by D. J. Molles
Sam took her by the shoulders and was about to turn her back for the door, to try to push into the mess of bodies milling to get through the front doors, but something flashed in the periphery of his vision and made him stop. He wasn’t sure why he stopped, wasn’t sure what about that particular thing in the corner of his eye had caught his attention like that. Perhaps something in his subconscious.
He turned and looked, eyes wide, brow furrowed.
Another face staring back at him.
The face was familiar, but for some reason, in the darkness, in the hectic battling of people to get into the door, it took Sam a moment to place that face. He couldn’t see the freckles in the darkness, but the annoying buck teeth stood out, the white bone seeming almost to glow.
Caleb.
Standing there with his mouth open. Staring at the doors to the Camp Ryder building, but not moving toward them. He was standing there at the very first row of shanties, at the very corner that was closest to the fence. Maybe a hundred feet from the Camp Ryder building.
What the hell is he doing? Sam thought, immediately full of anger, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. Caleb stood there, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his hands kind of fluttering in the air, his feet prancing.
But he wasn’t coming.
“Let’s go!” Sam heard Old Man Hughes bellow from inside the Camp Ryder building. “Make room! Let everyone inside! Get as close as you can to the back wall!”
Sam glanced behind him. The backlog at the doors was smaller now, maybe just a dozen people shuffling their way inside. They would be in and the doors would be locked and barred in less than a minute.
“Come on, Sam!” Abby urged him.
Sam held steady and turned back to Caleb, who still stood there in the shadows. “Caleb!” Sam waved him on. “Come on! What are you waiting for? Come on!”
But rather than come running, Caleb seemed to snap out of whatever trance the overload of fear hormones had put him into, and he turned abruptly and ran back into Shantytown.
Sam had taken two steps to run after him before realizing that Abby was still attached, and screaming her head off for Sam to go inside with her. He spun around and grabbed the girl by the shoulders. “Abby, I need to help someone get inside…”
This is stupid, he was thinking, even as his mouth spilled other words.
“Go inside and find Marie…”
Don’t go out there by yourself, Sam, don’t do it, you’re being stupid, and you don’t even like that kid, you don’t even like him, who cares what happens to him?
“Tell Marie that I had to help Caleb get inside, okay? Can you do that?”
Abby’s eyes were wide and gushing tears. “What? No! Don’t go out there! It’s dangerous! You have to get inside! You have to come inside with me so we can be safe!”
Sam extracted his arm from her and pushed her for the doors. Now that he was in the shadow of the building, the light splashing out from the open doors was an inviting square of illumination on the gravel, but he was no longer in it. “Abby! Do what I tell you to do!”
Sobbing, she turned and ran in the headlong manner of terrified children, as though her feet could hardly keep up with her and she might topple forward in mid-stride.
Sam turned and ran for Shantytown, thinking, I don’t even like Caleb. I don’t even like him. But he’d scream. He would scream if they got a hold of him, and I would hear it from inside. And I don’t think I could hear that. I don’t think I would ever sleep after that. I need to get him inside before the hunters get him and make him scream…
They made it halfway into Shantytown before Lee realized he had no idea where Jenny’s shack was. He forced himself to hold back a few paces and let Angela take the lead. She moved ahead of him without question or comment. He ran after her, following her down a row of blue tarpaulin hovels. They were close to the fence, and Lee kept looking up at it, trying to see if something was climbing over. But it was empty, and the woods beyond were still.
Angela pushed her way into the shanty, Lee directly behind her. The interior was small and cluttered. There was a series of large blankets spread out on the floor, on a layer of cardboard. This was a makeshift bed. Curled in the corner of this thing was a lump of blankets. Steam came from the top in billows, along with the sound of rattling breath.
“Shit.” Angela moved to the lump of blankets. “Jenny?”
The blankets stirred. Jenny looked at them, but her eyes seemed glazed and feverish. “Angela…” Jenny’s voice was a croak. “I feel horrible. I can’t… can’t even walk.”
Angela bent down over where Jenny was lying and pulled the blankets away. In the dimness, Lee could see crusted and frozen vomit on the blankets and on the side of Jenny’s face. “Oh my God.” Angela’s nose wrinkled. She touched the other woman’s forehead. “You’re burning up.”
Jenny’s eyes flickered open and closed. Her head lolled. “I need some help…”
“I know, hon.” Angela waved Lee forward. “Help me with her.”
Lee stooped, not relishing the idea of taking his hands off his rifle. But he told himself the Marines were on the roof. They would cover their run. They were professionals. He could trust them. So he slung his rifle onto his back and slipped his fingers under Jenny’s armpits.
“Ready?” he said, his voice breathy.
“Uh-huh,” Angela replied and then lifted.
Jenny grunted and moaned as they pulled her up off the ground. “Where you guys takin’ me? Where we goin’? You takin’ me home?”
“Yes, Jenny,” Angela said as they struggled to get her through the cluttered shanty and to the door. “We’re taking you home.”
Lee moved backward through the door, stopping to poke his head out of the flap. Jenny’s shanty was close to the fence and the woods beyond. He could not see the hunters, but he could hear them, the snuffling, shuffling, growling sounds of them working through the woods, rattling the fences, looking for the weak points that they could exploit.
Sweat, cold and clammy, on his neck and chest.
Please, Marines, have my back…
He headed through the door. The tarp brushed past him, like weak hands trying to grasp him, desperate ghosts begging for his attention. He ground his teeth together, baring them, feeling the cold, bracing air hit them, drying them, and making them ache.
“I’m so sorry,” Jenny was mumbling. “I’m so sorry about this.”
Something hit the fences hard, perhaps a few rows of shanties away. The sound of metal rattling and creaking and tearing loose. Then Lee heard it, right along with the sound of the defenses being mounted and torn away—the sound of feet hitting the ground. Multiple sets. Hitting, and then running.
Somewhere in Shantytown, a hunter screeched.
Jenny twisted violently in their arms, eyes going wide and fearful almost to the point of panic. “Are there infected? Where are they?” She tried to look around and almost ripped herself out of their grip.
Angela struggled and then clamped down on Jenny’s arm. “Chill out, Jenny,” Angela said sternly. “We got you. We’re getting you inside the building. It’ll be warm and safe.”
“Don’t… don’t let ’em get me,” Jenny said.
Lee was hauling backward, his leg muscles burning and his ankle screaming. He was moving so fast that he was pulling Angela along as he moved, the pain a peripheral reality to the concept of being carried away and fed on while his heart was still beating in his chest. He kept glancing behind him to see how close the Camp Ryder building was. He kept thinking they’d gained more ground than they had, but when he looked, it seemed that they were no closer.
Go, go, go! Gotta go! Gotta get inside!
He was breathing hard. He looked back around. Angela was straining to keep the pace and still hold on to Jenny, who was still writhing in their grip, falling into some sort of delirium. Her fever must have been cooking her brains. She seemed more out of sorts than anyone else Lee had seen come down wit
h the pneumonia bug.
“Almost there,” Lee said breathily, though his own heart was sinking, thinking, Are we gonna make it?
The sound of bare feet slapping across the hard-packed dirt and gravel of Shantytown. A throaty roar. A shadow among the shadows, just over Angela’s shoulder.
“Fuck…” Lee tried not to drop Jenny, but her head hit the ground anyway and she mewled out a pathetic sound of pain.
“What are you doing?” Angela demanded, though she barely had the breath in her lungs to speak.
“Grab an arm!” Lee barked, then whipped his rifle around and tucked the buttstock under his armpit, holding the rifle in tight as he stooped to grab Jenny’s other arm. Now Jenny was strung between Lee and Angela as they lifted her and started moving again, her heels dragging across the gravel, bouncing along loosely, uselessly.
Lee was facing forward now, running for the Camp Ryder building.
They were within fifty yards.
“They’re behind us,” Jenny croaked. “Behind us!”
Lee twisted as he ran, a clumsy version of the “karaoke” drill he’d learned in high school football. A dark shape loomed toward them, close on them. Lee pulled the trigger, firing his weapon single-handedly from the hip.
He had no idea where the rounds went, but a louder sound than the report of his 5.56 mm cartridges boomed over Camp Ryder and the thing that was so close on their heels suddenly face-planted in a tumble of arms and legs, spraying black blood across the gravel.
Lee turned forward again, pushing, pulling, trying to get to the building. They were so close. He looked up and could see the shape of one of the Marines on the roof, shouldering a large rifle. When he looked back down, three Marines were pouring out of the doors to the Camp Ryder building, running for them with their rifles up.
“They’re behind us!” Lee shouted hoarsely. “Behind us!”
The Marines bolted past them, already firing as they formed a thin line directly behind Lee and Angela and Jenny, giving them cover for their retreat. Between the gunfire Lee could hear his breath rushing in his throat, harsh and cold and raw, and he could hear the crunch of gravel underneath his feet, and he could hear them inside Camp Ryder now, more than before, their barking and roaring filling up the blackness. But every time Lee turned there was nothing to see but shadows, jilting at odd angles from the muzzle flashes of the Marines’ rifles. Streaks of pale, bare skin that moved through Shantytown with incredible quickness and agility.
The Marines were backing up as they laid down suppressive fire.
The night around them screeched at them like one giant, angered beast.
It moved, and crawled.
Lee was about to turn around, when a shape leapt out of the darkness between two shanties, slamming one of the Marines to the ground. In a single second, Lee saw it. What had once been a man, now a creature with flailing dreadlocked hair and a mangy beard clinging to his impossibly wide mouth. Long, iron-corded arms wrapped the Marine up as the two of them hit the ground, the greedy, gaping jaws clamping over the Marine’s face, stifling his scream before it could even come out. The hunter ripped its head back and forth, snapping the Marine’s neck.
The two other Marines pivoted with their rifles, shouting out for their downed comrade. Lee was still sidestepping, his rifle pointing in the direction, still deciding whether or not to pull the trigger—the Marine’s neck was broken, but did that justify firing indiscriminately into the tangle of limbs?
And then the hunter did something that Lee had not seen them do.
It bounded away into the darkness, leaving the crumpled body of the Marine there on the ground, bloody, twisted, and twitching.
Lee turned and ran for the doors.
The hunters weren’t just killing for food. They were eliminating threats.
It was on the second row of Shantytown that Sam heard the gunshots and stopped dead in his tracks, his left side pasted up against the tarpaulin wall of some construction, feeling the cold of it come through the shoulders of his jacket.
Out beyond his little circle of reality, the sounds of screaming and screeching battled, echoing back and forth inside Camp Ryder, ringing around his head like a ricochet. He felt the terror in him, heavy and black and immovable. Like rusted hinges, it made his limbs difficult to move.
They’re here. They’re here, right inside of Camp Ryder.
What are you doing, Sam? Just go back inside the building…
Somewhere close to him he heard the sound of whimpering.
Dammit… he’s somewhere close. Just get him and go. Grab him and take him back, it’s just that simple. You have to do it. You have to do it so that you don’t have to hear him scream when the hunters get him…
But they’ll get you.
They’ll get you, Sam, and then you’ll both be screaming.
He leaned around the corner of the shanty that he hid behind. He could see all the way down the row and into the Square. He saw a flash of bodies in the darkness, the shape of them lit by one side from the light that was pouring out of the open doors of the Camp Ryder building. The rest of the figures lay in shadows. He saw rifles, spitting yellow and white, and the figures didn’t stop running. There was something chasing them.
Sam leaned back into cover, trying to catch his breath. The air around him seemed like it was short on oxygen. He kept sucking it in, but it didn’t seem to be doing him much good. He felt his knuckles aching because of how hard he was gripping the little rifle.
Twenty-two caliber.
Not big enough to stop a hunter.
You’re screwed. You’re so screwed.
You can’t find that guy that you don’t even like, and if you ran for the building now, the hunters would see you, and they would chase you down and tackle you before you got there. You’d be exposed out in the open.
You’re so screwed.
You tried to be a hero, and now you’re screwed.
Sam closed his eyes, but that lasted only for a fraction of a second. The complete darkness terrified him. He wanted to shut out the horror around him, but he didn’t want to be blind to it. He didn’t want to let it hurt him. He had to keep moving.
“Keep moving,” he said, his voice a thready whisper.
It seemed like good advice. Like something Captain Harden would say.
Almost laboriously, he turned back in the direction he had been heading. Back in the direction of the whimpering noises. Back in the direction that he had last seen Caleb. He moved slowly, his feet feeling heavy and burdensome. His shoulder slid along the tarpaulin wall, a steady, quiet zzzzzz sound.
Gunshots to his left.
The sound of heavy, animal breathing.
Footsteps speeding through the woods on the other side of the fence, so very close to where he was.
A voice in the darkness, thin and childish: “Go away. Please, go away.”
Sam peeled himself off the tarpaulin wall as he came to the beginning of the next row of shanties. He stood there at the corner and listened, but for a long moment, all he could hear was the sound of fighting. People were shouting back and forth, and all around them, the infected hunters were growling and screeching.
Don’t let them get me, please, God, don’t let them get me.
A brief lull in the sound of gunshots and screaming, and this time Sam heard it, very close: “Go away, go away, go away. Make them go away.”
“Caleb!” Sam hissed through the darkness.
He thought the sound of the other boy’s voice was coming from the next row of shanties. Sam was staring straight across at it, a simple wooden construct with some plastic siding to keep water out of the cracks. The door was made of canvas, but it was pulled aside and slightly inward, as though someone had run haphazardly through.
Someone like Caleb, trying to hide.
But now the voice was silent.
“Caleb!” Sam said, just slightly louder.
Somewhere very close, an infected barked.
Sam ducked
down, almost flat to the ground.
He felt cold dirt on his hands and knees. The rifle in his grip, reassuring and not, all at once. It was something, but it was so small, and the dangers were so big. The creatures in the blackness were strong and powerful and he knew all in an instant that he was woefully undermatched. He had made a mistake. He had made a Big Fucking Mistake.
Frozen to the ground for a time. Like frost was making him stick to it. And then finally he forced one hand in front of the other, his knees shuffling across the ground. Jib and jabs of sharp gravel rock stabbed him in the palms of his hands, but he could not convince himself to stand on his own two feet. He wanted to be low. He wanted to be invisible.
He made his way to the shanty that was sitting half open in front of him, and he slipped inside.
It smelled of foul breath and dirty socks.
He could hear his own breath huffing in the air.
Something moved just outside.
The air caught in his lungs. He listened, staring at the blackness inside the shanty, waiting for his eyes to perceive something in the sludgy darkness. There were cracks in the wall of the shanty, and dim light shone through, the source of which Sam had no idea. Perhaps the lights of the Camp Ryder building, or perhaps ambient starlight, perhaps neither. But he could see those glowing cracks blotted out as something moved stealthily on the other side. Just a shadow laid against the wall. And the sound of breathing.
Nasally. Heavy.
Sniffing the air.
Don’t smell me. Don’t smell me.
Sam lay frozen on the ground, his heart beating out of his chest.
The shadows kept creeping across the siding, the cracks, all the way to the corner, where the door was situated.
Sam wanted to move away from the door. His feet were there, just inches from it, and the door was only cloth, hung to provide privacy. The thing on the other side was there. Sam couldn’t see it, but he knew that it was there, listening, sniffing for prey, sniffing for him. Waiting for him to move, to make just the slightest sound, and then it would burst through the flimsy curtains and rip him to shreds with its teeth and its claws.