by John Russo
“It’s…it’s not the fuse,” Harry stammered. “The power lines must be down!”
Ben squirted charcoal-lighter into the embers of the fire, and with a loud whoosh the flames leapt up. He threw a bundle of rolled-up newspapers onto the fire. Then, in the half-light, he opened the cellar door wide and began to work his way downstairs.
Harry seized Helen by the arm and pulled her face close to his so he could whisper. “Helen…I’ve got to get that gun. We can go to the cellar. You have to help me!”
He had let the ice pack come away from his eye, and in the flickering light from the fire Helen saw its blackened, swollen condition—and the desperation in his face.
“I’m not going to help you,” she whispered hoarsely. “Haven’t you had enough? He’d kill us both.”
“That man is crazy!” Harry argued, fighting to hold his voice to a whisper. “He’s already responsible for two people being dead—I’ve got to get that gun—”
Harry was cut short by the sound of Ben’s footsteps at the top of the stairs, and Ben entered the room. “It’s not the fuse box,” he announced, with an air of hopelessness. “I had to feel my way to it—but I found a flashlight down there. All the fuses are okay. I left the flashlight at the head of the stairs, so we can see to go down. You’d better go down there and see to your daughter. She’ll be—”
Crash! From the kitchen, the sound of splintering glass. Then more racket. Moans and loud crashes. The walls of the house began to shake. The dead things outside were attacking it en masse. Some of them had gotten into the den and were hammering at the barricaded door.
Ben was on his feet immediately, trying to reinforce the barricades. With hammer and crowbar, he swung through the broken glass at the dead things and tried to shore up the pieces of lumber that were threatening to give way under the onslaught.
“Harry! Harry! Give me a hand over here!”
Harry came over behind Ben, and instead of helping ripped the gun from Ben’s back. Holding the gun on Ben, Harry backed toward the cellar. Ben turned around, panicked; the things were breaking into the house.
“What are you up to, man? We’ve got to keep those things out!”
“Now we’ll see who’s going to shoot who,” Harry said, backing away and waving the gun in Ben’s direction. “I’m going to the cellar, and I’m taking the two women with me—and you can rot up here, you crazy bastard!”
Ignoring Harry, Ben threw his body against the window, where the barricades were starting to come apart. At least a half-dozen ghouls were outside the window, pounding at it, forcing the nails loose.
Harry froze for a moment, transfixed by the fury of the attack and by Ben’s indifference to the fact that he no longer had possession of the rifle; Harry had expected Ben to beg to be allowed to come with the others to the cellar.
Purposely, Ben let the ghouls pry loose one of the largest pieces of lumber that had been nailed across the living room window; then, when it was loose, he spun and hurled it in Harry’s direction. The gun was hit and knocked aside, and it fired its shot harmlessly into the floor. Ben leaped upon Harry and, after a brief violent struggle, succeeded in wrenching the gun away.
Helen watched, frozen in place, with the noise of the ghouls pounding in her ears.
Harry backed away from Ben, toward the cellar.
Ben cocked and fired. Harry screamed. A great clot of blood appeared at his chest. Clutching the wound, he began to sink; he fell through the entranceway to the cellar stairs, then reeled and grabbed the banister, staggered, and fell head first down the stairs.
Some ghouls had broken through the window, and they had Helen by the hair and by the neck, ripping and clawing at her. Ben pounded and smashed at them with the butt of the rifle; then he leveled off and shot two of them in the face. Freed, Helen ran screaming to the cellar and, in the absence of light, she too fell and tumbled down the stairs. Her screams grew louder, as she realized she had fallen onto something large and soft—the dead body of her husband; her hand was wet and slippery with his blood. Then, out of the darkness something stumbled toward her, and moaned softly, and clutched at her.
“Karen?”
It was Karen. But she was dead. Her eyes flickered in the dark. She let go of her dead father’s wrist, which she had been holding to her lips; she had been chewing the tender flesh on the underside of his forearm.
Helen struggled to see in the darkness.
“Karen? Baby?”
The dead little girl had a garden trowel. Silently, staring without a word, she plunged the trowel into her mother’s chest. Helen fell back, screaming and clutching while the life-blood gushed from her and her daughter began stabbing her again and again. Helen’s screams mingled with the other sounds of destruction echoing through the old house.
Then the screams stopped. But the garden trowel continued to stab downward, again and again, hacking Helen’s body to bits, rending and tearing the bloody flesh. When the trowel fell from her dead blood-stained hands, Karen bent over her mother, drooling, and bared her teeth…She dug her hands into the gaping wounds…
Upstairs, Ben was continuing to fight as hard as he could hoping to drive the things back.
With the hysteria of revenge, Barbara too had flung herself into the attack. She smashed a chair against one aggressor, and it went down, and she threw herself upon it and beat her fists into its face—then the thing grabbed her and they rolled and struggled, the dead creature clawing at Barbara and sinking its teeth into her neck. Ben stepped up and pointed his gun directly in the thing’s face and fired, and the force of the explosion hurled the thing back, splattering Barbara with blood and bits of bone as the back of her attacker’s head was blown off. She jumped to her feet screaming and screaming—and ran straight into a cluster of ghouls that had smashed through the living room door.
The ghouls seized Barbara, ripping and tearing at her and dragging her outside the house. She looked up, as more attackers moved in for the kill, and began to struggle for possession of her soon-to-be-dead body. One of the attackers was her brother, Johnny, back from the dead. He stared evilly, his teeth smashed and his face caked with dried blood and dirt, as he moved toward Barbara and dug his fingers into her throat. She screamed, and passed out, dead of shock. The ghouls dragged her out into the night, ripping her apart and digging their hands and teeth into the soft parts of her body—while groups of two or three of the flesh-eaters pulled and twisted at her limbs, trying to break and tear bone and cartilage to dismember her body.
Inside the house, Ben was nearly overwhelmed. At least twenty or thirty ghouls were now in the house, the barricades broken through. There was no way that Ben could continue to stand and fight.
For a moment, there was a stand-off as the ghouls stood and stared, confronting the man that they had trapped, like a rat in a corner of a room.
Ben backed toward the cellar door. Then, from behind, the little girl, Karen, seized him, clawing and tearing at him—and he wheeled and grabbed her by the throat and hurled her against the wall—but she got to her feet and advanced toward him, her face smeared with her mother’s blood—and the other ghouls, too, had started to advance.
Ben stepped onto the cellar stairs, slamming the door behind him and frantically barricading it as the ghouls pounded and smashed at the door and the walls. The sounds of their rasping breath and their insane pounding and smashing filled Ben’s ears as he trembled and hoped that the barricade would hold. Though the pounding continued for a long time, the door seemed to be strong. The ghouls seemed unable to break it down. Ben sat there in the dark—overwhelmed by the hopelessness of his situation and the fact that everybody was dead who had tried to hold out in the old house, everybody but him.
Then his fingers closed around the flashlight that he had left there earlier when he had come to check out the fuse box, and, turning it on and pointing its beam of light ahead of him, he began to descend into the basement.
In the peripheral illumination from the beam of the flashlight, Ben
looked at his arm and—with a shock—saw that he was bleeding. The girl, Karen—she had bitten him in their struggle.
Frozen on the stairs, Ben stared at the teeth marks in his arm. If he died, he was going to become—
—unless a cure could be found—
He did not allow his mind to complete the horrible thought of what might happen to him.
The pounding of the ghouls at the cellar door was growing weaker, and more half-hearted.
The flesh-eaters, content to devour and fight over the remains of the slaughtered Barbara, were wandering out of the house, out into the yard—where groups of ghouls were already sinking their teeth into warm human flesh and organs—and gnawing at human bone.
At the foot of the stairs, the beam of Ben’s flashlight fell on the ash-white dead face of Harry Cooper, with his arm half chewed through at the elbow.
And slowly in a little while Harry’s eyelids began to flutter…and come open…
CHAPTER 13
The sounds of men braking camp disturbed the normal hush and silence of the woods in the gray dawn. A damp mist hung over the field where the men had slept, and as they straggled to assemble in the clearing which McClellan had designated, white breath hissed from their mouths and nostrils and hovered around them as they walked. They did not talk much, but they stuck close together in little groups, in case one of the dead things should attack them out of the fog.
George Henderson spat on the ground and said to the sheriff, “It’s a wonder how it could be so warm last night and so cold this morning. Maybe we got some rain movin’ in.”
“Naw,” McClellan said. “I checked the weather report. The sun’ll come up and burn this fog in a few hours.”
“It’ll be hell if it rains, and these men have to slog through mud,” George said. “There’ll be some people that won’t get rescued.”
As the two men talked, a white jeep station wagon, its engine growling, nosed its way in circles through the tall, damp grass—as two posse men, fully armed, followed along behind the jeep—stopping here and there to pick up bed rolls and packed-up tents and throw them on board.
The campfires had all been doused; there were beds of wet, black coals scattered throughout the field, in proximity to the tents and bed rolls.
“Hurry it up, men!” McClellan yelled. “How’d you like it if your wife or daughter was waitin’ for you to haul ass and save her from those things?”
The men stepped it up a little bit.
Soon they were all assembled in the clearing under the trees, where McClellan’s tent had been pitched.
CHAPTER 14
The circle of light on Harry Cooper’s face grew larger as Ben descended the staircase. Ben moved the flashlight quickly to take in the whole picture. Harry lay dead in a pool of blood, his arm chewed halfway through. Helen lay dead too, not far away, a garden trowel protruding from her hacked-up chest.
With an additional flutter of his eyelids, Harry opened his eyes wide. Then he began to sit up. Holding the flashlight and the gun at the same time, Ben stepped as close as he dared, and took careful aim. He quivered but pulled the trigger—and was jolted by recoil as the top of Harry’s head was blown off and the loud report of the rifle echoed in the dank basement.
Ben looked down, moving the flashlight and pointing it. He shuddered as he thought he could see splatters of blood on the bottoms of his trouser legs.
Then, he remembered Helen—and he pointed the flashlight in her direction. Her face and hair were caked with blood; blood had come in a stream from her mouth and nostrils, and several of her teeth were broken and twisted; her ribs, where some flesh had been eaten away, showed glistening white in the beam of the flashlight. In a little while, she opened her eyes—and Ben fired. Her body heaved and twitched with an abrupt convulsion, as the bullet smacked into her brain.
Ben threw the rifle down and covered his eyes with his hands. Tears rolled down his checks as he stepped over the dead bodies. Moving the flashlight around, he was overcome by the loneliness and the dismalness of the dark cellar—and his eyes fell on the makeshift table that had been Karen’s sick bed. In a fit of rage, he overturned the table and hurled it to the floor, with a crash. Then he staggered about aimlessly in his grief, stumbling over objects in the dark as though they weren’t there if the flashlight failed to show them.
Tom. Judy. Barbara. Harry. Helen.
All dead.
If only the truck hadn’t caught fire.
If only…
If only…
Gathering his senses together somewhat, Ben picked up the rifle and cocked it. He looked all around, pointing the gun and the flashlight. His eyes scanned his surroundings for possible areas of threat or vulnerability. Moving around slowly and quietly, holding his breath though it wanted to come gasping out of him, he probed behind the packing crates and in the dark corners of the cellar.
There was nobody around. Nobody in hiding. Just the dead bodies of Harry and Helen Cooper.
Ben sat in a corner, leaning against a wall of concrete block, and cried softly.
He looked down at the wound on his arm. And at the blood splattered on his trousers.
Upstairs, the noise of the ghouls had stopped. Perhaps a few were still in the house, lurking silently.
From exhaustion, finally, Ben’s head nodded and he yielded to an agonized, nervous sleep.
His last thoughts were of his children.
CHAPTER 15
Sunrise.
Bird sounds. Then the sounds of dogs, and human voices.
The rising sun, bright and warm. Dew on the high grass of a meadow.
More sounds, in the distance.
The whir of a helicopter.
Men with dogs and guns, working their way up from the woods that surrounded the meadow. Shouts…muffled talk…panting and straining of dogs against leashes…Sheriff McClellan’s posse.
CHAPTER 16
Ben nodded and snapped awake—startled, unsure of his surroundings.
He thought he heard a helicopter. Or maybe he was dreaming.
He listened.
Nothing.
Then, in the distance, a beating of metal wings.
A helicopter. Definitely.
Ben clutched the rifle and listened and looked all around. The basement was not dark any longer; but it was not bright, either; it was dusky and dank, illuminated in varying shades of gray by whatever sunlight could filter through the high, tiny windows. The helicopter sounds continued to fade in…and recede. Ben strained his ears, but could hear no other signs of human activity.
Finally, stepping gingerly and trying not to look, he got past the corpses of Helen and Harry Cooper and began to sneak up the cellar stairs.
The stairs creaked, startling him, but he paused only momentarily, then continued his ascent toward the barricaded door.
CHAPTER 17
A few men, some German shepherds on leashes, came up out of the woods and onto the edge of the sunlit, dewy meadow. They stopped and looked all around, as if they were scrutinizing the meadow for possible danger. The boots and trouser legs of the men were damp, from plodding through the wet grass.
Sheriff McClellan was the next man up from the surrounding thicket—he was breathing hard because of his weight and the difficult job of leading the men through the woods, when none of them had had any rest or any breakfast. He was armed with his rifle and pistol, with a belt of ammunition slung over his shoulder. He paused, looked back over his shoulder into the woods, and mopped perspiration from his brow with a balled-up dirty handkerchief.
More men were still working their way out of the woods, into the clearing. MeClellan shouted at them.
“Come on—let’s step it up, now! Never can tell what we’ll run into up here—”
His voice broke off as his deputy, George Henderson, came over to him and opened his mouth to say something.
But McClellan spoke first.
“You keeping in touch with the squad cars, George?”
George was wearing a sweatband and carrying a rifle and a side-arm—and he also had a walkie-talkie strapped on his back. Breathing hard, he hunched and adjusted the straps of his burden. “Yeah…they know where we are. They should be intercepting us at the Miller farmhouse.”
“Good,” McClellan said. “These men is dog tired. They can use some rest and hot coffee…” Then, looking back toward the men moving up from behind, he shouted, “Let’s push along, now—the squad cars’ll be waiting with coffee and sandwiches at the house!”
The men continued to push on, across the meadow. And soon they began to work their way cautiously into the strip of woods on the other side.
CHAPTER 18
At the top of the cellar stairs, Ben was listening as intently as he could, behind the barricade.
For a long time, he had not been able to hear any helicopter sounds; perhaps it had landed somewhere, or flown away. Ben wished he could have been upstairs, so he could wave to it from the lawn.
Then—from far off—he heard the distinct sound of a dog—barking. He listened for a long time, but heard nothing more. He was tempted to undo the barricade and take his chances on going out there to look around.
CHAPTER 19
When the men worked their way through the narrow belt of trees on the far side of the meadow, they came out into a cemetery, the one Barbara and John had come to with the wreath for their father. The posse continued its advance, threading its way among the grave markers.
Down a dirt road, and up a short grade, the men found Barbara’s car, with the smashed window. The headlight switch was on, but the battery was dead. There were no signs of blood, and the men could not find any corpses anywhere near the car.
“Maybe whoever was in here escaped and got away,” McClellan said, hopefully. “Move on, men! We can’t do any good here!”