by Scott Hale
A scream, but not from the creature he hit. An old woman and a small girl emerged from the carriage and bolted through the breach left by the wounded monsters. But they were slow and wounded themselves; they didn’t get two feet before the rest of the zombies were on them.
“Please, they’re my people!” Mayor Covert fired and shattered one of the creature’s jaws. “Ms. Carol, Lisa, hold on!”
Herbert’s stomach sank. By simply saying their names, the old woman and the small girl were elevated above the unknown corpses piled high around him. Knife in hand, he ran and ripped through the group of zombies, driving the blade into their necks and ears. The zombies moaned and drooled as they fell backward and on their sides. But by the time Herbert had a clear view of Ms. Carol and Lisa, he wished he hadn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, backing up before the zombies, so intensely ravenous in their feasting, realized he was there.
Under the cover of gunfire, Herbert made it to the mayor’s house unscathed. As he pulled open the door, he caught sight of a group of armed townspeople making their way through Marrow.
“Where’s Boone?” Mayor Covert said, startling Herbert.
Herbert shut the door behind him and caught his breath. He shook his head and said, “Divorced.”
Mayor Covert’s eyes were red-rimmed and filled with tears. He fell against Herbert, bawling as he managed to say, “She did this. She did this. Herbert, how did this happen?”
“We have to get out there.”
Herbert patted Roger’s back. When he pulled his hand away, he found his palm covered in red. Was it the mayor’s blood, or the blood of all those he’d loved too much to let live as undead?
“Did you bring people to the inn?”
Mayor Covert nodded. He stood upright and swallowed hard. “Some. There’s two upstairs.” He sniffed his nose, fell against the banister of the staircase, and started to cry again.
“We have to keep moving. Once we have the… living… secure, we’ll take care of the rest. Okay?”
Again, Mayor Covert nodded. “What’s happening, Herbert? Where’s your partner?”
“Seth’s going to the inn, too. It’s a lot to explain, mayor. Just… if you see one of the missing children… blow their fucking head off. Trust me.”
Joseph
They don’t like it when I kiss them. Mommy said they would. They always cry. Crying makes them taste funny. Mommy said she filled us up with love. Mommy said we should fill them up with love, too. They yell at me and ask me to stop, but I know they like it, because after a while, they get real quiet, and I can kiss them as much as I want.
There’s so many people here to play with. They look scared. I tried to play with the girls and boys in their rooms, but I think I hurt them. All their mommies and daddies are in the front. They look scared, too. I think they’d feel better if they were together.
I let them out. They really didn’t like being locked up in those rooms. Everyone is kissing everyone now. Mommy will be happy. I like making Mommy happy.
Herbert
When they finally reached the inn’s wraparound porch, Herbert stopped and introduced himself to the father and daughter he’d helped escort there. He hadn’t wanted to know their names, or for them to know his, until he was certain they were safe. It had always been better this way. Too many victims haunted him at night as it was.
“Dale Jones,” the father said, shaking Herbert’s hand with the kind of firm grip only the grateful can manage. “This is my beautiful daughter, Scarlet. She’s eleven.”
Scarlet smiled. If she hadn’t been surrounded by putrid death, she may have even blushed at this strange stranger.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice softened from a night of screaming. Her dark blonde hair fell in front of her face as she asked, “What happened, Mr. North?”
Mayor Covert, having lagged behind, finally arrived outside the inn and said, “Come on, come on. Inside, let’s get inside.”
“I’m not sure, Scarlet,” Herbert said, looking into the girl’s eyes, which begged him for an answer, a justification for what had happened to her small, quiet, uneventful, can’t-wait-to-leave-here-for-the-big-city town. “But we’re going to get you out of here. Ready?”
“Ready,” Scarlet said, the hint of a smile behind all the dirt and blood on her face.
“Ready,” Dale said, looking at his daughter as though he were trying to figure out how he could be as courageous as her.
Mayor Covert nodded as he held on tightly to the rifle that had so quickly killed so many of his own.
Herbert North took one last look at the place he would never truly know. He looked at the faded yellow houses, soft and bloated, and the fire spreading between them. He looked at the bone-white earth and the blood tide washing over it. He looked at the creatures roaming through the town, scavenging for flesh in all the places flesh may hide. How did they end up here? How did things turn out this way? The kind thing to do would be to leave some of the zombies behind for others to find and to give credence to the stories the survivors would tell. But could they take that risk just to raise awareness, just to fend off psychosis? He caught a glimpse of the group of armed townspeople again—already their numbers seemed thinned—and when he looked back to the zombies, he counted several more than before.
“Mr. North?” Scarlet’s words shook him from his thoughts. “Are there more people like you?”
He smiled and turned away from Marrow. Reaching for the inn’s front door, he said, “Not enough.”
“I could do it,” she said, squinting her eyes to look scary, like a soldier surveying a battlefield.
“Better than us, I bet.” Herbert nodded at Mayor Covert, and Mayor Covert nodded at him. “Stay close. There may be a few in here since you last left. I don’t know how long it takes to turn.”
“I made sure,” Mayor Covert said.
“Good.” Dale bent down, and Scarlet climbed up his back and held onto his shoulders. “Good, thank you, good, good.”
Herbert pushed open the front door and, for a moment, time stopped. Everyone was there, just like the mayor had said, but what he had brought and what now stood before them was not the same. They were zombies, all of them. Under the bloodstained ceiling, from each blood-drenched wall, men, women, and children stood tightly packed, their fresh, seething wounds rubbing into one another’s. And beyond the hungering horde, at the top of the stairs, Joseph sat, his cheeks fat like a chipmunk’s as he stuffed his face with strips of flesh.
“Herbert! Get the hell out of here!”
He spotted Seth at the farthest end of the second floor, where most of the balcony was in splinters. Seth looked as though he were about to collapse, and his clothes, his expensive, entirely inappropriate for the occasion clothes, were shredded.
Herbert turned to his companions. “Mayor, go, please. Run. They’re slow. You’ve got your gun.”
And before they could object, he stepped into the inn and slammed the door shut behind him. He didn’t bother barring it, because he knew they wouldn’t follow.
“What are you doing?” Seth fired a bullet at Joseph, but missed.
What am I doing?
Goosebumps ran up and down his arms as the zombies began to realize he was there.
What am I doing?
He had run out of bullets, so he turned his pockets inside out for the bagged powers inside.
Rapture, Grave Dust, Ensnare… Rapture.
There wasn’t much left of the black, purple-flecked component, but it was more than enough to get the job done.
“Seth, do you still have Damnation?”
The two powders needed to be segregated for obvious reasons; neither man had any interest in having the end of the world start in the crotch of their pants.
Seth nodded as he held out the little bag of death.
The floor vibrated and shook as the zombies limped towards Herbert. He had five seconds at most before hundreds of teeth were picking clean his bones.
>
“Shoot it!” He pretended to throw the bag into the air.
“What about the kid? I only have one bullet.”
Joseph looked at Seth and swallowed the meat in his mouth. He started to stand, ready to run.
Herbert shrugged, fell back against the front door, and flung the bag of Rapture into the air. It soared above the zombies. When it hit its peak, Seth fired. The bullet ripped through the bag, showering the creatures in the thick, abyssal dust. The zombies, seemingly mesmerized, looked up and reached out, as though they were children caught in winter’s first snow.
“Get out!” Seth pulled back the hand that held Damnation. “I’ll meet you out back!”
Herbert turned to leave, but before he could, Seth shouted and crashed into the floor. Through the rungs in the banister, Herbert saw Seth and Maribel atop him, with Joseph crawling over to join in the fun.
Several hands reached out and pulled Herbert into the sour mass of flesh. Fingers dug at his skin, pinched it as though it were putty. He kicked and slashed the creatures, severing hands, slitting throats. Those he injured fell, but only out of habit. Crooked mouths with flicking tongues closed on his side, his shoulder. He shook and flailed; stabbed their heads, gouged their eyes. Corpses collapsed upon him and died one last time; using them as a shield, he crawled across the sticky floor towards the front desk.
“Are you still… get the hell off—”
Herbert looked up and saw Seth’s bloodied hand hanging over the edge of the second floor. He stood up, shedding the leaking body sprawled across him. He leapt for the front desk; a hand caught his ankle and pulled him back down. His chin cracked against the hardwood floor. With one hateful kick, he smashed the zombie’s face in and then hurried to his feet.
“Hold on! I’m coming!”
Herbert stepped onto the front desk and followed it around to the huge bookcase behind it. As the mass of undead converged on him, he jumped onto the bookcase and scrambled up it. The case swayed, and its shelves buckled, but he kept climbing until he was at the top, on the top.
Without thinking, because he had no time to, Herbert jumped. Again, time stopped, and as he thrashed through the air, he saw the seemingly endless citizens of Marrow below, wallowing in their own mire of filth, waiting for him to fall.
Time resumed; the edge of the second floor was coming up on him. He threw his hands out, caught the banister and a bit of the carpet beyond.
“Seth, just hold on!”
His legs dangled over the crowd of flesh beggars as he fought for purchase with bloody hands. Slowly, he pulled himself up and over the banister. Wasting no time, he ran for his friend.
Seth was still screaming, which was a good sign. But the fact Maribel was digging at his stomach like a dog was not. Herbert bolted across the second floor, grabbed the girl by her greasy hair, and slammed her face into the wall.
Joseph growled and scurried over Seth. He caught Herbert’s legs. With more strength than should’ve been possible, he knocked Herbert over. Joseph punched him in the face, in the throat; Herbert coughed and wheezed.
God damn son of a bitch, he thought as he braced his arm against the child’s chest, forcing him back. Joseph kicked between his legs, grinding his toes into Herbert’s testicles.
“Get the fuck off!” Herbert knocked the boy back and then cupped himself as pain struck like lightning throughout his body.
Seth caught Joseph as he lunged again for Herbert. Maribel staggered over to save her brother, but her eyes had rolled back into their sockets, and she couldn’t see where she was going.
“Where is it?” Herbert called in between pathetic moans. “Where’s the dust?”
“On me,” Seth said as Joseph wiggled to be free of Seth’s hold. “Grab Maribel and…”
Joseph tipped his head back and made a choking noise. The front of his shirt started to move, became bunched up as though something were behind it. Seth wrinkled his nose as he smelled something foul, like the boy had vacated his bowels.
“I think they’re dying, Herbert,” Seth said, furrowing his brow as Joseph shook in his hands. “Grab Maribel and we’ll—”
Joseph had one final spasm, and then the buttons blew off his shirt as two heads tore through his stomach. Skeletal arms with feet for hands dropped out of the gaping hole and hung there limply. The two heads, rubbery and fused, had teeth all the way up their ears; and at the top of their skulls sat a crown of fingernails and bone fragments.
“Now, Herbert,” Seth said, lifting the boy and his conjoined brothers and throwing him over the banister.
Joseph, still choking, crashed into the clamoring crowd below, the force of the collision ejecting his sibling from his chest.
Herbert hobbled to his feet. He scooped up the blinded Maribel.
No more. This is over. Bringing her to the banister, he noticed the lightness of her body, the softness of her skin. He saw the way her eyebrows arched, as though she were in pain or afraid. Maribel was a monster, but she hadn’t allowed herself to become this way. The fact that she had been created for this purpose gave to her a kind of pathetic purity that weakened Herbert’s resolve. No, he couldn’t let her live—she was too dangerous, too infectious—but perhaps if the situation had been different, if Seth hadn’t been there…
Herbert held Maribel over the edge of the second floor and then released her. Wasting no time, Seth opened the pouch of Damnation Dust and tossed it into the air. End over end, it went, and with every grain of the powder that fell, a small, green fire started where it landed. The hellish flames spread rapidly amongst the Rapture-coated dead. When the pouch hit the ground, it exploded into a pillar of flames that shot upward through the center of the horde to the ceiling itself.
“Do you think some of the kids were still in there? In the bodies?” Herbert searched the smoke for signs of Joseph and Maribel; he wanted to be sure they had died.
“Their souls?” Shadows swept across Seth’s face from the tornado of fire spinning through the inn. “No, I don’t think so. I hope not.” He sighed and took his friend’s hand. “We’re done here, Herbert. Let’s go.”
Joy
From the Void, the world looked dark, but the green fires in Marrow left enough light to see what had been done. Joy wasn’t delusional enough to think she’d been right, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to hurt those who had brought ruin to her own.
Her sister sat beside her on the rocky precipice. “Is that all of them?” she asked.
Joy shook her head and said, “Caleb and Christina are still out there. I can feel them, for now. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll make it. At least those men don’t know about them.”
“I heard his name—Herbert, that’s what Seth called him.” Her sister put her arm around Joy’s shoulder and brought her close. “I have an idea. Who do you want to destroy the most?”
“Herbert,” Joy said immediately. “There’s something about him.”
“So we’ll start with Seth. It will take time. Can you be patient?”
Joy turned, felt her sister’s white hair with her fingertips. “Time is nothing to us. If I must wait until he draws his last breaths, I will. And in those moments, I will make him feel more pain than the whole of the universe has combined.”
“No, no,” her sister said, kissing Joy’s forehead. “Pain is my namesake, my job. Keep making us families. One day, you’ll get it right, and we won’t need this place anymore.”
Joy smiled and bit her lip. “I was a good wife, wasn’t I?”
Her sister nodded. “You were, truly.”
“I just wanted the best for my children. I wanted them to be happy. I wanted them to grow up and love and have children of their own.” Joy shook her head and said, “Is that too much to ask?”
Her sister shushed her. “Hush, now, there’s still hope in Caleb and Christina. They’re beautiful children. When they’re done, the world will be so much better because of them.”
“You think so?”
“Oh yes. They will bring such joy to the world. After all, they have all your best qualities.”
THE BLACK HOURS
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Gemma sucked on the salty tips of her hair as she laid ruin to her kingdom of sand. Fists and fingers left holes where houses had been. The returning tide saw to the rest. The great city shivered and cracked and, like wax beneath a flame, sank into itself, until all that remained was all it would ever be. Covered in the ocean’s grime, Gemma the Thirteen-Year-Old Destroyer came to her feet, smiled, and made for the cave that yawned on high.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Camilla rolled down the driver’s side window and let the heat scorch her some. The air conditioner had been reduced to a wheeze and a rattle. She wiped the sweat from her eye; with it went her makeup, too. Her cell phone buzzed against her leg. She pulled it from her pocket, read the name across the screen, and threw it like spilt salt over her shoulder. It landed on a pamphlet—junk mail, really—for Our Ladies of Sorrow Academy.
Camilla knew what her husband wanted, but she wouldn’t be moved on the matter. The divorce was going through whether he wanted it to or not.
The truck dipped and groaned as it went over the uneven lip of the lot. Camilla’s nerves were much like the suspensions about to give way—stretched beyond their limit and soon to snap. She parked where the weeds grew wildly and sat there a moment. Her hardness fell away like scales, leaving her with the tender truth that hurt too much to consider. Was she being selfish? Was she making a mistake? These questions she often asked and seldom answered.
Camilla kicked open the door, because a push was never enough, and headed for the antique shop.
TRENT GEMMA CAMILLA
Storm clouds crept along the sun-blasted sky, thunder like horns announcing their coming. Trent waited until the call went to voicemail, and put the phone away. His brother, Jasper, sent him a sympathetic look from across the kitchen table. Trent smiled, and guzzled his beer until there was nothing left of it.
“Give her time,” Jasper said, swatting away a horsefly from his neck.
“I’d give her just shy of forever if I knew it’d do me any good.” Trent leaned forward, put his elbows on the table. He said into folded hands, “No more. It’s done.”