The List

by Christopher Coleman

  Danielle gave no thought on what to do this time, and she immediately shot the ghost again, this time from point blank in the back of its head.

  She lifted her eyes to scan the scene around her, but from her place on the sidewalk, she was blind. She walked slowly into the middle of the street and stopped, resting the shotgun on the ground at her feet and arming herself with the rifle. Using the night scope, she searched the darkness of the downtown streets, turning back and forth several times, waiting for a squad of soldiers to appear, or perhaps a trio of mutated ghosts.

  But there was only the darkness and the low brush of wind through the streets, and Danielle noted the nip of chill in the air. It reminded her of the first cool morning of fall, which then prompted thoughts of the brutal winter that surely lay ahead.

  2.

  Energized with the instinct to survive, Danielle picked up the shotgun and ran quickly down Franklin in the direction of Raise the Flagon. Within minutes, she was through the alley entrance to the bar, the shotgun leading the way in.

  McCormick was still on the floor where Danielle had seen him last, and, by all accounts, still unconscious. His rifle was missing, but she assumed Davies had grabbed it on his way out the door and tossed it, a precaution in the event Danielle gave him the slip and found her way back to the bar.

  She moved in close to the motionless soldier now, studying his face for any sign of life. She placed two fingers against the side of his neck and knew instantly by the warmth of his skin—and then the beat of his pulse—that he was only asleep. She walked quickly to the bar and reached across it, fishing a half-empty bottle from the shelf behind. She then walked back to the knocked-out soldier and splashed a few tablespoons of water into the soldier’s face.

  He stirred.

  Danielle immediately put the twin barrels of the shotgun to the man’s forehead, and when he opened his eyes, he clutched them closed almost immediately. The pain of the blow he’d taken was surely acute, as was his current predicament as a prisoner.

  “Davies is dead,” Danielle announced. “I want you to know that up front. I didn’t kill him, but I would have. And I’ll kill you too. Unless you want to help me.”

  McCormick opened his eyes, squinting them in confusion as he shook his head once in either direction. “Help you? Why would I do that? I came here to capture you. To kill you, if necessary. And even if I didn’t end up doing it—or Davies—you would never have been allowed to leave. It’s not a personal thing against you or anyone in here—we have no idea who is still alive—but whoever is, they can never be allowed to leave.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, Mr. McCormick, I really do, but the situation has changed a bit, so we’re going to see what else we can work out.” Danielle flipped the barrel of the shotgun up. “Get up.”

  Gingerly, McCormick rose as instructed, pinching his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. His eyes were bloodshot and badly bruised.

  Danielle took a few steps backward, holding the gun low at her prisoner’s torso. “How’s your vision, soldier?”

  McCormick removed his hand from his face and blinked several times, testing. “A little blurry still, but it’ll be alright, I think.”

  “Can you see that?” Danielle pointed to the list tacked above the bar. “Can you see that piece of paper pinned up top there?”

  McCormick searched in the direction of the finger for a few seconds and then found it. He nodded.

  “I want you to go over there and take a good look at it. You’ll need to hop up on the bar to read it.”

  “Why?”

  Danielle’s voice fell flat. “Because I told you to.”

  McCormick didn’t debate the issue further, and within a few seconds he was standing on the bar top in front of Danielle’s list. “Ok.”

  “Number four. That’s the one I want to bring to your attention. Read it.”

  “Kill a Soldier,” he read. He then turned back to Danielle. “That doesn’t sound too promising.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so either if I were you.”

  “So, since you said you didn’t kill Davies, I guess that leaves me. Is that the point?”

  McCormick sighed and swallowed hard, and for the first time since his awakening, Danielle could see a trace of fear in the man’s face. It was of the same variety that she had heard in his voice when he first arrived outside the bar. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be part of this. Davies may not have either, but Danielle could tell that Davies was too far in to be turned. She held out hope for McCormick though.

  “I would be thinking the same thing if I were in your shoes. No question. And, if push comes to shove, it will mean that yet. But that goal is not one of revenge, Mr. McCormick. You carrying out your duties isn’t personal, and neither are my goals. Well, at least not that one.”

  Danielle thought of two of the goals further down the list, where things did get a little more personal.

  “That particular goal is there for one reason and one reason only.”

  McCormick awaited the answer without asking.

  “Because killing one of you is the only way I’m going to get out of here.”

  McCormick swallowed nervously. “Okay.”

  “But...I would be willing to forego that particular item if there were another way.” This time Danielle waited for McCormick to speak before continuing.

  Finally, the soldier shook his head and asked, “What way is that?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly, soldier. That’s where I’m looking to you for some answers. Being as you work around these parts and all. I was thinking you might know the ins and outs a bit. Capiche?”

  He shrugged. “Even if I did, I can’t help you. What would I say when I get back? If I make it back? Sergeant Davies is my partner. I can’t just announce he’s dead. Or that he disappeared inside. How would I be able to explain that? I would be questioned for days, relentlessly, until I couldn’t speak anymore. Lie detectors. The whole thing. And if I tell them the truth, that Davies...whatever it is that happened to him, I still—”

  “Stop, soldier!” Danielle shouted. “For Christ’s sake, shut up!” She lowered her voice and, through habit, peeked up at the recess window. “You’re not going back. Ever. Your days as a soldier—if you have any days left after tonight—are over. But you are going to help me get out of this county. Out of the cordon.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I don’t know exactly—your clearance or connections or whatever—but you have knowledge of the cordon that I don’t, and you’re going to help me figure this out.”

  “And what if I say ‘no?”

  Danielle shrugged. “Nothing lost then. I hadn’t expected any help to begin with, so that leaves me right where I planned to be. You know, the place I was before I encountered you charming gentleman.” She paused. “Except maybe that’s not quite true. I’m maybe a little better off knowing there are two less soldiers to deal with.”

  McCormick scoffed. “You think they won’t miss us? That they won’t come looking for us? They knew exactly our search location; they’ll be here within a few hours if we’re not back.”

  Danielle scrunched her face dubiously. “Will they? I don’t know. I would think the risk inside here is known to be pretty high. Especially by the top of the food chain. So, you’d be missed, I’m sure that’s true, but I can’t imagine there would be any emergency measures taken right away. You’re in unknown territory now. You know, now that you and your team has unleashed monsters into the world. I would think the masterminds behind this containment effort would expect there to be a few broken eggs along the way.”

  Danielle was conjecturing, but the drop of McCormick’s eyes implied she wasn’t too far off.

  “I am going to escape this place one way or the other. With your help or not. So, if you don’t help me, if you decide that evil is the path you’d rather take—”

  “I never signed up for this. These are my orders; I have to fol
low them.”

  Danielle dropped her head slowly and shook it with disappointment. “Wow,” she scoffed, “I can’t believe soldiers still say that. After all we know from history.”

  McCormick stared up toward the ceiling now and covered his face with his hands, as if the exhaustion of his life was just now collapsing down on him.

  “As I was saying, if you’d rather take the path of evil, then I’ll simply follow through with goal four and be done with it. It won’t bother me in the least. It’s kind of satisfying crossing the words off, you know?”

  The soldier looked back to the list and then eased himself down to the bar top and hopped to the floor. Danielle kept the shotgun level.

  “Well, if you like that feeling, you can go ahead and cross off the one second from the bottom too, because that’s already been taken care of.”

  “What?”

  “Stella, that second name of your list up there. I assume that’s Stella Wyeth?”

  Danielle tensed at the name, though she now realized she had never known the woman’s last name. She felt the grit of her teeth as she spoke. “Probably. Do you know her? And what do you mean ‘it’s been taken care of?’”

  The soldier nodded, studying Danielle curiously. “I guess that makes sense that you wouldn’t know—why would you, right?—but Stella’s dead.”

  “What?” Danielle felt the blood rush from her face in a euphoric combination of delight and disappointment, a feeling which ultimately converged in her chest. Her legs weakened, and she moved to one of the tables and sat, keeping the gun on McCormick.

  “They found her body—or what was left of it—in the lab. D&W? That giant hangar complex off the interstate?”

  Danielle knew of the building vaguely, though not its purpose. “What happened?”

  “What always seems to happen with people like her. Destroyed by her own invention. I don’t know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The story is that the corrupted got her, but no one knows for sure exactly how any of it happened. Not really. There was some kind of mutiny inside they think, or maybe a hostage situation. And apparently some of the workers assisted a couple of the Internals and they escaped the cordon. Internals is what we call—”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Anyway, it seems they got the drop on Stella and the colonel and flew the hell out of there.”

  Danielle was bursting with excitement and anticipation, but she kept it tempered, assuming that the story was going to end badly for her friends. Still, she was compelled to ask, “What happened to them? The ones who escaped? Did they ever find them?”

  McCormick shook his head and shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard. The pilots and the girls who worked at the place eventually made it back to base, but not the Internals. The pilots gave the location where they’d dropped them, but by the time the brass sent a team out to find them, they were gone. No one has seen them since. And it was particularly hard because no one really knew who they were to begin with. Most of the people in this county are...gone. The people running this disaster had no idea who was who. It could have been anyone flying out of there.”

  “But the pilots must have seen them. The women who worked there.”

  McCormick shrugged again. “I don’t know. Some think they had military assistance. That that’s the only way they could have pulled it off.”

  “Assistance from who?”

  “Like you said, it’s not unusual to lose people inside. We lost a lot of people over these few months.”

  Danielle let all of the information sink in and then felt a tear form at the side of her eyelid. It was an unspecified sadness, about her friends, her family, her life. She blinked it back and lifted her chin high, steeling her voice for the question to follow. “So what do you say McCormick, are you ready to be a hero?”

  The soldier closed his eyes and then squinted them open. “Tonight?” he replied sheepishly.

  “I was thinking tomorrow.”

  “Good, because I’ve still got a hell of a headache.”

  Danielle smiled; she considered apologizing but refrained.

  “Have you got a plan?” he asked, his voice and face subdued.

  “Not really. Like I said, I hadn’t factored you into this plan until ten minutes ago.”

  McCormick looked to the ground just off to his right, as if pondering some question with deep consideration. “Well, do you have a car?” he asked finally.

  Danielle smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  3.

  The following morning, Danielle was up before the sun, which meant she’d probably gotten fewer than four hours of sleep. But it was enough; her adrenaline was flowing like a river. Besides, with McCormick sharing her living quarters for the evening, restful sleep wasn’t in the cards anyway.

  She had no reason to trust the soldier, of course, other than her gut instinct, which, to this point in her life, probably had about a fifty-fifty success rate. Danielle knew most people considered their instincts to be great, and then they ended up committing themselves to a string of abusive relationships or bad business deals. But Danielle was honest about her own intuition, and she knew it was below average at best.

  Still, though, there was something—or someone—in McCormick who she recognized and believed in, and as much as she hated to admit it, that person was Dominic.

  No one has seen them.

  McCormick’s words were as good as any she could have hoped to hear regarding the survival of her friends. If they’d made it out alive and had yet to be captured, it was almost a guarantee that they were still safe and in hiding. How Danielle would ever find them if she ever made it out, she couldn’t know in that moment, but that was a problem for later.

  That was Goal 6.

  Danielle walked to the stage where she found McCormick still asleep, his face flat against the dusty floor, his arm stretched out above him using his bicep as a pillow. Before she had finally gone to sleep the night before, she had draped a tablecloth across the man’s back, a twinge of pity for the soldier finding its way into her heart. But that act had been a farce, as the makeshift blanket had crept up and was now almost completely around his neck.

  McCormick’s hands were still bound behind his back, loosely, sloppily, and Danielle knew that if he had really wanted to escape, he could have freed himself from the binds over the course of the night and then removed the duct tape around his ankles. The latter binding—the duct tape on the ankles—Danielle had forced McCormick to apply himself. It was the first step in his detention, and it kept him relatively immobilized while she did the wrists. But the truth was, even with his legs rendered useless, Danielle knew McCormick could have overpowered her as she tied his hands behind the chair, turning the tables on her in seconds.

  But he hadn’t moved a muscle as she bound him with rope she’d secured from the Flagon’s storage room. He had simply allowed it to happen, and Danielle felt confident that he was all in on the plan to help her escape.

  Well, seventy-five percent anyway.

  Danielle stepped softly over to the bar, not wanting to wake McCormick yet, and then grabbed the keys to the Mazda which she’d placed next to the bottle of Dewar’s (a luxury she’d foregone the previous night, despite needing it more than ever). From there, she headed out the door and up to the alley, and then to Franklin Street where she made her way south towards the car. Within minutes, she was sitting behind the steering wheel with the keys in the ignition.

  She took a deep breath and turned the key, and the car started easily, purring to life the way only new cars do.

  The headlights came to life automatically, and Danielle fumbled around for the controls, trying to find the manual shut-off knob. She found it, but just before she turned the knob left to kill the beams, she glanced up through the windshield and saw a dull mass rising up in the distance, just over the horizon where Franklin began to crest down toward the river.

  It wasn’t quite dawn yet, and what littl
e sunlight there was had been consumed by a thick layer of clouds across the sky.

  Fog, Danielle assumed. That’s all it is.

  She turned the headlights off and shifted the car into park, and then she began slowly forward toward the alley and the Flagon.

  She was a block from the intersection at Huntington and Poplar, and still, even in the darkness, she could see the mass on the horizon. It was growing larger, in fact, closer, like a storm cloud ballooning over a distant plain.

  Her belly rumbled with anxiety, and a pain fulgurated through her chest.

  It wasn’t fog. The only question now was how bad it was going to be.

  The first crab exploded out of the whiteness as if it had been thrust through a portal in time, the features of its body pixelating from blurry to crystal clarity in the blink of an eye. Its dead, white face was a thing of repulsion, appearing at once to be both modern and prehistoric.

  It came at the car with ferocity, a white spasm of speed and determination, galloping toward the vehicle like a wild boar. There was no expression in its face, only the cold stare of focus that Danielle had come to know so well over these few nightmarish months.

  A dozen more followed behind the first, entering into view one after the other, streaming at her now like a blizzard and then fanning out several feet before they reached the car, alternating directions in what seemed to be some coordinated, instinctive pattern. It was the move of hunters, Danielle thought, like a pack of wild dogs, and she was suddenly reminded of the Maripo River Bridge and how the crabs had plunged into the water one-by-one and then proceeded to form their own bridge of bodies toward their boat.

  The torrent of white beasts finally ended, and by the time it did, the ghosts had formed a circle of bodies around the car. There were at least twenty of them in a perfectly dispersed perimeter.

  Danielle could only stare in frightened disbelief over the steering wheel, fearful not only of her current predicament, but of how much she still didn’t understand about this enemy with whom she shared a world. She had yet to witness this exact behavior, despite her almost daily study of them.