by Chad Huskins
I’m weak, she thought. So is Kaley. Without him, we would be dead. Shannon felt an itch at her groin, and as she reached to scratch it, she remembered that night on their way to Dodson’s Store. Shannon had just wanted to go home, but Kaley wanted to go back and get what little money they had been shortchanged. And it wasn’t Kaley that got raped that night. It wasn’t Kaley that girls like Nancy and Laquanda were making fun of for her infection.
Thinking of those two girls, Shannon felt a thrill, just as she had when she saw Freckle-face get her face smashed in.
“Can we have this one now?”
“Ohhhhhh, yes, yes, yes, yesssssssssssss, let us have this one!”
“No! We need to focus on the other two! They will open the way for us!”
Shannon didn’t know when it started, just that it came on strong and had to happen. It was like when she had the flu and was set to vomit. There was a sense of building up to it; a few heaves, a cold sweat.
“Let us have her now! Yesssssss, let us have her!”
Shannon turned and looked around the room. “You can’t have me. No one can. Not anymore.”
“The insolence! The insolent child!”
“I will have her!”
“Leave me alone,” she said. Her voice cracked, and she felt her bottom lip trembling. There was a sensation of something swelling in her belly. Then a swelling of her brain. Something laughed just behind her. It sounded like one of those hyenas on The Discovery Channel. She heard things sliding on the walls, only she couldn’t see anything there. It was all around her. There was a chattering, like those wacky wind-up teeth you bought in gag stores. The whispers crawled up her spine and over every follicle of hair. “Leave me alone.”
They didn’t hear her. The Others did as they pleased.
“I’m…I’m not afraid…”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not!”
“Shannon?” said Mrs. Taylor, stepping over to her. Officer Regus was right behind her.
A moment before it happened, Shannon felt it, and tried to stop it. “No…no, please, don’t! Don’t come any closer! Just stay—” The vomiting finally occurred, though it was a vomit of a different sort. It didn’t come from her mouth, but from her everything. Her pores and her heart. Her soul and her eyes.
Officer Regus and Mrs. Taylor were hit by an invisible wave. They suddenly froze, as if captured in a picture. She heard both of them screaming, though their faces were perfectly plain. They were inside there, trapped inside their own immovable bodies. Though they were frozen, their lungs worked just fine. They screamed through ordinary faces as first Mrs. Taylor’s left leg spilled open, and out poured her muscle and sinew, swimming across the floor, each piece of tissue suddenly given life. Officer Regus’s tongue became angry with her, and launched itself out of her mouth and crawled along the floor, leaving behind a slimy trail like a snail’s, only red.
Something was pushing against the walls of Officer Regus’s stomach.
Each piece of their bodies was now an individual living creature on its own. The eyeballs in Mrs. Taylor’s face sprouted legs like a tarantula, and as she screamed, they climbed out of her face, unfolding membranous wings, and buzzed around the room. From beneath her skirt dropped her intestines, slithering and moving and looking out at Shannon curiously with various dilated eyes that popped open.
There was still something trying to get free of Officer Regus’s stomach. Her belly was swollen enough to make her look ready to give birth.
And still, both women screamed in petrified agony.
Shannon wanted to avert her eyes, but she couldn’t. Arrested to the spot, she stared unblinkingly. The hands on Mrs. Taylor elongated, then separated from the wrists, the sound of the bone popping almost as loud as their combined screams. When the hands finally tore themselves free of the sightless librarian, they plopped to the ground, and each bit of sinew immediately became like tendrils feeling for their surroundings. The hands felt one another, and started fighting like two cats in heat. They even made similar sounds.
“We are almost there! Yes, yes, yes, yesssssssssssss!”
Officer Regus’s belly swelled even larger. Now, something was squirming against the skin, fighting to get free. Her police shirt split, as did some of the flesh, but it still would not spill.
Mrs. Taylor’s screams finally ceased when her jaw opened wide, so wide that it broke itself free and pushed each tooth out of the sockets, the gums now gushing blood. The lower and upper gums split, revealing eyes that blinked lazily, as though they had just woken from a long slumber.
“I have these two! Do you see? Do you see? I have gotten through! Yessssssss!”
Blood pooled at the feet of each woman. They both remained upright and as still as mannequins. Only Officer Regus still screamed, though she was mostly gurgling and choking now. She finished screaming when her stomach finally burst, and out fell a bulbous wet sack of viscera, which hit the floor and exploded. A soupy mix of muscles, bones and tendons crawled away on their own, each tiny piece fighting for its own survival.
“We are come!” came a chant. “We are come! We are come! We are Legion! We are come!”
Shannon dropped slowly to her knees, horrified, and unable to speak for a moment. When she finally did, she spoke through gushing tears. “Please…please, no more…”
“She begs! She begs! Hear how she begs!”
“She said she doesn’t fear us! She knows now! She knows! Yes, yes, yessssssss!”
All around her, windows cracked and burst. The glass of water in Officer Regus’s hand, still there, now shattered, driving shards of glass through her fingers. Books were flung at her from shelves, and the works of J.K. Rowling and William Diehl and Mark Twain all laughed at her as the physics from another world poured into hers.
Shannon’s eyes rolled to the back of her head. She closed them, and thought she was about to faint. It would have been better if she had.
The scene outside of Cartersville Elementary School hadn’t changed much. Leon sat in his Nissan, parked on the side of the road across from the building. He’d double-backed, following the current of leaves. They weren’t bobbing and whipping around in any kind of a breeze—though, the wind was blowing—but rather they were just gliding sideways, and without spinning or spiraling or dancing the way they normally would in an airstream. And…snow? Was it snowing now?
Leon watched a few flakes land on his windshield. Within the span of a few seconds, the snowfall began to intensify. A few flurries at first, then great swaths of white flakes. He didn’t recall snow being anywhere on the weekly forecast, and Leon checked those frequently.
The squad car of Officers Graham and Belle was exactly where it had been all along. Kids were letting out, hopping into buses. How many of them see it? How many of the teachers notice the leaves? He wagered only one or two, the rest were just too busy ushering kids to the correct bus or directing them to the cars of their parents.
Leon checked his cell phone for the time: 3:20 PM. Where were the other cops? Graham and Belle had said that Cartersville detectives were on their way. He had a mind to call the guys at APD, the ones that would still speak to him, but worried that, after his public disgrace, he might wear out a welcome fast even with them. Who wants to keep listening to a corrupt cop on suspension?
The wind picked up, rocking his car, yet it still didn’t affect the physics at work on the leaves: they still didn’t dance or spin, just moved sideways through the air. He remembered the rain coming in sideways on Avery Street, just before everything went south, just before David Emerson vanished from the face of the earth.
The first of the buses were just pushing out, their kid cargo all set, and some of them going crazy in the back. One of the kids rolled down his window and spit at him as the bus was passing Leon’s car. The gob smacked against his windshield. If he hadn’t been focused on CES and the strangeness with the leaves, he might’ve taken down the bus number and reported it to the school.
Then, he saw the glass crack. It started at one of the windows on the west wing of the school. “What—the—fuck?” he said slowly, stepping out of his car. The snowfall intensified, collecting in his hair and on his jacket. He watched as what few children were remaining waiting outside on the curb started shouting. A few teachers turned and saw the cracking windows, then looked back and forth at one another in consternation, then concern.
The ground trembled. An earthquake? Leon thought. Georgia had a minor fault line that rarely got active enough to stir anything.
The leaves were still moving horizontally towards CES. The large sign that was announcing BOOK FAIR FRIDAY suddenly cracked down the middle, and then flattened as though some invisible giant had stepped on it. A few windows cracked on some of the parents’ vehicles. Then, one of the tires on one bus exploded. Then another one. Each one sounded like a gunshot. Flames suddenly leapt out of the back seat of Graham and Belle’s squad car. Then more flames shot out of the gas tank of a van. A moment later, both vehicles exploded.
Now, children were screaming, and teachers were panicking.
All of this had happened within the span of a few breaths. Leon bolted across the street. The earth was still trembling, but this was no earthquake. These symptoms were different, yet familiar.
As Leon approached the school, a wave of foul air assaulted him, like sulfur mixed with sewage and onion breath. The air felt like it was being sucked towards the school. As he approached the flaming squad car, Leon was temporarily lifted off his feet—that had only ever happened to him once before during a tornado while visiting family in Connecticut. He landed back on his feet, staggered past a pair of teachers trying to herd a group of confused and frightened kids, and shouted, “Get them away from the school! Get them outta here! Now!” He didn’t know if any of them had heard, or if any would listen if they had, but he had to try.
When he approached the front doors, a pair of teachers were running out. One of the glass doors shattered and the glass flew inward, not outward like it would from an explosion. Leon stepped inside, reaching for his gun by reflex, but finding that he’d left it in the car. He didn’t even know what he wanted it for—this couldn’t be the Rainbow Room or the vory making a move, not like this—but he would’ve felt better having it.
The marble floors of the front atrium had cracked in places, and were being covered in the dust that had fallen from the ceiling. A group of six kids were being hustled out by a fat, waddling teacher…a teacher who looked like her hair was smoking, and had burns on her left arm where the sleeve was blackened.
Graham said they moved Shannon to the library. Leon had been to CES once long ago to pick up the child of a friend, and remembered the library being near the front lobby…
There! It was exactly where he recalled, with a big sign above it saying, MRS. TAYLOR’S QUOTE OF THE MONTH: A ROOM WITHOUT BOOKS IS LIKE A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL – MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO. The door was made of wood, and strangely hot to the touch when he opened it. Out came smoke, yet it didn’t reek of any smoke Leon had ever smelled before. It didn’t even make him cough, only gag like smelling a dead body that had spent a couple days roasting in the sun.
He started to step inside, but paused. Just over the threshold were the bodies of Officers Graham and Belle. At least, he thought it was them. Amid a puddle of meats and immolated flesh, there were what appeared to be the charred remains of a police uniform, perhaps two of them. The gunbelts were strangely untouched, and he reached down to lift one, and unholstered it.
“Shannon?!” he hollered.
The room was filled with this smoke, which he now noted was dark black with flecks of gray tendrils. Leon held his breath, and stepped inside. “Shannon Dupré!” No answer. The earth was still trembling. Outside, he heard more screaming, and another explosion.
The acrid smoke burned Leon’s eyes. He stepped through, staggering over uneven ground, catching glimpses of strange formations through the smoke. An overturned bookcase here, an unidentifiable puddle of sludge there, and every so often…well, they looked like freestanding doors, each one of them painted red and with a large golden horse engraved on them.
With the smoke swirling around him, he could barely tell when he was about to hit a wall, and did so twice. “Shannon?” When he spoke, he gagged at the aroma. “Shannon Dupré! It’s Detective Leon Hulsey!”
When the smoke started to clear, he got a better sense of where he was. I’m back in a hallway. He blinked. How did I get here? It was a long hallway, with red carpet and fake lit torches hanging from sconces in the walls. He turned around, looked through the library behind him, at what few desks and bookcases he could make out, then ahead. It looked like a hallway in a hotel more than any school. They must’ve done some remodeling. There were two more doors like the freestanding ones, red and with a golden horse engraving, only these were connected to white walls.
Once Leon was down the hall and clear of the smoke, he looked back at where he came from, and saw something strange. The walls of the hall were buckled, split, and crushed, and looked like they had been connected crudely to the walls of the library. Like two different rooms were forced together. Earthquake or not, that could only be the fault of poor engineering.
Then, ahead of him, a man stepped out of one of the red doors, peeked outside, and then stepped fully out and looked Leon up and down. He looked like an elderly man in pajamas. He even had a fluffy night cap. “Where the hell am I?” Leon asked. “Is this still the library? Have you seen a little girl?”
The elderly man walked up to Leon, and looked over his shoulder at the smoky hallway leading into the school library. “Chto sluchilos?” the man said. “Chto eto?”
“What? I don’t…you need to get out of here. Now. There’s been an explosion, and you need to—”
The elderly man turned his face on Leon in disgust. “Shahktor! Kto ty?” He seemed indignant, and didn’t notice the gun in Leon’s hand.
“I’m looking for Shannon Dupré. Have you seen her?”
“Otsyuda! Shahktor!”
“I don’t understand a word you’re…never mind. Just get out now.” Leon left the old man where he was, and then came to a T-junction. He spotted a floor plan and took a moment to wonder why it was in some other language, but disregarded it almost immediately and made his way down another hall. The lights suddenly blinked on and off. Then, both the lights on the ceiling and the fake torches in the wall sconces dimmed, and stayed dim. Behind him, another door opened. He spun, keeping his gun at low-ready. A small, matronly woman with gray hair stepped out. In the darkness, Leon couldn’t quite make out her details. “Ma’am, you need to get out of here.”
She tried to say something, but only gurgled.
“Have you seen a girl?” he said, stepping over to her. The woman didn’t respond, just stood at the center of the hall and stared at one of the torches, as if trying to make out something on a distant horizon. Leon touched her arm. “Ma’am, are you all right?” She finally turned and faced him.
Leon screamed. The woman’s face was a grotesquery of impossible dimensions and proportions. Leon stepped back. The woman reached out to him beseechingly, hands searching for aid from someone, anyone who could undo this unfairness. Leon tried to speak, but only screams and gasps came out. He backpedaled, and, though he had taken an oath to protect and serve, he ran. Much to his shame, he ran. But he would never be able to run from that face, not as long as he ever lived.
Kaley felt the thug die inside her, but for some reason it didn’t hurt her quite as badly as other deaths she had been present for. She hated to think that she was getting used to this, but after the night she first met Spencer, and after all she’d seen this night, somehow feeling a person’s life force ebb was only like a mild stomach cramp, nowhere near the nausea and anxiety she felt the first time she experienced death. Maybe it’s because of who he was. Seconds before Spencer killed him, the big man had come close enough for Kaley to get a gist of the man’s
essence, what he liked. He was certainly a bad man—a fiend, even—but it came as small consolation when she considered she was an accessory to murder.
He manipulated me, she thought, watching Spencer pull the corpse into the elevator. Kaley might’ve helped with the killing, but she couldn’t force herself to handle a dead body. She didn’t know why he was even hiding the body; a trail of blood and brain matter followed him. He knew just what to say in the moment to get me to help him.
Spencer was excitedly checking the body. His exuberance was matched only by his efficiency. He wasn’t even looking at her, talking to her, or acknowledging she was around at all. He was humming to himself (it sounded like “Tainted Love”). Now that he’s gotten what he wanted out of me, he’s not interested. Not until he needs me again.
Then, several things happened concurrently. Spencer, looking most pleased with himself, pulled out what looked like a keycard from the dead man’s wallet. The lights dimmed, then came back on a little too brightly, like a power surge. Then, they went out completely. When they came back on, they stayed dim. Except in the elevator, where the lights were a little too bright.
Spencer wasn’t smiling anymore. He picked up his gun—the Coke bottle silencer was no longer smoking—and stepped slowly out of the elevator. He looked left and right, then down at her. “What do you know about this?”
She blinked. “About what?”
“Is this you? Are you doin’ this?”
“You mean making the lights go out? No.”
He looked at her skeptically, then said, “We better move.”
“Where are we going?”
Spencer crouched and slinked to the end of the hall. “One last thing to do.” He peeked around the corner, then looked back at her. “Ya might wanna stay back, since you’re not a little ghost girl anymore. Bullets will hurt you now, and you’re—” He stopped. His mouth hung open. Kaley looked at him, and he looked right back. Spencer’s face went slack, and then formed a vicious scowl. He raised his gun, and aimed it at her. “Don’t move,” he said.