Backwoods

by sara12356

  “Come on.” The recessed emergency lights in the hallway were dim but cast enough of a glow so he could see nothing moving. But the fact that Suzette’s door stood open kept him uneasy, even as he crept out from the adjoining corridor to approach. He heard the soft whisper of Dani’s footsteps as she fell in behind him.

  They made it several feet down the corridor, then a soft sound, a warbling groan, drew them both to abrupt, simultaneous halts. It was a woman’s voice, feeble and pained, and it came from beyond the darkened threshold of Suzette’s little office.

  Dani stepped toward the door and alarmed, Andrew reached out, catching her by the arm. “What are you doing?” he whispered, eyes wide.

  “Someone’s hurt,” she whispered back. “It sounds like Dr. Montgomery.”

  “We can’t go in there.”

  “She’s hurt,” Dani said again, brows narrowing. “We can’t just leave her.”

  She was right and he knew it. Even though nearly every instinct in his body was screaming flight not fight at the moment, he resisted the urge to simply charge past the opened door and run as fast as he could down the corridor. Because even though he might not have much cared for Suzette at that moment—and even though there would’ve been no way in hell she’d do the same thing for him—he knew she was still alive and needed help. Especially if the screamers were still in there with her.

  Following Dani this time, he reached behind him, drawing the pistol from the back of his pants. At the click as he thumbed off the safety, Dani glanced over her shoulder at him. Taking the nine millimeter into account, she raised her brow.

  “I’m better with this one,” he tried to reassure her.

  She managed a quick smirk. “Here’s hoping.”

  They stood together at the threshold of the office, backs pressed to the wall. Cautiously, Dani leaned forward, using the barrel of the rifle to ease the door open all the way, sending it swinging inward in a slow-moving arc. Earlier, emergency lights inside had been aglow, but now there was only darkness. With her hand, Dani motioned Andrew forward so he could point the flashlight beam into the room, sweeping it in reconnaissance.

  Moving in unison, they stepped through the doorway. Dani had thumbed off the safety and chambered a fresh round in the M16. She held it drawn to her face now, her head tilted slightly as she lined up her aim with practiced skill and ease. Andrew panned the light across the interior, surprised and caught off guard to find no screamers inside.

  There were, however, definite signs of a struggle. Andrew could see dimpled impressions left in the drywall, places where something had hit the walls hard enough to crack the surface. Some of the ceiling tiles overhead lay lopsided, the fluorescent light fixture covers dangling from their hinges. Suzette’s cardboard box of supplies had been overturned and scattered, the packages of crackers stomped on and shredded, crumbs strewn everywhere like a dusting of snow. Cans of peas and green beans had rolled in all directions, their aluminum lids winking in the Maglite’s beam as it swept past them. Something else glittered weakly in the flashlight’s glow; dark and smeared on the floor, it glistened like wet paint that had been tracked in on a boot heel.

  Not paint, Andrew thought. Blood.

  “Oh, God,” Dani whispered as the flashlight found what was left of Suzette. Sprawled in a heap in the corner of the room, she looked like a rag doll that had been tossed tempestuously about by a toddler on a rampage. The front of her blouse was covered in blood, her khaki slacks were splattered with it in a grisly patchwork. Her stomach had been torn open. The meat of her entrails lay in a glistening, bloody heap against her groin, drooping in fleshy coils to the floor.

  Slinging the rifle over her shoulder, Dani rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside Suzette.

  “Dani,” Andrew began in protest, sweeping the light one last, anxious time around the breadth of the room. Where’d they go? he thought. If the screamers had attacked Suzette, they’d been quick about it and even quicker to disperse, which made no sense because they would’ve had no reason. So where are they, then? Why did they leave?

  “She’s still alive,” Dani exclaimed. She’d felt along Suzette’s neck for a pulse and apparently had found one. Turning to Andrew now, her voice urgent, she said, “Bring the light over here. She’s still alive!”

  Even as he crossed the room to squat beside Suzette, Dani was on the move again, hurrying toward the desk, the heap of blankets Suzette had piled beneath in a makeshift pallet. “We can use one of these to make a litter,” she said, pulling a sheet loose, flapping it between her hands to shake off cracker crumbs.

  At this sound, sharp and smart, Suzette’s eyelids fluttered open. Andrew could see her nose had been broken and was now a swollen and misshapen lump, the nostrils crusted with blood. Her lips were likewise battered and bloodied, and a narrow laceration zig-zagged down the side of her face, nearly from her hairline to her chin. Her gaze focused blearily on Andrew and when she gasped, a ragged exhalation of air, blood peppered up from her lips to spatter her chin.

  “It’s alright,” Andrew said, reaching instinctively for her hand. Their last encounter had been anything but friendly, but all at once that didn’t matter. She was clearly in pain. The glazed look in her eyes reminded him powerfully, poignantly of his sister, Beth’s; an injured rabbit caught in a trap that has struggled to the point where it had nearly torn, chewed or clawed its tethered leg loose to free itself.

  “It’s going to be okay, Suzette,” he whispered.

  Her eyes rolled helplessly from him toward Dani, then up at the ceiling, then down again. She croaked something, a gurgling sound he couldn’t make out.

  “Don’t try to talk,” he soothed.

  She seized the front of his shirt with surprising strength and he gasped in surprise as she pulled him toward her. “Run,” she hissed.

  With a loud BANG that Andrew mistook at first for gunfire, the ceiling panel almost directly above his head came crashing down. He caught a blur of motion, felt thrumming in the floor beneath him as something heavy and large sprang down from the narrow open overhead, landing in front of him.

  “Jesus!” he screamed. That was all he had time for, because before he could even scuttle backwards or raise his pistol in feeble self-defense, the creature—a screamer, one of the deformed, mutated members of Alpha squadron—seized him roughly by the throat, hauling him abruptly off his feet, hoisting him into the air.

  It was hideous, its face and form a twisted, gnarled mess of varicose veins, bulging nodules and pus-filled cysts. Tumors had covered one of its eyes with stark red lumps and growths, while the other bulged from its socket as if shoved out from behind. Its lips wrinkled back and the bulbous globe of its protruding eye locked on Andrew’s face.

  “Andrew!” Dani cried as the screamer threw him the length of the room, sending him smashing into the far wall, leaving a crumpled depression in the plaster. The force of the impact knocked the wind from him and he collapsed in a heap on the floor, his ears ringing, his mind swimming.

  Dani screamed again as with an overlapping series of crashes and thuds, more screamers pounced from hidden alcoves in the ceiling. They had all been hiding in the claustrophobically small channel between the drop tiles and original ceiling, clinging to conduits, I-beams and whatever else had been on hand to support them.

  “Oh, my God,” Dani shrieked, then she fired the M16, sending a rapid-fire series of rounds scattering into the clustered screamers. The report was deafening, and with each brutal impact, the screamers danced wildly, jerking and writhing, staggering backwards, falling over.

  “Shoot them in the hearts,” Andrew tried to tell her, but even if he hadn’t still been gasping vainly to catch his breath, he doubted she’d have heard him over the furious ratta-tat-TAT of automatic gunfire. Now he understood why Moore had told him this when they’d encountered the first creature inside the lab. The regenerative capabilities caused by his synthetic virus meant anything less than an instantaneously lethal wound would only s
low them down. And probably piss them off.

  The gunshots ceased, the room fading to silence, a lingering haze of smoke and drywall dust hanging in the air. The screamers all lay sprawled on the floor, tangled together, a mass of mostly indiscernible appendages that had once been arms and legs, feet and hands.

  “What are they?” Dani whispered. “What the hell are those things?”

  That was right about the time one of the screamers began to move, recovering from this initial attack. A pair of spindly, jointed limbs rose from the heap of bodies, each as big around as Andrew’s forearm and longer than one of Andrew’s legs, grotesquely oversized and insectile.

  When the screamer lifted the remains of its torso up between these two hideously peculiar limbs, Andrew realized they were some of its ribs, that somehow several of the lower bones in its ribcage had fused together, then grown out from its torso in crude protuberances. Between these and its arms—which had likewise split along fault lines from the vertexes of its thumbs clear to its elbows, separating the hands and the parallel bones of its forearms into separate limbs—the screamer balanced itself, spider-like.

  Unlike O’Malley or any of the others Andrew had seen to date, this screamer’s head remained relatively untouched by the tumor-like growths. Its mouth looks swollen, its eyes bulging out as the brain matter behind and beneath grew out of control, swelling inside its skull cavity, but its features still looked human, a contrast to its monstrously deformed body that made it somehow even more grotesque.

  “Oh, my, God,” Dani whispered with a breathless, stunned sort of horror, the barrel of the M16 drooping toward the floor. “Langley?”

  PFC Grant Langley—or what was left of him, anyway—scrabbled around, crab-like and swift, at the sound of his name. His distended eyes swung to lock on Dani’s face and the thin seam of his mouth cut wide, his lips pulling back as he grinned at her, gleeful and deranged.

  “Santoro,” he said, although his voice no longer sounded even remotely human, more a lisping, scraping sound, like fingernails against a chalkboard or a knife blade against a whetting stone.

  The places where Dani’s bullets had struck Langley were healing, new tumors bubbling out like heated air bubbles from a lava bed, regenerated flesh forming to fill in the crater-like points of impact where he’d been shot.

  The other screamers began to stir and rise all around Langley. The one that had attacked Andrew rose clumsily to its feet, propped on the oversized, gnarled twists of its hands like a silverback gorilla. One of Dani’s rounds had caught it in the head and glistening, spongy tissue burbled out like the innards of a rotten melon spewing from a fissure.

  Dani moaned. “Duvall?” she whispered to this one, shrinking back. Her stricken, horrified gaze panned from screamer to screamer, staring past the tumors and disfigurements, finding enough familiarity in each to recognize them all. “Parker?”

  Another had been shot in the neck, unleashing a gory rush of blood from its punctured carotid artery. If that wound hadn’t spontaneously healed, then the blood flow had at least been rerouted by the same regenerative abilities, as new blood vessels, each as thick as Andrew’s forefinger, began to grow, vine-like, to encircle its throat, to reach up toward its head in rapidly spreading tendrils and capillaries.

  “Madison?” Dani moaned. “Oh, God, what’s happened to you?”

  “Shoot them,” Andrew screamed.

  “What?” she stared at him, stricken, shaking her head. She looked back at what was left of Alpha squadron as they shambled toward her, backing her further and further across the room. “No, no, I can’t do that, I can’t.”

  “Dani, shoot them,” Andrew screamed again, stumbling to his feet, grimacing at a sharp, grinding pain that lanced through his lower back at the movement.

  “I can’t!” she screamed back, her voice strained and hoarse. She’d retreated into a wall and pressed herself there. To Andrew’s horrified dismay, the M16 tumbled from her hands, clattering to the floor by her feet. “I know them.”

  “Santoro,” Langley hissed again, scuttling forward, swallowing the distance between them in less than a second.

  “What happened to you?” Dani whispered. “They told us you got sick. All of you…you were sick.” Her voice cut short in a frightened cry as one of his forked, deformed hands shot forward, its long, spindly fingers splayed wide to frame her face.

  “Santoro.” He continued to smile at her, his grin stretching wider and wider until the skin of his cheeks began to split with the strain, ripping open with a sickening sound, like old parchment tearing along moldering seams.

  “Oh, God,” Dani moaned.

  The flesh under Langley’s chin also split as his neck began to elongate, stretching like molten taffy being pulled to unnatural, elastic proportions. Further and further, his neck stretched, the muscles and ligaments beneath pulling taut, new blood vessels growing in a bizarre, interlocking latticework, until Langley’s head bobbed at least three feet above his shoulders.

  “Santoro,” he said again, his cheeks rived wide enough so that when he opened his mouth, his bottom jaw seemed to come completely unhinged, dropping unnaturally, grotesquely wide. She screamed at this, then screamed again as what looked like a pair of chelicerae, the massive fang structures of a spider or crab, suddenly protruded from beneath his upper lip, extending from where he’d carried them retracted and tucked against his upper palate. This was apparently what had happened to his front teeth and gums, how Moore’s retrovirus had transformed them into something horrific, hideous and new.

  “Dani!” With a desperate cry, Andrew lunged at Langley, plowing into him from the side, trying to knock him away. Instead, Langley pivoted to greet him, keeping Dani pinned to the wall with one hand and reaching out, catching Andrew with surprising speed and force with the tines of the other. Those twin spikes locked beneath Andrew’s throat, abruptly snuffing his airflow and he choked vainly for breath, thrashing as Langley hoisted him off his feet, leaving him to struggle in mid-air.

  “Andrew!” Dani wailed.

  “Andrew,” Langley echoed, those grotesque pedipalps waggling. Arching his back with a sickening series of pops as his vertebrae snapped into new, unnatural configurations, Langley exposed his stomach, bowing it out so that when he dragged the hooked tip of one of his mutated ribs to gouge open his navel, both Dani and Andrew had clear and unobstructed views.

  “Dani. . . run,” Andrew gagged as Langley eviscerated himself, slicing open a thin seam in his gut that split wide with a moist, squelching sound, letting a tumble of intestines suddenly protrude. Dani screamed, her voice ripping up shrill octaves as the slick coils of entrails suddenly began twitching and moving of their own accord. Like a nest of snakes uncovered, they began to writhe and wriggle, sliding free in thick, fingerlike projections that reached out from Langley’s belly to touch her, grope at her.

  “Dani,” Andrew croaked. “For…for God’s sake…”

  His voice cut short as Langley threw him across the room, sending him crashing into the wall, bouncing off the desk and slamming face-down against the floor. Although he didn’t black out from the impact, he hit hard enough for his mind to slip into a momentary murkiness, for his eyes to droop closed and remain that way, at least until Dani’s next shrill, piercing shriek ripped him soundly from the edge of that unconscious oblivion.

  The nasty tendrils of Langley’s intestines had encircled her arms, heading for her shoulders. She struggled wildly, screaming like a fire bell. Andrew remembered the video of Langley and the camel spider, the sadistic glee he’d taken in tormenting it.

  He’s toying with her, Andrew thought, gritting his teeth against a swell of dizziness as he shoved his hands beneath him and struggled to sit up. He’d jostled a broom that had been left propped against the desk in his fall, and when it toppled, the handle barked him in the head.

  “Leave…her alone,” he seethed at Langley, knocking the broom aside. It was flimsy and cheap with plastic bristles and a lightweight,
hollow aluminum shaft. It was nothing he could use as a weapon, which he was about to need in short measure, he realized, as the other screamers broke away from their tight circumference around Langley and Dani and started shambling toward him.

  Shit, he thought, sitting up, scrambling back toward the desk. He glanced around wildly, looking for his pistol, which he’d lost in the initial screamer’s attack. Not that it would do him much good, he suspected. The screamers were too badly infected with Moore’s virus. Its regenerative properties were so accelerated now, they were nearly instantaneous, and he doubted even a wound to the heart would be lethal anymore. He didn’t see the gun, but did spy something else, a rumpled package of Marlboro Lights among the blankets beneath the desk, Suzette’s chrome-encased Zippo lighter beside it.

  He grabbed the broom in one hand, Suzette’s fallen lighter in the other. His fingers were shaking, so much so, he had to tuck the broom beneath his arm and use both hands to flip back the lid of the Zippo and paw at the flint wheel. It took him three tries, each one more desperate and harried than the last, before he got it to light, and he whipped the end of the broom around, shoving the flame beneath the angled edge of the grey plastic bristles.

  Please work, he thought, inching back even as the screamers inched forward. Like Langley, they were fucking with him, playing cat-and-mouse, biding their time so they could take him at their leisure. They didn’t perceive him as a threat, and hadn’t all along, which was probably why he’d made it out of the forests alive after escaping their snare trap in the first place.

  Because they let me go.

  “Fuck,” he whispered, blowing lightly on the bristles, which had begun to blacken and sear with the heat of the wobbly flame. They weren’t igniting, but they were smoldering long enough to burn the plastic, to send thickening strands of pungent smoke spiraling toward the ceiling.

  The screamers fanned out around him in a quickly collapsing circumference. There was the silverback looking one, he of the massive forearms and oversized tree-trunk hands that had initially attacked Andrew. Another, the one who’d been shot in the neck, now boasted a macabre mask of throbbing, pulsating blood vessels, each thick and glistening, heaped and tangled around its face and neck like mangrove roots. Another had lost most of its lower jaw in Dani’s initial gunfire; it listed loosely in a broad, irregular maw, its tongue lolling out of the gaping space in between. The last one had a crest of irregular bony protuberances framing its head, where the upper and transverse processes in its vertebrae, the prominences in its spinal bones, had grown radically and out of control, punching through its skin, fanning out like the frills of some prehistoric dinosaur.