by Eddie Patin
“It’s inside!” he whispered.
People ran past them without slowing, some of them letting out animalistic whimpers and huffs of panicked breath, others focused and determined to get away from the madness! Refugees continued down the hall up ahead of them, disappearing into the darkness.
The metallic shriek of a smaller Zahnan suddenly rang out in the air of the hall, sharp and crisp and very close to them...
Without taking a moment to look behind them, Tommy grabbed his sister’s hand, and pulled them back into a run. He didn’t even notice when they had stopped to huddle against the wall next to a closed classroom door.
More people tore past them; grownups with much longer legs and stronger muscles.
A sudden, smacking jolt of pain to the side of Tommy’s head made the boy trip and threw him down onto the floor. He went careening off and smashed into the wall of lockers with a clang! Jody screamed, small and high-pitched.
Someone had hit him in the head.
He brought a hand up to his skull and looked up the hall, only to see a small group of people sprinting away in front of them, fleeing the danger...
“Jody!” he called, scrambling back to his feet. Tommy felt her little hand grab his, so they kept running.
When the floor shook again with a deafening crash, Tommy knew that the giant Zahnan had knocked in another section of wall, or brought a piece of the roof down, or something terrible that caused damage to the building! The air was suddenly filled with dust that choked out the remaining light and made the boy squint his eyes. He pulled Jody out of the path of three people stampeding past them.
And then, they stopped, peering up ahead with wide eyes, as the shriek of a monster was answered with several screams of the people up ahead, primal and full of terror!
It was up there. Up ahead...
What were they going to do??
Tommy yanked Jody to the wall and held her still in the darkness.
The boy held his breath...
The children both gasped when the nightmarish long and alien form of a Zahnan dashed from one side to the other, up ahead at an intersection of hallways, its tail flickering behind it like a cat’s. Another monster followed behind it, holding something in its mouth...
It was an arm. A human arm, wrapped in a blue sleeve.
“Shit!” the boy exclaimed. “Go back!”
Making sure he still had his sister’s hand, he turned to head back toward the gym.
“What are we gonna do, Tommy??” Jody asked, her voice on the edge of breaking.
“I don’t know!” he cried back. “We’ve gotta hide somewhere!”
As they ran back toward the raging hell of fires and screams and panic, Tommy pulled his sister behind him as they weathered the bursts of people that fled in groups against them. He scanned all around, desperate to find a room that was open, or a bathroom, or something that they could duck into to be out of the main path of the chaos!
Only to get cornered and eaten, he thought.
What could they do?!
The boy was still preoccupied with trying to come up with a plan on the fly when a couple of people crashed into them, making the children stop. Tommy looked up, and saw Mrs. Jackson staring back down at them, her face twisted into a mask of hysteria! The woman gasped, sweeping down to grab the kids by their shoulders. Her eyes were full of fear and the glittering mania of madness!
“Kids!” she cried out among the screams. “We’ve got to get out of here! You’re going the wrong way! Come on!”
Tommy wrenched his shoulder out of her grip.
“No!” he shouted. “Not that way!! The monsters are back there, too!”
Mrs. Jackson looked appalled that he had rejected her help.
“Come on, baby! You’ve got to get away!”
And Tommy felt cold fear clench at his gut when the woman swooped down and swept his little sister up in her arms...
Jody screamed. “No!!” She squealed with a high noise of panic...
“No!” Tommy cried as the woman took off down the hall with his sister. He pulled at the woman’s clothes with desperate hands, but she broke away, much stronger than he was. The boy ran after them, clawing at the woman. “No, Mrs. Jackson!! Not that way! Put my sister down!”
“Come on, Tommy! This way! You’re going the wrong way!”
She wasn’t hearing him.
Tommy saw his little sister struggling in the woman’s arms, her long, dark-blonde hair flaying out around the lady’s shoulders as she fought against Mrs. Jackson’s grip. Jody’s eyes were bright and wide in the dark and brimming with tears.
“Tommyyyyyyy!!”
“Stop!!” Tommy screamed, and he charged at the woman, colliding hard with her back! He tried to tackle her to the ground.
It worked! Mrs. Jackson stumbled, fell, and crashed to the floor, landing on her shoulder. Tommy felt a sudden terror that he might have hurt his sister—made her hit her head on the lockers, or knocked her out, or split her skull open, smashing into the linoleum under the weight of the falling woman...
Jody screamed again, and Tommy saw her break free from Mrs. Jackson’s grasp! The tall, frantic woman was already scrambling to her feet, her face hardened with fury, and Tommy’s eyes darted up to the terror of a lone monster suddenly turning the corner behind her...
The Zahnan was huge, and long, and forged out of stone and death and all of the nightmares of the darkness outside. Its terrible form slithered into being out the edges edge of world, the scary places that were just out sight when Tommy looked out into the night. The creature was just a little taller than a grown man, but as it approached with clicking claws and a deep hiss growing in its chunky throat, the beast was like a god to the boy, looming over them with long arms and fingers with too many digits tipped with claws that were as long as Tommy’s hands and looked like metal...
Mrs. Jackson rose to one knee, rubbing at her other kneecap and scowling at the boy, opening her mouth to speak. She was somewhere halfway between crazy with fear and mad as hell. Tommy saw Mrs. Jackson’s face register that the boy, himself, was staring in horror at something behind her—above her—and the woman turned to see the beast hovering over her, long lines and claws decorated in shadow and splashed with gore and the glow of the growing inferno, with a curved and arcing tail coiled and rolled constantly behind it...
Mrs. Jackson screamed, and the Zahnan screeched behind her, snatching her up with its broad, alien hands like the woman was a doll. It bit into her head with its long, beak-like mouth, and the scream disappeared.
Tommy reached out to Jody, who was on the floor just under the creature and the meat that was previously Mrs. Jackson, and he shot his hands out to her, fingers splayed open, willing her to appear in his arms!
The beast’s little eyes glittered in the red and orange glow, all black with no pupils (like a spider’s eyes, Tommy thought), and the boy had no idea whether it was looking at him or not. The Zahnan stretched its mouth open again, and slid a section of Mrs. Jackson’s shoulder and upper body into its gullet, taking a gulping bite, guzzling at the woman’s body in a way that made Tommy think of a crocodile...
Little Jody rushed to her feet and fled away from the monster, dashing to Tommy’s arms like he’d hoped!
The boy didn’t want to wait around...
He grabbed his sister’s hand, and the children ran away from the grisly scene, back toward the gym!
Once they reached the hall that led back to the entrance, the boy tried not to look at the piles of bodies—or at least the few pieces left over after the creatures tried to consume them—and was relieved to see that the Zahnan were spread out through the school. Pieces of the building crashed and the extreme heat of growing fires blasted Tommy in the face! Sometimes, the children ducked together as gusts of hot wind blew showers of red sparks through their path. But they kept moving, coughing together in the smoke and gaping in wonder and terror when passing the door to the gym at the daylight flooded in there t
hrough a massive collapse in the wall and the roof...
Somehow, Tommy and Jody found themselves outside again.
Scanning around the horizons of devastation in shock, Tommy could see people running around here and there like frightened herd animals. Two or three Zahnan dashed around in the smoky air, running from group to group of survivors, cutting them down and pausing to eat their bodies. They were like wiry animals of stone and metal, dashing around without a care in the world in the middle of a huge buffet...
A massive roar told the boy that the huge Zahnan was actually inside the school, somewhere, and he did a double-take when he saw the hulking form of another gargantuan monster approaching the school from Elm Street to the west—back where they walked in from the ditch the night before!
It was another giant one, also with its own escort of smaller monsters, scampering around it in search of prey as the great beast sauntered forth, pausing to eat cars in its way and shoot hellfire into the darkening, smoky sky...
Tommy looked down at his little sister, and saw that white flecks of ash were stuck to her hair, and her face was streaked with soot. The boy had to assume that he looked the same way.
The town of Flagstaff was on fire all around them, it seemed. Elm Street to the east and west was red and raging, the tall trees on either side of the road burning and sending thick smoke high into the sky. Several houses were obviously in flames, too. The school was quickly becoming an inferno behind them as well.
It’ll get worse, too, Tommy thought. It seemed that, with every several meaty bites the creatures took of the people dying around them, gulps of meat and clothes, or huge mouthfuls of vehicles and chunks of buildings in the case of the giant ones, the monsters would pause to hunker down, then blast great gouts of flames out of the holes on their backs like ... well, like flamethrowers!
Looking around, the only thing Tommy could figure—the only way that was even remotely safe, if that was even possible—was to go ahead, to the south...
He eyed the long, single-story apartment buildings across the street with the parking lots full of broken down cars that led to the thick trees and bushes up against the bike path and the gulch they passed through yesterday...
Zahnan crisscrossed the streets looking for victims, quick and casual and unconcerned, and any survivors who had made it out of the school were darting from cover to cover, doing whatever they could to get away.
People were dying.
They weren’t getting away.
How would Tommy and Jody manage to escape, if the grownups were all getting eaten up??
Another ear-splitting roar that shook the air and the pavement under Tommy’s shoes spurred them into action once again, and he took off toward the street, pulling his little sister behind him.
They were on their own again, and he wracked his brain to think of where they could possible go...
All he could think of was, maybe, the library? Just south of their house?
Assuming it wasn’t on fire as well.
But first, they had to make it through the chaos of the Zahnan in the streets and parking lots, hunting down the many refugees trying to escape...
12 - Officer Harvey Swanson
Las Vegas, NV
Citizens of Las Vegas, Nevada died in droves panicking through the streets, cut to ribbons by lean and limber ghouls that ran and pillaged with blue-fire eyes, talons that split their skin and sliced up their bodies, and long, tentacle-like tongues that ripped the meat from their bones! They were crushed and torn limb from limb by monstrous demons that resembled goat-men with burning red eyes and black horns and teeth—the lucky ones were simply shot down to the hot, sandy ground by the goat demons’ mish-mash of modern and old firearms. The worst deaths were delivered by the abominations; the lumpy, fused-together body-part horrors that flopped and slithered and pulled themselves along with random appendages seemingly crafted haphazardly by unknown forces, assembled out of the bodies and pieces of the dead—bodies that were nowhere to be seen. The incomprehensible horrors grabbed at terrified survivors with gnarled and twisted hands and crooks of elbows, puking pus and other sickening fluids onto shrieking victims as they opened rude, unexpected mouths from weird locations, full of fangs that looked like razorblades!
Harvey didn’t even want to think about what was going on behind closed doors and in the confined spaces of the buildings they had passed; the places where normal people that still lived were probably trying to hole up and hide from the monsters that permeated the city, hunting for blood and meat! He didn’t want to understand what was happening where all of the screams were coming from as they passed by, moving on with their meager mission for guns and ammo...
These monsters were the armies of Hell. Or, at least, of this Hell-like place that used to be a human city. Las Vegas was rapidly turning into ... something else. The dim, crimson-red sky roiled constantly with venomous clouds, and didn’t show a hint of a sun or moon! Instead, the incomprehensibly massive swirl leading to darkness, pulling at the edges of reality and sucking the entire red atmosphere in great, sweeping arcs irrevocably toward its central void was the only landmark in the air above. The many scattered forms of winged demons flitted about in the mad sky...
Harvey found out very quickly that he had to avoid looking at it—the void—the cosmic black swirl in the sky that drew his eyes and his thoughts upwards and threatened his sanity. The secrets he could see deeper inside, if he focused on the worlds and dimensions rounding its edges, would surely destroy his mind...
The M60 machine gun in his hands boomed repeatedly in short, controlled bursts as the hordes rushed at him and the surviving officers from the Convention Center Command Station. He, along with Sergeant Becker and Officers White and Mendez, had backed away from the oncoming attack until they stood more or less in a circle, side by side, focusing their fire mainly north as the slaughter of innocents fleeing the apartment complex started to spill their way.
As the belt of ammo jerked and flipped on the left side of the receiver, littering its tinkling metal linkage pieces from the other side of the rifle as the weapon shot bolts of lead into the monstrosities ahead of him, Harvey knew that their time was up...
He saw the belt jangle with each two or three shots he fired, dwindle from maybe two-dozen rounds left, down to a dozen, then more like eight, then the last few rounds stuck out of the receiver like a small, brass tongue...
And then the gun went dry.
“I’m out! The 60 is out!” Harvey bellowed, instinctively drawing his Glock 17. Before he even realized it, what was left of the last original mag he had in the gun was gone, two or three shots at a time, well-placed into the center mass and heads of the long-tongued zombies sprinting at him!
“We’ve got to—” Becker started. “Hold the ... we’re gonna...”
“What are we gonna do??” Harvey shouted. “We can’t stay here!!”
“Run!!” White cried, pausing to shove more shells into his shotgun’s tube. Harvey could see the whites of his eyes starkly in the red glow.
“No!” Becker commanded. “Hold the—” He stopped shooting and looked around. Harvey watched the sergeant’s eyes settle on the gas station behind them on the corner of Flamingo and Swenson. He was looking at the huge jets of flaming gasoline venting into the air from the wreckage of the gas pumps. “Follow me!” he shouted. “Mendez, cover fire!!”
They started moving as a group toward the intense gouts of flame. Mendez walked backwards at their rear, taking conservative shots with his Remington 1100 shotgun here and there. White guided him backwards with a hand on the shoulder.
“What’s the plan?” Harvey asked.
“Through the flames!” Becker replied.
“Are you nuts?!” White exclaimed, jerking his head around to look back at the gas fires.
“In between them, genius!!” Becker shouted over the gunfire and screams and screeches of the demons. “Concealment! And lead the zombies through the fires!”
I
t might work, Harvey thought. Hell, what else were they gonna do?
Looking back at the slaughter near the apartment complexes, Harvey could see a growing pink, sloppy tide of abominations rolling and slithering their way toward them behind the zombies...
As they approached the jets of flame, roaring in the air with a constant fluttering, burning noise, Harvey could feel the intense heat scorch his skin in waves. It was much hotter than the sizzling wind that was blowing all the time now, carrying the red sand with it, leaving build-up and drifts all over this civilization under assault.
But Becker was right. There were gaps in between the blazing pillars, clogged by the twisted metal of the fallen roof...
Officer White patted Mendez hard on the shoulder from behind.
“Let’s go!” Becker called.
Mendez fired off two more blasts from his shotgun, halting a sprinting zombie with a chunky blow to the chest, then popping its head like a meat balloon! Harvey saw pieces of its long tongue flying off to the side.
The four of them ran through the fires.
Harvey choked on the gasses and smoke, squinting his bleary eyes and trying to be careful with his footing on the mangled debris in between the roaring pyres, and when he emerged on the other side of the gas pump island, he realized that he was coughing.
They were all coughing.
But it worked—if at least for the moment...
Looking back through the intense flames, Harvey saw the shadows of the lean ghoul bodies pursuing them through the wreckage, being caught by the pillars of fire and burning to death in writhing dances of destruction! Some would make it through, of course, but Harvey bet—assuming that those demons didn’t have any special abilities to sense his team through concealment (they’d hidden from them before)—that he and his squad were safe for the time being.
At least for several seconds, while they figured something else out...
“Come on!” Becker shouted, and the sergeant leaded the team into the wide main street on the other side of the parking lot. Flamingo Road was crowded with bumper to bumper traffic—a great variety of vehicles, busses, taxis and limos—all dead and abandoned.