by Sam Sisavath
“Tori!” Jake shouted.
Screams filled the lobby in tune to the relentless rattling of metal bars from outside the windows and doors to Keo’s right. He did everything possible to block them out. They were distractions, unimportant. What was happening inside the building was what mattered, was all that mattered. But telling himself that and following up on it wasn’t quite the same thing.
Jake’s flashlight scoured the room until its bright beam fell across Henry on the floor, the creature’s jaw clamped down on the back of his neck. Tori was nearby, screaming. Keo didn’t know whose screams were louder—Henry’s or Tori’s, or father and daughter combined.
Jake was running toward the bloody scene, the flashlight bouncing up and down as he switched his grip to his shotgun. More screaming, though now Keo couldn’t tell who it was coming from, and he didn’t have time to see what had happened because—
BOOM!
Norris was shooting behind him again, his Remington and flashlight pointed up at the square ventilation opening. His shotgun blast had widened the box, buckshot having torn chunks off the surrounding wall, and a creature was leaning out when a second blast from Norris’s weapon blew a hole in its chest. The creature looked annoyed just before it staggered out of the wall and plummeted, hitting the floor with a loud clattering of bones.
Norris racked his shotgun and was backing up just as another one of the monstrosities groped its way out of the opening. There was already another one—no, two more—behind it, waiting for their turn to come through.
Keo darted across the room, swerving around the creatures as they landed in front of him, the clack-clack of bones hitting the floor tiles somehow louder than even the shotgun blasts behind him.
Jake. Jake’s shooting. Sorry, kid.
Keo couldn’t worry about Jake anymore because one of the creatures spun on him, obsidian eyes glinting in the darkness. Keo shot it from less than a foot away, and large sections of its head came unglued and flew across the floor in a sea of brain and skull and blood (or what used to be blood).
One of ghoulish creatures swiped at him, but Keo sidestepped just in time, actually spinning on his heels like some ballet dancer.
Eat your heart out, Mikhail Baryshnikov!
He might have even cackled. Though, of course, it was impossible to hear anything over the roar of shotgun blasts from in front and behind him. Norris and Jake shooting, one after another, as if they had timed their fire. And there were Tori’s bloodcurdling screams, which seemed to go on and on and on…
Keo thought the creature would chase him, but instead it bounded into the darkness in the opposite direction—toward where Keo last saw Jake trying desperately to save his would-be father-in-law.
Run, Jake, run! Save yourself, kid!
He looked back, just as a flash of fire lit up the room, and in that same split-second, Keo made out Henry in a pool of blood and Jake trying to shake off one of the creatures clinging to his own back. Then Jake’s shotgun fired again and blew a hole in the wall—and the top half of Tori’s head right along with it.
Keo stopped and stared for a good second, until the darkness overtook his vision again.
Oh, damn.
“Kid, come on!” Norris shouted behind him.
“Right behind you!” Keo shouted back, before turning and running.
He didn’t see where Gillian had gone and prayed she had run straight to the back room at the end of the hallway like they had agreed. His fingers were already busy instinctively reloading the shotgun as he ran past the sheriff’s office. He glimpsed Taylor and Aaron inside hiding behind the massive desk, so big that they couldn’t bring it outside to use on the doors.
“Run!” he shouted at them.
They stared back at him, clutching at the sides of the big oak furniture, faces barely visible in the semidarkness. He couldn’t tell if they were paralyzed with fear or if they couldn’t hear him over the screaming and shotguns blasts. Maybe both.
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”
Yeah, right.
Then the two of them were gone, vanished from his peripheral vision, as Keo entered the hallway and kept going.
Sorry, kids, can’t help you now!
He concentrated on what was in front of him. The back hallway, and almost at the very end, the room with the now-empty gun rack and shelves fully stocked with bullets that had no weapons to load.
And the steel door.
His sneakers had a hard time gripping the floor as he ran. He didn’t know why until he remembered all the blood and brains and flesh he had stepped on and collected as he fled from the lobby. He was vaguely aware that he was reloading as he moved through the rectangular shaped darkness that was the hallway, the flashlight beam jolting left and right, then up and down, illuminating just enough to keep him from running straight into a wall.
Someone was moving behind him, shotgun blasting all the way. It was likely Norris. Keo had given up on Jake, and the chances of Aaron and Taylor making it out of the sheriff’s office was not even worth thinking about. To find out for sure, he would have to slow down and look back.
Keo ran full-speed down the hallway instead.
He saw the door up ahead, Gillian’s face temporarily lit up by his bouncing flashlight beam. She was at the door and holding it open with both hands, shouting something at him that he couldn’t hear over the roar of gunfire from less than a meter behind him.
Then, out of nowhere, a voice shouted, “I’m out, I’m out!”
Keo slid to a stop and spun around. “Run, old man, run!”
Norris’s face was contorted into a pained expression and there was sticky goo (blood?) clinging to his chest and face when Keo’s flashlight flashed across him. When the beam of light left him, Norris was swallowed up by the darkness, though Keo could still make out the large whites of his eyes as the ex-cop ran past him.
Then there was just the hallway and the quivering, moving mass of silhouetted creatures flooding into the narrow passageway in front of him, their deformed shapes partially lit by large pools of moonlight splashing across the lobby.
He fired, then backed up and fired again, racked, and fired again.
One shot…two shots…three…
Keo wasn’t aiming at their chests, which was the biggest part of them. Instead, he was gunning for their legs, because knocking them off their feet was the only thing that seemed to even slow them down.
Buckshot tore into their long spindly limbs, the strangely satisfying crunch of bones snapping at will. Sometimes he shot too high and shattered femurs, which was just as good.
“Keo!” from behind him. Gillian. “Come on!”
…four shots…five shots…
…six…
They fell over each other trying to get up the hallway at him. They slipped and slid on splattered and spraying blood, but all that did was delay them for a second, sometimes even less than that.
Daebak. I’m going to fucking die in this two-horse town.
Or worse.
He didn’t know where the hell they had come from, how so many had gotten into the station so fast. How many had been in the air ducts? A dozen? A hundred? It looked like thousands were now rushing toward him. So many that he couldn’t see the lobby behind them anymore, just little slivers of moonlight here and there, trying to pierce through a wall of death that was surging, stumbling, and crawling over the ones he had felled by taking out their legs.
And still they kept coming, and coming…
“Keo, goddammit!”
He fired his last shot and turned and ran. He didn’t have far to go because he had backed almost right up to the open back room door. He practically stumbled his way inside as Gillian and Norris slammed the heavy piece of steel shut behind him. They drove the door into its frame with their entire bodies, fueled no doubt by a healthy dose of adrenaline.
Keo’s momentum almost sent him right into the bench but he somehow managed to right himself in time. He lo
oked back at Norris and Gillian as they took two quick, involuntary steps away from the door, which trembled slightly each time the creatures smashed into it, producing a soft, almost perversely gentle thoom-thoom-thoom, the noise impossibly muted by the metal door’s construction.
The door held the way it was supposed to, even against the frantic assault from the other side. It housed guns, after all, and the valuables of the station’s occupants.
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
Keo ran his flashlight around the room. Rachel and Christine were embracing each other near the back, their faces hidden from his beam. Lotte sat trembling next to them in her wheelchair, a look of half-shock, half-terror on the orphaned fourteen-year-old’s face.
Norris continued backpedaling from the door and reloading his shotgun at the same time. “Did you see Jake and Henry?”
Keo shook his head. “Back in the lobby.” He remembered Tori’s head exploding under buckshot from Jake’s shotgun… “I don’t think they made it.”
“Yeah…”
“What about Taylor?” Gillian asked.
Keo shook his head again. “I don’t know. I saw them in the office when I was running past.”
Gillian looked as if she wanted to ask something else, but maybe she already knew the answer, so she didn’t.
Behind her, the steel door vibrated slightly against the thoom-thoom-thoom…
Keo reloaded his Remington with shells from his pouch. Jesus, was he hyperventilating? He calmed himself—or at least, did the best he could to stop the pounding in his chest.
In and out, in and out…
Gillian sat quietly down on the bench next to him while Norris leaned against one of the lockers and caught his breath. The three of them didn’t say a word and barely moved as they fixed their eyes on the piece of steel that was holding back the night. The only thing between them and a fate worse than death at the moment.
The creatures continued their attack, though by now the thoom-thoom-thoom had mostly faded into the background.
Not that they stopped. Not for a second.
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
He wondered how long they were going to keep it up.
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
Maybe all night. Maybe through tomorrow. Maybe well into the next night…
Thoom-thoom-thoom…
CHAPTER 13
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
Thoom-thoom-thoom…
“Why won’t they stop?” Gillian asked around eight, three hours after nightfall.
He could barely see her in the darkness. Every now and then, either he or Norris turned on their flashlights and looked around to make sure everyone was fine. Or as fine as could be, locked inside a room where there were, possibly, hundreds of unkillable things squirming in wait on the other side of the only way out. Jake, Henry, and Tori were dead. He wondered if they were out there now, having joined the mass of undead.
Right. Because three more or less is going to make much of a difference either way.
“They can’t get through,” Gillian said. “They know that. So why don’t they just stop?”
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Maybe they don’t know how.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No.”
He shrugged. “I’m out of ideas.”
“You’re useless.”
“Sorry.”
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
“Did you see what happened to Taylor?” she whispered.
“No.”
“What about Jake and his girlfriend?”
“I didn’t see what happened to them, either,” he lied.
Thoom-thoom-thoom…
*
The girls finally went to sleep around midnight after trying in vain to stay awake. Lotte simply closed her eyes and leaned back against her wheelchair, while Christine laid her head on her mother’s lap and drifted off. Gillian moved from the bench to the floor next to the lockers and slid a pile of clothes under her head, then curled up into a ball and went to sleep.
Keo remained sitting on the bench facing the door, while Norris sat with his shotgun over his knees behind him.
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
“Jake and the others?” Norris said, his voice so quiet that Keo barely heard him.
Keo shook his head. He remembered flames stabbing out of Jake’s shotgun, Henry on the floor, then Tori’s head exploding against the wall…
“Dammit,” Norris said.
“Yeah.”
Thoom-thoom-thoom.
“They’re a persistent bunch of fuckers,” Norris said.
“It’s not like they got anywhere else to be.”
“What about the surrounding towns? The cities? You said it yourself. This thing isn’t just statewide, it’s probably nationwide, too. It’s a full-scale invasion. So why are they wasting time on a half dozen people in Bentley?”
“Did you see how many were out there?”
“Looked like the whole town, and then some.”
“Yeah. Looked like the whole damn town. If it’s this bad here, think about the cities. There must be thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of those things running around in places like New Orleans and Shreveport. Maybe they’re running out of…food.”
“Already?” Then, “You think it’s gone, don’t you?”
“What?”
“The country. Good-bye, America.”
“It’s the lack of anything from FEMA that worries me.”
“No FEMA, no United States government.”
“Yeah.”
Norris didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he said, “You’re good at this.”
“What’s that?”
“Surviving.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“Who exactly did you use to work for, kid?”
“You wouldn’t know them. They pride themselves on staying in the shadows. But if you’re ever in Downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, they have a building there. Nothing special, but they’re always looking to hire people like you.”
“People like me?”
“Ex-law enforcement types. People not shy around guns. Bonus points if you’re not queasy around blood.”
“Sounds like swell guys.”
“Oh yeah,” Keo smiled. “Not that it matters now. They’re probably gone, too. If Uncle Sam can’t survive this…”
“Was it good money?”
“Good enough.”
“But not great.”
“It depends on the gig. Every call out’s different.”
“So why do it if the money isn’t always great? I’m guessing your life’s at stake each time you go out there.”
“It’s what I’m good at,” Keo said. “I’ve never been good at very much else. Some people know they’re destined to become a singer, an actor, or go into outer space. Me? I realized I could do this pretty well.”
“What is ‘this’?”
“Fight. Survive. Make a little money while I’m at it. You know, the American Dream.”
“You’re crazy,” Norris said.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Keo said.
*
The creatures stopped trying to break down the door around two in the morning. There were no hints that they were getting tired or signs of anything else happening outside. One second they heard the constant thoom-thoom-thoom, and the next there was just silence.
Keo and Norris remained where they had been for the last six hours. Keo wasn’t sure what Norris was thinking, but he was wary of the quiet and tried focusing on Gillian snoring lightly on the floor next to him instead. Rachel, Christine, and Lotte were still in the back somewhere, though it was harder to hear them.
It’s a trick. Some kind of sick, twisted trick.
He waited a minute. Then two…
…then ten…
And there was just the stillness inside and outside the back room.
“They’ve stopped,” Norris finally said. “You th
ink it’s a trick, too?”
“Has to be,” Keo said.
“Go find out.”
“Why me?”
“You’re younger. You probably have better hearing.”
Keo stood up and moved through the darkness, walking as lightly and silently as he could manage, and leaned against the cold steel door.
He could hear them outside. Moving, but not frantically. Not like creatures with purpose. Almost…bored?
“Well?” Norris whispered behind him.
Keo took a couple of steps backward. “They’re still out there.”
“What are they doing?”
“Do I look like I have x-ray vision?”
“What did you hear, then?”
“They’re moving around. Like they’re…”
“What?” Norris pressed.
“Like they’re settling in for the night.” Keo tiptoed back to the bench and sat down. “They’re going to wait us out. You know that, right?”
“How long, do you think?”
“You don’t understand, old timer. They don’t have to go anywhere. You remember this afternoon?”
“What about it?”
“Sunlight doesn’t reach this far back into the hallway.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Keo said.
He wondered how many were out there right now on the other side of the steel door, waiting in the darkness.
A dozen? A hundred?
How many could possibly fit into the narrow space of the passageway?
Too many. Too damn many…
*
He felt morning rather than saw it. There was the sweat pooling under his armpits and dripping from his temple, and the suddenly noticeable stench of the blood on the front of his shirt and pants. Or, at least, he thought it was blood. It was too dark, too clumpy, and hadn’t really dried the way blood should overnight.
Keo glanced down at his watch: 6:44 a.m.
It had actually sneaked up on him. Norris, too, from the way he opened his eyes and stood up, sighing as his joints popped from sitting all night. Or just old age. He stretched and looked around. Visibility had increased enough that everything wasn’t just black lumps around them anymore.
Keo used the precious little light available to look for new clothes in one of the lockers. He found an Under Armour T-shirt and pulled it on, then shoved the stained one inside. There were no spare pants, so he made do with the ones he had on. Norris did the same thing, finding only a white T-shirt that was just one size too small. He didn’t look happy with the fit as he pulled it on.