Finally, as if all their intense focus pushed it, the zombie started to stumble away from them down the street.
Curt turned his head to the rest of them. "Quietly," he said. He moved from behind the bus stop and hugged the building on their right. The rest of them followed, with Sarah and Wayne holding their handguns at the ready. Finally spotting a zombie had put all of them in a state of fear—fear that there were more around, hiding in the darkness. They kept their heads on a swivel and stayed ready for anything. The wind continued to whip by them, growing to an incredible intensity and loudness, masking the sounds of all else. Sarah's skin crawled, Carly scratched the itchy cut below her ear, and Ron's teeth chattered so loudly that he forced himself to press them together as hard as he could.
Sarah lagged behind the rest of them a little, worried about something coming up behind them. She turned around and walked backwards with the group as she watched the darkened street to their rear, her gun half-drawn. The trees lining the sidewalks swayed violently and the darkness swelled and shifted and crawled all over the place, intensifying and extending into a horrible black maw in the direction they had come from. She knew it was all in her head, but that didn't make it any less real to her. She felt as if the darkness itself was crawling across the street for them, piercing its sharp claws into the pavement and dragging itself little by little to consume them. Every little sight or sound in her peripheral vision made her jump a little, and she lagged behind the group even more without noticing, like a skittish deer on alert and ready to run.
She passed an office building to her left and suddenly heard a noise, barely audible behind the howling wind. She looked around, spinning in circles and trying to discern the direction it came from, but everything was washed in the same blackness.
Everything except a flickering orange light coming from one of the windows in the office building. It was up on the fourth floor of what looked to be an eight-story building, and it appeared as an insignificant pinprick in the darkness surrounding it.
Sarah stopped and stared at it. At first she figured it was some other survivor or group that had holed up and started a fire. A shadow danced across the single wall that she could see from the street, stretching and shifting as all shadows do as they move around a source of light, and it made it difficult to tell the characteristics of the person she was looking at. But something very peculiar struck her. The hair was long and the shadow certainly looked like a female, but the head was too big for the body, even in the distorted silhouette. As the actual figure itself came up to the window and peeked out, Sarah knew immediately that it was a child. A little girl. And it looked like she was all alone.
Sarah turned to point her out to the others and saw that they were already a block down the street from her, the zombie they were following just a tiny little speck in the distance. "Guys!" she whispered as loudly as she could. "Hey!" she cried, her voice cracking.
But it was no use. They were too far away and she would have to run to catch up to them. She stood there, torn in indecision. She looked from the others to the orange window, seeing that the girl was gone from the sill. If it were any other survivor, she would have no problem leaving them to their own devices and being on her way, but she couldn't bear the thought of the child being all alone, and as she ran to find the entrance of the office building, she prayed that the little girl was with her parents.
The doors to the building were locked, but the glass inserts had been smashed and she slipped through the narrow space, being careful not to cut herself. She fished around in her pockets but found that she didn't have a flashlight on her. She had given hers to Carly and was left in the darkness with no good way to see, save for any faint light that came through the doors or windows. The rest of the lobby in front of her was in complete blackness, and she paused to let her eyes adjust to it as much as they could.
Her heart hammered in her chest. She shuffled her feet along the floor, feeling small shards of glass being pushed across as she held her pistol at her side with one hand and reached out with the other one in front of her, feeling around in the darkness. Her arm trembled badly, waiting to feel something chomp down on her fingers. It took everything she had to continue forward. The image of that girl's silhouette standing in the window galvanized her. She didn't even stop to consider if maybe she mistook the shape and it wasn't a child at all, or if the whole thing was actually a trap to lure her in, or any other of the infinite scenarios that she forced out of her mind.
She reached the back of the lobby as her eyes barely adjusted enough to not be completely blind. She found a set of elevators that were obviously useless to her, but beyond them was a stairwell. She turned the handle on the door, the steel freezing in her hand, and she pushed it open. It squealed on its hinges, and she paused in the darkness, waiting to hear something stir. When nothing did, she walked up the stairs in absolute silence, feeling around carefully with her feet on each step. The stairwell was completely black and there was no hope of seeing anything in here. But she made her way up, her heartbeat almost echoing in the narrow space, counting each landing for the floors and half floors. When she arrived at the fourth, she slowly pulled open the door and stepped out into a hallway.
The entrances to a few offices surrounded her at various points. She thought about where she was in the street and where the girl had been and tried to reorient herself from her new position. She took a left and carefully went down the hallway, using the wall next to her as a guide. The faintest bit of light came in through little windows in some of the doors and it was just enough for her to see where she was going, but not enough that she could tell for certain that she was alone in the darkness. Her heartbeat was again the loudest thing in the hallway, or at least in her own ears, and she kept her footsteps as light as possible.
The hallway seemed to stretch on longer than it should have, but eventually it turned a corner to the right and as soon as Sarah went around it, she saw the door to one old company's office that had bright orange light pouring out from the window and around the frame, and she could faintly hear the crackling of a fire. It lit up this portion of the hallway enough for her to see that it was empty and she crept the rest of the way to the door, staying quiet. No matter whom she was going to find inside, she didn't want to spook them. She came up to the door and gazed through the window.
She could see now that the window the girl had been peering out had been smashed and the smoke from the small fire sitting in the middle of the tile floor drifted out of it into the night. The little girl was at the window again, staring down at the street, and now that Sarah was there in person she could see that it was indeed a little girl, maybe about six or seven years old. Her back was to Sarah, completely unaware that she was being watched. Long, messy brown hair flowed down her back and covered most of a Sunday school dress, which faintly looked like it used to be a cream color but was now mostly a dark brown with greasy patches of gray in spots.
Sarah twisted the door handle slowly and pushed it open.
The little girl spun around at the noise, a look of sheer terror across her face. Sarah had just enough time to see that she was actually quite a beautiful girl underneath all the dirt with a soft, round face and gorgeous blue eyes before she bounced away from the window like a flea and hid behind the big office administrator's desk next to them.
"It's okay," Sarah whispered, putting her gun away. She closed the door behind her, knowing that if she didn't the little girl was likely to run. "I'm not going to hurt you." Sarah crouched at the side of the desk, leaving the little girl hidden. "What's your name?"
The girl didn't answer.
"I'm Sarah," she said. "What are you doing here all by yourself?"
The girl didn't answer.
Sarah sat her butt down on the floor and leaned against the desk. She waited for a while to let the girl calm down before she began talking again. "I used to have a son about your age. I think you and him would've got along really well. He always loved to go
out and explore and meet new people." She waited for a good half a minute, pacing her speech. "He was really nice, too. I think if he found you here, he would have given you his coat to keep warm."
"What's his name?" a squeaky little voice asked from under the desk.
"David." Sarah leaned her head against the desk, waiting for the little girl's sweet voice to pierce the silence again.
"What happened to him? Is he gone?"
"Yeah," she said softly.
After a few moments, the little girl timidly shuffled out from behind the desk on her hands and knees, poking her head around the corner and looking at Sarah. "I'm sorry," she said with the saddest, sweetest face Sarah had ever seen.
It made her heart melt and she instinctively crawled toward the girl. "Oh honey, come here."
The girl's eyes widened like dinner plates and she disappeared behind the desk again in a flash with a frightened little squeak.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," Sarah said, cringing at herself. "I just don't like to see you here all by yourself. Don't you have any parents or anyone with you?"
There was only silence, and Sarah thought she had screwed everything up. But then the little voice that was like a shaky flame in the darkness spoke up. "No."
That single word broke Sarah's heart and she had to bite her lip to keep from trying to scoop the girl up in her arms again. "How long have you been here? It isn't safe for a little girl like you to be on her own."
"I don't know," the girl said. "I don't know what time it is anymore."
"Can we come sit out here by the fire and talk?" Sarah asked. "I'm just going to sit here against the wall and we can talk if you want."
The little girl poked her head out from behind the desk again, judging Sarah's weathered face. Finally, she stood up and carefully made her way to the other side of the fire, next to where the walls opened up into a big darkened floor space that was probably filled with skeins of dusty cubicles. She sat down and crossed her legs, her socks and black shoes just as dirty as the rest of her.
"Don't sit near there, honey," Sarah cautioned her, unsure of what might be in the darkness. "Go sit over near the desk."
"It's okay," the girl said. "There's nothing in here. But there's some in the rest of the building. If I keep the door closed, they don't find me."
Sarah regarded the girl with awe. "How on earth have you stayed... on your own... for so long?"
The little girl shrugged. "I know where everything is. I just hide when I need to."
"You know the city really well?"
The girl nodded. "But I try to stay inside more now."
"Because of the cold?"
"No, because of the scratchers."
"What are the scratchers?" Sarah asked.
"The new zombies. Because they always look really itchy and they're trying to scratch themselves."
Sarah grinned at the frank innocence of the girl, that same innocence that reminded her so much of her son. Her heart weighed heavily in her chest and tears sprang up to her eyes.
"What's wrong?" the little girl asked, concerned.
"It's nothing," Sarah said, wiping her tears away. "How many of the scratchers have you seen?"
"Lots of them," she said. "I see them in the streets a lot. I've also seen him."
"Him?"
"The Shadow Man," the girl said in such a high and frightened tone that she sounded like a mouse.
"Who's the Shadow Man?" Sarah asked, instinctively leaning forward. She had an uneasy feeling in her gut, and something told her she knew where this was going.
"He's really big," the girl said. "And he's dead."
"Dead? What do you mean?"
"He's all black, and his face looks like a skeleton."
Sarah leaned back against the wall, feeling the hot fire toast her skin. Her chest heaved like she was falling down a deep hole. The gravity of the situation was becoming very heavy all around her, and she didn't know the extent of it or what any of it really meant, but it suddenly made her sick to her stomach and she wanted to run away from it all. But she composed herself and asked her next question: "Do you know anything about him?"
The girl shook her head. "He always travels with smaller black people, and they all have big guns."
"Have you seen them around here?"
"Yes."
Sarah suddenly realized what a fool she had been. They had fled the repair shop in the danger of the night because she thought it wasn't safe, but instead they went deeper into the city when they should have left it completely. "Where have you seen them?"
The girl thought for a moment. "All over. But I saw the Shadow Man go into that one building once. The one that all the scratchers come out of."
"You know where they come from?" Sarah asked, shocked. "Which building is it?"
"It's over there," the girl said, shifting and pointing toward the wall behind her. "It says something on the front, but..." She suddenly looked embarrassed. "I can't read."
A rush of thoughts went through Sarah's head and she jumped up to her feet so quickly that the girl nearly dove under the desk again. "Can you take me there?" She turned and opened the door to the hallway, waiting for the girl to get up. She took off her coat and held it out toward the girl. "Here, put this on," she said excitedly. "I don't want you to freeze outside."
"Shh!" the girl cried. "The zombies are going to hear you!"
Sarah realized that she had forgotten herself in her excitement, talking loudly as she held the door open to the silent hallway. And like she had just sinned and it was time for her to get her knuckles rapped, a tortured and raspy groan came from somewhere in the dark hallway.
The little girl jumped up to her feet. "It heard you!" she hissed, and like a bolt of lightning she slipped between Sarah and the door and ran off into the black hallway away from the noise.
"Hey! Wait!" Sarah cried. She had screwed up big time and now the little girl had run headlong into the unknown blackness with the lurking dead.
10
Shot in the Dark
The smothering blackness of the building seeped into her consciousness until she felt like she was wandering through limbo. She tried to make her way after the girl, following the path that she had traveled up in the first place, but all the sounds were drowned out by the smacking of her shoes on the tile floors, the sound of her heartbeat pounding in her chest, and the incessant buzzing in her head that would have made her go insane if it weren't for the imperative mission that was laid out before her.
Her hands flew out wildly in front of her, smacking into walls and doorways. She stubbed her fingers and cracked a fingernail or two, but she didn't even notice. Working from a stunted sense of feeling and her memory alone, she somehow managed to make her way back to the stairwell without running into any of the dead. She would hear ever-so-faint noises coming from up ahead, telling her that she was still on the little girl's trail. She had just enough mental headspace while she chased after the girl to kick herself for being so stupid and scaring her.
She ran down the stairwell almost as if they weren't there at all and she were free falling. When she got to the bottom, she wrenched open the door and sailed through the lobby, nearly flying through the broken glass in the door and being greeted by the cold hand of night again. Her head sprang in both directions in the street, and she spotted the little girl, still only in her Sunday dress, heading for an old Macy's department store across the street. Sarah followed as she put her coat back on to keep from freezing.
When she got into the department store, she had a moment to rest and trained her ears to the silence of the dark store. She hunched over and took a moment to catch her breath. She tried to hold it at various intervals to get an earful of the sound that the little girl must have been making as she pattered through the store, but she heard nothing. She knew she was in here, but it was a big store, and once again she was left in the dark with no flashlight. She pulled the gun out of her waistband and clutched it with both hands, po
inting it at the floor in front of her as she slowly crept through the store, ready for any surprises.
"Hey!" she cried. "Where are you?"
The deafening sound of silence met her ears and she began to wonder—trapped in that limbo—if she had imagined the girl and this was all some terrible hallucination. But the first time her shin slammed into a display and she cried out in pain, she was brought right back to reality.
Skylights periodically dotted the roof of the store and let in a little bit of light, creating small circular sections of the store that were illuminated and leaving the rest in darkness. They sort of acted as waypoints and she tried to move from one to the next, giving her some semblance of direction.
"Hey!" she called out again. "We're safe now! The zombie's gone! Come with me and I can get you somewhere safer."
She crossed through the footwear section, passing dusty displays of old shoes and dry leather boots that had drooped over to the sides after years of solitude. As the sound of her own shoes hit the tile and echoed through the department store, she thought she heard a little squeaking sound somewhere in the distance. She stopped and looked around from one patch of light to another.
"Are you there?" she called out quietly.
"...here" was all she could make out coming from somewhere ahead.
Sarah walked through the darkness carefully, stepping with one foot out in a sideways pose, using it to feel for any obstacles in her way. When she would bump into something, she would sidestep and continue on, holding the next batch of light in front of her as the only thing that mattered, keeping her ears trained carefully for anything coming up beside or behind her.
"I'm coming!" she told the girl as she got near to where she thought the sound had originated.
The ladies' clothing section stood ahead of her and there was a cluster of mannequins, some clothed and some naked, sitting in a patch of moonlight.
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