.
“This is a good spot. Let’s hide here,” Jake told his father.
“No, we’re not staying.”
Jake heard a thunderous yell from Brooks at the front of the gas station as he gathered the demon runner’s attention. He heard the Marked scream with evil hatred as they followed Brooks through the building. He heard the back door of the building slam shut.
Brooks wedged the handle of the battle axe into the door handles, securing it shut. The Marked thumped on the door, trapped inside, unable to breakthrough, their shrieks of evil filled the night. With the lighter, Brooks lit the end of the rope that he had trailed out the crack of the door. He turned and ran down the alleyway, guided by Thomas’ voice.
The night became as bright as day as flames erupted like a volcano at the gas station, and a drape of fire cascaded in the black sky. The explosion rumbled the earth, and the fire was hot on their skin. There were no screams to hear.