Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  The place almost looks like the entrance to a necro’s nest. I eased inside, testing the planks’ strength with one foot. They creaked under my weight. The interior metal frame disappeared into the shadows overhead, along with mazes of pipes and a rebar service ladder. The elevator shafts appeared to be connected, partitioned by metal cages. When I shined my flashlight down, I realized the elevator cars rested several floors below in a subbasement. Air swelled through the shafts, the scent like sewage to the tenth power. I wrinkled my nose.

  Glowstick-green ghostlight rippled along the far shaft wall. I stilled and turned off my flashlight, watching for more.

  It is a necro nest. No doubt our target chose this hideout strategically, knowing it could use the necros as shields or barriers. Smart. “Oliver”—I whispered into my comm—“what are the stats on the basement?”

  “Give me a second,” he replied. Out in the hall, Ryder’s flashlight clipped up and hit me in the hip. Helsing had rules against shining flashlights in people’s faces; reapers died waiting for their pupils to readjust in the midst of a hunt.

  I put my finger to my lips. Ryder moved toward the elevator, beckoning me to get out.

  Something’s down there, I mouthed.

  You think? He reached for me. I shifted toward him, making a board squeak. Something groaned in response, down in the deep darkness. We froze, gazes latching—the sound hadn’t come from the building settling.

  My comm crackled. “The building has a massive two-story basement with access from both Natoma Street and the city’s combined sewer system,” Oliver said. Ryder cocked his head, listening, too. “It’s private property, so it’s not on our watch list.”

  Something hummed in the darkness overhead. The tune sounded like “Rock-a-bye, Baby,” and a skittering of metal resonated through the shaft. Ryder held his hand out to me, impatient. But when I reached for him, the elevator doors creaked.

  My soulchain jerked in my stomach.

  The bone splintered.

  Our eyes met.

  “Move,” I shouted. The doors crashed shut, squealing like a car wreck. Sharp, bony fragments needled my skin, peppering the metal and concrete. The shaft’s metal skeleton shook. I hunkered down as the wooden platform shied and creaked. Putrid dark wrapped me up so tight, I almost couldn’t breathe.

  “Micheline, you okay?” Ryder asked into the comm.

  “I’m not dead,” I whispered, not daring to move. “Do you still have both your arms?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “What happened?” Oliver asked.

  “The elevator doors slammed shut on their own.” I clicked on my flashlight and ran its beam over the crushed doors. The metal had crumpled like tinfoil—I couldn’t tell where one door ended and the other began. Bits of bone stuck from the doors like alligator teeth. Dust coated my tongue and my mouth dried out. Whether the bone weakened on its own or whether our ghost triggered the reaction, I knew one thing for certain: “I’m trapped in the shaft.”

  “Hang tight,” Ryder said. “There’s no way we’re getting this mess open. Can you get down to the basement level?”

  “We can meet you there,” Jude said.

  “You guys don’t know what you’re going to find in the basement,” Oliver said. “Go up a floor, not down.”

  Another green glow flickered against the elevator cars below me. “With what ghostlight I’m seeing in here, a couple of floors isn’t going to make a difference either way.”

  “What’s the spectral color?” Oliver asked.

  “Green, it’s definitely something hypernecrotic,” I said.

  After two seconds of radio silence, Ryder said, “Can you climb down somehow, Micheline?”

  I thought about scrambling down the shaft’s metal skeleton until I remembered I’d seen a ladder running parallel to the elevator doors. “Yeah, there’s a ladder in here,” I whispered.

  “We’ll see you in two minutes,” Ryder said. “Be careful.”

  A tremor started in my jaw. I turned off my flashlight and shoved it in my belt, wrapping one hand around a rebar rung. A cry lifted out of the darkness, lonely, hungry. I took a deep breath and eased myself onto the ladder. My shoulder groaned with pain, but I bit it back and nudged the floorboards aside with a toe.

  I felt my way down rung by rung. The smell blanketed my face, pressing against my nose and mouth; I swallowed hard to keep from choking on the stench.

  After ninety seconds in the dark, my eyes started playing tricks, drawing designs on the flat black canvas around me. A faint luminescence oozed over the elevator cars below. My pulse picked up speed. A rat-a-tat-tat echoed up the shafts, the sound of claws clicking on a hard surface. I thought I saw something bright dart across one wall, but it might’ve been my imagination.

  The boys’ voices scraped through the elevator doors. Metal groaned beside me, the sound echoing up and down the shaft. I winced. The darkness cracked, a high-powered flashlight beam shooting into the shaft. Ryder cursed, forcing the crowbar in.

  Something shrieked from deep in the basement.

  Wrapping one arm around the ladder, I whispered into my comm: “Did you guys hear that?”

  “Yeah, we’ll hurry,” Ryder said.

  “Can you be quieter about it?” I asked.

  “You want out or not, Princess?” Jude asked. The boys hit the elevator doors again, grunting and swearing. The crowbar screeched as it penetrated deeper, its cleated edge poking between the doors. Ryder muttered something about not having enough leverage to pop the doors open.

  I hooked my arm over a rung, anchoring myself, and pulled my Colt out of its holster. The gun’s weight comforted me—.45 caliber bullets punched big holes in dead flesh. Great. Big. Holes. I chambered a bullet and kept watch on the pit. The ghostlight reflecting off the elevator car grew brighter, so much that I saw the outline of the car and the cage containing it. Something lurked below, something big, something hypernecrotic. Dangerous. Square breathing now, one, two, three, four …

  The doors split open a little wider.

  “Bogey, three o’clock!” Jude shouted. The elevator doors clamped shut around the crowbar. Reports of rifle fire blasted through the doors, followed by an inhuman scream—no, it was several voices blending in a sick harmony. Lime-green ghostlight eked through the space between the doors and into the shaft.

  My heart crawled into my throat. “Guys?” I said into the comm. “Status?”

  A volley of rifle fire answered me. The chorus of shrieks and calls and shots spiraled through the shaft, growing louder and more irate by the second.

  “Ryder?”

  “Not now,” Ryder said into the comm.

  “What’s going on in there?” Oliver asked.

  “We’re under attack!” I had to find a way to them—I flicked on the Colt’s mounted flashlight with my thumb and pointed down. The shaft’s elevator car hung about fifteen feet below me, painted in rust and saffron bloodstains and speckled with bone fragments. Something had torn open the elevator cage at the bottom and peeled it back, curling the metal like a rind of dead flesh. I didn’t want to know what kind of necro could rend a steel cage, but I sure as hell wanted to take it down.

  The gunfire didn’t let up.

  Gritting my teeth, I dropped down the ladder. Pain radiated through my injured shoulder. I jumped the last five feet to the elevator car, grabbing its cables to stop from sliding off its slick surface. Screams spurred me forward. I leapt down from the elevator and into a pit overrun with darkness. Several large phosphorescent sacs clung to the walls and ceiling, each enclosing a half-human, half-necro larval knot of limbs. I cringed—this really was a necro nest, a place where corpses reanimated and turned into something else.

  “Micheline, necros are moving into the walls,” Ryder said. “You need to get out of the elevator shaft if you can.”

  I scanned the subbasement by the light of the necro sacs. “I’m already looking for the building’s transformers.”

  “What
? Forget about them and get out—” Rifle fire chopped off his voice.

  There’s still two rifles firing, they’re okay. For now. The subbasement held a two-story-tall boiler; the upper basement floor had been cut open to accommodate the machine. Ducking behind it, I spotted several electrical panels on the far wall, lit by the queasy glimmer of another necro sac. I ran toward them, keeping my Colt aimed at the floor and ready.

  The electrical panels jutted a foot off the wall. Strips of tape indicated which lever controlled the power for which floor, a white-noise buzz audible under the bark of bullets. One larval sac hung over the panels, clinging to the basement catwalk. Though I couldn’t see the sac’s contents, an eight-fingered hand pressed up against the membrane and flexed, as if reaching for me.

  Best part of the job, I thought, holding down a breath. Ducking under the sac, I wove between strings of mucus. The main lever was unmistakable: larger than the rest, almost as long as my forearm, and half covered by the embryonic sac. Gritting my teeth, I wrapped both hands around the lever’s end. The back of my hand and arm pressed against the sac, snotty slime coating my arm. Ugh. I flung off the mucus with a sharp jerk of my hand, then tried the lever again.

  It refused to budge.

  “Micheline, we need to regroup,” Ryder said into the comm. “Are you still in the subbasement?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, giving the lever another sharp tug. I threw my weight into it, grunting, until I heard the sibilant sound of ripping flesh.

  Something thudded into the catwalk overhead. A waterfall of amniotic slime gushed over the lip of the metal walkway. Ghostlight eked down the walls. An infant cry scraped my spine like a rusty nail, one voice made of blended octaves.

  I pistol-whipped the lever with the butt of my gun. The lever loosened when I struck it a second time, groaning, rusty; another tug killed the electric hum in the panels. The building’s power went down with a ka-thunk.

  “Head toward the lobby,” Ryder said. “We’re on our way toward your position.”

  “Understood.” Stairs cut a triangular silhouette against the wall on my left, leading up to the basement catwalk. The necro on the walkway screamed again, but this time, an answering cry rose from behind me—a large, many-limbed necro crawled down one of the elevator cars, its body radiating green ghostlight, stinger raised over its back.

  Holy mother of—

  A scorpion.

  Made of pressed-together corpses. It crawled on four sets of mismatched arms. Human legs fused together to make a stinger that curled over the necro’s back—I’d never seen anything like it, not in anatomy class or Helsing’s bestiaries or even in stories. Hypernecrotic mutations didn’t generally involve corpses fusing together into one huge nightmare.

  Bile tore at my throat. I broke into a run, scrambling up the stairs, thinking I’d take my chances with the newborn. One of the blister sacs on the ceiling had ripped open, dumping a writhing mass of limbs onto the catwalk below. The necro glowed like radioactive Mountain Dew seeped from its glands, its ghostlight acid-green. It smashed its stinger into the guardrail, crumpling the metal; the catwalk groaned and tilted sideways, pulling free of its moorings. In my head, Dad barked, Take it down—you are the predator, not the prey!

  I lifted the Colt. Sweat slicked my grip and adrenaline made the seconds pound faster. Harder. I fired into the necro’s “face”—a collection of too-human eyes and mouths between its pincers. The creature shrieked. The Colt’s massive recoil echoed through my body and made my arm ache anew. I fired again, spattering the walls with glowing bits of flesh that burned out like embers. Three times. Four. The bullets burst the scorpion-necro’s eyes and ripped off chunks of flesh, but where to aim for the kill?

  Flashlights lit up the other end of the catwalk. Staccato shots ripped along the newborn’s side and smacked into the wall behind me. The newborn cried out, struggling to right itself, bleeding phosphorescence. With an answering howl, the adult necro lunged off the elevator car and crawled toward us.

  “We’ll cover you,” Ryder said in my ear. “C’mon!”

  No choice now—the walkway swayed and creaked as the adult started up the stairs. With one last glance back, I made a run for it. As I passed the infant, it grabbed for me with both pincers. I dodged left. Overcompensated. I slipped on the slick flooring and smashed down on a knee. My heart churned my blood butter-thick, and I looked up and straight into the necro’s eight eyes. One still had clumps of mascara clinging to its lashes.

  The newborn shrieked and stabbed its barbed stinger at me. Yanking my monopod around, I blocked the hooked barb with the pole. My shoulder screamed on impact—the bony hook screeched down and caught on the grip.

  “Hold steady,” Jude shouted, his rifle barking. Bullets chewed into the necro’s tail, forcing it off me. I kicked at its ugly face—my boot grated its flesh. Rolling to avoid a second strike from the barb, I scrambled to my feet. I covered the yards to the boys at a dead run.

  Once I made it past the muzzles of the boys’ rifles, Ryder grabbed me by the arm and pushed me toward a stairwell. “We’re aborting, let’s go.”

  I leapt up the stairs and to the landing. The boys followed close. But as I hit the first floor and stepped into the lobby, a forest of serpentine limbs rose in front of me. Ghostlight coated scabbed backs, arms and pincers, weeping wounds and bleeding eyes.

  The boys tumbled into me, shoving me into the lobby. Shrieking, I pushed back against their chests. Ryder seized me and pulled me into the stairwell.

  “Get to the roof,” he shouted at us.

  No need to tell me twice—I raced up ten flights on pure adrenaline, the boys bringing up the rear. Weak light filtered through the stairwell windows. The necros’ cries rose like a cyclone through the staircase and lashed at my skin.

  Eleven floors up.

  Twelve.

  I pushed my body faster, harder, my breath tearing out my lungs. Sweat loosened my grip on my Colt. We were conditioned for this, but how often does a girl run flat-out up twenty-six flights of stairs in training? Answer: never.

  “What the hell’s going on in there?” Oliver shouted through the comm. “The GPS is lighting up with unidentified necros. Good God, they’re huge—”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” Jude said.

  “There’s twenty-one of those things in the building,” Oliver said. “Get out of there!”

  “Working on it,” I said. Ten more floors, I told myself, pushing on despite the buckets of lactic acid pouring into my muscles.

  Oliver continued: “Your anomaly’s still on the top floor—”

  I didn’t hear the rest, Oliver’s words cut off by gunfire and an angry shriek. I glanced down and realized the necros were crawling up the stairwell’s inner flanks. Ducking pincers, Ryder shot one necro point-blank in the face. I leveled my Colt and sank a bullet into each pincer before the necro could strike again. Jude brought the butt of his rifle down on the necro’s finger-claws, the crunch audible from where I stood. It shrieked and lost its balance, knocking several of its companions off the walls and rails as it fell.

  When I ran out of stairs at the twenty-sixth story, I stumbled through the doorway and into the top-floor lobby, praying nothing waited on the other side. Clear. Jude and Ryder scrambled past the threshold, slammed the door, and broke off the door handle with a rifle’s butt.

  The relief my muscles craved was lost in a place like this, with death just footsteps away. I choked on air, every muscle screaming for oxygen. The boys didn’t look much better—heaving, breathless. Jude leaned over and put his hands on his knees, flinching when one of the necros banged into the door.

  In the deep darkness ahead, something giggled. Not a girlish giggle, not a happy giggle, but a half-wheezed, radio-static, ghostly sound that froze us cold. No doubt the entity enjoyed watching us squirm. Maybe that’s why it hunkered down here in the PacBell—because it knew that even if we managed to locate it, we’d be beaten and exhausted by the time we reache
d the top floor.

  “That door won’t hold long,” Ryder said, his words half coughed. Jude bobbed his head and pushed up. “Ollie, we need a path to the roof.”

  My comm crackled in my ear. “Either you head north through the auditorium and deal with the anomaly, or you move through the south hall. You’ll find an emergency exit to the roof on either side of the building.”

  One of the necros slammed into the other side of the door, denting it. The boys looked to me for a decision, a choice I didn’t have time to make the right way. If those scorpion-necros got through the door before I defeated our ghost, someone could end up dead. But to come all this way without even trying to exorcise our captor seemed even more reckless.

  I went with my gut: “Let’s take out our ghost.”

  Jude spat, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and bobbed his head. Okay. Ryder palmed his rifle’s barrel. Agreement enough.

  “Semper Vigilans, guys,” Oliver said.

  We moved forward like a unit, the boys lighting the way with their rifle-mounted flashlights. I walked into the darkness with more confidence than I felt, almost able to hear how hard Ryder gripped his rifle. His breath pushed past my hair, so close was he; I holstered the Colt and took out my camera, locking a lens into the casing. I tried not to think about how outnumbered we were and how under-armed I felt … or how we’d escaped a nightmare in order to walk into a circle of hell. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as Mom would say.

  The elevator doors glared in the low light, stamped with bloody, multifingered handprints and trails of black ash. Half-eaten corpses littered the floor. The hall on our right looked like a black hole, dark and just as hungry. I motioned the boys left—north—with my head. Windows rose on one side of the hall, their panes sealed in fog. Hardly any of the city’s light penetrated this high.

  We made it a few steps in before Jude cursed and swung his rifle toward the windows. “Something moved out there,” he said softly.